The perm maintains the quo in order to not impact stability – only the alt alone can solve by removing the “slowdown of history.”

Below, I explore these questions in the context of four different security agendas. First, I look at European security between 1960 and 1990, the period of change and détente, which provided the framework for developing the speech act interpretation of security. During this period, the main issue was whether political and social change could be de-securitized even as the basic political structure of the region was kept frozen with major help of the security instrument. How much could be de-securitized and how was a major question, as is why and how change suddenly took on a new and different character in 1989. In the second part, I deal with a very different case: Environmental security. Here we see not an instance of de-securitizing an essentially securitized field but, rather, the potential advantages and disadvantages of securitizing a new area that, perhaps, should be addressed via other thematizations. In the third part, I take up the issue of societal security. This topic is presented in a fashion somewhat parallel to the preceding one, but I also ask the following: If we start using the concept of societal security in order to understand certain new dynamics, especially in post-Cold War Europe, what differences are there between a traditional, alternative security approach as opposed to a speech act approach to security? In the final part, I analyze the major new attempts to apply the concept of "security" in Europe, with particular reference to the notion of "European security." Change and Détente: European Security 1960-1990 A peculiar feature of the Cold War system in Europe was the almost total exclusion of unwanted change, a guaranteed stability of the status quo. Raymond Aron once described it as a "slowdown of history" (but then went on to discuss the iron law of change that would ultimately upset this strange situation).26 Security became the means whereby this slowdown was effected. The speech act "security" is, of course, more than just a word, since one must have in hand the means to block a development deemed threatening. For example, if a foreign army walks across the border or tries to intimidate a country, it is necessary (but not sufficient) to have adequate military strength to resist; or if social unrest, caused from within or without, is the problem, one must have a sufficiently repressive apparatus, ideological cohesion in the core group that allows the apparatus to be mobilized, and the legitimacy to use it that avoids the escalation of public opposition. For a long time the situation in Central and Eastern Europe was such that, where nonmilitary issues were concerned, it was always possible for the regime to control things--in extremis , with the help of friends with tanks. In Cold War Europe, moreover, military threats could also be fenced off because of the general nuclear condition. As the late Franz Josef Strauss once put it: "In the present European situation there is no possibility of changes through war, but neither through revolution or civil war."27 Change seemed impossible without some consent by the power-holders; it had to take place through a negotiated process of pressure and acceptance, stabilization and destabilization. And so it happened. The central issue of the debates on European détente--and the mechanism that actually worked in them--was the logic of change through stabilization . In particular, as Willy Brandt explained, German Ostpolitik and Deutschlandpolitik were very explicit about the necessity of "stabilizing the status quo in order to overcome the status quo." Only by removing some threats to, and thereby some excuses for, the regimes in the East, would it then become possible to push back the securitization of East-West relations and change domestic conditions in Eastern Europe. At the same time, the field of human rights evolved into an attempt to develop new rules of the game in the nonmilitary arena. "Human rights" became the label for a specific political struggle/negotiation over the border between security and politics, intervention and interaction. This theme generated a great deal of controversy in the mid-1980s, especially where efforts by West German Social Democrats (SPD) to revive détente were concerned.28