Sites of Modernity—Places of Risk: Risk and Security in Germany since the 1970s 9781805390268

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Sites of Modernity— Places of Risk

New German Historical Perspectives Series Editor: Paul Betts (Executive Editor), St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford

Established in 1987 this special St. Antony’s series showcases pioneering new work by leading German historians on a range of topics concerning the history of modern Germany, Europe, and the wider world. Publications address pressing problems of political, economic, social, and intellectual history informed by contemporary debates about German and European identity, providing fresh conceptual, international, and transnational interpretations of the recent past. Recent volumes: Volume 12

Volume 6

Sites of Modernity—Places of Risk: Risk and Security in Germany since the 1970s Edited by Martin H. Geyer

Anti-Liberal Europe: A Neglected Story of Europeanization Edited by Dieter Gosewinkel

Volume 11

Volume 5

The Force of Comparison: A New Perspective on Modern European History and the Contemporary World Edited by Willibald Steinmetz

A Revolution of Perception? Consequences and Echoes of 1968 Edited by Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey

Volume 10

Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices Edited by Sylvia Paletschek

Negotiating the Secular and the Religious in the German Empire: Transnational Approaches Edited by Rebekka Habermas

Volume 4

Volume 3

Humanitarianism and Media: 1900 to the Present Edited by Johannes Paulmann

Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective Edited by Jürgen Kocka

Volume 8

Volume 2

Space and Spatiality in Modern GermanJewish History Edited by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup

Crises in European Integration: Challenges and Responses, 1945–2005 Edited by Ludger Kühnhardt

Volume 9

Volume 7

Poverty and Welfare in Modern German History Edited by Lutz Raphael For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/new-german-historical-perspectives

Sites of Modernity— Places of Risk Risk and Security in Germany since the 1970s

Edited by Martin H. Geyer

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Martin H. Geyer All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2023004603 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80539-025-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-80539-026-8 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781805390251

Contents

Introduction Martin H. Geyer

1

1. Exploring the Invention of Risk Debates: Natural Disasters, Insurance, and Risk Management in the Late Twentieth Century Nicolai Hannig

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2. Insuring Catastrophes: Capital Market-Based Forms of Insurance since the 1980s Martin Lengwiler

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3. Places of Risk on the Site of Socialist Modernity: Fighting Industrial Accidents until the GDR Was No More Thomas Lindenberger

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4. From “Black Sheriffs” to “Security Partners”? The Emergence of Private Policing in Public Spaces in Germany since the 1970s Marcus Böick

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5. Risky Housing: Squatting in London and Hamburg in the 1970s and Early 1980s Christine G. Krüger

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6. Imprisoned Protest: The Body at Risk and Hunger Strikes in the United States in Transnational Perspective, 1968‒85 Maximilian Buschmann

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7. “An Inseparable Pair”: Freedom and Security in the Schengen Space Isaac Stanley-Becker

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8. It’s the Brain, Stupid: Neuroscience, Risk, and Crime Peter Becker

Contents

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Conclusion. From Risks to Emergencies? Martin H. Geyer

193

Index

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Introduction Martin H. Geyer

Risk and Security since the 1970s The contributions to this volume were presented at a workshop held at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in June 2019.1 They look at specific places of risk that stand at the center of security debates and are generally perceived as sites of modernity: institutions with a long tradition of calculating risks, such as insurances; technical facilities striving to prevent or to maximize control over potential environmental catastrophes; industrial sites producing hazardous goods and posing risks to the community at large; public and domestic security bodies with their monitoring apparatuses, like the police and prisons; and, last but not least, humans and the risks they take with regard to their own physical bodies or to the detriment of others. These are sites of modernity in that they promise to provide security and safety, yet at the same time are often deemed to be responsible for creating new risks. The history of these places of risk is closely entwined with the ascendency of academic risk expertise and theory in the fields of actuarial, technical, and social sciences, which have always thrived on the urgency to reflect on the uncertainties regarding the future, to make risks calculable, and thus to provide certain degrees of security and safety. Risks have always denoted not only hazard and a state of insecurity, but also the chance to manage them and thus make a profit. These efforts are inherent to the project of modernity and thus go back in time. This is true with respect to the origins of commercial insurances since the late Middle Ages; the risk-taking of early modern adventurers, capitalists, and entrepreneurs; the attempts of individuals to improve their chances at the gambling table; and the efforts to cope with looming natural risks, such as building dikes to prevent flooding. It is also true for the history of modern interventionist states that have provided institutions promising to make individual and collective risks calculable and manageable, such as accidents, invalidity, old age, and other health and

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epidemiological risks. The explicit aim was (and is) to provide individual and societal security by bundling, that is, collectivizing individual risks on the basis of a technical-statistical rationality to calculate probabilities.2 Since World War II, modern welfare states have hugely expanded security provisions beyond the more narrow confines of social security and technical safety by introducing new fields such as food security, Keynesian full employment policies, human rights protection, and environmental protection. Ever since 1945, the risks of an atomic war have loomed large, thus prompting the call for expansive concepts of domestic, international, and military security, as one can see most clearly in the US national security state.3 There have always been limits to insurability, especially in cases of catastrophes. After all, “when all else fails,” governments and the state have remained the “ultimate risk manager(s).”4 This volume focuses more narrowly on the period since the 1970s, a time of strikingly new and expansive debates on risk. By itself, this is an interesting historical fact, which is dealt with by the contributors. If political and social terms are understood not only as a signature of their times but also as an important factor in creating the reality that they address, then risk is certainly one of the strong competitors in defining the period from the last decades of the twentieth century until today. A search in Google’s Ngram Viewer illustrates that the continuous surge of the term started in the 1970s in English, French, and to a lesser degree German publications. By the turn of the century, it had become quite common to ask whether we live in a “risk society” (be it in the singular or the plural), in which nearly every aspect of our social, economic, and political life is framed in terms of risk and might actually be at risk. Strikingly new was the widespread criticism leveled against techno-scientific, “rationalistic” approaches in engineering, economics, and epidemiology, which for a long time had been engaged in “the identification of risks, mapping causal factors, building predictive models of risk relations and people’s responses to various types of risk and proposing ways of limiting the effects or risk.”5 The social sciences jumped on the bandwagon of risk studies and—contested—expertise. Their mantra was “new risks,” such as the environment; they broadened the debate, along with new heuristics and methodologies, to challenge what seemed to be firmly established technoscientific expertise. In 1986, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck coined the term “risk society”—quite accidentally—in the same year as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophe in Ukraine, following the chemical and nuclear accidents of Seveso in Italy (1976), Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania (1979), and Bhophal in India (1984). Were such environmental risks something altogether new, manmade, the unforeseen results of economic growth and modernizing agendas of “industrial modernity”? Did nuclear risks have an altogether new quality in so far as, unlike former social and economic risks, they affected rich and poor alike? Were they, in other words, “democratic”? Moreover, was the established risk expertise, which had become firmly anchored in institutions of industry, the state, and science, capable of dealing adequately with these new risks? At a time of intensive debates over the advent of postmodernity, Beck framed his critical obser-

Introduction

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vations in very broad terms of modernity and a new age. In his view, humankind stood at the dawn of a new epoch, in which only a “second” and “reflexive modernity” could deal with these new risks and overcome the “first modernity,” namely the logic of industrial society. It was a plea to critically reflect on the premises, especially the side effects, of industrial society. The English translation of Beck’s book, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, appeared in 1992, followed by the publication of another work of his, World Risk Society, in 1999. These two books and the embrace of his theory by fellow social scientists like Anthony Giddens triggered an outpouring of English-language—and conspicuously British—social science literature on the topic in the twenty years that followed.6 These ideas fell on fertile soil and gained a new political urgency. The new academic preoccupation with risk was driven by the environmental movement, on the one hand, and by neoliberalism, on the other; last but not least, it engaged an increasing number of academics who had become dissatisfied with modernization theory and its underlying premises of industrial progress. In the context of the transformations that the United Kingdom had been undergoing since 1979 under Margaret Thatcher (quite a political risk-taker indeed), especially through her extremely unpopular domestic policies, and during the Labor Party’s search for a “third way” that was “beyond left and right” (Giddens), Beck’s themes of a looming environmental catastrophe were broadly reframed within ongoing debates about the future of the welfare state and its promises to handle social risk effectively, about neoliberal notions of the efficacy of risk and risk-taking, and even about new consumerist lifestyles. Beck provided some of the keywords, prompting most authors to engage productively (yet more often than not quite critically) with his grand social theorizing and far-reaching propositions.7 Ulrich Beck may have sparked a wider debate and coined some key terms, but he was never the measure of all things said on risk. Others, like Helga Novotny, had reflected on the issue, also in the context of the nascent ecological movement.8 As Nicolai Hannig demonstrates in his contribution to this volume, the insurance industry has always played a pioneering role in thinking about risks, old or new. In fact, big insurers like Allianz and Munich Re, one of the greatest world players in reinsurance, were responsible for putting the term “risk” on the agenda in their own terms. Especially in dealing with disasters, their operationalization of risk corroded the prevailing naturalistic and simplistic image of safety. Insurances experts worked against viewing natural hazards as events that occur suddenly and interrupt the natural order of things. Instead, most modern risks arise through state crisis management, these authors argued, through the exploitation of resources, faulty infrastructure politics, and forgotten forms of self-help by the local populations—all arguments familiar to the readers of James C. Scott’s critique of modernization agendas in his book Seeing Like a State.9 The ideas of new social movements, innovative insurance expertise, and critical academic debates on security and risk inspired the trailblazing book Vom Risiko (1995) by Wolfgang Bonß, who had worked with Ulrich Beck in the 1980s. In

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this book (which unfortunately never found its way into the English-language book market), he not only provided the first systematic study of risk, including a historical perspective, but developed all the themes that one would later find in the various handbooks on risk. Beck was continually challenged by Niklas Luhmann, another German grand master of theory. As the German sociologist had noted early on in his contention with Beck, increased risk awareness and efforts to make risks manageable actually proliferated risk debates in each respective field of politics and society. Yet paradoxically, this did not “solve” looming risks. Just the opposite: it may have even increased the overall feeling of insecurity.10 Outside Germany, the anthropologist Mary Douglas (also in collaboration with Aaron Wildawsky) had become highly influential in risk debates by the 1990s, also by way of criticizing Beck. As a cultural anthropologist, Douglas challenged many technicians and theorists, including Beck, who conceived risks as something given and “real.” Instead, she was interested in subjective “risk perceptions” in various contexts—social, economic, and environmental—and how they were imbued with shared social and group beliefs. For her, risks had to do with societal and group-specific ideas of self-understanding concerning oneself and “the others.” She was interested in the mainstream of society, with regard to social and economic risks, as much as in what she called sectarian cultures, which included parts of the environmental movement.11 Risk always had a correlate of blame—meaning, in anthropological terms, attributing blame to those who transgressed the boundaries of “purity” in any given society.12 Together with the ongoing work on risk by psychologists, Douglas’s approach opened the way for research on how societies, groups, and individuals handle risk, fear, and uncertainty, and on their subjectivity. In this vein many studies have examined the way that individuals and groups deal with the daily risks confronting them, be it in making financial investment decisions, using drugs, consuming alcohol, or participating in extreme sports; other studies have looked at the risk advice offered to people concerning how to drive a vehicle, use a razor, or operate a lawnmower, for example.13 Thus, in Frank Furedi’s terms, risk debates are about “who you are,” a question that is not easy to answer in view of the fact that “every conceivable experience has been transformed into a risk.”14 In Germany, Beck’s rather alarmist depiction of new risks has somewhat obscured the simultaneous emergence of a broad literature that optimistically heralded the new age of risk and risk-taking—the “good risks,” as they became known by the 1980s. Did risk not offer opportunities? Were high-risk activities perhaps more socially and economically productive than low-risk ones, not least because “uncertainty generates flexibility”?15 Couldn’t risks be “managed” by “the market,” including the financial market, instead of by governments? Originally, this vein of literature was more prominent outside of Germany. Sometimes it was formulated as a critique of the interventionist welfare state, like in Yair Aharoni’s The No-Risk Society (1981), or as the depiction of somewhat heroic histories of the rise of the modern seafaring and enterprising world, like in The Taming of Chance (1990) by Ian Hacking or Peter L. Bernstein’s bestseller Against the Gods:

Introduction

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The Remarkable Story of Risk (1998). These books also show how the field of risk studies became firmly established alongside the narrower field of environmental studies.16 New journals emerged, like Risk and Uncertainty (from 1988), the Journal of Risk (from 1998), and the Journal of Risk Research (from 1998), in addition to other more specialist journals like Health, Risk & Society (from 1999). Most of all, the numerous handbooks on the topic indicate how established this field had become.17

A Contemporary History of Risk Historians were somewhat late in joining this research field. Although they can claim that few things in today’s world are as new as they may appear at first sight, it is quite obvious that the historical studies that address issues and forms of risk in the past are epistemologically embedded in the contemporary public and academic engagement with risk. And historians face the same challenge as their colleagues in the social sciences, specifically, the difficulty of sorting out the closely interwoven language of catastrophe, danger, hazards, (in)security, and risk found in the sources.18 Language poses other challenges. One example is the German word Sicherheit, which encompasses the English terms “security,” “safety,” and to some degree also “certainty” (or the lack thereof, in terms of Unsicherheit, that is, uncertainty). With this broad semantic meaning of the term (Un)Sicherheit, risks lurk everywhere. In fact, against this backdrop it may seem quite appropriate that the idea of the “risk society” originated in Germany, a country that appears to some riveted by a culture of fear, with a strain of deep-seated, culturally embedded aversion to risk in the name of security.19 The focus of this volume is on the times since the 1970s when the new risk debates took off. The chapters do not primarily aim at revisiting and probing the grand theories of risk empirically. Instead they look at the ways that risk and security played out in various social, political, economic, and academic contexts, meaning what was being discussed by the 1990s as “risk communication.”20 Of particular interest are the ways that individuals, groups, and scientists came to embrace risk as an argument in order to criticize established institutions that provided security, to challenge political and economic assumptions of progress, security, and modernization, and also to legitimize individual risk-taking. In many instances the chapters revolve around forms of risk and the nascent theorizing of risk and security, also in terms of modernity. Thus, this is looked at not just from the angle of scientific theorizing but also from concrete practices that came to challenge and indeed change institutions. German historiography today has dealt intensively first with the 1970s and by now also with the 1980s. Originally, an important focus was on the post-1968 social movements.21 Those involved in these movements radically politicized the threat of what politicians, business, the media, and no doubt the public at large viewed as the requirements and guarantees not only for economic growth but

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also for political and social stability. There had always been critical voices, but by the early 1970s the protest against atomic energy came to present it as the source of “new” health and environmental risks, which were discussed in terms of lurking dangers. Much of this danger appeared incalculable, despite claims to the contrary by technical experts in the field. With respect to atomic energy, insurances argued that the risks were of such a dimension that the public and thus the state had to jump in to cover them. Thus, well before Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society in 1986, (not just) Germany had become engulfed in intense debates on atomic risk. These debates were entwined with critical assessments of economic and social modernization, technical safety, and even the reform politics of the Social‒ Liberal coalition government. Technological sites of modernity and ideas of progress and modernization that had epitomized modern West Germany, also in terms of a Modell Deutschland, were now being questioned. Such threats became highly political issues, conspicuously unlike in France or on the other side of the well-defended German‒German border in East Germany.22 The atomic risk debate spun off into other forms of pollution, including chemical waste, asbestos, and acid rain, and soon into a myriad of related issues, such as foodstuffs, medical drugs, and car safety (in which the United States was a great inspiration). Already at the time, much of this was framed in terms of different risk perceptions among the “lay public” as opposed to “experts,” with a much-quoted article by Amos Twerksy and Daniel Kahnemann on “Judgement under Uncertainty” in 1974.23 Yet it was also a debate among experts. Soberly, the Canadian organizational sociologist Charles Perrow described nuclear power as a “high-risk system,” whose complexity, he predicted in 1984, could not be controlled. Retrospectively, he pointed out that the “metaphor of an accident residing in the complexity and coupling of the system”—that is, the unforeseeable interaction of components of a system—has seeped into many other areas where he originally never thought to apply it. However, by the late 1990s, the list of areas that Perrow himself deemed necessary to include in his study of “normal accidents” had increased tremendously and included financial markets, terrorism, the internet, wildfire, and the AIDS epidemic.24 In his chapter on major accidents and workplace safety provisions in East Germany’s chemical industry, Thomas Lindenberger looks at such “normal accidents” but with a twist, because the political-economic planning system established in this communist country provides a counterfactual argument to Perrow: What happens when no institutionalized culture of risk communication exists and when there are no powerful actors such as the insurance industry, a concerned public, and particularly a critical press to monitor decisions made by the political leadership keen on maximizing output, even against objections of plant managers? Ironically, at least on paper, East Germany had a very well-developed system of industrial safety provisions in the German tradition of accident insurance. Lindenberger presents a vivid picture of the catastrophic state that the East German chemical industry was in by the end of the 1980s, where everyone played the blame game with respect to accepting responsibility for accidents and undermined any ability to manage risks

Introduction

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effectively. By the time of its demise, communist industrial modernity was no beacon of progress, nor for the ecological movement.

Risk, Futurity, and Gaps The focus on nuclear energy, large-scale accidents, and social movements is too narrow to explain the broad epistemic embrace of risk in nearly all fields, starting in the 1970s. It was rooted in a more general sense of what appeared to many contemporaries as an “age of uncertainty” at the end of the “boom years,” or what the French called the end of “trente glorieuses.” It was a time of “prosperity lost” and an “age of fracture.”25 In the wake of the two oil crises in 1973/74 and 1979/80, which were followed by severe economic recessions, unemployment, and inflation, many assumptions with respect to the malleability of the future appeared to be shattered. This was true for the zeitgeist, especially for the special academic species of “futurologists,” whose previously booming field drifted into crisis within a few years.26 Grand predictions about the future became a risky business. Futurology, so popular and influential until the early 1970s, underwent a process of professionalization, specialization, and a repackaging of what were formerly often general assumptions about the future into more specific research fields—including risk studies.27 By the late 1970s, critics argued that much of what had once been considered “doable” and “feasible” now proved to be unrealistic, even “utopian,” an argument that was picked up also by historians.28 Quite fitting was the diagnosis in 1980 by Jürgen Habermas that the “political utopia” of the “classical industrial-work society,” which had promised an increase of social rights and liberty, had lost its momentum.29 It was not only the present that had become “insecure,” “uncertain,” and full of real and potential “crises” (another key term that was and is closely related to contemporary risk debates), but also the near and distant future.30 In this atmosphere of uncertainty, the historian Reinhart Koselleck diagnosed at the end of 1979 the drifting apart of the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation.” Even though he formulated this in the very general terms of a recurring historical experience of modernity, it fit the prevalent sentiments that societies were then facing a turning point and waving many postmodern farewells to what was being called industrial modernity and its false promises of security.31 Quite like the contemporaries of the 1970s, German historiography has debated the implications of various contemporary diagnoses of shifts quite intensively, in terms of a fundamental “structural break” (Strukturbruch) but also of multiple hairline fissures (Haarbrüche), be they in the economy, science, politics, or culture. Such diagnoses prompt questions concerning the end of “industrial modernity” and what to call this new epoch (provided that this is not a misnomer).32 The contemporary trope of a “loss of the future,” which found its way into historiography, seems to contradict the various diagnoses with respect to the temporality of mainstream risk studies, because risk societies are conspicuously

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obsessed with all the possible aspects of what Deborah Lupton has called “futurity.”33 Risks are about the things that may occur in the future and can either be calculated or, if not, remain tantamount to hazard and uncertainty. Either way, provisions with respect to the future can or have to be undertaken.34 This can go hand in hand with the sobering experience mentioned earlier that former expectations with respect to an easy manageability of the future lose their credibility, hence creating a feeling, if not of “crisis,” then of an urgency to address in the present the pending risks of the near and distant future. In the words of a strategic planner at Royal Dutch Shell, “traditional planning was based on forecasts, which worked reasonably well in the relatively stable 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1970s, however, forecasting errors have become more frequent and occasionally of dramatic and unprecedented magnitude.”35 This peculiar temporality explains some of the juxtapositions of “old” and “new” risks, including ideas of (post)modernity on the one hand, and the critique of modernization and what was discussed as industrial modernity on the other. In the early 1970s, the German sociologist Franz-Xaver Kaufmann could argue with respect to the welfare state that the quest for security was tantamount to “annihilating the temporality of the future” by means of planning.36 This was just another way of saying that the modern social state was in fact able to contain the looming risks of the future—first and foremost by learning from past failures and by doing things better than previous generations, thus implying that it was possible to avoid the disastrous consequences of the economic, social, and political instabilities of the interwar period. The risk debates that started especially in the 1980s turned this logic almost upside down: there might only be a few cracks visible at the present, be they in atomic safety, a public pension system, or environmental issues, but these cracks might herald serious fissures and develop into future disasters. Next to the known unknowns loom the unknown unknowns, which might pose even greater risks in the future. In such risk debates, inaction in the present is often depicted as having threatening, if not catastrophic consequences. The risks of the future, whether real or supposed, colonize the present and assert preventative maxims for action. Thus, future risks, as depicted by experts but also other interested groups, are used as a veto power over actions and policies in the present.37 Ulrich Beck offered us a good example of this new risk-futurity when he contrasted the incapacity of “first [industrial] modernity” to solve new, pressing issues to the new “reflexive” ability of a “second modernity.” Extrapolating the future on the basis of past experiences with past assumptions of security and risk could not be applied, in Beck’s view, either to what he considered outmoded national circumstances or to the new global ones of environmental risks that had been produced by the “first modernity.” One of the characteristics of the drifting apart of the realms of experience and expectations in the context of risk was the multiplication of “gaps” in whatever policy field or institutional setup one looked at. These perceived “gaps” were

Introduction

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(and, in fact, are) the breeding ground of political risk awareness: viewed in terms of risk, nearly all sites of modernity showed cracks. This phenomenon was not altogether new. In light of the Russian nuclear buildup during the Cold War, the United States debated the existence of its “missile gap,” which in many respects prefigured later risk debates and spawned many spin-offs, like the technology gap or the educational gap. Closing the missile gap by military buildup was one thing. But nuclear armament was about how to act under conditions of uncertainty, how to calculate risks based on models of rational choice, cybernetics, systems, and game theory, how to prevent falling behind the military strength of the enemy but at the same time to safeguard against Armageddon, and how to control and to prepare societies at risk.38 All of this cost vast sums of money and engaged scientists of various professions. The result was a trickling-down effect into a wide range of areas.39 One such example is the 1972 report of the Club of Rome on the alleged limitation of resources vis-à-vis the growth of the world population. This report, much quoted at the time, focused on the gaps that were to be expected in the future and the possible crises, if not catastrophes, linked to them.40 In Germany, the threatening gap in oil supply led to the oversized planning of new nuclear plants, whose “safety gaps” drove the environmental and antinuclear movement. Likewise, there were gaps in the form of deficits, for example, in the hugely extended system of old age pensions and in public budgets, which seemed to be spiraling out of control. This was intensified by the fact that many countries faced gaps with respect to economic growth and employment, which had not lived up to what had been optimistic forecasts. “Stagflation,” a slowdown of economic growth combined with a new inflationary trend, also seemed to challenge the prevalent Keynesianism. There were many other fields in which the talk was of “gaps.” Were we not suffering from domestic “security gaps” as a result of the terrorist threat? Who was to blame and what was at risk? Terrorists posed a deadly threat to individuals and society, yet the government’s answer, the buildup of the “security state,” also threatened to unhinge the Rechtsstaat. The equation of the domestic “security state” with the “atomic state” (Atomstaat) and its system of surveillance for the sake of security and safety illustrates how the scope of the risk debates widened into different areas.41 In turn, the state security apparatus and politicians of the major parties (not only in Germany) lumped together those who protested against security laws and atomic industry as a risk to society at large.42 In order to understand some of the conflicts at the time (but also the argument and reception of Beck’s Risk Society), it is good to keep in mind these social and political polarizations of security and risk.43 Such obliterations of historical experience with their specific historical assumptions of a new futurity can be found in many risk studies. The implications of a widening of the “demographic gap” offer one such example. The beginnings of the dramatic decline in fertility in most industrial countries could hardly be felt at the time when the baby boomers came of age and joined an overcrowded

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labor market. Yet amid the “crisis of the welfare state,” demographic forecasts become an argument, conspicuously a veto, against both past and present social policies. Starting in the mid-1970s, new scenarios and forecasts of the impact of demography in combination with different scales of economic growth became standard fare in social policies. Many people, including the economist Milton Friedman, denounced the public pension system as a “Ponzi scheme.”44 To manage future possible risks almost always called for new measures, whether this meant smaller or larger recalibrations of existing provisions in accordance with future risk, or the abolishment or fundamental change of systems. More specifically, the neoliberal aim was to put pension systems on a sound “footing,” that is, to base them on actuarial risk calculations and to privatize them.45 When it came to issues of risk, societies became geared toward the future; no doubt this applies all the more to those who believed in (and cashed in on) the new financial instruments of securitization. Such arguments became entangled with the proposition of a new (post)modernity that left the sullen past of statist security behind. The underlying optimism was a reflection of the neoliberal time.46 The point is that such diagnoses of gaps launched various risk discourses and, once set in motion, a process of addressing ever-new risks, also in politics. Big political and philosophical issues existed alongside nitty-gritty technical issues. It was Niklas Luhmann who sharply analyzed (within his broader general systems theory) this great variety of “risk communications,” which he identified as a key to understanding the dynamics of the controversies. In modern, functionally differentiated societies, he saw a growing plurality of risk discourses, very specific to each societal subsystem (i.e., the economy, science, and culture) and field (i.e., the atomic industry, public security vs. the concerned public). The risk assessment of specialists in each of these fields would, by necessity, clash with that of others who were not part of this system yet had their own specific assessment of risks. As he argued, this made it quite unlikely that a societal consensus would emerge, be it national or global, with respect to “solving” or “controlling” risks. This argument was aimed against Ulrich Beck and many other risk-technicians making such claims. What would occur, argued Luhmann, would be the opposite of what Beck expected, not least because of an ever-intensified societal “risk communication.”47 This cacophony of public risk communication, which also involved highly specialized risk experts, raised questions about what was at risk and who was not only to blame but might even pose a risk to individuals and society. This was articulated in terms of dangers, hazards, insecurity, safety, and security gaps. Despite the fact that there was a transnational dimension to this risk communication, it was not an identical phenomenon in each country. National differences remained strong. The altogether different ways in which the risks of atomic energy were debated and treated in Germany and France is one such example.48 Another is the very different attitude of hailing risk as a way out of economic stagnation and self-inflicted problems that, as it was argued, resulted in the gaps between expectations and harsh reality.

Introduction

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Security and Risks Ideas of social and individual risks and perceptions of (in)security (in the broad German sense of the word, including safety and certainty) are closely interrelated and often cannot be untangled. The weakness in some of the social science literature on risk is that it often leaves out the security side of the equation. Historians argue closer to their sources in which the talk of risks and security is more often than not easily juxtaposed in terms of old types of security versus new risks. This is another way of saying that history is often a pretty messy affair that tends to ruffle up clear-cut theoretical assumptions. A good example is Christine Krüger’s comparative depiction of house-squatting in Germany and Britain in this volume. Whether house-squatting was motivated by sheer economic necessity or expressed a form of alternative lifestyle, it always involved risks. Yet, as Krüger argues, the readiness of the squatters to live with the risk of being evicted and to get into legal trouble should not be interpreted as evidence that seemingly older values of security associated with the welfare state were being abandoned by these activists. At the same time, they were criticizing aspects of the welfare state on a massive scale: in Hamburg squatting was indeed directed against technocratic urban planning and new, large, modern public and private housing. In London, the protest was directed against the inefficiency of the welfare system, against officialdom, and against the paternalism of civil servants—in other words, the workings of the welfare state. In his chapter, Isaac Stanley-Becker looks at the nexus of security and risk from another, more governmental angle by examining the zone of free movement established by the 1985 Schengen Accord as both a place of risk and of (national) security. While Schengen offered the opportunities and profitability of a larger economic space, a free market, and the prospect of a future European citizenship, it also created what appeared to many critics to be new risks associated with the removal of border controls. Becker casts light on procedures devised to fortify Schengen’s external borders in order to block unlawful immigration and surveil the movement of foreign nationals into and across a new space of freedom for European citizens. The creation of the Schengen Information System (SIS) became a focal point of concern about the risks of information gathering and the threats to individual privacy that animated opposition to Schengen among human rights organizations and migrants laying claim to free movement as a human right. Providing security was and is closely connected with the expansion of redistributive welfare states, which reached their apogee in the 1970s. The agenda underlying them thrived on claims of effectively dealing with—collective—social and economic risks, be they old age, health, housing, unemployment, or crime. At the same time, it was also imbued with a sense of economic and social modernization of societies and aimed to provide social stability. The much-discussed “crisis of the welfare state”—as manifested in high unemployment rates, dwindling economic growth, inflation, social unrest, and so on—resounded in one way or another in most of the industrialized countries starting in the mid-1970s.

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It brought to the fore the need to amend and improve the established systems of economic and social security. Reforms often went hand in hand with efforts to cut back benefits or at least to limit the expansion of the welfare state. In the context of the privatization drive starting in the 1980s, a common argument was that the provisions for social security produced negative side effects both on the economic macro- and the individual micro-level: these being, for one, the risk of economic stagnation, inflexibility, and economic “overburdening,” and, for another, the much-discussed “welfare-dodgers” and the risk they supposedly posed to the welfare system.49 However, the picture is more contradictory than it seems at first, for at the same time, new types of societal risks were added to the societal agendas of security. This is best illustrated by the United Nations Human Development Report of 1994, which addressed both national and global issues. It advocated a “a new concept of human security” and defined security very broadly. It included “economic security, food security, health security, environmental security,” as well as political and “personal security.” The latter addressed “threats from the state (physical torture), threats from other states (war), threats from other groups of people (ethnic tension), threats from individuals or gangs, against other individuals or gangs (crime, street violence), threats directed against women (rape, domestic violence), threats directed at children based on their vulnerability and dependence (child abuse), and threats to self (suicide, drug use).”50 These were new national policy issues, which strongly involved nongovernmental organizations and particularly emphasized preventative policies. Most of these new security issues were also being addressed by the growing field of risk studies. In fact, in addition to the abovementioned gaps, the upswing of the term “risk” starting in the 1990s can be traced back to the expansion of public security agendas in the field of civil and human rights. The situation was somewhat paradoxical, in so far as the arrangements of the welfare state, and its underlying notions of security and modernization, were being heavily criticized at the same time. This critique had a strong anti-statist, often anti-welfare state impetus. The intensity of this criticism grew from the 1970s onward and gave an altogether new thrust to the arguments of those who used the concept of “risk” to attack “old” types of statist security and often to play “old” risks against “new” ones. This paved the way for new institutional arrangements and ideal reconfigurations of the relationship between individuals, nongovernmental organizations of civil society, experts, and the state, all of which revolved around ideas of how to deal with risks and who or what was at risk. This—sometimes more, sometimes less subtle—anti-statist critique was embraced by a very diverse crowd of people with quite different agendas, including economists, environmentalists, and broad segments of health-conscious consumers who were concerned about all sorts of risk to their health. Despite this diversity, one can identify shared principled arguments and assumptions, among them being the emphasis on negative side effects, “complexity,” and new forms of institutional “governance” with which to address and manage risks.51

Introduction

13

The new mantra that spread like wildfire starting in the 1970s was that the sites of modernity, be they the atomic industry or the welfare state, were not “solving” but “producing” new types of risk. In 1980, Niklas Luhmann critically depicted an ever-expansive “system” of the welfare state—one made up of specialists as much as politicians—that thrived on the notions of managing risks and providing security, thus creating new fields of intervention but also new insecurities through its specific risk communication.52 Confronted with gaps and the phenomena of a crisis of the welfare state, advocates of the welfare state also saw what they called “steering problems of the welfare state” (Steuerungsprobleme im Wohlfahrtsstaat) and argued the necessity for a social state of the “second order” with “reforms of the reforms” to undo the side effects of earlier social reform policies.53 In this context, “complexity” and “incalculable feedback mechanisms” with their “unintended consequences” were catchwords of systems theory and cybernetics that critically asked how to steer “complex systems”—be they a chemical nuclear plant, the economy, or social security. Political and academic modernizing agendas underlying the welfare state were critically questioned across political divides in politics as much as in academia.54 The “contradictions” and “crisis” of economic and social modernization and the role of the modern welfare and “tax state” was an older argument of the New Left. Instead of social integration and economic stability, the modern state was said to produce new forms of economic and social contradictions, if not anomie.55 In this tradition, Ulrich Beck and Wolfgang Bonß would also point to “the dominance of non-intended side effects of technical-economic and culturalpolitical innovations in global capitalism, which in this way revolutionizes its own societal basis”; hence, the earlier modernization efforts disenchant the “premises of modernity ... whereby in the end the preconditions and standards of the rule of law, the social state, the national economy, and the corporate system dissolve just like those of parliamentary democracy.”56 More specifically, the “unintended side effects” of economic and technological modernization brought about the “new risks” of the risk society, which, according to Beck, could not be solved by the old means. Left unresolved, these new risks threatened all of society—and on a global scale. By the late 1970s such criticism of the left had become appropriated by the emerging “neoconservative crisis literature.” This new body of literature spoke of the “crisis of the welfare state” and a “crisis of political legitimacy” as a result of the gaps between the public’s expectations with respect to benefits and what was actually feasible. Did the democratic process of modern welfare states cause some of the very risks that it tried to solve, namely unemployment, inflation, and loss of economic growth? Moreover, was it responsible for the dissolutions and transgressions of core societal values, the loss of social control, moral hazard, and a mentality of free-riding that in turn brought about new risks?57 Such a diagnosis thrived among neoconservatives, neoliberals, and (in the United States) libertarians who were dissatisfied with traditional conservative and liberal agendas. It found its way into politics, even if only in highly diluted forms (as in the case of Germany).

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Ronald Reagan’s famous statement in his inaugural speech on 20 January 1981 that the “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” was another way of saying that governments created the very risks they wanted to do away with.58 At about the same time, Milton Friedman told his television audience watching the miniseries Free to Choose (1980) that Western societies stood at a crucial crossroad on the way to a free, risk-taking capitalism that promised new opportunities. To many, this was the beginning of an era of regenerated capitalism, one to be freed from the shackles of state regulation.59

Individuals and Risk The main proposition was that unfettered markets and self-interested individuals could deal more efficiently with risks. This was often accompanied with a highly optimistic embrace of risk-taking, comparable to that of early modern voyagers who set out for what became the New World and thus a new epoch. In the second half of the 1970s, the idea of “privatizing risks” was still a fairly new concept, one used not only critically but also affirmatively by those who argued that individuals and institutions in the marketplace could handle risks better, more efficiently, and more rationally (in the sense of rational choice models) than the state could. Necessary were new ways of governing both public and individual risks. To undo the old sites of the welfare state and either replace them with or transform them into free market institutions or free market incentives was an important way to bring about the “great risk shift.”60 As general as these presuppositions were (and still are), by the 1980s they were part of the foundational concepts for an explosion of new risk discourses that affected nearly all sites of modernity. New forms of institutional “governance” were proposed, be they for social security, housing, education, or, later, CO2-trading. One area impacted by such new arrangements was that of public security, which is examined here by Marcus Böick. He shows that, starting in the mid-1970s in West Germany, not only did the question arise of who should provide security, but also the awareness emerged that security was needed in newly evolving places of risk, such as airports and industrial sites. In an age of rising concern over political terrorism and urban crime, private security companies entered the stage of public policing, leading many observers to ask how risky or outright dangerous the retreat of the modern state and the loss of the state’s monopoly on the use of force were. With respect to the privatization of security provision, Böick identifies a sharp shift from conflicts and controversies involving private security providers, such as those focusing on the “Black Sheriffs” of Munich in the 1970s and 1980s, to a broad range of public‒private security cooperation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, starting in the 1990s. Privatization also included the undoing of the regulations of financial markets, which had been a core aspect of the New Deal policies of the 1930s. Mar-

Introduction

15

kets would handle economic and financial risks better, it was argued. The panacea promising to sustain the new system was new financial instruments, such as bundling (mortgage) loans in order to disperse them widely through new financial products. “Securitization” was the technical term for this new magic: in place of the state and public institutions, the new instruments of financial markets could provide means to deal with any sort of risk, whether this pertained to old age pensions or housing.61 This involved new forms of public‒private cooperation, as Nicolai Hannig demonstrates. Big companies like Swiss Re or Munich Re developed into service providers that not only offered insurance-related expertise but also expert knowledge on minimizing natural risks, which benefited the business. Martin Lengwiler looks at one of the more spectacular forms of such securitization of risk, namely the history of the by-now-growing capital market of so-called catastrophe bonds (CAT bonds) as a novel approach by the insurance industry and investors for dealing with mega-risks that had been considered uninsurable until then, such as windstorms, earthquakes, pandemics, nuclear disasters, or even climate change. Their success mirrored a shift in responsibilities between the public and the private sector. In the market for CAT bonds, the private sector promised to increase its financial stakes to the relief of the state. Moreover, the power of capital markets and the economic rationale of investors partially replaced the traditional idea of the state as the guarantor of last resort. For the new risk enthusiasts—meaning those who stressed the benefits of risk-taking—notions of liberty, (individual) risk-taking, and individualism became closely entwined. The new icons were the Schumpeterian “risk-taking” entrepreneurs and financiers, whose path was that of a “creative destruction” of the old way of doing things, and who thrived under uncertainty and the chances for profit. This path allowed and, in fact, needed failures—ironically, such as those of the economist Joseph Schumpeter himself, who had miserably miscalculated risks as an academic-turned-brash financier during the Austrian inflation of the early 1920s.62 An equivalent group in popular culture who embraced such arguments were the participants in various forms of extreme sports. They conveyed their own “aesthetics of risk.”63 Among them were the “free climbers,” people who professed ecological sentiments and tried to free themselves from the vast apparatus of mountain-climbing gear, while maintaining that they were able to calculate the risks of what they were doing (unreasonable as this sounds to outsiders). The Hollywood film Cliffhanger, a commercial box office hit released in 1993 starring Sylvester Stallone, came to epitomize such aesthetics of risk.64 Such hyperreal examples of commercial mass culture should not obscure the wide range of risky lifestyles characteristic of many of the social movements. This privatization of risk has received much attention, particularly with respect to its effects on former collective risks, known as the “financialization of everyday life,”65 and to the formation of “neoliberal subjects” who—supposedly—are able to handle risks efficiently.66 As John Tulloch and Deborah Lupton have shown on the basis of interviews they conducted in different countries, indi-

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vidual risk assessments do indeed vary greatly, just as a great variety of “risk views” are also communicated by the media.67 They found that reflexive risk awareness was widespread, yet not necessarily in the way Beck had predicted it: environmental risk played a rather minor role. Instead, mundane issues of everyday life and the inequalities of class, gender, ethnicity, and not least age continued to matter greatly. To their interviewees, it made a big difference whether one was at risk or whether one actively took risks. Unsurprisingly, people stressed the subjective side of risk, namely adventure, emotions of excitement, and the opportunities that risk-taking could provide. Crossing borders of socially acceptable risks, be they real or metaphorical, is an important aspect to understanding “active citizens” and their subjectivities. An extreme and no doubt very peculiar form of such individual risk-taking is the hunger strikes in the 1970s. As Maximilian Buschmann demonstrates, to embark on a hunger strike meant to take enormous individual risks and produce a situation of contingency with uncertainty for all sides involved, not least for the authorities, who were subject to public scrutiny. This involved a debate on security and risk with a dialectical dynamic between the security of the state (which seemed to be threatened by hunger strikes) and the much-discussed threat of an authoritarian state to society and individuals (which hunger strikes seemed to unveil). As Buschmann argues, hunger strikes were another side of a “reflexive modernity,” since the actors involved reflected intensely on who and what was at risk and what this had to do with modern societies. Once again, Buschmann also depicts the fluidity between risk and security debates, at a time in which Michel Foucault was not just an observer but an activist participant. Foucault’s arguments were not about risks but about the “état de securité,” which appealed to the fear of individuals, that is, the risk that this security state posed to individuals.68 Psychologists have a long tradition of researching various forms of individual risk-taking. The risk shift since the 1970s has also greatly impacted the understanding of the way individuals deal with risks. Instead of general societalenvironmental factors, what emerged was a new focus on individual factors of risk that were not located so much in society but in genetic and neurophysiological factors. This was quite in tune with the interventionist welfare state and its efforts to provide for security. In his contribution, Peter Becker looks from a historical point of view at how scientists were peering into the brains of subjects and using mouse models to understand the modulation of brain chemistry and gene variations and thus decode psychopathic personalities and the risk factors relevant for careers in violent and deviant risk behavior. This had far-reaching implications for the criminal justice system, but also preventive policies of crime. Furthermore, this biologization has the potential to shift the location from which social problems—careers in violent and deviant behavior—can be assessed in terms of risk: namely from the sociologist’s desk to the neuroscientist’s lab. In addition to the dissection of individual dispositions in dealing and coping with risks, this biological and psychological research also deals with the possibil-

Introduction

17

ities to influence and direct individual behavior. If risks could not be contained effectively by public management and state planning, so goes the argument, individuals and society at large had to learn to cope with insecurity and risks without relying on public institutions, due to their limited capacities to safeguard against all eventualities. Starting in the late 1990s, resilience became the catchword to denote new ways in which individuals, groups, and institutions could cope with insecurity and risks. The roots of resilience thinking are to be found especially in the bio-ecological research of Crawford Stanley Holling, who published work in the 1970s on the adaptability of plants to environmental changes, some of which could not be controlled. This went hand in hand with a critique of static ideas of security and the accompanying assumptions that all the contingencies of complex systems were manageable, also by way of comprehensive measures of prevention. Defined as the capacity of a system not only to absorb disturbances but also to reorganize itself while undergoing change in order to continue to function, resilience turned out to be very adaptable particularly to neoliberal views of the risk society and its institutions. After all, wasn’t the “market” also a very chaotic yet self-adaptive system, ever in flux and motion? The foundation of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2007 illustrates how Holling and other scientists very successfully expanded the concept of resilience to other fields of social, economic, and political life.69 The first decade of the new century was the heyday of the new paradigm of risk that had emerged since the 1970s by various routes. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, this paradigm thrived in conjuncture with spectacular events: major industrial accidents; the British “mad cow disease” of the late 1990s, which not only underscored the risks of infectious disease and the need for food safety but also highlighted economic and social repercussions, such as rioting farmers; the new terrorist threat, prior to and especially after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, DC, and later in other countries; the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 along the American Gulf Coast and in particular in New Orleans; and the dramatic economic crisis of 2007/8. These and a large number of other less spectacular events were fueled by an ever-growing “risk communication,” in both the academic and public realms and on both a national and a global scale. At the center of many social and political conflicts were issues of risk: how were they to be evaluated and how were they to be handled? Such multifarious threats caused pervasive feelings of gloom and crisis (perhaps all the more so in Germany than elsewhere, notwithstanding the fact that it did not have to weather any major catastrophes). Yet this should not obfuscate the equally pervasive feeling of optimism that existed, particularly before the financial crisis of 2008/9. This was nurtured by the promises of a society that wrought itself out of the constraints of the prescriptive state, opened the path to new individual risk-taking, and made possible new, more flexible, productive, and “resilient” forms of governance applicable to traditional and new sites of risk. These were promises of a new modernity, indeed.

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Martin H. Geyer has been Professor of Modern History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich since 1997. His research interests and publications deal with issues of social policies, political scandals, the history of capitalism, and political and social theories in the 1970s and 1980s. Recently, he published a book entitled Kapitalismus und politische Moral in der Zwischenkriegszeit Oder: Wer war Julius Barmat? (Hamburg, 2018). Currently he is working on a research project entitled “The State of Emergency in the 20th Century: What We Can Learn Today from German History of the Interwar Period?”

Notes 1. Many thanks to the Volkswagen Stiftung and to the members of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony’s College, and particularly to Paul Betts, who had made possible my visit to the Centre as a Weizsäcker Research Fellow during the academic year 2018/19. I thank my wife Dona Geyer for her great help in editing this volume. 2. Wolfgang Bonß, Vom Risiko: Unsicherheit und Ungewißheit in der Moderne (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995); François Ewald, Der Vorsorgestaat, with an essay by Ulrich Beck, trans. Wolfram Bayer and Hermann Kocyba (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993); Peter Borscheid et al., The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); David Miers, “Gambling Histories: Writing the Past in the Present,” in Qualitative Research in Gambling: Exploring the Production and Consumption of Risk, ed. Rebecca Cassidy, Andrea Pisac, and Claire Loussouarn (London: Routledge, 2013), 42‒56; Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: Wiley, 1996); Martin Lengwiler, Risikopolitik im Sozialstaat: Die schweizerische Unfallversicherung 1870‒1970 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006); Julia Moses, The First Modern Risk: Workplace Accidents and the Origins of European Social States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Nicolai Hannig, Kalkulierte Gefahren: Naturkatastrophen und Vorsorge seit 1800 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019); Ernst Homburg and Elisabeth Vaupe, eds., Hazardous Chemicals: Agents of Risk and Change, 1800‒2000 (New York: Berghahn, 2019); Martin Diebel, Atomkrieg und andere Katastrophen: Zivil- und Katastrophenschutz in der Bundesrepublik und Großbritannien (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017). 3. Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Nikolas K. Gvosdev, Derek S. Reveron, and John A. Cloud, eds., The Oxford Handbook of U.S. National Security (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); for a somewhat different periodization with a focus on the 1970s, see Christopher Daase, “National, Societal, and Human Security,” Historical Social Research 35 (2010): 22‒37. 4. David A. Moss, When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); with respect to the (non)insurability of atomic risks, see Christoph Wehner, Die Versicherung der Atomgefahr: Risikopolitik, Sicherheitsproduktion und Expertise in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und den USA 1945‒1986 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017). 5. Debora Lupton, Risk (London: Routledge, 1999), 2. See this book for an early overview. 6. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999); Ulrich Beck, “Risk Society Revisited: Theory, Politics and Research Programmes,” in The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for

Introduction

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

19

Social Theory, ed. Ulrich Beck, Barbara Adam, and Joost van Loon (London: Sage, 2000), 208‒25; for a very good, although not uncritical analysis of Beck, see especially Joost van Loon, Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence (London: Routledge, 2002), esp. chap. 2; Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991); Anthony Giddens, “Risk Society: The Context of British Politics,” in The Politics of Risk Society, ed. Jane Franklin (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 23‒34; Anthony Giddens, Beyond Right and Left: The Future of Radial Politics (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). For a concise critique, see Lupton, Risk, chap. 4. Franz-Xavier Kaufmann, Sicherheit als soziologisches und sozialpolitisches Problem: Untersuchungen zu einer Wertidee hochdifferenzierter Gesellschaften, 2nd edn. (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1973); Helga Nowotny, Kernenergie, Gefahr der Notwendigkeit: Anatomie eines Konflikts (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979); Adalbert Evers and Helga Nowotny, Über den Umgang mit Unsicherheit: Die Entdeckung der Gestaltbarkeit von Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1987); Bayerische Rück, ed., Risk is a Construction: Perceptions of Risk Perceptions (Munich: Knesebeck, 1993). James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Niklas Luhmann, Risk: A Sociological Theory (New York: De Gruyter, 1993). For a somewhat narrow overview, see Wolfgang Bonß and Jens O. Zinn, “Risk and Theory in Germany,” in Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies, ed. Adam Burgess, Alberto Alemanno, and Jens O. Zinn (London: Routledge, 2016), 94‒105; see also Niklas Luhmann, Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat (Munich: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1981), in which he developed the argument that the proliferation of risk debates creates an ever-increasing expansion of the welfare state. For an overview, see Iain Wilkinson, “Psychology and Risk,” in Beyond the Risk Society: Critical Reflections on Risk and Human Security, ed. Gabe Mythen and Sandra Walklate (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education, 2003), 25‒41. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildawski, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1992). Andrew Kirby, Nothing to Fear: Risks and Hazards in American Society (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990); Arwen Mohun, Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear Revisited: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation, 4th edn. (London: Continuum, 2006), 5. Ronald A. Heiner, “The Origin of Predictable Behavior,” American Economic Review 73 (1983): 560-95, 564. Yair Aharoni, The No-Risk Society (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1981); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Bernstein, Against the Gods. For the best introductions to the debates in various fields, see esp. Lupton, Risk; Gabe Mythen, ed., Beyond the Risk Society: Critical Reflections on Risk and Human Security (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006); van Loon, Risk and Technological Culture; Kirby, Nothing to Fear. Most useful is Adam Burgess, Alberto Alemanno, and Jens O. Zinn, eds., Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies (London: Routledge, 2016); see also Benjamin Wisner, Jean-Christophe Gaillard, and Ilan Kelman, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction (London: Routledge, 2012); Sabine Roeser et al., eds., Handbook of Risk Theory:

20

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

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Epistemology, Decision Theory, Ethics, and Social Implications of Risk, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Springer, 2012); Murray Lee and Gabe Mythen, eds., The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime (London: Routledge, 2017); Havidán Rodríguez, William Donner, and Joseph E. Trainor, eds., Handbook of Disaster Research, 2nd edn. (Cham: Springer, 2018). See note 1; Cornel Zwierlein, “Einleitung: Sicherheitsgeschichte, ein neues Feld der Geschichtswissenschaften,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012): 365‒86; Bas van Bavel et al., eds., Disasters and History: The Vulnerability and Resilience of Past Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Frank Biess, German Angst: Fear and Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Furedi, Culture of Fear can also be read in this context. For a more general argument on insecurity in Germany, see Eckart Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1945 bis in die Gegenwart (Munich: Siedler, 2009). In the early 1990s, risk communication was still a somewhat new term; see Hyunyi Cho, Torsten Reimer, and Katherine McComas, eds., The Sage Handbook of Risk Communication (Los Angeles: Sage, 2015). Dieter Rucht, Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen: Deutschland, Frankreich und USA im Vergleich (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1994); Sven Reichardt, Authentizität und Gemeinschaft: Linksalternatives Leben in den siebziger und frühen achtziger Jahren (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014). For the general context, see Martin H. Geyer, “Rahmenbedingungen: Unsicherheit als Normalität,” in Geschichte der Sozialpolitik in Deutschland, Vol. 6, 1974‒1982, Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Neue Herausforderungen, wachsende Unsicherheiten, ed. Martin H. Geyer (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2008), 1‒109, esp. 42‒46; Joachim Radkau, Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft: Verdrängte Alternativen in der Kerntechnik und der Ursprung der nuklearen Kontroverse (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowolt, 1983); Wehner, Versicherung; Natalie Pohl, Atomprotest am Oberrhein: Die Auseinandersetzung um den Bau von Atomkraftwerken in Baden und im Elsass (1970‒1985) (Stuttgart: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2019); Rucht, Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen. Amos Twersky and Daniel Kahnemann, “Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristic and Biases,” Science 185 (4157) (1974): 1127‒31; see also Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristic and Biases (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). According to the afterword in the new edition: Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 354. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty (London: BBC, 1977); Jean Fourastié, Les Trente Glorieuses: Ou la Révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979); Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008); Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belkamp Press, 2011). Elke Seefried, Zukünfte: Aufstieg und Krise der Zukunftsforschung, 1945‒1980 (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), 499‒507; Jenny Andersson, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), chap. 10. Andersson, The Future of the World, chap. 9; Jakob Arnoldi, “Global Risk,” in Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies, ed. Adam Burgess, Alberto Alemanno, and Jens O. Zinn (London: Routledge, 2016), 275‒81.

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21

28. This trope is very common in German; see, e.g., Michael Ruck, “Ein Kurzer Sommer der konkreten Utopie: Zur Westdeutschen Planungsgeschichte der langen 60er Jahre,” in Dynamische Zeiten: Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften, ed. Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried, and Karl Christian Lammers (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 2000), 362‒401. 29. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Moderne: Ein unvollendetes Projekt,” in Kleine politische Schriften, I-IV, (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1981), 444‒63. 30. Most influential as a textbook version of history, particularly in Germany, is Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914‒1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1995), chap. 14. 31. Reinhard Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectations’: Two Historical Categories,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 267‒88. 32. Doering-Manteuffel and Raphael, Nach dem Boom; Philipp Sarasin, 1977: Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021). 33. Lupton, Risk, 74. 34. See also Nicolai Hannig and Malte Thießen, eds., Vorsorgen in der Moderne: Akteure, Räume und Praktiken (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017). 35. Pierre Wack, “Scenarios: Unchartered Waters Ahead,” Harvard Business Review 63 (1985): 73‒89 (here 82). 36. Kaufmann, Sicherheit, 243; Sven Opitz and Ute Tellmann, “Katastrophale Szenarien: Gegenwärtige Zukunft in Recht und Ökonomie,” in Sichtbarkeitsregime: Überwachung, Sicherheit und Privatheit im 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Leon Hempel, Susanne Krasmann, and Ulrich Bröckling (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011), 27‒52. 37. Ulrich Bröckling, “Dispositive der Vorbeugung: Gefahrenabwehr, Resilienz, Precaution,” in Sicherheitskultur: Soziale und politische Praktiken der Gefahrenabwehr, ed. Christopher Daase, Phillip Offermann, and Valentin Rauer (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2012), 93‒108. 38. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), esp. chap. 19 (“The Gap That Never Was”); Andersson, The Future of the World, chap. 6. 39. Paul Robinson, Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State, and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016); Mark Solovey and Hunter Heyck, Cold War Social Science, Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy and Human Nature (London: Palgrave, 2012). 40. Denis Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Signet Book, 1972); Seefried, Zukünfte, 235‒92. 41. See the book by the atomic physicist Robert Jungk, Der Atom-Staat: Vom Fortschritt in die Unmenschlichkeit (Munich: Kindler, 1977). 42. Sibylle Marti, Strahlen im Kalten Krieg: Nuklearer Alltag und atomarer Notfall in der Schweiz (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2020), esp. 275‒82; Frank Reichherzer, “Zwischen Atomgewittern und Stadtguerilla: Gedanken zum Kriegsbild westdeutscher Wehrexperten von den 1950er Jahren bis zum Nato-Doppelbeschluss,” in Den Kalten Krieg denken: Beiträge zur sozialen Ideengeschichte seit 1945, ed. Holger Nehring and Patrick Bernhard (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2014), 131‒60; Günter Frankenberg, Staatstechnik: Perspektiven auf Rechtstaat und Ausnahmezustand (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2010). 43. On the strategic uses of making an issue one about security or risk, see Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne

22

44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

Martin H. Geyer

Rienner, 1998); they speak of “securitization.” More generally, with respect to the contests over political language in Germany, see Martin H. Geyer, “War over Words: The Search for a Public Language in West Germany,” in Political Languages in the Age of Extremes, ed. Willibald Steinmetz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 293‒330. Milton Friedman, “The Biggest Ponzi Scheme on Earth,” Hoover Digest 2 (1999), https:// www.hoover.org/research/biggest-ponzi-scheme-earth (accessed 15 August 2021); Rainer Famulla and Klaus Spremann, “Generationenverträge und Rentenversicherung als Ponzi Gmbh,” Zeitschrift für öffentliche und gemeinwirtschaftliche Unternehmen 3 (1980): 379‒403. This is a summary of Martin H. Geyer, “‘Gaps’ and the (Re-)Invention of the Future: Social and Demographic Policy in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s,” Social Science History 39 (2015): 39‒61. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998); Sarasin, 1977. Luhmann, Risk; For an excellent summary of systems theory and in particular of Luhmann’s theory, see Klaus P. Japp and Isabel Kusche, “Systems Theory and Risk,” in Social Theories of Risk and Uncertainty: An Introduction, ed. Jens O. Zinn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 76‒105. See, for example, Karena Kalmbach, The Meanings of a Disaster: Chernobyl and Its Afterlives in Britain and France (New York: Berghahn, 2020). For an early treatment of “welfare dodgers” in terms of “welfare queens,” see Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and other Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), chap. 5. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report: 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, published for the UNDP, 1994), 30‒32; S. Neil MacFarlane and Yuen F. Khong, Human Security and the U.N.: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Ariane Leendertz, Der erschöpfte Staat: Eine andere Geschichte des Neoliberalismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2022). Luhmann, Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat. See the collection of essays by Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, Sozialpolitik und Sozialstaat: Soziologische Analysen (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2002); one big issue of critique was the neglect of demography; see Geyer, “‘Gaps.’” Todd R. La Porte, ed., Organized Social Complexity: Challenges to Politics and Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Ariane Leendertz, “Das Komplexitätssyndrom: Gesellschaftliche Komplexität als intellektuelle und politische Herausforderung,” in Die neue Wirklichkeit: Semantische Neuvermessungen und Politik seit den 1970er Jahren, ed. Ariane Leendertz and Wencke Meteling (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2016); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), 67. Ulrich Beck and Wolfgang Bonß, “Einleitung,” in Die Modernisierung der Moderne, ed. Ulrich Beck and Wolfgang Bonß, Frankfurt a. M. 2001: Suhrkamp, 19. Claus Offe, “Unregierbarkeit: Zur Renaissance konservativer Krisentheorien,” in Stichworte zur “Geistigen Situation der Zeit,” Vol. 1, Nation und Republik, ed. Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980); of considerable importance is Michael Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975);

Introduction

58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

23

Nevel Johnson, Die Englische Krankheit: Wie kann Großbritannien seine politische Krise überwinden (Stuttgart: Klett, 1977). Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, 20 January 1981, https://www.reaganfoundation. org/media/128614/inaguration.pdf (accessed 1 July 2021); Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); John Ehrman, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Aharoni, NoRisk Society develops the arguments against the welfare state most clearly. Rodgers, Age of Fracture, chap. 2; Jones D. Stedman, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Lewis S. Ranierie, “The Origins of Securitization, Sources of Its Growth, and Its Future Potential,” in A Primer on Securitization, ed. Leon T. Kendall and Michael J. Fishman (Boston: MIT Press, 1996), 31‒44. Michael Peneder and Andreas Resch, Schumpeter’s Venture Money (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); see, for example, the how-to type of book by David James, The Entrepreneurial Adventure: Embracing Risk, Change, and Uncertainty (New York: Business Expert Press, 2020), with a foreword by the entrepreneur Richard Branson. Michael Thompson, “Aesthetics of Risk: Culture or Context,” in Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough, ed. Richard C. Schwing and W. A. Albers (London: Plenum Press, 1980), 273‒86. Mark Stranger, “The Aesthetics of Risk: A Study of Surfing,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 34 (3) (1999): 265–76; Jonathan Simon, “Taking Risks: Extreme Sports and the Embrace of Risk in Advanced Liberal Societies,” in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, ed. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 177‒208. Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Léna Pellandini-Simányi, “The Financialization of Everyday Life,” in The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, ed. Christian Borch and Robert Wosnitzer (London: Routledge, 2021), 278‒99. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1999); Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krassmann, and Thomas Lemke, eds., Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart: Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2000); Pat O’Malley, “Governmentality and the Analysis of Risk,” in Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies, ed. Adam Burgess, Alberto Alemanno, and Jens O. Zinn (London: Routledge, 2016), 109‒16. John Tulloch and Debora Lupton, Risk and Everyday Life (London: Sage, 2003), 135; for an overview of earlier research on risk in psychology, see Wilkinson, “Psychology and Risk”; Pellandini-Simányi, “Financialization.” Thomas Lemke, Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1997); David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 392–96. For valuable overviews, see Jeremy Walter and Melinda Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaption,” Security Dialogue 42 (2011): 143‒60; Wolfgang Bonß, “Karriere und sozialwissenschaftliche Potentiale des Resilienzbegriffs,” in Resilienz im Sozialen: Theoretische und empirische Analysen, ed. Martin Endreß and Andrea Maurer (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015), 15‒31.

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———. Beyond Right and Left: The Future of Radial Politics. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. ———. “Risk Society: The Context of British Politics.” In The Politics of Risk Society, edited by Jane Franklin, 23‒34. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Gilman, Nils. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Gvosdev, Nikolas K., Derek S. Reveron, and John A. Cloud, eds. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. National Security. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Habermas, Jürgen. Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973. ———. “Die Moderne: Ein unvollendetes Projekt.” In Kleine politische Schriften, I-IV, 444‒63. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981. Hacker, Jacob S. The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement and How You Can Fight Back. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hannig, Nicolai. Kalkulierte Gefahren: Naturkatastrophen und Vorsorge seit 1800. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019. Hannig, Nicolai, and Malte Thießen, eds. Vorsorgen in der Moderne: Akteure, Räume und Praktiken. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017. Heiner, Ronald A. “The Origin of Predictable Behavior.” American Economic Review 73 (1983): 560–95. Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914‒1991. London: Michael Joseph, 1995. Homburg, Ernst, and Elisabeth Vaupe, eds. Hazardous Chemicals: Agents of Risk and Change, 1800‒2000. New York: Berghahn, 2019. James, David. The Entrepreneurial Adventure: Embracing Risk, Change, and Uncertainty. New York: Business Expert Press, 2020. Japp, Klaus P., and Isabel Kusche. “Systems Theory and Risk.” In Social Theories of Risk and Uncertainty: An Introduction, edited by Jens O. Zinn, 76‒105. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Johnson, Nevil. Die Englische Krankheit: Wie kann Großbritannien seine politische Krise überwinden. Stuttgart: Klett, 1977. (Original: In Search of the Constitution: Reflections on State and Society in Britain, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977). Jungk, Robert. Der Atom-Staat: Vom Fortschritt in die Unmenschlichkeit. Munich: Kindler, 1977. Kalmbach, Karena. The Meanings of a Disaster: Chernobyl and Its Afterlives in Britain and France. New York: Berghahn, 2020. Kaplan, Fred. The Wizards of Armageddon. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983. Kaufmann, Franz-Xaver. Sicherheit als soziologisches und sozialpolitisches Problem: Untersuchungen zu einer Wertidee hochdifferenzierter Gesellschaften. 2nd edn. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1973. ———. Sozialpolitik und Sozialstaat: Soziologische Analysen. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2002. Kirby, Andrew. Nothing to Fear: Risks and Hazards in American Society. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990. Koselleck, Reinhart. “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectations’: Two Historical Categories.” In Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 267‒88. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. La Porte, Todd R., ed. Organized Social Complexity: Challenges to Politics and Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.

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Lee, Murray, and Gabe Mythen, eds. The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime. London: Routledge, 2017. Leendertz, Ariane. “Das Komplexitätssyndrom: Gesellschaftliche Komplexität als intellektuelle und politische Herausforderung.” In Die neue Wirklichkeit: Semantische Neuvermessungen und Politik seit den 1970er Jahren, 93-132, edited by Ariane Leendertz and Wencke Meteling. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2016 ———. Der erschöpfte Staat: Eine andere Geschichte des Neoliberalismus. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2022. Lemke, Thomas. Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität. Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1997. Lengwiler, Martin. Risikopolitik im Sozialstaat: Die schweizerische Unfallversicherung 1870‒1970. Cologne: Böhlau, 2006. Luhmann, Niklas. Politische Theorie im Wohlfahrtsstaat. Munich: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1981. ———. Risk: A Sociological Theory. New York: De Gruyter, 1993 (Original: Soziologie des Risikos, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991). Lupton, Debora. Risk. London: Routledge, 1999. Macey, David. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Pantheon, 1993. MacFarlane, S. Neil, and Yuen F. Khong. Human Security and the U.N.: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Marti, Sibylle. Strahlen im Kalten Krieg: Nuklearer Alltag und atomarer Notfall in der Schweiz. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2020. Martin, Randy. Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Meadows, Denis, Donella Meadows, Erich Zahn, and Peter Milling. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Signet, 1972. Miers, David. “Gambling Histories: Writing the Past in the Present.” In Qualitative Research in Gambling: Exploring the Production and Consumption of Risk, edited by Rebecca Cassidy, Andrea Pisac, and Claire Loussouarn, 42‒56. London: Routledge, 2013. Mohun, Arwen. Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Moses, Julia. The First Modern Risk: Workplace Accidents and the Origins of European Social States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Moss, David A. When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Mythen, Gabe, ed. Beyond the Risk Society: Critical Reflections on Risk and Human Security Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006. Nowotny, Helga. Kernenergie, Gefahr der Notwendigkeit: Anatomie eines Konflikts. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979. Offe, Claus. “Unregierbarkeit: Zur Renaissance konservativer Krisentheorien.” In Stichworte zur “Geistigen Situation Der Zeit”, Vol. 1, Nation und Republik, edited by Jürgen Habermas, 294‒318. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980. O’Malley, Pat. “Governmentality and the Analysis of Risk.” In Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies, edited by Adam Burgess, Alberto Alemanno, and Jens O. Zinn, 109‒16. London: Routledge, 2016. Opitz, Sven, and Ute Tellmann. “Katastrophale Szenarien: Gegenwärtige Zukunft in Recht und Ökonomie.” In Sichtbarkeitsregime: Überwachung, Sicherheit und Privatheit im 21. Jahrhundert, edited by Leon Hempel, Susanne Krasmann, and Ulrich Bröckling, 27‒52. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011.

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Pellandini-Simányi, Léna. “The Financialization of Everyday Life.” In The Routledge Handbook of Critical Finance Studies, edited by Christian Borch and Robert Wosnitzer, 278‒99. London: Routledge, 2021. Peneder, Michael, and Andreas Resch. Schumpeter’s Venture Money. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Updated edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1984] 1999. Pohl, Natalie. Atomprotest am Oberrhein: Die Auseinandersetzung um den Bau von Atomkraftwerken in Baden und im Elsass (1970‒1985). Stuttgart: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2019. Prasad, Monica. The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Radkau, Joachim. Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaf: Verdrängte Alternativen in der Kerntechnik und der Ursprung der nuklearen Kontroverse. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowolt, 1983. Ranierie, Lewis S. “The Origins of Securitization, Sources of Its Growth, and Its Future Potential.” In A Primer on Securitization, edited by Leon T. Kendall and Michael J. Fishman, 31‒44. Boston: MIT Press, 1996. Reagan, Ronald. Inaugural Address, 20 January 1981. Retrieved 1 July 2021 from https:// www.reaganfoundation.org/media/128614/inaguration.pdf. Reichardt, Sven. Authentizität und Gemeinschaft: Linksalternatives Leben in den siebziger und frühen achtziger Jahren. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014. Reichherzer, Frank. “Zwischen Atomgewittern und Stadtguerilla: Gedanken zum Kriegsbild Westdeutscher Wehrexperten von den 1950er Jahren bis zum Nato-Doppelbeschluss.” In Den Kalten Krieg denken: Beiträge zur sozialen Ideengeschichte seit 1945, edited by Holger Nehring and Patrick Bernhard, 131‒60. Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2014. Robinson, Paul. Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State, and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. Rodgers, Daniel T. Age of Fracture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011. Rodríguez, Havidán, William Donner, and Joseph E. Trainor, eds. Handbook of Disaster Research. 2nd edn. Cham: Springer, 2018. Roeser, Sabine, Rafaela Hillerbrand, Per Sandin, and Martin Peterson, eds. Handbook of Risk Theory: Epistemology, Decision Theory, Ethics, and Social Implications of Risk. 2 vols. Heidelberg: Springer, 2012. Rose, Nikolas. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, [1990] 1999. Rucht, Dieter. Modernisierung und neue soziale Bewegungen: Deutschland, Frankreich und USA im Vergleich. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 1994. Ruck, Michael. “Ein Kurzer Sommer der konkreten Utopie: Zur Westdeutschen Planungsgeschichte der langen 60er Jahre.” In Dynamische Zeiten: Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften, edited by Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried, and Karl Christian Lammers, 362‒401. Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 2000. Sarasin, Philipp. 1977: Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Seefried, Elke. Zukünfte: Aufstieg und Krise der Zukunftsforschung, 1945‒1980. Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015. Sherry, Michael S. In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

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Simon, Jonathan. “Taking Risks: Extreme Sports and the Embrace of Risk in Advanced Liberal Societies.” In Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, edited by Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon, 177‒208. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Solovey, Mark, and Hunter Heyck. Cold War Social Science, Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy and Human Nature. London: Palgrave, 2012. Stedman, Jones D. Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Stranger, Mark. “The Aesthetics of Risk: A Study of Surfing.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 34, no. 3 (1999): 265–76. Thompson, Michael. “Aesthetics of Risk: Culture or Context.” In Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough? edited by Richard C. Schwing and W. A. Albers, 273‒86. London: Plenum Press, 1980. Tulloch, John, and Debora Lupton. Risk and Everyday Life. London: Sage, 2003. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristic and Biases.” Science 185, no. 4157 (1974): 1127‒31. ——— . Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristic and Biases. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Human Development Report: 1994. New York: Oxford University Press, published for the UNDP, 1994. Van Loon, Joost. Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence. London: Routledge, 2002. Wack, Pierre. “Scenarios: Unchartered Waters Ahead.” Harvard Business Review 63 (1985): 73‒89. Walker, Clive. The Civil Contingencies Act 2004: Risk, Resilience and the Law of the United Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Walter, Jeremy, and Melinda Cooper. “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaption.” Security Dialogue 42 (2011): 143‒60. Wehner, Christoph. Die Versicherung der Atomgefahr: Risikopolitik, Sicherheitsproduktion und Expertise in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und den USA 1945‒1986. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017. Wilkinson, Iain. “Psychology and Risk.” In Beyond the Risk Society: Critical Reflections on Risk and Human Security, edited by Gabe Mythen and Sandra Walklate, 25‒41. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education, 2003. Wisner, Benjamin, Jean-Christophe Gaillard, and Ilan Kelman, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Hazards and Disaster Risk Reduction. London: Routledge, 2012. Zwierlein, Cornel. “Einleitung: Sicherheitsgeschichte, ein neues Feld der Geschichtswissenschaften.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012): 365‒86.

1 Exploring the Invention of Risk Debates Natural Disasters, Insurance, and Risk Management in the Late Twentieth Century Nicolai Hannig

Our modern preventive society, with its efforts to minimize risk and provide security, is based on risk calculations in every aspect of life. In a nutshell, this is evident in the way that natural hazards were dealt with in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Technical prevention—that is, inhibiting natural disasters—lost its pole position and became merely one strategy among many others. At the same time, an entire new market of modern risk management emerged, bustling with diverse suppliers. In addition to engineers, others now became involved: insurance managers, social scientists, behavioral scientists, and disaster control authorities.1 Especially when the insurance industry appeared on the scene, a significant change occurred in dealing with natural disasters. Insurances pursued an altogether different approach, characterized increasingly by market-based and thus manageable calculations of risk that were marketed as working to the advantage of all.2 In this process, the very concept of risk also transformed.3 The economist and financial historian Peter L. Bernstein described this development in the mid1990s. According to him, people attempted throughout the twentieth century to reduce the number and types of events and developments occurring in nature and in the social world that could not be influenced and whose origin and effects were unknown. Consequently, this enlarged the range of risks that were considered controllable.4 It should be noted, however, that modern technical societies overestimated their own abilities to control and overcome disasters for a long

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time. Regulating rivers and dam projects are excellent examples of methods that were by all means successful, yet at the same time had some fatal consequences.5 I do not want to suggest that people learned to accept uncertainty during the twentieth century. Rather, conflicts over what we know and do not know, what we can influence and what we just want to influence, had far more impact on our way of dealing with natural hazards than previously. Kenneth Arrow, who received the Nobel Prize for economics in 1972, applied the hypothesis that we know less than we want to accept we do to this field. He focused on the US economic crisis of the 1930s. Yet he also applied this idea to other areas, such as environmental policy. His ideas were certainly influenced by his own experiences as a US military weather officer during World War II, when he was expected to give prognoses on unpredictable weather forecasts. When interviewed on his life philosophy, he said in 1992 that our knowledge of how things work, be it in society or nature, is veiled in “clouds of vagueness”; the fatal belief in one’s own certainty, whether in history, politics, diplomacy, or the economy, often leads to terrible consequences. Therefore, Arrow’s recommentation was clear and simple, and a slap in the face to all planners and futurologists who believed they were shaping the big picture: whenever decision-makers make sweeping resolutions, Arrow would stress, caution is appropriate, because the consequences of such resolutions cannot be predicted.6 Such critical statements with respect to planning and false security have been made by many other authors since the 1970s. The mantra of the day was that modern societies were in constant battle with uncertainties wherever you looked. It was in this context that contemporaries came to embrace the term “risk.” It was used most prominently by Ulrich Beck, who coined the term “risk society” in order to explain how “classic industrial modernity” had turned into what he called “reflexive modernity.”7 He argued that both new and what he considered to be “merely reallocated” risks made industrial societies in the 1970s problematize and reflect on the paths taken earlier. Diagnoses concerning both the present and the future became gloomy. Gone was the optimistic faith in progress and solutionism, because those players who had long been considered the most competent developers of preventive strategies, namely scientists and technologists, were now considered the perpetrators of problems. In turn, many historians have argued that the 1970s were a time of crisis with ruptures and “breaches of structure,” especially in economic terms.8 However, others have observed more of an awakening—particularly in the fields of consumption, leisure activities, and media usage.9 The decade of the 1970s witnessed widespread debates on security and risks, especially in the fields of social, economic, and energy politics.10 In many cases these debates were led particularly by people who considered themselves “crisis managers.” In this context, the term “side effect” became a key concept.11 Whether in state reform policies, in the sciences, or in economics, the allegation was that the solutions offered to problems merely caused more problems. Here was the fatal crux: most risks were homegrown and man-made.

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Moreover, one of the main players in these risk debates—we could even say the inventor of risk discourse—was oddly absent. The insurance business is rarely mentioned, although it was responsible for putting the term risk on the agenda and making it socially acceptable in the twentieth century.12 Especially in dealing with disasters, the term risk corroded the prevailing naturalistic image of the world and concepts of safety. Insurances worked against viewing earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, or industrial accidents as events that occur suddenly and interrupt the natural order of things. Instead, the insurance industry drew attention to another relation of cause and effect: most modern risks arise, on the one hand, through state crisis management, thereby anticipating the later term “side effect,” and, on the other hand, through the exploitation of resources, faulty infrastructure politics, and forgotten means of self-help. The latter was a more or less indirect critique of contemporary modernization theories.13 In this chapter, I would like to expand on the questions about how important these risk estimations were, how they came to determine the handling of natural disasters, and how far they influenced the risk debates of the twentieth century. Mainly, I will discuss the origins of our modern risk debates, which were radically new fifty years ago, and examine practices of risk calculations. In my opinion, the initiatives and work of insurance companies had a large impact in this context, because their work was not limited simply to providing financial compensation, that is risk coverage, after natural disasters. In no other field did the large insurance companies invest in such intensive risk research as in natural disasters. The giants in this sector developed into service providers that not only offered insurancerelated expertise but also expert knowledge on minimizing natural risks.

Networks of Risk and Disaster Research In the second half of the twentieth century we find a dense network of risk management involving many organizations and institutions besides insurances: civil protection agencies like the Technisches Hilfswerk in Germany that provide rescue, aftercare, and reconstruction services; specialized technicians and engineers who build protective devices; geoscientists who search for ways to predict hazards, develop simulation procedures, and even put techniques of weather control and climate engineering to the test; social scientists who study human behavior in cases of natural disasters and develop strategies of crisis management; local organizations and cooperations like dyke associations that run observation and maintenance services for the purpose of flood protection; and, last but not least, state authorities that dispense disaster relief and take over organizational tasks. Therefore, the strategies of risk management are accordingly broad. In a 2014 position paper, the Academy of Technical Sciences, a think tank of the German Ministry of the Interior, put these strategies in the framework of a “resilience cycle” in which resilience is the master strategy of risk management. According to the academy’s definition, almost all strategies known from former centuries

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merge into resilience: “Resilience is the ability to defend oneself against actual or potential adverse events, prepare and plan for them, cope with and recover from them and continuously improve one’s ability to adapt to them. Adverse events are disasters or change processes with devastating consequences that are the result of human-made, technological or natural causes.” 14 In such a statement we can see the attempt to structure the historically developed diversity of risk management. The aim is not to eliminate risks but to help individuals and institutions cope with them. This change of strategy goes back to an altered understanding of catastrophes and prevention. In the 1970s, a player entered the area of risk management in Germany that up until then had shown very little interest in questions of risk and risk management, namely, sociology, or more specifically, the field of catastrophe sociology.15 Although as early as 1951 the German Ministry of the Interior had created an expert commission to advise the government on matters of civil defense, hardly anyone took any notice of this commission.16 This did not change until nuclear threats increased in the 1960s. However, the commission’s scientists focused mainly on radiation protection. Other threats took a back seat. As a consequence, the image of civil defense was dealt another serious blow in its efforts to rid itself of its association with death and all things military, which evolved during World War II. Suspicion arose within the public that the commission was helping develop weapons of mass destruction involving biological and chemical agents.17 So in 1970, the commission added a new panel on “psychobiology” that was to explore human behavior during extreme situations.18 Such strategies of psychosocial control were much en vogue in the second half of the twentieth century. US researchers had been analyzing human behavior in catastrophes since the final phase of World War II and had produced a lot of empirical material on this subject. Regulating human behavior promised new solutions to known problems. Thus, a researcher hoped to cope better with crises and catastrophes using psychologically and sociologically inspired means of control. These North American approaches to catastrophe research were also pursued in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, many countries in Central and South America, and eventually also Germany.19 Among others, the psychiatrists Hanns Hippius and Detlev Ploog were appointed to the commission by the German Ministry of the Interior. To fill the commission’s position of a sociologist, the ministry had originally chosen a person who, though well known in academic circles, was yet to become famous: Niklas Luhmann, a recently appointed professor at the University of Bielefeld. However, he turned down the offer of the post. Instead, he suggested Lars Clausen from the Institute of Sociology at the University of Kiel. In the 1960s, Luhmann had worked with Clausen at the Dortmund Social Research Centre of the University of Münster and knew of Clausen’s expertise on mining catastrophes and diseases. Clausen eventually accepted the post and developed the first research project on catastrophes and sociology in Germany, called “Social Behavior in Catastrophic

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Conditions.” His project design reflected a good measure of critical, Marxist, and grassroots spirit, which—in this form—was certainly not compatible with the North American research on catastrophes.20 Indeed, Clausen and the other men from Kiel distanced themselves radically from psychosocial control-oriented risk research in the United States and developed their own models. Although the German researchers also wanted to improve protection and behavioral insight in cases of disaster, their actual interests were merely theoretical and not very empirical or application-oriented. Within the Ministry of the Interior, their work met with little recognition and response. However, they did popularize a fundamentally new understanding of prevention and catastrophes. They questioned how catastrophe-prone (katastrophenträchtig) modern societies were, writing: “In a nutshell, the organizations [of the Federal Republic] dealing with catastrophe have succumbed to the general belief that there are normal situations that can be disrupted by external, suddenly occurring events in the realm of ‘nature,’ ‘technology,’ and ‘human’ fallibility; but with the help of specific catastrophe-stabilizing measures, the normality of such situations can be reestablished.” The underlying notion, they continued, was a “stunted understanding of catastrophes.”21 The researchers generally doubted the entire effort that government agencies had devoted to setting up catastrophe prevention after the war. For them, it was crucial to know to what degree these “normal situations” were socially susceptible to a catastrophe beforehand. Therefore, they encouraged analyzing the genesis of catastrophes and explained that it was rather futile to merely examine behavior in reaction to floods, earthquakes, or other events. The Federal Department for Civil Defense was not smitten with such views.22 Nonetheless, this new panel was the first to develop an understanding of catastrophes that still serves today as the methodical and theoretical basis of analysis for almost all studies on natural hazards. In their first article in 1975, the psychobiologists wrote that there were no “natural hazards,” just “cultural hazards.” People did not die because the earth shook, but because they inhabited houses that could not withstand the shock. They died because they lived in towns that wrapped around volcanoes known to erupt every now and then. They died because the state had not taken large-scale precautions but just watched on as people settled closer to rivers that flooded constantly. Risk research should therefore not dwell on single events, it was argued, but should ask instead how and to what extent societal change itself produced, tolerated, or mediated catastrophes. In other words, when masses of water flooded entire cities, the reason for the disaster was not sustained periods of rain, fast melting ice, or storms. On the contrary, the reason lay in the fact that people were living in what had become a significantly altered “secondary nature.” Every canal, every dam, and every rectification of rivers had helped turn a natural incident into a cultural dynamic.23 On the one hand, such perspectives are reminiscent of Immanuel Kant, who developed similar views in his treatises on the earthquake of Lisbon.24 On the other hand, the arguments of the catastrophe researchers correlated distinctively

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with those of the environmental movement.25 When sociologists stressed how humanity had ruthlessly exploited resources and how badly it had adapted to its surroundings, they turned it into the main culprit for catastrophes—the same blueprint for understanding nature as described previously by Ludwig Feuerbach. You could only take as much from nature as you gave back. However, this necessary balance had become unhinged. Unfortunately, nature was only perceived as a counterpoint to culture and as a further commodity that fueled “the Promethean attempt at independence,” as the catastrophe sociologist Wolf R. Dombrowsky wrote in 1983. In this manner, the path to powerful prevention was being blocked. Nature was no “unforeseeable demon” who “was lashing back as a natural hazard in cunning disguise. It was time to free nature from its myths, to secularize it.”26 Their insistence had an impact. The aforementioned commission and the government gradually acknowledged that prevention only achieved the desired effect beyond technical precautions when the specifics of human behavior were known. Detlev Ploog, who had done tests on animals and stress tests with mentally ill people, even spoke of misjudgment in cases of catastrophes. Thus, he implied that there was also correct behavior that would be triggered by specific measures. In 1975 he wrote, “we know that all physical measures to protect the population—as meticulously as they may have been prepared—are substantially compromised in their effect or even destroyed when the psychological manners of reactions of those concerned, albeit a few or many, are not taken into account and, when appropriate, steered.”27 In other words, he advocated that civil protection and disaster control be understood more as human guidance and management than as technical provisions and precautions. So, what remains of these premises? The longer the catastrophe researchers studied the problems, the more familiar the scientists became with the people impacted by such potential disasters. As a result, Clausen and his colleagues shifted away from their macro-sociological perspective and instead framed their research in a more application-oriented way. For example, they looked at ways in which organized catastrophe prevention could work together with the affected population in cases of emergency. While not abandoning their focus on prevention, they now also concentrated on rescue and auxiliary operations and searched for ways that these emergency organizations could prevent incidents from escalating. One starting point was the potential that could be found in the help and self-help of the affected population. For a long time, this had just been perceived as an additional source of danger, hindering professional rescue work.28 The scientists called attention to a fatal development that had started in the nineteenth century. When engineers attempted to eliminate natural hazards technically in the name of the government, they also incapacitated the population. Or put in another, more provocative way: the nationalization and professionalization of prevention led people to unlearn how to protect themselves. This shift of perspective, spurred by the catastrophe researchers, had an effect: “self-help before state help.”29

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At the same time, the scope of risk research widened. During the 1970s, geographers jumped on the bandwagon, too. They were especially interested in socioeconomic aspects of catastrophes and shifted their focus to developing countries. Their basic assumptions were similar to those of the sociologists: it was not the specific natural event that determined the extent of damage, but rather the vulnerability of the social and economic structures of a society. Earthquakes, such as the one that hit Guatemala in 1976, killing twenty thousand people, soon became, in terms of their social impact, “class quakes”30 in the rhetoric of the researchers. So we cannot speak of the egalitarianism of risks, at least not with respect to natural hazards. This challenges the point that Ulrich Beck made later, which became a central assumption in risk discourse, that not only could risks no longer be attributed to specific social classes but that, in fact, a risk society dissolved social classes. Economic risks in particular affected everyone: “poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic,” wrote Beck.31 Socio-geographers held a completely opposing view: natural hazards cemented allegedly overcome class lines, both in the Global South and the rich industrial countries. They rendered the poor poorer and the rich richer. An ecological perspective emerged, critical of civilization, in which natural hazards were seen as mere “initiating events,” socalled triggers of the “societal catastrophes” that followed, as the socio-geographer Robert Geipel from Munich has put it.32 Soon German socio-geography was calling itself “hazard research” in accordance with its practitioners’ American idol Gilbert F. White. They focused more on the consequences of prevention and their unintended side effects. When hazard research emerged in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, led by White as its doyen, such side effects became the pivot and focal point of this young discipline. How was it possible, for example, that the damage caused by flooding had continued to increase despite the high level of expenditure, legislated in the Federal Flood Control Act of 1936, that was spent by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build dams and dikes as protections against flooding? The answer was very simple and reminds us of the problem of moral hazard found in the insurance industry. With time, more people and firms had settled behind the enormous dams and along the regulated rivers than had been there previously. Investment in these allegedly safe areas had boomed. Yet prevention could not offer full protection. Although the floods had become rare, when they did eventually occur, the destruction caused by them far exceeded earlier damages. It was as if the damage cost was the interest that had to be paid for investing in risky areas.33 Although there had also been critical voices in the nineteenth century with regard to huge prevention projects, such as rectifying rivers, and although there were people who destroyed measuring instruments at night and sabotaged construction projects, it was only in the 1970s that prevention became reflexive. People finally began to address explicitly the consequences of prevention measures, which—in many cases—were even more fatal than the risks from which people were to be protected.

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Limits of Insurability What role did insurances assume in these academic debates and within this emerging network of risk research? How did they adapt to these epistemological changes? Attempts to insure extensively against all kinds of natural hazards go back a long way in history. The first efforts were made in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yet it was a risky business, indeed, and most were soon swept off the market, some of them even literally. In 1899, a flood in St. Louis, Missouri, brought down, of all things, the administration building of one of the first insurances to offer flood protection insurance.34 Natural risks were too specific for the insurances and not economically feasible. The reason lay predominantly in what is known as risk cumulation, a problem that the insurance sector still faces today. This was encountered especially with regard to damage by floods, earthquakes, landslides, and avalanches. An insurance company offering specific policies for these risks would quickly only collect “bad risks,” meaning policyholders living in river valleys or earthquake areas who would claim damages regularly. So the insurance would lack balance and distribution—meaning “good risks,” people and firms that would not be constantly exposed to hazards. The insurance company would have to demand such high rates that it would then be hard to find new customers. Or it could set the rate lower and thereby risk bankruptcy due to several claims to damage. Although destruction caused by natural hazards was limited in its locality, it usually happened with great force. Therefore, it was difficult for pioneers in this field, because a single occurrence of damage soon spelled ruin. There were two ways out of this dilemma: first, expand to a more international market. Only when the insurance sector took on a more international direction at the turn of the twentieth century and huge reinsurance companies could enter the business of insuring against natural hazards could risks be spread more broadly.35 As a result, the companies insured fewer clients in each region but expanded the number of regions in which they had clientele. Thus, the cost of an event causing great damage was shouldered by many insurance companies, instead of only a few heavily impacted ones. The second option out of this dilemma was nationalization. This meant an obligatory insurance against natural perils, similar to the principle of social insurance. The problem of distributing risk was thereby circumvented by introducing compulsory insurance, which is also based on the principle of solidarity irrespective of where you live or how valuable your property is. In the first half of the twentieth century, Switzerland, for example, introduced such an obligatory insurance against natural dangers in most of its cantons.36 In Germany, however, similar plans were abandoned with the introduction of social insurances.37 Here, it was the reinsurance company Munich Re that took up the initiative shortly before and after World War I. These initiatives were supported by the state because the ministries in question recognized that technical preven-

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tion had not proved to be the silver bullet against natural disasters that they had previously hoped for.38 Rather, subsequent problems, meaning new risks, had emerged that demanded new strategies. Technical prevention led to a change of behavior, a certain carelessness, a kind of macro-social moral hazard: people neglected and “unlearned” how to handle risks. In no other area is this more visible than in handling natural hazards. Straightening rivers and avalanche-building regulations had led to a significant reduction of the numbers of floods and avalanches. Yet, in turn, greater claims of damage were now concentrated in former risk zones. In the words of hazard researchers in the 1970s, people moved closer to rivers and mountains, thereby becoming even more vulnerable than they had been before prevention programs.39 In consequence, new facets of risk developed: in times of technical prevention and urbanization, natural hazards became a more class-specific risk than before. Who had to inhabit river regions or live in quarters with unfortified houses in expanding, seismically active areas like the San Francisco Bay Area? The lower classes.40 When extreme natural hazards occurred, they had even more devastating consequences. Once again, this lastingly damaged the image of the sustainably of prevention. The satisfaction of developing prevention measures turned to frustration. As early as the first half of the twentieth century, nobody envisioned this as clearly as the insurance sector. An alternative path of prevention thus seemed highly necessary. Most contemporary observers thought that involving insurances was essential. But politics did not pursue the path of insurance coverage with the due firmness. This had to do with the lack of a statistical basis, essential for any risk calculation. The precondition for economic risk calculation was processing data from natural hazards, and this was difficult. Finally, it was a crisis that led to the insurers’ consequent participation in the business of natural hazards. Many small, newly founded reinsurance companies intensified competition in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, American firms were expanding while primary insurers created their own departments for reinsurances. The older, larger companies feared the possibility that they might eventually lag behind and then get kicked out of the industry by this competition.41 An interesting example is Swiss Re and the way that the company dealt with this challenge. With advanced industrialization, the risk environment changed, too, so Swiss Re tried to alter its marketing strategy and its philosophy as a firm.42 The mathematician and general director Max E. Eisenring upgraded the middle management and employed several technical experts, who then inspected and evaluated risks worldwide. They collected data systematically and outlined conditions for insurances. The image gradually faded of the reinsurer as a man in a suit with a big cigar. Instead, the companies gave themselves more of a scientific and technical look. The significance of this change can be evaluated by the number of employees at the headquarters in Zürich. Between 1917 and 1964 the number rose from four hundred to five hundred and by 1979 had reached almost a thousand.43

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Starting in the late 1970s, the reinsurances employed more and more “georisk researchers” (a term these specialists gave themselves). Basically, their work laid the groundwork for capitalizing on natural hazards to an extent unprecedented until then. The added value these specialists provided was immense, and their influence on the entire direction of the branch was accordingly great. In the 1980s, this trend continued. Swiss Re took over other companies that specialized in risk inspection. This was a way to tackle the known unknowns in the field of risk evaluation, which made it possible to explore new risks and better assess known risks. Their goal was “the establishment of a branch-specific infrastructure of knowledge.” One centerpiece of this “infrastructure of knowledge” may be surprising—at least at first glance.44 The research results of these new insurance and risk experts were in no way meant just for internal use, for example, to secure significant competitive benefits. Rather, the reinsurers perceived themselves more as public service providers, who now offered scientific and insurance expertise besides their traditional service. Yet this was not done out of pure goodwill. In fact, the aim was to further capitalize the field of natural hazards and thus to create a new market. Their first priority was to collect data, which then went hand in hand with their second priority of enhancing their reputation and increasing the trust instilled in them by providing competency and economic integrity. The idea was to present and advertise their own research and market observations, which were known to be difficult to obtain, to an interested audience and thereby heighten their reputation.45 This change within firms like Swiss Re or Munich Re is so significant to our context because it presented the key to a new, insurance-related risk management of natural hazards. By and by, the insurance industry perceived itself as the interface between financial risk compensation and the calculation and avoidance of risks. For specific regions, the geo-risk researchers working for insurance companies mapped risk zones, analyzed the fragility of old structures and buildings, examined soil conditions, and created photo documentation.46 Although such collections of material remained a patchwork of information, they blazed a new trail of research, at the end of which the reinsurers were to stand as shining centers of competence. Yet competence for what? Most reputable and serious scientists, as well as these new insurance experts, still considered earthquakes and tornadoes barely insurable, because they were neither predictable nor controllable. The insurance companies had held this opinion for more than a hundred years and did not tire of emphasizing this themselves. With their new strategy, all the talk of uninsurable risks only played into their hands.47 Certainly, it was a gamble to identify this uncharted territory as a new area of competence because little was actually predictable despite the many studies and new risk calculations that had been done. However, it was not long before the distinction between insurable and uninsurable risks blurred in the eyes of many first insurers, the clients of the reinsurers. So the reinsurers’ plan paid off.48

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The job of the geo-risk researchers was to recognize, analyze, and evaluate risks, but also to reduce, avoid, and even prevent them. Their theories and research were published in journals issued by their companies. Swiss Re launched the bulletin sigma in 1968; Munich Re started to publish several magazines on special topics.49 In many countries it became widely accepted that natural events combined with technical progress could have “irreversible consequences for the environment.” This would lead to an “increased request of insurance” and would be a good opportunity to enlarge their own expertise in risk analysis, wrote Bruno Porro, head of the risk management department of Swiss Re at the end of the 1970s.50 But why would an insurance company be interested in prevention? Already during the early phase of industrialization, insurances considered the new dangers inherent in it as one of their core fields. Different classes of danger and insurance tariffs served to create new incentives for insurance customers to reduce risks. Often, insurers intervened directly in the construction plans for new factory buildings, thereby giving impulses for prevention. The new label for this from the 1960s was “risk management” or “risk engineering,” terms used by innumerable new magazines, brochures, and handouts linked to the insurance business.51 In 1977, Munich Re and Swiss Re initiated CRESTA together with a few British firms. Their acronym represented a study group dealing with “catastrophe risk evaluating and standardizing target accumulation.”52 This group standardized accumulation controls for risks posed by earthquakes, floods, or storms. They created maps with danger zones and devised forms to register accumulations and to provide background information on specific areas. The goal was to develop a procedure that could universally measure geo-risks, and thus, in turn, to calculate them efficiently. Therefore, CRESTA was also an instrument of prevention. Their declared objective was to optimize risk prognoses. At the same time, CRESTA centralized the flow of information while monopolizing the business of natural hazards. Now, the insurers had a kind of preventive lever. This could be used to punish customers by raising the premia or to reward them with a reduction. According to the researchers of Munich Re, this was to be applied not only for their own sakes, but for the benefit of the entire insurance industry, even the whole world.53 The main causes of water damage were predominantly human-made, according to the authors in the geo-risk department of Munich Re. Especially in countries of the Global South, authorities had adopted security measures without taking into consideration the specific hydrological and meteorological conditions of their regions. The consequences for the insurers were obvious to the researchers. In one of their magazines they wrote: Also in the interest of the insurance customers such shortcomings should be removed from the beginning. The insurers and reinsurers would thereby be able to offer more attractive premia and preconditions. In cases of enduring negligence of the insurance customer, the insurer must insist on redeveloping the policy so as not to be confronted with burdening the branch too much and burdening good risks and entrepreneurs to settle the score with inferior stock. It surely cannot be the task of the insurance business to finance inadequate executions of projects.54

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Gerhard Berz, director of the geo-risk department of Munich Re, traveled to Australia in 1975 to evaluate the risks of cyclones in more detail. His task was to make cartographs of disaster zones from which insurance clerks could derive risk cumulations. Berz mapped the location of settlement structures in relation to the courses of cyclones. This was meant to enable the insurers to estimate their limits and premia more precisely. For the authorities on site, Berz’s material was a great help: in the future they would work with his maps for urban planning and civil protection.55 The motto of Munich Re and Swiss Re then became: generate expertise and distribute it liberally, because every prevention eventually pays off. This premise was also found in magazines and brochures that they published at their own expense. The group from Zürich published a monthly magazine called sigma. Its cover was extremely plain and appeared to be out of sync with the glossy annual reports produced in the industry at the same time. Even this image was calculated: shape and content were to signal that these were special analyses by experts delivering data material and sample calculations.56

Conclusion Since the 1970s, one fact has crystallized vividly: much money can be made from natural disasters. What gently and cautiously started around 1900 was let loose in a torrent roughly seventy years later. An insurance system was established by the first insurers and reinsurers who developed new methods of risk management. Yet soon, these established processes reached their limits. Through larger value concentration, risks became in part so great that they could not be shouldered by even financially strong reinsurers. So new methods of risk distribution were required: the reinsurers had to be reinsured. Companies managed this by inviting investors to bet on natural hazards, specifically, that they would not occur. Since the 1990s, so-called CAT bonds or act-of-God bonds have been issued by the reinsurers. These are catastrophe bonds with which the industry collects money to cover damage that has previously been delineated to certain catastrophes—provided they happen. If no such catastrophes occur, investors are pleased with the high returns, comprising payments from premia and their capital gains.57 By 2017, firms had issued about four hundred of these catastrophe bonds worldwide. In this way natural disasters became objects of speculation.58 This is the provisional end of a development that started in the 1970s, a decade of risk management—not necessarily due to so many more or new risks, but rather to a changed perspective on risks. Two players were crucial to this development, namely risk research and the insurance industry. The former modernized from a socioeconomic and geographical perspective what had been an antiquated understanding of catastrophe and nature, which until then had been shaped strongly by nineteenth-century technical prevention. Catastrophe sociology and research from Harvard University questioned established images of pre-

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vention and directed their attention to side effects, such as the permanency of social injustice, the unlearning of self-protection, and the economic collapse of entire regions. Prevention became reflexive. The insurance industry tried to capitalize on natural hazards and to create a lucrative market. However, they first had to gain deeper insight into the risk involved. Large firms, such as Munich Re and Swiss Re, founded their own georisk research structures and institutions in order to accumulate extensive in-depth knowledge that would eventually generate capital. Through such initiatives they also created a new awareness of natural risks and prevention, particularly as they offered prevention solutions themselves, in addition to the classic insurance business of financial damage compensation. They examined storm-prone buildings, encouraged building methods that enhanced safety during earthquakes, worked on emergency plans, and trained the security staff of firms. In this manner, prevention interfaced with the business interests of the private sector and became, from this point forward, a contested issue, bounced around between insurances, firms, politics, and science. Nicolai Hannig is Professor of Modern History at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. His research interests and publications deal with environmental history, risk management and prevention, media history, religion, and violence. Recently, he has published a book on the history of natural disasters and prevention since 1800 entitled Kalkulierte Gefahren: Naturkatastrophen und Vorsorge seit 1800 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019). He is currently working on a research project investigating protest and street violence in European cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Notes 1. Nicolai Hannig, Kalkulierte Gefahren: Naturkatastrophen und Vorsorge seit 1800 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019). 2. Franz Mauelshagen, “Sharing the Risk of Hail: Insurance, Reinsurance and the Variability of Hailstorms in Switzerland, 1880–1932,” Environment and History 17 (2011): 171‒91. 3. Martin Lengwiler, “Risky Calculations: Financial Mathematics and Securitization since the 1970s,” Historical Social Research 41 (2016): 258‒79. 4. Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: Wiley, 1996). 5. David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: Norton, 2006). 6. Kenneth J. Arrow, “I Know a Hawk from Handsaw,” in Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies, ed. Michael Szenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42‒50 (here 46); Bernstein, Against the Gods, 203. 7. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). 8. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012).

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9. Frank Bösch, “Boom zwischen Krise und Globalisierung: Konsum und kultureller Wandel in der Bundesrepublik der 1970er und 80er Jahre,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42 (2016): 354‒76. 10. Martin H. Geyer, “Die neue Wirklichkeit von Sicherheit und Risiken: Wie wir mit dystopischen, utopischen und technokratischen Diagnosen von Sicherheit zu leben gelernt haben,” in Die neue Wirklichkeit: Semantische Neuvermessungen und Politik seit den 1970erJahren, ed. Ariane Leendertz and Wencke Meteling (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016), 281–315; Rüdiger Graf, “Détente Science? Transformations of Knowledge and Expertise in the 1970s,” Centaurus: An International Journal of the History of Science and Its Cultural Aspects 59 (2017): 10‒25. 11. See Martin H. Geyer, “‘Gaps’ and the (Re-)Invention of the Future: Social and Demographic Policy in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s,” Social Science History 39 (2015): 39‒61. 12. Peter Borscheid, “Introduction,” in World Insurance: The Evolution of a Global Risk Network, ed. Peter Borscheid and Niels Viggo Haueter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1‒34. 13. Welf Werner, “Hurricane Betsy and the Malfunctioning of the London Reinsurance Market: An Analysis of Transatlantic Reinsurance Trade, 1949–1989,” Financial History Review 14, no. 1 (April 2007): 7‒28. 14. Klaus Thoma, ed., Resilien-Tech. “Resilience-by-Design”: Strategie für die technologischen Zukunftsthemen, Acatech Studie (April 2014). English summary: Klaus Thoma, ed., Resilien-Tech: Resilience-by-Design: A Strategy for the Technology Issues of the Future, Acatech Position Paper—Executive Summary and Recommendations (April 2014), 1. 15. Scott Gabriel Knowles, The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger, “Praktisches Wissen, Katastrophen und Wissenschaft: Zur Geschichte der sozialwissenschaftlichen Katastrophenforschung, 1949‒1989,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 40 (2017): 350‒64; Hannig, Gefahren, 436‒54. 16. Lars Clausen, “Belastungssituationen: Zur Arbeit eines Ausschusses,” in Schutzkommission beim Bundesministerium des Innern: Vorträge auf der Tagung Trier, Mai 1982, ed. Schutzkommission beim Bundesminister des Innern in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Bundesamt für Zivilschutz (Bonn: Bundesamt für Zivilschutz, 1982), 115‒24. 17. Rolf Osang, “Wissenschaft im Dienst des Bevölkerungsschutzes: Jahrestagung der Schutzkommission beim Bundesinnenministerium,” Zivilverteidigung 1, no. 7/8 (1970): 48‒50. 18. “Letter by Ltd. Reg. Med. Dir. Prof. Dr. med. J. Schunk to the German Minister of the Interior, 6.5.1971,” Bundesarchiv Berlin (hereafter: BArch B), 106/54538. 19. Knowles, Disaster Experts, 209‒49. 20. Cf. project proposals and the meetings’ minutes in: Schleswig-Holsteinisches Landesbibliothek (SHLB), Handschriftenabteilung, Kiel, Nachlass Lars Clausen, Sign. Cb 171, Kasten 131. 21. Wieland Jäger, Katastrophe und Gesellschaft: Grundlagen und Kritik von Modellen der Katastrophensoziologie (Darmstadt: Leuchterhand, 1977), 95. 22. “Note, MinR Dr. Stein, Referat ZV 8, 20.12.1976,” BArch B 106/73375; “Letter from MinR Dr. Stein to Lars Clausen, 23.12.1976,” BArch B 106/73375. 23. Lars Clausen and Wieland Jäger, “Zur soziologischen Katastrophenanalyse,” Zivilverteidigung 39 (1975): 23. 24. Imanuel Kant, Kants Werke: Akademie Textausgabe, Vol. I (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1968), 456.

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25. Frank Uekötter, Deutschland in Grün: Eine Zwiespältige Erfolgsgeschichte (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck and Ruprecht, 2015), 119‒36; Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Schranken der Natur: Umwelt, Gesellschaft, Experimente, 1750 bis heute (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2014), 254‒57; Joachim Radkau, Die Ära der Ökologie: Eine Weltgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 2011), 134‒64. 26. Wolf R. Dombrowsky, “Solidarity during Snow-Disasters,” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 1 (1983): 189‒206; Wolf R. Dombrowsky, “Katastrophenbekämpfung und Katastrophenprophylaxe: Abseitiges zu R. Moniacs Beitrag über die Schneekatastrophe,” Zivilverteidigung 10, no. 3 (1979): 62‒64 (quotations 63 and 62). 27. Detlev Ploog, “Fachausschuß VIII: Psychobiologie—Verhalten in Belastungssituationen,” in Schutzkommission beim Bundesminister des Innern: 25 Jahre Forschung für den Zivil- und Katastrophenschutz, ed. Bundesamt für Zivilschutz (Bad Honnef-Erpel: Osang, 1975), 81‒89 (here 81). 28. Wolf R. Dombrowsky and Lars Clausen, “Lehren aus den schleswig-holsteinischen Schneekatastrophen,” in Schutzkommission beim Bundesministerium des Innern: Vorträge auf der Tagung Trier, Mai 1982, ed. Schutzkommission beim Bundesminister des Innern in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Bundesamt für Zivilschutz (Bonn: Bundesamt für Zivilschutz, 1982), 125‒29. 29. See e.g., the papers in “Erfahrungen und Folgerungen aus den Schneekatastrophen in Norddeutschland 1978/1979. Maßnahmen zur Verbesserung der öffentlichen und privaten Vorsorge bei Katastrophen”, BArch, B 106/85689. 30. The term goes back to research done by the Disaster Research Unit at the University of Bradford, England. Scientists there had, in fact, adopted the term from the Guatemalans. Phil O’Keefe, Ken Westgate, and Ben Wisner, “Taking the Naturalness out of Natural Disasters,” Nature 260 (1976): 566‒67. 31. Beck, Risk Society, 36. 32. Robert Geipel, “Gesellschaftliches Verhalten bezüglich potentieller und tatsächlicher Katastrophenfälle: Die Sicht der Hazard-Forschung,” in Gesellschaft und Unsicherheit, ed. Bayerische Rück (Karlsruhe: Verlag Versicherungswirtschaft, 1987), 67‒84 (here 68 and 76). 33. Gilbert F. White, ed., Natural Hazards: Local, National, Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 34. Otto Meltzing, “Geschichte und Theorie der Hochwasserschädenversicherung,” Assekuranz-Jahrbuch 32 (1911): 164‒94 (here 173). 35. Werner, “Hurricane Betsy.” 36. Verena Rothenbühler, Daniel Kauz, and Martin Lengwiler, Funkenflug und Wassernot: Gebäudeversicherung im Thurgau 1806‒2006 (Frauenfeld: Huber, 2006), 121‒31; Christine Wanner, “Ein untragbares Risiko? Naturkatastrophen als Auslöser für Lernprozesse: Die Entstehung der Elementarschadenversicherung in der Schweiz,” Traverse 10 (2003): 100‒14. 37. Uwe Lübken, “Die Natur der Gefahr: Zur Geschichte der Überschwemmungsversicherung in Deutschland und den USA,” Behemoth: A Journal on Civilisation 1 (2008): 4‒20. 38. Hannig, Gefahren, 220‒39. 39. See Ted Steinberg, Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 173‒96. 40. Simon Winchester, A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

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41. Peter Borscheid, “Global Insurance Networks,” in The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance, ed. Harold James et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 105‒45. 42. Ulrich Herbert, “Europe in High Modernity: Reflections on a Theory of the 20th Century,” Journal of Modern European History 5, no. 1 (2007): 5‒21. 43. Tobias Straumann, “The Invisible Giant: The Story of Swiss Re 1863‒2013,” in The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance, ed. Harold James et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 237‒351. 44. David Gugerli, “Cooperation and Competition: Organization and Risks in the Reinsurance Business, 1860‒2010,” in The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance, ed. Harold James et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 147‒235. 45. Welf Werner, “Natural Catastrophes and their Effects on Reinsurance,” in Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming, ed. Niels Viggo Haueter and Geoffrey Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 248‒76. 46. “Swiss Earthquake Service: Guidelines on Earthquakes, January 1964,” Swiss Re Company Archives (SRCA), Zurich, Sign. 10.103 577.00.009. The pictures were systematically filed in photo albums with brief explanations of the damage cases. SRCA, Sign. 10.122.445. 47. Bruno Porro, “Katastrophengefahren: Presentation in the Board’s Meeting of Swiss Re Swiss on 7.10.1981,” SRCA, Sign. 10.144 153.00.009. For further examples, see Gugerli, Kooperation, 289–90. 48. Niels Viggo Haueter and Geoffrey Jones, “Risk and Reinsurance,” in Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming, ed. Niels Viggo Haueter and Geoffrey Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 17‒25. 49. For example, Munich Re, Earthquakes (Munich: Münchener Rückversicherungsgesellschaft, 1973). 50. “Future activities of the SR in RM, 20.9.1978,” SRCA, Sign. 10.166 820.00.009. 51. A. Wyss, “Risk Management, 6.5.1983,” SRCA, Sign. 10.166 820.01. 52. Bruno Porro, “Katastrophengefahren: Presentation in the Board’s Meeting of Swiss Re Swiss on 7.10.1981,” SRCA, Sign. 10.144 153.00.009. 53. I would like to thank Gerhard Berz for information on CRESTA. 54. Munich Re, Hochwasser, Überschwemmung (Munich: Münchener Rückversicherungsgesellschaft, 1973), 6. 55. The cartographs on “Katastrophenrisiko- und Kumulzonen” were provided to me by Gerhard Berz. 56. See, here and in the following, Gugerli, Kooperation, 285–86. 57. Ivan Damnjanovic, Zafer Aslan, and John Mander, “Market-Implied Spread for Earthquake CAT Bonds: Financial Implications of Engineering Decisions,” Risk Analysis 30 (2010): 1753‒70. 58. Marc Gürtler and Christine Rehan, “CAT Bonds,” Der Betriebswirt 69 (2009): 415‒18.

Bibliography Arrow, Kenneth J. “I Know a Hawk from Handsaw.” In Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies, edited by Michael Szenberg, 42‒50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992.

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Bernstein, Peter L. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk. New York: Wiley, 1996. Blackbourn, David. The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. New York: Norton, 2006. Borscheid, Peter. “Introduction.” In World Insurance: The Evolution of a Global Risk Network, edited by Peter Borscheid and Niels Viggo Haueter, 1‒34. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. ———. “Global Insurance Networks.” In The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance, edited by Harold James, Peter Borscheid, David Gugerli, and Tobias Straumann, 105‒45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Bösch, Frank. “Boom zwischen Krise und Globalisierung: Konsum und kultureller Wandel in der Bundesrepublik der 1970er und 80er Jahre.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42 (2016): 354‒76. Brüggemeier, Franz-Josef. Schranken der Natur: Umwelt, Gesellschaft, Experimente, 1750 bis heute. Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2014. Clausen, Lars and Jäger, Wieland, “Zur soziologischen Katastrophenanalyse,” Zivilverteidigung 39 (1975): 20-25. Clausen, Lars. “Belastungssituationen: Zur Arbeit eines Ausschusses.” In Schutzkommission beim Bundesministerium des Innern: Vorträge auf der Tagung Trier, Mai 1982, edited by Schutzkommission beim Bundesminister des Innern in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Bundesamt für Zivilschutz, 115‒24. Bonn: Bundesamt für Zivilschutz, 1982. Damnjanovic, Ivan, Zafer Aslan, and John Mander. “Market-Implied Spread for Earthquake CAT Bonds: Financial Implications of Engineering Decisions.” Risk Analysis 30 (2010): 1753‒70. Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm, and Lutz Raphael. Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012. Dombrowsky, Wolf R. “Katastrophenbekämpfung und Katastrophenprophylaxe: Abseitiges zu R. Moniacs Beitrag über die Schneekatastrophe.” Zivilverteidigung 10, no. 3 (1979): 62‒64. ———. “Solidarity during Snow-Disasters.” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 1 (1983): 189‒206. Dombrowsky, Wolf R., and Lars Clausen. “Lehren aus den schleswig-holsteinischen Schneekatastrophen.” In Schutzkommission beim Bundesministerium des Innern: Vorträge auf der Tagung Trier, Mai 1982, edited by Schutzkommission beim Bundesminister des Innern in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Bundesamt für Zivilschutz, 125‒29. Bonn: Bundesamt für Zivilschutz, 1982. Geipel, Robert. “Gesellschaftliches Verhalten bezüglich potentieller und tatsächlicher Katastrophenfälle: Die Sicht der Hazard-Forschung.” In Gesellschaft und Unsicherheit, edited by Bayerische Rück, 67‒84. Karlsruhe: Verlag Versicherungswirtschaft, 1987. Geyer, Martin H. “‘Gaps’ and the (Re-)Invention of the Future: Social and Demographic Policy in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.” Social Science History 39 (2015): 39‒61. ———. “Die neue Wirklichkeit von Sicherheit und Risiken: Wie wir mit dystopischen, utopischen und technokratischen Diagnosen von Sicherheit zu leben gelernt haben.” In Die neue Wirklichkeit: Semantische Neuvermessungen und Politik seit den 1970er-Jahren, edited by Ariane Leendertz and Wencke Meteling, 281–315. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016. Graf, Rüdiger. “Détente Science? Transformations of Knowledge and Expertise in the 1970s.” Centaurus: An International Journal of the History of Science and Its Cultural Aspects 59 (2017): 10‒25.

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Gugerli, David. “Cooperation and Competition: Organization and Risks in the Reinsurance Business, 1860‒2010.” In The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance, edited by Harold James, Peter Borscheid, David Gugerli, and Tobias Straumann, 147‒235. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gürtler, Marc, and Christine Rehan. “CAT Bonds.” Der Betriebswirt 69 (2009): 415‒18. Hannig, Nicolai. Kalkulierte Gefahren: Naturkatastrophen und Vorsorge seit 1800. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019. Haueter, Niels Viggo, and Geoffrey Jones. “Risk and Reinsurance.” In Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming, edited by Niels Viggo Haueter and Geoffrey Jones, 47‒69. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Herbert, Ulrich. “Europe in High Modernity: Reflections on a Theory of the 20th Century.” Journal of Modern European History 5, no. 1 (2007): 5‒21. Jäger, Wieland. Katastrophe und Gesellschaft: Grundlagen und Kritik von Modellen der Katastrophensoziologie. Darmstadt: Leuchterhand, 1977. Kant, Immanuel. Kants Werke: Akademie Textausgabe, Vol. I. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1968. Knowles, Scott Gabriel. The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Lengwiler, Martin. “Risky Calculations: Financial Mathematics and Securitization since the 1970s.” Historical Social Research 41 (2016): 258‒79. Lübken, Uwe. “Die Natur der Gefahr: Zur Geschichte der Überschwemmungsversicherung in Deutschland und den USA.” Behemoth: A Journal on Civilisation 1 (2008): 4‒20. Mauelshagen, Franz. “Sharing the Risk of Hail: Insurance, Reinsurance and the Variability of Hailstorms in Switzerland, 1880–1932.” Environment and History 17 (2011): 171‒91. Meltzing, Otto. “Geschichte und Theorie der Hochwasserschädenversicherung.” Assekuranz-Jahrbuch 32 (1911): 164‒94. Munich Re. Earthquakes. Munich: Münchener Rückversicherungsgesellschaft, 1973. ———. Hochwasser, Überschwemmung. Munich: Münchener Rückversicherungsgesellschaft, 1973. O’Keefe, Phil, Ken Westgate, and Ben Wisner. “Taking the Naturalness out of Natural Disasters.” Nature 260 (1976): 566‒67. Osang, Rolf. “Wissenschaft im Dienst des Bevölkerungsschutzes: Jahrestagung der Schutzkommission beim Bundesinnenministerium.” Zivilverteidigung 1, no. 7/8 (1970): 48‒50. Ploog, Detlev. “Fachausschuß VIII: Psychobiologie—Verhalten in Belastungssituationen.” In Schutzkommission beim Bundesminister des Innern: 25 Jahre Forschung für den Zivil- und Katastrophenschutz, edited by Bundesamt für Zivilschutz, 81‒89. Bad Honnef-Erpel: Osang, 1975. Radkau, Joachim. Die Ära der Ökologie: Eine Weltgeschichte. Munich: Beck, 2011. Rothenbühler, Verena, Daniel Kauz, and Martin Lengwiler. Funkenflug und Wassernot: Gebäudeversicherung im Thurgau 1806‒2006. Frauenfeld: Huber, 2006. Stehrenberger, Cécile Stephanie. “Praktisches Wissen, Katastrophen und Wissenschaft: Zur Geschichte der sozialwissenschaftlichen Katastrophenforschung, 1949‒1989.” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 40 (2017): 350‒64. Steinberg, Ted. Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Straumann, Tobias. “The Invisible Giant: The Story of Swiss Re 1863‒2013.” In The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance, edited by Harold James, Peter Borscheid, David Gugerli, and Tobias Straumann, 237‒351. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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Thoma, Klaus, ed. Resilien-Tech. “Resilience-by-Design”: Strategie für die technologischen Zukunftsthemen. Acatech Studie (April 2014). English summary: Klaus Thoma, ed. ResilienTech: Resilience-by-Design: A Strategy for the Technology Issues of the Future. Acatech Position Paper—Executive Summary and Recommendations (April 2014). Uekötter, Frank. Deutschland in Grün: Eine Zwiespältige Erfolgsgeschichte. Göttingen: Vanderhoeck and Ruprecht, 2015. Wanner, Christine. “Ein untragbares Risiko? Naturkatastrophen als Auslöser für Lernprozesse: Die Entstehung der Elementarschadenversicherung in der Schweiz.” Traverse 10 (2003): 100‒14. Werner, Welf. “Hurricane Betsy and the Malfunctioning of the London Reinsurance Market: An Analysis of Transatlantic Reinsurance Trade, 1949–1989.” Financial History Review 14, no. 1 (April 2007): 7‒28. ———. “Natural Catastrophes and Their Effects on Reinsurance.” In Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming, edited by Niels Viggo Haueter and Geoffrey Jones, 248‒76. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. White, Gilbert F., ed. Natural Hazards: Local, National, Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Winchester, Simon. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

2 Insuring Catastrophes Capital Market-Based Forms of Insurance since the 1980s Martin Lengwiler

The COVID-19 pandemic has just illustrated how vulnerable and unprepared contemporary societies are in cases of major health risks. Rather unnoticed by the larger public, the pandemic also brought attention to innovative ways of safeguarding against such mega-risks, in particular novel forms of insurance against catastrophic events that were held, until recently, to be uninsurable. In mid-April 2020, several media outlets reported that a so-called “pandemic bond” was about to be triggered, which meant that the World Bank, the issuer of the bond, would pay out the sum of USD 196 million to a series of the world’s poorest countries. The payout was financed by investors who originally bought the bonds on the capital markets. Because the total sum of the payout was divided among dozens of receiving nations, the instrument was quickly criticized by development organizations as hopelessly inadequate, especially when compared with the huge economic costs of the pandemic.1 Technically, pandemic bonds belong to a larger group of investment vehicles, the so-called catastrophe bonds or CAT bonds. They represent a risk-linked form of security, and are sold on capital markets and provide a form of insurance for the issuer. It was no coincidence that the World Bank developed its first pandemic bond, issued in 2017, in cooperation with two major reinsurance companies, Swiss Re and Munich Re. At that time, in the wake of the Ebola crisis, the insurance industry was interested in new instruments to expand its possibility of covering catastrophic and financially costly risks.2 In principle, CAT bonds operate as a cross between an insurance contract and a tradable security. On the one side, the issuer acts as an insurance, promising

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financial compensation for a catastrophic loss—like a pandemic in the case of the World Bank bond. On the other side, financial liabilities are transformed into a bond, placed in the financial market. Investors are attracted by a premium or an interest, paid out if the catastrophic event does not occur during a defined lifetime of the bond. In the case that the unlikely event does occur, the bond is triggered and investors share the financial burden and lose some or all of their investment. With pandemic bonds, the risk of a loss event was comparably small. Until the COVID-19 crisis, they were seen as a highly profitable form of CAT bond.3 CAT bonds epitomize a major shift in the insurance business. By operating on capital markets, insurance companies are able to raise large sums, provided by a multiplicity of investors, for a single risk. CAT bonds thus offer an adequate tool to deal with mega-risks by widely diversifying financial obligations. Thus, CAT bonds were developed, beginning in the late 1980s, as a means particularly to insure against large-scale natural hazards, such as earthquakes, windstorms, and floods, or against failures of large-scale infrastructures and high-risk technologies, such as nuclear incidents. This chapter investigates the rise of CAT bonds and similar insurance instruments based on capital markets. This rise represents two major developments that have marked the insurance industry over the past decades. First, the insurance industry has increasingly engaged in finding solutions for different sorts of megarisks, not just natural hazards, but also nuclear accidents, climate change, or the burdens of increasing longevity on pension systems. Second, these solutions are based on a fundamentally new approach to insurance. The financial compensation offered with the insurance contract is not covered by the reserves of the insurance company, as in traditional forms of insurance, but by investors on the capital market. CAT bonds and similar instruments mirror the increasing entanglements between the insurance industry and capital markets, a convergence that started in the 1980s and has gradually transformed the insurance industry ever since. Sociological analyses of the 1980s already dealt with the question, then unresolved, of how to deal with mega-risks. They depicted a new era of modern societies, confronted with the negative effects of modernization and the rise of high technology. In 1984, Charles Perrow coined the concept of “normal accidents” for the unavoidable and inherent risks linked to the diffusion of complex technological systems: he was thinking mainly of nuclear power plants, air traffic, and the chemical industry. Two years later, Ulrich Beck published the original German version of Risk Society (Risikogesellschaft) and argued that industrial modernity had advanced to a new stage, marked by the production of technical and environmental risks. He saw contemporary Western societies at a crossroads. To deal adequately with the increased potential of self-induced risks, they would have to develop a reflexive form of modernity, with new precautionary means for protecting against risks. Industrial modernity developed the welfare state to deal with its specific social risks. Reflexive modernity would have to invent its own new policies, according to Beck, in order to deal with the challenges of the

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emerging risk society. Beck emphasized, in particular, the development of ecological policies on a global level.4 The financial sector is a crucial element of modern Western capitalism, and in that role a prominent site of modernity. The case of CAT bonds points out another, more recent feature of contemporary finance. Banks, insurances, and capital markets have started to take—in Beck’s terminology—a more reflexive approach to the risks of modernity. CAT bonds and their siblings offer, at least potentially, a new approach to covering for catastrophic and environmental risks. Some insurance experts argue that they have the potential to significantly expand the limits of insurability and offer fundamentally new solutions to problems, such as the insurance of nuclear accidents or earthquakes.5 Others are more critical and point to the inherent instabilities of financial markets (and of financial instruments based on capital markets) and to the problematic shift of responsibilities from public institutions (the state as the guarantor of last resort) to the private industry. CAT bonds are thus criticized as a neoliberal solution and a financialization of self-induced social and ecological problems.6 Indeed, they did emerge in the 1980s and 1990s, in the context of the new approaches of deregulation and privatization that fundamentally transformed the ways political and economic actors handled risks. This chapter follows up on this debate. In the following section, I will summarize the history of CAT bonds and similar insurance instruments, assess the size of this new market, and analyze its relevance in a broader context. How established have these novel forms of insurance become over the past decades? To what degree did they expand the limits of insurability in their respective fields of insurance? Did the division of responsibilities between public and private actors shift in any significant way as an effect of such forms of insurance?

CAT Bonds as Alternative Risk Transfers: The Emergence of a New Market On a technical level, CAT bonds are seen as a groundbreaking innovation in the history of insurance.7 For the customer, they offer a regular insurance contract, but the risk of a payment is covered in an unconventional form. In the event of a claim, regular insurance contracts cover the loss through the financial reserves of the insurance company or with the help of reinsurance or coinsurance contracts (dividing the risk among different insurance companies). CAT bonds, however, belong to a series of alternative procedures for covering risks, summarized as Alternative Risk Transfers (ARTs). These new forms of insurance originated in the 1980s, in the context of increasing difficulties of the insurance industry to cope with major hazards. Their common idea was to use the sheer unlimited capacities of capital markets to cover the costs of financial claims. Capital markets offered a powerful alternative especially to reinsurance and its limited financial capabilities.8

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The rise of ARTs marks a fundamentally new relation between insurance and capital markets, under the new macroeconomic conditions of the post-Bretton Woods context. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s, with its controls on international capital transfers, resulted in a massive expansion of international capital markets.9 The subsequent stock exchange boom of the 1980s affected the insurance industry on several levels. One effect was a significant shift in the earnings of the insurance industry. Many companies saw their profits rise, not from their core business of selling insurance but from investing a part of their reserves in capital markets. Until the end of the 1980s, capital-related earnings significantly surpassed insurance-related earnings in the US insurance industry.10 The European insurance industry witnessed similar shifts. The industry, once a bulwark of risk-averse business practices, gradually developed an appetite for risky investments. Investing capital in equities at stock exchanges, for example, became a common pattern of insurance corporations, replacing previous investment policies focusing on properties or sovereign bonds. In several important insurance markets, such as in Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Australia, the amount of capital invested by the national insurance industries in equities expanded by more than 50 percent during the 1980s—in Britain it grew to nearly half of all investments at the end of the decade.11 Various forms of ART became more common as a reaction to the so-called “liability crisis” of the insurance markets. This crisis primarily hit the US insurance industry in the mid-1980s, but had global repercussions, mostly through the reinsurance networks. The reasons for the crisis are complex. A major role is attributed to US tort law and the spiraling liability costs for insurance companies in the 1980s, in particular in the fields of medical malpractice, health hazards, environmental hazards, and litigation costs. Tort law reform starting in 1986 did indeed help to settle the crisis. Still, the US insurance market suffered from a shortage of financial reserves and a lack of coverage for liability risks. Many US insurers went bankrupt, and international insurers left the US market. Even the larger European reinsurance companies were severely hit, and the reinsurance market experienced a significant shock.12 As a side effect of the crisis, larger insurance corporations started to experiment with innovative forms of insurance, which were later subsumed under the term ARTs. The emergence of ARTs is also linked to a major epistemic shift that affected the insurance industry in the 1980s. In those years, the insurance industry started to adopt theoretical innovations in actuarial theory. Already in the early 1970s, novel approaches for modeling the pricing of options, developed by Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and Robert Merton, prepared the ground for the emerging field of financial economics. The banking industry quickly adopted the Black‒Scholes‒Merton model and used it to construct advanced forms of securities. The boom of derivative markets in the 1980s, in particular on the Chicago Stock Exchange (Chicago Options Exchange), was partly based upon the technical models and symbolic legitimacy provided by financial economics.13

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The theoretical innovations did not go unnoticed in actuarial theory. Some mathematicians working for the insurance industry argued for using the new approaches developed in financial economics. In the 1980s, the actuarial community was split. There were heated debates between advocates for cooperation with economists and more critical actuaries, who warned against the difficulties of calculating the complex dynamics of financial markets. Eventually, the actuarial profession—especially the younger generation—endorsed the new field. In a symbolic move in 1988, the International Actuarial Association (the main professional body on the international level) established a permanent subcommittee on “Actuarial Approaches for Financial Risks.” From that point on, a major group of actuaries actively participated in the development of the new subdiscipline of financial mathematics. Financial mathematics stood at the crossroads between financial economics, business studies, and actuarial theory. Its basic aim was to understand the mathematical foundations of financial transactions—and of financial markets in general. The insurance industry adopted the approaches from financial mathematics in two fields. One was the management of operational risks and the calculation of a company’s exposure to the risks of the financial markets; the other field was the calculation and construction of insurance-linked securities as new investment products. Finally, the development of capital market-based forms of insurance was also fueled by the boom of mergers and acquisitions in the 1980s. In the financial sector, mergers increasingly served the strategy of so-called “bancassurance,” that is, to combine insurance companies with banks. The strategy was marked by interests from both sectors: the need of the insurance industry for expertise in investment practices and the search of the banking industry for new investment products and new markets. In the 1980s and 1990s, bancassurance became an influential business model. Yet the model was soon criticized for producing companies too complex and unprofitable (like in the failed cases of the marriage of Allianz and Dresdner Bank or of Credit Suisse and Winterthur) and lost its momentum after 2000. Still, it brought insurances in closer contact with the banking business, and their business economists trained in constructing investment products for their customers.14 It was in this context that the first CAT bonds emerged. These securities, linked to insurance risks, were issued by the Chicago Board of Trade in 1992. The offer was not very successful and the initiative discontinued. In 1994, the idea was taken up again, this time linked to disaster risks. This first CAT bond was issued by Hannover Re, a German reinsurance company, and placed on the Chicago Stock Exchange. This time it met with substantial demand by investors.15 During the next decade, the market for CAT bonds developed, but only slowly. By 1997, credit-rating agencies found ways to rate the new product. Until 2005, the number of placements remained around ten issues per year; the total volume of the securities rose from USD 0.6 (1997) to USD 2 billion (2005). In the following years, it quickly expanded to USD 7 billion (2007), before collapsing again in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis.16

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The growth of the CAT bond market was repeatedly driven by the impact of natural disasters. The introduction of the first CAT bonds followed on the heels of the losses of the industry after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and subsequent discussions about novel forms of covering such mega-risks. The Northridge earthquake (1994), the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center (2011), and the hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma (all in 2005) all had a profound effect on the market for CAT bonds, spurring both supply and demand.17 CAT bonds became particularly popular as coverage for high-loss risks with an extremely low probability, mostly for risks with an occurrence of 1 in 50 years or less. Reinsurance companies usually excluded such events from contracts. Thus, securitization over capital markets helped the insurance (in particular, the reinsurance) industry to offer new and greater coverage for its customers.18 Accordingly, companies that promoted CAT bonds were either exposed to disaster risks or striving to develop a stronger position in this market. One of the early promoters was AIG (American Insurance Group), a dynamic company aggressively engaged in securitization (which ended up as the largest victim of the financial crisis in 2008). Other important firms included the American USAA and a couple of reinsurance companies, such as Swiss Re, Munich Re, and Hannover Re.19 CAT bonds are usually categorized either through the risks insured or the type of company issuing them. Most CAT bonds are issued for disaster risks of the US market. In 2011, 45 percent of CAT bonds covered earthquake risks in the United States, 30 percent US windstorm and tornado risks, 7 percent European windstorm risks, and the remaining 18 percent other risks (about half of them in Japan).20 About 60 percent of all CAT bonds are issued by insurance companies, 25 percent by reinsurance companies, and 15 percent funded by public authorities, mainly public catastrophe funds such as the California Earthquake Authority (data for 1997–2017). These state funds (also called “sovereign CAT bonds”) were primarily developed to foster insurance markets that suffered from a lack of interest on the part of private insurance companies, such as with earthquake insurance in California after the Northridge disaster in 1994, or with windstorm insurance in Florida after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. State funds issuing CAT bonds offered reinsurance-like coverage with reimbursements for private insurers for catastrophic losses.21 The model of sovereign CAT bonds received particular attention in 2006, when the Mexican government developed a similar state-based CAT bond against earthquake risks. In this case, CAT bonds are used to contribute to a state-owned disaster fund (Fondo de Desastres Naturales, FONDEN) that pays out financial support in natural disaster cases. The CAT bond raised USD 160 million for the Mexican government and contributed, together with conventional reinsurance and other forms of securitization, to an overall package of USD 450 million. The bond was successfully placed, because Mexico had a comparably low earthquake risk. The country has since placed other bonds against earthquake and hurricane risks.22

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Sovereign CAT bonds raise the question of shifting responsibilities between the public and the private sector. They became particularly attractive in a period marked by global financial crises (2001, 2007/8) and the growing fiscal crisis of states, and not least in the context of the European debt crisis (2009–14) and the current COVID-19 crisis.23 The limitations of fiscal means have led to an increasing role of capital market investors in government schemes for protecting against or compensating for the effects of natural disasters. The emergence of sovereign bonds is still recent, and its institutional effects are not very clear. It is still to be seen just how heavily respective states have become more dependent on the interests of private investors.

The Construction of CAT Bonds and the Appeal of Securitization The technical construction of CAT bonds, and of ARTs in general, is based on the method of securitization, and the resulting products are summarized accordingly as Insurance Linked Securities (ILSs). The term “securitization” refers to procedures of transforming debts or liabilities into investment products (securities). The rise of securitization since the 1980s reflected, as mentioned, a general trend in the insurance industry toward more risk-prone approaches of investment banking.24 Parallel to this development, the industry also developed new forms of self-insurance, such as captives. These are companies established and owned by a parent company and often located in offshore domiciles like the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands, with the sole aim being to insure risks of the parent company.25 The construction of CAT bonds is a problem in itself, because the risk of a loss event is very low and the damage very high. Sound statistical data is rare and the uncertainty of the underlying actuarial assumptions is correspondingly great. The construction itself involves a substantial degree of mathematical modeling, often based on complex climatic and economic data. The calculation is often outsourced to a small number of specialized companies that have established themselves over the past few years for this task. These include, for example, AIR (Applied Insurance Research) and RMS (Risk Management Solutions).26 Another important technical element is the triggering mechanism, namely the definition of the moment when the bond is dissolved and the invested sum is paid out, at least partly, for compensation. There are several types of triggers, depending on the size of a loss: an index linked to the loss of a group of companies or a larger geographical area, a physical characteristic of an event (windspeed or power of earthquake), or a combination of different factors.27 The boom of these profitable CAT bonds was driven not only by the needs of the insurance industry, but also—some argue crucially—by the demand of investors.28 Since the 1990s, CAT bonds turned out to be a rather safe investment. The danger of moral hazard and the risk of loss was comparably low and yields rather high. Returns on investment ranged from 5 to 15 percent. The

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overwhelming number of bonds were not triggered.29 In recent years, the share of CAT bonds in the market for disaster insurance has grown to currently about 10 percent.30 Investors have often used CAT bonds as part of their diversification strategies. The gains and losses of CAT bonds are correlated with rare natural hazards. Apparently, they also follow the reinsurance business cycle.31 But they have no clear correlation with regular business cycles. CAT bonds are therefore seen by rating agencies and consultancies as a convenient supplement to investing in regular, more cyclical securities. Only during the peak of the financial crisis of 2007/8 did the market for CAT bonds suffer with the rest of the markets. Apart from this short period, CAT bonds developed independently from the rest of the financial market.32 Another appeal of CAT bonds is that they are seen as a comparably transparent form of security, compared, for example, with the more complex asset-backed securities (securities based on mortgages, credit card debts, or student loans) that triggered the financial crisis of 2007/8.33 This made CAT bonds a product much appreciated by private and institutional investors, especially pension funds.34 The commercial success of so-called “sidecar” insurances also shows that transparency is an important issue in the development of CAT bonds. Sidecars have become a regular form of reinsurance since around the year 2000, in particular as an alternative to CAT bonds for insuring natural disasters. They represent a specific financial structure with which a company diversifies certain risks (an aggregate portfolio of contracts, for example) with the help of external investors. Different from securities, they are constructed within an insurance corporation— usually a reinsurance company—and are open to short-term but renewable investments, in order to create a mutually funded entity that expands the capacity of the insurer. In this form, they also address the issue of transparency and trust. External investors consider sidecars a trustworthy form of insurance, because the issuing insurance company has its own stake in the product and its potential liabilities.35 Currently, the sidecar market is still limited to about one to two dozen issues per year by major reinsurance companies.36 The appeal of CAT bonds became particularly clear after the financial crisis of 2007/8. As mentioned, the crisis also hit the CAT bond market, particularly after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.37 But CAT bonds recovered much more quickly than did other assets. In 2010, the sum of CAT bonds was already at the level of its second-best year (2006). In 2013, it surpassed the previous top year (2007).38 The yields of CAT bonds also remained robust. One of the standard indexes, the Swiss Re Cat Bond Index, shows that CAT bonds performed much better than other indexes, such as for equities or regular bonds. Between 2006 and 2018, the Cat Bond Index rose by 160 percent (2006 taken as 0 percent), equities by 125 percent, and bonds by a mere 60 percent.39 This also contrasts with the market for other Insurance Linked Securities, which suffered from substantial and enduring losses in the aftermath of the crisis.40

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Beyond Natural Catastrophes: Innovative Insurance for Nuclear Disasters, Climate Change, and Demographic Longevity CAT bonds have become a standard method of insurance in one specific field: insuring catastrophe risks like windstorms, earthquakes, or floods. However, in recent years, capital market-based forms of insurance have spread far beyond that field. ARTs or securitization are discussed, tested, or regularly applied to life insurance, health insurance, or the insurance of mega-risks, such as nuclear accidents or even climate change. Often, CAT bonds formed a starting point from which new forms of insurance were developed for risks formerly uninsured. Most of these developments are very recent, often tentative, and experimental. In the following, I will discuss some of these new forms of insurance and ask how sustainable their emergence is. Two of the new fields of ART insurance developed directly out of the CAT bond market. The first case is Extreme Mortality Bonds, at times also called Mortality Catastrophe Bonds. These are designed for events causing an extreme loss of life, such as pandemics or terrorist attacks. It is no coincidence that Extreme Mortality Bonds emerged in the mid-2000s, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the AIDS epidemic, early outbreaks of Ebola starting in 2000, SARS starting in 2002, and avian influenza (bird flu) starting in 2003.41 Swiss Re and AXA were among the leading issuers of such Extreme Mortality Bonds. Swiss Re started with a program called “Vita Capital,” a product launched in 2003 and specifically designed for cases of excess mortality. Of course, such bonds were also affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic; the ongoing Swiss Re program is just one case in point.42 Another spin-off from the CAT bond market deals with the risk of catastrophic accidents in nuclear power plants.43 Unlike in the case of Extreme Mortality Bonds, the development of ART instruments for nuclear accidents is still in its infancy and is discussed mainly on a theoretical level. The Fukushima disaster in 2011 clearly spurred the debates on capital market-based forms of insurance for nuclear power plants. In this field, most countries have legal regulations that provide a division of liabilities between the operators of power plants, the insurance industry, and the state. The European Union, for example, sets the liability of power plant operators at EUR 700 million per accident. Operators normally take out liability insurance for their financial risk. Insurance companies that are active in this market organize themselves in national or international pools to provide a cooperative form of insurance for such costly disasters. The state usually acts as the guarantor of last resort.44 The use of securitization is currently not yet established in this classic form of insuring nuclear power plants. But some experts are in favor of introducing nuclear bonds, as an instrument to shift the boundaries between the responsibilities of the public and the private sectors. The French economists Pierre Picard and Alexis Louaas, for example, argue that the optimal liability to be covered by the

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insurance industry could be significantly expanded by the use of nuclear bonds. They see this expanded liability not as a substitute but as a complement to the state’s liability. Nuclear bonds, they argue, would gradually relieve governments of their financial burdens, with positive effects for all participating actors.45 Most recently, the use of securitization has also been discussed in the context of climate change, the ultimate risk of contemporary societies. The scope of risks associated with climate change is enormous, and the financial consequences of such risks are both inconceivably complex and hard to calculate. Insurance plays a small but substantial role in the debates around climate change. There is a long tradition of weather-related forms of insurance (hail insurance, windstorm insurance), but they always operate on a regional or national scale and cover specific weather-related damages. More recently, the insurance industry established regional pools of insurers against catastrophe risks, including some of the effects of climate change, especially in the Global South.46 The use of CAT bonds is also being debated. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main scientific organization for research on climate change, called for the implementation of CAT bonds as a promising form of economic provision against the effects of climate change. However, the actual use of CAT bonds explicitly designed against the risks of climate change is still marginal and experimental.47 A completely different field for applying capital market-based forms of insurance, unrelated to CAT bonds, has recently emerged to handle the risk of longevity. Here again, the debate is still in its infancy and mainly theoretical, and the market is still very small. Longevity is understood as the long-term demographic increase of life expectancy, a trend that affects several large insurance systems, such as government schemes for old-age insurance, private pension schemes, and life insurance schemes provided by the insurance industry.48 Already in 2014, the OECD pointed at the structural and demographic problems of both public and private pension systems and called for the development of large-scale instruments, based on capital markets, for hedging against the risk of longevity.49 Since then, a lively debate has arisen among actuaries about the possibilities and technical standards of the securitization of longevity. Most contributors agree that the dimension of such a longevity risk market is enormous; estimates vary between USD 6 and 30 trillion—a far larger market size than, for example, that of the CAT bond market (estimated at USD 100 to 300 billion).50 The commercial development of longevity bonds was more modest. The earliest products were launched around 2003, parallel to the introduction of Extreme Mortality Bonds. The products were placed by companies like Swiss Re or BNP Paribas. At that time, they did not attract much attention at capital markets—they were mainly sold in Britain and North America—partly because the products lacked the necessary transparency to gain the trust of investors. Despite these original failures, the idea of longevity bonds became the subject of various scholarly studies that subsequently proposed a variety of technical solutions for more successful securities.51 This continuing interest in longevity bonds

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is due in part to the commercially enticing prospects of such an enormous, still unexploited market, for which classic forms of insurance provide no solution.52 Another important factor that makes longevity bonds an attractive issue is the recent trends in insurance regulation. After the last financial crisis, many legislators tightened their insurance regulations and increased the requirements for financial reserves. The European Union, for example, introduced the Solvency II regulation in 2016, forcing insurance corporations to raise more capital for internal and operating risks. Increased longevity counted as an internal financial risk, which forced companies to look for instruments to reduce their exposure to it. Thus, ironically, a regulation designed to safeguard the insurance industry from the instabilities of capital markets has, in fact, motivated insurers to seek financial help from the same capital markets.53

Conclusion: Shifting Responsibilities between the State and the Insurance Industry Since 1957, one of the top events of the international community of reinsurance experts has been an annual conference in September, accordingly called the “Rendez-Vous de Septembre.” Since 2008, it has also included a roundtable on the current state and development of the ILS/ART market. The meeting is regularly held—with no irony intended—in Monte Carlo.54 Does this genius loci insinuate, metaphorically, that the business of insurance is inherently speculative and that the expansion of the ART market increases such instabilities? The cases presented in this chapter suggest a different conclusion. Since its early days in the 1980s, the ART market has survived several economic and financial crises and become a stable, though still comparably small, part of the insurance business. Moreover, these crises did not affect the long-term development of the market, rather the opposite. After each financial crisis and after catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and the Fukushima disaster, the market for insurance-linked securitization rebounded to a level stronger than before. Tightened regulation, such as Solvency II, also helped to convince insurance and reinsurance companies to increase their financial solidity, not least with the help of external investors from capital markets. Clearly, the use of bonds and similar securities for insurance purposes is still disparate and at a low level when compared with traditional forms of insurance. Its most popular form is CAT bonds for windstorm, earthquake, and flood risks, with a market share of around 10 percent. The market for pandemic bonds is much smaller, though also growing. Other markets, such as for securitization against nuclear disasters, climate change, or longevity risks, are still in their infancy. Despite its moderate size, the market for insurance-linked securities has gradually expanded over the past decades, and many scholars estimate that the potential for further growth is huge. Natural disasters, pandemics, and the bur-

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dens of increasing longevity have financial consequences that far exceed the financial capabilities of traditional forms of insurance, based on in-house capital and reserves. By comparison, the pockets of international capital markets are nearly infinite. These financial opportunities are a strong incentive for further expanding the ART market and, with it, the limits of insurability—with no foreseeable end in sight. The commercial and political consequences of this development are only gradually becoming recognizable. What is clear is that a new actor has entered the field of insurance: investors in capital markets. At the moment, their role is rather passive, with only marginal influence on the policies of the insurance companies. One area where investors’ interests apparently have had and continue to have an effect on insurance policies is the transparency of ART products. One of the common reasons for failed issues of insurance-linked securities was the lack of transparency with regard to their technical construction. In the market of mortality-based or longevity securitizations, for example, investors have repeatedly alleged that the underlying statistical models, constructed by the issuing company, were not accessible for external investors. Some experts argue that the relative success of more transparent forms of ART, such as bonds or sidecars, is precisely due to such investors’ criticisms.55 Another, rather political effect of the spread of ARTs is the shift in responsibilities between public and private actors. In market sectors where the state offers its own insurance schemes (old-age insurance) or represents the guarantor of last resort (natural disasters, nuclear accidents, climate change), securitization increased the financial stakes of the private sector to the relief of the state. Thus, economic interests and the play of market forces became more relevant in such fields of insurance. However, to speak of a privatization of public responsibilities overestimates the influence of private actors, as the ultimate liability still remains with the state. The debates about the lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic are a case in point. Despite all the headlines about commercial pandemic insurances, most observers agree that it will still be the state that shoulders most of the financial burden of the next pandemic.56 Martin Lengwiler is a historian and Professor of Modern European History at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He works in the fields of economic history, European history, and global history, specializing in the history of the welfare state and commercial insurances. In his current research project (“Global Cultures of Risk”, https://www.culturesofrisk.net/, accessed 9 December 2022), he investigates the social and cultural conditions for the global diffusion of commercial insurance in non-Western contexts (1870–1980). Recent publications include Science, Africa and Europe: Processing Information and Creating Knowledge, edited with Nigel Penn and Patrick Harries (London: Routledge, 2019) and “Gesundheit als Investment: Die doppelte Geschichte der Gesundheitsökonomie,” Studies in Contemporary History 17 (2): 335–48.

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Notes 1. “Coronavirus Spread Triggers World Bank Pandemic Bond Buyout,” Reuters, 20 April 2020, www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-pandemic-bonds/coronavirus-spreadtriggers-world-bank-pandemic-bond-payout-idUSL8N2C861O (accessed 19 June 2020). 2. “World Bank Launches First-Ever Pandemic Bonds to Support $500 Million Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility,” World Bank, 28 June 2017, https://www.worldbank.org/ en/news/press-release/2017/06/28/world-bank-launches-first-ever-pandemic-bondsto-support-500-million-pandemic-emergency-financing-facility (accessed 19 June 2020). 3. “A Novel Pandemic Security is No Match for a Novel Virus,” The Economist, 7 March 2020, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/03/05/a-novel-pandemicsecurity-is-no-match-for-a-novel-virus (accessed 19 June 2020). 4. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf Dem Weg in Eine Andere Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). 5. Takahiro Tsuda, “Japan’s Disaster Risk Financing: Framework and Policies,” in Governance, Risk and Financial Impact of Mega Disasters, ed. Akiko Kamesaka and Franz Waldenberger (Singapore: Springer, 2019), 13–34 (here 14, 17–21). 6. Razmig Keucheyan, “Insuring Climate Change: New Risks and the Financialization of Nature,” Development and Change 49, no. 2 (1 March 2018): 484–501. 7. Hans Bühlmann and Martin Lengwiler, “Calculating the Unpredictable: History of Actuarial Theories and Practices in Reinsurance,” in Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming, ed. Geoffrey Jones and Niels Viggo Haueter (London: Oxford University Press, 2016), 118–43. 8. For a summary: Martin Lengwiler, “Risky Calculations: Financial Mathematics and Securitization since the 1970s,” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 41, no. 2 (156) (2016): 258–79. 9. Youssef Cassis, Capitals of Capital: The Rise and Fall of International Financial Centres, 1780‒2009 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 235–41. 10. “Die Versicherungsjahre 1975–1986 in sieben Industrieländern,” sigma 3 (1988): 1–19 (here 4). Sigma is a publication of the Swiss Re Institute. 11. “Die Kapitalanlagen der Erstversicherer,” sigma 5 (1991): 1–24 (here 10). 12. Christopher Kobrack, “USA: The International Attraction of the US Insurance Market,” in World Insurance: The Evolution of a Global Risk Network, ed. Peter Borscheid and Niels Viggo Haueter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 274–308 (here 300‒4). 13. For more detail, see Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 119–78. 14. Bühlmann and Lengwiler, “Calculating the Unpredictable,” 139–40. 15. Kobrack, “USA,” 302; J. David Cummins, “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities: Product Design and Evolution of the Market,” in Extreme Events and Insurance: 2011 Annus Horribilis, ed. Christophe Courbage and Walter L. Stahel (The Geneva Reports, Risk and Insurance Research, no. 5) (March 2012), 39–61. 16. Cummins, “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities,” 50; Pauline Barrieu and Henri Loubergé, “Hybrid Cat Bonds,” Journal of Risk and Insurance 76, no. 3 (1 September 2009): 548–52. 17. Kobrack, “USA,” 302; Jozef De Mey, “Insurance and the Capital Markets*,” The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance—Issues and Practice 32, no. 1 (2007): 35–41; J. David Cum-

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21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

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mins and Philippe Trainar, “Securitization, Insurance, and Reinsurance,” Journal of Risk and Insurance 76, no. 3 (1 September 2009): 463‒92 (here 463–64). Cummins, “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities,” 43. Maurice R. Greenberg and Lawrence A. Cunningham, The AIG Story (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013); Keucheyan, “Insuring Climate Change,” 491; for Swiss Re: Tobias Straumann, “The Invisible Giant: The Story of Swiss Re,” in The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance, ed. Harold James et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 237–351 (here 337–39); Lengwiler, “Risky Calculations,” 267–68. Cummins, “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities”; Marc Gürtler, Martin Hibbeln, and Christine Winkelvos, “The Impact of the Financial Crisis and Natural Catastrophes on CAT Bonds,” Journal of Risk and Insurance 83, no. 3 (1 September 2016): 579–612. Andy Polacek, “Catastrophe Bonds: A Primer and Retrospective,” Chicago Fed Letter, Essays on Issues, 405 (2018): 1–7. Ibid., 5–6; Cummins, “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities,” 54; Keucheyan, “Insuring Climate Change,” 492–93. Keucheyan, “Insuring Climate Change,” 493. Walther Neuhaus, “Alternative Risk Transfer,” in Encyclopedia of Actuarial Science, ed. Jozef L. Teugels and Bjorn Sundt (Wiley Online Library, 25 June 2012); Richard W. Gorvett, “Insurance Securitization: The Development of a New Asset Class,” in Discussion Paper for the 1999 Casualty Actuarial Society (1999), 133–72 (here 138–40), https://www .casact.org/pubs/dpp/dpp99/99dpp133.pdf (accessed 19 August 2020). Kobrack, “USA,” 301–2; for Swiss Re: Straumann, “The Invisible Giant,” 335. Keucheyan, “Insuring Climate Change,” 496–97; Cummins, “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities,” 43–44; Semir Ben Ammar, Martin Eling, and Alexander Braun, Alternative Risk Transfer and Insurance-Linked Securities: Trends, Challenges and New Market Opportunities (St. Gallen: Verlag Institut für Versicherungswirtschaft der Universität St. Gallen, 2015), 85–90. Cummins, “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities,” 44. Alexander Braun, Katja Müller, and Hato Schmeiser, “What Drives Insurers’ Demand for Cat Bond Investments? Evidence from a Pan-European Survey,” The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance—Issues and Practice 38, no. 3 (1 July 2013), 580–611 (here 595, 597), https://doi.org/10.1057/gpp.2012.51. Keucheyan, “Insuring Climate Change,” 491. For current data, see “Catastrophe Bond & ILS Market Charts, Statistics, and Data,” Artemis, https://www.artemis.bm/dashboard/cat-bond-ils-market-statistics/ (accessed 20 August 2020). Gürtler et al., “The Impact of the Financial Crisis,” 609–11. Richard J. Kish, “Catastrophe (CAT) Bonds: Risk Offsets with Diversification and High Returns,” Financial Services Review: The Journal of Individual Financial Management (Athens, OH: Academy of Financial Services, 2016): 316–21; Peter Carayannopoulos and M. Fabricio Perez, “Diversification through Catastrophe Bonds: Lessons from the Subprime Financial Crisis,” The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance—Issues and Practice 40, no. 1 (2015): 1–28. Keucheyan, “Insuring Climate Change,” 491. Ibid. David Blake et al., “Still Living with Mortality: The Longevity Risk Transfer Market after One Decade,” British Actuarial Journal 24, no. 1 (2019): 1–80 (here 64–65); Nicholas

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42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

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Bugler et al., “Reinsurance Sidecars: The Next Stage in the Development of the Longevity Risk Transfer Market,” North American Actuarial Journal (23 January 2020): 1–15; Cummins, “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities,” 46–50. For a current list of reinsurance sidecars, see: www.artemis.bm (accessed 20 Aug. 20), https://www.artemis.bm/reinsurance-sidecars/ (accessed 20 Aug. 2020). Gürtler et al., “The Impact of the Financial Crisis,” 605–6. Polacek, “Catastrophe Bonds,” 4; Cummins, “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities,” 49–50. Swiss Re, “Insurance-Linked Securities Market Update,” vol. 30 (February 2019), https:// www.swissre.com/dam/jcr:7467c134-2803-42f3-8a2f-cc2e9e156c34/ils-market-yearend-february-2019.pdf (accessed 9 December 2022), 20–21. Samuel Cox, Joseph R. Fairchild, and Hal W. Pedersen, “Actuarial and Economic Aspects of Securitization of Risk,” ASTIN Bulletin: The Journal of the International Actuarial Association 30, no. 1 (2000): 157‒93 (here 158). Morton Lane, “Longevity Risk from the Perspective of the ILS Markets,” The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance—Issues and Practice 36, no. 4 (1 October 2011): 501–15 (here 506); Gordon Woo, “Current Challenges in the Securitization against Terrorism Risk,” in Catastrophic Risks and Insurance, ed. OECD (OECD: Paris, 2005), 91‒103; Keucheyan, “Insuring Climate Change,” 491–92. Steve Evans, “Swiss Re’s Vita Capital VI Mortality Bond on Negative Watch on Covid-19: S&P,” Artemis, 3 April 2020, https://www.artemis.bm/news/swiss-res-vita-capital-vimortality-bond-on-negative-watch-on-covid-19-sp/ (accessed 21 April 2021); Martin Lengwiler, “Im Fahrwasser der Finanzmärkte,” in Vorsorgen in Der Moderne, ed. Nicolai Hannig and Malte Thiessen (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017), 63–78. Part of this section relies on Lengwiler, “Im Fahrwasser der Finanzmärkte,” 76–77. Alexis Louaas and Pierre Picard, Optimal Nuclear Liability Insurance (2019), https://hal .archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01996648 (accessed 9 December 2022), 2–3. Ibid., 18–19; Tomas Kåberger, “Economic Management of Future Nuclear Accidents,” in The Technological and Economic Future of Nuclear Power, ed. Reinhard Haas, Lutz Mez, and Amela Ajanovic (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2019), 211–20. Nikolas Scherer, Insuring Against Climate Change: The Emergence of Regional Catastrophe Risk Pools (London: Routledge, 2020), 3–7. Keucheyan, “Insuring Climate Change,” 491–92. Blake et al., “Still Living with Mortality.” “OECD Calls for Capital Markets to Embrace Longevity Risk Hedging,” Artemis, 9 December 2014, http://www.artemis.bm/blog/2014/12/09/oecd-calls-for-capital-marketsto-embrace-longevity-risk-hedging/ (accessed 21 April 2021). Lane, “Longevity Risk from the Perspective of the ILS Markets,” 503; Blake et al., “Still Living with Mortality,” 3. Blake et al., “Still Living with Mortality”; Bugler et al., “Reinsurance Sidecars.” Blake et al., “Still Living with Mortality,” 65–66; Arun Muralidhar, “Managing Longevity Risk: The Case for Longevity-Indexed Variable Expiration Bonds,” Retirement Management Journal 8, no. 1 (2019): 31–44, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3522653 (accessed 9 December 2022). Blake et al., “Still Living with Mortality,” 7–8, 28–30, 41–45; Lane, “Longevity Risk from the Perspective of the ILS Markets,” 507; Bugler et al., “Reinsurance Sidecars,” 2, 5–6; Yajing Xu, Michael Sherris, and Jonathan Ziveyi, “Market Price of Longevity Risk for a Multi-Cohort Mortality Model with Application to Longevity Bond Option Pric-

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ing,” Journal of Risk and Insurance 87, no. 3 (1 September 2020): 571–95 (here 571–72), https://doi.org/10.1111/jori.12273; Johan A. Lybeck, A Global History of the Financial Crash of 2007‒2010 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 274–79. 54. See their website: http://www.rvs-monte-carlo.com (accessed 20 August 2020). 55. Lane, “Longevity Risk from the Perspective of the ILS Markets,” 508; Hua Chen and Samuel H. Cox, “Modeling Mortality with Jumps: Applications to Mortality Securitization,” Journal of Risk and Insurance 76, no. 3 (1 September 2009): 727–51 (here 728). 56. “A Novel Pandemic Security.”

Bibliography “A Novel Pandemic Security is No Match for a Novel Virus.” The Economist, 7 March 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2022 from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/ 03/05/a-novel-pandemic-security-is-no-match-for-a-novel-virus. Barrieu, Pauline, and Henri Loubergé. “Hybrid Cat Bonds.” Journal of Risk and Insurance 76, no. 3 (1 September 2009): 547‒78. Beck, Ulrich. Risikogesellschaft: Auf Dem Weg in Eine Andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Ben Ammar, Semir, Martin Eling, and Alexander Braun. Alternative Risk Transfer and Insurance-Linked Securities: Trends, Challenges and New Market Opportunities. St. Gallen: Verlag Institut für Versicherungswirtschaft der Universität St. Gallen, 2015. Blake, David, et al. “Still Living with Mortality: The Longevity Risk Transfer Market after One Decade.” British Actuarial Journal 24, no. 1 (2019): 1–80. Braun, Alexander, Katja Müller, and Hato Schmeiser. “What Drives Insurers’ Demand for Cat Bond Investments? Evidence from a Pan-European Survey.” The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance—Issues and Practice 38, no. 3 (1 July 2013): 580–611. https://doi.org/10.1057/ gpp.2012.51. Bugler, Nicholas, et al. “Reinsurance Sidecars: The Next Stage in the Development of the Longevity Risk Transfer Market.” North American Actuarial Journal (23 January 2020): 1–15. Bühlmann, Hans, and Martin Lengwiler. “Calculating the Unpredictable: History of Actuarial Theories and Practices in Reinsurance.” In Managing Risk in Reinsurance: From City Fires to Global Warming, edited by Geoffrey Jones and Niels Viggo Haueter, 118–43. London: Oxford University Press, 2016. Carayannopoulos, Peter, and M. Fabricio Perez. “Diversification through Catastrophe Bonds: Lessons from the Subprime Financial Crisis.” The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance— Issues and Practice 40, no. 1 (2015): 1–28. Cassis, Youssef. Capitals of Capital: The Rise and Fall of International Financial Centres, 1780‒2009. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. “Catastrophe Bond & ILS Market Charts, Statistics, and Data.” Artemis. Retrieved 20 August 2022 from https://www.artemis.bm/dashboard/cat-bond-ils-market-statistics/. Chen, Hua and Samuel H. Cox. “Modeling Mortality with Jumps: Applications to Mortality Securitization.” Journal of Risk and Insurance 76, no. 3 (1 September 2009): 727–51. “Coronavirus Spread Triggers World Bank Pandemic Bond Buyout.” Reuters, 20 April 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020 from www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-pandemic-bonds/ coronavirus-spread-triggers-world-bank-pandemic-bond-payout-idUSL8N2C861O.

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Cox, Samuel, Joseph R. Fairchild, and Hal W. Pedersen. “Actuarial and Economic Aspects of Securitization of Risk.” ASTIN Bulletin: The Journal of the International Actuarial Association 30, no. 1 (2000): 157‒93. Cummins, David J. “Cat Bonds and Other Risk-Linked Securities: Product Design and Evolution of the Market.” In Extreme Events and Insurance: 2011 Annus Horribilis, edited by Christophe Courbage and Walter L. Stahel (The Geneva Reports, Risk and Insurance Research, no. 5) (March 2012), 39–61. Cummins, David J., and Philippe Trainar. “Securitization, Insurance, and Reinsurance.” Journal of Risk and Insurance 76, no. 3 (1 September 2009): 463‒92. De Mey, Jozef. “Insurance and the Capital Markets*.” The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance—Issues and Practice 32, no. 1 (2007): 35‒41. “Die Kapitalanlagen der Erstversicherer.” Sigma 5 (1991): 1–24. “Die Versicherungsjahre 1975–1986 in sieben Industrieländern.” Sigma 3 (1988): 1–19. Evans, Steve. “Swiss Re’s Vita Capital VI Mortality Bond on Negative Watch on Covid-19: S&P.” Artemis, 3 April 2020. Retrieved 20 August 2022 from https://www.artemis.bm/ news/swiss-res-vita-capital-vi-mortality-bond-on-negative-watch-on-covid-19-sp/. Gorvett, Richard W. “Insurance Securitization: The Development of a New Asset Class.” Discussion Paper for the 1999 Casualty Actuarial Society (1999): 133–72. Retrieved 9 December 2022 from https://www.casact.org/pubs/dpp/dpp99/99dpp133.pdf. Greenberg, Maurice R., and Lawrence A. Cunningham. The AIG Story. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013). Gürtler, Marc, Martin Hibbeln, and Christine Winkelvos. “The Impact of the Financial Crisis and Natural Catastrophes on CAT Bonds.” Journal of Risk and Insurance 83, no. 3 (1 September 2016): 579–612. Kåberger, Tomas. “Economic Management of Future Nuclear Accidents.” In The Technological and Economic Future of Nuclear Power, edited by Reinhard Haas, Lutz Mez, and Amela Ajanovic, 211‒20. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2019. Keucheyan, Razmig. “Insuring Climate Change: New Risks and the Financialization of Nature.” Development and Change 49, no. 2 (1 March 2018): 484–501. Kish, Richard J. “Catastrophe (CAT) Bonds: Risk Offsets with Diversification and High Returns.” Financial Services Review: The Journal of Individual Financial Management (Athens, OH: Academy of Financial Services, 2016): 316–21. Kobrack, Christopher. “USA: The International Attraction of the US Insurance Market.” In World Insurance: The Evolution of a Global Risk Network, edited by Peter Borscheid and Niels Viggo Haueter, 274–308. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Lane, Morton. “Longevity Risk from the Perspective of the ILS Markets.” The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance—Issues and Practice 36, no. 4 (1 October 2011): 501–15. Lengwiler, Martin. “Risky Calculations: Financial Mathematics and Securitization since the 1970s,” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 41, no. 2 (156) (2016): 258–79. ———. “Im Fahrwasser der Finanzmärkte.” In Vorsorgen in Der Moderne, edited by Nicolai Hannig and Malte Thiessen, 63–78. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017. Louaas, Alexis, and Pierre Picard. Optimal Nuclear Liability Insurance (2019). Retrieved 9 December 2022 from https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01996648. Lybeck, Johan A. A Global History of the Financial Crash of 2007‒2010. London: Cambridge University Press, 2011. MacKenzie, Donald. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

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Muralidhar, Arun. “Managing Longevity Risk: The Case for Longevity-Indexed Variable Expiration Bonds.” Retirement Management Journal 8, no. 1 (2019): 31–44. Retrieved 9 December 2022 from https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3522653. Neuhaus, Walther. “Alternative Risk Transfer.” In Encyclopedia of Actuarial Science, edited by Jozef L. Teugels and Bjorn Sundt. Wiley Online Library, 25 June 2012. “OECD Calls for Capital Markets to Embrace Longevity Risk Hedging.” Artemis, 9 December 2014. Retrieved 21 April 2021 from http://www.artemis.bm/blog/2014/12/09/ oecd-calls-for-capital-markets-to-embrace-longevity-risk-hedging/. Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Polacek, Andy. “Catastrophe Bonds: A Primer and Retrospective.” Chicago Fed Letter, Essays on Issues, 405 (2018): 1–7. Scherer, Nikolas. Insuring Against Climate Change: The Emergence of Regional Catastrophe Risk Pools. London: Routledge, 2020. Straumann, Tobias. “The Invisible Giant: The Story of Swiss Re.” In The Value of Risk: Swiss Re and the History of Reinsurance, edited by Harold James et al., 237–351. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Swiss Re. “Insurance-Linked Securities Market Update.” Vol. 30 (February 2019). Retrieved 9 December 2022 from https://www.swissre.com/dam/jcr:7467c134-2803-42f3-8a2fcc2e9e156c34/ils-market-yearend-february-2019.pdf. Tsuda, Takahiro. “Japan’s Disaster Risk Financing: Framework and Policies.” In Governance, Risk and Financial Impact of Mega Disasters, edited by Akiko Kamesaka and Franz Waldenberger, 13–34. Singapore: Springer, 2019. Woo, Gordon. “Current Challenges in the Securitization against Terrorism Risk.” In Catastrophic Risks and Insurance, edited by OECD, 91‒103. Paris: OECD, 2005. “World Bank Launches First-Ever Pandemic Bonds to Support $500 Million Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility.” World Bank, 28 June 2017. Retrieved 19 June 2020 from https:// www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2017/06/28/world-bank-launches-firstever-pandemic-bonds-to-support-500-million-pandemic-emergency-financing-facility. Xu, Yajing, Michael Sherris, and Jonathan Ziveyi. “Market Price of Longevity Risk for a MultiCohort Mortality Model with Application to Longevity Bond Option Pricing.” Journal of Risk and Insurance 87, no. 3 (1 September 2020): 571–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/ jori.12273.

3 Places of Risk on the Site of Socialist Modernity Fighting Industrial Accidents until the GDR Was No More Thomas Lindenberger

Erring between Security and Safety: The GDR as a Construction Site of Modernity The process of transforming the part of Germany dominated by the Soviet Union after 1945 into a socialist society turned this territory into a “major construction site” (Großbaustelle), a site of modernity in its own right. Here, the SED leadership, following the Soviet model but also drawing on local traditions, sought to realize on German soil an alternative to the bourgeois-capitalist variant of industrial society. This transforming construction of a new society was to be carried out as quickly as possible so that the moral and material “advantages of socialism” could be demonstrated within a generation after the war. The project was based on the dictatorial monopoly of power by the SED and its “organs,” particularly the ministries for state security, interior, and defense, as well as specialized ministries with far-reaching executive powers for specific branches of industry. From the beginning, the project’s success was called into question by the location of this “construction site” on the military frontline of the Cold War, its lack of acceptance among the East German population, and the magnetic appeal of the West German alternative. The SED leadership met the sociopolitical risks associated with the project, be they popular revolt or mass emigration to the West, with a policy of all-encompassing state security (Staatssicherheit) intended to permeate every aspect of the socialist structure, particularly large industry.

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In the factories of the chemical and energy industries, on which this chapter focuses, this project was exposed to still other dangers. Every production site where technologically complex, high-energy industrial processes continually transform raw materials is an inherent place of risk. Interruptions in the supply of materials and fluctuations in the conditions and operating parameters of production are sources of potential functional disruptions that, according to risk theorist Charles Perrow, can in extreme cases lead to destructive energy conversions due to the close coupling of highly complex partial functions. Since the emergence of industrial production, factory managements have sought to control the inherent risk of such “normal accidents”1 through technical precautions and behavioral guidelines, although these measures have always competed with desires to maximize efficiency and profitability. This also applied to the nationalized factories subjected to the centrally administered planned economy of the SED state. In addition, state-owned factories were simultaneously places of direct political domination and, accordingly, political risk. In the eyes of those responsible for state security, technical safety and political security were ultimately indistinguishable. The fact that the word Sicherheit in the German language can mean both “security” and “safety” further cemented this connection. Behind every large industrial accident, Stasi officers looked for evidence of Western saboteurs without ever decisively proving such involvement.2 How did those responsible for industrial and occupational safety in the SED state manage the risks of large modern industrial plants within these systemically set limitations, and how successful were they? How were the protective concepts developed by the GDR’s technical and occupational experts implemented and put into practice? At the heart of these considerations stand large industrial accidents, or Havarien (“disasters”) as they were referred to in the predominant contemporary terminology of the Eastern Bloc.3 These were “normal accidents” of a particularly socialist kind. As will be shown, company managements and their workforces were compelled by the exigencies of the planned economy to take risks that they could not handle due to the lack of experience and expertise during the GDR’s early decades. The SED state used the traumatization of the workforce that was caused by the many deaths resulting from such catastrophes to cast itself in the role of the all-responsible caretaker and to appropriate the victims as fallen heroes in the battle for the creation of a socialist state. At the same time, systematic press censorship ensured that such mass accidents rarely, if ever, gained national attention. This suppression was always done with an eye toward preventing such stories from reaching those compelled to carry out work that posed extreme risks to their health.

Managing Occupational Risks During the construction of socialism in the GDR, the responsibility for workplace safety (Occupational Health and Safety, or OHS) and for the entire social insurance system was taken over by the communist-led trade union confederation

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(Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftbund, FDGB.) Among its hundreds of thousands of honorary officials were also the “workplace safety inspectors,” people responsible for ensuring that factories complied with workplace safety regulations.4 The technical supervision (technische Überwachung) was, for its part, carried out by a “government office” that reported directly to the GDR’s Ministerial Council; in practice, however, traditional “bourgeois” methods remained in place, above all compulsory “self-supervision” by factory employees acting as state-certified safety engineers.5 While in capitalist enterprises, private liability in connection with competitive pressures encouraged the effectiveness of autonomous risk prevention, the mammoth state conglomerate, which the ensemble of state-owned plants, factories, combines, and cooperatives actually represented, had to regulate all costs and damages internally. As a result of the compulsory target goals set by central planning (defined as specific quantities to be produced) and the subordination of efficiency and profitability, it was difficult to anchor risk assessment and limitation into the praxis of production management. We can postulate that due to the “soft budget constraints”6 characteristic of state-socialist enterprises, risk-conscious production management was systematically deprioritized in the everyday practice of factories. Furthermore, in the deterministic worldview of Marxist-Leninist ideology, there was little room for theories of risk and contingency. It was only during the brief heyday of cybernetics at the end of the 1950s that economists and experts in criminal law were able to systematically contend with the risks inherent in production. These approaches, like those of game theory, were only briefly tolerated before being censored by party ideologues.7 It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that tentative attempts were made to conceptualize “risk” as part of the responsibility of management in state-owned enterprises, albeit still without any significant carryover into the actual economic practices themselves.8 Simultaneously, abstract knowledge about the safety of work and production processes, obtained from observations and translated into concrete scenarios at the company level, was constantly present in all larger companies in the form of safety engineers. These engineers formed their own community within the GDR, which was furthered by occupational and health science training at universities and academic institutes.9 However, their ability to assert themselves within factories remained limited. They had little if any power to issue sanctions, and above them stood a Sicherheitsbeauftragter (security commissioner) reporting directly to the boss, a top manager, responsible for the company’s overall security (including political security), who worked closely with the ministry for state security.10 As in other socialist economies, disruptions in production were commonplace occurrences, as were the means and methods of preventing them. The trend of these occurrences within the GDR can be seen in official statistics showing the total number of workplace accidents, the number of accidents per thousand employees, and the total number of fatal accidents, for each of the years listed. The trend illustrates a strong reduction in workplace accidents in total, in both absolute as well as relative numbers, which (with regards to the actual num-

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Table 3.1. Number of workplace accidents (number of accidents per 1,000 employees).11 Steiner et al., Statistische Übersichten zur Sozialpolitik in Deutschland seit 1945, 140, as taken from the Statistisches Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (StJb), Das Gesundheitswesen der DDR. Year

Workplace accidents (incl. commuting accidents)

Number of fatal accidents

Workplace accidents per 1,000 employees

1955

595,023

873

49.5

1960

397,318

993

48.6

1965

362,514

757

45.2

1970

334,610

662

40.8

1975

277,006

517

33.0

1980

251,528

.

29.0

1985

214,991

.

24.1

1986

211,536

204

23.7

1987

211,956

234

23.7

1988

202,681

251

22.6

1989

195,844

228

22.0

ber of accidents occurring at the workplace) is even more pronounced when one considers that the number of commuting accidents for this same time period remained fairly constant, at nine out of one thousand employees per year.12 However, when it comes to mass accidents (more than two people injured or killed), the limited effectiveness of statutory occupational safety measures and technical monitoring can be easily reconstructed. The catastrophic explosion at the state-owned Bitterfeld electrochemical plant (Elektrochemisches Kombinat Bitterfeld) in July 1968, which resulted in forty-two deaths and over two hundred injured workers, is a telling example in this regard. At the same time, it also marked a turning point in dealing with risks in industry.13 In contrast to previous comparable disasters, the Bitterfeld catastrophe did not result from a lack of technical knowledge about how to control highly complex systems under maximum load. Instead, what led to the catastrophe was the sheer physical deterioration of equipment, some of which was over forty years old, in conjunction with irresponsible behavior by managers and workers in the face of risks they had recognized for years. In hindsight, “Bitterfeld” appears to herald the GDR’s industrial decline. Due to the alerting of emergency services and the presence of three thousand rescue units, the state media could not restrict itself to a few brief agency reports as it had in previous accidents. Instead, the press reported extensively on rescue services, clean-up work, and the memorial service for the victims, which was portrayed as a state funeral. In the months that followed, there was no

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real public debate about the explosion’s causes. In specialist circles, however, it was no secret that there had been serious failures in dealing with the defects of a production facility that everyone knew had been written off years ago. Shortly thereafter, a consensus developed within the party leadership, trade union boards, and the responsible ministries that things could not go on as they had with regard to occupational safety and compliance with safety regulations. Various resolutions drew sweeping conclusions from the example of “Bitterfeld.” Theoretically, the science of occupational safety in the GDR had long established precise guidelines that specified how technical safety in complex production sites should be guaranteed. Prof. Dr. Erwin Gniza, doyen of occupational safety science in the GDR and director of the GDR’s leading research institute on the subject in Dresden, had already formulated the “two-way theory” in the 1950s and propagated it throughout the country.14 According to Gniza’s theory, technical organizational means and measures (the first way) should be combined with systematic educational efforts directed toward the labor force (the second way), whereby priority would be placed on the first “main way.” In the chemical industry in particular, this required the introduction of monitoring and control technology, which GDR industry as a whole simply never possessed, certainly not at the level of advanced information technology. What remained was the “second way,” influencing the “human factor.” How could the state encourage the people of the “advanced socialist society” to conduct themselves in a “socialist” way during the production process, that is, a careful, safety-conscious manner, compliant with regulations, in the interest of minimizing both individual and collective risks? To do so, each person had to internalize prescribed principles and behaviors, without which regulated and disruptionfree industrial production could not function. Above all, this required instruction, education, and training. The most ideologically and politically innocuous way to launch an educational campaign in the GDR was to adopt what had been done in the Soviet Union as the propagated example for the socialist future in one’s own country. In the Soviet Union, the bricklayer Alexei Dmitrijewitsch Bassow earned fame and recognition after his brigade went seventeen years without reporting a single workplace accident. In 1972, the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB) started a mass initiative based on the public commitment by work collectives and personnel to achieve specific, verifiable levels of performance: in this case, compliance with the safety regulations and behavioral norms that promoted occupational safety. With headlines like “Work and Live in the Socialist Way” and “Order and Safety: That’s Part of the Competition,”15 the campaign of the FDGB leadership committee tied directly into the 1959 “invented” tradition of “socialist competition.”16 What was new was the critical gesture of addressing thinking habits without exculpatory references to capitalistic “remnants”; instead the peculiarities of the socialist mode of production were emphasized. This included, among other things, the fetishization of absolute outputs, frequently criticized as “quantity-

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over-quality ideology,” as was suggested by the index numbers of planned production. In an interview in the daily newspaper Neuer Tag, Bassow was asked about this during a tour of various GDR factories in the Frankfurt an der Oder district: Interviewer: Here in the GDR, with our competitive self-commitment, production goals always take priority and working conditions mostly come last. What do you think of this? A. D. Bassow: Our first obligation—and this is also the concern of our managers and engineers—is to work without accidents or disasters. Firstly, people are the priority at work, and secondly, I can only set high economic goals when I ensure that, in competing for “order and safety,” no accidents or disasters occur.17

In contrast to other campaigns in which learning from the Soviet Union meant “learning to triumph,” the emphasis of Bassow’s campaign was not on simply imitating a particular “method” of work organization. “Not method but attitude!” is what counted, according to the brigadiers of the East Construction and Assembly Combine in Fürstenwalde.18 Calls for “safety, order, and cleanliness” seem to be timeless. “Respectable” German skilled laborers, with their proverbial sense for “quality work,” were likely to have known this maxim for generations, also in the GDR, and occupational safety officials always promoted it. But more than before, the leaders of the socialist planned economy were less able to rely precisely on these self-evident “attitudes,” as the tragic accident in Bitterfeld had made dramatically clear. They remained powerless against indifference and workers’ firm focus on bonuses. As a Soviet import, however, “safety, order, and cleanliness” became part of a narrative of the meteoric rise of the Soviet Union toward becoming a world-leading industrial nation, and therefore sacrosanct in its function as a model for a “new” to be aspired to in the GDR, even though this did not stop the Bassow campaign from becoming a joke among the workers.19

Havarien: Soviet-Style Accidents Comparable to developments in Western industrial nations, the early and mid1970s witnessed a clear increase in efforts to raise awareness about major industrial accidents. In the socialist states, this was discussed using the term Havarien. The frequency with which the SED’s central organ Neues Deutschland mentioned the subject of Havarien serves as an indicator of these educational efforts. While the term was originally used almost exclusively for shipwrecks, from 1953 onward it was adopted from the Soviet Union as a synonym for “an accident at an industrial factory.” Such usage came in waves. Figure 3.1 illustrates the reporting of actual disasters as well as articles discussing disasters in general, including disaster prevention through technology and “anti-disaster training.” After an initial increase in the early 1960s (1961‒64 showed nineteen references per year), usage

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Figure 3.1. Occurrences of the term “Havarie” in Neues Deutschland, 1952‒89 (not including those related to shipping or aviation). Source: Neues Deutschland. Zentralorgan der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschland, Berlin edition, based on the calculation of DDRPresse Zefys, http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ddr-presse (accessed 6 April 2020). Dark grey: mentionings of a specific Havarie event. Light grey: mentionings of Havarie in general. Intermediate grey (1986‒89): Tschernobyl.

rose in the 1970s to an average of 27.4 instances per year. After a slight decline in the first half of the 1980s, the diagram shows that the once-in-a-century disaster at a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, on 26 April 1986 (which is indicated separately in the chart), catapulted the theme of Havarien to a new and even higher level of usage in the GDR’s final crisis years.20 At the same time, the focus on behavioral norms, even personal characteristics (attitude!), considered indispensable at industrial workplaces made it possible to avoid addressing the necessary technical equipment and safety-oriented organizational methods that, at least according to the doctrine of the “two ways” of accident prevention, should have flanked the educational implementation of such behavior. Here, too, it was a matter of performing the trick of “socialist rationalization,” which amounted to the intensification of labor input without additional investment.21 Even “Leseland DDR” (a claim by the GDR that it was a reading-friendly country) was not immune to these moralizing efforts. In 1973, the Berlin publishing house Volk und Welt published a contemporary novel by the Soviet author Vladimir Popov. In the original Russian, the work was titled Obretjosch w boju (Victory in Battle); for the German translation, it was titled Havarie im Stahlwerk (Disaster in a Steel Mill). The plot centers around a young engineer who, at loggerheads with a disapproving management staff, must take responsibility for an uncontrolled runoff of 600 tons of liquid steel. The party and trade union press promoted the publication of this industrial novel, written in the post-heroic style of socialist realism, with numerous reviews.22 In 1985, the Berlin

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publishing house Neues Leben published the industrial novel Havarie (Disaster) by the Czech working-class author Jiři Švejda. while in 1988 the film distributor Progress-Filmverleih imported a feature film with the same title from the People’s Republic of Vietnam. In both works a fatal disaster in a large state-owned factory served as the starting point for stories about the responsibility of the individual toward the collective and their own family, as well as handling the discrepancy between proclaimed values and careerist opportunism that characterized daily life in “real-existing socialism.”23 However, the efforts went beyond merely ideological-educational measures. Rather than the unspecific, general promotion of “order, safety, and cleanliness” in the workplace, programs for the conditioning of the workforce gained greater importance at manufacturing plants with production and conveyance facilities where interruptions in production were not only particularly expensive, but also dangerous for people and machinery. In September 1979, the State Department for Standardization defined the following measures in its standard for “electric power plants”: “Anti-disaster training is the continual qualification of personnel with the goal of training all workers entrusted with the operation of systems in the main and secondary processes of electrical power generation in order to achieve sufficient responsiveness, avoid mistakes, and master developing events in incidents of disruptions and disasters.”24 Anti-disaster training systematically anticipated accident scenarios and rehearsed the measures to be taken in the event of an accident. Therefore, all conceivable variations had to be run through, above all steps to shut down highly complex sites with closely coupled aggregates and, if necessary, to bring them to a standstill in order to avoid endangering people and equipment at the production site (as well as in the surrounding area), and to minimize the costs of the stoppage. A further option to increase technical safety at production sites was to sanction misconduct. Prior to the Bitterfeld catastrophe, when large disasters occurred the SED state showed great reluctance when it came to punishing obvious violations of safety regulations uncovered during the accident-investigation process. In general, there was a tendency not to hold production workers accountable under any circumstances. This tendency was due to the need to break with the approaches of the capitalist past. Previously, factory owners had always sought to portray the workers’ subjective shortcomings as the only source of risk, in order to exempt themselves from material and moral responsibility for the risks inherent to production sites.25 After Bitterfeld, factory managers and engineers had to assume individual legal responsibility for omissions and errors that led to accidents involving personal injury. In the majority of cases, they got away with suspended sentences or a few years of imprisonment. A stark exception to the normally mild rule was the case of an engineer from the energy sector who in 1973 was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment and a 10.3-million-mark compensation payment after being forced, in classic Stalinist fashion, to denounce himself as a saboteur commissioned by the West.26

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The 1980s: A “Normal Accident” Paradise During the last decade of the GDR’s existence, economy and regime society relations were marked by accelerating decay—not just morally, but above all physically.27 It became evident that the economic strategy pursued during the 1970s under Erich Honecker of financing rising social benefits though credits from the world market (which, in turn, would allow investments to step up productivity in the near future) was failing blatantly. The GDR was more indebted than ever, and the distance between its and Western levels of productivity, particularly its pace of development, was rising steadily. Due to deteriorating revenues from international trade as a result of the second oil crisis in 1979, substantial investments in new technology had been postponed or canceled altogether. This led to a system of operating machinery in a wear-and-tear mode (“auf Verschleiß fahren”) or—to use the English term—in a delayed maintenance mode. This included restricting repairs to the bare minimum required to resume production in a short-term perspective, while dispensing for good with overall repairs of a given production facility, whose value had already been written off a long time ago. The longer the GDR existed, the more the country as a whole resembled a Perrowian “normal accident” paradise. This impact of this practice on the condition of the productive infrastructure of the GDR’s national economy can also be read as an indicator of the effective use of human resources. According to Lutz Wienhold, 15 percent of industrial labor hours were spent repairing machinery and on the sheer maintenance of production facilities by the end of the 1980s.28 Maintenance personnel composed about 30 percent of the active industrial workforce.29 While in 1980 the degree of capital stock deterioration in the production sector stood at 43 percent, by 1989 it had risen to 47 percent, and to 55 percent for machinery and equipment. In the last year of the GDR, the productivity of East German industry stood at two-thirds of its West German counterpart.30 The cost of these policies can be seen in Table 3.2. Most striking is the sudden increase of accidents and disasters in the early 1980s. Officials reported more than twice as many “accidents and disasters in facilities subject to mandatory monitoring” without any corresponding change in their jurisdiction.32 In contrast, the number of reported injuries did not increase on the same scale, and deaths even decreased slightly. The figures for the value of the damaged or destroyed production facilities fluctuate greatly among the double-digit sums, and two extreme incidents, which are described below, led to losses in the three-digit range in 1982 and 1987. The whole malaise of technical decay in East German industry is reflected in the production losses caused by accidents. These annual losses stood at or under 200 million marks of the GDR prior to 1981, then rose to a range of 300‒500 million in the middle of the decade, before sinking again in 1988 to 262 million. What had been achieved during the 1970s was a routinized and informed handling of occupational hazards by the workforce. This was due to educational

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Table 3.2. Accidents and Havarien in the GDR, according to SATÜ reports, 1977‒88.31 Year

1977

1978

1980

1981

1982

Total number

1,635

1,312

3,762

3,732

4,078

472

360

499

470

575

Of whom died

42

32

38

32

28

Damages in millions

37

77

43.6

40.8

148

196

117

188.2

203

339.2

Injured

Production losses in millions 1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

4,183

3,959

4,632

4,385

4,533

3,899

525

504

592

521

509

463

26

29

36

28

15

31

45

25.8

40

45.1

447.4

22

295.1

307

360

379.9

505

262.2

campaigns as well as the overall rise in levels of secondary education. In particular, the continual rehearsing of disaster prevention scenarios (Anti-Havarietraining) produced the desired results. Moreover, comprehensive medical care was offered in factories, in which doctors were given far-reaching authority to reassign individual workers to “cushy jobs” and thereby keep them away from positions whose risks they could not handle.33 However, this could not prevent spectacular Havarien altogether; instead, the nature of their risks changed. Industrial accidents became a risk to the country at large, jeopardizing entire infrastructures of energy distribution and leaving producers and consumers across the entire country without gas and electricity. A look at Havarien during the 1980s reveals two different examples of accidents that epitomize the specific characteristics of the GDR’s failure as an industrial nation: those hitting large networks of energy distribution and those hitting the most vulnerable parts of the East German labor force, namely conscientious objectors and prison inmates. The Gaskombinat Schwarze Pumpe (GKSP), situated in the industrial village of the same name in the district of Cottbus, was another of the many prestige projects of the GDR’s industrial policy. Founded in 1965 in the surface-mining area of Lower Lusitia, it processed brown coal to supply the GDR mainly with city gas, but also with lignite coal briquettes and other combustibles. It was one of the biggest employers in the industry, with a workforce of about fifteen thou-

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sand in 1980, and enjoyed an aura of heroism in its contribution to the cause of advancing socialist society.34 On 22 April 1982, one of four huge Rectisol columns (a process that separates various forms of gas in the process of lignite production) exploded. One worker was killed immediately and thirty-five others were injured, two of them severely. The Rectisol process drew the raw gas coming from a battery of reactors that extracted it from brown coal briquettes under a high-pressure steam-oxygen mixture. Each of these processes in itself was a routine operation in city gas production based on brown coal. According to the numerous experts called to the site of destruction, an exploding Rectisol column was an unforeseen risk. Obviously a large quantity of pure oxygen had “sneaked” into the Rectisol column before it detonated there.35 The Schwarze Pumpe incident differed from earlier disasters in several significant ways. Human injury was minimal in relation to the power of the detonation. However, the material damage went far beyond the 100-million-mark price tag for the destroyed production line. Schwarze Pumpe’s production site was part of an extended gas production line providing city gas for 45 percent of the country. Thus, the loss of gas caused huge economic losses for many small and medium-sized companies of the GDR, not to mention the suffering of private households in the midst of winter. The disaster’s immediate impact on a nationwide audience certainly contributed to its proactive handling in the party press and the speedy reconstruction of the Rectisol column by 1 June.36 The tempo of rebuilding was the result of the successful shift into emergency operation mode by management and the workforce alike. Unlike during the accident in Bitterfeld, it was the deputy general director who convened a special staff of managers immediately after the detonations to lead the rescue and recovery operations on the basis of a strict compliance with the disaster scenarios (Havarievarianten) developed and rehearsed for that purpose. The company’s party organization accompanied these efforts with continual political agitation, including a special cultural program and leisure time activities for the recovery and reconstruction teams, who worked in twelve-hour shifts for several weeks. As a result of the extended investigations by both the “official” expert commission and engineers consulted by the Stasi, the underlying technical cause—the connection of the sewer gas pipe system with the Rectisol columns—could be solved. However, the commission identified the poor quality of the instrumentation and control system to have been the decisive deficit in the entire production line: basic measuring and steering instruments were either lacking completely or had been failing on the day of the disaster due to the permanent shortage of maintenance resources. Moreover, “bad habits,” such as poor documentation and communication, had also played their part, as usual.37 “What are the four deadly enemies of socialism? Spring, summer, autumn, and winter,” went a popular joke in communist East Germany, and winter was undoubtedly the main enemy. During a very harsh winter in 1986/87, when the whole country was fighting the “heroic winter battle” against recurrent break-

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downs of the energy networks, a Havarie struck the Boxberg power plant in the southern part of Lower Lusitia, by far the GDR’s largest and most technically advanced electricity producer, on 14 January 1987. A huge electrical generator heated up and caused havoc.38 It jumped out of its axle bearing, destroying the hydrogen and oil-filled pipe system surrounding it. Immediately the entire factory hall and also a second generator-turbine bloc caught fire. This not only affected the country’s already critical energy supply situation, but was also the most expensive Havarie ever, with costs for reconstruction exceeding 400 million East German marks, not to mention the hard currency losses incurred for the electricity that needed to be imported from Austria via Czechoslovakia. No one was killed or injured. The technical failure was easy to identify: due to a lack of brown coal to produce steam for the turbine, the generator had been taken off the grid. The circuit breaker in a circuit breaker compartment some 50 km away from the power plant did not fully execute this operation, but rather reconnected the grid to the already-slowing-down generator, feeding it with electrical energy instead of being fed by it. This led to an increasing asymmetry of its rotation. Within only four minutes it heated up to 600°C, at which time the rocking colossus set the entire building on fire. Similarly to the Schwarze Pumpe event five years earlier, reports underlined the highly disciplined and unfailing reaction of the operating crew on site due to their years-long disaster training. Newspapers and political mobilization in the company’s party organ praised the workforce for their extra commitment to relaunching new generators by July and December.39 Again, the list of failures and persistent nondecisions by several managers within the Boxberg plant and in the hierarchy of the electrical industry was impressively long and detailed. The accident’s immediate cause, the icing of circuit breaker contacts, was not altogether new, but efforts to mend them had come to naught. Furthermore, the lack of sophisticated control instrumentation barred the grid manager from realizing that the powering-down operation had actually failed. In the end, the mistakes were covered up—too many managers had participated in the bad practice.

Bitterfeld: The Risk of Industrial Prison Work During the 1980s the years-long omission of investments in new production technology had turned companies like Buna and Bitterfeld into the dirtiest and unhealthiest workplaces in the German Democratic Republic. On top of this, these sites were surrounded by an exponentially degrading environment. In the 1980s, Bitterfeld became synonymous within the GDR for environmental pollution and degradation.40 For many of those who not only lived but also worked there, it was simply hell. In our final case study, we encounter a completely different configuration of work, technology, and risk, one in which the late socialist production regime reveals itself to have been a politically determined “system of organized irresponsibility,”41 with deadly consequences.

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It is no wonder that people tried to avoid employment in Bitterfeld’s factories, the worst in the county. Some simply moved elsewhere. As a consequence, positions in which toxic substances were handled, such as mercury, chlorine, and fluorine, became increasingly difficult to fill. Under communist rule the country could “solve” such problems by deploying its own brand of forced labor, of which there were two sources: “construction soldiers” (Bausoldaten, i.e., conscientious objectors who were allowed to do their military service without arms),42 and (mostly nonpolitical) prison inmates. As historian Justus Vesting has amply documented,43 some factories at the Chemiekombinat Bitterfeld (CKB)44 had already earned a particularly bad reputation by 1980 as an unhealthy work environment and were being deserted by “regular” workers. Prison workers there were exposed to doses of chemicals far beyond the legal maximum. The chlor-alkali-electrolysis plant was by far the most dangerous of these places because its amalgamation process needed mercury to produce chlorine, lime potash, and hydrogen. Due to the deteriorated state of the production line (dating from the 1930s), this highly toxic substance spewed massively through leaks and clefts to form little ponds inside the factory building, whose windows had been bricked over to protect the outside world. The severe degradation of the prisoners working there was clearly evident. It became a scandal that two of them had died as a result of their exposure to mercury in 1980 and 1981, which became public when political prisoners who had been released to West Germany after a bailout by the West German government reported on the horrendous conditions in Bitterfeld in Western media. These were not the only cases. The risk that the dire reality of socialist production would eventually be exposed to a global public finally materialized in January 1989, when the Stasi had to handle a lethal accident in the CKB’s aluminum electrolysis plant. Due to a complete lack of protective measures, working there meant risking exposure to highly toxic fluorine at temperatures of 60°C or higher while being in close vicinity to the fluid aluminum leaking from the melting furnace. During the morning shift on 14 January, one of the two smelting furnaces in the ingot-casting foundry exploded while being charged with melt material. Two workers were severely injured, and two others suffered minor injuries. One of the severely injured workers, who had operated the charging process, died a week later from his severe burns. The power of the explosion was extraordinary: the furnace (which measured 2.6 meters in width and 3 meters in length, packed into a 16 mm steel shell) was torn apart at its lower basement while the shockwave took off the hall’s entire roof. As a result, the aluminum foundry had to be closed down for two months. The cost of the immediate damage was put at 3 million East German marks; that of the daily losses due to interrupted production at 150,000 marks. The reason for this accident was simple. The use of the containers for the recycled aluminum as generic waste bins and the failure to ensure their dehydration before discharging them into the furnace had caused a steam explosion under extremely high pressure.45 Such safety problems in the aluminum foundry were famil-

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iar. A report by the OHS (Occupational Health and Safety) inspection team of the Halle FDGB cited a similar incident caused by humid melt material in 1977; however, the documented conclusions drawn from it had never been adopted by anyone in the chain of command.46 Since 1987, the permanent Stasi office maintained in the CKB had kept a chronology on the frequent incidents in which prisoners had been negatively affected by working conditions in the aluminum factory.47 In 1988, a group of twenty Catholic Bausoldaten had refused to work in the foundry and could only be motivated to do so after they were granted extra holidays.48 In his conclusion to the abovementioned report, the Halle OHS inspector named responsible individuals in the usual way: he accused the heads of the CKB department and the foundry section, the shift supervisor, and the safety inspector of serious infractions of laws and regulations and explicitly exempted “Werktätige,” that is, foremen and workers, from responsibility.49 The final report by the expert commission ruled out any possibility of assigning specific personal responsibility for the explosion because too many people had been jointly loading the containers over too long a time period and because of the lack of documentation of the containers’ actual content and “the multitude of contributing conditions that occurred in synchronicity, also due to a lack of regimentation.”50 The final report of the Stasi also stated “contributing conditions” and referred to “poor management and insufficient application of legal norms.” It noted that the district prosecutor of Halle, as part of his duty to supervise legality overall, intended to submit a protest to restore the legal status of the general director. They confined themselves to requesting that the OHS inspection initiate an “administrative sanction proceeding” against the managers of the aluminum works—however, not against the general director.51 There were good reasons for this. This sad situation in Bitterfeld’s aluminum production was well known at the very top of the GDR’s political hierarchy. Just seven months before the accident, none other than Comrade Böhme, first secretary of the Halle district committee of the SED and member of the Politburo, had urged the CKB general director in June 1988 to redress the untenable situation.52 As a CKB memo described in May 1988, the aluminum works had been operating since 1976 with exceptional permission issued by the Ministry of Health because the outdated technology made the observance of OHS norms impossible and aluminum was desperately needed by the GDR economy. This exceptional permission had expired at the beginning of 1987, after which the production of primary aluminum in Bitterfeld had taken place illegally—“for which the general director has to bear the full responsibility.”53 Of course, he did not actually have to do so. As long as the GDR existed, no general director and no high-ranking member of the planning administration or the party leadership had to face any charges for their responsibility in the inhumane deterioration of working conditions and the sometimes lethal consequences. That it was possible to operate the aluminum works in Bitterfeld illegally for three years while still accounting for its investments and output in the economic plan epitomizes the progressing decay of the GDR in its final years. Operating the tech-

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81

nology in delayed maintenance mode amounted to ruling the country in a permanent state of extralegal emergency. It is no wonder then that hundreds of thousands yearning for decent work under decent conditions not only turned their back on a nationalized, socialist economy, but also on the whole country in the summer of 1989. Behind the general desire for freedom and the prospect of prosperity in the West, dissatisfaction with working conditions and opportunities in the GDR ranked very high among the motives identified by the Stasi in September 1989 as an explanation for the mass emigration from the workers’ and peasants’ state.54

Against All Odds: Safety Made in the GDR and Its Improbable Survival The extent to which the GDR had generated scientific and practical knowledge concerning the assessment and avoidance of risk in the workplace and in production processes was revealed during the revolutionary year of 1990 and after the country ceased to exist. It is not without irony that, upon its accession to the Federal Republic in 1990, the GDR was, on paper, far ahead of West Germany in terms of legal norms concerning occupational health and safety. The current predominant narrative of the West’s “takeover” of the East is largely based on the idea of the one-sided and all-encompassing transfer of Western standards to the former East Germany. In the area of statutory regulations governing occupational health and safety, the situation was somewhat different. According to the beginning of Chapter VII (Labor, Social Welfare, Family, Women, Public Health, and Environmental Protection) of the Unification Treaty concluded by the two German states on 31 August 1991, “it shall be the task of the all-German legislator . . . to bring public law on industrial safety into line with the present-day requirements in accordance with the law of the European Communities and the concurrent part of the industrial safety law of the German Democratic Republic.”55 GDR standards continued to apply in the FRG as the result of a framework directive adopted by the EU in 1989 concerning the revision of the legal basis and standards of occupational health and safety. These corresponded more with the regulations in place in the GDR at the time of its dissolution than with the antiquated statutes of the former Federal Republic of Germany.56 The GDR’s governmental standards were “thus to continue to be available as a supplement to the body of rules and regulations of the recognized technical legislation in the Federal Republic.”57 The TÜV Nord, organized as a registered association and entrusted with responsibilities of public administration, was able without any problem to incorporate units and members of the GDR’s State Office for Technical Supervision.58 Those who take seriously the precarious cohabitation of the SED state and East German society as a variant of twentieth-century multiple modernities frequently come up against such perplexing examples of the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.” The divergence between a reality-based framework of norms

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and blatantly failing performance could be found in virtually all aspects of life. In itself, this is not unusual in modern societies. In a closed society, subjected to the because-nothing-can-be-that-must-not-be attitude of a party dictatorship, this tension assumed the quality of a collectively experienced schizophrenia. The vigilant avoidance of risk in the workplace on the part of the production worker was part of the social contract, as was the simultaneous wasting of material resources and thus the erosion of the common basis of prosperity. After Honecker took office, this situation was officially referred to as the “Unity of Economic and Social Policy”; unofficially people in the Eastern Bloc summed it up as “we pretend to work, you pretend to pay us.” Places of risk and open-ended risk management had no legitimate place in this world, where Sicherheit meant both security and safety, until this peculiar site of modernity was no more. Thomas Lindenberger is director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism at the Technische Universität Dresden, where he is also a professor. His fields of work include social and everyday-life history of twentiethcentury Germany and Europe, the history of film, the history of communism, and the history of the GDR. His publications include Volkspolizei: Herrschaftspraxis und öffentliche Ordnung im SED-Staat, 1952–1968 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003); and together with Alf Lüdtke, “Eigensinn: Espaces d’action et pratiques de domination”, in: Le Mouvement Social, 273 (2020) 4, pp. 67-89.

Notes 1. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, updated edn. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). This edition features a new afterword and a postscript on the Y2K problem. 2. See Thomas Lindenberger, “Havarie: Die sozialistische Betriebsgemeinschaft im Ausnahmezustand,” in German Zeitgeschichte: Konturen eines Forschungsfeldes, ed. Thomas Lindenberger and Martin Sabrow (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016), 242–64; Thomas Lindenberger, “Governing the State of Emergency: Large Industrial Accidents in Communist East Germany,” in Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945‒1989: Contributions to a History of Work, ed. Marsha Siefert (Budapest: CEU Press, 2020), 219‒43. 3. See several case studies for the late 1950s and 1960s in Lindenberger, “Havarie. Die sozialistische Betriebsgemeinschaft”; Lindenberger, “Governing.” See below for the change of meaning that the term “Havarie” underwent in the GDR. 4. Lutz Wienhold, Zwischen Anspruch und Wirklichkeit: Historischer Abriß zum Arbeitsschutz in der SBZ/DDR (Cologne: Grin Verlag, 2011), 232‒37. 5. Ibid., 276. 6. János Kornai, “The Soft Budget Constraint,” Kyklos 39, no. 1 (1986): 3‒30. 7. See Günter Grundmann, Manfred Klass, and Theo Liebau, “Einige Probleme des technischen Risikos im ökonomischen System des Sozialismus unter den Bedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Revolution,” Wirtschaftswissenschaft 16, no. 9 (1968): 1469– 76; Dietmar Seidel, Risiko in Produktion und Forschung als gesellschaftliches und strafrechtliches Problem (Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1968). On

Places of Risk on the Site of Socialist Modernity

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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the sad fate of cybernetics and game theory in the GDR, see Thomas Lindenberger, “Gesellschaft spielen? Überlegungen zu Kontingenz und Herrschaftspraxis im real existierenden Sozialismus der DDR,” in Spielen im Staatssozialismus: Zwischen Sozialdisziplinierung und Vergnügen, ed. Juliane Brauer, Maren Röger, and Sabine Stach (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2021), 19‒36 (here 24‒28). Ursula Wilke, Risiko und sozialistische Persönlichkeit (Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1977); Herbert Hörz, “Risiko und Verantwortung,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 36, no. 10 (1988): 873–84. Wienhold, Anspruch, 198, 267–68. Renate Hürtgen, Zwischen Disziplinierung und Partizipation: Vertrauensleute des FDGB im DDR-Betrieb (Cologne: Böhlau, 2005), 209–47. Steiner et al., Statistische Übersichten zur Sozialpolitik in Deutschland seit 1945, 140, as taken from the Statistisches Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (StJb), Das Gesundheitswesen der DDR. Lutz Wienhold, Arbeitsschutz in der DDR: Kommunistische Durchdringung fachlicher Konzepte (Hamburg: Disserta Verlag, 2014), 420. According to both East and West German experts, these figures are reliable. Ibid., 232; Michael Zschiesche, “Vergessene Umweltgeschichte: Störfälle, Havarien und Umweltunfälle in der DDR,” in Jahrbuch Ökologie 2002 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 235–41. See, for example, Erwin Gniza, “Zur Theorie der Wege der Unfallverhütung,” Arbeitsökonomik und Arbeitsschutz 1, no. 1 (1957): 62–76. Bundesvorstand des FDGB, Abt Arbeitsschutz et al., ed., Ohne Unfälle und ohne Havarien den Plan erfüllen: Wir lernen von der Sowjetunion—Erfahrungsaustausch mit Alexej D. Bassow, 2nd edn. (Berlin: Tribüne, 1974), 5, 9. See Thomas Reichel, “Sozialistisch arbeiten, lernen und leben.” Die Brigadebewegung in der DDR (1959‒1989) (Cologne: Böhlau: 2011). Bezirksvorstand FDGB Erfurt, Abt Agitation und Propaganda, ed., “Arbeiten ohne Unfälle und Havarien”: Offen gefragt—und klar geantwortet vom Moskauer Baubrigadier A. D. Bassow (Erfurt, ca. 1971), 3. Bundesvorstand, Ohne Unfälle, 13. See several untranslatable vernacular phrases in Saxon dialect in the German Wikipedia entry “Alexei Dmitrijewitsch Bassow,” https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Dmitrijew itsch_Bassow (accessed 24 June 2021). For reactions in the GDR to the Chernobyl disaster, see Melanie Arndt, Tschernobyl: Auswirkungen des Reaktorunfalls auf die Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die DDR, 3rd edn. (Erfurt: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2012), 67‒93. See Peter Hübner, Arbeit, Arbeiter und Technik in der DDR 1971 bis 1989: Zwischen Fordismus und digitaler Revolution. Mit einem Essay von Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk über die Arbeiter in der Revolution 1989/90 (Bonn: Dietz, 2014). A total of thirty-seven reviews were found, twenty-one of which appeared in 1973. Jiři Švejda, Havarie (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1985). The original Czech title Havária was published in 1975; Die Havarie (Lối rẽ trái trên đường mòn), dir. Huy Thanh (Vietnam, 1985), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq5ZZceGgGE (accessed 9 December2022). TGL 190-122, September 1979, Elektroenergie-Erzeugungsanlagen ANTIHAVARIETRAINING, Spezialarchiv Bauen in der DDR, https://www.bbr-server.de/bauarchivddr/ archiv/tglarchiv/tgl190-1bis190-x/tgl190-101bis190-200/tgl-190-122-sep-1979.pdf (accessed 25 June 2021). “TGL” stands in German for “technische Normen, Gütevorschriften

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

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und Lieferbedingungen”(technical standards, quality regulations, and delivery conditions) and represents the equivalent of the Deutschen Industrienorm (German Industrial Standard, DIN). See John Chynoweth Burnham, Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). See the case study by Thomas Lindenberger, “Eigen-Sinn im Chemiedreieck: Wie sich ein Ingenieur dem SED-Staat undienlich machte,” Mittelweg 36 30, no. 2 (2021): 105‒26. See Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). This section is partly derived from an earlier research report on the EU-funded project RESOCEA; see Thomas Lindenberger, “‘Havarie’: Reading East-German Society through the Violenc/se of Things,” Divinatio 42–43 (2016): 301–70. Wienhold, Anspruch, 382. Heike Knortz, “Bei Windgeschwindigkeiten über 55 km/h müssen 22 Gebäude aus Sicherheitsgründen von den Werktätigen verlassen werden,” Deutschland Archiv 43, no. 3 (2010): 462–70 (here 467). André Steiner, The Plans That Failed: An Economic History of the GDR (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 178, 183. Calculation based on Staatliches Amt für Technische Überwachung, 5 April 1979, Information über Unfälle und Havarien an und im Zusammenhang mit überwachungspflichtigen Anlagen und daraus resultierende volkswirtschaftliche Auswirkungen, BArchB, DF400/35/1 (n.p.); Staatliches Amt für Technische Überwachung, 19 March 1979, Information über Unfälle und Havarien 1978 bei überwachungspflichtigen Anlagen und daraus resultierende volkswirtschaftliche Auswirkungen im Bereich des Ministeriums für Kohle und Energie, BArchB, DF400/127/1 (n.p.); Staatliches Amt für Technische Überwachung, 29 March 1984, Bericht über die Entwicklung des Unfall- und Havariegeschehens in der Volkswirtschaft 1983 mit Schlußfolgerungen, BArchB DF4/20195 (n.p.); Staatliches Amt für Technische Überwachung, 16 January 1987, Schlußfolgerungen aus dem Unfall- und Havariegeschehen 1986 zur Erhöhung der technischen Sicherheit, Ordnung und Disziplin in den Kombinaten, BArchB, DF400/51/1 (n.p.); Staatliches Amt für Technische Überwachung, 7 February 1989, Schlußfolgerungen aus dem Unfall- und Havariegeschehen 1988 zur Erhöhung der technischen Sicherheit, Ordnung und Disziplin in den Kombinaten, BArchB, DF4/24044 (n.p.). Technische Überwachung, 7 February 1989, Schlußfolgerungen aus dem Unfall- und Havariegeschehen 1988 zur Erhöhung der technischen Sicherheit, Ordnung und Disziplin in den Kombinaten, BArchB, DF4/24044 (n.p.). Wienhold, Anspruch. Peter Hübner and Monika Rank, Schwarze Pumpe: Kohle und Energie für die DDR (Berlin: Deutsche Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1988); Günter Bayerl, ed., Braunkohleveredelung im Niederlausitzer Revier: 50 Jahre Schwarze Pumpe (Münster: Waxmann, 2009). Protokoll Nr. 17/82 Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED am 27. April 1982, Anlage 1: Expertenkommission zur Untersuchung der Ursachen der Havarie im VEB Gaskombinat Schwarze Pumpe, 19 April 1982, Bericht zur Ursache der Havarie in der Gasreinigungsanlage des VEB Gaskombinat Schwarze Pumpe, Stammbetrieb, am 22. 02. 1982, BArchSAPMO, DY30/J IV 2/2/1943, fol. 13‒49. See Neues Deutschland, 23, 24, 25, 26 February 1982 and 2 March 1982; and Tribüne, 24, 25, 26 February 1982. See also reports in the GKSP party organization weekly Sozial-

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38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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istische Zukunft: Organ der Industriekreisleitung Schwarze Pumpe der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands 27 (March‒July 1982). Oberste Bergbehörde beim Ministerrat der DDR: Spezialkommission, Schwarze Pumpe, 27.5.82, Bericht über die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung der Havarie vom 22. Februar 1982 im Gaswerk des VEB Gaskombinat Schwarze Pumpe—Stammbetrieb, BStU, MfS BVfS Cottbus OD Schwarze Pumpe 8211, fol. 233‒311. For the following, see Bericht der Untersuchungskommission über die Ursachen der am 14. 1. 1987 eingetretenen schweren Havarie am Block 13 des Kraftwerkes Boxberg, 21 January 1987, in the protocols of the SED Politburo, BArch-SAPMO, DY30/J IV 2/2/2205, fol. 23‒46. Neues Deutschland, 15 January 1987; Boxberger Energie: Organ der Zentralen Parteileitung der BPO der SED Großkraftwerk Boxberg (January–November 1987). Tobias Huff, Natur und Industrie im Sozialismus: Eine Umweltgeschichte der DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2015). See also the famous novel by Monika Maron, Flugasche (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1981). In 1985 an English translation appeared with the title Flight of Ashes. As the former Hungarian minister president Andras Hegedüs is quoted as saying in Rudolf Bahro, Die Alternative: Zur Kritik des realexistierenden Sozialismus (Cologne: EVA, 1977), 134. See Thomas Widera, ed., Die DDR-Bausoldaten: Politischer Protest gegen die SED-Diktatur (Erfurt: Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung Thüringen, 2014). See Justus Vesting, Zwangsarbeit im Chemiedreieck: Strafgefangene und Bausoldaten in der Industrie der DDR (Berlin: Links, 2012). Chemiekombinat Bitterfeld was the company created by the merger of Elektrochemisches Kombinat Bitterfeld and Farbenfabrik Wolfen in 1969. Abteilung IX, 31 January 1989, Information zum gegenwärtigen Stand der Untersuchung zur Aufklärung der Ursache der Havarie vom 14. 1. 1989 im VEB CKB […], BStU, MfS BV Halle Abt. XVIII 8, fol. 1‒5; see also the expert opinions in this file. Pfeiffer, Arbeitsschutzinspektor, FDGB-Bezirksvorstand Halle, [n.d., n.t.], BStU, MfS BV Halle Abt. XVIII 8, fol. (38‒50) 47–48. [Handwritten chronology from 3 January 1987 to 11 November 1987 and from 4 July 1988 to 27 December 1988], BStU, MfS BV Halle Abt. XVIII 1081, fol. 65‒72. Die katholischen Bausoldaten aus Bitterfeld, [n.d.], Fakten und Feststellungen zu unserem Einsatz in den Aluminiumwerken I und II des CKB, BStU, MfS BV Halle Abt. XVIII 1081, fol. 264‒68. Pfeiffer, Arbeitsschutzinspektor, FDGB-Bezirksvorstand Halle, [n.d., n.t.], BStU, MfS BV Halle Abt. XVIII 8, fol. (38‒50), here 47‒50. Abt. IX, Abt. XVIII, 8.5.89, Abschlußinformation zum Ergebnis der Untersuchung zur Explosion im VEB CKB […] vom 14. 1. 1989, BStU, MfS BV Halle, Abt. XVIII 8, fol. (88-92) 92. BV Halle, 16.5.89, to Zentraler Operativstab, Information Nr. 40.1/89, Ursachenermittlung zur Explosion mit Brandfolge mit erheblichem Sach- und Personenschaden im VEB CKB/Halle, BStU, MfS ZOS 3034, fol. 29. BV Halle, OD CKB, 13 June 1988, Operative Information, BStU, MfS BV Halle OD CKB 1309, fol. 60‒61. VEB Chemikombinat Bitterfeld, 26 May 1988, Auskunftsbericht/Lageentwicklung im Aluminiumwerk des VEB CKB und Entscheidungsvorschläge zur Gewährleistung der

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Produktions- und Arbeitssicherheit, BStU, MfS BV Halle OD CKB 1309, fol. (42‒46), here 42. MfS (9 Sept. 1989): Motive für Anträge auf ständige Ausreise. Hinweise auf wesentliche motivbildende Faktoren im Zusammenhang mit Anträgen auf ständige Ausreise nach dem nichtsozialistischen Ausland und dem ungesetzlichen Verlassen der DDR [Bericht O/225]. BStU, MfS ZAIG 4256, in Mark Schiefer and Martin Stief, eds., Die DDR im Blick der Stasi 1989: Die geheimen Berichte an die SED-Führung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2019), https://www.ddr-im-blick.de/jahrgaenge/jahrgang-1989/report/ motive-fuer-antraege-auf-staendige-ausreise-1/ (accessed 12 December 2022). Vertrag zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und der Deutschen Demokratischen Republiküber die Herstellung der Einheit Deutschlands—Einigungsvertrag, 31 August 1990, DC 20/6040, Bl. 33, www.bundesarchiv.de/digitalisate/DC20-19468/DC_20_ 6040/DC_20_6040_0035.jpg (accessed 10 July 2021). English translation at https:// ghdi.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=549 (accessed 28 October 2021). See also Wienhold, Arbeitsschutz, 434. This passage expresses “appreciation for the legal system of occupational health and safety implemented in the GDR” (Wertschätzung für die in der DDR vorgenommene Rechtsordnung zum Arbeitsschutz); the “closed set of regulations with its systematic approach certainly received recognition in the process of negotiations on the unification of Germany” (geschlossene Vorschriftenwerk mit seiner Systematik fand im Prozess der Verhandlungen zur Einheit Deutschlands durchaus Anerkennung). See Fritz Kochan, “Arbeitsschutz im Prozeß der deutschen Wiedervereinigung,” in Arbeitnehmerhaftung, Kündigung und Arbeitsschutz, ed. Frithjof Kunz, Joachim Michas, and Fritz Kochan (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1997), 230–86 (here 278–79). Ibid., 252. See Klaus Weber and Werner Witt, “Nach der Wende,” in Die Geschichte der technischen Überwachung in Norddeutschland, ed. TÜV-Nord-Gruppe (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2003), 69‒79.

Bibliography Arndt, Melanie. Tschernobyl: Auswirkungen des Reaktorunfalls auf die Bundesrepublik Deutschland und die DDR. 3rd edn. Erfurt: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2012. Bahro, Rudolf. Die Alternative: Zur Kritik des realexistierenden Sozialismus. Cologne: EVA, 1977. Bayerl, Günter, ed. Braunkohleveredelung im Niederlausitzer Revier: 50 Jahre Schwarze Pumpe. Münster: Waxmann, 2009. Bezirksvorstand FDGB Erfurt, Abt Agitation und Propaganda, ed. “Arbeiten ohne Unfälle und Havarien.” Offen gefragt—und klar geantwortet vom Moskauer Baubrigadier A. D. Bassow. Erfurt [ca. 1971]. Bundesvorstand des FDGB, Abt. Arbeitsschutz, et al., ed. Ohne Unfälle und ohne Havarien den Plan erfüllen: Wir lernen von der Sowjetunion—Erfahrungsaustausch mit Alexej D. Bassow. 2nd edn. Berlin: Tribüne, 1974. Burnham, John Chynoweth. Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Gniza, Erwin. “Zur Theorie der Wege der Unfallverhütung.” Arbeitsökonomik und Arbeitsschutz 1, no. 1 (1957): 62–76.

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Grundmann, Günter, Manfred Klass, and Theo Liebau. “Einige Probleme des technischen Risikos im ökonomischen System des Sozialismus unter den Bedingungen der wissenschaftlich-technischen Revolution.” Wirtschaftswissenschaft 16, no. 9 (1968): 1469–76. Hörz, Herbert. “Risiko und Verantwortung.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 36, no. 10 (1988): 873–84. Hübner, Peter. Arbeit, Arbeiter und Technik in der DDR 1971 bis 1989: Zwischen Fordismus und digitaler Revolution. Mit einem Essay von Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk über die Arbeiter in der Revolution 1989/90 (Bonn: Dietz, 2014). Hübner, Peter, and Monika Rank. Schwarze Pumpe: Kohle und Energie für die DDR. Berlin: Deutsche Verlag der Wissenschaft, 1988. Hürtgen, Renate. Zwischen Disziplinierung und Partizipation: Vertrauensleute des FDGB im DDR-Betrieb. Cologne: Böhlau, 2005. Huff, Tobias. Natur und Industrie im Sozialismus: Eine Umweltgeschichte der DDR. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. 2015. Kochan, Fritz. “Arbeitsschutz im Prozeß der deutschen Wiedervereinigung.” In Arbeitnehmerhaftung, Kündigung und Arbeitsschutz, edited by Frithjof Kunz, Joachim Michas, and Fritz Kochan, 230–86. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1997. Kornai, János. “The Soft Budget Constraint.” Kyklos 39, no. 1 (1986): 3‒30. Knortz, Heike. “Bei Windgeschwindigkeiten über 55 km/h müssen 22 Gebäude aus Sicherheitsgründen von den Werktätigen verlassen werden.” Deutschland Archiv 43, no. 3 (2010): 462–70. Lindenberger, Thomas. “Havarie: Die sozialistische Betriebsgemeinschaft im Ausnahmezustand.” In German Zeitgeschichte: Konturen eines Forschungsfeldes, edited by Thomas Lindenberger and Martin Sabrow, 242–64. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016. ———. “‘Havarie’: Reading East-German Society through the Violenc/se of Things.” Divinatio 42–43 (2016): 301–70. ———. “Governing the State of Emergency: Large Industrial Accidents in Communist East Germany.” In Labor in State-Socialist Europe, 1945‒1989: Contributions to a History of Work, edited by Marsha Siefert, 219‒43. Budapest: CEU Press, 2020. ———. “Eigen-Sinn im Chemiedreieck: Wie sich ein Ingenieur dem SED-Staat undienlich machte.” Mittelweg 36 30, no. 2 (2021): 105‒26. ———. “Gesellschaft spielen? Überlegungen zu Kontingenz und Herrschaftspraxis im real existierenden Sozialismus der DDR.” In Spielen im Staatssozialismus: Zwischen Sozialdisziplinierung und Vergnügen, edited by Juliane Brauer, Maren Röger, and Sabine Stach, 19‒36. Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2021. Maron, Monika. Flugasche. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1981. Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Updated edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1999. Reichel, Thomas. “Sozialistisch arbeiten, lernen und leben”: Die Brigadebewegung in der DDR (1959‒1989). Cologne: Böhlau, 2011. Schiefer, Mark, and Martin Stief, eds. Die DDR im Blick der Stasi 1989: Die geheimen Berichte an die SED-Führung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019. Retrieved 12 December 2022 from https://www.ddr-im-blick.de/jahrgaenge/jahrgang-1989/report/motivefuer-antraege-auf-staendige-ausreise-1/. Seidel, Dietmar. Risiko in Produktion und Forschung als gesellschaftliches und strafrechtliches Problem. Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1968. Steiner, André. The Plans That Failed: An Economic History of the GDR. New York: Berghahn, 2010.

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Steiner, André, Matthias Judt, and Thomas Reichel. Statistische Übersichten zur Sozialpolitik in Deutschland seit 1945: Band SBZ/DDR. Bonn: Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Soziales, 2006 Retrieved 6 February 2023 from https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/han dle/document/32260/ssoar-2006-steiner_et_al-Statistische_Ubersichten_zur_So zialpolitik_in.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y&lnkname=ssoar-2006-steiner_et_al-Statis tische_Ubersichten_zur_Sozialpolitik_in.pdf. Švejda, Jiři. Havarie. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1985. Vesting, Justus. Zwangsarbeit im Chemiedreieck: Strafgefangene und Bausoldaten in der Industrie der DDR. Berlin: Links, 2012. Weber, Klaus, and Werner Witt. “Nach der Wende.” In Die Geschichte der technischen Überwachung in Norddeutschland, ed. TÜV-Nord-Gruppe, 69‒79. Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2003. Widera, Thomas, ed. Die DDR-Bausoldaten: Politischer Protest gegen die SED-Diktatur. Erfurt: Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung Thüringen, 2014. Wienhold, Lutz. Zwischen Anspruch und Wirklichkeit: Historischer Abriss zum Arbeitsschutz in der SBZ/DDR. Cologne: Grin Verlag, 2011. ———. Arbeitsschutz in der DDR: Kommunistische Durchdringung fachlicher Konzepte. Hamburg: Disserta Verlag, 2014. Wilke, Ursula. Risiko und sozialistische Persönlichkeit. Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1977. Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Zschiesche, Michael. “Vergessene Umweltgeschichte: Störfälle, Havarien und Umweltunfälle in der DDR.” In Jahrbuch Ökologie 2002, 235–41. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001.

Filmography Die Havarie (Lối rẽ trái trên đường mòn). Dir. Huy Thanh. Vietnam, 1985. Retrieved 9 December 2022 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq5ZZceGgGE.

4 From “Black Sheriffs” to “Security Partners”? The Emergence of Private Policing in Public Spaces in Germany since the 1970s Marcus Böick

Sources of Risk or Producers of Security? The Contested Debates on Private Security Companies In April 2020, the German security industry seemed to be close to its political long-term goal. While unprecedented measures against the COVID-19 pandemic were being introduced all over the world, Securitas—a Swedish multinational firm with over 330,000 employees and the biggest private security provider in Germany—urged the federal and state governments to acknowledge the “systematic relevance” of the “security branch” during the pandemic: “Our security workers show passion and quality—guarding supermarkets, pharmacies, hospitals, or refugee camps—every day.”1 A few days earlier, on 26 March 2020, Catherine Piana, Director General of the Confederation of European Security Services, had issued a joint statement in Brussels emphasizing that private security “can support public forces” in areas where police and state officials throughout Europe were finding themselves dramatically overwhelmed by the task of enforcing all the new regulations and restrictions introduced to monitor and combat these new places of pandemic risk: “Cooperation and exchange of information [between states and companies] are crucial,” she argued, and private security “stands ready for an enhanced public‒private partnership in these challenging times.”2

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From a German perspective, a formal acknowledgment of the “systemic relevance” of the private security industry would be close to revolutionary in the field of domestic security. For its entire existence as a commercial business, starting in the early 1900s, the private security industry and its national interest groups had tried to obtain a legal status by way of a national “Security Service Law.” Unlike in many other European countries, German governments throughout the twentieth century—be it during the period of Imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist dictatorship, or the Federal Republic—had failed to pass legislation to officially acknowledge and extensively regulate the commercial presence and public role of these security companies.3 It seems remarkable that a private business sector would so urgently plead for stricter state oversight. Up until now, regulation in this field has been limited. Besides “everyone’s right” to self-defense in situations of imminent threat, there are very few provisions that regulate the right of policing on the part of private security personnel. Furthermore, the standards and obligations to create and run a security company and to qualify its staff are astonishingly meagre. This lack of state regulation and recognition seems surprising, especially in Germany, a country with a reputation for regulating vast aspects of public and private life. As this chapter argues, a closer look at the history of private security in late twentieth-century Germany shows that the relationship between private security businesses and state institutions (meaning politicians as well as the police) has always oscillated between conflict and cooperation in the interplay between the state, the market, and society, especially when it comes to providing security in public spaces.4 The mid-1970s in particular seem to mark a turning point in the public perceptions and political discussions related to private security and the industry’s newly obtained role in guarding and policing public spaces like local transport, airports, shopping malls, squares, or certain events. The perception of places like these changed during the 1970s under the impact of rising fears about terrorism and crime. During the long years of a seemingly never-ending postwar boom, these areas had been widely viewed as sites of modernity, economic growth, and welfare. But in the mid-1970s, these same public places and spaces turned into spaces of risk. This dramatic development happened not only in West Germany but also in many Western countries and led to an increased demand by the public and politicians for strong reactions and control. Thus, a new “security gap” was opening up that marked, as I argue, the emergence of a public‒private security market, which came to full fruition during the 1990s. This transformation from sites of modernity into places of postmodern risk during the 1970s resulted in a remarkable economic stimulus package for the private security industry. This widely perceived “boom” of private security as a commercial field was accompanied by an intensely debated “retreat” of the state and its police forces from such “risky” places. It fueled heated debates about domestic security throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In the public eye, the state monopoly on the use of physical force was under heavy pressure from endemic and seemingly uncon-

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trollable developments of international and domestic terrorism, as well as from soaring big-city crime rates that now seemed to threaten the places of everyday life. The controversially debated question was (and still is): do the emerging private security companies pose a risk by “privatizing” and commercializing sensitive state security tasks, thus transforming security and safety into tradeable “goods” for those who can afford them—or do they work as an efficient and professional alternative means to provide basic security services for the public, particularly in times of dire need?5 This traditional distrust and concern about the rise of private security and policing since the 1970s was especially widespread in Germany. It is this focus on the state as the sole provider of security that explains why private security companies and their histories have been neglected in German contemporary and economic history to this day. Private security is more or less considered, if anything, a secondary but undesirable phenomenon of the decline of modern nation-states. In our case, a nearly insurmountable obstacle to a broader perspective in the field of security seems to be the often traditional approach to state-produced archival sources and materials, which originated from the establishment of academic historical research in mid-nineteenth-century Germany and its close alliance with the (Prussian) nation-state. However, this picture is changing. Due to the impact of a series of terrorist attacks in European cities, research in the field of (public) “securitization” has made a remarkable comeback in Germany. Following the much-cited works of Eckart Conze and others in the 2000s and 2010s, these empirical studies focus on the state, its organizations, and their respective realms of discourse—particularly security politics, police, the military, and intelligence services.6 Broader historical and criminological approaches in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada are refocusing and analyzing the complicated and intertwined relationships between the “modern” state and other social or commercial providers of security. This may be a reflection of the fact that private security companies have enjoyed a longer presence and official acknowledgment in those countries, especially in the United States, where the notorious Pinkerton National Detective Agency paved the way with its disputed business model starting in the mid-1870s. This has also led to a richer research tradition about security production beyond the state up to the present day. In a recently published volume, David Churchill, Dolores Janiewski, and Pieter Leloup argue convincingly that the general historical assumption of a “secure state-based monopoly over the governance of crime, disorder, personal security, and risk (preceding the contemporary era of plurality, commercialization, and securitization)” should be questioned. Moreover, “historicizing private security” and other actors and forms of nonstate security production and provision in the era of the “modern” state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the transformations of statehood and its complex relations to economy and society.7 In this chapter, I focus on the discursive shift that occurred in debates on the presence of private security in risky public spaces in West Germany starting in the

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1970s. I will show how, in the last third of the twentieth century, private security companies transformed from a dangerous commercial or even “capitalist” threat to the state’s claim on the monopoly of the use of force into a widely acknowledged provider of professional security services. Firstly, I give a brief overview of the history of the private security business and its changing political and social framings since the late nineteenth century. Secondly, I highlight the accelerating debates focusing on private security from the mid-1970s and 1980s, when the “Black Sheriffs” of Munich became a highly disputed symbol of this emerging trend and when a novel type of private security guard was often depicted as a new source of risk, danger, violence, and inequality in public spaces. Thirdly, I move on into the 1990s and 2000s, when a growing professionalization and further expansion of private security companies also led to a new approach in security politics in unified Germany, in which public‒private security networks are now seen as a new and cooperative way of providing “efficient” security in “risky” places.

Private Security in Germany in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: An Old‒New Business Model between Economic Boom, Wars, and Crises The 1890s marked the dawn of a new business model in Imperial Germany. Ironically, it was a forceful state bid for the centralization and professionalization of the Prussian police forces in the mid-1890s that paved the way for a new private business sector by abolishing the system of night watchmen in most German cities and towns. This traditional form of municipal policing dated back to the late Middle Ages and was characterized by the nightly street patrols of men who watched out for open doors, suspicious circumstances, or unusual activities in dark streets and alleys. In the eyes of many politicians as well as the broader public, these elderly watchmen did not seem to be fit for the requirements of “modern” policing, which required combating new types of increasingly organized and professionalized crime (like burglary or theft) in the context of rapidly industrializing and growing cities. At the same time, the creation of a new state police force inevitably led to rising expenditures for qualified staff and modern equipment. Thus, certain policing tasks, especially the patrolling duties of private properties at night, now seemed too expensive and unappealing for professionally trained police officers.8 In the eyes of many contemporaries, this attempt to strengthen the state police forces in the growing cities led to the emergence of a new “security gap,” especially at night. Starting as early as the 1880s, new forms of private policing had evolved in different parts of Imperial Germany where the modern state abstained from direct intervention. In the Ruhr area, new types of private security militias (“Zechenwehren”) were operated by the rapidly expanding capitalist mining companies to suppress the growing unrest of the working class, which

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led to conflicts like strikes or occupations. Furthermore, new forms of public‒ private policing by private militias or mercenaries were introduced in the newly acquired African or Asian overseas territories, which were mostly administrated by (often very brutal) colonial “entrepreneurs.” Eventually, private landlords and shop owners in big cities like Berlin, unsettled by a growing fear of nightly theft crimes, started to form new “security cooperatives” to finance and organize their own night patrol services.9 These new developments enabled a new business model to emerge. After coming back from a trip to New York, the German businessman Lachmann N. Jacob founded the first commercial security company together with his partner Fritz Salomon on 15 July 1900 in Hanover, the Hannoversche Wach- und Schließinstitut. Inspired by the controversial but also extraordinarily successful business model operated by the Pinkertons and other US-based security firms, Jacob’s idea was to offer guard-patrolling services to private costumers (real estate, shops, small- or medium-sized companies) based on a subscription model. Just months later, the second German security company, the Kölner Wach- und Schließgesellschaft, was founded by Benno Koßmann. He started his security services with twelve guards. The following years saw a remarkable boom of such security companies. The business was now spreading to nearly every major German town. New firms were founded in Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Leipzig, Breslau, Nuremburg, and Düsseldorf in 1902 alone and quickly filled their ranks with guardsmen in shiny uniforms that often resembled those of the police or army. The overall demand for such guarding and patrolling services seemed quite remarkable and created fierce competition among the security companies. A huge number of advertisements appeared in every local press. At the same time, these companies also struggled for public and political recognition of their business as “honorable” and professional.10 This first boom period of commercial private security companies in Germany came to an abrupt halt with the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. The promising model of private security services was now in question as many guardsmen were conscripted by the German armed forces; at the same time, military officials started to strictly regulate the bearing of arms and wearing of uniforms in public for nonstate organizations. This caused a major crisis for many security companies, and they even started to recruit female guards to fill their ranks (e.g., in Berlin). However, the war itself fueled the demand for extra security services, especially after the “famine crisis” of 1916, which produced soaring rates of theft and other property crimes all over Germany. This was also true after 1918/19, when the newly established Weimar Republic was struggling to reestablish public order after the revolution at the end of the war. The following years of political conflict, economic crisis, social unrest, and cultural uncertainty led to new developments in the field of domestic security. With militias of the radical left and right on the rise, the troubled Weimar state police forces started to explore early forms of public‒private partnerships and to see the

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growing private security companies as a potential ally in bringing down rising crime rates. In 1927, the republic introduced the first nationwide regulation for the security industry, which defined professional standards and requirements for licensing new companies.11 At the same time, the economic shocks and downturns following the hyperinflation of 1922/23 and the international economic crisis after 1929–31 also posed grave challenges to a lot of security companies because they lost many of their customers and subscribers, most of whom had been private shop owners or smaller companies that had sought more individual safety in these risky times. After 1933, the advent of the National Socialist regime appeared to be another dangerous threat to the security business model. In their hatred of the “weak” Weimar state, many Nazi leaders strongly emphasized a strict centralization of state police forces, which put security companies under pressure. The standard black uniforms that many security firms introduced after 1927 were perceived by Nazis as mimicry of the symbols and colors used by the new regime’s emerging policing powerhouse, the SS. The Nazi state thus quickly tightened its regulations on uniforms, weapons, and business authorizations in 1934 and 1937. In the eyes of Nazi officials, the overall aim of eradicating crime in a racially reorganized and “cleansed” national community also seemed to render additional security services pointless beyond those of the new strong state. Furthermore, many security companies were run by German-Jewish businessmen who were now forced to sell or close their businesses. This process of “Aryanization” was accompanied by attempts of many security companies to adapt to the “Third Reich” and its nationalist and racial ideology. This process intensified after 1939, because security companies started to be involved in the “war effort” by guarding forced laborers for small- or medium-sized companies in different parts of Nazioccupied Europe.12 After 1945, nearly all security companies, their business networks, and their circle of customers had disappeared; many of them had lost their headquarters, files, and staff largely in the last two years of the war. In the early days of the occupational regime, the Allied forces did not like the thought of uniformed Germans bearing arms and guarding even smaller properties. The Allied authorities feared that many former Nazi policemen or soldiers who had been dismissed from public service would be attracted by such security jobs. Only when crime rates started to soar dramatically in the context of another menacing postwar hunger crisis in 1946/47 did Allied officers carefully relicense smaller security companies to provide additional security measures on a local level. After 1949, many security companies tried to revive their business networks. In the wake of the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, the West German security industry experienced a period of steady growth, as companies were contracted primarily to guard the prosperous corporate properties and industrial complexes. In the East, the story was different. In the Soviet occupational zone and later in the GDR the private security industry was completely wiped out by integrating it into the new communist state police forces.13

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“Black Sheriffs”: Professionalization and Scandals of Private Policing in the 1970s and 1980s For many of the security companies that were (re)founded in the late 1940s and early 1950s, this long-term postwar economic boom turned out to be a slow but steady return to the conventional security business models of the 1900s or the mid-1920s. Their mainstay of business was the offer of traditional patrolling and property-guarding services in nonpublic areas. Their staff was often recruited from the ranks of older policemen or military veterans. In 1964, the federal government passed a new regulation to replace the older decrees of 1927 and 1937. However, in the mid-1960s, another corporate “innovation” not only led to a fervent push toward new strategies and fierce competition, but also dragged this rather unspectacular, if even boring commercial field (which conjured up images of old, sleepy, and bored men guarding lonesome factory gates at night) into the limelight of public attention and even political debate: the invention and emergence of the “Black Sheriffs.” Again, it was a young businessman traveling through the United States who began to introduce a new “Americanized” style of “powerful” and “strong” security services to West Germany, or more precisely, to Bavaria. In 1964, Carl Wiedmaier, a burly Oh Do Kwan martial arts teacher from Bavaria, founded the Ziviler Sicherheitsdienst (ZSD) in Munich. After having studied the bigger US security companies on a trip to the States, he centered his own corporate philosophy around eye-catching and provocative appearances of his staff, especially in public places. Dressed up like American “cops” in black uniforms and driving around in big cars with a logo resembling those on US police vehicles, the ZSD recruits were well-trained young martial arts fighters from Wiedmaier’s own schools. The company educated them in “combat shooting” (although they were not allowed to bear guns on duty) and the use of militant “group psychology.” Aggressive marketing was one key feature of ZSD. The company’s claim that “we are not renting night watchmen” emphasized the new security company as it endeavored to capture a greater share of this new market at the end of the 1960s.14 This corporate innovation in Munich was accompanied by a remarkable shift in security perceptions and politics that initiated new discourses about and forms of domestic security production in West Germany. The 1970s saw the abrupt end of the seemingly never-ending postwar growth and stability as political conflict and economic crisis escalated all around the Western world. The decline of traditional industries like coal, textiles, and steel and the rising rates of unemployment accompanied by new forms of social inequality were intensely debated consequences of these dramatic economic shifts. They also shook the overall confidence in the nation-state as the main actor of planning and coordinating “progress” and development in Western societies. With the dramatic advent of deadly forms of inter- and transnational terrorism during the early 1970s—intensely covered by the mass media—the state as the main provider of security and its intelligence and police forces seemed to be overwhelmed by new threats.

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In the Federal Republic, the terrorist attacks on the Israeli Olympic team at the Summer Games in Munich in 1972 marked a turning point. Furthermore, an alarming series of left-wing terrorist attacks on leading politicians and managers in the mid-1970s, prominently carried out by the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), fueled a growing sense that the existing security system was failing. Finally, at the end of the 1970s, rising crime rates in large cities, often related to drugs or gangs, added to the notion that the state monopoly on security provision was on the brink of collapse.15 The changing perceptions of risk and danger, combined with a quickly growing demand for security and safety in what were now considered “risky” public spaces, like shopping malls, transportation, and squares, led to new business opportunities in the field of private security. During the 1970s, Wiedmaier’s ZSD increased competition in the field, causing more traditional security companies to despise him and his “ruffians” and accuse them of being “black sheep” who were spoiling the already precarious public image of the entire private security business. But the eccentric ZSD boss did not care. As a member of Bavaria’s dominating political party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), he was able to extend his private networks into conservative Bavarian state politics, which provided him with spectacular public security commissions in Munich. Beginning in the mid-1970s, ZSD men, quickly becoming known as “Black Sheriffs,” started to patrol the city’s subways, major squares, large new housing and commercial areas, and the Olympic Park. They immediately attracted media attention, first locally, then nationally. More and more, the sturdy and muscular men came to symbolize a new type of private security guards who were a far cry from the traditional sleepy old men or bored students of the “night watch.” Thus, critics—mostly on the liberal or left side of the political spectrum, but also from within the ranks of the police force—perceived them as the provocative personification of a new and dangerous private security regime, one that was forming “private armies” and selling its “goods” on newly emerging “markets of fear” exclusively to wealthy people who could afford this service.16 The brassy phenomenon of the “Black Sheriffs” highlighted the specific interplay of “selling security” in public spaces to a broader audience. The ZSD advertised its services aggressively by painting a frightening scenario of escalating crime in the neighborhoods of big cities that needed to be dealt with in a decisive and robust manner: “What is theft and vandalism today could easily become brutal assault or even manslaughter tomorrow,” warned a ZSD brochure in the late 1970s. This aggressive strategy of amplifying public fear of escalating crime rates and increasing danger in risky places was combined with a confident offer to counter such ominous threats to everyday life with a “strong” response. Where the state and its weakened police were said to be retreating, bold ZSD men could step in and reinstate security and safety. However, despite all the promises, Wiedmaier’s men were not a solution to the escalating problem of crime and violence in public spaces. On the contrary: as was regularly reported in the press, dullwitted young ZSD guards tended to provoke escalating acts of physical violence,

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especially against homeless people, youngsters, drug-addicted persons, or punks on the subway. Ironically, it now seemed to be the security guards themselves who posed a risk for people in these places. Wiedmaier’s energetic push for a spectacular “Americanization” of the security business in Bavaria attracted a lot of nationwide attention from the late 1970s onward. More and more, the “Black Sheriffs” became a negative symbol of an evergrowing and increasingly out-of-control “private security system” run by shady figures. Thus, in the early 1980s, the political debate on private security in Germany started to intensify in local, state, and federal politics. In another rather ironic twist, many leftist politicians from the ranks of the social democrats now started to defend a “strong state” that should equally protect all of its citizens, while their liberal or conservative counterparts found “flexible” and private solutions increasingly appealing and preferable to a bureaucratic and “overstretched” state, especially when it came to introducing new budgetary restrictions to cut back the costs of security forces that had been vastly extended during the tumultuous 1970s.17 In 1982, a special report on “the role of private security,” published by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, stated that the actual role of private security companies in public spaces was, in fact, still marginal. Besides the spectacular “Black Sheriffs” and a few new contracts in the field of airport or nuclear power plant security, the federal security experts concluded that these strictly regulated and state-controlled private security services were mostly operated by larger and more traditional security companies and did not seem to pose any relevant threat to the state’s monopoly on the use of force. While the public and political discourse on the dangerous “threats” of a new private security regime, especially in risky public places and spaces, was quite widespread, on a practical day-to-day level the role of private security companies seemed to be rather marginal and very limited in the field of domestic security until the end of the 1980s.18

Toward a New “Security Market”? Public‒Private Security Partnerships and the Transformation of Domestic Security Production in the 1990s and 2000s While the 1970s and 1980s were times of heated public debate and political discussion about a still relatively marginal but highly visible phenomenon, exemplified by the “Black Sheriffs,” the 1990s and 2000s were the decades in which an astonishing increase in public‒private partnerships between state and commercial actors occurred on a practical level in various areas. During these years, the entire private security sector started to boom at a staggering pace. In 1980, private security companies in West Germany employed 30,000 people, gradually rising to 50,000 by the end of the decade. After German reunification in 1990, this growth accelerated dramatically: from 56,000 (1990), the figure doubled to 120,000 (1995), and then soared to 145,000 by the end of the millennium. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, these numbers climbed to 170,000 (2004), which put

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the figure close to that of the state police forces, namely 250,000. This exponential growth is also reflected in the volume of business across the entire security industry, which rose from roughly EUR 250 million in the mid-1970s to EUR 650 million in 1985, jumping to EUR 1 billion in 1990, tripling to EUR 3 billion in 2000, and soaring to EUR 4 billion in 2003.19 This accelerated economic expansion of the private security sector in Germany was not just based on an increase of new public contracts. More traditional guarding and patrolling services for commercial or industrial customers continued to be the heart of most private security business activity. At the same time, many of these security services were now provided by quickly expanding national and transnational companies like Kötter or Securitas. These big players started to take over smaller, often family-run rivals and invest in high-end security technologies like surveillance centers. Yet this did not stop smaller security companies from attempting to enter the flourishing market. This was particularly the case after reunification in the eastern part of Germany, where many former East German policemen or intelligence agents set up their own private security firms to sell under the new capitalist conditions the knowledge and expertise they had gained during the repressive communist regime. In a way, these “Red Stasis” replaced the “Black Sheriffs,” at least for a time, as the most scrutinized and criticized “members” of the entire private security family in unified Germany. Like their Munich counterparts, they were not seen as a reliable provider of (additional) security, but as a potentially dangerous source of risk.20 Overall, the 1990s witnessed the remarkable emergence of an increasingly sophisticated “security market” that offered a wide range of actors, areas, services, and technologies to both private customers and public clients. As in the mid1970s, this rapid commercial expansion was driven and framed by broader social developments and changing public discourses on perceived dangers and security needs. After the surprising and abrupt end of the long struggle between Eastern communism and Western liberalism that had created the two German states and shaped Europe and the world since 1945, this new era after the alleged “end of history” (Francis Fukuyama) was not as peaceful as many had hoped it would be in the euphoria following the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the contrary, in the early 1990s, questions of domestic security and the fight against organized crime in cities and rural areas again became a major political battlefield. Increasing fears concerning new types of “professional” gang crime originating from the Eastern European countries led to a new sense of danger and insecurity. The level of public alert was sharply on the rise until the mid-1990s. While in the more rural parts of eastern Germany, many villagers and small-town residents started to organize militias and vigilante groups, in some larger cities in the west the inhabitants of wealthy urban neighborhoods began to hire private security guards at their own expense. Even the Guardian Angels—an unarmed vigilante group of primarily young men in shiny red uniforms founded in crime-ridden New York in 1979—started to patrol the Berlin subway in the 1990s, an event that was widely covered by the national and international press.21

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After all, the bigger picture in terms of domestic security seemed grim, and trust in the state and its security forces was being undermined especially by a widely debated rise in crime rates. Could security providers beyond the overstrained state be a sustainable solution to bring peace to these risky public and private places? The “markets” and “civil society” seemed to be a likely source of alternative security providers in times of dire need. During the mid-1990s, the political debate on crime and security was still following the lines of the conflict that existed in the late 1970s, but this time the arguments seemed to be far more specific and tied to practical questions concerning nonstate security providers. Leftist parties and police unions criticized the low standards of qualification for the often poorly paid security personnel, as well as the risk of rising social inequalities reflected in the emerging “gated communities” that were springing up. In addition, widespread forms of “vigilante justice” on the streets seemed to be a dangerous threat to the constitutional state itself. Yet at the same time, there were those, mostly conservatives and liberals, who praised the advantages of an open competition between different security solutions provided by commercial or civic actors. In their eyes, these new players could help the police with its “core” business, meaning that private or social actors could take over the often dull patrol shifts, leaving the police professionals to focus on “real” crime investigations.22 Unlike in the 1970s or 1980s, these debates had political consequences this time. In late 1994, the national conservative‒liberal coalition government specified regulations of the industry that required additional security checks on the staff hired by private security companies. This was accompanied by a new Verbrechensbekämpfungsgesetz (anti-crime law) that introduced new standards for the licensing of private security companies and set at least some modest standards for the qualification and education of their staff. In addition, many German states introduced political action programs for new forms of public‒private cooperation in the field of domestic security, like “citizen patrols” in public spaces. These measures were dramatically accelerated after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 when omnipresent fears of Islamic terror caused public alert levels to rise even further. In the 2000s, the German state actively engaged in new and manifold projects of systematically introduced “public‒private security partnerships” (PPSP) in order to have private firms support and assist police forces by guarding public places, events, or “critical” infrastructures like power plants, airports, transportation networks, or schools; even the privatization of prisons was considered, but then rejected.23 In total, these new PPSP strategies opened the gates especially for the bigger security companies to engage in a broader cooperation with state forces. But they did not lead to a simple “replacement” of state policemen with private security guards. Instead, a new public‒private security complex emerged, in which the state and its police still covered the core provision of domestic security but were now accompanied by a variety of commercial contractors or civil groups evolving from a new “security market” governed by supply and demand. The political controversy about a dangerous “Americanization” of domestic security by “private

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armies” underwent a final upswing in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, even the new national government, formed by a coalition of the Social Democratic party and the Green party, which had previously opposed the involvement of private security contractors, decided to support these new modes of public‒private security cooperation. Despite a few brief media scandals about misbehavior, right-wing networks, connections to organized crime, or fierce competition by wage dumping in the private security sector, the widespread presence of private security guards became a new normality in everyday life in Germany.24 Finally, these arrangements of extensive cooperation and “security governance,” in which the state and its police cooperated with and regulated nonstate actors on a broader scale, led to a sharp decline of another business model focused on force, conflict, and escalation, namely that of the “Black Sheriffs.” After another series of scandals following acts of violence committed against public transportation passengers during the late 1990s, the notorious “Black Sheriffs” of Munich began to lose most of their lucrative government contracts in Bavaria, and the company finally shut down shortly after the death of Carl Wiedmaier in 2013. Thus, a broader “normalization” of private security cooperation in Germany after 1990 also led to the dramatic downfall of the very firm that shaped the problematic public image of private security companies like no other.25

Conclusion: From Competition to Cooperation? Private Policing in Public Spaces since the 1970s Will this remarkable shift from blunt confrontation and scandals during the 1970s to a full-scale cooperation and coordination of private and public security forces be completed in the 2020s? Recently, Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer announced new plans: the political competence for the private security industry should be transferred from the Ministry of Economics to the Ministry of the Interior, thus acknowledging that the private security business, with its more than 270,000 employees, is a regular pillar of domestic security production and provision in present-day Germany. This could perhaps lead to a new federal legislation regulating this field in 2022. In fact, the struggle that many states, regions, and cities are experiencing in finding effective ways to control and enforce all the new social-distancing rules accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to a crucial push toward a wider political and public acceptance of this often-disputed business model. Will private security firms finally be seen as a “normal” but commercial means to produce additional security beyond the modern state—and not as a dangerous and risky phenomenon of its dramatic decline or “sell-off”?26 This question, one that haunted so many contemporaries throughout the twentieth century, cannot be answered easily. As has been shown here, the role and perception of private security businesses has been changing and transforming for the more than 120 years of the field’s existence. In recent years, the discourses

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have shifted away from confrontation and competition toward cooperation and coordination, with the “new” state acting as the central node governing a complex network of public‒private security partnerships, as Les Johnston and Clifford Shearing put it for the United Kingdom. Security should not be enhanced by strengthening state forces, as many leftist politicians had demanded from the late 1970s, but by introducing a more “open” interplay and “free” competition, with new actors like commercial security companies, as well as vigilante groups, which would support the state forces in their mission to provide (additional) security, especially in risky public and private places. While a “bureaucratic” and “overstretched” state was perceived as a major problem by many politicians and experts starting in the late 1970s, “dynamic” and “efficient” security markets could, in this view, prove to be a key solution. In the dawning age of “neoliberalism,” this shift in emphasis within the security discourse was also reflected by an exponential growth of public‒private cooperation on municipal, state, and federal levels in the 2000s. Despite earlier political confrontations and criticism concerning a “privatization” of security, this shift was also carried out by leftist governments, not only in Germany, but all over Europe, when confronted not only with organized crime, but also with a seemingly endless wave of Islamist terrorism that rendered nearly every public space a place of potentially fatal risk.27 All in all, there is much historical research to be done on the connection between “securitization” and “marketization” in a (post)modern age, especially when it comes to the changing ways that security and safety are perceived, produced, and provided beyond the state. Therefore, the largely unwritten history of private security companies in Germany, one oscillating between despised “Black Sheriffs” and praised “security partners,” should be put in a European or even global context. The international references and transnational relationships of different security companies and their interest groups have not yet been explored. Furthermore, a comparative exploration of different “national security cultures,” in which the German approach to private security is compared to other cases (like those of the United States, the United Kingdom, or even France, Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia), might provide us with many very different and new perspectives on this issue.28 Of course, the described “normalization” of private security in Germany from the 1970s to the 2000s is not a one-way street and clearly does not mark the end of the story. Especially from a long-term perspective, the German private security business has already experienced various up- and downswings in its eventful and ever-changing history. After all, the ongoing debate on the role and status of private security involved in the twentieth century, and still involves, a critical interplay between the modern state, capitalist markets, society, and different groups and individuals. Who should take care of risks and dangers in what fields and areas in order to provide a sufficient level of security and safety, and who should not? Is it a public task? Or could it maybe also be described as a commercial, social, or private endeavor? These remain open questions. The recent backswing to a “strong” state approach in 2020, when many national governments literally

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cut off transnational or global connections overnight, underlines the contingency and openness of this storyline. The emerging model of public‒private “security governance” was already described (and criticized) by Les Johnston and Clifford Shearing in 2003 with regard to the United Kingdom. Even some years earlier, David Garland identified this tendency as a general shift toward a new and “neoliberal” security regime of “responsibilization” within the Western world that made individuals responsible for providing for their own safety.29 This reasoning was also echoed by Zygmunt Bauman in the mid-2000s when he described the category of “liquid fear” as a new signature of a postmodern age. In Bauman’s view, the nation-state has lost its ability to “deliver on its promise [to] protect its subjects against threats to their existence,” which was the main reason that it historically had a “claim to citizens’ obedience on the promise to protect its subjects against threats to their existence.” But in the late twentieth-century context “of the fast globalizing and increasingly extraterritorial markets,” the state had started to shift its “emphasis on ‘fear protection’ from dangers to social security to the dangers of personal safety.” To manage this development, it has to “subsidiarize . . . the battle against fears ‘down’ to the realm of individually run and managed ‘life politics,’ while simultaneously contracting out the supply of battle weapons to the consumer markets.” The rising bundle of fears and risks concerning climate change, natural disasters, crime, and terrorism in the age of neoliberal globalism and digitalization are, in Bauman’s interpretation, not manageable by the (nation-)state alone. Thus, these broader processes gave way to an accelerating privatization and individualization of security and safety beyond the state’s power—thus also providing perfect conditions for private security businesses in postmodern configurations.30 Following Bauman’s lines of interpretation, the described development of the private security industry could also be seen as a “great transformation” from a modern security statehood, with the state and its forces at a core position, into something new that could be seen as a “fluid” configuration of different collectives and individuals negotiating perceptions of and reactions to different threats and dangers. It is worth noting that this “opening,” or better, commercialization, marketization, or privatization of the field of security production and provision was and actually is closely connected to the emergence of modern capitalism itself. In the United States, traditionally by far the largest private security market in the Western world, this process had already started in the 1870s, when private security companies established this commercial business model, long before a public or state safety infrastructure was established, within the “open” Western frontier society, where sites of modernity and “progress” and places of risk and “danger” fell into one, as Wilbur Miller has convincingly pointed out.31 Significantly, it took about one hundred years for private security companies to make a significant entrance into public places in continental Europe, with its traditionally strong emphasis on a “pure” state monopoly of physical force. One could ask whether the rise of a new type of transnational or even global “security capitalism” that started to enter the public sphere during the dawn of a new “risk

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society,” as Ulrich Beck prominently put it in the mid-1980s, was merely a result or even a driving force of this development. But these diagnosed “risks” of a new postmodern era not only materialized in a global sphere and on a “macro” level, but also started to materialize in distinct public areas and private places where “self-responsible” individuals now faced possible threats of terrorism, crime, or violence. These “micro levels” of danger and security, as Alison Wakefield has argued in her analysis of private policing in British shopping malls, were now transformed into sites of a new configuration of public‒private risk governance. Starting in the mid-1970s, private security companies visibly began to enter these new places of risk—providing additional security, in the eyes of their advocates, or becoming another source of even more danger according to their critics. However, these everyday discourses and practices of security production beyond the state blurred the boundaries not only between public and private and modernism and postmodernism, but also between states, markets, societies, groups, and individuals.32 Marcus Böick is Post-Doc Researcher and Lecturer in the field of contemporary history at the Historical Institute of the Ruhr-University Bochum. His current project analyses the history of the German private security business since the late nineteenth century in its transnational contexts. He obtained his PhD in history in 2016 from the University of Bochum. His thesis dealt with the transformation of the socialist planned economy operated by the Treuhandanstalt in eastern Germany after 1990. Previously, he was awarded a PhD scholarship by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship in Berlin. Besides his interest in different European and American security regimes, his research is focused on the history of post-socialist transformations, the history of organizations, and the histories of privatization and marketization.

Notes 1. Securitas Deutschland, Press Statement: Sicherheitsbranche als systemrelevant anerkennen, Berlin, 13 April 2020, https://aswnord.de/fileadmin/user_upload/2020-04-13-sich erheitsbranche-systemrelevant.pdf (accessed 12 December 2022). 2. Confederation of European Security Services, Press Statement: Observations and Recommendations on the COVID-19 Situation, Brussels, 26 March 2020, https://www.coess .org/newsroom.php?news=Observations-and-Recommendations-on-the-COVID-19Situation-from-the-Private-Security-Sector (accessed 12 December 2022). 3. Rolf Stober, “Zur Neuregulierung der Sicherheitswirtschaft—Ein altes Thema im neuen Gewand,” Zeitschrift für das Gesamte Sicherheitsrecht 3 (2020): 141‒92. 4. Marcus Böick, “Ökonomisierung des Gewaltmonopols? Die Sicherheitswirtschaft und die Privatisierung öffentlicher Sicherheitsaufgaben seit den 1970er Jahren,” in Ökonomisierung: Debatten und Praktiken in der Zeitgeschichte, ed. Rüdiger Graf (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019), 139‒65. 5. Erhard Eppler, Vom Gewaltmonopol zum Gewaltmarkt? Die Privatisierung und Kommerzialisierung der Gewalt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).

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6. Eckart Conze, Geschichte der Sicherheit: Entwicklung – Themen – Perspektiven (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018); Cornel Zwierlein, “Sicherheitsgeschichte: Ein neues Feld der Geschichtswissenschaften,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012): 365‒86. 7. David Churchill, Dolores Janiewski, and Peter Leloup, eds., Private Security and the Modern State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2020), 3. 8. Ralph Jessen, Polizei im Industrierevier: Modernisierung und Herrschaftspraxis im westfälischen Ruhrgebiet 1848‒1914 (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991); Richard J. Evans, “Polizei, Politik und Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1700‒1933,” Geschichte & Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 609‒28; Timo Luks, Schiffbrüchige des Lebens: Polizeidiener und ihr Publikum im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlan Verlag, 2019). 9. Tanja Bührer, Die Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika: Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und transkulturelle Kriegführung, 1885 bis 1918 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011); Amerigo Caruso, “Joining Forces Against ‘Strike Terrorism’: The Public‒Private Interplay in Policing Strikes in Imperial Germany, 1890–1914,” European History Quarterly 49, no. 4 (2019): 597–624; Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014); Jakob Zollmann, Koloniale Herrschaft und ihre Grenzen: Die Kolonialpolizei in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894–1915 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010). 10. Erich Kupferschmidt and Thomas Menzel, Geschichten eines Sicherheitsunternehmens (Berlin: Securitas Deutschland, 2013). 11. Sigmund Nelken, Das Bewachungsgewerbe: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Selbstschutzes (Berlin: Verlag der Wach- und Schließ-Gesellschaft, 1926); Klaus Weinhauer, “Protest, kollektive Gewalt und Polizei in Hamburg zwischen Versammlungsdemokratie und staatlicher Sicherheit ca. 1890‒1933,” in Gewalt in europäischen Großstädten im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Friedrich Lenger (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), 69‒103. 12. Klaus Kapinos, “Entwicklung des Bewachungsgewerbes unter den Nationalsozialisten von 1933‒1945” (Hamburg: unpublished manuscript, 2018); Patrick Wagner, “Der Kern des völkischen Maßnahmenstaates—Rolle, Macht und Selbstverständnis der Polizei im Nationalsozialismus,” in Die Polizei im NS-Staat, ed. Wolfgang Schulte (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft, 2009), 23–48. 13. Kupferschmidt and Menzel, Geschichten. 14. “In Sachen Sicherheit,” Die Zeit 41, October 1975; “Töten wir auch?” Der Spiegel 14, March 1977. 15. Eckart Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart (Munich: Siedler, 2009); Achim Saupe, “Von ‘Ruhe und Ordnung’ zur ‘inneren Sicherheit’: Eine Historisierung gesellschaftlicher Dispositive,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 7 (2010): 170‒87. 16. Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem, “Übergang der Polizeigewalt auf Private? Überlegungen zur Entwicklung gewerblicher Sicherheitskräfte,” Zeitschrift für Rechtspolitik 9, no. 11 (1977): 277‒84. 17. Böick, “Ökonomisierung.” 18. Bundesministerium des Innern, “Bericht zur privaten Wahrnehmung von Wach- und Sicherheitsaufgaben,” Innere Sicherheit 64 (1982): 28‒38; Lothar Mahlberg, Gefahrenabwehr durch gewerbliche Sicherheitsunternehmen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988). 19. Bundesverband der Deutschen Sicherheitswirtschaft, Sicherheitswirtschaft in Deutschland (Berlin: Eigenverlag, 2020). 20. “Nickerchen im Auto,” Der Spiegel 40, September 1992. 21. “Umstrittene Engel,” Focus, September 1993.

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22. Daniela Klimke, Wach- & Schließgesellschaft Deutschland: Sicherheitsmentalitäten in der Spätmoderne (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008). 23. Benno Kirsch, Private Sicherheitsdienste im öffentlichen Raum (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2003); Sabina Schmidt, Das expandierende private Sicherheitsgewerbe: Droht der Verlust des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols im öffentlichen Raum? Eine Analyse für das Land (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2004). 24. Karl-Uwe Fratzky, Ökonomisierung der polizeilichen Gefahrenabwehr (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovač, 2013). 25. “Schnell und knallhart in München: Die Schwarzen Sheriffs in blau,” Abendzeitung, 13 February 2018. 26. Eppler, Gewaltmonopol; Wolf-Dieter Narr, “Der Markt der Sicherheit, das Gewaltmonopol des Staates und die Bürgerreichte,” Bürgerrechte & Polizei 43 (1992): 6‒13. 27. Mark Button, Private Policing (Cullompton: Willan, 2019); Les Johnston and Clifford Shearing, Governing Security: Explorations in Policing and Justice (London: Routledge, 2003). 28. Churchill et al., Private Security; Christopher Daase, “Wandel der Sicherheitskultur,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 50 (2010): 9‒16. 29. David Garland, “The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society,” The British Journal of Criminology 36 (1996): 445‒71; Johnston and Shearing, Governing Security. 30. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4. 31. Wilbur R. Miller, A History of Private Policing in the United States (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 32. Rita Abrahamsen, Security beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); Aleyandra Schwell and Katharina Eisch-Angus, eds., Der Alltag der (Un-) Sicherheit: Ethnografisch-kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf die Sicherheitsgesellschaft (Berlin: Panama Verlag, 2018).

Bibliography Abrahamsen, Rita. Security beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992. Bundesministerium des Innern. “Bericht zur privaten Wahrnehmung von Wach- und Sicherheitsaufgaben.” Innere Sicherheit 64 (1982): 28‒38. Bundesverband der Deutschen Sicherheitswirtschaft. Sicherheitswirtschaft in Deutschland. Berlin: Eigenverlag, 2020. Böick, Marcus. “Ökonomisierung des Gewaltmonopols? Die Sicherheitswirtschaft und die Privatisierung öffentlicher Sicherheitsaufgaben seit den 1970er Jahren.” In Ökonomisierung: Debatten und Praktiken in der Zeitgeschichte, edited by Rüdiger Graf, 139‒65. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2019. Bührer, Tanja. Die Kaiserliche Schutztruppe für Deutsch-Ostafrika: Koloniale Sicherheitspolitik und transkulturelle Kriegführung, 1885 bis 1918. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011. Button, Mark. Private Policing. Cullompton: Willan, 2019.

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Caruso, Amerigo. “Joining Forces Against ‘Strike Terrorism’: The Public‒Private Interplay in Policing Strikes in Imperial Germany, 1890–1914.” European History Quarterly 49, no. 4 (2019): 597–624. Churchill, David, Dolores Janiewski, and Peter Leloup, eds. Private Security and the Modern State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2020. Conze, Eckart. Die Suche nach Sicherheit: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart. Munich: Siedler, 2009. ———. Geschichte der Sicherheit. Entwicklung—Themen—Perspektiven. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018. Daase, Christopher. “Wandel der Sicherheitskultur.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 50 (2010): 9‒16. Eppler, Erhard. Vom Gewaltmonopol zum Gewaltmarkt? Die Privatisierung und Kommerzialisierung der Gewalt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Evans, Richard J. “Polizei, Politik und Gesellschaft in Deutschland 1700‒1933.” Geschichte & Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 609‒28. Fratzky, Karl-Uwe. Ökonomisierung der polizeilichen Gefahrenabwehr. Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovač, 2013. Garland, David. “The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society.” The British Journal of Criminology 36 (1996): 445‒71. Hoffmann-Riem, Wolfgang. “Übergang der Polizeigewalt auf Private? Überlegungen zur Entwicklung gewerblicher Sicherheitskräfte.” Zeitschrift für Rechtspolitik 9, no. 11 (1977): 277‒84. Jessen, Ralph. Polizei im Industrierevier: Modernisierung und Herrschaftspraxis im westfälischen Ruhrgebiet 1848‒1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Johnston, Les. The Rebirth of Private Policing. London: Routledge, 1992. Johnston, Les, and Clifford Shearing. Governing Security: Explorations in Policing and Justice. London: Routledge, 2003. Kapinos, Klaus. “Entwicklung des Bewachungsgewerbes unter den Nationalsozialisten von 1933‒1945.” Hamburg: unpublished manuscript, 2018. Kirsch, Benno. Private Sicherheitsdienste im öffentlichen Raum. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2003. Klimke, Daniela. Wach- & Schließgesellschaft Deutschland: Sicherheitsmentalitäten in der Spätmoderne. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008. Kupferschmidt, Erich, and Thomas Menzel. Geschichten eines Sicherheitsunternehmens. Berlin: Securitas Deutschland, 2013. Leloup, Pieter. “The Private Security Industry in Antwerp (1907‒1934): A Historical-Criminological Analysis of its Modus Operandi and Growth.” Crime, History & Societies 19 (2015): 119‒47. Luks, Timo. Schiffbrüchige des Lebens: Polizeidiener und ihr Publikum im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2019. Mahlberg, Lothar. Gefahrenabwehr durch gewerbliche Sicherheitsunternehmen. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1988. Miller, Wilbur R. A History of Private Policing in the United States. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Moyd, Michelle R. Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014. Narr, Wolf-Dieter. “Der Markt der Sicherheit, das Gewaltmonopol des Staates und die Bürgerreichte.” Bürgerrechte & Polizei 43 (1992): 6‒13.

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Nelken, Sigmund. Das Bewachungsgewerbe: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Selbstschutzes. Berlin: Verlag der Wach- und Schließ-Gesellschaft, 1926. O’Hara, S. Paul. Inventing the Pinkertons: Or, Spies, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Plumpe, Werner. Das Kalte Herz: Kapitalismus—Die Geschichte einer andauernden Revolution. Berlin: Rowolt, 2019. Saupe, Achim. “Von ‘Ruhe und Ordnung’ zur ‘inneren Sicherheit’: Eine Historisierung gesellschaftlicher Dispositive.” Zeithistorische Forschungen 7 (2010): 170‒87. Schmidt, Sabina. Das expandierende private Sicherheitsgewerbe: Droht der Verlust des staatlichen Gewaltmonopols im öffentlichen Raum? Eine Analyse für das Land. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2004. Schwell, Alexandra, and Katharina Eisch-Angus, eds. Der Alltag der (Un-) Sicherheit: Ethnografisch-kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf die Sicherheitsgesellschaft. Berlin: Panama Verlag, 2018. Stober, Rolf. “Zur Neuregulierung der Sicherheitswirtschaft—Ein altes Thema im neuen Gewand.” Zeitschrift für das Gesamte Sicherheitsrecht 3 (2020): 141‒92. Wakefield, Alison. Selling Security: The Private Policing of Public Space. London: Willan, 2015. Wagner, Patrick. “Der Kern des völkischen Maßnahmenstaates—Rolle, Macht und Selbstverständnis der Polizei im Nationalsozialismus.” In Die Polizei im NS-Staat, edited by Wolfgang Schulte, 23–48. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft, 2009. Weinhauer, Klaus. “Protest, kollektive Gewalt und Polizei in Hamburg zwischen Versammlungsdemokratie und staatlicher Sicherheit ca. 1890‒1933.” In Gewalt in europäischen Großstädten im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by Friedrich Lenger, 69‒103. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013. Zollmann, Jakob. Koloniale Herrschaft und ihre Grenzen: Die Kolonialpolizei in Deutsch-Südwestafrika 1894–1915. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Zwierlein, Cornel. “Sicherheitsgeschichte: Ein neues Feld der Geschichtswissenschaften.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38 (2012): 365‒86.

5 Risky Housing Squatting in London and Hamburg in the 1970s and Early 1980s Christine G. Krüger

It is a common belief that the 1970s were an epochal threshold, labeled the “end of modernity.” However, there is still no consensus on what to call the new period that has followed it other than the “beginning of the present.”1 It is possible to identify a host of social, cultural, and political developments that continue to be very pressing concerns and have, as a whole, contributed to the spread of the feeling that we are living in an era of “new uncertainty.” Issues of security and risk have come to play a prominent role, and we have seen the emergence of new security cultures. First, the economic crisis of 1973 and increasing environmental concerns generated a growing skepticism toward the traditional belief in progress. Economic decline involved what was soon perceived as a “crisis of the welfare state.” Second, new technologies not only opened opportunities for worldwide communication and travel but also raised the consciousness of global interdependence and vulnerability: “the shock of the global” overrode traditional security mechanisms.2 Third, at least for many Western countries, but also for other parts of the world, the 1970s were a period of profound cultural change or what came to be called “value change.” This term has played a considerable although contested role in German historiography in that it describes the trend toward a greater valorization of individualism and self-realization. Challenging traditional value systems, this process of individualization is argued to have created further feelings of insecurity. 3 It is widely held that these transformations resulted in tightened state surveillance and more comprehensive security policies. For example, Zygmunt Bauman characterized our present time as a growing divergence or juxtaposition of security

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and freedom.4 Referring to Ulrich Beck’s famous diagnosis of the “risk society,” Bauman explains this development by pointing to the fact that globalization has stripped the nation-state of its traditional power to protect.5 Interesting for our context is that Bauman identifies the urban unrest in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s as the beginning of what he calls “liquid fear” in times of “liquid modernity.” Quoting the sociologist Sharon Zukin, he identifies this period as a “watershed” for the relationship between freedom and security.6 Bauman’s writings on security and surveillance are full of sophisticated and insightful observations on the developments of recent years. However, this chapter argues that we should be cautious when projecting present-day interpretations of globalization onto the 1970s and early 1980s. The metaphor of a “watershed” implies an irreversible change coming about with the inevitability of a natural force. This does not adequately characterize the transformations of security cultures in the 1970s. In hindsight, it is easy to highlight developments that have apparently led to critical problems in the present and to overlook the openness and diversity of the past. Moreover, the argument here is that we should more precisely differentiate among the various developments that shaped the 1970s. Their simultaneity and their indisputable interrelations invite generalizations. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that they provoked highly different outcomes. Against this backdrop, it will be argued that it would be one-sided to characterize the changing security cultures of the 1970s by an increasing reliance on surveillance and “neoliberal” security practices alone. The squatters’ movement is an adequate test case for the analysis of changing security cultures in the 1970s, because the squatted house was a new site of risk emerging during this decade. Moreover, it is closely related to the different developments that are usually considered key factors of the transformation during the decade. Three strands of interpretation shape the recent historiography on the squatters’ movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The first focuses on youth culture, highlighting the squatters’ attempts to open up spaces for self-realization and develop individual lifestyles.7 The second presents the squatting movement as a transnational phenomenon par excellence and part of a European, if not global, movement against capitalism.8 Thus, squatters may appear as early antiglobalization protesters. The third, as found in some studies in Britain, analyzes the movement in the context of the history of the welfare state.9 Focusing on the cities of Hamburg and London during the 1970s and early 1980s, this chapter analyzes two important branches of the squatters’ movement. With the aim of contributing to the overall objective of this book, that is, to shed light on the relationship between changing security cultures and modernity, the comparative framework may lead to an emphasis on similarities rather than divergences. Certainly the transnationality of the squatters’ movements and their almost-simultaneous emergence all over Europe are factors that emphasize their similarity.10 However, the aim of this chapter is to examine the differences between these two cases more closely, which is indeed a more challenging task and allows us to examine the specifics of different security cultures.

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It is not the objective here to carry out a comprehensive comparison or to provide the basis for delineating British and German squatters’ movements, or even a British or German security culture. Nor does this chapter cover the entirety of the squatters’ movement in either city. Instead, the focus on these two particular branches of the movement is meant to illustrate the breadth and diversity of the phenomenon in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, if we keep this in mind, we may still find it possible to identify some national particularities. For Hamburg, the focus is on residential squats, while squats for other types of use, such as the occupation of empty buildings with the aim of establishing new youth centers, are not part of the study.11 For London, the analysis concentrates on the family squatters who initiated the movement and continued to make up a large part of it throughout the 1970s. In the middle of the 1970s, more and more people—often young singles or couples with middle-class backgrounds— started squatting in order to experience an alternative way of (communal) life, and certainly it could be argued that, compared with the family squatters, they shared more characteristics with the Hamburg movement, although with a different degree of militancy.12 There is no evidence indicating how many squatters were in each of the different types in London, but according to contemporary estimations and survey data from the middle of the 1970s, a third or even the majority of the squatters were family squatters.13 Despite the large number of family squatters, to this day most historiographic attention has focused on the alternative youths. This is partly explained by the general historiographic interest in the alternative counterculture.14 Furthermore, students made up a large part of this more recent type of squatter, and undoubtedly some historians feel attracted to the topic because they had some sort of relationship to the movement when they were young or even squatted themselves.15 By shifting the spotlight to the family squatters, this dominant image of squatting as alternative youth-driven activism might indeed be modified to some degree. However, the choice to examine family squatters is motivated first and foremost by the fact that this branch of the movement is more useful as a complement to the Hamburg squatters in illustrating the breadth of security concepts in relation to squatting.

The Squatters In what sense can we regard the squat as a “place” or “site of risk,” and what can we learn about security cultures from the analysis of squatting? In response to this question, it might appear obvious first to think of the statutory reactions to—or against—the squatters. Many people did indeed perceive squatting as a severe social or political threat, since it questioned the established norms of property rights and, in some cases, provoked violent conflict. This applies especially to Hamburg, where fierce confrontations between police forces and squatters and their sympathizers were one of the major political topics during the second half of the 1980s.

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However, public and statutory reactions to squatting shall be examined later. First, it seems appropriate to ask how the squatters themselves conceived of security. I argue that the emergence and growth of the movement needs to be explained in the context of changing security cultures. In fact, many squatters justified their actions by citing security concerns, and we can rightly consider the squat itself as a “place of risk” for the individual squatter. By definition, squatting is a precarious form of housing. The home is normally perceived as a place of safety: the saying “my home is my castle” may be the most famous expression of this idea. However, the squatters decided to live with the permanent risk of eviction, and especially in Hamburg, they were even ready to run the risk of violent confrontation with police and penal prosecution. Does this substantiate the argument that individual freedom for some people became more important as a value, while security lost significance? Such a conclusion would be erroneous. The authors of Squatting: The Real Story, a book published in 1980, asserted that some squatters experienced “a nightmare of discomfort, insecurity and fear.”16 Likewise, although in more sober tones, government officials responsible for housing affairs believed in 1977 “that the majority of the rank and file have taken to squatting out of what they see as necessity rather than deliberate choice.”17 This applied particularly to the family squatters who initiated the English movement in 1968.18 Like many others, these working-class families were victims of the severe housing crisis of the period. Most of them had been desperately looking for a home in the regular housing market before they decided to squat. Some had been forced to live in overcrowded slum dwellings without running water or a bathroom of their own, while others had even been lacking electricity.19 A number of them came from special centers for the homeless: families who had to move into one of these centers were often torn apart due to the single-sex policy of the centers.20 The regular housing market had not offered any alternatives. In the private market, the prices were unaffordable for working-class families, and access to state-subsidized accommodation required them to register on a waiting list and then be patient: usually several years passed before a council flat or house was allocated. In such conditions, what the family squatters sought was social security in the field of housing. However, in order to obtain it, it appeared safer to them to live with the risky status of squatters than to rely on the statutory welfare agencies. Apart from economic pressure and the housing shortage, there were other security concerns that might have been the motivations for squatting. The most pressing of these was the threat of physical harm. One group of people who squatted because they were subject to such threat were immigrants, for whom it was usually difficult to find accommodation because they were discriminated against by both private landlords and government officials.21 Some of them squatted after having become victims of racial violence, because squatting allowed them to live in a community that could offer protection against racist attacks.22 Another group was that of “battered wives.” Women who had left their violent husbands often preferred to live in shared houses where they could support each other; in

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the normal housing market, they had little chance of finding premises for this purpose. The examples of these groups clearly illustrate that, despite the risks involved, squatting could offer some people more liberty and more security. As for the family squatters, one specific strategy in particular demonstrates the high priority of safety and security motives: time and again squatters directed public attention to their children and emphasized their need for protection. In 1978, for example, the cover of the Squatters Handbook, a brochure giving practical advice to squatters, showed a photo of a baby in a high chair in front of a house that was being renovated by a few women.23 Likewise, the squatters were eager to hand out photos of children to the press. In early 1969, for instance, the left-wing Daily Mirror illustrated an article on the burgeoning movement with a picture of a squatting mother, suffering from influenza, with her ten-year-old son and quoted her statement of relief: “We are safe here.”24 In September 1973, the same newspaper displayed a large portrait of a six-month-old baby of a squatter family sucking the official writ of eviction.25 These examples illustrate that, in general, the London family squatters were looking for consensus with the wider public rather than confrontation. They carefully tried to avoid being perceived as a danger to the community. For example, on a poster they claimed that by mending houses and preventing long vacancies, they reduced fire hazards.26 In addition, the family squatters underlined that they did not threaten traditional family norms but held them in high esteem, unlike some of the youths who squatted in order to break loose from such norms. Therefore, family squatters highly resented it when, in the course of the 1970s, the squatters’ movement diversified, and an increasing number of squatters were inspired by a left-leaning youth culture whose primary motivation was to experience an alternative way of living or to experiment with new forms of communal life. Some observers even spoke of a “schism” between the two branches of the movement.27 Many family squatters feared that people on the waiting list for council housing and especially homeless people could accuse these squatters of taking away habitable dwellings. Thus, they argued that squatting should be reserved for people in severe need of housing. Although “very few squatters [were] political radicals or ‘social drop-outs,’” as a contemporary study noted, spokespeople for the family squatters expressed their concern that the new type of squatters, whose lifestyle was commonly associated with drugs, hedonism, and idleness, would spoil the image of the movement.28 This fear was not unfounded, since both the press and public authorities did indeed adopt a much more critical attitude toward the movement at this time, especially when referring to “smash and grab” or “hippy squatters” and warning of their alleged propensity to use violence.29 While the efforts of the family squatters to gain and maintain public sympathy reveal a high degree of confidence in society and in the political system, they were extremely critical of state authorities and the bureaucratic machinery, which they depicted not only as inefficient but also unscrupulous or even potentially aggressive. Therefore, once again, the family squatters particularly highlighted

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the health and safety of children when the authorities endeavored to evict them. In self-portrayals of the movement, activists often described episodes during the violent evictions at Redbridge in 1969. For instance, Squatters’ News reported: “Threats of physical violence to his children were used to ‘persuade’ Mr. Chris Fleming to leave quietly.”30 Indignation arose especially in the case of the eviction of a family when private bailiffs, who had been hired by the Greater London Council, did not shrink from violence. Activists denounced the action repeatedly, and it caused quite a stir when it was learned that the “visibly pregnant” mother had been struck in the abdomen with an iron bar and the children had been dragged out of bed.31 Only the fear of contagion had eventually stopped the men when they heard that the five-year-old girl had scarlet fever. However, the eviction was executed a few weeks later, shortly after the mother had suffered a miscarriage. As in this case, family squatters usually preferred to respond to such attacks by appealing to public opinion rather than showing their readiness to fight back. If it is obvious that most London family squatters did not interpret squatting as a renunciation of security for the sake of freedom, what about those who adhered to the alternative youth culture and who associated squatting with “self-determination, independence, experimentation and creativity”?32 No doubt, the 1970s and early 1980s were a period in which freedom and self-realization became highly important for many people. Although it is a commonly asserted belief that the pursuit of self-realization and individual liberties is structurally opposed to security objectives, this idea merely simplifies the relationship between the values of freedom and security. In order to expand on the argument here, it is necessary to reflect in more detail on how we should define security. The traditional understanding of security defines it in the context of state security.33 However, in the last three decades, such a definition has been criticized as normative because it is modeled on the modern European nation-state. In particular, political scientists advocating the research agenda of critical security studies and historians focusing on the history of security have highlighted the need to find a definition of security that also includes stateless collectives.34 At the same time, they take on a constructivist approach, claiming that security can only be understood as a phenomenon of perception. This is consistent with a constructivist conception of social collectives. Consequently, we should understand security as the perception of the absence of existential threats to an “imagined community.”35 If we follow this line of argument, an existential threat will also have to be understood in a broader sense, one that not only refers to the physical survival of the imagined community but also to the cohesive forces that are considered to guarantee its integrity. Among these cohesive forces, shared values usually play a vital role. Therefore, the value of freedom can also be an important reference object of security concerns. This can be illustrated by the example of the squatters in Hamburg, whose motivation differed greatly from that of the London family squatters. After severe problems in the first two postwar decades, the housing market in Hamburg in

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the 1970s was no longer under urgent pressure. This is one of the main reasons for the different sizes and characters of the squatting movements in the two cities. There were only several hundred squatters in Hamburg compared with an estimated thirty thousand in London.36 The other major reason for this difference was the legal basis for squatting. Unlike in England, where squatting—as long as it was performed without violence or material damage to the squatted building— was only a civil offence, in Germany it was a penal one. This explains why there were very few families among the Hamburg squatters; the majority were young people, mainly male.37 The Hamburg activists conceived of squatting as a protest against the developments in the housing market, which they presented as a severe danger. On the one hand, they wanted to protest against speculation and rising rents;38 on the other hand, they sharply criticized the construction of huge housing estates. Since the 1960s, the massive erection of such estates had helped to ease the postwar housing shortage. However, by the beginning of the 1970s, they were falling more and more into disrepute. It was a widespread belief that the monotony and anonymity of these estates would endanger the mental health of their inhabitants and provoke rising rates of criminality.39 Indeed, if we look for new “places of risk” in the 1970s, these estates were definitely examples of such places. The squatters shared this widespread perception.40 And they went even further and interpreted the construction of these satellite cities as a deliberate strategy to destroy popular neighborhoods and existing networks of working-class solidarity.41 This suspicion was part of the wider ideology of some sections of the German New Left and particularly of autonomist groups. Accordingly, the Hamburg squatters and their sympathizers considered the state—and what they called the “bourgeois press”—to be their enemies. What is important here is that we can clearly see that they did not justify their fight in terms of self-realization alone, but depicted their protest as the reaction to a perceived existential threat. While the London family squatters accused the authorities of neglecting their duty to protect the weak, the Hamburg autonomists perceived the state as an aggressor. Police reactions to squatting promoted this idea further, and when the conflict escalated, the squatters compared themselves time and again to those persecuted during National Socialism. Leaflets commenting on the first squat that provoked violent clashes between the police and the squatters in 1973 described the police operation as “systematic terror”42 or even as “attempted murder”43 and equated the police with the “Gestapo,” save that they believed the police to have more modern and thus even more effective weapons.44 They suspected the Hamburg Senate of pursuing a “systematic plan for extermination” and characterized prison sentences for squatters as “torture.” Thus, they urged the “well-fortified democracy” to react, emphasizing their alleged need for self-defense and their readiness to use violence.45 One of these leaflets even presumed that the press was treating squatters worse than the Nazi press had treated communists and Jews in

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the 1930s. Such comparisons were meant to justify the recourse to violence.46 Already in the early 1970s, squatters in Hamburg were involved in fierce street fights with the police. In the 1980s, the clashes between the police, on the one hand, and the squatters and their sympathizers, on the other, reappeared in an aggravated form in the context of the famous squat in the Hafenstraße, a conflict that scandalized the German public for several years.47 The effect of warnings propagated by the squatters that they were under imminent threat was twofold. First, the squatters spotlighted the jeopardy they felt their own community was in. This fostered group cohesion and identity construction.48 Second, the warning that the state authorities were heavily attacking democracy and freedom referred to a set of values that, according to a broad consensus, ought to have been at the core of West German society. In dramatizing this putative danger, the autonomist squatters and their sympathizers closely linked freedom and security. Scholars who highlight the transnationality of squatting refer to the fact that the movement occurred almost simultaneously all over Europe as a form of leftwing protest questioning the capitalist system of property. Searching for such transnational elements, they can easily find some evidence for cross-border communication between various branches of the movement in different European countries.49 However, we should be careful not to overemphasize such evidence. The Hamburg squatters almost exclusively interpreted and justified their protest by referencing National Socialism.50 This reference to the German past was a much more prominent point in what the squatters wrote than any references to transnational connections to squatter movements in other countries. A similar observation can be made of London. Compared with Hamburg, we find more references to squatter movements of other countries in the writings of the London squatters. However, for them as well, national history was a more important benchmark for their self-perception. The London squatters emphasized that they were building on a centuries-old British tradition.51 They were especially keen to depict themselves as the successors to the squatting veterans in the aftermath of World War II, who had claimed the right to decent housing in recompense for their contribution to the war.52 In the period of postwar consensus about the necessity of a strong welfare state, which was also widely perceived as a reward for the national war effort, these squatters enjoyed broad public support, especially within the working class.53 The family squatters of the 1970s probably hoped to benefit from this image of heroism when they claimed to continue the tradition of these postwar squatters.54 The reference to this tradition again marks the most important characteristic distinguishing the London family squatters from the Hamburg movement. This appeal to national heroism illustrates once more that the former strove for consensus with the wider public rather than conflict. Furthermore, the identification with the postwar squatters was in line with their general strategy to arouse sympathy by presenting themselves as in need of protection.

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The Reactions to Squatting Squatters in Hamburg and London were highly sensitive to media coverage and tried to control their public image. However, their strategies varied significantly in both places. Highly diverging public reactions were the counterpart to these differences. Like the appearance of the squatter movements themselves, these reactions have to be interpreted first and foremost within the national and urban contexts. When analyzing the reception of the squatting movements, it is important to note that not everyone regarded the squatters as a danger. In both cities, the movement met with considerable sympathy, especially on the left side of the political spectrum.55 Nevertheless, squatters were not unanimously welcomed, even on the left.56 The animosities against them will be central to the argument here, since, in asking about changing security cultures, we have to focus on the fears the squatters raised. In both cities, different concerns dominated. In London, the most prominent concerns were the right of property, on the one hand, and social justice, on the other. In 1969, the chairman of the Greater London Council Finance Committee warned that “the whole system of home ownership will be threatened.”57 Property owners were especially afraid. Rumors circulated widely about squatters moving into houses while their usual occupants were on holiday, although the police denied such allegations.58 Indeed, some companies started to offer special insurances against squatters and, likewise, people looking for temporary accommodations in London advertised themselves as guardians who could prevent houses from being squatted.59 However, maybe even more important than the fear of property owners was the criticism by other families in need of housing. They accused the squatters of queue-jumping because they disregarded the waiting list for council housing.60 Whereas London squatters were considered as a threat to social justice and the norms of property, in Hamburg they provoked mainly political fears. The conservative press called them “terrorists.”61 Opponents of the movement warned about political radicalization and about the creation of a legal vacuum, which in their eyes would lead to anarchy. Quite like the activists of the movement themselves, the press often drew parallels to the recent German past, comparing the squatters with National Socialist groups of thugs in the 1930s.62 Thus, both sides exhibited a lack of confidence in their country: the Hamburg squatters harbored a distrust of the political system of the Federal Republic of Germany, and their opponents did not trust the stability of West German democracy. The public reactions to squatting reflect most clearly the conflict between two different concepts of security: the first, as has been dwelt on so far, is the concept of security according to which it is necessary to eliminate or isolate the source of danger; the second is a concept of security that results from the fear of so-called “security dilemmas,” that is, the fact that speaking of insecurity creates insecurity.63 Adherents of this concept of security prefer to coexist with what appears to be a danger, fearing that the effort to eliminate it will cause an even

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more dangerous conflict. They strive for communication, negotiation, and integration rather than confrontation. My argument is that a sensitivity to the risk of entering into a security dilemma and the accompanying security strategy were unusually widespread in the 1970s, although that decade is often associated more with a tendency toward hard policing, as was propagated especially in the context of anti-terrorist measures. In order to adequately assess the initial response to squatters in London, we should take into account that these squatters appeared before the phenomenon started spreading on the European level. Local authorities were neither prepared nor familiar as yet with legal regulations. Thus, at the beginning, their first impulse was to attempt immediate eviction, sometimes with the help of private bailiffs who had little scruples about threatening and intimidating the squatters and their families or even using violence.64 However, squatting directed public attention to the deficiencies of housing policy. This was problematic for the authorities because their fight against the squatters could easily breed even more discontent. Indeed, in the face of the housing shortage, many people sympathized with the squatters. Large sectors of the media supported them and criticized the evictions.65 Therefore, the local authorities changed their policy very quickly, although to different degrees in different boroughs. As early as 1969, the borough of Lewisham had “licensed” some squats, that is, allowed the squatters to stay on the basis of short-term agreements in council houses left empty before their scheduled renovation or demolition.66 Other boroughs followed this example, and by 1972, squatters had obtained licensing agreements in almost half of all London boroughs.67 In 1970, there were about one thousand licensed squatters, and in 1973 about three thousand.68 In 1975, a survey financed by the national Department of the Environment stated: “Although squatters are trespassers and hence civil wrongdoers, squatting has achieved a de facto status which in part arises from the degree of toleration granted by some local authorities.”69 Nevertheless, leniency was accompanied by the search for more rigid measures to fight the squatters. In particular, some voices called for legislative amendments. National and local debates were closely linked, because more than 50 percent of the squatters lived in London.70 In the middle of the 1970s, the debates intensified as the image of the squatters deteriorated, and in 1976, the Labour government established an interdepartmental discussion group with the task of reconsidering the possibility of changing the law.71 Yet squatting did not become a criminal offence until 2012.72 The activist Steve Platt believes that the complicated laws of property ownership and tenancy deterred politicians from implementing legal change.73 However, on the basis of the existing law, the Greater London Council tried to intensify its fight against the squatters. In 1977, the newly elected Tory government of the Council promised, on the one hand, to grant amnesty to all squatters on council property who were ready to enter a rental contract;74 yet it was determined, on the other, to follow a “tougher line” against squatters who rejected this

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proposal and to enforce evictions.75 In 1980, the Conservative politician George Tremlett, the leader of the GLC Housing Policy Committee, assessed that this double-edged strategy was what had eventually “broken the back of squatting in London.”76 Indeed, twelve thousand squatters accepted the offer, representing the majority of those to whom this opportunity was offered.77 It cannot be ruled out that later some ex-squatters took advantage of Margaret Thatcher’s Right-toBuy program—which allowed council house tenants to purchase their homes at a discount—and eventually became homeowners, but this has not been studied yet. What is certain, however, is that in the 1980s the squatting movement in London ebbed away. Unlike in London, where Tory and Labour majorities alternated in the 1970s and 1980s, in Hamburg, the Social Democrats remained in power throughout the whole period. Here, too, the authorities pursued a volatile policy in handling the squatters. Some squats resulted in rental agreements, or the squatters moved out without resistance.78 Media attention to squatting rose in May 1973, which has to be interpreted in the context of the fear caused by the Red Army Faction. A special police force established after the Palestinian terror attack against the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 supported the regular police’s eviction of a squat in the Ekhofstraße. During the operation, the police used physical violence and even fired three warning shots.79 The police justified their course of action by raising the suspicion that the squatters had been using the Handbuch für Hausbesetzer, a handbook propagating militancy and giving concrete tips for active resistance against the police in order to prepare the defense of the squat.80 For some years after the eviction of the Ekhofstraße, there were no more militant attempts to occupy residential buildings. Only in the early 1980s did the movement revive when the most famous squat in the history of Hamburg took place: about a hundred people squatted in nine houses scheduled for demolition in the Hafenstraße. These houses belonged to a communal housing society and were located at the shoreline of the port, a site that was highly attractive for investors. Although city officials and the squatters soon came to an agreement for rental contracts until 1986, the district authority sought to terminate these contracts prematurely. Fueled by the claims made by the chief of the Hamburg Office for the Protection of the Constitution that some of the squatters were closely linked to the Red Army Faction, the conflict escalated shortly afterward. The squatters of the Hafenstraße ostensibly displayed their readiness to use violence. They showed up hooded and erected barricades and barbed-wire barriers. The few families with children who had lived in the squats up to that point then moved out, because serious confrontation with the police in the event of an attempted eviction appeared predestined. Demonstrations supporting the squatters attracted more than ten thousand participants. Violent clashes between some of these demonstrators and the police indicated how fierce the resistance would be in the event of an attempted eviction. Several attempts at negotiation failed. The affluent heir Jan Philipp Reemtsma proposed to buy the buildings in the Hafenstraße for a symbolic price in order to renovate them and allow the squat-

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ters to stay, but the Senate delayed the decision on this offer because some of its members did not agree to Reemtsma’s conditions. As a consequence, Reemtsma withdrew his offer. While the conservative opposition urged the Senate to evict the squatters, there was no consensus on how to handle the case within the Senate, which at that time was ruled by a coalition government of Social Democrats and Liberals. As the conflict dragged on, the mayor Klaus von Dohnanyi realized that it would be impossible to convince the Senate majority to reach a consensus on a solution. In November 1987, while six thousand policemen were already prepared for the eviction of the squats and everyone expected the onset of violent street fights, Dohnanyi decided single-handedly to offer another agreement to the squatters. In order to gain their confidence, he promised to stand down from his office should his initiative fail. The squatters accepted the offer and removed their barricades within the 24-hour ultimatum given by the mayor. A “miracle” had happened, to use Dohnanyi’s words, which were readily adopted by the press in the days that followed.81 To summarize, two divergent security concepts were at the center of the controversy in the debate about the adequate reaction to squatting. One fraction of society propagated a strict policy of evictions. In England, moreover, this went along with the call for new laws that would penalize squatting and thus facilitate police interference. Others, however, suggested legalizing the squats. What seems important is that, in both cities, the policy of legalization greatly influenced or even gained the upper hand during the 1970s and early 1980s, even though the reaction of the authorities to the first squatters had been to send bailiffs or the police to evict them.

Conclusion The study of the squatters’ movements in London and Hamburg reveals striking differences, which suggest that transnational networks and globalization—although undoubtedly having an important impact on the squatters’ movements— were not the central factors in the emergence of this new site of risk. This is not to say that there were no commonalities between the two cases. In both cities, many activists considered squatting a protest against the statutory housing policy. In London, their protest was directed against the inefficiency of the welfare system, against officialdom, and against the paternalism of civil servants. In Hamburg, it was directed against technocratic planning, because the latter was associated with large modern housing estates. Here, we could argue that squatting reflects the spreading loss of confidence in the idea of progress. At the same time, these two cases underscore that a loss of confidence in state-made progress had been spreading even before the global economic crisis of 1973, which is often cited as the turning point in this respect. Indeed, squatting was closely linked to a strong criticism of the state, as had flourished with the emer-

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gence of the New Left in the late 1960s. Thus, we could argue that it was the long phase of economic prosperity that had triggered the squatting movement and that it resulted from the inner logic of the idea of progress in the field of welfare, in which reality always lags behind expectations. Another commonality of both cases is that appeals to security played an important role in the strategies of justifications propagated by the squatters. Thus, we have seen that the new valorization of freedom and individualism did not necessarily go along with a devaluation of security. It could even be argued that the 1970s was a period in which an unusually large number of people conceived of freedom and security as inseparable and mutually dependent. This leads us to another prominent feature of the security cultures in the 1970s and early 1980s. In particular, when we turn to the reactions to squatting, we can clearly see that these decades were a period in which the conflict between two diverging security concepts was particularly strong. It would be misleading to present the 1970s as the starting point of a tendency toward more surveillance and more rigorous policing without mentioning that it was also a phase in which there was a remarkably high awareness of the so-called security dilemma and a pronounced willingness to achieve security by the means of communication, negotiation, and efforts toward integration. Christine Krüger is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Bonn. She received her doctorate from the University of Tübingen in 2005 and habilitated at the University of Oldenburg in 2015. She was a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Oxford and a visiting scholar at SciencesPo (Paris), the Pontífica Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile), and the Colegio de México (Mexico City). Her fields of work are German and European history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her contribution to this volume is part of a project she has been working on at the Collaborative Research Centre “Dynamics of Security” at the universities of Gießen and Marburg, sponsored by the German Research Foundation.

Notes 1. Martin Geyer, “Security and Risk: How We Have Learned to Live with Dystopian, Utopian, and Technocratic Diagnoses of Security since the 1970s,” Historia 396 1, no. 1 (2015): 93‒134; for the concept of security cultures, see Christopher Daase, “Sicherheitskultur: Ein Konzept zur Interdisziplinären Erforschung Politischen und Sozialen Wandels,” Sicherheit und Frieden 29 (2011): 59‒139. 2. Niall Ferguson, ed., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); for a recent overview of the 1970s in a European perspective, see Sonja Levsen, “Einführung: Die 1970er Jahre in Westeuropa—Un Dialogue Manqué,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42, no. 2 (2016): 213‒41. 3. Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970, 3rd edn. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012); for a critical

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9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

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review of the concept of “value change,” see Isabel Heinemann, “Wertewandel,” http:// docupedia.de/zg/Wertewandel (accessed 30 January 2020). Zygmunt Bauman, Communities: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Oxford: Polity, 2001); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Cambridge: Polity, 2013). Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine Andere Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986). Bauman, Communities, 114; Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 38‒39. Sven Reichardt, Authentizität und Gemeinschaft: Linksalternatives Leben in den Siebziger und Frühen Achtziger Jahren (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 498‒571. Alexander Gallus, Axel Schildt, and Detlef Siegfried, “Einleitung,” in Deutsche Zeitgeschichte—Transnational, ed. Alexander Gallus, Axel Schildt, and Detlef Siegfried (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015), 11‒26 (here 19); Squatting Europe Kollektiv, ed., Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggle (Wivenhoe: Autonomedia, 2012); Claudio Cattaneo, ed., The Squatters’ Movements in Europe: Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2014); Bart van der Steen, Ask Katzeff, Leendert van Hoogenhuijze, and George Katsiaficas, eds., The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014). Alexander Sedlmaier combines both lines of interpretation: Alexander Sedlmaier, Konsum und Gewalt: Radikaler Protest in der Bundesrepublik (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), 205‒32. Kesia Reeve, “De Britse Kraakbeweging, 1968‒1980,” in Kritiek 2009: Jaarboek voor Socialistische Discussie en Analyse, ed. Leendert Van Hoogenhuijze (Aksant: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 138‒60. (For an English version, see: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/6347/, accessed 30 January 2020); Kesia Reeve, “Squatting since 1945: The Enduring Relevance of Material Need,” in Housing and Social Policy: Contemporary Themes and Critical Perspectives, ed. Peter Somerville and Nigel Springings (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 197‒217. Bart van der Steen, “Die Internationalen Verbindungen der Hausbesetzerbewegung den 70er und 80er Jahren,” in Deutsche Zeitgeschichte—Transnational, ed. Alexander Gallus, Axel Schildt, and Detlef Siegfried (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015), 203‒20; John Davis and Juliane Fürst, “Drop-Outs,” in Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt, ed. Robert Gildea, James Mark, and Anette Warring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 193‒210. For these squats, see David Templin, Freizeit ohne Kontrollen: Die Jugendzentrumsbewegung in der Bundesrepublik der 1970er Jahre (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015). Ron Bailey, The Squatters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 178. Although in 1973, squatters in Islington tried to avert eviction by building a barricade, confrontations between squatters and the authorities were far less violent in London than in Hamburg. A higher propensity for violence characterized squatters in Brighton; see Steve Plate, “A Decade of Squatting: The Story of Squatting in Britain since 1968,” in Squatting: The Real Story, ed. Nick Wates and Christian Wolmar (London: Bay Leaf Press, 1980), 14‒103 (here 26). The National Archives (TNA), HLG 118/2172, Housing (Homeless Persons) Bill, Speaking Note, Better Use of the Housing Stock/Empty Houses, [1977]. This is valid, for example, for the contribution published on the 1968 movement by Reeve, “De Britse Kraakbeweging.” Some historical publications are still published in close cooperation between activists and professional historians, for example: Van der Steen et al., The City is Ours. Nick Wates, “Introducing Squatting,” in Squatting: The Real Story, ed. Nick Wates and Christian Wolmar (London: Bay Leaf Press, 1980), 1–3 (here 3).

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17. TNA HLG 118/2172, Housing (Homeless Persons) Bill, Speaking Note, Better Use of the Housing Stock/Empty Houses, [1977]. 18. Bailey, Squatters; Plate, “Decade of Squatting,” 14‒29. 19. Bailey, Squatters, 16‒18. 20. Plate, “Decade of Squatting,” 15. 21. Milner Holland, ed., Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London (London: Wiley, 1965), 188‒95. 22. Plate, “Decade of Squatting,” 40‒41; Sasthi Brata, “Squatters at the End of Their Tether,” 10 Sept. 1978 [press cutting, TNA HLG 118/1785]. 23. Squatters Handbook (London: Advisory Service for Squatters, 1978). 24. “Return of the Squatter,” Daily Mirror, 7 February 1969. 25. “Question: What Did Baby Mark Do When He Was Served a Writ? Answer: He Ate It,” Daily Mirror, 29 September 1973. 26. Lucy Finchett-Maddock, “Squatting in London: Squatters’ Rights and Legal Movement(s),” in The City Is Ours, ed. Bart van der Steen et al. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), 207‒31. 27. Plate, “Decade of Squatting,” 31. 28. Kevin C. Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting in London,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69, no. 4 (1979): 589‒98 (here 591). 29. London Metropolitan Archive (LMA), Greater London Council, Press Releases 1975, 1–170, GLC/DG/PRB/35, Vol. 24, GLC public information branch, press office, 20 January 1975, no. 24; Plate, “Decade of Squatting,” 22‒25, 59‒61. 30. Squatters’ News, May Day 1969 [British Library], 1. 31. Ron Bailey, Tony Mahony, and Malcom Conn, Evicted! The Story of the Illegal Evictions of Squatters in Redbridge (London: London Squatters Campaign, 1969), 3‒4. 32. Wates, “Introducing Squatting,” 1‒3, quotation on 2. 33. Eckart Conze, Geschichte der Sicherheit: Entwicklung—Themen—Perspektiven (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 22‒31. 34. Steffen Patzold, “Human Security, Fragile Statehood and Governance in the Early Middle Ages: Challenging the Limits of Premodernity,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38, no. 2 (2012): 406‒22; Christoph Kampmann and Ulrich Niggemann, “Sicherheit in der Frühen Neuzeit: Zur Einführung,” in Sicherheit in der Frühen Neuzeit: Norm, Praxis, Repräsentation, ed. Christoph Kampmann and Ulrich Niggemann (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2013), 12‒27. 35. Despite the obvious need for a constructivist approach to security in order to adopt a constructivist understanding of the collective, critical security studies have hardly ever considered Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2016). An exception is: David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Generally, there are very few scholars in the field of security studies who ask about the relationship between perceptions of security and the construction of identity; see Bill McSweeney, Security, Identity and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 74, and Lee Jarvis, Security: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 113‒17. 36. Kearns, “Intraurban Squatting,” 589; according to the Family Squatter Advisory Service, there were thirty-five thousand squatters in London in 1975: Victoria Brittain, “Squatters’ Rights and Wrongs,” Illustrated London News, 1 August 1975, 41.

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37. When the Ekhofstrasse squatters were evicted in May 1973, the police registered fortynine male and twenty-five female squatters; see the video Schutzpolizeiamt Hamburg; Hausräumung Ekhofstrasse 39, 23 May 1973 [YouTube, Michels Goedeke: Hamburg Ekhofstrasse 1973, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=146v6DRIelM], last accessed 28 January 2023. 38. Karl Christian Führer, Die Stadt, das Geld und der Markt: Immobilienspekulation in der Bundesrepublik 1960‒1985 (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016), 175‒87. 39. See the contributions to Sebastian Haumann and Martina Heßler, eds., Westeuropäische Großsiedlungen (Informationen Zur Modernen Stadtgeschichte) (Berlin: Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik, 2013). 40. Christine G. Krüger, “Von Mümmelmannsberg bis Allermöhe: Sicherheits- und Unsicherheitskonstruktionen,” Forum Stadt 3 (2020): 223‒37. 41. Archive of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung (ArchHIS), Sanierung Karolinen-Poker 1934‒84, 25. 42. ArchiHIS, SBe 600, B:85; Wohnungsprobleme in der BRD. 43. ArchHIS, SBe 600, Dokumentation zur Hausbesetzung in der Ekhofstr. 39, 7. 44. ArchHIS, SBe 600, Dokumentation zur Hausbesetzung in der Ekhofstr. 39, 45. 45. ArchHIS, SBe 600, Dokumentation zur Hausbesetzung in der Ekhofstr. 39, 11. 46. This is how Freia Anders argues for the Berlin autonomist squatters of the 1980s; Freia Anders, “Wohnraum, Freiraum, Widerstand: Die Formierung der Autonomen in den Konflikten um Hausbesetzungen Anfang der Achtziger Jahre,” in Das Alternative Milieu: Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und Linke Politik in Deutschland und Europa, ed. Sven Reichardt and Detlef Siegfried (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), 473‒98. 47. Werner Lehne, Der Konflikt um die Hafenstraße (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verl.- Ges., 1994); Monika Sigmund, “Die Hafenstraße und das ‘Wunder Von Hamburg’: Selbstbestimmtes Leben im Widerstreit Politischer Interessen,” in 19 Tage Hamburg: Ereignisse und Entwicklungen der Stadtgeschichte Seit den Fünfziger Jahren, ed. Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (Munich: Dölling und Galitz, 2012), 265‒80. 48. Anders, “Wohnraum”; Simone Beate Borgstede, “Der Kampf um die Herzen und Köpfe der Menschen,” Das Argument 289 (2010): 849‒58 (here 852). 49. Van der Steen, “Die Internationalen Verbindungen”; Van der Steen describes contacts between squatters from Amsterdam and peers in Frankfurt, Berlin, and London. However, even if he has carried out research on Hamburg, in this article, he does not mention any transnational connections of squatters from Hamburg. 50. Joist Grolle, “Der Hamburger Hafenstraßenkonflikt und der Geisterkrieg um die Vergangenheit,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 91 (2005): 133‒58. 51. Colin Ward, “The Early Squatters: Squatting from the Middle Ages to the Second World War,” in Squatting: The Real Story, ed. Nick Wates and Christian Wolmar (London: Bay Leaf Press, 1980), 104‒9; Colin Ward, Cotters and Squatters: Housing’s Hidden History (London: Five Leaves, 2002), chap. 2, 4, and 5. 52. Andrew Friend, “The Post War Squatters: What Happened When There Were No Homes for the World War Two Heroes,” in Squatting: The Real Story, ed. Nick Wates and Christian Wolmar (London: Bay Leaf Press, 1980), 110‒19. 53. On the postwar squatters, see Don Watson, Squatting Britain, 1945‒1955 (London: Merlin Press, 2016); Colin Ward, Housing: An Anarchist Approach (London: Freedom Press, 1976), 19‒27. The authorities suspected these squatters of communism and pursued a strict policy of eviction.

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54. E. T. C. Dee believes that the memory of the postwar squatters was one of the reasons that the English squatter movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s enjoyed broad public support; E. T. C. Dee, “The Right to Decent Housing and a Whole Lot More Besides: Examining the Modern English Squatters’ Movement,” in Squatters’ Movement in Europe: Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism, ed. Claudio Cattaneo (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 90. 55. Borgstede, Kampf ; Lehne, Konflikt; Dee, “Right to Decent Housing,” 90. 56. Plate, “Decade of Squatting,” 27 and 51. 57. LMA, GLC/DG/PRB/35, vol. 7, GLC Press Releases 1969, 1‒235, Greater London Council, press office, no. 162, 21 March 1969. 58. TNA, HO 291/1907, Interdepartmental Group on Squatting: report, Report of the Interdepartmental Group on Squatting, January 1976, 6. 59. Plate, “Decade of Squatting,” 59; The Times, 6 April 1976, 31. 60. LMA, GLC/DG/PRB/35, GLC Press Releases, 1981, 1‒244, GLC public relations branch, news service, no. 3, 9 January 1981. TNA, HLG 118 2172. 61. Lehne, Konflikt, 99‒106. 62. Grolle, “Hafenstraßenkonflikt,” 144‒50. 63. The term “security dilemma” was coined by the political scientist John H. Herz with respect to the nuclear arms race in 1950 and attracted particular interest in the 1970s: John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2, no. 2 (1950): 171‒201. 64. Plate, “Decade of Squatting,” 18‒21. 65. Ibid, 22, 60. 66. Ibid., 27‒29. 67. Ibid., 32. 68. Ibid., 29, 33. 69. Mike Kingham, Squatters in London (London: Shelter, 1977), 6. 70. Kearns, “Interurban Squatting,” 589. 71. TNA, HO 291/1907, Interdepartmental Group on Squatting; LCO 65/288. Interdepartmental Working Party on Squatting. 72. Dee, “Right to Decent Housing,” 104. 73. Plate, “Decade of Squatting,” 27. 74. LMA, ACC/3499/SL/01, GLC Council Agenda 17 March 1981. 75. TNA, GLC/DG/PRB/35, GLC Press Releases, 1981, 1‒244, GLC public relations branch, news service, no. 3, 9 January 1981. 76. TNA, HLG 118/1785, London housing: squatters; discussion papers, minutes of meetings, briefing papers, GLC public relations branch, news service, no. 295, GLC reprieve for Camden squatters, 3 October 1980. 77. Ward, Cotters, 165. 78. Der Schröderstift, Archive of the HIS. 79. Schutzpolizeiamt Hamburg; Hausräumung Ekhofstrasse 39, 23 May 1973 [YouTube, Michels Goedeke: Hamburg Ekhofstrasse 1973, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=146 v6DRIelM], last accessed 28 January 2023. 80. ArchHIS, Handbuch für Hausbesetzer. 81. Sigmund, “Hafenstraße,” 265‒67.

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Bibliography Anders, Freia. “Wohnraum, Freiraum, Widerstand: Die Formierung der Autonomen in den Konflikten um Hausbesetzungen Anfang der Achtziger Jahre.” In Das Alternative Milieu: Antibürgerlicher Lebensstil und Linke Politik in Deutschland und Europa, edited by Sven Reichardt and Detlef Siegfried, 473‒98. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016. Bailey, Ron. The Squatters. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Bailey, Ron, Tony Mahony, and Malcom Conn. Evicted! The Story of the Illegal Evictions of Squatters in Redbridge. London: London Squatters Campaign, 1969. Bauman, Zygmunt. Communities: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. Oxford: Polity, 2001. ———. Liquid Fear. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Bauman, Zygmunt, and David Lyon. Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Beck, Ulrich. Risikogesellschaf: Auf dem Weg in eine Andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. Borgstede, Simone Beate. “Der Kampf um die Herzen und Köpfe der Menschen.” Das Argument 289 (2010): 849‒58. Brittain, Victoria. “Squatters’ Rights and Wrongs.” Illustrated London News, 1 August 1975, 41. Campbell, David. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Manchester: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Cattaneo, Claudio, ed. The Squatters’ Movements in Europe: Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2014. Conze, Eckart. Geschichte der Sicherheit: Entwicklung—Themen—Perspektiven. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018. Daase, Christopher. “Sicherheitskultur: Ein Konzept zur Interdisziplinären Erforschung Politischen und Sozialen Wandels.” Sicherheit und Frieden 29 (2011): 59‒139. Davis, John, and Juliane Fürst. “Drop-Outs.” In Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt, edited by Robert Gildea, James Mark, and Anette Warring, 193‒210. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Dee, E. T. C. “The Right to Decent Housing and a Whole Lot More Besides: Examining the Modern English Squatters’ Movement.” In Squatters’ Movement in Europe: Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism, edited by Claudio Cattaneo, 85‒109. London: Pluto Press, 2014. Doering-Manteuffel, Anselm, and Lutz Raphael. Nach dem Boom: Perspektiven auf die Zeitgeschichte seit 1970. 3rd edn. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012. Ferguson, Niall, ed. The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Finchett-Maddock, Lucy. “Squatting in London: Squatters’ Rights and Legal Movement(s).” In The City is Ours, edited by Bart van der Steen et al., 207‒31. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014. Friend, Andrew. “The Post War Squatters: What Happened When There Were No Homes for the World War Two Heroes.” In Squatting: The Real Story, edited by Nick Wates and Christian Wolmar, 110‒19. London: Bay Leaf Books, 1980. Führer, Karl Christian. Die Stadt, Das Geld und Der Markt: Immobilienspekulation in der Bundesrepublik 1960‒1985. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016.

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Gallus, Alexander, Axel Schildt, and Detlef Siegfried. “Einleitung.” In Deutsche Zeitgeschichte— Transnational, edited by Alexander Gallus, Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, 11‒26. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015. Geyer, Martin. “Security and Risk: How We Have Learned to Live with Dystopian, Utopian, and Technocratic Diagnoses of Security since the 1970s.” Historia 396 1, no. 1 (2015): 93‒134. Grolle, Joist. “Der Hamburger Hafenstraßenkonflikt und der Geisterkrieg um die Vergangenheit.” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 91 (2005): 133‒58. Haumann, Sebastian, and Martina Heßler, eds. Westeuropäische Großsiedlungen (Informationen Zur Modernen Stadtgeschichte). Berlin: Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik, 2013. Heinemann, Isabel. “Wertewandel.” Retrieved 13 December 2022 from http://docupedia.de/ zg/Wertewandel. Herz, John H. “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma.” World Politics 2, no. 2 (1950): 171‒201. Holland, Milner, ed. Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London. London: Wiley, 1965. Jarvis, Lee. Security: A Critical Introduction. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Kampmann, Christoph, and Ulrich Niggemann. “Sicherheit in der Frühen Neuzeit: Zur Einführung.” In Sicherheit in der Frühen Neuzeit: Norm, Praxis, Repräsentation, edited by Christoph Kampmann and Ulrich Niggemann, 12‒27. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2013. Kearns, Kevin C. “Intraurban Squatting in London.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 69, no. 4 (1979): 589‒98. Kingham, Mike. Squatters in London. London: Shelter, 1977. Krüger, Christine G. “Von Mümmelmannsberg bis Allermöhe: Sicherheits- und Unsicherheitskonstruktionen.” Forum Stadt 47, no. 3 (2020): 223‒37. Lehne, Werner. Der Konflikt um die Hafenstraße. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verl.-Ges., 1994. Levsen, Sonja. “Einführung: Die 1970er Jahre in Westeuropa—Un Dialogue Manqué.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42, no. 2 (2016): 213‒41. McSweeney, Bill. Security, Identity and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Patzold, Steffen. “Human Security, Fragile Statehood and Governance in the Early Middle Ages: Challenging the Limits of Premodernity.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38, no. 2 (2012): 406‒22. Plate, Steve. “A Decade of Squatting: The Story of Squatting in Britain since 1968.” In Squatting: The Real Story, edited by Nick Wates and Christian Wolmar, 14‒103. London: Bay Leaf Books, 1980. Reeve, Kesia. “Squatting since 1945: The Enduring Relevance of Material Need.” In Housing and Social Policy: Contemporary Themes and Critical Perspectives, edited by Peter Somerville and Nigel Springings, 197‒217. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. ———. “De Britse Kraakbeweging, 1968‒1980.” In Kritiek 2009: Jaarboek voor Socialistische Discussie en Analyse, edited by Leendert van Hoogenhuijze, 139‒60. Aksant: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Reichardt, Sven. Authentizität und Gemeinschaft: Linksalternatives Leben in den Siebziger und Frühen Achtziger Jahren. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Sedlmaier, Alexander. Konsum und Gewalt: Radikaler Protest in der Bundesrepublik. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018. Sigmund, Monika. “Die Hafenstraße und das ‘Wunder von Hamburg’: Selbstbestimmtes Leben im Widerstreit Politischer Interessen.” In 19 Tage Hamburg: Ereignisse und Ent-

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wicklungen der Stadtgeschichte Seit den Fünfziger Jahren, edited by Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg, 265‒80. Munich: Dölling und Galitz Verlag, 2012. Squatting Europe Kollektiv, ed. Squatting in Europe: Radical Spaces, Urban Struggle. Wivenhoe: Autonomedia, 2012. Squatters Handbook. London: Advisory Service for Squatters, 1978. Templin, David. Freizeit Ohne Kontrollen: Die Jugendzentrumsbewegung in der Bundesrepublik der 1970er Jahre. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015. Van der Steen, Bart. “Die Internationalen Verbindungen der Hausbesetzerbewegung den 70er und 80er Jahren.” In Deutsche Zeitgeschichte—Transnational, edited by Alexander Gallus, Axel Schildt, and Detlef Siegfried, 203‒20. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015. Van der Steen, Bart, Ask Katzeff, Leendert van Hoogenhuijze, and George Katsiaficas, eds. The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014. Ward, Colin. Housing: An Anarchist Approach. London: Freedom Press, 1976. ———. “The Early Squatters: Squatting from the Middle Ages to the Second World War.” In Squatting: The Real Story, edited by Nick Wates and Christian Wolmar, 104‒9. London: Bay Leaf Press, 1980. ———. Cotters and Squatters: Housing’s Hidden History. London: Five Leaves, 2002. Wates, Nick. “Introducing Squatting.” In Squatting: The Real Story, edited by Nick Wates and Christian Wolmar, 1‒3. London: Bay Leaf Books, 1980. Watson, Don. Squatting Britain, 1945‒1955. London: Merlin Press, 2016. Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

6 Imprisoned Protest The Body at Risk and Hunger Strikes in the United States in Transnational Perspective, 1968‒85 Maximilian Buschmann

Introduction They believe that their safety lies in chains. —James Baldwin to Angela Davis, 1970

On 24 October 1970, imprisoned political activist Angela Davis declared a hunger strike in New York’s Women’s House of Detention. Eleven days earlier, she had been arrested and charged with “murder and kidnapping” for her alleged involvement in an attempted jailbreak.1 On national television, President Richard Nixon congratulated anticommunist FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for the capture “of the dangerous terrorist, Angela Davis.”2 But Hoover and Nixon did not have much time to celebrate, because Davis’s imprisonment was emblematic of a rapidly emerging site of political struggles during the “long 1970s.” Placed into so-called “solitary facilities,” she declared: “Since October 24, I have consumed no solid foods. To date, I have lost approximately eight pounds, and my health has deteriorated because of the form of protest I have been forced to take to call attention to my just complaints.”3 In choosing the hunger strike as a means to resist her treatment in prison, Angela Davis was not an exceptional case. Rather, during the “long 1970s,” hunger strikes were a widespread phenomenon. In 1978, US diplomatic missions in more than thirty countries, such as Paraguay, Northern Ireland, Morocco, Iran, Pakistan, the USSR, and South Korea, reported the occurrence of hunger strikes to the US Department of State, revealing the global occurrence of this form of

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protest at the time.4 Likewise, Amnesty International reported on hunger strikes in multiple countries.5 The human rights organization directed an international audience toward prisoners’ struggles, for example, in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was among those who went on hunger strikes to protest against prison conditions, apartheid, and racism.6 This chapter does not ask primarily why hunger strikes took place during this time of political and social upheaval, which was the heyday of the New Left, the Black Power movement, and the emergence of clandestine militant groups. Instead, the focus is on how this form of protest by way of individual risk-taking could turn into a risk for those who were responsible for state security and how hunger strikes led to the implementation of new measures of security by state apparatuses.7 I will argue that hunger strikes created situations of emergency and contingency. By taking an individual risk, prisoners tried to transform prisons into publicly visible stages of resistance. Whereas prison discipline and daily routines were the prevalent technologies of governmental power, the hunger strike was a technology of resistance.8 Thus, during the course of the 1970s, there unfolded a dialectical dynamic between the security of the state (which seemed to be threatened by hunger strikes) and the threat of an authoritarian state (which hunger strikes seemed to unveil). However, spurred by conservative narratives, legal experts and politicians argued that a hunger strike was an individual “lifestyle” decision—an argument that once again shifted the risks of hunger striking back to the individual.

The Revival of Hunger Strikes in the Age of Civil Rights Angela Davis’s hunger strike in 1970 stood in a long-established tradition of refusing to eat under conditions of captivity that was deeply entangled in the United States with the history of racism and slavery. On the “middle passage” it was one of the most important forms of resistance used by enslaved Africans against their captors.9 In the first decades of the twentieth century, suffragists, anarchists, and conscientious objectors established hunger strikes as a political tool against modern imprisonment.10 During World War II, conscientious objectors, such as the theorist and practitioner of nonviolence Bayard Rustin, used hunger strikes to protest racist segregation in federal prisons.11 During the 1961 “Freedom Rides,” fasts and hunger strikes were discussed as part of the concept of nonviolence.12 It was during this era of the Civil Rights movement that the prison emerged as a site of resistance in the struggle against racist oppression.13 “[T]he whole experience of the black man in America can be summed up in one word: prison,” wrote poet Etheridge Knight in 1970.14 Prison writing turned into sociological analyses and turned prisons into visible sites of political protest and resistance, not only for the prisoners but also for social movements. However, refusing to eat was a hotly debated means of protest in organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).15 “You want to talk about

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a hunger strike? . . . No way. We need our strength to face these pigs,” argued SNCC activist Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) against fellow antiracist activists, although he eventually joined the hunger strike.16 In addition to hunger strikes in prison, political activists used publicly staged fasts as a symbolic form of protest. Among them was César Chávez. Born into a Catholic Mexican-American family, Chávez organized farm workers in California to fight for their civil rights, for improved labor conditions, and against exploitation.17 On 15 February 1968, Chávez started a 25-day fast. In his own words, he “undertook this Fast because my heart was filled with grief and pain for the sufferings of farm workers . . . It was a Fast for non-violence and a call to sacrifice.”18 Like imprisoned hunger strikers, he saw in his body a tool of the disenfranchised to engage in politics. Furthermore, he embraced personal risk to save others: “We are poor. Our allies are few. But we have something the rich do not own. We have our own bodies and spirits and the justice of our cause as our weapons. . . . It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives we find life. . . . To be a man is to suffer for others.”19 At the end of his fast, he broke bread with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a Catholic.20 For Chávez, fasting was embedded in a religious belief system and he fasted as a manly sacrifice that resonated with Christian American audiences.21 Furthermore, breaking bread with Robert F. Kennedy generated high visibility in the nation’s newspapers and on television, where commentators speculated about the ambitions of the former president’s brother to run himself for the highest office in the country.22 This symbolic act circulated widely and was inscribed into American popular culture. Chávez’s fast was a significant act, not only within the history of the American labor movement but within the history of hunger strikes and political fasts. Religiously influenced social movements and activist groups like the peace movement and the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) were to use public fasts in the 1980s to protest against nuclear weapons and homelessness.23 Mitch Snyder, the best-known activist of the CCNV, staged fasts across the street from the White House and persuaded President Ronald Reagan to tolerate the occupation of an abandoned government building.24 However, the first time Snyder ever used the refusal of food as a form of protest was during his imprisonment in Danbury Federal Prison in 1971.25 Snyder and other religious peace activists, among them Philip F. Berrigan, had been imprisoned because of their protest against the Vietnam War and started a hunger strike to protest parole regulations.26 By the early 1970s, the various agencies responsible for public security feared the diffusion of hunger strikes among large groups of prisoners. As soon as Angela Davis declared her hunger strike in October 1970, the state placed her under a 24-hour surveillance regime and argued it was for the safety of the prison.27 Assistant corporation counsel Leonard Bernikow told the press that “she could possibly have a serious and destructive influence on the rest of the [prison] population.”28 Indeed, during her imprisonment, Davis directed the attention of other prisoners and the public to imprisonment as being part of an “oppressive politico-

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economic order.” More and more prisoners began to see themselves in this way as “political prisoners” who had been victimized by a racist and capitalist society.29 In the early 1970s, refusing to eat became one of the more prominent forms of protest among all prisoners, and one that often led to other acts of collective resistance. The prison—the site of security par excellence—reemerged as a site of resistance.30 Among those who used hunger strikes to protest their treatment and prison conditions were fifteen hundred prisoners in New York’s Rikers Island prison in March 1970, nine hundred inmates at Connecticut Correctional Institution in 1972, and prisoners on death row in San Quentin in 1976.31 The most significant prison protest was the so-called “Attica Prison Uprising.” Because the Black Panther activist George Jackson was shot on 21 August 1971 in California’s San Quentin Prison, most prisoners at Attica Prison in New York State initiated a day of protest. They refused to eat lunch and dinner, a collective act of solidarity that the official report of the New York State Commission identified as the key event for the subsequent prison uprising, because “the inmates had demonstrated their ability and their willingness to act en masse.”32 The one-day food refusal broke with the daily routines of prison life and led to a collective protest that turned into a nightmare for prison officials. The prisoners were able to take control over parts of the prison and took officers as hostages. Four days later the New York State Police took the prison by force, killing twenty-nine inmates and ten correctional officers.33 In the immediate aftermath numerous prison rebellions throughout the country took place, among them a hunger strike by 330 inmates in a New Jersey maximum-security prison.34 Those hunger strikes and revolts revealed once more that “after a century of ‘prison reform,’ our country has a penal system that is a dismal failure,” as the select committee on the Attica uprising stated.35 What was seen as the critical threat to state security was not really the possibility of a hunger-striking prisoner dying; it was that such a disturbance of prison routine could spark further protests. If one prisoner could go on a hunger strike, so could many.

The Crisis of Imprisonment and Risk Assessment as a “Law and Order Policy” The protests and violence that occurred in prison during the early 1970s not only led to political discussions but also to an increase in scientific research on imprisonment. In August 1971, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment on the social psychology of prison life, funded by the US Office of Naval Research. In what became arguably one of the best-known psychological experiments in history, Zimbardo studied the effects of social roles on the behavior of “ordinary” people in a “mock” prison with students as experimental subjects. After just six days the study was halted: “What we saw was frightening. . . . The majority had indeed become ‘prisoners’ or ‘guards,’ no longer able to clearly differentiate between role-playing and

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self.”36 One of the incidents that prompted the halt of the experiment was a hunger strike by a subject in the “prisoner” role who was then locked up in a small closet as solitary confinement.37 Before a congressional hearing on prisons and prison reform in October 1971, Zimbardo stated his key finding that anyone could be affected by the social conditions of prison life: “I could have become Calley at My Lai [a US army officer convicted of a massacre in Vietnam], George Jackson at San Quentin, one of the men at Attica . . . I believe you could too.”38 Prison bore the risk of “dehumanizing” its inmates and staff, and therefore reform was needed, Zimbardo stated. Moreover, the country needed reform, too, as “prisons of concrete and steel are only metaphors for the social prisons we create and maintain through enforced poverty, racism, sexism, and other forms of social injustice.”39 New regulations were indeed implemented as a result of large and long protests involving food refusal and legal victories for prisoners.40 However, these regulations were not the ones Zimbardo primarily had in mind. The US Department of Justice directly cited the prison riots of the early 1970s as the main reason for “new and better methods for identifying and controlling high-risk prisoners.”41 The most important reaction to prisoners’ resistance and outbreaks of violence was the implementation of sociological, criminological, and psychological inmate classification systems. They were a consequence of federal court rulings in the 1970s affirming prisoners’ civil rights, namely that an administration could not treat inmates at its deliberate will. At the same time, the classification systems were intended to predict the behavior of inmates, and the assignment of “security levels” promised a more predictable approach for reestablishing routine in American prisons.42 This process involved “risk-assessment” and the calculation of a “classification score” on a “security scale.”43 Prisoners could move to “lower security settings based on satisfactory behavior” or could be placed in de facto solitary confinement.44 This is what happened to Little Rock Reed, a Native American activist who had to serve 180 days in solitary confinement after his hunger strike in 1986.45 Inmate classification systems thus subjected the individual prisoners to a competition for self-optimization in which acts of resistance bore not only the risk of punishment but endless incarceration, because most states operated under “indeterminate sentencing.” This meant that prisoners did not know when they would leave prison because this decision was made by a parole board (for instance, George Jackson had been sentenced to “one year to life”).46 Risk assessment thus did not replace the disciplinary regime in prison, but it turned out to be a scientifically justified form of punishment that was less prone to lawsuits.47 In combination with the narrative and right-wing slogan of “law and order,” which was only “a thinly coded representation about race,” the data that inmate classification provided served to justify solitary confinement and prolonged incarceration.48 Since more than four times as many human beings were being held behind bars in 2010 than were in the early 1980s, the campaign for prison abolition became the life’s work of Angela Davis.49

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The Body in Theory and Practice and the Politics of Michel Foucault As police forces were strengthened and the FBI’s surveillance programs were extended and increasingly focused on Black militants, a transatlantic political counterculture formed against the US escalation of the war in Vietnam that spoke out against racist oppression and the threat of a “new fascism.”50 Inspired by Marxist theories of fascism, Black Panther George Jackson most famously argued the existence of what he called the “American brand of fascism” as a particular form of capitalist hierarchy and production that took different forms in different countries.51 In her own prison writing, Angela Davis explained fascism as a “cancerous” process and argued that “while today, the threat of fascism may be primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latent revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people, tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and eventually even more moderate democrats.”52 In an open letter to Angela Davis written from his exile in Paris and widely read worldwide, poet James Baldwin reflected on the history of racism and the rise of a new Black consciousness and claimed that now was the time to fight: Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps—for that is what they are—is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. . . . Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.53

When Baldwin wrote to Davis, she had already ended her hunger strike. However, her struggle against imprisonment continued. The protests of Davis and other prisoners were rarely struggles of prisoners alone; on the contrary, activists and lawyers created networks of solidarity that transcended prison walls and tried to undermine the system of incarceration from different angles. Law students and lawyers formed legal defense groups and prisoners formed their own unions.54 Angela Davis supporters tried to gain the favor of the public by arguing that she was not a threat to the American people, but that the US prison system was a threat to her and to Black citizens throughout the country. The arrest and incarceration of Davis led to solidarity campaigns all over the world that called out to “Save Our Sister” Angela Davis using pamphlets, posters, leaflets, editorials, songs (e.g., by John Lennon and the Rolling Stones), and, of course, rallies and marches.55 The New York Times published more than three hundred articles on Davis’s case between her arrest on 13 October 1970 and her acquittal on 6 June 1972.56 Davis also made headlines internationally. The German news magazine Der Spiegel ran the headline “Faschismus in Amerika?” and used an image of Davis’s face as its

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cover.57 For the radical left in West Germany, Davis and the Black Panthers served as role models.58 On the day Davis was arrested, five thousand Germans marched in Berlin, demanding her release from prison and shouting “Freiheit für alle politischen Gefangenen” (freedom for all political prisoners).59 In East Germany, her case was also well known, and after her release she visited the GDR and met with First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Erich Honecker.60 Among those who rallied behind Davis was also the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who at the time was involved in anti-prison campaigns in France. Although Foucault did not mention hunger strikes explicitly in his scholarly work, these localized, bodily acts captured his political interest.61 In September 1970, incarcerated Maoists in France went on a hunger strike and demanded to be treated as political prisoners, a status that had been granted to some prisoners during World War II and the Algerian War. The strike received widespread public attention, and a speaker for the prisoners’ cause was allowed to list their demands and call for solidarity at a Rolling Stones concert in Paris, just before the band performed their song “Street Fighting Man.”62 The Maoists’ hunger strikes in September 1970 were followed by another one in January 1971, which also led to a few solidarity hunger strikes by students in Paris. It was at a press conference on 9 February 1971, at which the end of those hunger strikes was announced, that philosopher-activist Foucault presented a new manifesto and publicly announced the founding of the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP).63 The concept of the group, consisting of intellectuals, lawyers, physicians, psychologists, and journalists, was deeply connected to Foucault’s ideas of the intellectual’s role within society. The group thus tried “to mobilize a group of specialists who could function as a network that relayed the truth of prison.”64 In 1972, Foucault crossed the Atlantic to visit Attica State Prison. This was the first time the intellectual saw the inside of a carceral institution, as French law at the time offered no right to visit prisons. Foucault mentioned this in an interview with his American colleague John K. Simon.65 “At first sight you have the impression you are visiting more than just a factory, that you are visiting a machine, the inside of a machine,” he said. “So the question one obviously asks is what does the machine produce, what is that gigantic installation used for, and what comes out of it.”66 For Foucault, the prison was a machine that produced the very subjects it imprisoned. The prisoner’s body was “directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks.”67 Arguably, it was his transnational activism that fundamentally influenced Discipline and Punish. In 1973, the New York Times published a page-long essay by the French thinker (translated by the novelist Paul Auster). What Foucault described was the prison as an “in fact” lawless institution that left its inmates vulnerable to arbitrariness: The risk, the eventuality, and worse, the temptation and desire for death have already begun in prison. . . . When one is sure of never getting out again, what is there left to do if

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not risk death to save one’s life, to risk one’s life even at the price of death? . . . Against the violence of the prison personnel the prisoners have nothing more than their bodies with which to defend themselves, and nothing more than their bodies to defend.68

Within this perspective, the body and what a body did were no longer quasinatural, universal, and stable preconditions of politics, but power’s true realm. Food, that is, when, where, what, and how one ate, was not something merely at the fringes of politics, but right at its center. Eating was a matter of reproducing one’s own existence; it was a matter of discipline and regulation. And it was a way of reforming a certain self. Foucault’s famous sentence that the “soul is the prison of the body” points toward the modern project of prison as an institution of reform.69 Surveillance and body-related regulations attempted to produce orderly (democratic) individuals as disciplined citizens. This process of “subjectivation,” as Foucault and others who followed in his footsteps have argued, is in itself subjecting and enabling. And thus, while the intake of food during regulated and organized meals was a technology of prison to produce an orderly, disciplined inmate, the hunger strike became a technology to produce a body “machine” with which to resist.70 In Foucault’s later work, his indignation over violent prison life gave way to an analytical view of prisons as machinery and prototypes of power in modern societies; however, what remained was his focus on the prisoner’s body. Prison protests “were revolts, at the level of the body, against the very body of the prison,” he wrote in Discipline and Punish.71 The human body “in Foucault’s scheme of things,” as David Harvey observed, was “the ‘site’ at which all forms of repression are ultimately registered.”72

The Emergence of Human Rights The descriptions of hunger strikes, which focused on a body endangered by weight loss and incarceration, shared structural elements and notions with the 1970s discourse on human rights and humanitarian aid. Hunger striking appealed not only to a revolutionary discourse on self-sacrifice, but also to a humanitarian discourse whose object was “the saving of individuals” and which produced “public representations of the human beings to be defended.”73 Since the hunger crisis in Biafra in the late 1960s, a new nongovernmental humanitarianism from below crafted and promoted narratives in which the lives of human beings were at risk and had to be saved by the actions of others.74 Over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, key figures of the French intellectual left like Michel Foucault, André Glucksmann, and Bernard Kouchner championed the rights of individuals to confront governments, because “people’s suffering must never be allowed to remain the silent residue of politics.”75 Within the context of those discussions, a vulnerable life could be used as a resource for political communication, and hunger strikes became an important issue for human rights organizations.76

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Taking an antitotalitarian stance, Amnesty International also portrayed hunger strikes universally as an indication of inhuman treatment in custody.77 The emergence of human rights campaigns, which Samuel Moyn has called the rise of a “last Utopia,”78 was international in scope and gained mass media attention, not least because a political prisoner’s brinkmanship was likely to produce headlines and sales. Nonetheless, socialist, liberal, and conservative forces campaigned for human rights in East and West, albeit for different reasons.79 Just as the Soviet Union and the GDR supported the case of Angela Davis, governments in the West praised Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, in which the Russian novelist and historian included a multipage segment on hunger strikes in the Soviet Union’s prisons and labor camps.80 Solzhenitsyn’s book delivered supporting arguments for intellectuals on the left (and right) who were already critical of the Soviet Union.81 Media coverage on political prisoners therefore created a point for political attack on the stage of international diplomacy. For example, in 1984, the USSR launched a campaign about a fast by Leonard Peltier, one of the most prominent imprisoned Native American activists, in response to American concerns about a hunger strike by Andrei Sakharov.82 From this perspective, the occurrence and frequency of hunger strikes, argued German law scholar Heribert Ostendorf, were not an individual’s problem but a “thermometer for a social pathology,” an argument he built on Emile Durkheim’s sociology of suicide.83 Within this humanitarian discourse, the body of a prisoner was seen as threatened and violated by the state, and a hunger strike was not interpreted as the individual’s choice but as the last means to act in an emergency situation.

Moral Turns: The Debates on Force-Feeding in the 1980s These debates about the body came to the fore in the context of political, ethical, and legal arguments about force-feeding, which became an issue in several Western countries.84 In 1975, the Word Medical Association declared that physicians should not “participate . . . in forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading procedures” and that a prisoner who is “capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment . . . shall not be fed artificially.”85 Five years later, the US Federal Bureau of Prisons included a passage on the treatment of hunger strikes in its regulations that stated first and foremost that “it is the responsibility of the Bureau of Prisons to monitor the health and welfare of individual inmates, and to ensure that procedures are pursued to preserve life.” Prisoners who refused to eat for more than seventy-two hours were to be placed under medical observation and a strict medical protocol was defined. The force-feeding of a hunger striker without their consent should be administered only as a last resort and in cases of “a medical necessity for immediate treatment of a life or health-threatening situation.”86 However, in 1982, three court cases led to divergent decisions and rationales.87 Although the case of Mark David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, received some publicity,88 the most widely debated case was a hunger strike

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by Ted A. Prevatte, a prisoner in Georgia.89 After he passed a month without nourishment, the case went to the Supreme Court of Georgia. The state argued “that it ha[d] a duty to protect the health” of its prisoners, whereas Prevatte invoked his “right to control his own body.”90 The court ruled that “the State ha[d] no right to monitor this man’s physical condition against his will; neither [did] it have the right to feed him to prevent his death from starvation if that [was] his wish.”91 The court rulings in the cases of Chapman and Jesse White, conversely, upheld the states’ interest in preserving the life and preventing the suicide of individuals in their custody.92 In the years that followed, the legal discussion in the country’s law reviews addressed the uncertainty that prison administrations and doctors were facing. In a Hastings Center Report, the Boston-based professor of health law George Annas discussed these cases and stated that because prisoners on a hunger strike “generally seek either to manipulate the prison system for their own benefits or to commit suicide, prison officials seem justified in seeking court orders for force-feeding to maintain order and security.”93 Although another author, Stephanie C. Powell, shared Annas’s assumption that prisoners would seek to “manipulate” the state with a hunger strike, she advised that the state should neither grant the demands nor artificially feed the prisoner. “This certainty of consequences alone may deter inmates.”94 Other commentators did not come to those firm conclusions. Instead, they moved toward a more case-centered and more flexible approach. In a discussion on the constitutionality of force-feeding, one author argued that a “prisoner may be force-fed only if a governmental interest outweighs the right to bodily integrity.”95 In an apparent reference to the cultural movements and language of the early 1980s, another scholar suggested that hunger strikers should be allowed to starve to death, because the “quality of life” is raised by “allowing each individual to choose his own lifestyle.”96 Neoliberal flexibility, a concern for personal “lifestyle” and choice, painted the hunger striker as a subject of rights and less as a subject of care.97 That was, if not the opposite, a stark difference to what Zimbardo had suggested to Congress in 1971, when he closed his statement with the appeal that “the main ingredient necessary to effect any change at all in prison reform, is caring.”98 The legal commentaries struggled with the question of how to balance the different interests of a prisoner’s freedom of choice, one of the core ideals of American democracy, and the duty to protect a prisoner’s life as well as public security. A decision, they argued, should be made with respect to individual cases and circumstances.99 Only a few years into the presidency of Ronald Reagan, those arguments resembled the thoughts of conservatives in West Germany and the United Kingdom. In 1981, ten Irish militant hunger strikers died in a high-security prison in Northern Ireland because the British government under Margaret Thatcher no longer attempted to forcibly feed the prisoners.100 As the Northern Irish example proved, the departure from force-feeding was a dangerous strategy. However, since force-feeding had not provided the desired security, the uncertainty of a hunger strike situation seemed to become a new normality anyway. In accordance

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with contemporary diagnoses of “risk-consciousness,”101 the state’s focus was not the immediately endangered life, but the future ramifications of a hunger strike. In West Germany, the debate on hunger strikes and force-feedings was strongly influenced by the discourse on leftist terrorism, since imprisoned members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) regularly used hunger strikes to protest prison conditions. Holger Meins (1974) and Sigurd Debus (1981) died during their hunger strikes despite forced feeding.102 In the early 1980s, the discussions reached a new climax when the new federal government, under the conservative Helmut Kohl (CDU), declared a “geistig-moralische Wende,” a change of mindsets and morals. During a hunger strike in winter 1984/85, the Bundestag passed a new law that aimed at recognizing the right to self-determination of hunger-striking prisoners and tried to release doctors from the obligation to artificially feed a person without this individual’s consent.103 According to the new law, correctional institutions would no longer be bound to forcibly feed a prisoner as long as the prisoner’s free will could still be determined.104 However, if a hunger striker lost consciousness, the administration had the right—not the duty—to artificially nourish the prisoner.105 The law, which critics called a “coma-solution,” went immediately into practice.106 In January 1985, a Red Army Faction prisoner in a life-threatening situation had to be transferred from prison to a local hospital.107 The relocation of the prisoner to a public hospital with twelve hundred patients was a logistic challenge, because the precautionary measures (such as the evacuation of other patients from the intensive care unit, the implementation of optical surveillance, and the assignment of police guards) were absolutely contrary to the maintenance of a hospital, as the police confirmed.108 However, the Federal Ministry of Justice saw no other choice, as a dead hunger striker would almost certainly spark a series of terrorist attacks.109 This was considered to be a great danger and intensified the security concerns of the authorities with respect to the life and health of other persons and objects.110 Security was expanded for judges, doctors, the ministers of justice and the interior, undersecretaries (Staatssekretäre), and US military facilities.111 Thus the objects of surveillance were not only the terrorists but also those people who needed protection.112 On 1 February 1985, the RAF “Kommando Patsy O’Hara,” named after an Irish militant who died on a hunger strike in Northern Ireland in 1981, murdered Ernst Zimmermann, chairman of the German Aerospace Industries Association (Bundesverband der Deutschen Luft- und Raumfahrtindustrie). A few days later, the RAF discontinued their campaign and the political tactic of the hunger strike in West Germany, linked to terror attacks, became increasingly discredited. A German newspaper summarized: “The hunger strike falls into disrepute” (“der Hungerstreik gerät in Verruf ”).113

The Risks of Hunger Striking The risk of hunger strikes was that political activists might discredit their goals. The outcome was open. To embark on a hunger strike created a situation of

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contingency for all those involved, since the consequences of refusing to eat (and sometimes to drink) depended on individual factors that could not be fully known in advance.114 Therefore, hunger strikers were not so different from other risk-takers in (post)modern societies, although, under the condition of an individual emergency, they raised the stakes to the limit. Refusing to eat was an individual act, but hunger strikes were also a social practice. That is, they were embedded in discursive contexts that gave meaning to this action. They were entangled in social movements and shaped by institutional regulations and rationales.115 As demonstrated above, for the authorities the risks of hunger strikes as a social practice lay in their potential to rupture institutional prison discipline and to spur further protest and terrorist attacks that endangered public safety. Furthermore, as Michel Foucault has argued, modern statehood relies upon disciplinary and biopolitical power formations, that is, the arrangement, regulation, and habitual routinization of human bodies in and through total institutions, and the foundation of a state’s legitimacy on the promotion of life, well-being, and security of its population.116 This included the state’s duty to care for the health and well-being of prison inmates. For this reason, suffering or even death in prison bore the potential of a political scandal, because the state’s institutions seemed to be unable to fulfill their purpose. So, a hunger strike that reached a life-threatening situation appeared as a visible exercise of power on an individual’s body.117 Thus, in an emerging “reflexive modernity” (Ulrich Beck) that became aware of its own risks, the hunger strike became tantamount to a symbol of the perils of modern security, specifically as an indicator of a state’s potential abuse of power. However, more often than not, the danger of a dead body in custody was only a minor problem for the state. This is a troubling thought, but the fact that the suicide (and homicide) rate in American prisons was far higher than in the nation in general leaves no doubt that death was a problem that was far too common.118 Maximilian Buschmann is a research assistant at the Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine at the Technical University of Munich. He is currently working on a research project about the history of brain science during the National Socialist regime. Most recently, he published several articles on hunger strikes in the United States and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. His PhD thesis, “Die Erfindung des Hungerstreiks. Eine transnationale Geschichte,” is under contract with Vandenhoek & Rupprecht and will be published in 2023.

Notes 1. New York Public Library (NYPL), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Angela Davis Legal Defense Collection (= Angela Davis Collection), Box 1, Docket No A 200-12, Criminal Court of the City of New York in the Matter of Angela Davis, Angela Davis Legal defense collection. 2. Bettina Aptheker, The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 24.

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3. Angela Davis Collection, Box 1, Affidavit Angela Y. Davis, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated, against John V. Lindsay. 4. National Archives, Washington, DC. Record Group 59. Electronic Telegrams 1978. Central Foreign Policy Files 1973–1979, https://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/ state-dept/rg-59-central-files/1973-1979 (accessed 19 February 2021). 5. Amnesty International, Annual Report 1978 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1978); Amnesty International, Annual Report 1979 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1979). 6. Fran Lisa Buntman, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 36‒60; see Tom Buchanan, Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism in Postwar Britain, 1945–1977 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 142. 7. On the change from why to how, see Marc Schuilenburg, The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk, and Social Order (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 14. 8. On the idea of technologies of governmental power, see David Garland, “‘Governmentality’ and the Problem of Crime: Foucault, Criminology, Sociology,” Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (1997): 173‒214 (here 183, 199). 9. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 284‒307. 10. Maximilian Buschmann, “Der erste politische Hungerstreik in den USA: Anarchistische Rebellen und die Geschichte des Nicht-Essens als Protestform im frühen 20. Jahrhundert,” in Geschichte des Nicht-Essens: Verzicht, Vermeidung und Verweigerung in der Moderne, ed. Norman Aselmeyer and Veronika Settele (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018), 145‒74. 11. Scott H. Bennett, Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915‒1963 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 121‒26. 12. Among them was the then nineteen-year-old John Lewis in Birmingham City Jail (Alabama); “Oral History Interview with John Lewis, 20, 1973: Interview A-0073,” Southern Oral History Program Collection, https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0073/excerpts/ excerpt_7336.html (accessed 19 February 2021). 13. Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 24. 14. Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 183. 15. Clayborne Carson, Zeiten des Kampfes: Das Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) und das Erwachen des afro-amerikanischen Widerstands in den sechziger Jahren (Nettersheim: Graswurzelrevolution, 2004), 97‒98. 16. Stokely Carmichael and Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 208. 17. On César Chávez and the United Farm Worker Association , see Matt Garcia, From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 18. University of California Berkeley, Microform Collections, Collection of the United Farm Workers of America. Woodbridge: Gale, 2009, Series 1, (= UWFA Collection), Reel 2, Statement by César Chávez on the conclusion of a 25-day fast for nonviolence. 19. Ibid. 20. “Head of Farm Workers Union Ends 25-Day Fast in California,” New York Times, 11 March 1968.

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21. Nayan B. Shah, “Feeling for the Protest Faster: How the Self-Starving Body Influences Social Movement and Global Medical Ethics,” in Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, ed. Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 239‒59 (here 247). 22. “Kennedy Plan to Run Reported and Denied,” New York Times, 8 March 1968. 23. See Kyle Harvey, “Prayer or Protest? The Radical Promise of Voluntary Poverty in the Anti-Nuclear Fast for Life, 1983,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 9, no. 1 (2015): 95–124. 24. Doug Rossinow, The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 146; Lyn Stolarski, “Right to Shelter: History of the Mobilization of the Homeless as a Model of Voluntary Action,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 17, no. 1 (January 1988): 36‒45. 25. George Washington University, Mitch Snyder Papers, https://searcharchives.library.gwu .edu/repositories/2/resources/196 (accessed 19 February 2021). 26. “Tennessean Meets on Berrigans’ Case,” New York Times, 14 August 1971; “Berrigan Ends Fast,” New York Times, 9 September 1971. 27. Angela Davis Collection, Affidavit Angela Y. Davis against John V. Lindsay, 3 November 1970; see “Angela Davis is Put under 24 Hr. Guard,” New York Times, 25 October 1970. 28. “Angela Davis Sues over Being Given Solitary Detention,” New York Times, 31 October 1970. 29. Angela Y. Davis, “Political Prisoners,” in If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, ed. Angela Davis (New York: Joseph Okpaku, 1971), 19‒36 (here 29). 30. Whereas in 1967 “only” five prison riots took place, the number rocketed to forty-eight in 1972; see Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows, 178‒79. 31. “Rikers Prisoners on Hunger Strike,” New York Times, 14 March 1970; “Hunger Strike Wanes,” New York Times, 29 February 1972; “Convicts on Hunger Strike,” New York Times, 4 April 1976. 32. NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Archives and Rare Books Division, Manuscripts, Haywood Burns Papers, Sc MG 625, “Official Report of the New York State Commission on Attica,” 107–8. 33. Berger, Captive Nation, 148. 34. Heather A. Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (New York: Vintage, 2017), 256‒65. 35. United States 93rd Congress, 1st Session, House Report No. 93-329, Reform of Our Correctional Systems: A Report by the Select Committee on Crime (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), 47. 36. Philip Zimbardo, Prepared Statement by Philip G. Zimbardo: “The Psychological Power and Pathology of Imprisonment.” Congressional Serial No. 15: Hearings Before Subcommittee No. 3 Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 92nd Congress, 1st Session on Corrections, Part II, Prisons, Prison Reform and Prisoner’s Rights: California. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office (25 October 1971), 152‒57 (here 154). 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 155. 39. Ibid. 40. James B. Jacobs, “The Prisoners’ Rights Movement and Its Impact, 1960‒1980,” Crime and Justice 2 (1980): 429‒70 (here 439); Robert T. Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethink-

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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ing the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement,” The Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 73‒86. James Austin, Objective Prison Classification: A Guide for Correctional Agencies (Washington, DC: National Institute of Corrections, 2004), x. Amy Craddock, “Formal Social Control in Prisons: An Explanatory Examination of the Custody Classification Process,” American Journal of Criminal Justice 17, no. 1 (1992): 63‒87. Robert A. Buchanan et al, “National Evaluation of Objective Prison Classification Systems: The Current State of the Art,” Crime & Delinquency 32, no. 3 (July 1986): 272‒90 (here 279‒80). Ibid., 280. Deborah L. Garlin, “A Political Fugitive: The Case of Little Rock Reed (A Story of Due Process the American Way),” Social Justice 20, no. 3/4 (Fall‒Winter 1993): 163‒78 (here 164). Keramet Reiter, 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 72. Joan Dayan, “Held in the Body of the State: Prisons and the Law,” in History, Memory, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 211. Anthony Platt, “The Politics of Law and Order,” Social Justice 21, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 3‒13 (here 5); Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 151. See Alex Zamalin, Struggle on Their Minds: The Political Thought of African American Resistance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 119‒49. On the FBI’s programs, see Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 205. “Field Marshal George Jackson Analyzes the Correct Method in Combating American Fascism,” The Black Panther, 4 September 1971; on the discourse of George Jackson and Angela Davis on fascism, see Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 127‒37. Davis, “Political Prisoners,” 34. James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis,” New York Review of Books, 7 January 1971. See Jacobs, “Prisoners’ Rights Movement.” Oakland Museum of California, All Of Us Or None Archive, “Save Our Sister.” Poster Work on Paper (1972). Oakland, United States. This was the result of a search for the term “Angela Davis” on the New York Times website. “Faschismus in Amerika,” Der Spiegel, 8 November 1971. Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, “We Shall Overcome: The Impact of the African American Freedom Struggle on Race Relations and Social Protest in Germany after World War II,” in The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade, ed. Grzegorz Kosc et al. (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), 66‒97 (here 78). “5000 Westberliner demonstrieren für die Panthers,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14 October 1970.

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60. Sophie Lorenz, “Schwarze Schwester Angela”—Die DDR und Angela Davis: Kalter Krieg, Rassismus und Black Power 1965‒1975 (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2020), 169‒249. 61. Michel Foucault, Schriften in vier Bänden: Dits et écrits, Vol. 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 2002), 249. 62. Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 76–77. 63. Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics, 81; see Cecile Brich, “The Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons: The Voice of Prisoners? Or Foucault’s,” Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 26‒47 (here 29). It is worth mentioning that in France not only radical leftists but also undocumented migrants used hunger strikes. Between 1970 and 1992 more than five hundred hunger strikes took place in France; Johanna Siméant, “Who Clamours for Attention—and Who Cares? Hunger Strikes in France from 1972 to 1992,” La Lettre de la Maison Française d’Oxford 10 (1999): 94‒115 (here 111‒14). 64. Jason Demers, “Prison Liberation by Association: Michel Foucault and the George Jackson Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies 13, no. 2 (2016): 165‒86 (here 170); Brich, “The Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons,” 28; Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 318‒22. 65. Michel Foucault and John K. Simon, “Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview,” Social Justice 18, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 26‒34 (here 26‒27). 66. Ibid. 67. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), 25. 68. Michel Foucault, “The Guillotine Lives,” New York Times, 8 April 1973. 69. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30. 70. On the concept of the body as a machine, see Nikolas S. Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 184‒85. 71. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30. 72. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 45. 73. Didier Fassin, “Humanitarianism as Politics of Life,” Public Culture 19, no. 3 (2007): 499‒520 (here 501). 74. See Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 176‒204; on Biafra, see Lasse Heerten, The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); for a broader perspective on humanitarianism, see Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 161‒204. 75. Michel Foucault, “Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l’homme,” Libération 967 (30 June–1 July 1984): 22; on the historical context of Foucault’s statement, see Eribon, Michel Foucault, 399‒401. 76. For a similar argument with respect to more recent cases in Russia, see Falguni A. Sheth, “Unruliness without Rioting: Hunger Strikes in Contemporary Politics,” in Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prison Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, ed. Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 123‒40 (here 124). 77. Amnesty International, Annual Report 1978; Amnesty International, Annual Report 1979. 78. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010), 1‒3.

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79. Rosemary Foot, “The Cold War and Human Rights,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 3, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 445–65. 80. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Der Archipel Gulag (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 426‒34. 81. Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 91. 82. “Soviet Points Finger at a Civil Rights Case in U.S.,” New York Times, 27 June 1984. 83. Heribert Ostendorf, Das Recht zum Hungerstreik: Verfassungsmäßige Absicherung und strafrechtliche Konsequenzen (Frankfurt a. M.: Metzner, 1983), 268. 84. On Britain, see Ian Miller, A History of Force Feeding: Hunger Strikes, Prisons and Medical Ethics, 1909‒1974 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 191; on West Germany, see Leith Passmore, “The Ethics and Politics of Force-Feeding Terror Suspects in West German Prisons,” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 2 (2011): 481–99. 85. World Medical Association, “Declaration of Tokyo,” University of Minnesota Human Rights Library, http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/tokyo.html (accessed 14 December 2022). 86. Bureau of Prisons (Department of Justice), “28 CFR, 549.60-66.” Federal Register 45, no. 67 (4 April 1980), 23, 365‒6. 87. Richard Ansbacher, “Force-Feeding Hunger-Striking Prisoners: A Framework for Analysis,” University of Florida Law Review 35, no. 1 (1983): 99‒129 (here 100). 88. “Chapman Breaks His 26-Day Fast,” New York Times, 2 March 1982. 89. Zant v. Prevatte, 248 Ga. 832 (1982), https://law.justia.com/cases/georgia/supreme-court/ 1982/38375-1.html (accessed 14 December 2022). 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 92. George J. Annas, “Prison Hunger Strikes: Why the Motive Matters,” Hastings Center Report 12, no. 6 (December 1982): 21‒22 (here 21); John Petrila and T. A. Prevatte, “Prison Hunger Strikes: The View from Inside,” Hastings Center Report 13, no. 2 (April 1983): 50. 93. Annas, “Prison Hunger Strikes,” 22. 94. Stephanie C. Powell, “Constitutional Law-Forced Feeding of a Prisoner on a Hunger Strike: A Violation of an Inmate’s Right to Privacy,” N.C. L. Rev 714 (1983): 714‒32 (here 731). 95. Joel K. Greenberg, “Hunger Striking Prisoners: The Constitutionality of Force-Feeding,” Fordham Law Review 747 (1983): 747‒70 (here 770). 96. Steven C. Sunshine, “Should a Hunger-Striking Prisoner Be Allowed to Die?” Boston College Law Review 423, no. 25 (1984): 423‒58 (here 458). 97. See Rose, Inventing, 36. 98. Zimbardo, “Psychological Power,” 157. 99. Ansbacher, “Force-Feeding Hunger-Striking Prisoners,” 128‒29. 100. Thomas Hennessey, Hunger Strike: Margaret Thatcher’s Battle with the IRA, 1980–1981 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013). 101. On this general tendency in “risk societies,” see Wolfgang Bonß, Vom Risiko: Unsicherheit und Ungewißheit in der Moderne (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995), 25; Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986), 44.

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102. On the RAF’s hunger strike, see Marcel Streng, “‘Hungerstreik’: Eine politische Subjektivierungspraxis zwischen ‘Freitod’ und ‘Überlebenskunst’ (Westdeutschland, 1970‒1990),” in Das schöne Selbst: Zur Genealogie des modernen Subjekts zwischen Ethik und Ästhetik, ed. Jens Elberfeld and Marcus Otto (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009), 333‒65; Jan-Hendrik Schulz, Unbeugsam hinter Gittern: Die Hungerstreiks der RAF nach dem Deutschen Herbst (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2019). 103. Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur Änderung des Strafvollzugsgesetzes, Bundestag-Drucksache 10/172, June 16, 1983, 1. 104. Ibid., 3. 105. See Marcel Streng, “Führungsverhältnisse im Hungerstreik: Ein Kapitel zur Geschichte des westdeutschen Strafvollzugs (1973‒1985),” in Zeitgeschichte des Selbst: Therapeutisierung—Politisierung—Emotionalisierung, ed. Pascal Eitler and Jens Elberfeld (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015), 113‒46 (here 144‒45). 106. The German parliament passed §101 StVollzG on 24 January 1985. See Schulze, Unbeugsam hinter Gittern, 298. 107. Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (= Nds. HStA), Nds. 100, Acc. 149/97 Nr. 136, Kripo Celle an Nds. Innenministerium, 29 January 1985; see Heiko Stoff, Die Komamethode: Willensfreiheit, Selbstverantwortung und der Anfang vom Ende der Roten Armee Fraktion im Winter 1984/85 (Berlin: Kadmos, 2020). 108. Nds. HStA, Nds. 100, Acc. 149/97 Nr. 136, Polizeieinsatzbericht, 9‒10. 109. Nds. HStA, Nds. 100, Acc. 149/97 Nr. 136, Landesjustizminister Walter Remmers an Personalrat der MHH 26.3.1985. 110. Nds. HStA, Nds. 100, Acc. 149/97 Nr. 136, Bundesinministerium i.a. dr. schreiber an alle Landesinneministerien, 23 January 1985; Fernschreiben an Landeskriminalamt Hannover, 24 January 1985. 111. Nds. HStA, Nds. 100, Acc. 149/97 Nr. 136, Lagebericht LKA Niedersachsen, an Nds. Innenminister, “Hungerstreik inhaftierter terroristischer Gewalttäter, hier Sicherheitslage,” 31 January 1985; an Verteiler 111, betr. eingeleitete bzw. vorbereitete poliz. masznahmen aus anlasz des hungerstreiks [fragment]. 112. On personal security in West Germany, see Maren Richter, Leben im Ausnahmezustand: Terrorismus und Personenschutz in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1970‒1993) (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2014). 113. “Drinnen hungern, draußen schießen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2 February 1985. 114. Conceptually, see Bonß, Vom Risiko, 52‒54. On the different motives of individual risk-taking, see Jens O. Zinn, “The Meaning of Risk-Taking: Key Concepts and Dimensions,” Journal of Risk Research 22, no. 1 (2019): 1‒15 (here 3). See also Amanda Machin, “Hunger Power: The Embodied Protest of the Political Hunger Strike,” Interface 8, no. 1 (2016): 157‒80. 115. On social practices, see Andreas Reckwitz, “Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken: Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32, no. 4 (August 2003): 282–301. 116. Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Michel Foucault, Sexualität und Wahrheit, Vol I., Der Wille zum Wissen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1983), 135. 117. See Thomas L. Dumm, “From Time to Torture: The Hellish Future of the Criminal Sentence,” in States of Violence: War, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die, ed. Austin Sarat and Jennifer L. Culbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 150‒68 (here 166). An interesting perspective on death fasts and the question of biopolitical sov-

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ereignty is provided by Banu Bargu, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 118. In 1980, thirty-four out of a hundred thousand inmates died from suicide in state prisons; cf. Christopher J. Mumola, “Suicide and Homicide in State Prisons and Local Jails,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report (August 2005, NCJ 210036), 2.

Bibliography Amnesty International. Annual Report 1978. London: Amnesty International Publications, 1978. ———. Annual Report 1979. London: Amnesty International Publications, 1979. Annas, George J. “Prison Hunger Strikes: Why the Motive Matters.” Hastings Center Report 12, no. 6 (December 1982): 21‒22. Ansbacher, Richard. “Force-Feeding Hunger-Striking Prisoners: A Framework for Analysis.” University of Florida Law Review 35, no.1 (1983): 99‒129. Aptheker, Bettina. The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Austin, James. Objective Prison Classification: A Guide for Correctional Agencies. Washington, DC: National Institute of Corrections, 2004. Baldwin, James. “An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis.” New York Review of Books, 7 January 1971. Bargu, Banu. Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Barnett, Michael. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Beck, Ulrich. Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986. Bennett, Scott H. Radical Pacifism: The War Resisters League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915‒1963. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Berger, Dan. Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Bonß, Wolfgang. Vom Risiko: Unsicherheit und Ungewißheit in der Moderne. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995. Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Brich, Cecile. “The Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons: The Voice of Prisoners? Or Foucault’s.” Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 26‒47. Buchanan, Robert A., et al. “National Evaluation of Objective Prison Classification Systems: The Current State of the Art.” Crime & Delinquency 32, no. 3 (July 1986): 272‒90. Buchanan, Tom. Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism in Postwar Britain, 1945– 1977. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Buntman, Fran Lisa. Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bureau of Prisons (Department of Justice). “28 CFR, 549.60-66.” Federal Register 45, no. 67 (4 April 1980): 23, 365‒6. Buschmann, Maximilian. “Der erste politische Hungerstreik in den USA: Anarchistische Rebellen und die Geschichte des Nicht-Essens als Protestform im frühen 20. Jahrhundert.” In

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Geschichte des Nicht-Essens: Verzicht, Vermeidung und Verweigerung in der Moderne, edited by Norman Aselmeyer and Veronika Settele, 145‒74. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018. Carmichael, Stokely, and Michael Thelwell. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. Carson, Clayborne. Zeiten des Kampfes: Das Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) und das Erwachen des afro-amerikanischen Widerstands in den sechziger Jahren. Nettersheim: Graswurzelrevolution, 2004. Chase, Robert T. “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement.” The Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 73‒86. Christofferson, Michael Scott. French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s. New York: Berghahn, 2004. Craddock, Amy. “Formal Social Control in Prisons: An Explanatory Examination of the Custody Classification Process.” American Journal of Criminal Justice 17, no. 1 (1992): 63‒87. Davis, Angela Y. “Political Prisoners.” In If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, edited by Angela Davis, 19‒36. New York: Joseph Okpaku, 1971. Dayan, Joan. “Held in the Body of the State: Prisons and the Law.” In History, Memory, and the Law, edited by Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, 183‒247. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Demers, Jason. “Prison Liberation by Association: Michel Foucault and the George Jackson Atlantic.” Atlantic Studies 13, no. 2 (2016): 165‒86. Dumm, Thomas L. “From Time to Torture: The Hellish Future of the Criminal Sentence.” In States of Violence: War, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die, edited by Austin Sarat and Jennifer L. Culbert, 150‒68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault: Eine Biographie. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Fassin, Didier. “Humanitarianism as Politics of Life.” Public Culture 19, no. 3 (2007): 499‒520. Foot, Rosemary. “The Cold War and Human Rights.” In The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 3, edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, 445–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Foucault, Michel. “The Guillotine Lives.” New York Times, 8 April 1973. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1979. ———. Sexualität und Wahrheit, Vol. 1, Der Wille zum Wissen. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983. ———. “Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l’homme.” Libération 967 (30 June‒1 July 1984): 22. ———. Schriften in vier Bänden: Dits et écrits. Vol. 2. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. Foucault, Michel, and John K. Simon. “Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview.” Social Justice 18, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 26‒34. Garcia, Matt. From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Garland, David. “‘Governmentality’ and the Problem of Crime: Foucault, Criminology, Sociology.” Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (1997): 173‒214. Garlin, Deborah L. “A Political Fugitive: The Case of Little Rock Reed (A Story of Due Process the American Way).” Social Justice 20, no. 3/4 (Fall‒Winter 1993): 163‒78. Gottschalk, Marie. The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Greenberg, Joel K. “Hunger Striking Prisoners: The Constitutionality of Force-Feeding.” Fordham Law Review 747 (1983): 747‒70.

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Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Harvey, Kyle. “Prayer or Protest? The Radical Promise of Voluntary Poverty in the AntiNuclear Fast for Life, 1983.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 9, no. 1 (2015): 95–124. Heerten, Lasse. The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hennessey, Thomas. Hunger Strike: Margaret Thatcher’s Battle with the IRA, 1980–1981. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013. Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Jacobs, James B. “The Prisoners’ Rights Movement and Its Impact, 1960‒1980.” Crime and Justice 2 (1980): 429‒70. Laqueur, Thomas W. “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative.” In The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, 176‒204. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Lorenz, Sophie. “Schwarze Schwester Angela”—Die DDR und Angela Davis: Kalter Krieg, Rassismus und Black Power 1965‒1975. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2020. Machin, Amanda. “Hunger Power: The Embodied Protest of the Political Hunger Strike.” Interface 8, no. 1 (2016): 157‒80. Miller, Ian. A History of Force Feeding: Hunger Strikes, Prisons and Medical Ethics, 1909‒1974. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010. Mumola, Christopher J. Suicide and Homicide in State Prisons and Local Jails. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report (August 2005, NCJ 210036). Ostendorf, Heribert. Das Recht zum Hungerstreik: Verfassungsmäßige Absicherung und strafrechtliche Konsequenzen. Frankfurt a. M.: Metzner, 1983. Passmore, Leith. “The Ethics and Politics of Force-Feeding Terror Suspects in West German Prisons.” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 2 (2011): 481–99. Petrila, John, and T. A. Prevatte. “Prison Hunger Strikes: The View from Inside.” Hastings Center Report 13, no. 2 (April 1983): 50. Platt, Anthony. “The Politics of Law and Order.” Social Justice 21, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 3‒13. Powell, Stephanie C. “Constitutional Law-Forced Feeding of a Prisoner on a Hunger Strike: A Violation of an Inmate’s Right to Privacy.” N.C. L. Rev 714 (1983): 714‒32. Reckwitz, Andreas. “Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken: Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32, no. 4 (August 2003): 282–301. Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007. Reiter, Keramet. 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Richter, Maren. Leben im Ausnahmezustand: Terrorismus und Personenschutz in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1970‒1993). Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2014. Rodríguez, Dylan. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Rose, Nikolas S. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rossinow, Doug. The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Schuilenburg, Marc. The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk, and Social Order. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

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Schulz, Jan-Hendrik. Unbeugsam hinter Gittern: Die Hungerstreiks der RAF nach dem Deutschen Herbst. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2019. Shah, Nayan B. “Feeling for the Protest Faster: How the Self-Starving Body Influences Social Movement and Global Medical Ethics.” In Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, edited by Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross, 239‒59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Sheth, Falguni A. “Unruliness without Rioting: Hunger Strikes in Contemporary Politics.” In Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prison Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, edited by Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts, 123‒40. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Siméant, Johanna. “Who Clamours for Attention—and Who Cares? Hunger Strikes in France from 1972 to 1992.” La Lettre de la Maison Française d’Oxford 10 (1999): 94‒115. Simon, Jonathan. Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. Der Archipel Gulag. Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978. Stoff, Heiko. Die Komamethode: Willensfreiheit, Selbstverantwortung und der Anfang vom Ende der Roten Armee Fraktion im Winter 1984/85. Berlin: Kadmos, 2020. Stolarski, Lyn. “Right to Shelter: History of the Mobilization of the Homeless as a Model of Voluntary Action.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 17, no. 1 (January 1988): 36‒45. Streng, Marcel. “‘Hungerstreik’: Eine politische Subjektivierungspraxis zwischen ‘Freitod’ und ‘Überlebenskunst’ (Westdeutschland, 1970‒1990).” In Das schöne Selbst: Zur Genealogie des modernen Subjekts zwischen Ethik und Ästhetik, edited by Jens Elberfeld and Marcus Otto, 333‒65. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2009. ———. “Führungsverhältnisse im Hungerstreik: Ein Kapitel zur Geschichte des westdeutschen Strafvollzugs (1973‒1985).” In Zeitgeschichte des Selbst: Therapeutisierung— Politisierung—Emotionalisierung, edited by Pascal Eitler and Jens Elberfeld, 113‒46. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015. Sunshine, Steven C. “Should a Hunger-Striking Prisoner Be Allowed to Die?” Boston College Law Review 423, no. 25 (1984): 423‒58. Thompson, Heather A. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy. New York: Vintage, 2017. Waldschmidt-Nelson, Britta. “We Shall Overcome: The Impact of the African American Freedom Struggle on Race Relations and Social Protest in Germany after World War II.” In The Transatlantic Sixties: Europe and the United States in the Counterculture Decade, edited by Grzegorz Kosc et al., 66‒97. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013. World Medical Association. “Declaration of Tokyo.” University of Minnesota Human Rights Library. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/tokyo.html (accessed 14 December 2022). Zamalin, Alex. Struggle on Their Minds: The Political Thought of African American Resistance. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Zimbardo, Philip G. Prepared Statement by Philip G. Zimbardo: “The Psychological Power and Pathology of Imprisonment.” Congressional Serial No. 15: Hearings Before Subcommittee No. 3 Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 92nd Congress, 1st Session on Corrections, Part II, Prisons, Prison Reform and Prisoner’s Rights: California. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office (25 October 1971), 152‒57. Zinn, Jens O. “The Meaning of Risk-Taking: Key Concepts and Dimensions.” Journal of Risk Research 22, no. 1 (2019): 1‒15.

7 “An Inseparable Pair” Freedom and Security in the Schengen Space Isaac Stanley-Becker

The village of Schengen lies at the tripoint border joining France, Germany, and Luxembourg. Unremarkable except for its pastoral beauty, it was visited by Goethe when he was writing on perceptions of nature.1 In the years after World War II, the village was known mainly as a wine-making center, not a theater of high politics. But on 14 June 1985, European diplomats convened in the wine-making village to approve a treaty on free movement that would come to be known as the Schengen Agreement. They returned in June 1990 to approve a convention implementing the agreement’s terms. The original parties to the accord—which today binds twenty-six European nations, including twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU members—were Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. As a landmark, Schengen embodied both the natural integration of European nations and the vision of free movement proclaimed by French president François Mitterrand using the mantra of “Citizens’ Europe.”2 Under the accord, however, free movement was hardly uncircumscribed, because Schengen’s framers understood the landmark as a place of risk—the risk of untrammeled travel by unwanted immigrants in a new transnational space without internal frontiers. At the signing ceremony in the summer of 1985, a pledge to prevent “illegal immigration” buttressed the declaration that Schengen would “benefit nationals” of a “Europe of Citizens” by expanding freedom of movement.3 How Schengen joined internal freedom with external control and gave rise to technologies to manage this balance is a guiding question of this chapter. On the eve of the Schengen accord’s incorporation into European Union law under the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, Waldemar Schreckenberger, state secretary to the

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German chancellor, recalled the effort to construct “a secure, crime-protected transnational space of free movement.”4 Precisely because the accord enlarged the domain of free movement—across an expanse of Western Europe and to all nationals of the European Community, not just those engaged in economic activity—it mandated new security procedures. Abolition of internal borders was expressly premised on the fortification of the Schengen area’s external perimeter, as well as restrictive immigration rules and policing of unauthorized migrants, to be enforced by member states. In particular, free movement gave rise to a plan for the Schengen Information System, a security apparatus designed to balance free movement with surveillance, to pair the lifting of physical barriers with the gathering of personal data that became core to methods of cross-border policing. Within the Schengen area, the free movement of persons across frontiers was intended only for nationals, for Europeans, and this liberty was hedged by transnational security measures that perversely required the assertion of national authority. Since its inception, therefore, Schengen has been a site of dualisms—of freedom and security, but also of transnational intercourse and national governmentality. Soon after the accord went into force, such peculiarities were bluntly summed up by none other than the director of the Schengen Secretariat, a quasiadministrative body with no substantive executive powers. “The term ‘Schengen institution’ is itself a paradox,” said the director, Wouter van de Rijt. He observed that “Montesquieu would probably have a number of reasons to roll over in his grave in encountering a dynamic process like Schengen. This great tool, a tool for police cooperation and free movement, does not have institutions in the forms with which we’re familiar . . . Schengen is not presided over by a government that leads, a parliament that votes, or a court that judges.”5 The Schengen area was founded as a place without government institutions but with a powerful transnational security apparatus to offset the risks posed by free movement across the frontiers of Western Europe. Until Schengen was incorporated within the protections of EU law under the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, it was a territory where individual freedom was acutely at risk precisely because the expansive security apparatus was subject to no countervailing transnational institutions either guaranteeing individual self-determination or checking the police power of nation-states augmented by new information technology. From this perspective, Schengen’s creation appears not only as a Montesquieuian nightmare and a challenge to informational privacy but—as claimed by foreign migrants in Citizens’ Europe—a transnational project of freedom marked by “totalitarian scars.”6 Historians have not fully probed the development of the Schengen accord as a complex administrative instrument designed to balance free movement with surveillance. The historical study of European integration, still in its infancy, mostly overlooks the accord.7 The period after Schengen’s incorporation into EU law in 1997 is the dominant vantage point in scholarly debates in North America and Europe, where Schengen has been identified as a key factor in the rise of “Sicherheitshysterie” or “security hysteria,” for example in the pages of Kritische

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Justiz, as well as a subject of comparative analysis of modes of European integration.8 This chapter draws on, but differs from, the methods and findings of political scientists, international relations theorists, and sociologists, whose work has dominated study of the accord.9 For instance, the French political sociologist Didier Bigo focuses on the system’s operation, rather than its origins, in finding that Schengen forms a cornerstone of a repressive EU regime of security captured in the image of “fortress Europe.” While drawing on Bigo’s critique, this chapter directs attention to the complexities of the security procedures paired to the principle of free movement at the time of Schengen’s emergence.10 It is still the case, as Bigo wrote of Schengen, that little study has been given to “the debate of the eighties and how all these norms were set up.”11 To explain how debate in the 1980s was aimed at managing the risks of open borders, I draw on meeting notes and diplomatic telegrams forming part of the arcana of Schengen negotiations and held in state agencies and at the European Council. Because of rules barring access to diplomatic records for thirty years, much of this material has not been studied. Contemporaneous reflections by security officials and privacy advocates, as well as oral histories with Schengen negotiators, also offer perspective on principles of freedom and exclusion.12 A “laboratory” was how Schengen was conceived in its formative era by its framers: “A laboratory for the free movement of persons in Europe.” It was “a model,” explained Dutch foreign minister Pieter Dankert in 1990, “a kind of experiment.”13 While Schengen was widely recognized as a laboratory of free movement—an “experimental garden” was how a report of the European Parliament put it—less well known is that Schengen was also a laboratory for Europol, the police agency of the European Union that began limited operations in 1994.14 What this chapter reveals is how Schengen—a common space conceived as a laboratory for the free movement of persons and the creation of a Citizens’ Europe—also came to produce a sort of transnational panopticon of the information age. My focus is on the theme of self-determination. The lack of control over personal information that put privacy at risk in the Schengen area represented, at bottom, a crisis of democratic self-determination. This is because Schengen created a gaping jurisdictional asymmetry, because new transnational instruments of surveillance and data exchange under the information system ran counter to enduring national sovereignty over security policy and the administration of justice. The guarantee of national security was etched not at the borders among nations but at the boundary between Europeans and non-Europeans. Schengen vested the power to police this distinction in the nation-state, even as the accord breathed life into a new conception of transnational citizenship, one that would be enshrined in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.15 Maintaining this distinction, one so critical to managing the risks of the Schengen area, involved the creation of an expanding web of checks, data collection, and surveillance.16 Such measures brought Europe closer to what penologists have called a “dossier society.”17 The making of Schengen thus joined free movement to intrusive policing procedures critical to the reconstitution of state power in an era of rapid global-

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ization. At the same time, it reconciled the disestablishment of national borders with the imperative of national security. As the Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt observed in the fall of 1989, “the border barrier is to be replaced by the computer terminal.”18 It was the nation that maintained “knowledge of the files,” to borrow Max Weber’s phrase, even as these files, which the German sociologist viewed as critical to the development of the modern state, transcended national boundaries.19

A New Principle of Free Movement Arguments set forth at the end of the last century, by authorities on European security, capture the perplexities involved in policing the Schengen area. One argument was that of a French police commissioner; the other was that of a German privacy commissioner. From differing vantage points, each took stock of Schengen’s emergence as a transnational territory of free movement. Notably, each commissioner viewed Schengen as a place of risk, and each was preoccupied by the plan for the Schengen Information System, or SIS. Vendelin Hreblay, the French police commissioner, was a member of the intergovernmental negotiating group that drafted the multilateral accord. “Free movement does not signify the absence of control,” he said. “Freedom and security are an inseparable pair . . . The abolition of internal borders between the member states of the Schengen accord cannot put at risk the internal security of those states.” It was axiomatic for Schengen planning that free movement among nations could be reconciled with national security.20 Whether the technologies developed to achieve that pairing adequately preserved individual freedom was what troubled German privacy commissioner Thilo Weichert, a lawyer and data protection officer. Schengen’s rules for government processing of personal data, he wrote in 1990, were “not suitable to ensure a constitutionally required minimum standard for the protection of informational self-determination.”21 For the civil servant and privacy advocate, authority over personal data was core to individual freedom and democratic rights. Informational self-determination was not a principle invoked in Schengen planning. Indeed, the Schengen accord did not use the language of rights. But abolition of a constraint carried a new freedom, and though the accord did not create a human right to cross common borders, it expressly affirmed that abolishing checks at border crossings would afford “free movement of persons.”22 Under the accord, all people who were nationals of member states of the European Community became free to traverse the internal borders of the Schengen area. This differed from the Rome Treaty, which spoke of workers in enumerating common market freedoms, predicating cross-border mobility on the pursuit of employment. It also differed from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a 1963 protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, which safeguarded movement within the territory of a single nation. Notably, in 1963

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as well, free movement was explicitly linked to the right of self-determination in a report by the special rapporteur of the UN subcommission on prevention of discrimination and protection of minorities. In human rights doctrine, the principle of self-determination has two meanings: for states as aspects of national, anticolonial autonomy, and for persons as aspects of the right to freedom of association and political belonging. Construing Article 13 of the Universal Declaration, which proclaims a right to freedom of movement within the borders of each state and the right of an individual to leave any country and return, the special rapporteur found that free movement is a “right of personal self-determination” and “a constituent element of personal liberty.”23 This was how Schengen’s authors conceptualized free movement, at least implicitly. What they created was not a revolutionary document. Yet simply by saying of persons, in the words of the French delegate Catherine Lalumière, “at the borders, pass, pass, pass . . . In principle, you can pass,” the accord revolutionized the principle of free movement. By making “life easier for people,” Schengen enshrined the crossing of national borders as a freedom of everyday life.24 The new principle of free movement, and plans for security measures that would accompany it, took shape in negotiations among officials representing the five signatory states. In drawing on precursors that included the policies of the Benelux Economic Union and a pact signed between France and West Germany in Saarbrücken in July 1984, the 1985 accord was a charter of intent. It was drafted in half a year. Above all, the aim was to stop the movement into and across the Schengen area of individuals who might threaten security, not least foreign migrants from countries listed in a confidential annex as “undesirable.” In 1985, the pariah countries ranged from Haiti, South Africa, and Yemen to East Germany, Poland, and China.25 The 1990 convention, by contrast, specified complex technical measures. Organized in both cases into working groups—immigration, police, transport, and customs—framers defined the terms of Schengen, producing reams of paperwork that recorded the process of treaty-making.

The Moment of Truth for Data Exchange Deliberations over the terms of the Schengen accord, beginning in 1985, brought urgency to ideas for advanced data exchange. At a critical Bonn meeting of the police and security working group in March 1985, delegates took up the issue of the exchange of information during their discussion of police collaboration. As summarized by the West German delegation, the talks found that “one of the key areas for improving collaboration will be the establishment of information exchange.” Negotiators said that sending data more efficiently across borders would be especially useful in the “fight against crime” and particularly in the “fight against illegal entry,” a problem that, by definition, transcended national borders. They enumerated three categories of information relevant to criminal prosecution: nonpersonal information, personal information not restricting the

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“freedom of persons,” and personal information that “must lead to a restriction of personal liberty.” Yet there were obstacles, both technical and legal, that made an automatic link between the data files of different states “impossible.” The dilemmas were so pervasive—“all states face serious legal problems inherent in computerized data protection,” the German summary stated—that the negotiators wondered whether it would be necessary to draft a “specific convention of public international law” addressing the quandaries of transnational linkages, the power of the state, and the protection of the individual. “This goal cannot be achieved in the short term,” the meeting’s draft summary affirmed. The participants concluded that legal certainty about data exchange was not a prerequisite to the guarantee of free movement. Instead, the draft summary stated that “the working group considers that it is possible to ease the formalities for crossing the intra-Community borders before a definitive solution is found to these problems.”26 From the start, the architects of transnational data exchange saw that such an apparatus posed risks to the rule of law and the rights of the individual. Their decision to press ahead with the removal of internal border controls illuminates the process driving the development of policing infrastructure, as the imperative of open borders came to compel ad hoc, compensatory measures. A reason for the summer deadline attached to the accord on free movement was to offer “tangible results” before the onset of the holidays.27 It was in November 1985, nearly a half year after the signing of the accord, that the Schengen states agreed to consider using electronic equipment to facilitate the exchange of information among their respective national authorities. The proposal came from the West German delegation. The idea was to study “not only the technical but also the legal aspects” involved in giving member states immediate access to data about people as well as goods.28 Increasing attention to data exchange among the Schengen states was mirrored at the Community level. Here, too, Schengen was a laboratory. Justice and interior ministers committed in principle to a common network for police cooperation, but resistance was mounted by national policing officials “jealous for their sovereignty,” as Le Républicain Lorrain, a regional French daily, reported. The newspaper recorded progress at the intergovernmental level, laying the groundwork for a “European super-police.”29 The Trevi group, which joined member states of the European Community in police and counterterrorism planning, based its study of a common automatic system of information exchange “on the model of Schengen,” as the European Commission explained in a report titled “Moment of Truth.”30 A permanent Schengen working group on information exchange was set up in December 1987 to plan for the “search union,” as police and security officials described the initiative in a report to the central negotiating group. The system would bind member states whose internal borders were projected to “lose their filter character after the removal of controls.”31 The task force, prosaically called the Standing Working Group on the Schengen Information System, began its work in February 1988. Membership included policing and information tech-

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nology experts from each country. The group’s first task was to study the feasibility of the envisaged system and its technical composition and to prepare a report, which was adopted by the Schengen ministers in the autumn of 1988.32 As they worked, they kept the international crime-fighting organization Interpol at arm’s length, in spite of the group’s offer of assistance. This illustrates how actively officials involved in Schengen’s planning envisioned not simply enhanced police cooperation but a new framework for its operation. The structure of their planning work helped anticipate the formation of Europol, which would come to rely on the system of information exchange and alerts inaugurated by Schengen.33 Agreement on most technical details came relatively easily. The working group’s report stated that a multinational file, which it termed the Schengen Information System (SIS), was possible and made its aim the storage and exchange of data for use in crime control, as well as in the delivery of visas and the approval of residence and work permits. The group elected to set up five separate files, anchored in a central database. National authorities would be empowered to report persons or goods in the system, based on considerations of public order or national security. An alert would then exist through the multinational network. The SIS was envisioned as a hit/no-hit system, allowing an officer to determine if a person or object was listed in the database and, if so, what action to take. Possibilities included arrest for extradition, refusal of entry because of non-admission in another member state, seizure of goods, and discreet checks as part of a surveillance request. In some cases, the aim would simply be to locate a missing person.34 Twenty-four hours a day, police, border control, customs, judicial, visa, and vehicle registration officials in the contracting states—as well as certain European agencies, including, eventually, Europol—would have access to the database.35 The implementing convention prepared by the working groups provided in great specificity for the computerized file. It was termed a “joint information system,” in which each state created a national section, all supported by a “technical service function” in a centralized location. The declared aim was to enable authorities in the Schengen states, “by means of an automated search process, to have access to alerts on persons and property for the purpose of border and police checks.” For example, any nation could issue an alert on refusing entry because of a threat to national security.36 The purpose of the database, as the implementing convention explained, was to “maintain public policy and public security, including national security,” by tracking the movement of wanted or missing persons and objects across the Schengen area.37 It would enable “discreet surveillance,” as the French foreign ministry’s secretary general explained, that would equip authorities, “on the occasion of police checks,” to convey information to a requesting state, such as a person’s location, the vehicle used, and the objects transported.38 The central database would be located in Strasbourg.39 Among the most difficult questions that confronted experts in the permanent working group were how quickly data added by one state would be available to the others and for what purpose. France pressed for delayed transmission of

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data, especially when it would be underwriting extradition. The Germans feared that such a stipulation would introduce unnecessary chokeholds into a system designed to overcome barriers to information sharing. “In a general way, the discussion was conducted in a positive climate,” the SIS working group reported. But agreement on the rules for data exchange remained an obstacle. Talks encountered difficulty when experts broached questions of national law, revealing profound differences among the states. France hesitated, requesting a pause in the negotiations at the end of 1988, in order to consult its data protection authority and develop a position addressing national autonomy and individual rights. Planning for the SIS had reached a rockier phase.40 Meanwhile, epic events unfolding in Europe impinged on the negotiations. A delay was caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the sudden opening of borders. West Germany had obtained an assurance from its partners that citizens of the East would not be treated as foreign nationals under the convention. But the prospect of unification raised new security concerns, as it pushed outward and made more permeable the eastern borders of the Schengen territory.41 Schengen, it was said, had been struck by a “Teutonic thunderbolt.”42

A Right to Informational Self-Determination By 1990, the creation of a shared digital file had become a condition for approval of Schengen’s implementing convention. Yet agreement on data protection rules remained an obstacle, the final unresolved issue in the drafting of the convention when talks resumed after parliamentary elections in East Germany. The problem that confronted negotiators as they prepared to finalize their work was that the SIS threatened to infringe on both national authority and individual privacy. The Standing Working Group on the Schengen Information System understood the need to provide for means of data protection, but differences in national approaches were marked. France and West Germany each had comprehensive legislation regulating police files. Luxembourg had a statement of principles, and the Netherlands was in the process of drafting a measure. But in Belgium, there were no applicable rules. France’s data protection agency, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique, or CNIL, led the way in sounding the alarm about the SIS. First responding to the inquiry from France’s Schengen delegation in November 1988, the CNIL bluntly warned that “a French citizen arrested in Belgium will not have the right to access and rectify information concerning him in the SIS.” Based on the draft convention viewed by the Commission, it stated in no uncertain terms: “The rights of persons will be fixed by national laws.” This promised to leave individuals who were subject to surveillance vulnerable to shifting rules depending on the territory in which they found themselves.43 The capacity to access and rectify information about oneself was already a central cause of privacy advocates. Notably, the principle was couched in the

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language of self-determination, especially in the Federal Republic, where Selbstbestimmung, or self-determination, had entered the lexicon of privacy debates in 1983, a year before the pivotal Saarbrücken Accord, removing border controls between France and West Germany, laid the groundwork for Schengen. That was the year that West Germany’s Constitutional Court suspended the execution of a census, finding that there was potential for abuse in the collection and processing of personal data. The court found that Selbstbestimmung was at risk. The judgment stated that rights protected by the German constitution included protection against “unlimited collection, storage, use and disclosure of [a person’s] personal data,” which entailed the “capacity of the individual to determine in principle the disclosure and use of his/her personal data.” In the context of data privacy, self-determination meant not collective, anticolonial autonomy but a personal right.44 Informational self-determination became a focal point of the criticism directed at the SIS. In Germany, the data protection officer Thilo Weichert argued that the implementing convention contained insufficient safeguards for personal freedom. And he feared that its power outstripped that of self-governed states. “Democratic control of the SIS is impossible,” he wrote in 1990. “Such a Europeanization of police and prosecution conflicts with the national constitutional order.” Weichert identified a conflict between democracy and transnational policing.45 Concerns about the SIS thus joined the two meanings of self-determination: the collective power to self-govern and the personal right to be sovereign over oneself, including in the digital realm. Both meanings were evoked by exponents of data privacy. Data protection, reasoned the French foreign ministry’s secretary general, “responds to a dual concern for the protection of individual freedom and respect for national sovereignty.”46 Jacques Fauvet, the head of the CNIL, addressed a letter to Emile Cazimajou, France’s Schengen coordinator, in February 1989, reporting on the conclusions of a summit on Schengen and data protection. “It is important,” Fauvet argued, “for public opinion to see the Schengen Agreement as creating an area of freedom more than a police area. Recognizing a right of access and rectification . . . could help to spread this idea.”47 The declaration issued as a result of the summit stressed the need to protect individual rights even when security interests were at stake. The document dwelled in particular on the “law of foreigners and the right of asylum,” observing that data exchange would become salient in these realms because of the need to adopt “common procedures.” Among relevant protections, the document emphasized the right to access information and rectify faulty entries, as well as the need to define the content and purpose of common data banks. The 1981 Council of Europe convention on Automatic Processing of Personal Data offered only “minimum requirements,” the document advised. It therefore called for “independent bodies” to oversee the collection, storage, and exchange of personal data.48 Especially central for privacy advocates were the governance and oversight of the SIS. It was agreed at the summit, Fauvet wrote, that the convention should provide for the establishment of an independent, multinational commission

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whose members would be chosen by national data commissions, not national governments. “This resolution,” Fauvet judged, “seemed preferable to that of entrusting the control of the system” to a national body alone.49 The recommendation was not realized in the implementing convention, which specified that the right of individuals to gain access to their data files would be governed by the law of each Schengen state. Furthermore, only a nation issuing an alert would be responsible for ensuring the data was accurate and would have the authority to alter, correct, or delete entries. The convention allowed “any person” to “correct, delete, or obtain information . . . in connection with an alert involving them,” but it vested “the authority competent under national law” with the power to adjudicate such a claim, rather than international courts or a new international body. In the absence of transnational institutions, the protection of personal data, as information crossed borders, depended on national law. Each contracting party was to set up an authority responsible for managing the data in its portion of the SIS; a joint supervisory authority, comprised of two members of each national authority, would resolve disputes among them.50 A single article in the convention addressed individual rights and selfdetermination. It banned collecting certain types of data, including information revealing racial origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, and health and sexual life, and thus adhered to the 1981 Council of Europe Convention on Automatic Processing of Personal Data. Such protection, however, would not stop discriminatory checks premised on racial difference, as critics of the agreement anticipated. In the British press, which anticipated non-Schengen states gaining access to the database, a warning was issued: “As there are fewer checks on you as you cross frontiers, the more there will be whenever you come into contact with officialdom—without you even knowing about it. In particular, life will become harder for black people resident in Europe.”51 The concern was prescient. Since the database’s inauguration in 1995, most of the personal data stored in the SIS has concerned non-Europeans and has been gathered to enable their exclusion from the territory of participating states.52

The Schengen Model Schengen’s proponents hardly conceded that the accord on free movement endangered data privacy. A response to Jacques Fauvet came from France’s director of legal affairs, who argued that Schengen would strengthen individual rights. “It is clear that, in spite of its difficulties, the construction of an area common to the five states . . . must be an opportunity for progress and not a regression in the field of civil liberties,” the state minister wrote in the spring of 1989.53 A meeting of the police and security working group following the data protection summit reflected a new consensus among delegates. As a summary explained, “the need to emphasize the concepts of privacy and personal liberty is now not disputed.” The German delegation, “formerly on the defensive, has even shown a great initiative in

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this direction.” France remained concerned over “the principle of national sovereignty” as a necessary condition of data protection. Negotiations over the surveillance system were vexed, reported Le Monde, because the agreement “touches on two ultra-sensitive areas: the security of citizens and individual liberties.” Charles Josselin, a Socialist politician who helmed France’s parliamentary committee on European affairs, noted that the accord on free movement exposed a clash between a “libertarian culture”—“we do not like cops, we do not like controls”—and a “security syndrome.” The convention sought to marry these principles, pairing freedom and security as it promised invisible yet omnipresent policing.54 The deference to state sovereignty was marked. Schengen did not create new norms of data protection, instead “asking all state parties to align themselves with the highest degree of protection of civil liberties,” as a circular accompanying the convention noted. The insistence on best practices by the individual parties, the document explained, was part of a broader effort to set “verifiable legal limits on the exercise of police cooperation.”55 Rather than requiring ratification of the 1981 convention on data processing, the convention required each contracting party to “adopt the necessary national provisions in order to achieve a level of protection of personal data” equivalent to the protections stipulated in the international convention.56 These measures forged consensus among Schengen delegates and satisfied the powerful executive arm of the European Community. The European Commission backed the surveillance structure in the critical year of 1989. “The SIS,” reported the Commission’s vice president, Martin Bangemann, the German liberal who had initially expressed skepticism about a transnational police file, “is the key to the security aspect, allowing effective and in-depth cooperation between the police services of the Schengen partners, designed to compensate for the abolition of checks at the borders.” The problem of protecting personal data, he argued, “must not block the system.”57 Jacques Delors, the Commission’s president, echoed these views the following year, observing that the Community at large was studying a common system of information exchange “on the model of Schengen.” The allegation that “fundamental rights” were threatened, he claimed, amounted to a “show trial.” He expressed faith in existing legal protections maintained by individual states.58 Community institutions were not in lockstep. The European Parliament foresaw intrusion on civil liberties, especially as data came to support not simply compliance with visa and customs rules but also broader policing efforts. A June 1990 resolution, issued as the member states prepared to consider ratification of the convention, highlighted objections to the computerized information system. European parliamentarians most feared the file’s broader utilization, urging the five nations not to approve the agreement “until it is guaranteed that Interpol will be completely excluded” from the database.59 Yet ten years after the formal launch of the SIS, a 2005 amendment to the convention made the system’s data available to Europol, the agency that had assumed many of Interpol’s functions in Europe.60

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Privacy and the protection of personal data remained active areas of European policymaking. The General Data Protection Regulation, adopted in April 2016 and enforceable as of May 2018, superseded Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, which had been adopted by the European Parliament and the European Council in 1995, the same year that Schengen entered fully into force. Invoking the “fundamental rights and freedoms” of all, the regulation was not legally binding but designed to be transposed into national law. Above all, the directive instructed member states to “determine more precisely the conditions under which the processing of personal data is lawful.” Possible standards included the consent of the data subject or the clear public interest served by the data processing. The directive set forth special guardrails for the transfer of data to third countries—those outside the European Community—in a reflection of fears that personal data could be subject to abuse in the handling of asylum requests.61 Where Schengen’s architects saw in the SIS a solution to the problems created by free movement, critics warned of risks to human rights and democracy precisely because national authorities could not properly check a system of transnational information exchange. They pointed to a gaping jurisdictional asymmetry, eroding principles of self-government and the autonomy of individuals founded on both privacy and free movement. Among those who espoused this view was the president of France’s human rights league, Yves Jouffa, a French Jew who had evaded Nazi capture as a member of the Resistance. Writing about Schengen in Le Monde, Jouffa highlighted the disjuncture between the power afforded by international security techniques and the inefficacy of national legal protections in critiquing the “spatial extension, or the very territorialization of police power” in plans for the information system. He argued: “To any new power of the police—and therefore of the state—must correspond a new control capable of combating it immediately and effectively if it is wrongly exercised.” He rooted his argument in the “very logic of human rights,” based on the principle of “no power without control,” as he claimed that Schengen’s security apparatus posed a risk to principles of self-government. “This is a crucial democratic issue,” he wrote, adding, “What is an authoritarian regime if not a regime in which the police take precedence over justice?”62 His concerns would find echoes later in speeches at the colloquy on “Human Rights without Frontiers.” It was a view that also gained prominence in the left-wing press. In 1991, L’Humanité, once an organ of the French Communist Party, lamented the advent of a “police and judicial area ‘Schengen.’” An agreement designed to bring down borders, the newspaper claimed, represented instead “a new wall in Europe.”63 It was a distinctly modern sort of wall. In the summer of 1991, as Europol gained approval in the European Council, based in part on German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s comparison to the American FBI, the analogy was linked explicitly to the Schengen accord. Jean Boissonnat, a prominent French financial journalist, wrote in the weekly La Tribune of the agreement: “It changes everything.”

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Far from ushering in drug traffickers, terrorists, and “gangsters of all kinds,” he observed, “Schengen led to the establishment of a common police, a sort of European FBI,” embracing the parallel drawn by Kohl. Immigration rules would become stricter, he predicted, as “each state will be too happy to take shelter” behind common procedures, notably on asylum. Remarkably, the journalist went as far as to characterize the guarantee of free movement as the first step toward collective European defense and provocatively called Schengen “an embryo of a European army.” Boissonnat’s point was that defense cooperation was a necessary result of removing border controls. “Because when several countries decree that there are no more borders between them and that the border of each one vis-àvis the outside world is everyone’s, they decide ipso facto that their armed forces cannot defend one without defending all,” he wrote, concluding that “either this army will have its own existence, or Schengen will have no meaning.” Schengen succeeded not only in binding national police forces. It was also understood at the time, at least by some observers, as a union between domestic policing practices and modes of military defense necessary to preserve security in a world of receding national borders.64

A European Search Union A decade before Schengen entered fully into force in 1995, the security apparatus had earned the epithet “European search union.” Those were the terms used by police and security officials in a report to the central negotiating group addressing the terms of the accord’s implementation.65 Similar words were enlisted by a foreign migrant from one of the so-called undesirable countries, Senegal. Hers was the outcry of the undocumented, the non-European, those who named themselves the sans-papiers, or without papers. Madjiguène Cissé, who had made the trek from Dakar to Saarbrücken to Paris, condemned the “huge computer file,” as she put it, claiming that it universalized one member state’s xenophobia throughout the entire Schengen territory.66 In a 1999 account of the sans-papier movement, Cissé bitterly assailed Schengen’s balancing of freedom and security, claiming that the accord “creates an area of free movement of goods and people, but at the same time strengthens cooperation among the states in terms of access to the common territory.”67 The risks of this century, from terrorism to deadly disease, have further torn at the attempted pairing of freedom and control, causing the reassertion of border controls. Less than a decade after the Schengen agreement went into force, a network of “no border” activists traveled from across Europe to Strasbourg, the headquarters of the Schengen Information System, to mount protests against the operation of data-enhanced surveillance. Their claims were not recognized by any national authority or vindicated by international institutions.68 However, in the future of free movement within the Schengen territory, everyday denizens of Citizens’

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Europe saw risks to self-determination that would go unchecked if democratic institutions were overpowered by a transnational security system. Isaac Stanley-Becker is the author of the forthcoming book Citizens’ Europe: Free Movement, Free Markets, and the Making of Schengen. His research interests include modern European and American history, political economy, migration, liberalism, and illiberalism. He received his MPhil and DPhil at the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar. Currently, he is a staff writer at the Washington Post, where he has reported from across Europe and is now focusing on US politics.

Notes 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject,” In Context 24 (Fall 2010): 19‒23. 2. Communiqué de Presse, Schengen, 14 June 1985, Folder Signature du Traité, Box 2 Coordination interministérielle pour l’allègement des contrôles aux frontières 1914INVA (hereafter 1914INVA), Direction d’Europe, Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Étrangères, La Courneuve, Seine-Saint-Denis, France (hereafter MEAE). François Mitterrand to Helmut Kohl, n.d., Folder 136.099, Box 421.26 Europäischer Rat in Fontainebleau, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts (hereafter PAA). I have translated into English all quotations from French- and German-language sources. 3. Discours de Monsieur Robert Goebbels, Secrétaire d’État aux Affaires Étrangères sur L’Accord, Bulletin de documentation 4 (Luxembourg, June–August 1985), 32. 4. Waldemar Schreckenberger, “Von den Schengener Abkommen zu einer gemeinsamen Innen- und Justizpolitik (Die Dritte Säule),” Verwaltungsarchiv 88, no. 3 (1997): 389‒415 (here 401). 5. Wouter van de Rijt, “Le fonctionnement des institutions Schengen: ‘Pragmatisme, toujours,’” in Schengen’s Final Days? The Incorporation of Schengen into the New TEU, External Borders and Information Systems, ed. Monica den Boer (Maastricht: European Institute for Public Administration, 1998), 59‒66 (here 59). 6. Madjiguène Cissé, Parole de Sans-papiers (Paris: La Dispute, 1999), 235. 7. For an account stressing Germany’s role, see Emmanuel Comte, The History of the European Migration Regime: Germany’s Strategic Hegemony (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). On historians arriving late to European integration, see Kiran Klaus Patel, “Widening and Deepening? Recent Advances in European Integration History,” Neue Politische Literatur 64, no. 2 (July 2019): 327‒57. It is absent, for example, in Luuk van Middelaar, The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union, trans. Liz Waters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); John Gillingham, European Integration, 1950‒2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Schengen is hardly addressed in scholarship on multiethnic Europe. While finding that fear of “internal ‘others,’” such as “waves of refugees,” has been “exacerbated by the free movement of people within the EU” and by the ideal of “Europe without borders,” Rita Chin, for example, does not consider how Schengen’s framers made freedom contingent on security measures and the suppression of illegal immigration. Rita Chin, The Crisis of Multicultur-

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alism in Europe: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 3. Even in histories of European migration, Schengen is termed a “major turning point” but receives little sustained attention, such as in Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent (New York: Allen Lane, 2019), 202. 8. Heiner Busch, “Europa—ein ‘Mekka der Kriminalität?’ EG-Grenzöffnung und international Polizeikooperation,” Kritische Justiz 23, no. 1 (1990): 1–13 (here 1). Since the adoption of the Schengen implementing convention in 1990, the consequence of abolishing border controls has drawn growing attention from European scholars. Among the historians to pursue such inquiry is Andreas Pudlat, who concentrates primarily on the period after incorporation into EU law in 1997 in his article “Der lange Weg zum SchengenRaum: Ein Prozess im Vier-Phasen-Modell,’ Journal of European Integration History 17, no. 2 (2011): 303‒26. Angela Siebold’s periodization is similar in ZwischenGrenzen: Die Geschichte des Schengen-Raums aus deutschen, französischen und polnischen Perspektiven (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2013). See also Andreas Pudlat, Schengen: Zur Manifestation von Grenze und Grenzschutz in Europa (Hildesheim: Olms, 2013). And for a telling reception in Scandinavian scholarship, see Kjell A. Eliassen and Nick Sitter, “Ever Closer Cooperation? The Limits of the ‘Norwegian Method’ of European Integration,” Scandinavian Political Studies 26, no. 2 (2003): 125‒44. 9. An extensive treatment of Schengen appears in the work of political scientist Ruben Zaiotti, including in his book Cultures of Border Control, yet this work mainly tests theories of border formation, setting bureaucratic approaches, such as the “incrementalist” model, against Andrew Moravcsik’s intergovernmental approach, which focuses on economic motives; see Ruben Zaiotti, Cultures of Border Control (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6, 4. My approach is informed by the work of legal scholar Elspeth Guild, though she does not thoroughly examine Schengen’s origins and casts the intergovernmental approach as a negation of a rights idea. See Elspeth Guild, “The Single Market, Movement of Persons and Borders,” in The Law of the Single European Market: Unpacking the Premises, ed. Catherine Barnard and Joanne Scott (Oxford: Hart, 2002), 295‒310. On incrementalism, see Jörg Monar, “Institutionalizing Freedom, Security and Justice,” in The Institutions of the European Union, ed. John Peterson and Michael Shackleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 186‒209. On the bureaucratic/testing approach, see Virginie Guiraudon, “The Constitution of a European Immigration Policy Domain: A Political Sociology Approach,” Journal of European Public Policy 10, no. 2 (January 2003): 256‒76. Research on Schengen’s governance framework does not fully explain how the distinctive structure—lacking a legislature, executive, and courts—came into being. See Sergio Carrera et al., The Future of the Schengen Area: Latest Developments and Challenges in the Schengen Governance Framework since 2016 (Study for the European Parliament, PE 604.943, Brussels, February 2018); Pierre Berthelet, “La ‘Gouvernance Schengen’: Le Sentier Périlleux de la Féforme; Commentaires et Analyses sur les Travaux en Cours,” Revue du Droit de l’Union Européenne 4 (2012): 655‒78. 10. See, e.g., Didier Bigo, Polices en Réseaux: L’expérience européenne (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politique, 1996); Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, “La mise à l’écart des étrangers: La logique du visa Schengen,” Culture & Conflits 49 (Spring 2003): 5–147. A comprehensive overview of the SIS appears in the work of the migration law expert Evelien Renate Brouwer, who provides a manual for resistance to the overreach of government authority rather than an inquiry into the motives of European governments in collecting data about cross-border movement. Evelien Renate Brouwer, Digital Borders and Real Rights: Effective Remedies for Third-Country Nationals in the Schengen Information System (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2008). Scholarship that delves more deeply into the

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

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history of free movement focuses primarily on Community initiatives and hardly explores Schengen, which was developed outside the framework of European law. See Holly WyattWalter, The European Community and the Security Dilemma, 1979‒92 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). Didier Bigo, “Frontier Controls in the European Union: Who is in Control?” in Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and within Europe, ed. Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 49‒99 (here 66). These sources differ from those used in studies focusing on the operation, governance, and shortcomings of the Schengen policing infrastructure. See Mariana Mihailescu and Marinela Lazarica, “The Process of Romania’s Accession to the Schengen Space: The Schengen Information System,” Anale/Annals 17 (2011): 335‒42; Georgios Glouftsios, “Governing Circulation through Technology within EU Border Security Practice-Networks,” Mobilities 13, no. 2 (2018): 185‒99; Shiraz Mahmood, “The Schengen Information System: An Inequitable Data Protection Regime,” International Journal of Refugee Law 7, no. 2 (January 1995): 179‒200. Joseph Lorent, “Moselortschaft Schengen geht in die EG-Geschichte ein,” Luxemburger Wort, 20 June 1990; Piet Dankert, “Discours de Piet Dankert sur la convention d’application de l’accord de Schengen (Schengen, 19 juin 1990),” Bulletin de documentation du Service Information et Presse, Ministère d’Etat 3 (Luxembourg, 1990): 10‒11. Elpida Papahatzi, Free Movement of Persons in the European Union: Specific Issues (Study for the European Parliament, PE 167.028, Brussels, May 1999), 7. On state infrastructure, see Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results,” European Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (1984): 185‒213. Ayse Ceyhan, “Policing by Dossier: Identification and Surveillance in an Era of Uncertainty and Fear,” in Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement Into and Within Europe, ed. Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 209‒32 (here 218). Kenneth C. Laudon, The Dossier Society: Value Choices in the Design of National Information Systems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Peter Zudeick, “Im Eimer,” Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, 1 September 1989, 3. Max Weber, “Technical Advantages of Bureaucratic Organization,” in Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge, 1991), 214‒15 (here 214). Vendelin Hreblay, La libre circulation des personnes: Les accords de Schengen (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994), 6, 9, 7, 32. Thilo Weichert, “Das geplante Schengen-Informationssystem,” Computer und Recht 1 (1990): 62‒66 (here 62). Schengen Agreement, 14 June 1985, Preamble. José Inglés, Study of Discrimination in Respect of the Right of Everyone to Leave Any Country, Including His Own, and to Return to His Country, Special Rapporteur of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (New York: United Nations, 1963), 9‒10. Catherine Lalumière, interview by the author, 19 October 2017. Jean-Paul Anglès, Réunion à Paris le 12 mars 1985 du “Groupe Central de Négociation,” 7 March 1985, Binder 1a, Schengen Collection, Central Archives of the Council of the European Union, Brussels, Belgium (hereafter Council), 2‒5. Télex du Ministère de l’Intérieur de la R.F.A. aux Ministères compétents dese pays du Benelux et de la France, 9 April 1985, Binder 2, Schengen overleg, Correspondentie, 1984‒87, Council.

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27. Conclusions de la réunion tenue à Bruxelles le 27 février 1985, Union Economique Benelux, 6 March 1985, MEAE Folder Allègement des contrôles aux frontières: réunion du 27 fév. 1985 à Bruxelles, Box 5 101 SUP (hereafter Conclusions de la réunion). 28. “Exécution de l’Accord entre les gouvernments des Etats de l’Union économique Benelux, de la République fédérale d’Allemagne et de la République française relatif à la suppression graduelle des contrôles aux frontières communes,” Comité de coordination Benelux, 13 November 1985, Box 1b, BNL-D-F + gc red cc Bnl, Council. 29. “Vers une ‘Europe des polices,’” Le Républicain Lorrain, 29 April 1987. 30. “Heure de verité,” Commission des Communautés Européennes, Cabinet du Président, 23 January 1990, Historical Archives of the European Union, Florence, Italy (hereafter HAEU), Chronos généraux. See Eva Oberloskamp, Codename TREVI: Terrorismusbekämpfung und die Anfänge einer europäischen Innenpolitik in den 1970er Jahren (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016). 31. Rapport au Groupe central de négociation, Union Economique Benelux, 4 December 1986, Council, Binder Schengen overleg, correspondentie, 1984‒87. See also Hreblay, Libre circulation, 95‒96. 32. Note relative au projet de traité conventionnel dans le domaine de la protection des données concernant le Système d’Information Schengen (S.I.S.), CNIL, 18 novembre 1988, Folder SIS – CNIL (1988‒89, 18 novembre 1988, Folder SIS – CNIL (1988‒89), Box 5 1914INVA, MEAE. 33. Conclusions de la réunion tenue à Bonn le 23 novembre 1987, 15 décembre 1987, Binder SCH/C, 1985–88, V-OJ-PV, Council. 34. Hreblay, Libre circulation, 98‒101. 35. Brouwer, Digital Borders, 49, 50. 36. Convention Implementing the Schengen Agreement, 19 June 1990, Articles 92, 1. 37. Ibid., Article 93. 38. François Scheer to Renaud Denoix de Saint Marc, 18 April 1989, MEAE, Folder Réunion du Groupe des Coordonnateurs, Bruxelles – 23 juillet 1990 et 13 sept 1990, Box 13 Coordination interministérielle pour l’allègement des contrôles aux frontières 101SUP (hereafter 101SUP). 39. “Accord de Schengen: Satisfaction du Vice-president Bangemann,” Commission des Communautés Européennes, 14 November 1989, HAEU, François Lamoureux, FL – 185. 40. Compte-rendu de la réunion du sous-groupe 4 ‘échange de renseignements’, 22 and 24 March 1989, MEAE, Folder SIS (système d’information Schengen), 1988‒89, Box 5 1914INVA; Emile Cazimajou, “Accord de Schengen,” Note à l’attention du Cabinet du Ministre des affaires européennes, Paris, 4 novembre 1988, Folder Lettre de M. Joxe (3 nov. 88), Convention Complémentaire Schengen, Visas nationaux/Reconnaissance, Box 5 Coordination interministérielle pour l’allègement des contrôles aux frontières, 1984‒89, MEAE. 41. F. Braun, Note à l’attention de M. Brunner et M. Lamy, Commission des Communautès Européennes, 18 December 1989, HAEU, François Lamoureux, FL – 195 Chronos généraux. 42. “Coup de Tonnerre sur les Frontières,” Le Monde, 15 December 1989, 3. 43. Note relative au projet de traité conventionnel dans le domaine de la protection des données concernant le Système d’Information Schengen (S.I.S.), CNIL, 18 novembre 1988, Folder SIS – CNIL (1988‒89, 18 novembre 1988, Folder SIS – CNIL (1988‒89), Box 5 1914INVA, MEAE.

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44. Bundesverfassungsgericht, 1 BvR 209/83, Guidelines 1, 2, 15 December 1983. On selfdetermination as an anticolonial project, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 67. 45. Weichert, “Das geplante Schengen-Informationssystem,” 62, 66. 46. François Scheer to Renaud Denoix de Saint Marc, 18 April 1989, MEAE, Folder Réunion du Groupe des Coordonnateurs, Bruxelles – 23 juillet 1990 et 13 sept 1990, Box 13 101SUP. 47. Jacques Fauvet to Emile Cazimajou, 14 February 1989, MEAE, Folder Schengen: Groupe Central Négociation, 26 oct. 1988, Box 3 101SUP. 48. Déclaration en matière de protection des données nominatives en relation avec le projet d’un système d’information commun des états signataires de l’accord de Schengen, 17 March 1989, MEAE, Folder Réunion Interministérielle: Preparatoire au Conseil Restreint du 19 avril 1989, Box 8 101SUP. 49. Jacques Fauvet to Emile Cazimajou, 14 February 1989, MEAE, Folder Schengen: Groupe Central Négociation, 26 Oct. 1988, Box 3 101SUP. 50. Schengen Implementing Convention, Article 111. 51. Jolyon Jenkins, “Foreign Exchange,” New Statesman & Society, 28 July 1989. 52. Brouwer, Digital Borders, 1. 53. Jean-Pierre Puissoche, “Réponse du Ministre d’Etat au Président de la CNIL,” 28 March 1989, MEAE, Folder Schengen: Groupe Central Négociation, 26 Oct. 1988, Box 3 101SUP. 54. “Comment Concilier Sécurité et Libertés,” Le Monde, 9 April 1989. 55. “Comment Schengen S’Inscrit dans la Perspective Européenne de 1993,” MEAE, Folder Liste des conventions, Box 26 101SUP, 3. 56. Schengen Implementing Convention, Articles 102‒18. 57. “Accord de Schengen: Satisfaction du Vice-president Bangemann.” See note 39. 58. “Heure de verité,” Commission des Communautés Européennes, Cabinet du Président, 23 January 1990, HAEU, FL – 185. 59. European Parliament, “Resolution sur l’accord de Schengen et la Convention sur le droit d’asile et le statut de réfugié du groupe ad hoc ‘immigration,’” 14 June 1990, MEAE, Folder Schengen: Deuxième Semestres 1990, Box 22 101SUP. 60. Council Decision 2005/211/JHA of 24 February 2005 concerning the introduction of some new functions for the Schengen Information System, including in the fight against terrorism, O.J. (L 68/44) (2005), https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/ publication/d0258379-0f37-4aa8-a2d9-666467d18005/language-en (accessed 5 September 2019). 61. Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, Articles. 7, 25, O.J. (L 281) (1995), 31‒350. 62. Yves Jouffa, Roland Kessous, and Gérard Soulier, “Contrôler la Police,” Le Monde, 4 May 1989. 63. Jean-Michel Cordier, “Un Nouveau Mur en Europe,” L’Humanité, 4 June 1991. 64. Jean Boissonnat, “Au-delà de Schengen,” La Tribune, 4 June 1991. 65. Rapport au Groupe central de négociation, Union Economique Benelux, 4 December 1986, Council, Binder Schengen overleg, correspondentie, 1984‒87. See also Hreblay, Libre circulation, 95‒96. 66. Cissé, Paroles, 196.

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67. Ibid. 68. Florian Schneider and Hagen Kopp, “A Brief History of the Noborder Network,” Tactical Media Files, 31 March 2010, http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/articles/3332/A-BriefHistory-of-the-Noborder-Network (accessed 22 September 2019).

Bibliography Berthelet, Pierre. “La ‘Gouvernance Schengen’: Le Sentier Périlleux de la Féforme; Commentaires et Analyses sur les Travaux en Cours.” Revue du Droit de l’Union Européenne 4 (2012): 655‒78. Bigo, Didier. Polices en Réseaux: L’expérience européenne. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politique, 1996. ———. “Frontier Controls in the European Union: Who is in Control?” In Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement Into and Within Europe, edited by Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, 49‒99. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Bigo, Didier, and Elspeth Guild. “La mise à l’écart des étrangers: La logique du visa Schengen.” Culture & Conflits 49 (Spring 2003): 5–147. Boissonnat, Jean. “Au-delà de Schengen.” La Tribune, 4 June 1991. Brouwer, Evelien Renate. Digital Borders and Real Rights: Effective Remedies for Third-Country Nationals in the Schengen Information System. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2008. Busch, Heiner. “Europa—ein ‘Mekka der Kriminalität?’ EG-Grenzöffnung und international Polizeikooperation.” Kritische Justiz 23, no. 1 (1990): 1–13. Carrera, Sergio, et al. The Future of the Schengen Area: Latest Developments and Challenges in the Schengen Governance Framework since 2016 (Study for the European Parliament, PE 604.943, Brussels, 2018). Ceyhan, Ayse. “Policing by Dossier: Identification and Surveillance in an Era of Uncertainty and Fear.” In Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement Into and Within Europe, edited by Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, 209‒32. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Chin, Rita. The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Cissé, Madjiguène. Parole de Sans-papiers. Paris: La Dispute, 1999. Comte, Emmanuel. The History of the European Migration Regime: Germany’s Strategic Hegemony. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Cordier, Jean-Michel. “Un Nouveau Mur en Europe.” L’Humanité, 4 June 1991. Dankert, Piet. “Discours de Piet Dankert sur la convention d’application de l’accord de Schengen (Schengen, 19 juin 1990).” Bulletin de documentation du Service Information et Presse, Ministère d’Etat 3 (Luxembourg, 1990): 10‒11. Eliassen, Kjell A., and Nick Sitter. “Ever Closer Cooperation? The Limits of the ‘Norwegian Method’ of European Integration.” Scandinavian Political Studies 26, no. 2 (2003): 125‒44. Gatrell, Peter. The Unsettling of Europe: How Migration Reshaped a Continent. New York: Allen Lane, 2019. Gillingham, John. European Integration, 1950‒2003: Superstate or New Market Economy? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Glouftsios, Georgios. “Governing Circulation through Technology within EU Border Security Practice-Networks.” Mobilities 13, no. 2 (2018): 185‒99.

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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject.” In Context (The Nature Institute Newsletter) 24 (Fall 2010): 19‒23. Guild, Elspeth. “The Single Market, Movement of Persons and Borders.” In The Law of the Single European Market: Unpacking the Premises, edited by Catherine Barnard and Joanne Scott, 295‒310. Oxford: Hart, 2002. Guiraudon, Virginie. “The Constitution of a European Immigration Policy Domain: A Political Sociology Approach.” Journal of European Public Policy 10, no. 2 (January 2003): 256‒76. Hreblay, Vendelin. La libre circulation des personnes: Les accords de Schengen. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994. Inglés, José. Study of Discrimination in Respect of the Right of Everyone to Leave Any Country, Including His Own, and to Return to His Country. Special Rapporteur of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. New York: United Nations, 1963. Jenkins, Jolyon. “Foreign Exchange.” New Statesman & Society, 28 July 1989. Jouffa, Yves, Roland Kessous, and Gérard Soulier. “Contrôler la Police.” Le Monde, 4 May 1989. Laudon, Kenneth C. The Dossier Society: Value Choices in the Design of National Information Systems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Lorent, Joseph. “Moselortschaft Schengen geht in die EG-Geschichte ein.” Luxemburger Wort, 20 June 1990. Mahmood, Shiraz. “The Schengen Information System: An Inequitable Data Protection Regime.” International Journal of Refugee Law 7, no. 2 (January 1995): 179‒200. Mann, Michael. “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results.” European Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (1984): 185‒213. Mihailescu, Mariana, and Marinela Lazarica. “The Process of Romania’s Accession to the Schengen Space: The Schengen Information System.” Anale: Seria Ştiinţe Economice/Annals: Economic Science Series 17 (2011): 335‒42. Monar, Jörg. “Institutionalizing Freedom, Security and Justice.” In The Institutions of the European Union, edited by John Peterson and Michael Shackleton, 186‒209. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Eva Oberloskamp, Codename TREVI: Terrorismusbekämpfung und die Anfänge einer europäischen Innenpolitik in den 1970er Jahren. Berlin, De Gruyter, 2016. Papahatzi, Elpida. Free Movement of Persons in the European Union: Specific Issues (Study for the European Parliament, PE 167.028, Brussels: May 1999). Patel, Kiran Klaus. “Widening and Deepening? Recent Advances in European Integration History.” Neue Politische Literatur 64, no. 2 (July 2019): 327‒57. Pudlat, Andreas. “Der lange Weg zum Schengen-Raum: Ein Prozess im Vier-Phasen-Modell.” Journal of European Integration History 17, no. 2 (2011): 303‒26. ———. Schengen: Zur Manifestation von Grenze und Grenzschutz in Europa. Hildesheim: Olms, 2013. Schneider, Florian, and Hagen Kopp. “A Brief History of the Noborder Network.” Tactical Media Files, 31 March 2010. Retrieved 16 December 2022 from http://www.tacticalme diafiles.net/articles/3332/A-Brief-History-of-the-Noborder-Network. Schreckenberger, Waldemar. “Von den Schengener Abkommen zu einer gemeinsamen Innenund Justizpolitik (Die Dritte Säule).” Verwaltungsarchiv 88, no. 3 (1997): 389‒415.

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Siebold, Angela. ZwischenGrenzen: Die Geschichte des Schengen-Raums aus deutschen, französischen und polnischen Perspektiven. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2013. Van de Rijt, Wouter. “Le fonctionnement des institutions Schengen: ‘Pragmatisme, toujours.’” In Schengen’s Final Days? The Incorporation of Schengen into the New TEU, External Borders and Information Systems, edited by Monica den Boer, 59‒66. Maastricht: European Institute for Public Administration, 1998. Van Middelaar, Luuk. The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union. Translated by Liz Waters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Weber, Max. “Technical Advantages of Bureaucratic Organization.” In Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 214‒15. London: Routledge, 1991. Weichert, Thilo. “Das geplante Schengen-Informationssystem.” Computer und Recht 1 (1990): 62‒66. Wyatt-Walter, Holly. The European Community and the Security Dilemma, 1979‒92. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Zaiotti, Ruben. Cultures of Border Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Zudeick, Peter. “Im Eimer.” Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, 1 September 1989.

8 It’s the Brain, Stupid Neuroscience, Risk, and Crime Peter Becker

“It is beginning to be clear that evolution has built into the human brain a central core of moral reasoning that is more or less universal. It is that central core that is missing in psychopaths.”1 This quotation is taken from an article published by neuroscientist Kent Kiehl and District Judge Morris Hoffman in Jurimetrics in 2011. They position the human brain center stage and underscore its evolutionary development and its cruciality for truly human existence, which they understand as characterized by empathy, sociability, and responsibility. Their argument skillfully combines neuroscience and penal law, which proves well the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration between practitioners from the bench and scientists, which was made possible by their participation in the prestigious Law and Neuroscience Project.2 The “moral compass” rooted in the brain is missing for some people, namely psychopaths. Kiehl and Hoffman describe them as eternal others of the respectable human self: “As long as humans have roamed the Earth, we have noticed that there are people who seem to be what psychiatrist Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig called ‘emptied souls.’”3 Neuroscientists engendered a rephrasing of the psychopathic condition by turning these empty souls into an “abnormal brain function.”4 Obviously, the brain poses a risk. In the reasoning of Kiehl and Hoffman, the evil of humankind appeared as consistent antisocial behavior and is not correlated with primitivity but rather with pathology.5 It is a rather peculiar form of pathology, for it affects neither the body nor the intellect but rather a person’s emotions and volition and is anchored in the subject’s brain. Psychopaths appear in criminological literature not merely as fascinating objects of intellectual curi-

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osity; they are considered even more significant as a burden to the modern state and society.6 Lacking the features of a mature personality, on which the society’s response to crime is based, psychopaths cannot be deterred by the threat of punishment and therefore remain outside of the reach of penal law’s general prevention.7 This turns them into a high risk for society: the more complex a society’s economic networks and interactions become, the higher the risk. Modernity—in the sense of increasingly complex markets and more volatile forms of subjectivity—provides opportunities for so-called psychopaths. This is, however, not the only connection we can find between psychopaths and modernity. Even though they have made a strong appearance in all periods of humankind—just imagine the destructive imprint of the Roman emperor Caligula8—they could be unmasked only with the advent of modern tools for personality analysis. The Psychopathy Checklist by Robert D. Hare identifies four crucial personality dimensions on the basis of clinical observation—interpersonal, affective, lifestyle, and antisocial aspects—and provides a tool to assess individuals both inside and outside penal institutions.9 The checklist was a psychometric tool for clustering psychopathic traits and not for identifying people who are qualitatively different from the rest of the population, as Adrian Raine and Andrea Glenn point out: “For research purposes, cutoff scores are sometimes arbitrarily designated to group together individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits.”10 Looking at the personality syndrome ascribed to psychopaths—“shallow affect, a callous disregard for the well-being or rights of others, a lack of remorse, predatory manipulation of others, and a propensity toward antisocial behavior”11—we are confronted with a personality disorder that has preoccupied criminology since the early nineteenth century and was characterized by the incorrigibility of the people afflicted. Recent decades have seen an extension of this concept to so-called successful psychopaths—“those who even use their psychopathic traits and lack of conscience to take advantage of others and gain positions of power in the corporate world.”12 Thus, psychopaths have moved the risk of consciously violating norms for personal gain from the underworld to mainstream politics, society, and economy. Businessmen, scientists, and even psychiatrists are able to thrive with a psychopathic personality profile, as Hervey Cleckley argues.13 Nevertheless, conceptual development and research on psychopaths has remained strongly focused on people committed to prisons and psychiatric hospitals, where they are clearly overrepresented as compared with their share in the general population.14 From the perspective of the penal system, psychopaths pose an interesting challenge. They are pathologically afflicted with a propensity for evil, since they are bös-krank, to use the diction of the Austrian philosopher of law Peter Strasser.15 Their personality—“an affective wasteland governed by primitive instincts”16— is tuned toward antisocial behavior.17 This poses an unsettling question: should these most dangerous criminals be excluded from the grip of penal law because they are not only evil but also pathologically deformed? Are repeat offenders thus

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to be treated more leniently because they are acting under the spell of a pathological deformation of mind and will? This question has been answered negatively so far because the pathology of psychopaths is exhibited in antisocial conduct and not in an identifiable disease. They need to be punished for their offenses even though they are considered to be unresponsive to the rationale of punishment. For this reason, the penal system has had to be amended in its rationale for sentencing. The penal law reform debates of the 1920s and 1930s were already strongly influenced by this consideration. The solution was the introduction of security measures, that is, the possibility to assign certain types of criminals to security confinement after the end of their prison term.18 Research in the early twenty-first century differs from earlier explorations into the underlying mechanisms that explain the core personality and emotional deficits, as it is now carried out by neuroscientists and geneticists, who reach out beyond their labs into research fields with a direct relevance for society and politics. They have taken over from psychiatrists, sociologists, and psychologists the competence to solve the riddle of psychopaths’ pursuit of immoral behavior and the parasitic exploitation of their fellow citizens.19 With this comes a new understanding of risks posed by the behavior of individuals. It’s the brain, stupid: this could be the motto for the neuroscientists’ move into the research domain of criminologists. Brain researchers benefit from the prospects related to new research technology such as brain imaging. Peeping into the brain of subjects and using mouse models to understand the modulation of brain chemistry by gene variations hold the promise of solving the riddles of humankind in general and of the psychopath in particular.20 Jack Dunagan, research director at the American Institute for the Future, even sees the advent of a “neurocentric age,” in which our lives, power relations, and social order will be transformed by the potential unleashed by new forms of knowledge and technologies.21 The inroads made by neuroscientists in research on psychopaths is a telling example of the strong impact that the coming of the neurocentric age will have on criminology and law. Being part of a reductionist agenda, neuroscientific perspectives redefine criminals in biological terms.22 Reaching into law and criminology, neuroscientists tend to overstretch their analytical and predictive potential, meaning their ability to relate fascinating insights into highly specific neurochemical processes affecting consciousness and intentionality and, more specifically, an individual’s choice-making.23 The American professor of law and psychology Stephen J. Morse castigates the effects of “a cognitive pathology,” which he wittily calls “Brain Overclaim Syndrome.”24 How does Brain Overclaim Syndrome relate to our debate on security and risk? The most obvious link is the increasing presence of neuroscientists in debates about violence, including extreme forms of violence. This presence is institutionally backed by their nomination as expert witnesses to testify in court about the personality of violent offenders. For several years, this role was given to neuroscientists only in the United States;25 yet not long ago an Italian appeals

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court also nominated two neuroscientists as expert witnesses, causing a significant uproar. In Europe and in the United States, neuroscientists reach across disciplinary boundaries and challenge social sciences, humanities, and even economics with their fresh look at men and women as social, political, economic, and cultural actors and risk-takers. In court, at conferences, and in their writings for a broader public, neuroscientists support their arguments with colorful images of criminal minds at work. These images powerfully convey the impression that solutions to violence and other social risks can be expected from a fresh look into the brains of subjects.26 This rationalizes abnormal behavior and even introduces new perspectives on the treatment of violent offenders. The malleability of the brain, a concept crucial for neuroscientists, no longer requires the permanent exclusion of subjects from society; the diagnosis of abnormal brain functioning is now linked to therapeutic interventions.27 I will discuss this reframing of violence by neuroscientists in three steps. First, I will look at the conceptualization of psychopaths around the midcentury using the novel The Bad Seed and its film adaptation from the 1950s as a literary point of entry. Second, I will look at genetic research and the role of neurosciences in developing a new understanding of the interplay between genetic variations, environmental factors, and brain chemistry. To illustrate the logic of this research, I will briefly turn to Fierce, a killer mouse, and its contribution to violence studies. Third, I will return to the beginning of my argument and look at current research strategies in genetics and neurosciences for decoding psychopathic personalities and their risk to society.

Biological, Social, and Genetic Conceptualizations of the Psychopath The forensic psychologist Hugues Hervé traces the historical genealogy of the concept of the psychopath and describes the efforts to come to terms with “psychopathy as a clinical construct.” Until the second half of the twentieth century, the classification of criminals on a biological basis lacked a solid foundation, he argues, which “resulted in many (antisocial) individuals being wrongly diagnosed with psychopathy.”28 Hervé ignores the fundamental turning point in criminological discourse in the 1960s. Up until then, biological explanations still dominated but did not provide a conclusive definition of psychopaths. A more general shift toward sociological theories had to wait another decade, even though such theories already started to challenge the criminal biological consensus in the 1950s, as we can learn from Giorgio Florita: “The fight between supporters of biophysiopsychic causes and those who supported sociological causes was won easily by the former when they admitted that there were also social causes (abject poverty, environment, etc.) [while] still maintaining, however, that the importance of these causes is only secondary.”29

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At this time of diagnostic uncertainty and lingering paradigmatic change, a crime novel and a crime film spotlighted the question of the very origins of psychopaths. William March’s novel The Bad Seed, published in 1954, presents the agony of Christine Penmark, who slowly becomes aware that her charming little daughter Rhoda is consciously killing to achieve her little childish ends: “I don’t believe environment had much to do with it,” Christine muses. “It must be something deeper than that . . . It was something dark. Something dark and unexplainable.”30 The deeper she digs into her own family history, the closer she gets to solving the riddle. She comes to realize that she was an adopted child, in fact the only surviving daughter left behind by the murderess discussed in her father’s writing. The plot turns into a desperate attempt by Christine to find a solution to save both her child and the social environment from the psychopathic personality disorder that the daughter obviously inherited from her grandmother. She accuses herself of carrying the bad seed and passing it on to her daughter. Her solution is a suicide combined with the attempted but failed killing of her daughter. The novel was received with much acclaim. Some critics raised objections, however, to the rather mechanical transmission of psychopathic tendencies from one generation to the next, which “reduced a terrifying novel to a neat horror story.”31 Notwithstanding the continuous presence of biological theories of crime in the 1950s,32 research on psychopaths had already moved beyond a reductionist biological explanation. By that time many authors had begun to combine biological and environmental factors in their explanatory models, while biological causation was not even necessarily related to inheritance.33 The author William March wanted to make a “definitive statement on the subject of violence in contemporary society, the inherent violence in man,” as his biographer Roy Simmonds observes. For March, Rhoda was “a metaphor for all the violence and greed that is part of every one of us, lying dormant . . . subconsciously or even unconsciously suppressed, awaiting the opportunity . . . to be released and manifest itself.”34 Violent tendencies are seen from this more nuanced perspective as being part of the human condition; the attention is directed, additionally, to environmental influences, which attenuate or reinforce everybody’s innate tendencies toward violence. The reflection on the causes of Rhoda’s psychopathic personality were further developed in the novel’s adaptation for theater and film. Instead of one male expert explaining to Christine the biological origins of psychopaths, mainly based on inheritance, the film allows three male experts to voice three different explanations. Most screen time is dedicated to the discussion between the protagonists of social and biological perspectives. Christine talks to the experts at a party about her problem, pretending that she plans to write a crime novel and wants to find a sound basis for her plot. The third voice comes into play toward the end of the film. The ending of the story is changed in the film, with Christine surviving her suicide attempt and Rhoda being killed by a bolt of lightning. The final round of discussion about the very causes of a psychopathic personality happens in the

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hospital: the neurologist who treats Christine presents the argument on the modulation of brain activities by genetic variation. From this perspective, he asserts that neither bad parenting nor a bad seed carried by their mothers is what causes psychopathic children.35 The neurologist’s argument operates on the level of genetics and looks therefore at more complex forms of genetic influence on behavior by introducing the genetic modulation of brain activities. This line of reasoning anticipates one of the main trends in current research on the biological basis of crime. Advances in molecular and behavioral genetics open a possibility to link antisocial behavior to a person’s genetic makeup.36

Brunner Syndrome: The Brain and the Reconfiguration of Risks About twenty years after The Bad Seed was published and enjoyed the attention of an enthusiastic readership, a woman arrived at Han Brunner’s department at the university clinic in Nijmegen. She was worn down by a history of aggression among male members of her family; battered and raped women paved the way of the men of her family. The pattern was so clearly visible that she did not turn to the police or a social worker but to Brunner, who was at that time a young and promising researcher at the department of human genetics. He took up the case and studied this family for many years: “The picture that emerged was of a trait that was developed by males and only certain males in the family. Women were completely unaffected, as were most of the men.”37 How did Brunner pursue this fascinating evidence of violence being propagated among the male members of a single family? Following up on studies of aggressive behavior in animals and humans, Brunner and his team systematically investigated the metabolism of serotonin in the male and female members of the family. After a series of complex genetic investigations, a “complete and selective deficiency of MAO-A in affected males” was found, as Brunner later wrote in a Science article published in 1993.38 The deficiency, later called Brunner Syndrome, refers to the enzyme Monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A), which breaks down serotonin and other neurotransmitters. The amount of this enzyme in the brain is modulated genetically and strongly influences the serotonergic system. As Brunner argues in his paper, the impulsive aggression exhibited by the male members of this family can be linked to high levels of serotonin in the cerebral fluid. To find out what role genetics played, he and his team carried out a sophisticated genetic analysis.39 The result of this analysis must have thrilled genetically literate criminologists. It basically meant that male adults of this Dutch lineage who showed aggressive behavior shared a genetic mutation that “instructs genetic machinery to stop producing the molecular product.” For this reason, the males affected by this mutation had a complete MAO-A deficiency, which was responsible both for their low level of intelligence and their inclination toward violent behavior.40

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Brunner Syndrome can be used to return to the question of the location of violence. Journalists misread the findings as the identification of the gene that codes violence in humans, something that Brunner “actively fought, and for good reasons.”41 In fact, Brunner and his team offered a much more complex story, which moves far beyond genetic determinism. His argument was further pursued by the psychologists Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, who claimed for themselves a breakthrough in criminological research that opened completely new perspectives for crime policy. According to them, “there are consequences to the field’s failure to push beyond the risk-factor stage to achieve an understanding of causal processes. Valuable resources have been wasted because intervention programs have proceeded on the basis of risk factors, without sufficient research to understand causal processes.”42 How could crime policy escape the narrow confinements of social risk factor assessment? Moffitt and Caspi used the potential of the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development study, in which one thousand children, born in 1972‒73, have been tracked over the years since their birth. From this study more than 1,100 papers, reports, and book chapters have been produced. One of them is the paper by Moffitt and Caspi on the interplay between genetic modulation, brain chemistry, and environmental influences on the production of violence. They took up the challenge to study the concurrence of environmental influences and variations at the locus of the genes encoding the MAO-A enzyme, which were already the focus of the Brunner study, for the development of violence in social interactions. Moffitt and Caspi began their argument by stating their discontent with “traditional socialization studies of antisocial behavior, which could not separate environmental influences from their correlated genes.”43 Moffitt and Caspi tried a different approach. They used child maltreatment as a measured environmental risk and correlated it with the difference between short and long versions of the MAO-A gene, with correspondingly low and high MAO-A activity.44 Negative effects of the genetic makeup—low MAO-A activity corresponding with high levels of serotonin in the brain—were much more likely to result in violent behavior if they concurred with negative environmental conditions, and vice versa.45 The study by Moffitt and Caspi on genetic and environmental influences on violence had an impact similar to that of the publication on Brunner Syndrome. A wide range of commentators read their findings as the discovery of individuals who were genetically predisposed to violence. This reading of Moffitt and Caspi’s study is not fully off the mark. Unlike Brunner’s study, their research was not based on a rare genetic mutation but rather on a frequent variant of the MAO-A gene: about 30 percent of the male population belong to the low-MAO-A group. But only a small percentage of them turn to violence.46 So where does the brain actually come into play? Even though the argument has focused on genetic research and the concurrence between genetic polymorphism, environmental factors, and behavioral patterns, the brain has always lurked in the background of this analytical model. Violent behavior is never con-

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sidered to be a direct result of genetic variations, nor even of a concurrence with environmental factors. Instead, the natural history of violence always operates with a three-dimensional figuration: genetic polymorphisms, brain chemistry, and environmental influences. The case of violent men in the abovementioned Dutch family was helpful to explain the relation between genetic variation and brain chemistry and its influence on violent behavior. The environment, which was introduced analytically by the Dunedin study in the form of child abuse, did not operate on the genetic level in the Moffitt‒Caspi model because Moffitt and Caspi were not interested in questions of epigenetics. The environment influenced the way in which men acted under the spell of high serotonin levels in their brains. The brain emerges as a kind of interface, where genetic modulation and environmental influences are constantly negotiated to define an appropriate performance within a given setting. The resulting pattern of neuronal activity defines, according to neuroscientists, the personality and performance of human and animal actors. If we want to understand the causes of abnormal behavior, we cannot restrict our research to environmental or genetic factors, we have to look at the brain, as Debra Niehoff urges.47 Niehoff’s brain is a neurochemical brain, just like the brain referred to in Brunner, Moffitt, and Caspi’s research. What does it mean to give greater voice to this neurochemical brain? It requires the departure from a simplistic deterministic model. A gene for psychopathy or violence cannot exist. The misreading by the media and lay commentators of Brunner, Moffitt, and Caspi’s findings is based on a misunderstanding of the way in which genetic variation impacts brain chemistry.48 Violence poses a different riddle to neuroscientists and behavioral geneticists than it does to laypeople, like the fictional character Christine Penmark and the Dutch woman who turned to Brunner for help. Both experts and laypeople look at the bodies of perpetrators for an explanation of abusive behavior. However, experts do not restrict their efforts to studying human perpetrators as representatives of our commonly experienced “first nature.” To understand properly the interplay between genetic variations, brain chemistry, and the response to adverse environmental stimuli, they turn to the “second nature” of the biological laboratory. Klaus Amann uses this label for the laboratory to emphasize the “instrumental-technical reconstruction or reconfiguration of biological entities,” which produces carefully designed, genetically modeled creatures: transgenic mice, designed in a standardized manner.49 Brunner and his team were blessed with the evidence of genetic mutations in the first nature that were knocking out the production of the enzyme that controls the level of serotonin in the brain. This gift of nature, however, left many questions open. They called therefore for the development of “animal models . . . to determine the various neurochemical alterations that are induced by selective MAO-A deficiency and their secondary effects on the organism.”50 Using the “second nature” of mouse models is possible because “mice and humans share many orthologous genes mapped to synthenic chromosomal re-

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gions.” Therefore, “it is conceivable that individual genes identified for one or more types of murine aggressive behavior may be developed as animal models for human aggression.”51 This permeability between human and animal forms of violence provides opportunities for a kind of research that eugenicists and criminal biologists would not have been able to imagine: animal studies suggest relations between genetic modulation and brain physiology, and focused investigations with human test persons help further develop the model, which, in turn, requires more experimentation in laboratories with transgenic mice. The second nature of mouse models has the disadvantage that even transgenic mice participate in the first nature, as they are subject to physical development during their growth. This introduces an uncontrollable risk within the highly controlled environment, as Lesch and Merschdorf observe: Because a missing gene might affect many developmental processes throughout ontogeny and compensatory mechanisms may be activated in knockouts, behavioral data from mice with targeted gene deletions should be interpreted with caution . . . It is becoming increasingly evident that many neurotransmitters and receptors are expressed at early periods of neural development, and it is likely that they participate in the structural organization of the nervous system.”52

All of this fits nicely with the experience of the Dutch woman suffering from the abusive behavior of males in her family. She was aware that aggressive male family members showed rather low intelligence. Therefore, the missing MAO-A enzyme and the resulting high serotonin levels impacted brain development. More detailed insights into the effects of impeded development on aggression can be learned from a spontaneous mutation—that of Fierce, the killer mouse.

Fierce: The Killer Mouse Only first nature interventions seem to provide the opportunities to answer the question of whether monstrous violence emerges from monstrous brains. Despite brain-scanning technologies, this question is very difficult to answer with respect to human subjects; it is not even easy to answer for rodents. There are those lucky moments in laboratory life, however, when lab handlers are unexpectedly confronted with new, eye-opening realities, such as in the case of a ferocious biting attack by a transgenic mouse. This is indeed what happened at the University of British Columbia, as the Canadian daily newspaper Globe and Mail reported on 6 May 2002: Two dead mice and a cage of chewed tails have led to the accidental discovery that a single genetic trait can trigger extremely violent behavior. A University of British Columbia scientist . . . found an inherited gene mutation in mice that affects the brain and results in very vicious creatures: Rodents that carry it are prone to attacking their mates, their siblings, their surroundings, even their lab handlers.

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The researchers at the University of British Columbia were lucky indeed. They were confronted with a spontaneous gene mutation within a laboratory animal, which they could easily reproduce within different genetic backgrounds and later dissect. First nature did not light the torch of genetic enlightenment, but rather served as a potent reminder to revisit the impact of a disruption mutation on mice’s gene Nr2e1. Previous targeted disruption mutation studies have reported on the developmental effect of the anterior brain but have not fully evaluated the extent of aggressive behaviors, as the researchers pointed out.53 Here, first nature stepped in and provided a spontaneous mouse mutation, which the researchers called “fierce,” for good reason. The mutation deleted gene Nr2e1 and, through the highly aggressive behavior of its carrier, invited researchers to more comprehensively study the effects of this mutation on development and behavior. Fierce, the Canadian “killer mouse,” emerged from the ambit of a Shelleyan laboratory. Unintended and thus uncontrolled genetic mutation during a controlled mutagenesis experiment brought it into existence.54 The result of this uncanny blend of human modeling of a mouse and unplanned natural variation was the emergence of a Frankensteinian creature, a highly aggressive, emotionally disturbed mouse with several brain defects, restrained in the use of its senses. The mouse was processed with all the care and sophistication required of animals used as epistemic objects and expressions of theoretical models. Fierces were bred; some were injected with a lethal dose of tribromoethanol to section their brains; pregnant female Fierce mice were “euthanized” using CO2 to “harvest” the brains of their fetuses. Other Fierce mice were also “euthanized” to remove their eyes and place them in Telly’s fixative. Some of the Fierce mice with controlled genetic backgrounds were kept alive long enough to study their behavior.55 To the neuroscientists, who so skillfully bred and dissected Fierce mice, this mutant offered many more insights. The Fierce mouse model provided “a tool not only for studies in brain development, metabolism, violent aggression, and maternal behavior, but also for identifying genes important in hydrocephaly, ocular development, and sex-limited modulation of aggression in females.” Moreover, this mutant was to “serve as a tool to explore unusual events that may complicate targeting experiments.”56 Kelly Young and her collaborators understand Fierce mice as an interesting contribution to theoretical reasoning about violence and especially about the role of genetic polymorphisms in it: as a “mouse model,” Fierce is understood as the physical representation of theoretical assumptions about the relation between genetic programs, brain chemistry, and behavior in and beyond the world of rodents. The Shelleyan laboratory from which Fierce mice emerged is one of the many sites of research in the neurosciences where the boundaries between animal and human behavior are transcended. A mouse is made to speak about humans and their social behavior. The flexibility of boundaries between human beings and animals is puzzling not just for the historian. After all, human subjects are somewhat more complex

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in their personal and social lives than mice and rats. However, the mouse models of aggression still make sense because of the increased complexity of the research question and the difficulty in correlating the genetic setup with brain chemistry. Behavioral geneticists and neuroscientists use their theoretical sophistication and their new research technologies to delve deep into the still widely uncharted waters of the interplay between genetic variation, brain chemistry, and brain physiology. This neurochemical brain57 is a key, albeit malleable interface between genes and proteins, the social and physical environment of the individual body, and, finally, evolutionary and developmental processes.58 We certainly need to know more about the working of this interface within the complex system that human subjects acting in the world constitute. Neuroscientists and geneticists are all too ready, however, to translate their insights into sociology, criminology, and social policy. Niehoff, Moffitt, and Caspi even considered political implications and called for a reassessment of funding for social policy, especially the reduction of funds for programs to improve life chances for socially disadvantaged children.59 Their policy recommendations favored targeted interventions for children who were genetically at risk of becoming violent. This makes sense solely from a clinical perspective. From a social-political perspective, which is consciously linked to a welfare policy agenda, providing disadvantaged children with better access to life chances is important independent of their genetic risk of becoming violent perpetrators and thus incurring costs for society in terms of incarceration, legal proceedings, and victimization of fellow citizens.60 From this perspective, the social is not just the direct environment of neurochemical brains but a politically and economically structured space with all its built-in positive and negative discrimination.

Peeping into the Brain of Psychopaths: The Violence of Psychopaths and Its Risks What are the implications of this bioneurological research for understanding the proneness to violence of psychopaths and the risk they thus pose to society? To describe the role of genetic variations for a higher risk of violent behavior, Brunner et al. referred to a defective metabolism of neurotransmitters (serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline) caused by the inhibition of MAO-A.61 Therefore, inhibitors have an important role in homeostatic regulations of brain chemistry. Derailed regulation can result in behavior that does not meet the normative expectations of its social environment; in other words, it results in forms of social deviance rooted not in the social environment but in the neuronal. This goes with the assumption that more recently developed parts of the brain are, in general, held responsible for the inhibition of unruly impulses arising from our phylogenetically behavioral past. In modern scientific lingo, Terrie Moffitt explains this in the following way:

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The connection has often been framed as a variation on the theme of neocortex-based suppression of primitive aggressive and predatory instincts that have been retained in subcortical limbic structures (often called the phylogenetically “old” or “reptilian” brain). Simply put, evolution has added brain tissue in the frontal lobes that enables primates to engage in complex prosocial behavior; the frontal lobes mind our manners.62

The close link between phylogenetic evolution and brain development directs the gaze toward people whose individual development had been arrested. Adrian Raine found a higher level of psychopathy in adults with the cavum septum pellucidum—a marker of fetal neural maldevelopment—persisting into adulthood. This “provides initial evidence for a neurodevelopment abnormality in antisocial individuals.”63 Their antisocial behavior is thus linked to their underdeveloped brain—a clear reference to the inhibitory role of later steps in brain development and a point well proven by the Fierce mice. Nevertheless, key players in the field, like Raine, warn against too ambitious an interpretation of the available data on the neurobiological correlates of psychopathic personality disorder.64 What brain malfunction, then, is responsible for the behavior of psychopaths? Are they simply operating under the spell of a reptilian brain, incapable of performing within modern society and economy? Systematic inquiries into the working of the brains of psychopaths reveal a more differentiated story.65 While clinical studies of brain lesions show the impulsivity and bad judgment of those afflicted,66 brain-imaging studies find deficits in this area only for the so-called unsuccessful psychopaths, meaning those people with psychopathic personality disorders who have come into conflict with the law.67 In short, not every psychopath lacks planning capacities linked to a well-functioning frontal lobe. However, what all psychopaths do lack is remorse, any receptivity to the deterring effects of possible punishment, and the ability to have genuinely loving relationships—all traits related to the subcortical parts of the brain. Brain-imaging research on psychopaths has looked beyond the evolutionary hypothesis of frontal lobe activation and embraced a more complex understanding of the brain as a densely interconnected communication system. This turned attention to the role of emotions in decision-making. Even the first fMRI study of psychopathy by Joanna Intrator is a good case in point.68 It started from the observation that psychopaths are emotionally detached from others and indifferent to their feelings and well-being. Further research in this direction motivated neuroscientists to adapt MRI technology to measure “the integrity of communicating pathways between different brain regions”69 and shifted their focus to the interaction between the cortical and subcortical systems, for instance in a study on the anterior cingulate, “which serves as a relay station of information and is densely interconnected to regions such as the amygdala and orbifrontal cortex, both of which are consistent[ly] implicated in psychopathy.”70 How do neuroscientists produce their evidence about cognition, volition, emotion, and communication pathways? The research strategies of neuroscientists have a long history, reaching all the way back to the use of sphygmographs

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documenting pulse frequencies around 1900. Technological change notwithstanding, the setting has remained the same: human guinea pigs are still being confronted with visual representations of stimuli: neutral, coveted, and detested objects and actions. The bodily correlations of their reactions are recorded and examined as if they will document emotional and cognitive brain activities, even though the response to these tasks is only hypothetically related to cognitive and emotional states. Brain-imaging studies suffer from small sample size and low statistical power.71 This is readily acknowledged even by the most seasoned practitioners in the field. The arguments of neuroscientists obscure the difference between “discovering the neural correlates of mental phenomena” and the explanation of these phenomena, as Stephen Morse points out.72 This is made possible by the strong reliance on model-building, based on clinical observation, statistical data from behavioral psychology, and animal models. Data from brain scans is then put into dialogue with this theoretical reasoning, as the synthetic view of Kiehl and Hofman on personality defects of psychopaths proves: psychopaths are incapable of even recognizing moral issues, they are incapable of inhibiting negatively connoted responses, and they cannot reach decisions about moral issues.73 The language of inhibition74 is crucial for understanding the reasoning of neuroscientists with regard to psychopaths. Their argument, uninhibited by the lack of a solid empirical foundation, links the neurochemical and genetic analysis of the brain to psychological testing batteries and their theoretical assumptions. In a nutshell, the argument posits that derailed neurochemical processes or neurobiological deficits negatively influence the ability of the brain to manage environmental influences on the basis of its genetic modulation in a socially integrative manner. The result is a person who lacks key social competences and thus poses a risk to society. The evidence of colorful images purportedly showing these subjects’ deficits of mind at work cannot obscure the fundamental problem of this reasoning, as it does not control for the social and cultural differences regarding the normative expectations toward individuals. Our understanding of the brain and its functioning has changed significantly due to massive research programs in the neurosciences. The relevance of this leap forward cannot be downplayed. These critical remarks are not directed against neurosciences and behavioral genetics, but rather against their claims to provide an improved assessment of social risks and a more efficient way to contain them.75

Conclusion What does it mean to locate the very origin of violence in the brain? The answer to this question depends very much on the way in which this link between violence and the brain is established. Even under the spell of the evolutionist paradigm at the beginning of the first biological turn in criminology, there was a way to relate violence to the brain—a brain, however, that carried the imprints

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of the cultural evolution of humankind.76 People with fully developed brains were then not susceptible to outbursts of extreme forms of violence, a form of behavior linked to the origins of humankind. Violent people, as evolutionistdefined others, were atavistic drawbacks to early stages of development. Despite this very subtle common ground between the self and the others, even the “normal” citizen of the fin de siècle could be frightened by the idea of a remote form of commonality with atavistic monsters. Should we be more frightened today? The connection between us and them now operates more directly, without the detour through common ancestors. The genetic makeup and brain chemistry of psychopaths are not substantially different from ours; they are just different in their actual working. From the viewpoint of normalization, we are confronted with a complex overlay of Gaussian curves, each of which represents the values of transmitters and receptors relevant for the neurochemical brain. Even the most gruesome psychopath shares their neurochemical processes with the most caring subject. This commonality can be taken even further, as is indeed done in many clinical narratives. The loving father turns into a pedophile under the influence of a brain tumor. This means we can no longer relax with the consoling thought that we are, thanks to our fully accomplished physical and social development, past any danger of crossing the divide to some monstrous other, one who preys on children or abuses physically and emotionally those who care for us, for example. I would like to close with a more positive thought, though. The susceptibility of our brain to learning and unlearning behavior introduces a further flexibility between us and them. Boundaries are no longer firmly drawn. Today’s psychopaths can be subjected to neuroceutical and therapeutic interventions to bring them back from careers in violent crime. Because the brain remains malleable, there is the opportunity for manipulation and controlling strategies beyond the assessment of individual risk patterns. Undesirable behavior can now be redressed by strategic, highly focused interventions into the brain. As Nikolas Rose put it: “What is learned may be unlearned, or may be replaced by a new and less damaging set of learned ways of thinking and acting, an array of competences and skills of life management that are more desirable to others, and indeed to the dependent person themselves.”77 Peter Becker is Professor of Austrian History at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on the history of state and public administration, the history of the League of Nations in its relations to the successor states of the Habsburg monarchy, and the biologization of the social in the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. He is the author of Verderbnis und Entartung: Eine Geschichte der Kriminologie des 19. Jahrhunderts als Diskurs und Praxis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002) and Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands, edited with Natasha Wheatley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

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Notes 1. Kent A. Kiehl and Morris B. Hoffman, “The Criminal Psychopath: History, Neuroscience, Treatment, and Economics,” Jurimetrics 51 (2011): 355‒97 (here 361). 2. See Michael S. Gazzaniga, “The Law and Neuroscience,” Neuron 60 (2008): 412‒15; applied to the treatment of psychopaths, see Stephen J. Morse, “Psychopathy and Criminal Responsibility,” Neuroethics 1 (2008): 205‒12. The project was sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation: see https://www.lawneuro.org (accessed 8 December 2020). 3. Kiehl and Hoffman, “Psychopath,” 359. 4. Ibid., 385. 5. See Peter Becker, “Furcht vor Niedergang und Entartung: Nährboden für sozialdarwinistische Ideen im späten 19. Jahrhundert,” in Streitfall Evolution: Eine Kulturgeschichte, ed. Angela Schwartz (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017), 362‒75 (here 362‒67). 6. Kiehl and Hoffman, “Psychopath,” 356: the authors estimate that 16 percent of adult males within the American prison system are psychopaths, whereas psychopaths make up only 1 percent of the entire male adult population. 7. This argument can already be found in the interwar period. See Edmund Mezger, Strafrecht: Ein Lehrbuch (Munich: Duncker & Humboldt, 1931), 510. 8. On the classification of Caligula as a psychopath, see Kiehl and Hoffman, “Psychopath,” 360. 9. See Robert D. Hare, “The PCL-R Assessment of Psychopathy,” in The Wiley International Handbook on Psychopathic Disorders and the Law, ed. Alan R. Felthouse and Hennig Saß (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley 2020), 63‒106; on the development of the psychopathy checklist by Hare, see also Kiehl and Hoffman, “Psychopath,” 365–66. The modernist character of this checklist becomes evident when it is positioned within a wider disciplinary historical context. Hare solves the century-old riddle of deciphering the psychopath as a menace to society: see Hugues Hervé, “Psychopathy across the Ages: A History of the Hare Psychopath,” in The Psychopath: Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. Hugues Hervé and John C. Yuille (New York: Routledge, 2012), 31–55. 10. Adrian Raine and Andrea L. Glenn, Psychopathy: An Introduction to Biological Findings and Their Implications (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 6. 11. Nathalie Y. Gauthier, Tabitha Methot-Jones, Angela Book, and J. Reid Meloy, “Psychopaths and the Neurobiology of Evil,” in Psychoanalysts, Psychologists and Psychiatrists Discuss Psychopathy and Human Evil, ed. Sheldon Itzkowitz and Elizabeth F. Howell (London: Routledge, 2019), 244‒61 (here 244). This definition is based on the seminal works by Robert D. Hare and Hervey Cleckley. 12. Ibid., 245–46. 13. See Kiehl and Hoffman, “Psychopath,” 360. 14. Ibid., 377–78. 15. See Peter Strasser, Verbrechermenschen: Zur kriminalwissenschaftlichen Erzeugung des Bösen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2005), 127‒54. 16. Hervé, “Psychopathy across the Ages”; the fear of the dominance of primitive instincts in the behavior of men in modern societies entered the debate with the degenerated criminal: see Erich Wulffen, Ein Handbuch für Juristen, Verwaltungsbeamte und Ärzte: Mit zahlreichen kriminalistischen Originalaufnahmen (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1921), 306, 317. 17. Psychopaths are recidivists because of their personality defects and are not identified as psychopaths because of their repeated criminal offenses: see Grant T. Harris and Marnie

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

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E. Rice, “Psychopathy Research at Oak Ridge: Skepticism Overcome,” in The Psychopath: Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. Hugues Hervé and John C. Yuille (New York: Routledge, 2012), 57‒76. Mezger, Strafrecht, 518–19; on American legislation, see Nicole Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), chap. 10; on the introduction of security measures, see Peter Becker, “Researching Crime and Criminals in the 19th Century,” in The Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology, ed. Ruth Ann Triplett (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2018), 32‒47 (here 44–45). Peter Becker, “The Neurosciences and Criminology: How New Experts Have Moved into Public Policy and Debate,” in Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880‒1980, ed. Kerstin Brückweh, Dirk Schumann, Richard F. Wetzell, and Benjamin Ziemann (New York: Palgrave 2012), 123‒125. See Robert D. Hare, “Forty Years Aren’t Enough: Recollections, Prognostications, and Random Musings,” in The Psychopath: Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. Hugues Hervé and John C. Yuille (New York: Routledge, 2012), 3‒28 on neuroimaging as a powerful new tool in the research on psychopaths. Jake F. Dunagan, “Politics for the Neurocentric Age,” Journal of Futures Studies 15 (2010): 51‒70 (here 52–53); see also his earlier reflections on Neurotechnobiopower in Jake Dunagan, “Neuroutires: The Brain, Politics, and Power,” Journal of Futures Studies 9 (2004): 1‒18 (here 8‒12). Peter Becker, “The Coming of a Neurocentric Age? Neurosciences and the New Biology of Violence: A Historian’s Comment,” Medicina & Storia 10 (2010): 101‒28 (here 101); on the reductionist aspect, see Paolo Legrenzi and Carlo Umiltà, Neuro-Mania: Il cervello non spiega chi siamo (Bologna: Mulino, 2009), 57. For a critical assessment of the multifarious entanglement between law and neuroscience, see the contributions to Dennis Patterson and Michael S. Pardo, eds., Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Stephen J. Morse, “Brain Overclaim Syndrome and Criminal Responsibility: A Diagnostic Note,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 3 (2006): 397‒412 (here 397). Nathaniel E. Anderson and Kent A. Kiehl, “Re-Wiring Guilt: How Advancing Neurosciences Encourages Strategic Interventions over Retributive Justice,” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020): 2; on the first use of fMRI as evidence in an American court, see Raine and Glenn, Psychopathy, 1–2. Becker, “Neurosciences and Criminology,” 128–29; on the role of neuroscientists in American courts, see Michael L. Perlin, “‘His Brain Has Been Mismanaged with Great Skill’: How Will Jurors Respond to Neuroimaging Testimony in Insanity Defense Cases?,” Akron Law Review 42 (2009): 885‒916; on the Italian case, see “Court of Assizes of Appeal in Trieste, October 1, 2009,” Riviste penale 1 (2010): 74, quoted in Emilia Musumeci, “Cesare Lombroso and Neuroscientists: A Failed Patricide” (paper presented at the workshop “Was Lombroso Right? The Historical Legacy of Neuroscience,” Vienna, 2010), 8. See Hans J. Markowitsch and Werner Siefer, Tatort Gehirn: Auf der Suche nach dem Ursprung des Verbrechens (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2007), chaps. 6 and 7. Hervé, “Psychopathy across the Ages,” 36. Giorgio Florita, “Enquiry into the Causes of Crime,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Political Science 44 (1953): 1‒16 (here 2); also Peter Becker, “Biologische Erklärungen von Gewalt und Aggression: Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen?” in Vererbung

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33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

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oder Umwelt? Ungleichheit zwischen Biologie und Gesellschaft seit 1945, ed. Constantin Goschler and Till Kessler (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), 55‒81 (here 72‒74). William March, The Bad Seed (New York: Random House, 1954), chap. 5. See my comments on Rhoda Penmark’s legacy in Becker, “Neurosciences and Criminology,” 120‒22. Roy S. Simmonds, The Two Worlds of William March (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 310. Imanuel Baumann, “‘Angeborene Minderwertigkeit.’ Zum kriminalbiologischen Paradigma in der westdeutschen Kriminalwissenschaft der 1950er Jahre,” in Gefährliche Menschenbilder: Biowissenschaften, Gesellschaft und Kriminalität, ed. Lorenz Böllinger et al. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010), 329‒43 (here 335‒37). On the history of the conceptualization of psychopathy, see Hervé, “Psychopathy across the Ages”; Rafter, Creating Born Criminals, chap. 9; on the shift away from notions of inherited feeble-mindedness and its eugenic implications since the end of the 1930s, see David W. Jones, Disordered Personalities and Crime: An Analysis of the History of Moral Insanity (London: Routledge, 2016), chap. 6. Simmonds, The Two Worlds of William March, 299. On this argument, see Becker, “Neurosciences and Criminology,” 120–21. Jones, Disordered Personalities, 242–43. James Tabery, Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 169. Han G. Brunner et al., “Abnormal Behavior Associated with a Point Mutation in the Structural Gene for Monoamine Oxidase A,” Science 262 (1993): 578‒80; Han G. Brunner et al., “X-Linked Borderline Mental Retardation with Prominent Behavioral Disturbance: Phenotype, Genetic Localization, and Evidence for Disturbed Monoamine Metabolism,” American Journal of Human Genetics 52 (1993): 1032‒39. Brunner et al., “Abnormal Behavior,” 579. Tabery, Beyond Versus, 170. Ibid. Terrie Moffitt and Avashalom Caspi, “Evidence from Behavioral Genetics for Environmental Contributions to Antisocial Conduct,” in The Explanation of Crime: Context, Mechanisms, and Development, ed. Per-Olof Wikström and Robert J. Sampson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 108‒52 (here 109). Ibid., 110. Ibid., 109 and 142; see also Tabery, Beyond Versus, 171. Similar results were obtained by a research group around Terrie Moffitt, working with twin studies: Essi Viding et al., “Evidence for Substantial Genetic Risk for Psychopathology,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 6 (2005): 592‒97; on the concurrence of genetic and environmental risk, see also Amy L. Byrd and Stephen B. Manuck, “MAO-A, Childhood Maltreatment, and Antisocial Behavior: Meta-Analysis of a Gene-Environment Interaction,” Biological Psychiatry 75 (2014): 9‒17. Tabery, Beyond Versus, 172. Debra Niehoff, The Biology of Violence: How Understanding the Brain, Behavior, and Environment Can Break the Vicious Circle of Aggression (New York: Free Press, 1999), 259–60. Becker, “Neurocentric Age,” 123‒25; Becker, “Biologische Erklärungen,” 65–66. Klaus Amann, “Menschen, Mäuse, Fliegen: Eine wissenssoziologische Analyse der Transformation von Organismen in epidemische Objekte,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 23 (1994): 22‒40 (here 29); on experimental model systems in biological psychiatry, see Nikolas

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58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 190‒92. Brunner et al., “Abnormal Behavior,” 580. Klaus Peter Lesch and Ursula Merschdorf, “Impulsivity, Aggression, and Serotonin: A Molecular Psychobiological Perspective,” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 18 (2000): 581‒604 (here 584); see also Niehoff, Biology of Violence, 78. Lesch and Merschdorf, “Impulsivity,” 598. Kelly A. Young et al., “Fierce: A New Mouse Deletion of Nr2e1: Violent Behaviour and Ocular Abnormalities are Background-Dependent,” Behavioural Brain Research 132 (2002): 145‒58 (here 146). The mutagenesis experiment from which Fierce emerged spontaneously is described in ibid., 146. A full account of the research program can be found in ibid., 147–48. Ibid., 157. The same logic informs the understanding of ourselves as a “neurochemical self.” This relocates the focus to our performance in various markets and encourages us to undertake continuous optimization. On the neurochemical self, see Rose, Politics of Life Itself, 222–23. See also Becker, “Neurosciences and Criminology,” 124‒27. On this argument, see Becker, “Neurosciences and Criminology,” 125–26. Moffitt and Caspi, “Evidence from Behavioral Genetics,” 109; Niehoff, Biology of Violence, 260–61. James Tabery (Beyond Versus, 183‒85) argues in the same direction. He suggests extending any intervention favoring children to all children and not just those who are genetically at risk. On the contrary, Kiehl and Hoffman (“Psychopath,” 397) represent the highly reductionist perspective on the use of public funds. They appear to justify this as solely for the purpose of saving taxpayers’ money and avoiding victimization of “any one of us.” Brunner et al., “Abnormal Behavior,” 579. Terrie E. Moffitt, “The Neuropsychology of Juvenile Delinquency: A Critical Review,” Crime and Justice 12 (1990): 99‒169 (here 148). Raine and Glenn, Psychopathy, 127; on fin-de-siècle precursors of this argument, see Domenico Chirchiglia, Pasquale Chirchiglia, and Rosa Marotta, “Median Occipital Fossa: Is It Really a Sign of Crime or Simply an Anatomical Variant?” Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology 124 (2019): 104‒6. Raine and Glenn, Psychopathy, 113–14; see also Kiehl and Hoffman, “Psychopath,” 384. Kiehl and Hoffman, “Psychopath,” 384–85. Nathaniel E. Anderson and Kent A. Kiehl, “Functional Neuroimagining and Psychopathy,” in Handbook on Psychopathy and Law, ed. Kent A. Kiehl and Walter P. SinnottArmstrong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 131‒49 (here 134). Raine and Glenn, Psychopathy, 7–8; see also S. J.-J. Leistedt et al., “La psychopathie: Depuis ‘The Mask of Sanity’ aux neurosciences sociales,” Revue Médicale de Bruxelles 30 (2009): 577‒87 (here 581–82). Joanne Intrator et al., “A Brain Imaging (Single Photon Emission Computerized Tomography) Study of Semantic and Affective Processing in Psychopaths,” Biological Psychiatry 42 (1997): 96‒103. Anderson and Kiehl, “Functional Neuroimagining” 133, 138‒41. Raine and Glenn, Psychopathy, 124. For a critical look at the methodological underpinnings of brain-imaging studies, see Jones, Disordered Personalities, 243‒46.

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72. Morse, “Brain Overclaim Syndrome,” 404. 73. Kiehl and Hoffman, “Psychopath,” 389. 74. Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 224. 75. Two authors from the mind-research network, Anderson and Kiehl (“Re-Wiring Guilt,” 10), concluded their review essay in 2020 with a cautionary statement: “Could neuroscientific measures reveal specific risk factors for re-offending that are not evident on standard psychiatric assessments? These are difficult questions indeed, and ones that we do not yet have answers for.” Their argument continues with an almost defiant claim that the future will bring a “more complete bio-psychosocial understanding of maladaptive behavior.” This will be, according to them, crucial for “more pragmatic” approaches to classifying offenders. 76. Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, vol. 1, new edn. (Munich: DTV, 1988 [1897]), 66; the English translation is taken from George J. Stack, Lange und Nietzsche (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 158. 77. Nikolas Rose, “The Neurochemical Self and Its Anomalies,” in Risk and Morality, ed. Richard Ericson and Aaron Doyle (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003), 407‒37 (here 418); treatment is indeed an important focus in research on psychopaths—see Kiehl and Hoffman, “Psychopath,” 393‒96.

Bibliography Amann, Klaus. “Menschen, Mäuse, Fliegen: Eine wissenssoziologische Analyse der Transformation von Organismen in epidemische Objekte.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 23 (1994): 22‒40. Anderson, Nathaniel E., and Kent A. Kiehl. “Functional Neuroimagining and Psychopathy.” In Handbook on Psychopathy and Law, edited by Kent A. Kiehl and Walter P. SinnottArmstrong, 131‒49. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. “Re-Wiring Guilt: How Advancing Neurosciences Encourages Strategic Interventions over Retributive Justice.” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020), doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg .2020.00390. Baumann, Imanuel. “‘Angeborene Minderwertigkeit.’ Zum kriminalbiologischen Paradigma in der westdeutschen Kriminalwissenschaft der 1950er Jahre.” In Gefährliche Menschenbilder: Biowissenschaften, Gesellschaft und Kriminalität, edited by Lorenz Böllinger et al., 329‒43. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010. Becker, Peter. “The Coming of a Neurocentric Age? Neurosciences and the New Biology of Violence: A Historian’s Comment.” Medicina & Storia 10 (2010): 101‒28. ———. “The Neurosciences and Criminology: How New Experts Have Moved into Public Policy and Debate.” In Engineering Society: The Role of the Human and Social Sciences in Modern Societies, 1880‒1980, edited by Kerstin Brückweh, Dirk Schumann, Richard F. Wetzell, and Benjamin Ziemann, 119‒38. New York: Palgrave, 2012. ———. “Biologische Erklärungen von Gewalt und Aggression: Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen?” In Vererbung oder Umwelt? Ungleichheit zwischen Biologie und Gesellschaft seit 1945, edited by Constantin Goschler and Till Kessler, 55‒81. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016.

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———. “Furcht vor Niedergang und Entartung: Nährboden für sozialdarwinistische Ideen im späten 19. Jahrhundert.” In Streitfall Evolution: Eine Kulturgeschichte, edited by Angela Schwartz, 362‒75. Cologne: Böhlau, 2017. ———. “Researching Crime and Criminals in the 19th Century.” In The Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Criminology, edited by Ruth Ann Triplett, 32‒47. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2018. Brunner, Han G., M. Nelen, X. O. Breakafield, H. H. Ropers, and B. A. van Oost. “Abnormal Behavior Associated with a Point Mutation in the Structural Gene for Monoamine Oxidase A.” Science 262 (1993): 578‒80. Brunner, Han G., et al. “X-Linked Borderline Mental Retardation with Prominent Behavioral Disturbance: Phenotype, Genetic Localization, and Evidence for Disturbed Monoamine Metabolism.” American Journal of Human Genetics 52 (1993): 1032‒39. Byrd, Amy L., and Stephen B. Manuck, “MAO-A, Childhood Maltreatment, and Antisocial Behavior: Meta-Analysis of a Gene-Environment Interaction.” Biological Psychiatry 75 (2014): 9‒17. Chirchiglia, Domenico, Pasquale Chirchiglia, and Rosa Marotta. “Median Occipital Fossa: Is It Really a Sign of Crime or Simply an Anatomical Variant?” Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology 124 (2019): 104‒6. Dunagan, Jake F. “Neuroutires: The Brain, Politics, and Power.” Journal of Futures Studies 9 (2004): 1‒18. ———. “Politics for the Neuorcentric Age.” Journal of Futures Studies 15 (2010): 51‒70. Florita, Giorgio. “Enquiry into the Causes of Crime.” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Political Science 44 (1953): 1‒16. Gauthier, Nathalie Y., Tabitha Methot-Jones, Angela Book, and J. Reid Meloy. “Psychopaths and the Neurobiology of Evil.” In Psychoanalysts, Psychologists and Psychiatrists Discuss Psychopathy and Human Evil, edited by Sheldon Itzkowitz and Elizabeth F. Howell, 244‒61. London: Routledge, 2019. Gazzaniga, Michael S. “The Law and Neuroscience.” Neuron 60 (2008): 412‒15. Hare, Robert D. “Forty Years Aren’t Enough: Recollections, Prognostications, and Random Musings.” In The Psychopath: Theory, Research, and Practice, edited by Hugues Hervé and John C. Yuille, 3‒28. New York: Routledge, 2012. ———. “The PCL-R Assessment of Psychopathy.” In The Wiley International Handbook on Psychopathic Disorders and the Law, edited by Alan R. Felthouse and Hennig Saß, 63‒106. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2020. Harris, Grant T., and Marnie E. Rice. “Psychopathy Research at Oak Ridge: Skepticism Overcome.” In The Psychopath: Theory, Research, and Practice, edited by Hugues Hervé and John C. Yuille, 57‒76. New York: Routledge, 2012. Hervé, Hugues. “Psychopathy across the Ages: A History of the Hare Psychopath.” In The Psychopath: Theory, Research, and Practice, edited by Hugues Hervé and John C. Yuille, 31–55. New York: Routledge, 2012. Intrator, Joanne, et al. “A Brain Imaging (Single Photon Emission Computerized Tomography) Study of Semantic and Affective Processing in Psychopaths.” Biological Psychiatry 42 (1997): 96‒103. Jones, David W. Disordered Personalities and Crime: An Analysis of the History of Moral Insanity. London: Routledge, 2016. Kiehl, Kent A., and Morris B. Hoffman. “The Criminal Psychopath: History, Neuroscience, Treatment, and Economics.” Jurimetrics 51 (2011): 355‒97.

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Legrenzi, Paolo, and Carlo Umiltà. Neuro-Mania: Il cervello non spiega chi siamo. Bologna: Mulino, 2009. Leistedt, S. J.-J., S. Braun, N. Coumans, P. Linkowski, et al. “La psychopathie: Depuis ‘The Mask of Sanity’ aux neurosciences sociales.” Revue Médicale de Bruxelles 30 (2009): 577‒87. Lesch, Klaus Peter, and Ursula Merschdorf. “Impulsivity, Aggression, and Serotonin: A Molecular Psychobiological Perspective.” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 18 (2000): 581‒604. March, William. The Bad Seed. New York: Random House, 1954. Markowitsch, Hans J., and Werner Siefer. Tatort Gehirn: Auf der Suche nach dem Ursprung des Verbrechens. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2007. Mezger, Edmund. Strafrecht: Ein Lehrbuch. Munich: Duncker & Humboldt, 1931. Moffitt, Terrie E. “The Neuropsychology of Juvenile Delinquency: A Critical Review.” Crime and Justice 12 (1990): 99‒169. Moffitt, Terrie E., and Avashalom Caspi. “Evidence from Behavioral Genetics for Environmental Contributions to Antisocial Conduct.” In The Explanation of Crime: Context, Mechanisms, and Development, edited by Per-Olof Wikström and Robert J. Sampson, 108‒52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Morse, Stephen J. “Brain Overclaim Syndrome and Criminal Responsibility: A Diagnostic Note.” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 3 (2006): 397‒412. ———. “Psychopathy and Criminal Responsibility.” Neuroethics 1 (2008): 205‒12. Musumeci, Emilia. “Cesare Lombroso and Neuroscientists: A Failed Patricide.” Paper presented at the workshop “Was Lombroso Right? The Historical Legacy of Neuroscience,” Vienna, 2010. Niehoff, Debra. The Biology of Violence: How Understanding the Brain, Behavior, and Environment Can Break the Vicious Circle of Aggression. New York: Free Press, 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Vol. 1. New edn. Munich: DTV, 1988 [1878]. Patterson, Dennis, and Michael S. Pardo, eds. Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Perlin, Michael L. “‘His Brain Has Been Mismanaged with Great Skill’: How Will Jurors Respond to Neuroimaging Testimony in Insanity Defense Cases?” Akron Law Review 42 (2009): 885‒916. Rafter, Nicole Hahn. Creating Born Criminals. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Raine, Adrian, and Andrea L. Glenn. Psychopathy: An Introduction to Biological Findings and Their Implications. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Rose, Nikolas. “The Neurochemical Self and Its Anomalies.” In Risk and Morality, edited by Richard Ericson and Aaron Doyle, 407‒37. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003. ———. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Simmonds, Roy S. The Two Worlds of William March. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984. Smith, Roger. Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Stack, George J. Lange und Nietzsche. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983. Strasser, Peter. Verbrechermenschen: Zur kriminalwissenschaftlichen Erzeugung des Bösen. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2005. Tabery, James. Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

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Viding, Essi, et al. “Evidence for Substantial Genetic Risk for Psychopathology.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 6 (2005): 592‒97. Wulffen, Erich. Ein Handbuch für Juristen, Verwaltungsbeamte und Ärzte: Mit zahlreichen kriminalistischen Originalaufnahmen. Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1921. Young, Kelly A., et al. “Fierce: A New Mouse Deletion of Nr2e1: Violent Behaviour and Ocular Abnormalities are Background-Dependent.” Behavioural Brain Research 132 (2002): 145‒58.

Conclusion From Risks to Emergencies? Martin H. Geyer

The range of topics that are dealt with in this volume is very broad indeed, quite appropriate to the topics of risk and security. Many more sites could have been looked at, yet completeness was not and could not have been the aim. The chapters address exemplary cases, yet they all illustrate the vibrant, contested debates that have exploded since the 1970s in various policy fields, social movements, and, not least, also in academia. Historical as the approach of the chapters is, it is a safe bet that all the sites of risk will continue to be with us in the future. In fact, a look at today’s global issues appears to vindicate Ulrich Beck’s argument that we live not just in a national but a global risk society. The past’s futurity of those studying risks in the past has become our present, and there is a rhythm to the appearance of ever-new “Riders of the Apocalypse,”1 even if they are often not that new at the time of their appearances. The COVID-19 crisis has its precedents in HIV/AIDS, mad cow disease, SARS, and earlier pandemics. The appearance of these and other deadly viruses has been closely interrelated with man-made environmental risks. The same is true when we look at industrial accidents, such as in Fukushima, or at the near-meltdown of the economy during the grave financial crisis of 2008. Not just with respect to climate change, but now also war in Ukraine, we have come to expect the next round of what are still unknown events. The number of things, issues, and people that might be at risk, in fact, has increased, not decreased. The UN initiative on “Human Security,” with its broad concept of risk, has been firmly established in national, international, and transnational agendas (notwithstanding the fact that it is far from being realized).2 Thus, twenty years into the new millennium, much of the

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new risk consciousness that came to the fore in the 1970s is still with us, the sites of risk have multiplied, and the awareness and evaluation of risk, including how and who should address it, are still controversial. We—and that includes the media—have come to expect and anticipate risks everywhere, and even denials of any given risks are to be understood as a kind of affirmation. And there can be no doubt that humankind will be confronted in the near or distant future with altogether new unknown unknowns. They will come as a surprise, even if they have been predicted as risks in one way or another (if not by scientists, then most probably by science fiction authors). Despite all continuities, we witness changes, some subtle, some more fundamental. Vanished is the optimistic, sometimes even slightly utopian vision that had become associated with the risk society. This is true for Beck’s assumptions that, notwithstanding his alarmist perspective, an economically and politically active grassroots citizenry could and would meet the risks of modern society head on with the aim of finding altogether new solutions in terms of a “reflexive modernity.” By the time globalization discourse took off in the 1990s, this risk society had become a global project of a “cosmopolitan” citizenship.3 After all, risks were global, and thus solutions also needed to be global, as the rapidly growing4 number of nongovernmental organizations argued. More recently, the worldwide appeal of the climate activist Greta Thunberg is a good example of the continued salience of global awareness. Yet activism is one thing, while setting up binding national or even international standards of institutionalized regulatory limits, based on risk assessments that must be communicated to the public, also on a global scale, is quite another. The same stifling of enthusiasm affected the global “end of history” type of liberal capitalism, including the notion of a “third way,” which had thrived even more alongside an enthusiastic idea of being able to “securitize” risk management to the benefit of all of society (and, not least, of those whose hands were on this wheel of economic fortune). With the economic crisis of 2008/9, liberal capitalism’s risks have come home to roost on their own terms. More professional and technocratic risk management promises to make the respective systems more effective, with governments at least trying to set up binding rules to prevent a recurrence of the last disaster, which was so expensive for the taxpayer.5 Despite this seemingly unbroken trend of an increasing sensitivity to risk in our public and private lives, one can nevertheless get the impression that we have been witnessing a shift in the past decade. In terms of sheer quantity, the term “risk” (as depicted by the Google Ngram Viewer) had reached a high point in the print media around the time of the financial crisis of 2008, that is, when the financial empire of “securitization” crashed. Since then, the usage of the word has receded, in German and French publications more so than in English ones (although it is not clear how the impact of the COVID-19 crisis might have once again changed this picture since 2019). In fact, it is certainly safe to say that the pinnacle of academic social science literature on risk has passed. Is this a reflection of the fact that the optimistic neoliberal trust in managing, selling, and even extolling “good risks” has diminished? Or does it reflect the fact that issues of risk

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have become a matter of course, and thus embedded in most aspects of how we have learned to manage our daily lives by coping with risks—without directly addressing the issue of risk explicitly? Further research is necessary to answer these questions. It will be most fruitful to look more closely at a concomitant issue to risk, namely security, and in particular at the changing configurations of risk and security over time. As a poststructuralist, or, for that matter, postmodern cousin of security, risk helped to dissolve the former certainties associated with its counterpart term in the 1970s. As we have also seen in the contributions to this volume, risk discourses and practices of risk management have unfolded in the last decades of the twentieth century very much in contention with statist concepts of “solving” and containing risks, including the implicit promise that simple solutions to security can be attained. This was as much an academic critique of older modernizing theories and agendas as it was a critique of the arrangements of the welfare and interventionist state. A distrust prevailed of state institutions and their political agendas, which supposedly were steeped in the past (or the “first modernity,” for that matter). Next to the nitty-gritty work of an ever-growing group of highly specialist “risk experts,” proponents of civil society—advocates of economic and financial interests as well as those of ecological or other social movements—were thriving on new propositions of how to handle risks, by way also of new forms of “governance,” be they national, regional, or global.6 All of this did not disappear, and, no doubt, is here to stay. Yet it is remarkable how the confrontation not with the abstract risks of some indeterminate future event, but with the immediate risks in situations of clear and present crises and catastrophic events—mad cow disease, pandemics, terrorist attacks, economic meltdown, floods, atomic accidents, cyber-attacks, and war—have brought “the state back in.”7 The efficacy of the state as the “ultimate risk manager,”8 guaranteeing human security on the national and global scale, is being tested by all sorts of not just national but also global risks that call out for international solutions. As one could see from very early on, this shift has not been limited to the “first modernity.” In fact, quite the opposite is true: the various risks of modern society have become increasingly, and very much in step with risk discourses, subsumed under the heading of emergencies, states of exceptions and (national) security. In tandem, the emerging field of critical security studies has branched out from international relations to all the fields that are also ploughed by risk studies.9 The mantra is the “next emergency” and possible catastrophes—health, environmental, economic, or whatever they may be. This could be seen most clearly particularly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which resulted in the worldwide tightening of national security laws and the waging of war against national and international “terrorism.”10 Homeland security has once again put the issue of security squarely on the table (from which it had however never disappeared to begin with), but on a national and international scale. These developments have reinvigorated debates about the features of a “security state” that Michel Foucault and others addressed in the 1970s: the reaction

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of governments and the state to terrorism, together with the threatening features of the Atomstaat, were not just risk, but, in fact, a threat to society at large.11 Originally, this was by and large the mantra of the critical left and alternative movements, in which the basic arguments revolved around the dangers of state surveillance, the restrictions of civil liberties, the atmosphere of heightened public fear, and the silent institutionalization of the emergency state by way of security laws and ordinances on the one hand side and extralegal emergency measures on the other.12 Since then, this debate has broadened considerably beyond the issue of terrorist threats, with homeland security being a part of national security.13 But issues of domestic security are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg of the security state, which claims to act not only retroactively, but already preventively.14 Managing vastly different risks, including the gravest forms of states of emergency, by legislation and new forms of institutions is on national and international agendas. 15 Examples are provisions for disasters; various national (and, as in Germany, often regional) health emergency laws that were meant to govern health risks during the COVID-19 pandemic; and the declaration of a state of siege in France in response to the Bataclan terrorist attacks in Paris.16 It is particularly the multiplication of such preventive laws in most different areas of public life—domestic security, energy, health, critical infrastructure, and flight safety—that characterizes the new normal of the security state and its vulnerable risk society. More often than not, these laws contain emergency clauses that leave governments and bureaucracies to act with swiftness ,not least by interfering in individual and property rights. This “nervous” security state that acts proactively against all sorts of looming risks is in fact rooted in a nervous risk society.17 It is torn between calling for decisive action, decrying lacking foresight, and possibly also demanding financial compensation for incurred material and psychological damage on the one hand, and yet on the other resisting the infringements of individual liberties and the backdoor plotting of governments, bureaucrats, and experts. Managing such security risks thus becomes entangled in questions of legality and legitimacy. Preparing for the worst is indeed part of the risk society and the security state—its language is that of emergency and the state of exception. This development is perhaps best epitomized by the UK Civil Contingencies Act of 2004. In its legal justification, the government stated that this act in fact “creates a new concept of an ‘emergency,’” and thus pertains to situations that “threaten serious damage to human welfare in a place in the UK,” “serious damage to the environment,” and, interestingly enough only as a third point, “war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom.” It enumerates situations of risk and purposes including loss of human life and disruption of services relating to a range of areas, from health to transportation to communication to the supply of money, food, water, energy, or fuel. The act then delineates at some length a clear set of roles and responsibilities for those involved in emergency preparations and responses at various levels, the so-called

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“responders” who are to be combined in “local resilience forums.” Under the heading “urgency,” that is, moments when there is insufficient “time for secondary legislation” (i.e., emergency legislation by the executive), the act describes the vast emergency powers of the monarch, who would act on the advice of her ministers, principally the Home Secretary, providing in fact for a sort of temporary constitutional dictatorship.18 The British Contingencies Act is interesting with respect to the way that areas of public life and its institutions are framed not only in terms of risk but also of the worst forms of emergency that need to be addressed the state. Quite unlike the French declaration of a state of siege and other forms of state of exception in other countries, the Contingencies Act has thus far never been activated. Compared with such emergency empowerments of the leviathans of the world, the risk debates of the late twentieth century almost seem like a Disney romance. Martin H. Geyer has been Professor of Modern History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich since 1997. His research interests and publications deal with issues of social policies, political scandals, the history of capitalism, and political and social theories in the 1970s and 1980s. Recently, he published a book entitled Kapitalismus und politische Moral in der Zwischenkreigszeit Oder: Wer war Julius Barmat? (Hamburg, 2018). Currently he is working on a research project entitled “The State of Emergency in the 20th Century: What We Can Learn Today from German History of the Interwar Period.”

Notes 1. This is the leitmotif of Joost van Loon, Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence (London: Routledge, 2003). 2. S. Neil MacFarlane and Yuen F. Khong, Human Security and the U.N.: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Robert J. Hanlon and Kenneth Christie, Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want: An Introduction to Human Security (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). 3. Ulrich Beck, “World Risk Society as Cosmopolitan Society? Ecological Questions in a Framework of Manufactured Uncertainties,” Theory, Culture & Society 14 (1996): 1–32. 4. On questions of governing global environmental issues and beyond, see Robin Geiß and Nils Melzer, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the International Law of Global Security (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 5. For two different perspectives on this topic, see Yousef Cassis and J. J. Van Helten, eds., The Legacy of the Global Financial Crisis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2021); Frank Romeike, Die Bankenkrise: Ursachen und Folgen im Risikomanagement (Cologne: Bank-Verlag, 2010). 6. Matthieu Leimgruber, “Bringing Private Insurance Back In: The Geneva Association as a Transnational Insurance Think Tank,” in European Economic Elites: Between a New Spirit of Capitalism and the Erosion of State Socialism, ed. Friederike Sattler and Chrisoph Boyer (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2009), 473–95.

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7. See Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), a by-now-classic call for the social sciences to look at the role of the state. 8. David A. Moss, When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 9. This development can be seen by comparing, for instance, Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and J. Peter Burgess, ed., The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies (London. Routledge, 2010). 10. Kim Lane Schepple, “The Empire of Security and the Security of Empire,” Temple Journal of International & Comparative Law 27 (2014): 241–78. 11. For the debates about “gaps,” see also the introduction to this volume; Thomas Lemke, Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1997), 192; David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 392–96. 12. Günter Frankenberg, Staatstechnik: Perspektiven auf Rechtstaat und Ausnahmezustand (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2010). 13. A good example is Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). 14. Nicolai Hannig and Malte Thießen, eds., Vorsorgen in der Moderne: Akteure, Räume und Praktiken (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017). 15. No doubt, this development does not pertain only to the US; see Frank R. Spellman, Food Supply Protection and Homeland Security, 2nd edn. (Lanham, MD: Bernan Press, 2016); Nikolas K. Gvosdev et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of U.S. National Security (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 16. Andrew Lakoff, “Preparing for the Next Emergency,” Public Culture 19 (2007): 247‒71; Gabe Mythen, “Terrorism, Risk and Insecurity: Debates, Challenges and Controversies,” in Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies, ed. Adam Burgess, Alberto Alemanno, and Jens O. Zinn (London: Routledge, 2016), 282‒98. Among the vast literature, see also Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); Mathias Lemke, Demokratie im Ausnahmezustand: Wie Regierungen ihre Macht ausweiten (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2017). 17. Tristan Barczak, Der nervöse Staat: Ausnahmezustand und Resilienz des Rechts in der Sicherheitsgesellschaft (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020); Barczak focuses on the state and is less interested in the aporias of the risk society. 18. “Civil Contingency Act 2004,” legislation.gov.uk, https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ 2004/36/notes/division/2/2 (accessed 1 September 2021), 2, 3, 6‒7. See Clive Walker, The Civil Contingencies Act 2004: Risk, Resilience and the Law of the United Kingdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005. ———. Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

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Barczak, Tristan. Der nervöse Staat: Ausnahmezustand und Resilienz des Rechts in der Sicherheitsgesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020. Beck, Ulrich. “World Risk Society as Cosmopolitan Society? Ecological Questions in a Framework of Manufactured Uncertainties.” Theory, Culture & Society 14 (1996): 1–32. Burgess, J. Peter, ed. The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies. London. Routledge, 2010. Cassis, Yousef, and J. J. Van Helten, eds. The Legacy of the Global Financial Crisis. London: I.B. Tauris, 2021. “Civil Contingency Act 2004.” legislation.gov.uk. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/ 36/notes/division/2/2 (accessed 1 September 2021). Frankenberg, Günter. Staatstechnik: Perspektiven auf Rechtstaat und Ausnahmezustand. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2010. Geiß, Robin, and Nils Melzer, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the International Law of Global Security. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Gvosdev, Nikolas K., et al., eds. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. National Security. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Hanlon, Robert J., and Kenneth Christie. Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want: An Introduction to Human Security. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Hannig, Nicolai, and Malte Thießen, eds. Vorsorgen in der Moderne: Akteure, Räume und Praktiken. Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017. Krause, Keith, and Michael C. Williams, eds. Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Lakoff, Andrew. “Preparing for the Next Emergency.” Public Culture 19 (2007): 247‒71. Leimgruber, Matthieu. “Bringing Private Insurance Back In: The Geneva Association as a Transnational Insurance Think Tank.” In European Economic Elites: Between a New Spirit of Capitalism and the Erosion of State Socialism, edited by Friederike Sattler and Christoph Boyer, 473‒95. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2009. Lemke, Matthias. Demokratie im Ausnahmezustand: Wie Regierungen ihre Macht ausweiten. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2017. Lemke, Thomas. Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität. Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1997. Moss, David A. When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.Macey, David. The Lives of Michel Foucault. New York: Pantheon, 1993. MacFarlane, S. Neil, and Yuen F. Khong. Human Security and the U.N.: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Mythen, Gabe. “Terrorism, Risk and Insecurity: Debates, Challenges and Controversies.” In Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies, edited by Adam Burgess, Alberto Alemanno, and Jens O. Zinn, 282‒98. London: Routledge, 2016. Neocleous, Mark. Critique of Security. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Romeike, Frank. Die Bankenkrise: Ursachen und Folgen im Risikomanagement. Cologne: Bank-Verlag, 2010. Schepple, Kim Lane. “The Empire of Security and the Security of Empire.” Temple Journal of International & Comparative Law 27 (2014): 241–78. Skocpol, Theda. “Bringing the State Back In.” In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, 3‒37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

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Martin H. Geyer

Spellman, Frank R. Food Supply Protection and Homeland Security. 2nd edn. Lanham, MD: Bernan Press, 2016. Van Loon, Joost. Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence. London: Routledge, 2003. Walker, Clive. The Civil Contingencies Act 2004: Risk, Resilience and the Law of the United Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Index 9/11, 17, 54, 57, 97, 99, 195 accidents, 1–2, 6–7, 32, 50–1, 57, 68–82 industrial, 2, 17, 32, 68, 70–2, 75–81, 193 normal, 2, 6, 50, 68, 75 nuclear, 2, 50–51, 57, 60 prevention, 73 Allianz, 3, 53 Arrow, Kenneth, 31 asylum, 158, 161–62 Atomstaat, 9, 196 Attica State Prison, 131–32, 134 avalanche, 37–8 AXA, 57 Beck, Ulrich, 2–3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 31, 36, 50–1, 103, 109, 139 Bernstein, Peter L., 4, 30 Black Power, 129 Black Sheriffs, 14, 92, 95–8, 100 border, 11, 115, 150–62 Bonß, Wolfgang, 4, 13 CAT bonds, catastrophe bonds, 15, 48, 50–1, 54–9 catastrophe 1–3, 9, 15, 17, 33–7 certainty, 4–5, 7–8, 9, 11, 15–6, 31, 55, 93, 109, 137, 155, 175 Chernobyl, 2, 73 Civil Contingencies Act, 196–97 civil protection, 32, 41 Civil Rights Movement, 129–30 Clausen, Lars, 33–5 climate change, 15, 50, 57–59, 102, 193 Club of Rome, 9 communism, 98 complexity, 6, 12, 181 counterculture, 110, 133

COVID-19, 47, 50, 55, 57, 89, 193–94, 196 crime, criminology, 11–12, 14, 90–4, 96, 99–102, 151, 154, 156, 172, 175–7, 183 cyber-attack, 195 cybernetics, 19, 13, 69 Davis, Angela, 127–30, 133, 136 demography, demographic risks, 10 disaster, 3, 8, 15, 30–42, 53–54, 56– natural, 30, 32, 38, 41, 54–6, 59–60 training, 72, 74, 78 Dombrowsky, Wolf R., 35 Douglas, Mary, 4 earthquake, 15, 32, 34, 36–7, 39, 42, 50–1, 54–55, 57, 59, 100 fear, 4–5, 16, 90, 93, 96, 99, 102, 109, 111–13, 116, 118, 196 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 128, 133 Federal Bureau of Prisons, 136 flood, flood control, 36 Foucault, Michel, 16, 133–35 freedom, 11, 81, 109, 111, 113, 115, 120 Friedman, Milton, 10, 14 futurity, 7–9, 193 genetics, 174, 176–78, 183 Giddens, Anthony, 3 governance, 12, 14, 17, 91, 100, 102–3 Habermas, Jürgen, 7 Havarie, 68–9, 72–4, 76–8 hazard, 2, 3, 5, 8, 10, 30–1, 32–9, 41–2, 50–1, 52, 55–6, 75, 112

202

homeland security, 195 Honecker, Erich, 75, 82, 134 hurricane, Hurricane Katrina, 17, 32, 54, 59 immigration, 11, 150–1, 154, 162 Luhmann, Niklas, 4, 10, 13, 33 Lupton, Deborah, 8, 15 mad cow disease, 17, 194–95 media, 5, 16, 31, 49, 70, 79, 95, 100, 116–8, 136, 178, 194–95 Merton, Robert, 52 migrants, 11, 111, 150–1, 154, 162 modernity, 1–3, 6–10, 13, 16–17, 31, 50– 51, 67, 82, 90, 108–9, 172, 194–95 end, 108 first and second, 3, 195 industrial, 2, 7–8, 31, 50 liquid, 109 modernization, 3, 5–6, 8, 11–12, 32, 50 reflexive, 3, 16, 31, 50, 139, 194 Munich Re, 3, 15, 37, 40–2, 49, 54 neoliberalism, neoliberal, 3, 101 neurosciences, 171, 174, 180 Novotny, Helga, 3 pandemic, pandemic bonds, 15, 49–50, 57, 59–60, 89, 193 Perrow, Charles, 6, 50, 68, 75 Picard, Pierre, 57 Platt, Steve, 117 police, 1, 89–90, 92–100, 110–11, 114–6, 118–9, 131, 133, 138, 152–62, 176 postmodernity, postmodern, 2, 7, 90, 102, 103, 195 PPSP (public-private security partnership) 99 precaution, 34–35, 50, 68 prevention, 17, 30, 33–6, 38, 40, 41–2 privatization, privatize, 10–2, 14–5, 60, 91, 99, 101–2 protection, 2, 32, 34–6, 37, 41–2, 81, 102, 111–12, 115, 138, 153–54, 157–8, 160–61 rational choice, 9, 14 Reemtsma, Jan Philipp, 118–19 reinsurance, 3, 37, 39, 52–4, 56, 59

Index

resilience, 17, 32–3, 197 risk(s) atomic, 6 assessment, 10, 16, 69, 2, 194 calculation, 10, 30, 32, 38 communication, 5–6, 10, 13, 17 cultures, 6 demographic, 9, 10, 57–58 discourse, 10, 32, 36, 195 economic, 2, 11, 36, 38 environmental, 1–2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 50–1, 177, 193 experts, 10, 39, 195 health, 48, 196 mega, 15, 49–50, 54, 57 nuclear, 2, 6–7, 9, 15, 33, 50–51, 57–8, 59, 73, 130 old, new, 1– 4, 8, 10–11, 13–15, 38, 39, 41, 194 privatizing, 14, 51, 91, 101 social, 3, 50, 174, 177, 183 society, 2–4, 6, 9, 13, 31, 50–1, 109, 4, 196 studies, 2, 5, 7, 12, 195 -taking, 1–5, 14–16, 129 safety engineers, 69 occupational, 68, 70–1 and security, 1, 5, 10–11, technical, 1–3, 5–6, 8–11, 17, 32, 42, 67–82 workplace, 6, 68–9 SARS, 57, 193 Schengen Information System (SIS), 11, 156 Securitas, 89, 98 security companies, 14, 89–100, cultures, 101, 1, 120 debates, 1, 16 domestic, 1, 90, 93, 95, 97–101, 196 food, 2, 12 gap, 9–11, 13, 90 human, 12, 193 market, 90, 97–9, national, 2, 11, 101, 3, 156, 161, 163, 6 private, 14, 89–92 public, 10, 12, 14, 96, 100, 130, 137, 156 state, 2, 9, 16, 102, 195–96 studies, 113, 195 sites of modernity, 1, 6, 9, 13–14, 90

Index

social security (s. welfare state), 2–4, 8, 10–3, 14, 16, 50, 60, 108–9 socialism, 68, 74, 78 Stasi, Staatssicherheit, 67–8, 77, 80–1 state of exception, 196–97 Swiss Re, 15, 38–42 systemic relevance, 90 terrorism, 14, 90–1, 95, 101–3, 138, 155, 162, 195–96 Thunberg, Greta, 194 TÜV, 81

203

uncertainty (s. certainty) violence, 12, 92, 96, 100, 103, 111–15, 117–18 Wach- und Schließgesellschaft, 93 welfare state Wiedmaier, Carl, 95–8, 100 Wildawsky, Aaron, 4 youth culture, 109, 112–13