"In the first instance, therefore, global terrorism created a kind of global community sharing a common fate, something we had previously considered impossible"
About this Quote
Terrorism, in Beck's telling, is a grim shortcut to globalization: it manufactures a "we" by forcing distant strangers into the same risk-calculus. The phrasing "in the first instance" is doing quiet work here. It's a sociologist's hedge, but also a provocation: before politics, before ideology, before the news cycle hardens into narrative, the earliest effect of spectacular violence is to synchronize attention and vulnerability across borders. Not solidarity, exactly. More like shared exposure.
The subtext is Beck's signature argument about the "risk society": modernity doesn't just produce wealth and freedom; it produces hazards that travel faster than governments can regulate them. "Previously considered impossible" nods to an older, comforting model of community grounded in nation, class, or locality. Terrorism punctures that model by exploiting the infrastructure of global interdependence - aviation, media, finance, migration - and turning it into an emotional and political commons. Everyone is not equally at risk, but everyone is conscripted into the same atmosphere of contingency.
Context matters: Beck is writing in the shadow of late-20th and early-21st century shocks, when "security" became the master frame for everything from airport design to foreign policy. There's an edge to the observation: the only thing that seems capable of creating a global public is fear. Beck isn't celebrating that community; he's diagnosing a paradox. Catastrophe can unite, but it also licenses surveillance, border hardening, and permanent emergency - a global community built less on mutual care than on mutual suspicion.
The subtext is Beck's signature argument about the "risk society": modernity doesn't just produce wealth and freedom; it produces hazards that travel faster than governments can regulate them. "Previously considered impossible" nods to an older, comforting model of community grounded in nation, class, or locality. Terrorism punctures that model by exploiting the infrastructure of global interdependence - aviation, media, finance, migration - and turning it into an emotional and political commons. Everyone is not equally at risk, but everyone is conscripted into the same atmosphere of contingency.
Context matters: Beck is writing in the shadow of late-20th and early-21st century shocks, when "security" became the master frame for everything from airport design to foreign policy. There's an edge to the observation: the only thing that seems capable of creating a global public is fear. Beck isn't celebrating that community; he's diagnosing a paradox. Catastrophe can unite, but it also licenses surveillance, border hardening, and permanent emergency - a global community built less on mutual care than on mutual suspicion.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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