Security and Fantasy

September 24th, 2008

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Posted by ChrisG at 12:57 pm

In Manchester for this event last Friday . Walking alongside the Ashton Canal from Piccadilly towards Ancoats, it was very hard to ignore the cyclical dramas of regeneration being played out across th water, taking the spectator from Ramsay Campbellto late Ballard and back again and again – from the city’s unconscious to the developer’s superego: all empty office space and settlements like Piccadilly Village (built, plaques inform us, in 1990).

While preparations for the Labour conference ensured that whole sections of the city were denied to its populace (with monitoring extending to every drain cover in the secure area, each of which had apparently been provided with its own electronic tamper sensor), security was also the centre of the workshop agenda. Interesting that security has been for some time now displacing the other s-word (sustainability) as the characteristic terminological tic of press releases and ministerial speeches. As a result, the admittedly feeble but nonetheless still audible future-oriented overtones of policy pronouncements about sustainable this, that or the other are drowned out by a terrified, monotonic insistence on resisting vulnerability within some kind of enduring and expanded present moment. Arresting the course of history, in essence, through the imaginary power of governmental and economic instruments of coercion.

Policy agendas framed by security reinforce the basic contradiction of the sovereign nation state’s position within a globalised world, whic generates an all-too-familiar collective action problem. Take energy security, for instance. The UK’s energy policy is based on a recognition that it is becoming a net importer of gas and no longer has significant reserves of gas and oil in its own territory to use or sell. There are, therefore, a variety of perturbations to which it will be exposed. The majority of these which worry policymakers are political (gas from an obstructive Russia, oil from a turbulent Asia). Therefore, it’s time to draw in our horns, and make ourselves less dependent on political uncertainties.

Which is one reason why nuclear power and imported LNG are touted as crucial short- to medium-term solutions. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get most of our uranium from friendly places like Australia, South Africa, the US and so on. And our LNG from Qatar. But all other nation states will be in the same boat: the nuclear renaissance, if it happens, promises to go global. The LNG markets are very active, and the Dutch and Japanese, for example, are far more successful on them than the UK has been. So by hoping to restrict vulnerability to political uncertainties, the energy policy promoted by UK ministers essentially involves massive exposure to the incalculable uncertainties of future markets where they are likely to wield a comparatively low amount of purchasing power. If, to use BERR’s favourite state-of-emergency cliché, a successful energy policy equals “energy security” equals “keeping the lights on”, what might ensure they go out is our massive over-reliance on gas’n'nuclear and consequent exposure to colossal market uncertainties.

Globalisation means interdependence – political and economic. To frame the future in terms of “energy security” is effectively to try and deny the first of these dimensions of interdependence. It is to strive to isolate nations from political uncertainty at the price of increased economic insecurity. The market is seen as providing more reliable access to resources than political and legal measures. But this withdrawal from political relationships which are seen to be difficult simply risks re-imposing a general condition of scarcity to which markets are no solution, without any serious long-term programme towards alternatives.

So what’s the attraction of “security”? Fantasies of invulnerability are always a temptation when faced with uncertainty: as the sociologist Peter Marris argued, trying to preserve autonomy is a competitive strategy in the face of an unknown future which can work, but only for those blessed with a surfeit of the resources and power needed to exert autonomy. In a strongly interdependent world, no-one arguably has such capacities. But I the face of this truth, a programme of building capital-intensive nuclear power stations and LNG terminals, backed up with new forms of administrative and legal coercion embedded in a “streamlined” planning process, at least provides a new generation of symbols of centralised authority, of imagined invulnerability. Accompanied by a renewed burst of economic activity (at least for the overseas companies and contractors who’ll be building them). At least for a short time, for the time it takes to breathe out an elongated collective sigh of relief that we haven’t been left to the mercy of the Russians. Say about twenty years or so. Until the price of uranium goes through the roof as new nuclear stations come online across the world, construction and decommissioning costs rocketing alongside as a result of the multiplying safety concerns that will accompany a new generation of nuclear accidents.

One participant at Friday’s event, speaking in favour of a hydrogen renaissance, described the future as one in which the processes of electrolysis needed to make a hydrogen economy possible were driven by solar electricity provided through cross-border political agreements, for example between North African countries and the EU. Such an arrangement would rely on freeing up of intellectual property through the release of patents, international subsidy of manufacturing and expertise in the countries where solar panel arrays would be sited, and so on. But whatever you think of the feasibility of hydrogen, such ideas at least face, head on, the uncertainty of the future without disavowing the responsibility of finding an international political solution, one based on real, concrete reciprocity and development justice, rather than one which slinks back into the false comforts of competition.