Risk Society

What do events as different as Chernobyl, global warming, mad cow disease, the debate about the human genome, the Asian financial crisis, and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks have in common? They signify different dimensions and dynamics of (global) risk society.

Premodern dangers were attributed to nature, gods, and demons. Risk is a modern concept. It presumes decision making and inherently contains the concept of control. As soon as we speak in terms of “risk,” we are talking about calculating the incalculable, colonizing the future. In this sense, calculating risks is part of the master narrative of (first) modernity. In Europe, this victorious march culminates in the development and organisation of the welfare state, which bases its legitimacy on its capacity to protect its citizens against dangers of all sorts. But what happens in risk society is that we enter a world of uncontrollable risk. “Uncontrollable risk” is a contradiction in terms. And yet it is the only apt description for the second-order, unnatural, human-made, manufactured uncertainties and hazards beyond boundaries we are confronted with in (second) reflexive modernity.

Risk society does not arise from the fact that everyday life has generally become more dangerous. It is not a matter of the increase, but rather of the de-bounding of uncontrollable risks. This de-bounding is three-dimensional: spatial, temporal, and social. In the spatial dimension, we see ourselves confronted with risks that do not take nation-state boundaries, or any other boundaries for that matter, into account: climate change, air pollution, and the ozone hole affect everyone (if not all in the same way). Similarly, in the temporal dimension, the long latency period of dangers—such as, for example, in the elimination of nuclear waste or the consequences of genetically manipulated food—escapes the prevailing procedures used when dealing with industrial dangers. Finally, in the social dimension, the incorporation of both jeopardizing potentials and the related liability question lead to a problem—namely, that it is difficult to determine, in a legally relevant manner, who “causes” environmental pollution or a financial crisis and who is responsible; these are mainly due to the combined effects of the actions of many individuals (“organized irresponsibility”). This then also means that the boundaries of private insurability dissolve, since it is based on the fundamental potential for compensation of damages and on the [Page 649]possibility of estimating their probability by means of quantitative risk calculation. So the hidden central issue in risk society is how to feign control over the incontrollable— in politics, law, science, technology, economy, and everyday life (Adam, Beck, and van Loon 2000; Allan 2003; Beck 1999; Giddens 1994; Latour 2003).

We can differentiate between at least three different axes of conflict in risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is global financial crises, which, during the first stage of modernity, can be individualised and nationalised. Financial risks threaten or devalue personal property (capital, jobs) so they are more individualized than ecological risks; if there is a collective definition, it tends to be a national one. And the third, which suddenly broke upon us on September 11, 2001, is the threat of global terror networks, which empower governments and states. Terrorism raises the question of who defines the identity of a “transnational terrorist.” Neither judges nor international courts do, but the governments of powerful states do. They empower themselves by defining who is their enemy. Terrorist enemy images are de-territorialized, de-nationalized, and flexible state constructions that legitimate global interventions by military powers.

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