Ulrich Beck, Twenty Observations on a World in Turmoil

Abstract

Ulrich Beck, Twenty Observations on a World in Turmoil. Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2012, 162 pp., $14.95 paper (978-0-7456-5397-6) By title, Twenty Observations would seem like casual reflections on contemporary events by an influential academic-pundit. But Ulrich Beck is trying to do more. Most of these essays were published in various European newspapers and magazines. This is only an academic sociology book in that it is written by a well-known sociologist. Nevertheless, we can learn something about public engagement as sociologists. In these essays--especially as they are collected into a surprisingly cohesive body--Beck attempts to alert to domestic as an important process in late modernity. Many of emerging trends in world today are simultaneously domestic and global. Beck is well known for proposing that global community (especially Western world) has entered a new period of modernity characterized by reflexivity and perceived risk. These formulations of reflexive modernization and risk society make multiple appearances in this short and eminently readable collection of essays. They are muted, however, in favour of a new focus on simultaneity of global and domestic. In Beck's hands, global domestic politics is cosmopolitan vector of globalism. It is also avenue for making sociology compelling. Sociology, he thinks, must escape container of nation-state in its understandings of contemporary society. As he puts it, One thing is clear: national outlook not only misunderstands this reality but it obscures how breathtakingly exciting sociology could become once again (p. 162). In kaleidoscopic fashion, collection traverses a wide range of topics: climate change, nuclear power, economics, European Union, immigration and transnationalism, terrorism, multiculturalism, religion, university system, global industry in organ transplantation, and onwards. To illustrate: in one essay Beck transitions from illegal immigration to biomedicine, and it makes sense. The drawback is that readers require knowledge of recent European events. This makes book hard to use in undergraduate courses; it is best used for personal professional reading. Global domestic politics is diffusion of us into them, in which the geographical, cultural, social and political separation between 'native' and foreigner' is de facto falling to pieces (p. 145) with immense consequences. Europe faces this every day, and not just with Algerians in France and Roma in Germany. The global and domestic merge with Greece in a united Eurozone. They merge in ash from Icelandic volcanoes, raising question of mobility in everyday life and becoming early warnings of a carbon-constrained world. Global domestic politics identifies how risk prevention war (p. 20) in Afghanistan is intimate with killing of Afghanistan-serving soldiers on London streets. …