“What we call crisis is always a social construction”

ATat the beginning of his book Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus published in 1973 (Reason and legitimacy. Problems of legitimation in advanced capitalism, Payot, 1988), the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas proposes to define what a crisis is. Two components are essential, he asserts, one objective, the other subjective. It is not enough that a problem arises for society, it must also be understood as such. This is easily understood in the case of climate change.

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For a long time, the issue of global warming remained confidential, at least until the creation in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the holding of the Rio summit in 1992. Even then, the problem and its consequences seemed hardly perceived by the public and political leaders, especially since controversy and denial weakened its recognition. It is only recently that climate change has become an object both of shared knowledge and of common concern, even if disparities remain according to countries and generations.

This shift from objectification to subjectification has meant translating science into opinion using figures and graphs, photos of vanishing glaciers and isolated bears on icebergs, the mobilization of associations environmental defense and green parties, the experience of extreme weather events. A number of critical situations thus correspond to this conjunction of the two processes. But what happens when there is dissociation between the two phenomena: the subjectification of a crisis without its objectification, or the objectification of a critical situation without its subjectification?

Imposing a discourse of crisis

On June 10, 2018, a ship chartered by the SOS Méditerranée association, with 629 shipwrecked people on board from sub-Saharan Africa, was refused access to Italian ports by the Minister of the Interior. This is a new episode in the criminalization of rescue organizations at sea. While the health situation on the boat becomes alarming, the incident generates tensions between European states, which end up reaching an agreement hardening the policies of the ‘immigration.

Nowhere in the document is there any mention of the 15,000 deaths in the Mediterranean over the previous five years. Nor is there any mention of the considerable drop in arrivals on the European continent by sea, the annual number of which is ten times lower than three years earlier. Widely relayed by the media, this crisis has no demographic basis. It is a subjective fact without an objective substrate.

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