Getty ImagesYou need only glance at the headlines these days to know that the current state of international relations is dangerous.
只需瞥一眼当今的新闻头条，便可知当前国际关系的局势岌岌可危。
From Washington’s retreat from multilateral commitments to Moscow’s aggressive ethno-nationalism, the defining feature of world affairs is not simply cold strategic calculation but something closer to anxiety.
从华盛顿对多边承诺的退缩，到莫斯科激进的族裔民族主义，世界事务的决定性特征已不再仅仅是冷酷的战略算计，而更接近于一种焦虑。
To explain this search for certainty in a world that no longer reflects the stories states have long told about themselves, political theorists have turned to the field of psychiatry. Specifically, to ideas of “self” and “being” that explain the idea of “ontological security”.
为了解释各国在一个不再反映其长期自我叙事的世界上对确定性的追寻，政治理论家们转向了精神病学领域。具体而言，是转向了关于“自我”与“存在”的概念，用以阐释“本体论安全”这一理念。
Ontology is a branch of philosophy that ponders the basic question of what it means to exist. In psychiatry, the term ontological security was coined by Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who characterised mentally stable people as having an identity and sense of autonomy that is never in question.
本体论是哲学的一个分支，探讨存在的基本含义。在精神病学中，“本体论安全”一词由苏格兰精神病学家R.D.莱恩首创，他将精神稳定的人描述为拥有从未受到质疑的身份感和自主感。
Those suffering from schizophrenia, however, typically felt: more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.
然而，精神分裂症患者通常感到：虚幻多于真实；字面意义上，死气多于生气；与世界其余部分有着脆弱的界限，导致其身份和自主性始终受到质疑。
States, too, can suffer from this form of insecurity – not as a clinical condition but a structural one, emerging from the uncertainties of a fracturing international system.
国家同样会遭受这种形式的不安全感——这并非一种临床病症，而是一种结构性问题，源于破碎的国际体系中的不确定性。
As political scientist Jennifer Mitzen argues, states have similar needs to people: “to experience oneself as a whole, continuous person in time” to maintain a stable identity.
正如政治学家珍妮弗·米岑所言，国家与人类有着相似的需求：即“在时间中体验自我为一个完整、连续的人”，以维持稳定的身份。
In his book Modernity and Self-Identity, sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that ontological security for states involves a “sense of continuity and order in events” – “security as being” rather than “security as survival”.
社会学家安东尼·吉登斯在《现代性与自我认同》一书中指出，国家的本体论安全涉及对“事件连续性和秩序感”的追求——即“作为存在的安宁”，而非“作为生存的保障”。
The danger is that when a state’s sense of self collapses, identity stops being a background condition of foreign policy and becomes its driving purpose, with potentially catastrophic results.
危险在于，当国家的自我意识崩溃时，身份认同不再仅仅是外交政策的背景条件，而成为其驱动力，这可能导致灾难性的后果。
Russia is perhaps the best example. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s shattered Russia’s sense of self – its role, purpose and place in the world.
俄罗斯或许是最好的例子。20世纪90年代苏联的解体粉碎了俄罗斯的自我认知——其在世界中的角色、目的和地位。
What followed was a decades-long search for ontological security that hardened under President Vladimir Putin into the assertion of a distinct Russian identity fundamentally incompatible with – and threatened by – the West.
随之而来的是长达数十年的对本体论安全的追寻，在弗拉基米尔·普京总统任内，这种追寻固化为对一种独特俄罗斯身份的宣示，这种身份从根本上与西方不相容，并视西方为威胁。
But this didn’t provide the ontological security it promised. Rather, it sowed the seeds for the invasion of Ukraine. For Putin, Ukraine’s embrace of Western identity was not merely a geopolitical inconvenience; it was a rebuke to that assertion of Russian identity.
但这并未提供其所承诺的本体论安全。相反，它播下了入侵乌克兰的种子。对普京而言，乌克兰拥抱西方身份不仅是一个地缘政治上的不便；更是对俄罗斯身份宣示的一种驳斥。
In this sense, the invasion was an attempt to resolve by force what could not be resolved by narrative, namely the claim Ukraine is not a real nation.
从这个意义上说，入侵是一次试图以武力解决叙事无法解决的问题的尝试，即声称乌克兰不是一个真正的国家。
The United States is a different but equally instructive case. The post-Cold War moment of supreme ideological confidence – the sense that liberal democracy had triumphed and American power could remake the world in its image – was gradually hollowed out.
美国是一个不同但同样具有启发性的案例。冷战结束后那种极度的意识形态自信——即自由民主已取得胜利，美国力量可以按照其形象重塑世界——逐渐被掏空。
The disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq shattered not just US prestige, but America’s story about being the “shining city on a hill”.
阿富汗和伊拉克灾难性的干预不仅粉碎了美国的威望，也击碎了美国关于自身是“山巅之城”的叙事。
President Donald Trump’s “America First” focus – a notion that the US should recover a simpler, more certain sense of itself by retreating from the commitments of the liberal international order – is a textbook case of a nation seeking ontological security.
唐纳德·特朗普总统的“美国优先”理念——即美国应通过从自由国际秩序的承诺中撤退，来恢复一种更简单、更确定的自我认知——是一个国家寻求本体论安全的教科书式案例。
But it also has significant ramifications for those countries that have wedded themselves to the US for their own security.
但这对于那些为了自身安全而依附于美国国家而言，也具有重大的影响。
Recovering a shared sense of self
恢复共同的自我认知
states seeking 'ontological security' is just a fancy way to say 'we need more surveillance and less freedom'. nice try.
国家寻求“本体论安全”不过是“我们需要更多监控、更少自由”的华丽辞藻。想得美。