International Politics of Anxiety: Individual, Mass, and the State

Despite being the prevailing condition of our times, anxiety has received scant attention in international relations theory. Anxiety has wrongly been conflated with fear, and almost since its inception, international relations theory has assumed that much of international behavior is guided by the fear of specific threats to state survival. However, today, the uncertainties surrounding the future of the world economy, the unforeseeable terrorist attacks, the unexplainable lure of radical fundamentalist ideologies, and unexpected shocks to global governance, such as the British exit from the European Union, all evoke a pervasive anxiety about what we do not know and what we cannot control, rather than the fear of a specific and known enemy. Yet we know very little about the international as a source of anxiety and the implications of anxiety for international politics. The aim of this article is to integrate the insights and findings of theorizing and research on anxiety, currently scattered around multiple disciplines and research programs. Drawing on the extant literature in political science and social psychology, I analyse the relevance of anxiety for international theory and politics at three levels of analysis. First as an individual level psychological factor that shapes foreign policy attitudes of citizens and in turn their support of different foreign policy options. Second, at the collective level, it matters as a collective condition of the humankind that drives mass politics. It supports vicarious identification with the nation and collective mobilization around the leader, and also potentially mass protests and revolutionary action. Thirdly, at the state level, it conditions and shapes techniques of government and political leadership.