“Enemies” lie at the essence of the state—and define “national security.” The enemy is the alien that cannot be allowed to penetrate into the nation. The boundary of the state separates badness from goodness—protecting the collective self.

Borders, according to Josefina Alvarez (2006), are the very “walls of the edifice of the state,” separating inside from outside. Security discourses function to “name dangers.” What is dangerous must be prevented from violating the state’s boundaries.

Danger, Alvarez says, is not a thing that exists “independently of those to whom it may become a threat.” Naming danger is a matter of interpretation: something is understood as dangerous only when interpreted within the “discursive realm which gives it meaning.”

Security discourses are an integral part of the state’s construction of identity, portraying certain dangers as threatening the “Us inside the state borders,” specifying “what we are not and what we have to fear”—and “what the state should defend us from.”

Thus, security discourses are not, fundamentally, a response to danger, but rather function to reproduce danger: as long as there are dangers that generate insecurity—then the state can perform its security functions.

Andreas Behnke, similarly (1999), states that modern security politics are predicated upon the possibility of “drawing the line between inside and outside—friend and enemy—in an unambiguous fashion.” The “Enemy” is simply “the Other, the alien, the outsider” which defines the boundary of “our” community.

Security is about the very “designation and delineation of the state,” and therefore its enemies. The Political is thus an inherently “agonistic concept,” constantly involving explicit and implicit decisions about the “line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.”

The defining characteristic of the sovereign, Behnke says, is to “designate a threat:” to “label actors enemies.” Designation of a threat enables the sovereign to take whatever steps are necessary to expel or defeat the enemy, including the exercise of violence. It follows that security is in fact “contingent upon insecurity.” The designation of a threat—what makes the nation insecure—allows the quest for security to come into being.

It would appear, then, that the idea of the nation-state and that of the enemy are two sides of the same coin. The nation comes into existence and maintains its power insofar as there are enemies to combat.

The nation achieves health and strength when there are Others to be fought. Boundary maintenance—the rejection or expulsion of enemies—lies at the heart of the nation’s task. Nations are like bodies with an immune system—preventing alien entities from entering into the interior.

According to conventional national security perspectives, enemies appear—and the nation-state consequently mobilizes to ward off or defeat enemies. From the “Realist” point of view, enemies represent an objective danger.

The alternative view suggests that enemies are created, or constructed. Nations identity enemies to affirm their own identity. Writing about the “ideological model of war,” Nico Carpentier observes (2015) that the Enemy is “presented as a threat to ‘our own’ identity.” Thus, the “identity of the Enemy as a constitutive outside” is “indispensable to the construction of the identity of the self.”

We imagine that “enemies” are an independent variable, and war the dependent variable. Perhaps it works the other way around. Perhaps nation-states need warfare—an enemy to struggle against—in order to justify their function as providers of security. The enemy—source of insecurity—mobilizes the state’s function to provide security.

The idea of the enemy, it would appear, is part and parcel of the idea of the nation. The state comes into being—and regains energy and power—as it defends itself against enemies. Perhaps if enemies did not exist, the state would wither away.