From Industrial Society to Risk Society: Questions of
Survival, Social Structure and Ecological Enlightenment
Are Risks Timeless?
Aren't risks at least as old as industrial society, possibly
even as old as the human race itself? Isn't all life subject to the risk of
death? Aren't and weren't all societies in all epochs `risk societies'?
On the contrary, should we not (or must we not) be
discussing the fact that since the beginning of industrialization, threats -
famines, epidemics or natural catastrophes - have been continually reduced? To
list only a few key advances: the reduction of infant mortality, the `bonus
years' (Imhof), the achievements of the welfare state, the enormous progress in
technological perfection over the past hundred years. Isn't the Federal
Republic of Germany, in particular, an Eldorado of bureaucratically organized
care and caution?
At a conference on risk at Cardiff University in February
1996, the British sociologist Hilary Rose suggested that `risk society' has a
German taste, a flavour of wealth and security. Perhaps only a few countries,
and certainly not Britain, can afford to be risk societies? A few weeks later,
the `BSE crisis', a textbook example of risk society, began. Even today, in
1999, this crisis is far from played out. No one knows how many other countries
may be affected by the disease, or what its long-term consequences may be. Thus
BSE highlights the growing importance of `aware unawareness' in risk production
and risk definition because the precise mode of its transmission across species
is a mystery and it may have a long gestation period (Adam, 1998: 163-92).
Meanwhile, its purely economic impact has been considerable. The latest
estimate from the BSE inquiry in 1998 puts its costs, in the UK alone, at £3
billion, measured in terms of compensation paid to farmers and the costs of
destroying infected cattle and disposing of their remains. The BSE crisis also
provides ample evidence of how risks and their contested social definitions cut
across borders - of states and of scientific disciplines. If, for example, you
had gone into the mountains of southern Bavaria in the summer of 1996 and
visited a lonely Wirtshaus (small local restaurant), your menu would probably
have borne a photograph showing the local farmer, arm in arm with his smiling
family and surrounded by family cattle, as a means of building personal trust
to counter the omnipresence of the BSE risk. The implicit message: `Please
trust me. You can enjoy this family steak safely here. Forget about that risky
British BSE beef!' However, the BSE crisis cannot be `kept on one side'
politically either and has flooded into key areas of politics - health
politics, agricultural politics, foreign politics, trade politics, European
politics - illustrating again the specific `and'-characteristic of risk
conflicts.
Still, it may be objected, certainly there are `new risks',
such as nuclear power, chemical and biotechnical production, but, considered
mathematically or physically, aren't these dangers not of great scope, but also
of exceedingly small, actually negligible, probability? Looking at them coolly
and rationally, does that not imply that they should be given a lesser status
than long-accepted risks, such as the incredible carnage on the highways or the
risks to smokers?
Certainly, ultimate security is denied to us human beings.
But is it not also true that the unavoidable `residual risks' are the downside
of the opportunities - for prosperity, relatively high social security and
general comfort - that developed industrial society offers to the majority of
its members in a historically unparalleled manner? Isn't risk primarily an
`energizing principle' (Giddens) for the active exploration of new worlds and
markets? Is the mostly negative dramatization of such risks not in the end a
typical media spectacle, ignoring established expert opinion, a `new German
anxiety', or a millennium fever, as untenable and just as short-lived as the
debacle regarding the `railroad sickness' from the end of the previous century?
And finally, aren't risks a central concern of the engineering and physical sciences? What business has the sociologist here? Isn't that once again typical?
The Calculus of Risk:
Predictable Security in the Face of an Open Future
Human dramas - plagues, famines and natural disasters, the
looming power of gods and demons - may or may not quantifiably equal the
destructive potential of modern mega-technologies in hazardousness. They differ
essentially from `risks' in my sense since they are not based on decisions, or,
more specifically, decisions that focus on techno-economic advantages and
opportunities and accept hazards as simply the dark side of progress. This is
my first point: risks presume industrial, that is, techno-economic, decisions
and considerations of utility. They differ from `war damage' by their `normal
birth', or, more precisely, their `peaceful origin' in the centers of
rationality and prosperity with the blessings of the guarantors of law and
order. They differ from pre-industrial natural disasters by their origin in
decision-making, which is of course conducted never by individuals but by
entire organizations and political groups.'
The consequence is fundamental: pre-industrial hazards, no
matter how large and devastating, were `strokes of fate' raining down on
humankind from `outside' and attributable to an `other' - gods, demons or
Nature. Here too there were countless accusations, but they were directed
against the gods or God, `religiously motivated', to put it simply, and not - like industrial risks -
politically charged. For with the origin of industrial risks in decision-making
the problem of social accountability and responsibility irrevocably arises,
even in those areas where the prevailing rules of science and law permit
accountability only in exceptional cases. People, firms, state agencies and
politicians are responsible for industrial risks. As we sociologists say, the
social roots of risks block the `externalizability' of the problem of
accountability.'
Therefore, it is not the number of dead and wounded, but
rather a social feature, their industrial self-generation, which makes the
hazards of mega-technology a political issue. The question remains, however:
must one not view and assess the past two hundred years as a period of continual
growth in calculability and precautions in dealing with industrially produced
insecurities and destruction? In fact, a very promising approach, and one
barely explored to date, is to trace the (political) institutional history of
evolving industrial society as the conflict-laden emergence of a system of
rules for dealing with industrially produced risks and insecurities (see Ewald,
1986, 1991; Bohret, 1987; Evers and Nowotny, 1987; Lau, 1989; Schwarz and
Thompson, 1990; Hildebrandt et al., 1994; Yearley, 1994; Boni3, 1995; Lash et
al., 1996; Wynne, 1996a, 1996b).
The idea of reacting to the uncertainties that lie in opening and conquering new markets or in developing and implementing new technologies with collective agreements - insurance contracts, for instance, which burden the individual with general fees just as much as they relieve him or her from dramatic damage cases - is hardly a new social invention. Its origins go back to the beginnings of intercontinental navigation, but with the growth of industrial capitalism, insurance was continually perfected and expanded into nearly all problem areas of social action. Consequences that at first affect only the individual become `risks', systematically caused, statistically describable and in that sense `predictable' types of events, which can therefore also be subjected to supra-individual and political rules of recognition, compensation and avoidance.
The calculus of risks connects the physical, the engineering
and the social sciences. It can be applied to completely disparate phenomena
not only in health management - from the risks of smoking to those of nuclear
power - but also to economic risks, risks of old age, of unemployment and
underemployment, of traffic accidents, of certain phases of life, and so forth.
In addition, it permits a type of `technological moralization' which no longer
need employ moral and ethical imperatives directly. To give an example, the
place of the `categorical imperative' is taken by the mortality rates under
certain conditions of air pollution. In this sense, one could say that the
calculus of risk exemplifies a type of ethics without morality, the
mathematical ethics of the technological age. The triumph of the calculus of
risks would probably not have been possible if fundamental advantages were not
tied to it.
The first of these lies in the fact that risks open the
opportunity to document statistically consequences that were at first always
personalized and shifted onto individuals. In this way risk de-individualizes.
Risks are revealed as systematic events, which are accordingly in need of a
general political regulation. Through the statistical description of risks (say
in the form of accident probabilities) the blinkers of individualization drop
off - and this is not yet sufficiently the case with environmental diseases
such as pseudo-croup, asthma or even cancer. A field for corresponding
political action is opened up: accidents on the job, for instance, are not
blamed on those whose health they have already ruined anyway, but are stripped
of their individual origin and related instead to the plant organization, the
lack of precautions, and so on.
A second advantage is closely connected to the first:
insurance payments are agreed on and guaranteed on a no-fault basis (setting
aside the extreme cases of gross negligence or intentional damage). In that
way, legal battles over causation become unnecessary and moral outrage is
moderated. Instead, an incentive for prevention is created for businesses, in
proportion to the magnitude of the insurance costs - or perhaps not.
The decisive thing, however, is ultimately that in this
manner the industrial system is made capable of dealing with its own
unforeseeable future. The calculus of risks, protection by insurance liability
laws, and the like, promise the impossible: future events that have not yet
occurred become the object of current action - prevention, compensation or
precautionary after-care. As the French sociologist Franqois Ewald (1986) shows
in detailed studies, the `invention' of the calculus of risks lies in making
the incalculable calculable, with the help of accident statistics, through
generalizable settlement formulae as well as through the generalized exchange
principle of `money for damages'. In this way, a norm system of rules for
social accountability, compensation and precautions, always very controversial
in its details, creates present security in the face of an open uncertain
future. Modernity, which brings uncertainty to every niche of existence, finds its
counter-principle in a social compact against industrially produced hazards and
damages, stitched together out of public and private insurance agreements; and,
thus, activating and renewing trust in corporations and government.
Politically and programmatically, this pact for the
containment and `just' distribution of the consequences of the standard
industrial revolution is an early Third Way because it is situated somewhere
between socialism and liberalism. On the one side it is based on the systematic
creation of consequences and hazards, but at the same time it involves public
and private insurance (welfare state) and active individuals in preventing and
compensating for them. The consensus that can be achieved with it always
remains unstable, conflict-laden and in need of revision. For that very reason,
however, it represents the core, the inner `social logic' of the consensus on
progress, which - in principle - legitimated techno-economic development in the
first industrial modernity. Where this `security pact' is violated wholesale,
flagrantly and systematically, the consensus on progress itself is consequently
at stake.
My decisive idea, and the one that leads us further, is that
this is precisely what has happened in a series of technological challenges
with which we are concerned today - nuclear power, many types of chemical and
bio-technological production as well as the continuing and threatening
ecological destruction. The foundations of the established risk logic are being
subverted or suspended.'
Put another way, since the middle of the twentieth century
the social institutions of industrial society have been confronted with the
historically unprecedented possibility of the destruction through
decision-making of all life on this planet. This distinguishes our epoch not
only from the early phase of the industrial revolution, but also from all other
cultures and social forms, no matter how diverse and contradictory these may
have been in detail. If a fire breaks out, the fire brigade comes; if a traffic
accident occurs, the insurance pays. This interplay between beforehand and
afterwards, between the future and security in the here and now, because
precautions have been taken even for the worst imaginable case, has been
revoked in the age of nuclear, chemical and genetic technology. In all the
brilliance of their perfection, nuclear power plants have suspended the
principle of insurance not only in the economic, but also in the medical,
psychological, cultural and religious sense. The residual risk society has
become an uninsured society, with protection paradoxically diminishing as the
danger grows. Turned around politically, this implies, as demonstrated by the
`nuclear exit-politics' of Germany's current Red-Green government, that raising
the insurance level of nuclear power plants is a `safe' ticket out of the
atomic age.
Ultimately, there is no institution, neither concrete nor
probably even conceivable, that would be prepared for the `WIA', the `worst
imaginable accident', and there is no social order that could guarantee its
social and political constitution in this worst possible case.' There are many,
however, which are specialized in the only remaining possibility: denying the
dangers. For after-care, which guarantees security even against hazards, is
replaced by the dogma of technological infallibility, which will be refuted by
the next accident. The queen of error, science, becomes the guardian of this
taboo. Only `communist' reactors, but not those in West Germany, are empirical
creations of the human hand which can toss all their theories onto the
scrap-heap. Even the simple question `What if it does happen after all?' ends
up in the void of unpreparedness for after-care. Correspondingly, political
stability in risk societies is the stability of not thinking about things.
Put more precisely, nuclear, chemical, genetic and
ecological megahazards abolish the four pillars of the calculus of risks.
First, one is concerned here with global, often irreparable, damage that can no
longer be limited; the concept of monetary compensation therefore
4 fails. Second,
precautionary after-care is excluded for the worst im-
aginable accident in
the case of fatal hazards; the security concept of
anticipatory
monitoring of results fails. Third, the `accident' loses its
delimitations in
time and space, and therefore its meaning. It be-
comes an event with
a beginning and no end; an `open-ended festival'
of creeping, galloping
and overlapping waves of destruction. But that
implies: standards
of normality, measuring procedures and therefore
the basis for
calculating the hazards are abolished; incomparable
entities are
compared and calculation turns into obfuscation.
The problem of the
incalculability of consequences and damage
becomes clear with
particular vividness in the lack of accountability
for them. The
scientific and legal recognition and attribution of haz-
ards takes place in
our society according to the principle of causality,
the polluter-pays
principle. But what strikes engineers and lawyers
as self-evident,
even virtually demanded by ethics, has extremely
dubious, paradoxical consequences in the realm of
mega-hazards. d
One example: the legal proceedings against the lead crystal
factory in
the community of Altenstadt in the Upper Palatinate.'
Flecks of lead and
arsenic the size of a penny had fallen on the
town, and fluoride vapors had turned leaves brown, etched
win-
dows and caused bricks to crumble away. Residents were
suffering
from skin rashes, nausea and headaches. There was no
question where
all of that originated. The white dust was pouring visibly
from the
smokestacks of the factory. A clear case. A clear case? On
the tenth
day of the trial the presiding judge offered to drop charges
in return
for a fine of DM 10,000, a result which is typical of
environmental
crimes in the Federal Republic (1996: 21,000 investigations,
forty-
nine convictions with prison terms, thirty-one of those
suspended,
the rest dropped).
How is that
possible? It is not only the lack of laws and not merely
the legendary shortcomings in applying them which protect
the crim-
inals. The reasons lie deeper and cannot be eliminated by
the staunch
appeals to the police and the law-makers that issue ever
more loudly
from the ranks of the environmentalists. A conviction is
blocked by
the very thing that was supposed to achieve it: the strict
application
of the (individually interpreted) polluter-pays principle.
In the case of the
lead crystal factory, the commission of the crime
could not be and was not denied by anyone. A mitigating
factor
came into play for the culprits: there were three other
glass factories
in the vicinity which emitted the same pollutants. Notice:
the more
pollution is committed, the less is committed.
More precisely: the more liberally the acceptable levels are
set, the greater the number of smokestacks and discharge pipes through which
pollutants and toxins are emitted, the lower the `residual probability' that a
culprit can be made responsible for the general sniffling and coughing, that is
to say, the less pollution is produced. Whereas at the same time - one does not
exclude the other - the general level of contamination and pollution is
increasing. Welcome to the real-life travesty of the hazard technocracy!"
This example illustrates three points: first, the importance
of metanorms of risk definitions, here the legal norms of how to attribute
causes and consequences to actors under conditions of high complexity and
contingency. If it is necessary to name one and only one actor, in the
overwhelming majority of cases no actor can be named.
This is even more true because, second, a significant number
of technologically induced hazards, such as those associated with chemical
pollution, atomic radiation and genetically modified organisms, are
characterized by an inaccessibility to the human senses. They operate outside
the capacity of (unaided) human perception. Everyday life is `blind' in
relation to hazards which threaten life and thus depends in its inner decisions
on experts and counter-experts. Not only the potential harm but this
`expropriation of the senses' by global risks makes life insecure.
Third, there is a significant interrelationship between ignoring
a risk which cannot be attributed according to the meta-norms of risk
definition in law and science and enforcing risk production as a consequence of
industrial action and production.
This organized irresponsibility is based fundamentally on a
confusion of centuries. The hazards to which we are exposed date from a
different century than the promises of security which attempt to subdue them.
Herein lies the foundation for both phenomena: the periodic outbreak of the
contradictions of highly organized security bureaucracies and the possibility
of normalizing these `hazard shocks' over and over again. At the threshold of
the twenty-first century, the challenges of the age of atomic, genetic and
chemical technology are being handled with concepts and recipes that are
derived from early industrial society of the nineteenth and the early twentieth
centuries.'
Is there an operational criterion for distinguishing between
risks and threats? The economy itself reveals the boundary line of what is
tolerable with economic precision, through the refusal of private insurance.
Where the logic of private insurance disengages, where the economic risks of
insurance appear too large or too unpredictable to insurance concerns, the
boundary that separates `predictable' risks from uncontrollable threats has
obviously been breached again and again in large and small ways.
Two types of consequences are connected in principle to this
overstepping of the bounds. First, the social pillars of the calculus of risks
fail; security degenerates into mere technical safety. The secret of the
calculus of risks, however, is that technical and social components work
together: limitation, accountability, compensation, precautionary after-care.
These are now running in neutral, and social and political security can be
created solely by means of a contradictory maximizing of technical
superlatives.
Second, a central part of this political dynamic is the
social contradiction between highly developed safety bureaucracies, on the one
hand, and the open legalization of previously unseen, gigantic threats, on the
other, without any possibility of after-care. A society which is oriented from
top to toe towards security and health is confronted with the shock of their
diametrical opposites, destruction and threats which scorn any precautions
against them.
Two contrary lines of historical development are converging
in late twentieth-century Europe: a level of security founded on the perfection
of techno-bureaucratic norms and controls, and the spread and challenge of
historically new hazards which slip through all the meshes of law, technology
and politics. This contradiction, which is not of a technical, but of a social
and political character, remains hidden in the `confusion of centuries'
(Giinther Anders). And this will continue so long as the old industrial
patterns of rationality and control last. It will break up to the extent that
improbable events become probable. `Normal accidents' is the name Charles
Perrow (1984) gives in his book to this predictability with which what was
considered impossible occurs - and the more emphatically it is denied, the
sooner, more destructively and shockingly it occurs. In the chain of publicly
revealed catastrophes, near-catastrophes, whitewashed security faults and
scandals the technically centered claim to the control of governmental and
industrial authority shatters - quite independently of the established measure
of hazards: the number of dead, the danger of the contaminations, and so on.
The central social-historical and political potential of
ecological, nuclear, chemical and genetic hazards lies in the collapse of
administration, in the collapse of techno-scientific and legal rationality and
of institutional political security guarantees which those hazards conjure up
for everyone. That potential lies in the unmasking of the concretely existing
anarchy which has grown out of the denial of the social production and
administration of mega-hazards occurrence would leave the experts' theories
intact but destroy their lives?
Sooner or later the question will arise as to the value of a
legal system that regulates and pursues every detail of the technically
manageable minor risks, but legalizes the mega-hazards by virtue of its
authority, to the extent they cannot be minimized technically, and burdens
everyone with them, including those who resist.
How can a democratic political authority be maintained which
must counter the escalating consciousness of hazards with energetic safety
claims, but in that very process puts itself constantly on the defensive and
risks its entire credibility with every accident or sign of an accident?
There is a public dispute over a new ethics of research in
order to avoid incalculable and inhuman results. To limit oneself to that
debate is to misunderstand the degree and type of involvement of the
engineering sciences in the production of hazards. An ethical renewal of the
sciences, even if it were not to become entangled in the thicket of ethical
viewpoints, would be like a bicycle brake on an intercontinental jet,
considering the autonomization of technological development and its
interconnections with economic interests. Moreover, we are concerned not merely
with the ethics of research, but also with its logic and with the unity of
culprits and judges (experts) of the engineering sciences in the technocracy of
hazards.
An initial insight is central: in matters of hazards, no one
is an
expert - particularly not the experts. Predictions of risk
contain a
double fuzziness. First, they presume cultural acceptance
and cannot produce it. There is no scientific bridge between destruction and
protest or between destruction and acceptance. Acceptable risks are ultimately
accepted risks. Second, new knowledge can turn normality into hazards
overnight. Nuclear energy and the hole in the ozone layer are prominent
examples. Therefore: the advancement of science refutes its original claims of
safety. It is the successes o f science which sow the doubts as to its risk
predictions.
But conversely, it is also true that acute danger passes the
monopoly of interpretation to those who caused it, of all people. In the shock
of the catastrophe, people speak of rem, Becquerels or ethylene glycol as if
they know what such words mean, and they must do so in order to find their way
in the most everyday matters. This contradiction must be exposed. On the one
hand, the engineering sciences involuntarily enact their own self-refutation in
their contradictory risk diagnoses. On the other, they continue to administer
the privilege handed down to them from the Kaiser's day, the right to determine
according to their own internal standards the global social question of the
most intensely political nature: how safe is safe enough?
The power of the hard sciences here rests on a simple social
construct. They are granted the binding authority - binding for law and
politics - to decide on the basis of their own standards what the `state of
technology' demands. But since this general clause is the legal standard for
safety, private organizations and committees (for instance, the Society of
German Engineers, the Institute for Standards) decide in Germany the amount of
hazards to which everyone can be subjected (see Wolf, 1987). This is a
situation that the Schroder government is going to change.
If one asks, for instance, what level of exposure to
artificially produced radioactivity must be tolerated by the populace, that is,
where the threshold of tolerance separating normality from hazardousness is
situated, then the Atomic Energy Act gives the general answer that the
necessary precautions are to correspond to `the state of technology' (Sec. 7 II
No. 3). This phrase is fleshed out in the `Guidelines' of the Reactor Safety
Commission - an `advisory council' of the Ministry of the Environment in which
representatives of engineering companies hold sway. When the Green Minister of
the Environment, Jurgen Trittin, came to office in 1998, the first thing he did
was to dismiss this commission, thus removing from the nuclear industry one of
its major instruments of (no-)risk power definition.
In air pollution policy, noise protection and water policy
one always finds the same pattern: laws prescribe the general programme. But anyone
who wishes to know how large a continuing ration of standardized pollution
citizens are expected to tolerate needs to consult the `Ordinance on Large
Combustion Facilities' or the `Technical Instructions: Air Quality' and similar
works for the (literally) `irritating' details.
Even the classical instruments of political direction -
statutes and administrative regulations - are empty in their central
statements. They juggle with the `state of technology', thus undercutting their
own competence, and in its place they elevate `scientific and technical
expertise' to the throne of the civilization of threat.
This monopoly of scientists and engineers in the diagnosis o
f hazards, however, is simultaneously being called into question by the reality
crisis' of the natural and engineering sciences in their dealings with the
hazards they produce. It has not been true only since Chernobyl, but there it
first became palpable to a broad public: safety and probable safety, seemingly
so close, are worlds apart. The engineering sciences always have only probable
safety at their command. Thus, even if two or three nuclear reactors blow up
tomorrow, their statements remain true.
Wolf Hafele, the dean of the German reactor industry, wrote
in 1974:
It is precisely the interplay between theory and experiment
or trial and error which is no longer possible for reactor technology ....
Reactor engineers take account of this dilemma by dividing the problem of
technical safety into sub-problems. But even the splitting of the problem can
only serve to approximate ultimate safety .... The remaining `residual risk'
opens the door to the realm of the `hypothetical' . . . . The interchange
between theory and experiment, which leads to truth in the traditional sense,
is no longer possible .... I believe it is this ultimate indecisiveness hidden
in our plans which explains the particular sensitivities of public debates on
the safety of nuclear reactors.
(Hdfele, 1974: 247)
What one hears here is nothing less than the contradiction
between experimental logic and atomic peril. Just as sociologists cannot force
society into a test tube, engineers cannot let people's reactors blow up all
around them in order to test their safety, unless they turn the world into a
laboratory. Theories of nuclear reactor safety are testable only after they are
built, not beforehand. The expedient of testing partial systems amplifies the
contingencies of their interaction, and thus contains sources of error which
cannot themselves be controlled experimentally.
If one compares this with the logic of research that was
originally agreed upon, this amounts to its sheer reversal. We no longer find
the progression, first laboratory then application. Instead, testing comes
after application and production precedes research. The dilemma into which the
mega-hazards have plunged scientific logic applies across the boa d that is,
for nuclear, chemical and genetic experiments science hovers blindly above the
boundary of threats. Test-tube babies must first be produced, genetically
engineered artificial creatures released and reactors built, in order that
their properties and safety can be studied. The question of safety, then, must
be answered affirmatively before it can even be raised. The authority of the
engineers is undermined by this `safety circle'.
Through the anticipation of application before it has been
fully ~^~a` explored, science has itself abolished the boundary between
laboratory and society (Kohn and Weyer, 1989; Beck, 1995). Concomitantly, the
conditions of freedom of research have shifted. Freedom of research implies
freedom of application. Today, anyone who demands or grants only freedom of
research abolishes research. The power of technology is based in its command of
practice. Engineers can directly apply things, where politics must first
advise, convince, vote and then push them through against resistance. This
makes technology capable of conducting a policy of the fait accompli, which not
only puts politicians and the public under constant pressure to react, but also
puts them at the mercy of the engineers' judgment for assessment and avoidance
of disaster. This power grows with the velocity of the innovations, the lack of
clarity regarding their consequences and hazards, and it grows even though the
credibility of technological promises of safety is thereby undermined.
Where the monopoly of technology becomes a monopoly on
concealed social change, it must be called into question and cancelled by the
principle of division of powers - like the earlier `legal transcendence of the
sovereign'. Internally, this implies a redistribution of the burdens of proof
and, externally, the liberation of doubt (see Beck, 1995: ch. 8). In all
central social issues and committees relative to technological development,
systematic alternatives, dissenting voices, dissenting experts and an
interdisciplinary diversity would have to be combined. The exposure of
scientific uncertainty is the liberation of politics, law and the public sphere
from their expert patronization by technocracy. Thus the public acknowledgement
of uncertainty opens the space for democratization.
If risk society does not mean only a technical challenge,
then the question arises: what political dynamics, what social structure, what
conflict scenarios arise from the legalization and normalization of global and
uncontrollable systematic threats? To reduce things to an admittedly crude
formula: hunger is hierarchical. Even following the Second World War, not
everyone went hungry. Nuclear contamination, however, is egalitarian and in
that sense `democratic'. Nitrates in the ground water do not stop at the
general director's water tap (see Beck, 1992: ch. 1).9
All suffering, all misery, all violence inflicted by people
on other people to this point recognized the category of the Other - workers,
Jews, blacks, asylum-seekers, dissidents, and so forth - and those apparently
unaffected could retreat behind this category. The `end of the Other', the end
of all our carefully cultivated opportunities for distancing ourselves, is what
we have become able to experience with the advent o f nuclear and chemical
contamination. Misery can be marginalized, but that is no longer true of
hazards in the age of nuclear, chemical and genetic technology. It is there
that the peculiar and novel political force of those threats lies. Their power
is the power of threat, which eliminates all the protective zones and social
differentiations within and between nation-states.
It may be true that in the storm tide of threat `we're all
in the same boat', as the cliché goes. But, as is so often the case, here too
there are captains, passengers, helmsmen, engineers, and men and women
overboard. In other words, there are countries, sectors and enterprises which
profit from the production of risk, and others which VP I find their economic
existence threatened together with their physical well-being. If, for instance,
the Adriatic or the North Sea dies or they are perceived socially as `hazardous
to health' - this difference is cancelled with respect to economic effects -
then it is not just the North Sea or the Adriatic which die, along with the
life those seas contain and make possible. The economic life in all the towns,
sectors and coastal countries that live directly or indirectly from the
commercialization of the sea is also extinguished. At the apex of the future,
which reaches into the horizon of the present day, industrial civilization is
transformed into a kind of `world cup' of the global risk society. Destruction
of nature and destruction of markets coincide here. It is not what one has or
is able to do that determines one's social position and future, but rather
where and from what one lives and to what extent others are permitted in a
prearranged unaccountability to pollute one's possessions and abilities in the
guise of `environment'.
Even passionate denial, which can certainly count on full
official support, has its limits. The revenge of the abstract expert dispute on
hazards is its geographic concretion. One can dispute everything, operating the
official whitewashing machinery in high gear. That does not prevent, but only
accelerates, the destruction. In this way, `toxin-absorbing regions' come into
being, crossing national boundaries and old institutional lines of conflict,
creating geographical positions whose `fate' coincides with the industrial
destruction of nature (see Beck, 1995: ch. 6).
The greenhouse effect, for example, will raise temperatures
and sea levels around the world through the melting of the polar icecaps. The
period of warming will submerge entire coastal regions, turn farmland into
desert, shift climatic zones in unpredictable ways and dramatically accelerate
the extinction of species. The poorest in the world will be hit the hardest.
They will be least able to adapt themselves to the changes in the environment.
Those who find themselves deprived of the basis of their economic existence
will flee the zone of misery. A veritable Exodus of eco-refugees and climatic
asylum-seekers will flood across the wealthy North; crises in the Third and
Fourth Worlds could escalate into wars. Even the climate of world politics will
change at a faster pace than is imaginable today. So far, all these are just
projections, but we must take them seriously. When they have become reality, it
will already be too late to take action.
Many things would be easier here if those countries on the
way to industrialization could be spared the mistakes of the highly
industrialized countries. But the unchecked expansion of the industrial society
is still considered the via regia that promises the mastery of many problems -
not only those of poverty - so that the prevailing misery often displaces the
abstract issues of environmental destruction.
`Threats to nature' are not only that; pointing them out
also threatens property, capital, jobs, trade union power, the economic
foundation of whole sectors and regions, and the structure of nation-states and
global markets. So there are `side-effects' to nature and `side-effects of
side-effects' within the basic institutions of first modernity.
Put another way: there is a major distinction between the
conflict field of wealth production - `goods' - from which the nineteenth
century derived the experience and premises of industrial and class society,
and the conflict field of hazard production - 'bads' - in the developed nuclear
and chemical age, to which we are only just beginning to become sensitive in
sociology. It probably lies in the fact that wealth production produced the
antagonisms between capital and labor, while the systematic chemical, nuclear
and genetic threats bring about polarizations between capital and capital - and
thus also between labor and labor - cutting across the social order. If the
social welfare state had to be forced through against the concerted resistance
of the private investors, who were called on to pay in the form of wage and
fringe-benefit costs, then ecological threats split the business camp. At first
glance, it is impossible to discern where and how the boundary runs; or, more
accurately, who receives the power, and from where, to cause the boundary to
run in what way.
While it may still be possible to speak of the `environment'
on the level of an individual operation, this talk becomes simply fictitious on
the level of the overall economy, because there a type of `Russian roulette' is
being played behind the increasingly thin walls of the `environment'. If it is
suddenly revealed and publicized in the mass media that certain products contain
certain `toxins' (information policy and mass media coverage is of key
importance considering the fact that hazards are generally imperceptible in
everyday life), then entire markets may collapse and invested capital and
effort are instantly devalued.
No matter how abstract the threats may be, their
concretizations are ultimately just as irreversible and regionally
identifiable. What is denied collects itself into geographical positions, into
`loser regions' which have to pay the tab for the damage and its
`unaccountability' with their economic existence. In this `ecological
expropriation', we are facing the historical novelty of a devaluation of
capital and achievement, while relationships of ownership and sometimes even
the characteristics of the goods remain constant. Sectors that had nothing or
very little causally to do with the production of the threat - agriculture, the
food industry, tourism, fisheries, but also retail trade and parts of the
service industry - are also among those most affected.
Where the (world) economy splits into risk winners and risk
losers - in a manner difficult to define - this polarization will also make its
mark upon the structure of employment. First, new types of antagonisms that are
specific to countries, sectors and enterprises arise between groups of
employees and correspondingly within and between trade union interest
organizations. Second, these are, so to speak, third-hand antagonisms, derived
from those between factions of capital, which turn the `fate of workers' into
`fate' in a further and fundamental dimension. Third, with the intensified
consciousness of the corresponding lines of conflict, a sector-specific
alliance of the old `class opponents', labor and capital, may arise. The
consequence may be a confrontation between this union-management bloc and other
mixed factions over and above the divisions of class differences which have
been narrowed under the pressure of `ecological politicization'.
One has to wonder what an ecological labor movement would really
mean. The production and definition of hazards aims largely at the level of
products, which escapes almost completely from the influence of the works
councils and workers' groups and falls completely under the jurisdiction of
management. And this is still at the intra-organizational level. Hazards are
produced by business operations, to be sure, but they are defined and evaluated
socially in the mass media, in the experts' debate, in the jungle of
interpretations and jurisdictions, in courts or with strategic-intellectual
dodges, in a milieu and in contexts, that is to say, to which the majority of
workers are totally alien. We are dealing with `scientific battles' waged over
the heads of the workers, and fought out instead by intellectual strategies in
intellectual milieu. The definition of hazards eludes the grasp of workers and
even, as things stand, the approach of trade unions for the most part. Workers
and unions are not even those primarily affected; that group consists of the
enterprises and management. But as secondary targets they must count on losing
their jobs if worst comes to worst.
Even a latent risk definition hits them in the center of
their pride in achievement, their promise of a usable commodity. Labor and labor
power can no longer conceive of themselves only as the source of wealth, but
must also be perceived socially as the motive force for threat and destruction.
The labor society is not only running out of labor, the only thing which gives
meaning and solidity to life, as Hannah Arendt puts it ironically, it is also
losing even this residual meaning.
Somewhat crudely, one can say in conclusion: what is
`environment' for the polluting industry is the basis of economic existence for
the affected loser regions and loser sectors. The consequence is: political
systems in their architecture as nation-states, on the one hand, and
large-scale ecological conflict positions, on the other, become mutually
autonomous and create `geopolitical' shifts which place the domestic and
international structure of economic and military blocs under completely new
stresses, but also offer new opportunities. The phase o f risk society politics
which is beginning to make itself beard today in the arena o f disarmament and
detente in the East-West relationship can no longer be understood nationally,
but only internationally, because the social mechanics o f risk situations
disregards the nation-state and its alliance systems. In that sense, apparently
iron-clad political, military and economic constellations are becoming mobile;
and this forces or, better, permits, a new `European global domestic policy'
(Genscher).
Political Reflexivity: The Counterforce of Threat and the Opportunities for Influence by Social Movements
Risk conflict is certainly not the first conflict which
modern societies have had to master, but it is one of the most fundamental.
Class conflicts or revolutions change power relations and exchange elites, but
they hold fast to the goals of techno-economic progress and clash over mutually
recognized civil rights. The double face of `self-annihilating progress',
however, produces conflicts that cast doubt on the social basis of rationality
- science, law, democracy. In that way, society is placed under permanent
pressure to negotiate foundations without a foundation. It experiences an
institutional destabilization, in which all decisions - from local government
policy on speed limits and `parking lots' to the manufacturing details of
industrial goods to the fundamental issues of energy supply, law and
technological development - can suddenly be sucked into fundamental political
conflicts.
While the facades remain intact, quasi-governmental power
positions arise in the research laboratories, nuclear power plants, genetic
factories, editorial offices, courts, and so on, in the milieu of hazards
dependent on definitions and publicity. Put another way: as the contradictions
of the security- and safety-obligated state are stirred up, systems come to
require action and become subject-dependent. The courageous Davids of this
world get their chance, and so do social movements. The colossal
interdependence of threat definitions - the collapse of markets, property
rights, trade union power and political responsibility - brings about key
positions and media of `risk-definition' which cross the social and
professional hierarchy.
One can use all one's powers of conviction to pile up
arguments for the institutional non-existence of suicidal threats; one need not
deny one iota of hope to the institutional hegemony; one can even draw on the
distraction of the social movements and the limitations of their political
effectiveness; and one must still recognize with equal realism that all this is
countered by the opposing power of threat. It is constant and permanent, not
tied to interpretations denying it, and even present in places demonstrators
have long since abandoned. The probability of improbable accidents grows with
time and the number of implemented mega-technologies. Every `event' arouses
memories of all the other ones, all over the world.
Different types of revolutions have been contrasted: coups
d'etat, the class struggle, civilian resistance, and so on. They all have in
common the empowering and disempowering of social subjects. Revolution as an
autonomized process, as a hidden, latent, permanent condition, in which
conditions are involved against their own interests, while political structures
or property and power relations remain unchanged - this is a possibility which
so far, to my knowledge, has neither been taken into consideration nor thought
through. But it is precisely this conceptual scheme into which the social power
o f threat fits (even if it is a social power only in relation to political
movements that activate it). It is the product of the deed, requiring no
political authorization and no authentication. Once in existence, public
awareness of it endangers all institutions - from business to science, from law
to politics - which have produced and legitimated it.
Everyone asks: from where will the opposing forces come? It
is probably not very promising to place large or small ads for the missing
`revolutionary subject' in hip papers of the subculture. It feels good, of
course, to appeal to reason with all the strictness at one's command, and it
can do no harm, precisely because a realistic view of experience has shown that
it leaves few traces behind. One could also found another circle for the
solution of global problems. Certainly, it is to be hoped that political
parties will catch on.
If all this does not suffice to stimulate alternative
political action, however, then there remains the knowledge of the activatable
political reflexivity of the hazard potential." Three Mile Island,
Chernobyl, Hanau, Biblis, Wackersdorf, and so forth: the global experiment of
nuclear energy (toxic chemistry, genetic engineering, virtual reality machines,
and so on) has by now taken over the roles of its own critics, perhaps even
more convincingly and effectively than the political counter-movements could
ever have managed on their own. This becomes clear not only in the world-wide,
unpaid negative advertising at peak news times and on the front pages of
papers, but also in the fact that everyone between the Alpine chalets and the North
Sea mud flats now understands and speaks the language of the nuclear critics.
Under the dictates of necessity, people have passed a kind of crash course in
the contradictions of hazard administration in risk society: on the
arbitrariness of acceptable levels and calculation procedures or the
unimaginability of the long-term consequences and the possibilities of making
them anonymous through statistics. They have learned more information, more
vividly and more clearly than even the most critical critique could have ever
taught them or demanded of them.
The most enduring, convincing and effective critics of
nuclear energy (or the genetic industry and so forth) are not the demonstrators
outside the fences or the critical public (no matter how important and
indispensable they may be). The most influential opponent of the threat
industry is the threat industry itself.
To put it differently, the power of the new social movements
is based not only on themselves, but also on the quality and scope of the
contradictions in which the hazard-producing and -administering industries are
involved in risk society. Those contradictions become public and scandalous
through the needling activities of the social movements. Thus, there is not
only an autonomous process of the suppression of dangers, but there are also
opposite tendencies to uncover this suppression, even though they are much less
marked and always dependent on the civil courage of individuals and the
vigilance of social movements. Catastrophes that touch the vital nerves of
society in a context of highly developed bureaucratic safety and welfare arouse
the sensationalist greed of the mass media, threaten markets, make sales
prospects unpredictable, devalue capital and set streams of voters in motion.
Thus the evening news ultimately exceeds even the fantasies of counter cultural
dissent; daily newspaper reading becomes an exercise in technology critique.
This oppositional power of the unintended revelation of
hazards depends of course on overall social conditions, which have so far been
fulfilled in only a few countries: parliamentary democracy, (relative)
independence of the press, and advanced production of wealth in which the
invisible threat of cancer is not overridden for the majority of the populace
by acute undernourishment and famine.
In the cooperation from within and without over and above
the boundary lines of the subsystems, there are also symptoms of strength,
which have so far remained almost unnoticed. The socially most astonishing,
most surprising and perhaps least understood phenomenon of the last twenty
years, not only in Germany, is individualization, the unexpected renaissance of
an `enormous subjectivity' - inside and outside of the institutions (see Beck,
1992: part 11; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). In this sense it is not an
exaggeration to say that citizens' groups have taken the initiative thematically
in this society. It was they who put the themes of an endangered world on the
social agenda, against the resistance of the established parties. Nowhere does
this become so clear as in the specter of the `new unity' which is haunting
Europe. The compulsion to perform ecological lip service is universal. It
unites the Christian Social Union with the Communists, and the chemical
industry with its Green critics. All products, absolutely all products, are
`safe for the environment', to say the least. There are rumors that the
chemical concerns plan to take out full-page ads announcing themselves as a
registered conservation association.
Admittedly this is all just packaging, programmatic
opportunism, and perhaps really intentional rethinking now and then. The actions
and the points of origin of the facts are largely untouched by it. Yet it
remains true: the themes of the future, which are now on everyone's lips, have
not originated from the farsightedness of the rulers or from the struggle in
parliament - and certainly not from the cathedrals of power in business,
science and the state. They have been put on the social agenda against the
concentrated resistance of this institutionalized ignorance by the entangled,
moralizing groups and splinter groups fighting each other over the true path,
split and plagued by doubts. Democratic subversion has won a quite improbable
thematic victory. And this in Germany, breaking with an authoritarian everyday
culture which, historically, has enabled all official nonsense and insanity
with its anticipatory obedience.
Europe is called to a new social project and has already set
off on it. After the implosion of the East-West conflict and the emergence of
states without enemies (Beck, 1998b), the international themes of the risk
civilization are moving into the resulting vacuum. One sign of this is the
pressure for global ecological politics and transnational arrangements which
technology, science and business produce. Another is the dawning of the large
and small, the creeping and the galloping suicidal hazards everywhere in the
world, and a final sign comes from the elevated standards of promised safety
and rationality in developed welfare state capitalism.
These are the horrendous opportunities that offer themselves
to a European global domestic policy, not only in the foundation and building
of the `European house', but also by the highly industrialized countries
assuming a large portion of the costs for the necessary corrective measures. In
the place where the dynamic of industrial development had its origin, in Europe,
enlightenment on and against industrial society could also begin. This project
of an ecological enlightenment would have to be designed and fought for both on
the macro and micro levels. Even in everyday life, because the threats overturn
well-worn routine everywhere and represent a spectacular challenge for civil
courage - at jobs in industry; in the practices of doctors where people come
with their fears and questions; in research which can block off or reveal; in
the courts; in the monitoring of the administration; and, not least, in the
editorial offices of the mass media, where the invisible can be made culturally
discernible. There are many concrete concerns in the relationship of the
`European house' to its neighbors on this planet. Among them is the
impossibility of appearing any longer with the self-confidence of the donating
wealthy, but rather admitting our destructive industrial role and correcting it
in thought and action.
The technological project, the technological dogmatism of
industrialism, must not simply be extended to the ecological crisis, lest an
ever more perfect technocracy result from the public dramatization of the
dangers. Industrial society bas produced a `truncated democracy', in which questions
of the technological change of society remain beyond the reach of
political-parliamentary decision-making. As things stand, one can say `no' to
techno-economic progress, but that will not change its course in any way. It is
a blank cheque to be honored - beyond agreement or refusal. Even ethics, which
everybody calls for, is, under these conditions, nothing but a bicycle brake on
an intercontinental airplane. We are living in an age of technological
fatalism, an `industrial middle ages', that must be overcome by more democracy
- the production of accountability, redistribution of the burdens of proof,
division of powers between the producers and the evaluators of hazards, public
disputes on technological alternatives.
This in turn requires different organizational forms for
science and business, science and the public sphere, science and politics,
technology and law, and so forth.
The ecological extension of democracy then means: playing
off the concert of voices and powers, the development of the independence of
politics, law, the public sphere and daily life against the dangerous and false
security of a `society conceived in the abstract'.
My suggestion contains two interlocking principles: first,
carrying out a division of powers and, second, the creation of a public sphere.
Only a strong, competent public debate, `armed' with scientific arguments, is
capable of separating the scientific wheat from the chaff and allowing the
institutions for directing technology - politics and law - to reconquer the
power of their own judgment.
The means: with regard to all issues that are central to
society, dissenting voices, alternative experts, an interdisciplinary variety
and, not least, alternatives to be developed systematically must always be
combined. The public sphere in cooperation with a kind of `public science'
would act as a secondary body charged with the `discursive checking' of
scientific laboratory results in the crossfire of opinions. Their particular
responsibility would comprise all issues that concern the broad outlines and
dangers of scientific civilization and are chronically excluded in standard
science. The public would have the role of an `open upper chamber'. It would be
charged to apply the standard `How do we wish to live?' to scientific plans,
results and hazards.
That presupposes that research will fundamentally take
account of the public's questions and be addressed to them and not just
multiply our common problems in an economic short-circuit with industry. Perhaps it would be possible that through
these two steps - an opening of science from within and the filtering out of
its limitations in a public test of its practice - politics and science could
successively hone their direction-finding and self-monitoring instruments -
instruments that are now largely inactive.
The cultural blindness of daily life in the civilization of
threat can ultimately not be removed; but culture `sees' in symbols. The images
in the news of skeletal trees or of dying seals have opened people's eyes.
Making the threats publicly visible and arousing attention in detail, in one's
own living space - these are cultural eyes through which the `blind citizens'
can perhaps win back the autonomy of their own judgment.
To conclude with a question: what would happen if
radioactivity itched? Realists, also called cynics, will answer: people would
invent something, perhaps a salve, to `turn off' the itching. A profitable,
never-ending business then. Certainly, explanations would soon arise and would
enjoy great public acceptance: they would claim that the itching had no
meaning, that it might be correlated to other factors besides radioactivity,
and that it was innocuous in any case, unpleasant but demonstrably harmless. If
everyone ran around scratching themselves and with rashes on their skin, and if
photo sessions with fashion models as well as management meetings of the united
denial institutes took place with all participants scratching themselves, it
would have to be assumed that such explanations would have little chance of
surviving. In that case, nuclear policy, as well as dealings with modern
mega-hazards in general, would confront a completely changed situation: the
object being disputed and negotiated would be culturally perceptible."
That is precisely where the future of democracy is being
decided: are we dependent in all the details of life-and-death issues on the judgment
of experts, even dissenting experts, or will we win back the competence to make
our own judgment through a culturally created perceptibility of the hazards? Is
the only alternative still an authoritarian technocracy or a critical one? Or
is there a way to counter the incapacitation and expropriation of daily life in
the age of risk?
From: Ulrich Beck, World
Risk Society. Polity Press: Malden, 1999.