There was a time when discussions of narratives were largely limited to the academy and its disciplines of literature and critical studies. No more. From analyses of local politics to those of presidential campaigns and debates, the existence of, or need to control, a particular narrative has become standard content in journalistic writings and pundits’ analyses. However, this implicit acknowledgment that stories shape our understandings, that single events may produce multiple versions, and that winning the battle of structuring their meanings is critical to other, more concrete, victories does not mean that the term “narrative” is now used with greater precision or care.
All the more important, then, that political scientists devote more systematic attention to the topic. The work under review here is an impressive attempt to bring theory and order to the study of narratives in international relations through an examination of their role in shaping national security policy. Ronald Krebs’s argument, buttressed by carefully constructed case studies from episodes in U.S. history, is that the predominant paradigms in IR are not capable of explaining the rise (or fall) of national security narratives. For example, as he illustrates, in contrast to what realists would argue, the international system does not offer clear imperatives regarding the content of narratives, but instead requires that a leadership engage in a politics of meaning construction. Further, contrary to what liberal internationalists would contend, policy is the product not just of bargaining among societal groups seeking to further their interests, but also of the role of leaders in the contestation over meaning settings in which the range of possible constructions is significantly limited by collective understandings.
The author’s argument rests on three premises: that on the largest questions of national security, leaders must legitimate their chosen policies before the public; that not all conceivable policies can be legitimated, and if a policy cannot be legitimated, it cannot be pursued over the long term; and that events, even high-profile international ones, do not speak for themselves, and hence, much of the politics of national security revolves around a competition over constructing or interpreting their meaning. For these reasons, Krebs argues, students of security affairs should devote attention not just to the existence of security narratives, which few would deny, but also to how the debates are structured. The content of the narrative should not be seen as self-evident, a direct reflection of the interests of the powerful, but as a powerful force in and of itself.
This study is divided into two parts. Part I explores how particular national security narratives have become dominant, while Part II examines the question of when security narratives rise and fall.
In Part I, Krebs posits that there are two intuitively appealing answers to the question of how such narratives attain dominance: a leader’s individual charisma or power, or the unmediated meaning of an international event. Finding them both unsatisfying, he proceeds to construct a more convincing explanation based on the interaction of three elements: the rhetorical demands of the environment, the power of the speaker(s), and the rhetorical mode adopted. The environment may be what he terms settled or unsettled: situations in which a preexisting dominant narrative shapes elites’ attempts to legitimate their policies versus situations in which there is no hegemonic story line. Krebs then theorizes that a narrative attains dominance when setting and mode match: A settled environment is best addressed using the mode of argumentation, whereas an unsettled one requires the leader—in his cases, the U.S. president—to assume the role of “storyteller-in-chief” for the broader public. To test his theory, drawing on a range of historical works, as well as speeches and press accounts, he examines Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to Pearl Harbor and George W. Bush’s narrative of 9/11.
In Part II, Krebs turns to the timing of narrative change, examining the examples of the Cold War and then the War on Terror, and relying largely on content analysis of opinion pieces from the conservative Chicago Tribune and the more liberal New York Times. Here, using the examples of the Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis, he makes the case for his most counterintuitive finding: that it is not periods of crisis, such as poor military performance or defeats, that open the way for a narrative change but, rather, episodes of victory or diplomatic success.
Like all solid scholarship in largely undertheorized and explored areas, Krebs’s study raises at least as many questions as it seeks to answer. While suggesting that there are strong grounds for expecting that his argument should travel reasonably well, he himself notes several potential limitations or concerns: It is a single-country study; it focuses on a democracy, with all that that means for the institutionalization of security policy formulation and the possibilities for open discussion; and the national security narrative is only one strand of a broader national narrative whose other constituent parts cannot simply be assumed to operate according to the same “rules.”
Several other elements of the author’s argument and theorizing also invite further investigation. For example, while the settled versus unsettled environment framework appeals intuitively, Krebs himself uses a range of sources to make his determination of the nature of the environment in his cases, and, tellingly, his ex post assessments are quite different from the long-prevailing wisdom about them. Hence, it is not clear how policymakers could know ex ante in which environment the country finds itself in order to shape a narrative effectively. In addition, he admits that periods of narrative disorder are not all born equal, and that the strength of public demand for storytelling varies accordingly. Thus, perhaps these empirical realities argue for a conceptualization of the setting as a continuum from unsettled to settled, rather than as a dichotomy. Such an approach might also better explain the success of a mixture of rhetorical modes—which is what some of his case material demonstrates—rather than a choice between either argumentation or storytelling alone.
Another concern is Krebs’s position that events do not have meaning in and of themselves, but also that there are limits to how events can be interpreted or narrated. Although he suggests plausible and implausible alternative story lines to the narrations chosen by the elite, he does not lay out what the range of acceptable narratives might be, or how we would determine it, except to suggest that the constituent elements cannot run counter to basic national identity components, which also, however, remain largely unspecified.
Thus, while the analysis helps us understand some of the mechanics of successful presentation of new meanings and their acceptance by the public, why a particular story line becomes hegemonic when it does is still limited by collective understandings. Krebs does not, for example, systematically engage the material interests of the punditocracy or the politico-economic elites they represent as an influence on the national security narrative. We are left to conclude that either the leader or elites successfully discerned which rhetorical mode the public craved, or that a set of circumstances (like battlefield problems) narrowed or shaped the bounds of discourse in a particular way because of political calculations, expediency, or opportunism.
Here, a specification of the broader national narrative or meta-narrative which, the analysis seems to suggest, is the source of enduring narrative components, could help explain the parameters of a successful subnarrative, like that in the national security realm. Of course, this then begs the question of the provenance of this meta-narrative. This is a far more difficult issue to address, but it may well be central to explaining narrative resilience or change.
Finally, while Krebs claims that this “book explores the silencing of dissent” (p. 20), he actually has very little to say about how narrative hegemony is enforced. In several instances, echoing the kind of hegemony that Antonio Gramsci grappled with, he attributes agency to the narrative through its apparent ability, by means of unspecified mechanisms, to straitjacket a leadership and marginalize voices whose positions fall beyond its parameters. However, while the less tangible forces that subtly normalize a range of shared understandings of history, politics, and identity may be more theoretically interesting, they should not blind us to the use of other, far less subtle, instruments of coercion that have been used by the American state to limit the bounds of “acceptable discourse.”
Indeed, such narrative disciplining has at times involved vicious threats and harassment against those who refuse to acquiesce in the orthodoxy of the story lines and associated policy prescriptions propagated by the power elite. The mechanisms of the overt coercion often required for what is defined as narrative “success” need to be part of any analysis of narrative legitimation.
In sum, this study explicitly and implicitly suggests an extremely complex interaction among the political and economic elites, the media, the public, historical context, and meta-narratives in the emergence, rise and fall of national security narratives. One hopes that Krebs’s theoretical insights, rich empirical case studies, and provocative conclusions will convince other IR scholars to reconsider their traditional approach to the study of narratives and further develop this critical area of research.
