PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide emissions. These emissions are in turn
likely to alter the earth’s atmosphere to the point where an accelerated process of global
warming negatively affects the entire world population, especially those living in coastal
and otherwise ecologically-exposed regions. So far, governments have been rather
unsuccessful in reversing this dynamic.
The key insight Beck provides in his book Risk Society is that modern society has
entered a development stage in which governments and other institutions are increasingly
unable to adequately assess and monitor the social and environmental risks of industrial
development (especially those embedded in the use of nuclear and biochemical
technologies). Uncertainty and risk enter the equation. Technology and science are no
longer unconditional guarantors of prosperity and progress.
However, this does not mean that the modernist project needs to be rejected,
since, as Beck as well as Giddens argue in later works, modernity is well capable of reevaluating
and reinventing itself. The rise of “counter-modernizing” forces does not
threaten modernity but strengthens it, resulting in a new stage of reflexive modernization
in which a new dialectic of counter-modernization and modernization continually propels
us forward, opening the way for other, perhaps yet more advanced “alternative
modernities” (see e.g. Beck 1997). These could, in principle, be regressive – indicated,
for example, by Augé’s (1995) ideas of the excessiveness of supermodernity or the rising
concerns among scholars with regard to the resurgence of nationalist and ethnocentric
movements. Beck’s hope, however, is for a “reinvention of politics” that addresses the
problems of uncertainty and risk by re-integrating and reinstitutionalizing the core
Enlightenment concept of doubt into modern policy-making. For Beck, “doubt … is the