Legislative crystallization of Covid-19 securitization processes. The case of Spain. From Law 4/1981 on states of alarm, exception and assault to Law 2/2021 on measures for the management of the pandemic

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present a theoretical-methodological proposal based on a model of analysis from the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, which incorporates the examination of legislative texts into the study of securitization processes. With this objective, we propose an approach to the study of the securitization of the Covid-19 pandemic through the comparative analysis of two texts that have given legislative coverage to the management of this health crisis in Spain. The text of (1) Organic Law 4/1981 on the states of alarm, exception and siege; and the text of (2) Law 2/2021 of the Basque Parliament on measures for managing the pandemic.

After the publication of Security: A New Framework For Analysis (Buzan et al.1997), numerous investigations have used the securitization analysis model of the Copenhagen School of Security Studies to study security policies on phenomena such as migratory movements (Müller and Gerbauer, 2021), the climate emergency, or the health crisis of Covid-19 by examining the texts published on social media (Karyotis et al., 2021),or the analysis of the audiences (Bengtsson and Rhinard, 2019) or political discourses (Kuleteva and Clifford, 2021). Securitization theory holds that what gives an issue the status of threat results from an interaction between an actor, whether it is a state, an organization, or the media, and which tries to define a certain problem as an existential threat, and an audience that accepts or rejects this attempt. Under this premise, security is considered a social construct, which has enormous consequences when it comes to its study. The analysis of the security agenda no longer consists of evaluating those threats considered real, but rather aims at the communicative processes through which actors and audiences agree to securitize an issue.

The contributions of Balzacq (2005), Salter (2008) and Stritzel (2007;2012), among others, have also broadened the objects of study of securitization, which have ceased to be exclusively texts of a political nature communicated in a linear manner to incorporate also the audience as an agent that interacts and participates in the creation of the securitizing discourse, the performance associated with the execution of the discourse or the interactivity of the discourse in socio-digital networks. However, despite this diversification in the approach to the study of securitization, most research continues to focus on texts belonging to political or media discourse. There is an absence of analysis of securitization in other types of texts, such as those of a legislative nature which are also interesting to study within the framework of these processes. That is, texts that, in many cases, give legislative coverage to the application of security policies and could represent the legal crystallization of previous political-media discourses.

That said, given the legal nature of the texts examined in this article, it is important to make clear that the analysis proposed is, following the model of the Copenhagen School, a discursive analysis. This article does not carry out a legal analysis of the documents or a study on the legal consequences of the implementation of these laws, a study that would need another theoretical-methodological approach. Without conducting a legal analysis, we propose to observe the discursive construction of security that underlies the texts analyzed and the consequences that, according to the hypothesis of the Copenhagen School, this entails.

Thus, the current analysis is about the securitization processes of the Covid-19 crisis. This health crisis has been one of the most disruptive episodes globally in recent decades. The unexpected appearance of the virus and its rapid spread made Covid-19, in just a few weeks, as UN Secretary General António Guterres pointed out, the greatest threat to global security. The pandemic surpassed any of the established international protocols, and the lack of multilateral agreements between different countries and measures against the virus showed in turn a lack of global governance to deal with this type of threat. At first sight, we could say that Covid-19, an illness that, being new, poses a threat to the health of the entire world population since most people do not have immunity against it. However, this health crisis is once again a good scenario in which to observe that the threat is perceived and constructed in a very diverse way among the population. The study by Kirk (2022) on the securitization of Covid-19 in the United States refers to this. She analyzes the discursive battle between different security narratives about the health crisis in a country where the wearing or not wearing of a mask in public places often becomes an expression of a political position.

The delimitation of the object of study to the examination of the texts of the Organic Law 4/1981 on states of alarm, exception, and siege, and (2) the Law 2/2021 of the Basque Parliament on measures for the management of the pandemic, is done for several reasons. In the first place, both texts, of an eminently legal nature, respond to the necessary characteristics to carry out the analysis in accordance with the objective of the study. Secondly, despite the substantial differences that both laws maintain in their preamble and the context of their drafting, the two texts have served as a legal framework for taking measures to deal with similar events, specifically, the crisis health of covid-19. This allows, following the proposal of the Copenhagen School, to contextualize the analysis of the securitization construction of the texts based on these facts. Third, the choice of texts, which share a legal framework, responds to the proposal to carry out an analysis of a state nature, and not an international one, given the prominence of state legislation in the coverage of policies and implementation of the security measures against the covid-19 disease because of the lack of international legal frameworks.

The article is structured in three parts. In the first section, a brief theoretical-methodological approach is elaborated on the evolution of security research in the field of International Relations and to the theory of securitization developed by the Copenhagen School. In the second, the context of the global health crisis and the case of Spain are described together with the securitization processes that accompany it. Thirdly, the documents examined and the operationalization that allows their analysis are presented. Subsequently, the discussion on the results and conclusions is addressed.