Security State, Honor, and Anti-Establishment Resentment

Security (together with its equally apolitical twin of ‘resilience’) has become a fetish of our times. The security state ceaselessly attempts to dominate people, its actions revealing time and again that ‘emergency’ in a liberal democracy is not a state of exception, but very much part of the system. Or as Mark Neocleous put it, emergency is ‘the iron fist in the velvet glove of liberal constitutionalism’ – and liberalism more a technique of security than a philosophy of liberty. Security fetishism keeps spreading into ever new realms, ‘securitizing’ ever new threats, resulting in an anti-politics obsessed with security and paranoid about potential future threats – a paranoid anti-politics that risks to sacrifice in the name of security, security itself. Many critiques of security and the security state have been put forward – more often than not in an attempt to humanize security, and balance security with liberty (a false dichotomy). After all, who could be fundamentally against security? But the question we must ask is – can we eschew the logic of security altogether? And what do we risk if we do not? In the paper, I will try to illustrate the current ‘security impasse,’ a source of much harm, by using the case of outlaw motorcycle clubs in Germany. These clubs, on one hand, resist and criticize the security state that targets them, often disproportionately, with all sorts of extreme and preventive measures, but on the other hand, they, too, frame their own demands and their own actions using precisely the same logic of security: they demand ‘real’ security, and employ the same false dichotomy of security vs. liberty, the same idea of the ‘perversion of the law’ and of the necessity of return to the ‘rule of law’ (in their case framed within the cultural logic of honor). In the meantime, until this ideal ‘rule of law’ is ‘restored,’ they offer self-administered street justice and protection, replacing what they deem the ‘failed security state’ by their own sovereign emergency measures as they challenge the state’s monopoly on violence. I will try to show that their acts follow exactly the logic of liberalism as a technique of security, revealing the fascist potential within liberalism rather than being liberalism’s opposite.