Time & Perspective Quote by Ulrich Beck

Beck’s sentence lands like a polite slap: the real danger isn’t globalization itself, but our talent for treating it as tomorrow’s problem. By insisting it is “taking place in the present,” he punctures a comforting political habit - outsourcing disruption to the future tense so leaders can keep offering old solutions to new conditions. The phrase “open our eyes” does double duty. It’s an appeal to awareness, but also an accusation: we’re already living inside the consequences, yet behaving as if we’re still in a pre-global world where borders, jobs, epidemics, and emissions stay put.

The intent is diagnostic, not prophetic. Beck, writing from the late-20th-century European context of accelerating capital flows, EU integration, post-Cold War realignment, and widening economic insecurity, helped popularize the idea of the “risk society”: modernity producing hazards (financial contagion, climate change, technological fallout) that ignore national boundaries and overwhelm traditional institutions. So “concern and threaten” isn’t melodrama; it’s a description of how interdependence makes shocks travel faster than governance.

Subtext: denial is itself a political stance. If globalization is framed as distant, it becomes optional, negotiable, someone else’s mess. If it’s framed as present, it demands immediate adaptation - new regulations, new solidarities, and new forms of accountability that can’t hide behind the nation-state. Beck’s rhetoric is deliberately plain because the move he’s making is sharp: he’s relocating the debate from speculation to responsibility.