Summary od "World at risk" - Ulrich, Sintesi del corso di Sociologia

Scarica Summary od "World at risk" - Ulrich e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Sociologia solo su Docsity! World at risk - Ulrich Introduction The political and moral responses about global warming and climate change. The ability to anticipate catastrophes and terrorist attacks changed the way we see danger.  The high reputation risk pushed a the banks to interrupt the nuclear intervention in Bulgaria because there were many protests and the risks of nuclear were brought up. The inundation of London, New York and Tokio In November 2006 the British prime minister said global warming would not allow anymore to bring the main help and products to the needy countries as Africa. In fact, New York, London and Tokyo risk to disappear in the sea because of climate change. In both Germany and California the aim is to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions. The existential concern which has been awaken through global warming awareness also show the new threats coming from the new nuclear power stations. 1. Risk Threat and insecurity have always touched society and families. From this threat brings more uncertainty and insecurity towards future. There are two faces of risk: chance and danger which became a dancer in the years of industrialization. Existence and its future depend on decisions, which can also bring to self destruction. Don Quixote was the first modern novel, first attempt to bring the unpredictable under control, not only scientists but also novelists explore the risks of modernity. Existential experimentalism is unavoidable: fear, desire, risk, surprise... The category of risk opens the debate between knowing and not knowing, which brings to uncontrollability. Risk is explored in the institutional forms, in the police and administration. Example is Kafka with self destruction and Balzac with the precarious human condition forsaken not anymore by God, but  by institutions. 2. Risk society A new risk emerges because the new conditions of calculating and facing risk has broken down. The conflicts in opinions are bringing to new institutionalizations such us the risk law.  The risk calculus is applied to many phenomena in the public health as traffic accidents, unemployment, aging and so forth. As a consequence, it is assumed that modern society can prevent danger and preview risks so to avoid them. There are some uncontrollable risks in finances and other fields, but it's kind of impossible to believe it as we're in a modern society with well developed technology. There are some risks that nobody can escape from, and that don't depend on social welfare or category: war for example is one of them. We are becoming a global community of threats, which means that threats can't be faced as internal dangers anymore. More science doesn't necessarily mean less risk, but maybe better preparation to risk.  Finally, fear is a protagonist in the risk environment, as it affects people who start making egoistic decisions for their own safety. 3. World risk society 1 Risk means the anticipation of catastrophe, means anticipating something that didn't happen yes, previewing the risk. The moment hewn a risk appears, they become catastrophes.  The detection of a risk changes the decisions and change institutions and politics worldwide (eg immigration or acts of terrorism and violence). But the truth is that a new risk is not known before the catastrophe happens, and as a consequence, the new law comes from that.  The distinction between risk and cultural perception of risk is blurred.risk is anticipated event and catastrophe is an actual event. The first perception of risk is given to research and science, as not everyone is an expert and we can't be guided and make decisions basing on perceptions. The less calculable the risk is, the bigger the cultural and social perception becomes, leaving truth to "guessing" and fate.  This first perception  is Called "staging of risk". Risks have no abstract existence, they depend on reality. Global threats affect everybody even those responsible for them. Chapter 2: relation of definition as relations of domination: who decides what is and is not a risk? Are Risks Timeless? Risks are not timeless phenomenon and so not suited to a particular era. Since the beginning of the industrial age threats have been consistently combated. For example the decrease in infant mortality, the increase in life expectancy, the advances in medical technology, they all bring to a secure existence for human. It is certainly true that new risks have arisen from global warming, through financial crisis and large-scale accidents in chemical plants, to terrorism. The risk calculus The difference between classical and modern risks lies at another level. The risk generated by industrial and large-scale technologies are the results of conscious decisions. They do not assail us as fate, we create them. Risks are shown to be systematic event that call for political regulation, and this opens up a corresponding field for political action. Risk and threat: organised irresponsibility Industrial societies have been confronted with the possibility of the self-destruction of all life on earth due to human intervention. Large-scale threats are abolishing the three pillars of the risk calculus. 1) they involve irreparable global harm that cannot be limited so the concept of monetary compensation fails. 2) precocious and aftercare is out of question because it is impossible to gouge outcomes in advance. 3) the accident has no limits in time and space, it becomes an event with the beginning but without an end. Large-scale risks have a social explosiveness over and above a physical explosiveness. The most influential on opponents threat Industry is the threat industry itself. Only a strong, competent public sphere ‘armed’ with scientific arguments is capable of reconquering the power of independent judgement from the institutions for regulating technology, namely, politics and law. This means that, in all controversies and committees 2 The combination of knowledge and non-knowing of global risks, in particular, destabilizes the established systems of national and international ‘relations of definition’ (see chapter 2). It is precisely the unknown that provokes the major conflicts over the definition and construction of political rules and responsibilities – with the aim of preventing the worst. The most recent and striking example is the second Iraq war, which was conducted in order to prevent what we cannot know, that is, whether and on what 5 scale terrorists are getting their hands on chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Individualization Faced with the uncertainty of the globalized world, individuals have to make their own decisions. This new form of individualization is the result of the failure of experts in the management of risks. The individual is forced to mistrust the promises of rationality of these institutions. Hence, people are thrown back upon themselves: disembedding without embedding is the ironic-tragic formula for this dimension of individualization in world risk society. The radicalization of modernity gives rise to this irony of risk: the sciences, the state and the military are becoming part of the problem they are supposed to solve. This is the meaning of the expression ‘reflexive modernization’: we are not living in a post-modern world but in a hyper-modern world. The Cosmopolitan Moment Through the increased awareness of the dynamics of world risk society, all people have become the immediate neighbours of all others, and thus share the world with non- excludable others, whether they like it, or want to recognize it, or not. Hence the cosmopolitan moment resides in the first instance in this compulsion to include cultural others which holds for all people throughout the world. This sociological concept of cosmopolitanism refers to a particular social way of dealing with cultural difference – in contrast, for example, to hierarchical exclusion (as encountered in past and present racist thought and practice), to the universalism which declares the dissolution of differences, to the nationalism which levels differences and at the same time excludes them in conformity with national antagonisms, and to the multiculturalism which is understood and practised as plural monoculturalism. Hence the public perception of risk forces people to communicate who otherwise do not want to have anything to do with one another. It imposes obligations and costs on those who resist them, often even with the law on their side. The anticipation of catastrophic side effects means also unexpected alliances. Enforced Cosmopolitanism ‘Enforced cosmopolitanization’ means that global risks activate and connect actors across borders who otherwise don’t want to have anything to do with one another. For when people are confronted with the alternative ‘Freedom or security’, a large majority of them seem to prefer security, even if that means curtailing or even suppressing civil liberties. 5 Why the neoliberal state is a failure Global risks serve as a wake-up call given the failure of nation-states in the globalized world. There is a surprising parallel between the 1986 Cher- nobyl reactor catastrophe and the 1991 Asian financial crisis, on the one hand, and 11 September 2001 and the consequences of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 for the self-image of America, not to mention the reignited debate over climate change, on the other. In each case they led to worldwide discussion over how far the dynamic of world risk society must count as a historical refutation of the neoliberal conception of the minimal state. The positive-sum game of global threat politics Underlying this are two premises. First, world risk society fosters a new historical logic. No nation can cope with these problems alone. Second, in the age of globalization a realistic political alternative that counteracts the loss of the power of command of state politics vis-à-vis globalized capital becomes possible. The precondition is that globalization must be understood not as economic destiny but as a strategic game for world power Chapter 4: The Overlapping of the State of Normalcy and the State of Exception . Risk is synonymous not with catastrophe but with the anticipation of the catastrophe – this is what I established in my initial treatment of the staging of risk. Does this mean that catastrophe is the new thing-in-itself? No, we must also pose the complementary question concerning the staging of the catastrophe: how do local catastrophes become global catas- trophes? Or, more precisely: how should we decipher the ‘symbolic code’ of 9/11? One of the most massive structures erected by human beings collapsed within 14 seconds in a mon- strous cloud of whirling and swirling dust. This destructive force was directed at the Twin Towers of a, in a literal sense, materially constructed and simultaneously profoundly symbolically imbued social authority, namely, the World Trade Center. These material and symbolic explosions brought forth something spatially and temporally removed from them, namely, the expectation of terrorism. “The becoming of the catastrophe in the mass media: How can the indif- ference be overcome and the distance be bridged? The sheer number of the dead is not sufficient. It requires, in addition, the deaths of huge numbers in real time on a global scale with the active presence and participation of the whole of humanity.” 6 . The more manifestly global risks elude the scientific methods used to predict them, the more the influence of the perception of risk grows. The result is that the contradictory certainties of religious, secular and political cultures confront one another in evaluations of global risks: clash of risk cultures. In the cultural turmoil and exchange of world risk society a previously scarcely noticed competitive relation between the secular belief in global risks and the religious belief in God is emerging. Risk enters the global stage after God has made his exit. When Nietzsche pronounced that God is dead, this had the – ironic – consequence that human beings must henceforth find their own explanations and justifications for the impending catastrophes. It seems that religious cultures are characterized by a ‘risk secular- ism’. Those who believe in God are risk atheists. . How can the conflictual and subversive potential of global risks be explained in political theory? My thesis is that the global political potential of global risks stems, in all of its ambivalence, from the overlapping of the state of normalcy and the state of exception. The state of exception no longer holds within a nation but on a ‘cosmopolitan’ scale, and thus gives rise to new conflicts, new commonalities and opportunities for action for diverse groups of actors. on the one hand, the anticipation of side effects catastrophes, such as those associated with the successes of the new cutting-edge technologies, but also with climate change, and so forth; on the other, the anticipation of intentional catastrophes, with transnational suicide terrorism being the prime example. Side effects catastrophes involve the expectation of a negligent state of exception that places state, scientific and economic authority in question and hence favours the disempowerment of the state and the empowerment of social movements. Correspondingly, state, scientific and technical power and legitimacy may implode. They profit from the spread of the awareness of danger in spite of relatively few catastrophes. They know the ‘insecurity business’. . The consequences for the legitimation of state authority: here we must distinguish between the increase in authority and the increase in its inefficiency: global risks produce authoritarian ‘failed states’ – even in the West. Everyone is searching for lost security. But the nation-state, which tries to deal with global risks on its own, is like the drunk on a dark night who tries to find his lost wallet in the beam of a streetlamp. In other words, global risks produce authoritarian ‘failed states’ – even in the West. The state structure which arises under the conditions of world risk society could be characterized in terms of inefficiency and post-democratic authoritarianism. Hence we must make a clear distinction between authority and inefficiency. Chapter 5: How Real is Catastrophic Climate Change? Nowadays, responsibility for the condition of nature is laid at the door of ministers and managers. Evidence that the ‘side effects’ of products or industrial processes pose a threat 7 differentiation between state politics and subpolitics does not lead automatically or exclusively to depoliticization, as is often assumed. Everywhere there are signs of this coalition model of global subpolitics or direct politics. In the case of the worldwide movement against President Chirac’s decision to resume nuclear testing, a spontaneous global alliance arose between governments, Greenpeace activists and the most diverse protest groups. The French miscalculation was reflected in two aspects of the situation: (a) the Mururoa decision coincided with commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and (b) it was unanimously condemned by a meeting of the ASEAN Forum, in which to top it all the United States and Russia took part. All this pointed to a fleeting alliance of direct politics spanning national, economic, religious and political-ideological differences. The result was a global coalition of conflicting symbolic and economic forces. Paradoxically, the challenges posed by global threats provide it with a source of new global morality and activism and of new forms (and forums) of protest. Subpolitics from below: symbolically staged mass boycott – a case study in global subpolitics Simplicity has many meanings. First, transmissibility: we are all environ- mental sinners; just as Shell wanted to dump its oil rig in the sea, ‘we all’ itch to toss cola cans out of the car window. Second, moral outrage: ‘the big shots’ can sink an oil rig filled with toxic waste in the Atlantic with the approval of the government and its experts, while ‘we small fry’ – especially in Germany – have to divide every teabag into three – paper, string and leaves – and dispose of them separately in order to save the world. Third, simple alternative actions: in order to damage Shell, you had to and could fill up your car with ‘morally clean’ petrol from one of its competitors. Fourth, sale of ecological indulgences: the bad conscience of the original inhabitants of industrial society lent the boycott importance because it meant that a kind of personal ego te absolvo could be granted at no personal cost. The Greenpeace people are multinational media professionals who know how self- contradictions between pronouncements and violations of safety and surveillance norms can be presented so that the great and powerful (corporations, governments), blinded by power, stumble into the trap and thrash around telegenically for the entertainment of the global public. Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi would have been delighted to see Greenpeace using the instruments of the media age to stage worldwide mass civil disobedience. Subpolitics from above: global climate policy and the potential emergence of the ‘cosmopolitan state’ The global character of risks (climate change) is giving rise to uncertainty which is being processed by a whole ensemble of institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the WTO and the OECD. The directors of these institutions, who 10 represent the incarnation of ‘globalization from above’, know each other and often move from one organization to the other. This sets them free from the ‘national framings’ and enables them to define the shared goals of their work pragmatically and in an ongoing mutual dialogue. The costs of taking measures against global warming today are minor in comparison to the costs of doing nothing. In future doing nothing could rob the global economy of 20 per cent of its performance – annually. The cosmopolitan state, freed from scruples concerning sovereignty, uses the unrecompensed cooperation of other governments, non-governmental organizations and globally operating corporations to solve ‘national’ problems. The cosmopolitan state would be the sum of the scopes for action of the national governmental institutions and bureaucracies plus the deliberate use of the cooperative capacities of transnational networks. The subpolitics of terror Ecological risks are hidden risks which for the most part escape everyday perception, often rest on abstract scientific models and calculations (climate change) and are correspondingly controversial. The greater the threat – or the greater it is made – the more easily democratic majorities can be won for restrictions on freedom. The subpolitics of terror means the individualization of war. Chapter 6: On the Antiquatedness of Linear Pessimism Concerning Progress A completely different situation exists when the hazards produced by industrial society dominate public, political and private debates. The incalculable threats are transformed into calculable risks by industrial society. They state that in the case of ‘low probability but high consequences risks’ the technical risk may tend towards zero; nevertheless the economic risk tends towards the infinite. One prognosis can be derived from the foregoing: the decisions and the ‘objective laws’ of scientific-technological progress are becoming political issues. This invites the question: Is the growing awareness of risk society synonymous with the invalidation of the linear models of technocracy. Increasingly it is experts who are governing where politicians are nominally in charge. On the antiquatedness of linear pessimism concerning progress The problem is not only that we are confronting challenges on an undreamt of scale but, more problematically, all attempted solutions contain the seeds of new, more difficult problems. Bauman, the social theorist of ambivalence, conceives of modernity in much too linear terms. The banal possibility that something unforeseeable could emerge from the unforeseeable (and the more incalculable, the more surprising) is lost from view. 11 Chapter 7: Knowledge or Non-Knowing? Two Perspectives of ‘Reflexive Modernization’ Living in world risk society means living with ineradicable non-knowing [Nichtwissen] or, to be more precise, with the simultaneity of threats and non-knowing and the resulting political, social and moral paradoxes and dilemmas. We have to distinguish between ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’: we’re talking about ‘knowledge’ as expectation, as social attribution and construction. Non-knowing permeates and transforms human conditions of life and suffering, expert and control systems, the notions of sovereignty and state authority, of law and human dignity. Since governments and authorities must continually reaffirm and re-establish their control over uncontrollable risks, people are exposed to a barrage of shifting forms of non-knowledge of scientific standards, biochemical categories and welfare state compensation claims. The greater the threat, the greater the gap in knowledge, the more urgent and more impossible is the decision (decision paradox). Intentional non-knowing must be carefully distinguished from this, however. One might say that the essence of al-Qaeda terrorism resides in organized non-knowledge. Following the attacks in the United States, al-Qaeda’s ‘centre of gravity’ shifted to anywhere and nowhere. In the case of both unintended and intentional non-knowing, one can compensate for normal catastrophes, but not for the greatest possible catastrophes. They have to be prevented. The compensation principle is replaced by the precautionary principle. The preventive measures against catastrophic risks themselves trigger catastrophic risks, which may in the end be even greater than the catastrophes to be prevented. The Iraq War is a textbook example of this. This was pre- sented, among other things, as a war against terrorism but has had the effect of transforming Iraq into a playground for terrorists. Two perspectives of ‘reflexive modernization’ It is difficult to avoid misunderstanding the concept of ‘reflexivity’. In the first view ‘reflexive’ modernization is associated primarily with knowledge (reflection) concerning the foundations, consequences and problems of modernization. In the second, reflexive modernization is primarily the result of side effects of modernization. In the first case, one could speak of reflection, in the second, of the reflexivity of modernisation. Giddens’s approach to knowledge under conditions of reflexive modernisation can be summarised as follows: • The more society modernizes, the more knowledge it generates concerning its foundations, structures, dynamics and conflicts. 
 12 used to demonstrate the importance of international relations of definitional power for how violence is actually staged at the global level. As we have seen, risk, as a matter of its conceptual logic, represents the negation of equality, justice and consensus. However, this should not be misunderstood in such a way that the existing global inequalities of risk are necessary and hence justified and unalterable. Risk cannot be reduced to the product of the probability of an event multiplied by the intensity and scope of possible losses. Given the power relations of global society, risk is instead a socially constructed and staged phenomenon through and through in which some have the capacity to define risk and others do not. There are two counter-tendencies and counter-arguments that are likewise implicit in the logic of risk against the dichotomous structural conflict dynamic of risk: first, the pluralization and, second, the universalization of risk conflicts. Since risks increase with the frequency of decisions, since all issues are becoming dependent on decisions in principle, there cannot be any zero- or non-risk. Luhmann defends an agnostic point of view regarding the social and political definition of risk. His agnosticism concerning risk depoliticizes risk conflicts by universalizing them: meanings are always unavoidably plural and relative. The result is that the distinction between the decision-maker ‘we’ and the ‘we’ of the living side effects is becoming obsolete as risk spreads. Luhmann’s position is reinforced by the universalization argument. There is no risk-free behaviour, hence none that is free of danger. The refusal to accept risks has itself become risky. The dichotomization of smokers and non-smokers Individualization and anonymization: To smoke or not to smoke seemed (as the globally powerful cigarette industry implied) to be a purely individual matter, although it has long been known that death from smoking represents an individual fate shared by masses of others with enormous economic costs. This individualization and pluralization of the distribution and perception of risk came to an abrupt end, once the staging in terms of self- endangerment was replaced by staging in terms of the endangerment of others. Suddenly something for which before nobody had been made socially accountable – the involuntary inhalation of the blue plumes of smoke which the cigarette smokers lustfully exhaled like miniature smokestacks – repre- sented a potential legal, social and political offence that transforms all others into the ‘we’ of non-smokers. Risk antagonism: This arises with the transition from self-endangerment to the endangerment of others, something which is discernible not in objective changes in behaviour but in how behaviour is socially staged. The behaviour remains the same – 15 smoking and non-smoking – but how it is socially perceived, evaluated and processed changes radically. Relations of definition: How is it possible that certain risks remain anonymous and as a result can increase to a point where they are suddenly described as ‘serious problems’ and set alarm bells ringing? A possible answer is that, on the one hand (following Luhmann), alarmism over risk permanently sabotages itself as a result of the pluralization and universalization of risks (the alarmism is drowned out by the general din of the alarm bells); on the other hand, this mechanism suddenly no longer works. Inversion of values: Suddenly smokers no longer endanger only their own health but also that of everyone else. Staging organized violence in the world risk society The Cold War is an example of how the most extreme reciprocal threat potential – the nuclear stalemate – can be compatible with a form of calcula- bility that fosters peace. Each side knew that the other did not want to jeop- ardize its own survival or that of the species. In a parallel development ‘new wars’ arise, that is, organized forms of privatized violence that displace the violence exercised by the state and chal- lenge, undermine and replace the state’s monopoly on violence. The concept of security has changed fundamentally in the twenty-first century. It is still a matter of preventing wars in the classical sense (for example, between North and South Korea, India and Pakistan, Iran and Israel). Security is also increasingly understood against the background of a worldwide solidarity (reflected in a UN mandate), as a matter of safeguarding elementary human rights in regions in which elementary human rights are severely threatened, where states are collapsing, where privatized… Whereas the realization of humanitarian goals is cited as the goal of virtual war, the new forms of suicidal terrorism à la bin Laden are driven by the radically opposed goal, namely, to defeat Western modernity with its own instruments in the name of Allah and to stage the Apocalypse. Religious warriors, people who believe they are fulfilling God’s will upon earth, have always stood out for their unimaginable brutality. What are analytically differentiated here – old, new and virtual wars and the anticipation of global terrorist attacks – mingle, overlay and blend in the military conflicts of recent years, for example, the Iraq War and the war in Lebanon. We are dealing with a confused mixture of new and old wars, of virtual wars and nationally and transnationally operating terrorism. I will refer to them as ‘risk wars’. The concept ‘risk war’ has a twofold meaning. On the one hand, it designates military interventions in foreign (not hostile) states with the goal of minimizing and controlling a ‘global risk’. At the same time, the concept ‘risk war’ refers to ‘risk-transfer war’. By this is meant that, under the primacy of controlling risk and minimizing casualties, the threat to one’s own troops is minimized and the threat to others is maximized. 16 Chapter 10: Global Inequality, Local Vulnerability On the one hand, the world of modernity is framed and cultivated as ‘opportunity’, and the gaze is directed to the potential advantages. On the other hand, modernization appears as a problematic, questionable and even un- acceptable jeopardization of one’s own social existence by the decisions of others. Threats to the environment as social threats Environmental and technical dangers initially spring from the inexorable triumphs of a linear industrialization that is oblivious to its consequences and which consumes its own natural and cultural foundations. Hence environmental hazards are constructions of the ‘latent side effects’ of industrial decisions. How can global awareness – and, in particular, the awareness of the developing world – of these hazards be awakened? n example of this development is how the European Union is extending its key role in the risk management of the European nation-states, for instance, with its January 2007 plan for a European climate policy with painful consequences for the automobile industry. The weakening of national structures and the strengthening of transnational non-governmental organizations of global civil society point in the same direction. Hierarchy: Downstream countries, being isolated by the sovereignty of the other countries, have no control over the hazards to which they are exposed and few possibilities of influencing the decisions which trigger them; likewise they have little negotiation power. Reciprocity: In this opposing model, the benefits and costs (harms) of deci- sions involving risks are distributed more or less equally among different countries and regions, including the countries where the risky decisions are made. Type 1: methodological nationalism The concept ‘methodological’ is used here more in a metaphorical sense. It involves a set of implicit historical premises whose analysis and critique is a task for a sociology of sociology. Two variants of methodological nationalism can be distinguished here: national-sociological self-analysis (social structural analysis of Germany by German sociology or of Great Britain by British sociology, etc.) and comparative studies (comparison of national societies). Thus what is decisive is the extension of risks across borders and the social constructions of latency. Methodological nationalism prevents these two issues from being thematized. As a consequence, the change in the meaning of borders in world risk society remains unrecognized. The export of threats to non-developed countries and the import of labour from these countries means that the countries in which the global threats are accumulating are being 17