Twenty Observations on a World in Turmoil

Ulrich Beck

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745653976, 9780745653969
• eBook ISBN: 9780745663005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Translated by Ciaran Cronin.

 

The world is a state of turmoil. From the financial crisis to the chaos in the eurozone, from the Arab uprisings to protests in Athens, Barcelona, New York and elsewhere, many of the familiar frameworks are collapsing and we have to find new ways to orient ourselves in a world undergoing rapid change. Of course, it is necessary for political leaders to address local issues and react to people's specific demands, but without a cosmopolitan outlook, such a reaction is likely to be inadequate. Ulrich Beck's Twenty-one Observations on a World in Turmoil is a demonstration of cosmopolitan politics in practice. It is more than a mirror: it is a magnifying glass that brings into focus the processes that are transforming our world and highlights the great challenges we face today.

'Global domestic politics', the concept introduced and developed by Beck, is much more than a political theory, a philosophical utopia (or dystopia), a governance programme or a mental state: it is the reality of our times. Beck turns the argument that 'global domestic politics' is an unrealistic ideology on its head, arguing that it is the proponents of the national who are the idealists. They view reality through the obsolete lenses of the nation-state and thus cannot see the profound global changes that are transforming our reality. Global domestic politics is therefore a perspective, a political reality and a normative idea. And it is the critical theory of our times since it challenges the most profound truths which we hold dear: the truths of the nation.

1

Mushrooms and Other Flowers of Capitalism

July 2009

For many Japanese, matsutake, wild gourmet mushrooms, are the most Japanese thing that the Japanese cuisine has to offer. These mushrooms acquire their unique flavour precisely where the environmental crisis has left its traces, in barren forests on parched ground. During the 1970s, as the anthropologist Anna Tsing reports, two things came together in Japan: increasing wealth and increasing environmental destruction. Thus, the ‘wild’ gourmet mushrooms had to be ‘produced’ and their production ‘outsourced’ – to the forests of China, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey, Mexico, Canada and the United States. Who harvests the mushrooms? Refugees, migrants, ‘outsourced’ citizens of the world and ‘self-entrepreneurs’ living at the edge or precipice of society, for whom living and working in ruined forests is not too much to ask. Thus the outsourcing of risks and the outsourcing of people come together in the symbol of the matsutake mushrooms, the most expensive mushrooms in the world and an original Japanese delicacy with which the Japanese enjoy their success and celebrate it for all to see. The macrocosm of globalized outsourcing capitalism is reflected in the microcosm of the mushrooms.

Thus, the ‘whether’ is no longer the issue. Outsourcing as a feature of global domestic politics – offloading risks and responsibility onto the weak who do the dirty work for the rich for a pittance – has become a key global source of profit in which the domination of the rich, the exploitation of the poor and the destruction of nature are entering into new combinations and becoming radicalized across all borders. The ‘national vision’, national borders and laws, transform deliberate outsourcing into ‘latent side effects’ in the no-man’s-land of organized irresponsibility.

This capitalism of disposal and supply chains (Anna Tsing) permeates all domains. The major corporations, which at one time were famous and celebrated for their comprehensive production machinery, have mutated into masters of outsourcing. Governments are imitating them by outsourcing everything – from social services, through war, even to torture – to subcontractors. Scientists arrange to have research projects which are regarded as ethically suspect or are forbidden in the EU conducted in ‘low ethics countries’. Moreover, the ‘emancipation compromise’ on which the unstable balance between double income marriages and parenthood is based in the West, falls under the headings of ‘outsourcing’ or ‘insourcing’. The labour which many women no longer want to do and which most men, in spite of lip service paid to open-mindedness, still do not want to perform – namely, the incessant, monotonous, dirty and yet joyful work involved in family and parenthood – is being delegated to immigrant women: ‘substitute mothers’.

This is one point of global domestic politics: the outside suggested by the concept of ‘outsourcing’ no longer exists. A particularly drastic illustration of this is provided by the so-called ‘environmental’ problems. Many people still believe that these ‘latent side effects’ of their industrial or political decisions can be ‘outsourced’ across national borders to ‘others’, ‘foreigners’, who do not have any public voice and cannot defend themselves. However, this factual global domestic politics raises questions of normative global domestic politics: how can the ‘outsourcing’ of transnational harms be exposed and placed on the global domestic political agenda? How can the boundaries of moral and political equality be redrawn? How can the ‘outsourced’ citizens of the world be included in decisions which affect their vital interests?

Are We Living in a Neo-Neoliberal Capitalist System to which there are No Alternatives?

One can literally hear it, the big sigh of relief on the markets. With the recent rise in the value of their stocks, the investors are already celebrating the end of the crisis. On the credit markets, too, there are muffled cries of joy – the message is that confidence has returned. Perhaps the clearest indicator is that those highly risky investments which started the whole slide are again in demand – in spite of a shrinking economy. How are banks which are still threatened by collapse able to make these megadeals? Quite simply by making the crisis itself into a business. Speculation has turned from junk assets to government bonds, in other words, to the money that the state must raise in order to rescue capitalism from itself. There are still gnawing doubts, for example that the Great Depression also only really set in in 1931 when people thought it was already over. When it comes to the present, it seemed for a brief historical moment as though the boundless, neoliberal capitalism would become reflexive and open to learning when faced with its self-endangerment.

Are the calls for regulation merely empty words? Has the window of opportunity for civilizing market fundamentalism already closed again? Could it even be that we are experiencing the shortest recession since the Second World War, now that the players can no longer contain their jubilation? Before everything finally turns to the good, we should again recall what was actually involved and is still involved.

The twentieth century was marked by two antagonistic and mutually exclusive systems: capitalism and socialism. We lived through two experiments on a planetary scale. One of them tried to impose the model of a centralized planned state economy, the other the capitalist economy free from any controls. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the failure of socialism. Now ‘pure’ capitalism is collapsing before our very eyes. There are good reasons for assuming that, although we are not witnessing the end of capitalism, we may be witnessing the end of that kind of neoliberal fundamentalist capitalism which held the world and its governments in thrall in the years since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. State socialism went bankrupt also because the alternative of unregulated market capitalism existed. As a consequence, one elite could be replaced by another. The pure doctrine of market capitalism is now likewise bankrupt, but without a viable alternative – either in economics or in politics. Everywhere the neoliberal poachers were appointed gamekeepers. However, this raises the question: is it even possible for pure capitalism to go bankrupt if the old elites continue to govern disguised as state socialist turncoats? Are we living in a global system of neoliberal state capitalism that is simultaneously bankrupt and not bankrupt but to which there is no alternative?

The Politics of Climate Change: Squaring the Circle

If it is the case that each of us must save the world from the impending climate catastrophe every day, then the US government under George W. Bush was actually good for something: one could blame Bush for everything that failed to occur or went wrong. Now many environmental activists hope that Barack Obama will bring about the environmental turn. In fact, the House of Representatives in Washington recently enacted a law to place limits on carbon dioxide emissions. What is envisaged may represent a giant step by comparison with the denial of climate change propagated by the Bush administration around the world. But the guidelines have actually turned out to be so moderate that they will probably have little effect. However, the Indians and Chinese, whose support has to be won for a worldwide agreement on climate change, are arming themselves with arguments that are not so easy to refute. By now, China has probably become the greatest global CO₂ transgressor; factored over the per capita income of its population, however, emissions in China are still far below levels in the West. How, the Indians and Chinese ask, can Americans and Europeans claim the right to consume energy on a scale that they want to deny to the poorer countries?

The proposal of the West boils down to the rich countries providing financial aid to the poorest states to enable them to reduce emissions by importing new, clean technologies from the West: this amounts to capitalist environmental altruism. China has made an interesting alternative proposal which is putting pressure on the Western governments: all developed countries should make one per cent of their gross national product available to enable poorer countries to combat global warming. What consequences would such an agreement have? The United States has a budget deficit of twelve per cent. The Chinese are holding US government bonds to the tune of at least $800 billion. It is they who are ‘rescuing’ – that is, buying up – the large companies in Europe and the United States. Imagine the following scenario: Obama would have to explain to his fellow Americans that he is issuing a large cheque to the Chinese, among others, so that they can combat climate change with clean technologies, while at the same time he must hope that the Chinese will generously buy American government bonds so that the American budget deficit can be financed!

The following squaring of the circle is in the offing: the more all sides proclaim their good will to solve the problem of climate change, and thus the weaker official objections become across the world, the more involved and contradictory the search for viable answers becomes. There is no one left to blame for the failure of climate policy. But for this very reason climate policy is at the mercy of the internal calamities of a radically unequal world. The debate on climate policy is dominated by what must and should be done – or by a green, all-party technocracy of market gullibility. If only good intentions – and their taboos – were enough!

Strange Bed Fellows

The hardliners in Iran are at each other’s throats. This could have advantages from the perspective of the sociology of power – that is, from the civil society perspective of the Iranian demonstrators and their sympathizers. When restrictions are placed on public liberties, it is the tendencies towards fragmentation within the more or less monolithic block of the governing clergy which – as the example of Gorbachev demonstrates – could bring the whole power structure tumbling down. Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has called upon President Ahmadinejad to dismiss the recently appointed first vice president. This was reported by the acting Speaker of Parliament, a confidant of Khamenei’s. Prior to this, leading representatives of the hardliners among the clergy and in the media were harshly criticized. This has opened up a further, perhaps decisive, line of conflict in the confrontations that began with the presidential election of 12 July 2009.

Yet how is this turmoil perceived in Iran and how does it appear from the global domestic political perspective of the European Left? The freedom fighters in Iran do not respect the human rights guidelines which are indispensable in the view of the European Left. They wear green headbands to evoke Khomeini’s religious revolution and to protect themselves from the brute force of the regime. And aren’t they pro-American? Consumerist? Internet-conformists? Transnationally networked? Perhaps even drug addicts? Thus ‘rent boys of financial capital’ (as a Western Marxist put it) who are ultimately getting what’s coming to them?

Liberation movements, human rights and Islam – these are not good bedfellows, as both the Left and the Right know from their own European experience. Therefore, it is better to keep calm so as not to jeopardize the good negotiation relations with the emerging nuclear power and the Ayatollah regime. New, disconcerting, coalitions among the various orthodoxies are emerging within global domestic politics: strange partners are climbing into bed with each other across all boundaries.

2

All Aboard the Nuclear Power Superjet – Just Don’t Ask about the Landing Strip

August 2009

Climate change and the oil crisis are being used to project atomic energy as a green panacea. In fact atomic energy is a reckless gamble.

Are we witnessing the beginning of a real-life satire, at once amusing and terrifying? Its theme is the overshadowing of the nuclear power risk by catastrophic climate change and the oil crisis. The US President and the British Prime Minister have reiterated their support for the construction of new nuclear power plants. The British government has announced the fast-tracking of eight new reactors and called for ‘a renaissance of nuclear power’ in a ‘post-oil economy’. It is as if a world that wants to save the climate must learn to appreciate the beauty of atomic energy – or ‘green energy’, as Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union party has rechristened it. Given this new turn in the politics of language, we should remind ourselves of the following.

Recently the US Congress established an expert commission to develop a language or symbolism capable of warning against the threats posed by American nuclear waste dumps 10,000 years from now. The problem to be solved was: how must concepts and symbols be designed in order to convey a message to future generations millennia from now? The commission included physicists, anthropologists, linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists, molecular biologists, classical scholars, artists, and so on.

The experts looked for models among the oldest symbols of humanity. They studied the construction of Stonehenge and the pyramids and examined the historical reception of Homer and the Bible. But these reached back at most a couple of thousand years, not 10,000. The anthropologists recommended the symbol of the skull and crossbones. However, a historian reminded the commission that the skull and crossbones symbolized resurrection for the alchemists, and a psychologist conducted an experiment with three-year-olds: if the symbol was affixed to a bottle they anxiously shouted ‘poison!’, but if it was placed on a wall they enthusiastically yelled ‘pirates!’

Even our language fails, therefore, when faced with the challenge of alerting future generations to the dangers we have introduced into the world through the use of nuclear power. Seen in this light, the actors who are supposed to be the guarantors of security and rationality – the state, science and industry – are engaged in a highly ambivalent game. They are no longer trustees but suspects, no longer managers of risks but also sources of risks. For they are urging the population to climb into an aircraft for which a landing strip has not yet been built.

The ‘existential concern’ being awakened across the world by global risks has led to a contest to suppress large-scale risks in political discussion. The incalculable dangers to which climate change is giving rise are supposed to be ‘combated’ with the incalculable dangers associated with nuclear power plants. Many decisions over large-scale risks are a matter of choosing not between safe and risky alternatives, but between different risky alternatives, and often between alternatives whose risks are too qualitatively different to be easily compared. Existing forms of scientific and public discourse are no match for such considerations. Here governments adopt the strategy of deliberate simplification. They present each specific decision as one between safe and risky alternatives, while playing down the uncertainties of atomic energy and focusing attention on the oil crisis and climate change.

The striking fact is that the lines of conflict within world risk society are cultural ones. The more global risks escape the usual methods of scientific calculation and turn out to be a domain of relative non-knowing, the more important becomes the cultural perception of specific global risks – that is, the belief in their reality or unreality. In the case of nuclear power, we are witnessing a clash of risk cultures. Thus the Chernobyl experience is perceived differently in Germany and France, Britain, Spain, or Ukraine and Russia. For many Europeans the threats posed by climate change now loom much larger than nuclear power or terrorism.

Now that climate change is regarded as man-made and its catastrophic impacts are viewed as inevitable, the cards are being reshuffled in society and politics. But it is completely mistaken to represent climate change as an unavoidable path to human destruction. For climate change opens up unexpected opportunities to rewrite the rules and priorities of politics. Although the rise in the price of oil benefits the climate, it comes with the threat of mass decline. The explosion in energy costs is gnawing away at standards of living and is giving rise to a risk of poverty at the heart of society. As a consequence, the priority which was still accorded energy security twenty-five years after Chernobyl is being undermined by the question of how long consumers can maintain their standards of living in the face of the steady increase in energy prices.

Yet to disregard the ‘residual risk’ of atomic energy is to misunderstand the cultural and political dynamic of the ‘residual risk society’. The most tenacious, convincing and effective critics of atomic energy are not the greens – the most influential opponent of the nuclear industry is the nuclear industry itself.

Even if politicians were to be successful in their semantic reinvention of nuclear power as green electricity, and even if the opposing social movements were to dissipate their energy through fragmentation, this is all nullified by the real opposing force of the threat. It is constant, permanent and remains present even when exhausted demonstrators have long since given up. The probability of improbable accidents increases with the number of ‘green’ nuclear plants; each ‘occurrence’ awakens memories of all the others, throughout the world.

For risk is not synonymous with catastrophe. Risk means the anticipation of catastrophe, not just in a specific place but everywhere. It doesn’t even have to come to a mini-Chernobyl in Europe. The global public need only to get wind of negligence and ‘human error’ somewhere in the world and suddenly the governments advocating ‘green’ nuclear power will find themselves accused of gambling recklessly and against their better judgement with the security interests of the population.

Given that radioactivity is invisible and odourless, what will become of ‘responsible citizens’ who cannot perceive these threats produced by civilization, and hence are robbed of their sovereign judgement? Consider the following thought experiment. What would happen if radioactivity caused itchiness? Realists, also known as cynics, will answer: people would invent something, for example an ointment, to ‘suppress’ the itching – no doubt a profitable business with a good future. Of course, convincing explanations would immediately be offered explaining that the itching was unimportant, that it could be traced back to factors other than radioactivity. Presumably such attempts to explain things away would have a poor chance of survival if everyone ran around with irritating skin rashes, and fashion shoots and business meetings were accompanied by incessant scratching. Then the social and political ways of dealing with modern large-scale hazards would be confronted with a completely different situation because the issue under discussion and negotiation would be culturally visible.

3

This Appalling Injustice!

September 2009

San Francisco, early August 2009. I’m taking a stroll through the streets around the Hilton Hotel where this year’s American sociology conference is being held. Sociologists, like casualty surgeons, are a pretty callous lot. Crises are their stock-in-trade. The people catch my attention. Over there one of them is lying on the side of the street, a policeman does a quick check for signs of life and continues on his way. Many of them have to struggle against the contortions of their own bodies just to keep moving. We’re sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant having lunch, delicious food, window seats. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a large, gaunt figure clad in tattered rags fills the whole window like an ominous bird, delighting in the fright that he (or she, it’s hard to tell) is causing. The waiter routinely chases him or her away like an annoying, neighbourhood dog that everyone mistreats. Across the way someone is lurching across the busy street, oblivious of the beeping horns and screeching brakes of the traffic s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 1 Mushrooms and Other Flowers of Capitalism
• 2 All Aboard the Nuclear Power Superjet – Just Don’t Ask about the Landing Strip
• 3 This Appalling Injustice!
• 4 Harm in Exchange for Money
• 5 Illegal World Citizens
• 6 The Cards of Power Are Being Reshuffled across the World
• 7 Felt Peace and Waged War
• 8 The Return of Social Darwinism or: Which University Do We Want?
• 9 A Kind of Berlin Wall Has Again Collapsed
• 10 German Euro-Nationalism
• 11 Beyond the Aeroplane
• 12 Global Domestic Politics from Below: How Global Families Are Becoming Normal
• 13 The Environmental Storm on the Bastille
• 14 Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian
• 15 The Caterpillar’s Mistake: Fukushima and the End of Nuclear Power
• 16 It’s Time to Get Angry, Europe. Create the Europe of Citizens Now!
• 17 Powerless but Legitimate: The Occupy Movement in the Financial Crisis
• 18 Cooperate or Bust! The Existential Crisis of the European Union
• 19 What Is Meant by Global Domestic Politics?
• 20 The Five Self-Delusions of a Supposedly Unpolitical Age