Security And Risk. How We Have Learned To Live With Dystopian, Utopian, And Technocratic Diagnoses Of Security Since The 1970s

Abstract

This essay starts with the observation that issues of security,
safety and risk became highly controversial political topics in
the 1970s and 1980s. This is particularly true with respect to
West Germany, where one can distinguish a broad and very
diverse range of political debates concerning security and
safety “gaps” in fields like social and military security, ecology,
plant safety, and, with respect to left-wing terrorism, also
domestic security. Parallel to these political debates, a vast
range of academic and intellectual efforts evolved to conceptualise
the ongoing transformation of society and politics by
the new issues of security. They range from modernization
theory to ideas of newly emerging risk or surveillance societies.
These intellectual debates are linked to various strands of
social and political movements, both on the left and the right,
which more often than not challenged social-democratic and
reformist ideas of the Modell Deutschland with its emphasis
on security. Debating security and risk went hand in hand with
efforts not only to shape actively but also to describe modern
societies. Thus the evolving technocratic, utopian, and dystopian
models of risk societies are of particular interest.

Keywords: Security, Risk, Surveillance Society, Modernization
Theory, 1970s, Germany.