National Security as an Institution: ?Constructing? the ?National Security State?

Constructivist readings of the ?culture? of national security have done much to account for national variations in military strategy. However, such accounts tend to focus on the norms themselves, rather than the particular conditions of norm creation, or their actual institutionalisation. Drawing on contemporary approaches to state theory, The paper will examine the development of the US ?national security state? in the post-World War II period as means to looking at these broader concerns. The centralising tendency of improved civil-military coordination may not have amounted to a ?garrison state?, as some have argued, but it certainly did go against prevalent anti-statist tendencies within US political culture. The institutionalisation of the national security state, therefore, was an important moment in postwar state identity formation. The institutionalisation of the national security state, by its very success, also led to the durability of both its formal and informal manifestations within the US government, as a form of reproduction of institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]