Nuclear Disaster and Liberal Democracy

Yascha Mounk: Liberalism and Disaster

IN THE aftermath of the horrific earthquake and the gigantic tsunami that hit Japan on Friday, the cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant failed. Eight hundred workers started to pump seawater into the plant in a desperate attempt to keep the nuclear fuel cool and safe. But their efforts were not enough: the fuel rods became partially exposed, a hydrogen explosion ensued, and radioactive steam was released.

One might have thought that this was the moment for Tokyo Electric Power Company, the owner of the Fukushima plant, to step up its desperate attempts to avoid a nuclear catastrophe. But the opposite seems to have happened. Apparently, the company was more worried for the safety of its employees than for the nuclear fallout it might inflict on a densely populated country. It withdrew all but fifty workers, crippling further efforts at containment.

Events have unfolded too chaotically for us to take in the sheer absurdity of this situation. Perhaps, inspired by the dimwitted Spartans fighting for the survival of their heroic civilization in 300, we romanticized the idea of these fifty workers somehow protecting their country against disaster. In any case, instead of demanding that additional personnel should be drafted into the plant, we piously accepted that fifty private citizens should form the last line of defense between a wealthy democracy and nuclear disaster.

As we now know, the problems at Fukushima only continued to intensify. And to multiply. Within hours, there was concern that a storage facility—“just like a swimming pool,” a smiling woman on CNN said, visibly relieved to inject some suburban vocabulary into all that awkward talk of Chernobyl—might catch fire. It too needed to be cooled by water. There was much talk of having helicopters spray water on the facility. But as the hours went by, no helicopters materialized. Media reports now suggest a reason: the Japanese government was too worried about the radiation to which the helicopter’s pilots might be exposed.

There have since been a few attempts to drop water on the plants by helicopter, which were then suspended, then resumed, then suspended again, because the pilots were deemed to have been exposed to too much radiation. But the crucial window of opportunity, when bold measures might actually have made a difference, seems to have closed, and the crisis continues to escalate. There have been further fires, further explosions, further breaches of containment vessels. The situation is more chaotic than ever. An all-out nuclear catastrophe seems imminent. What is the response on the ground? The company running the plant fluctuates between sending in another fifty workers and telling the fifty workers already present to take shelter when the radiation spikes. And the Japanese government continued to defer decisions to a private entity with a record of failure and obfuscation. It appears that Japan, to all intents and purposes, has given up on itself.

I’M A liberal. But watching these events unfold, I cannot help but ask myself vexing questions. Is liberalism to blame for this shortsighted response to the crisis? Does it make me somehow no longer liberal to say that, far from relying on fifty men, my first instinct would be to send an entire brigade to the Fukushima plant?

The most fashionable intellectual currents of the last decade have seemingly anticipated these problems better than I have. Neoconservatives have militated for a unitary executive precisely because they thought that liberal principles would put democratic societies at a disadvantage in dealing with emergencies, whether posed by terrorists or natural catastrophes. Left-wing thinkers influenced by the philosophy of Carl Schmitt, meanwhile, seem to expect—with a certain secret relish—that, in the process of dealing with some such emergency, liberal societies will eventually turn into crypto-fascist regimes.

I remained unconvinced by both these views. Liberal societies can react swiftly and effectively to emergencies, I responded to fans of Leo Strauss. And even though the domestic reaction to 9/11 was initially worrying, liberal norms have actually proven surprisingly resilient, I explained to fans of Giorgio Agamben. So when the tsunami hit Japan on Saturday, I did not, even for a moment, worry that this disaster, tragic as it was, might pose a deep challenge to my political views.

But as events at the Fukushima power plants are spiraling from worse to worst, my comfortable faith is being pushed to the brink. Our information on the crisis is sparse and evolving; we do not know the full extent of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima. One thing, however, is already evident: Japan, a liberal democracy, has responded to the crisis in what appears to be a shockingly misguided manner. And the constricting force of liberal pieties does seem, in part, to explain this failure.

JAPAN’S CURRENT troubles could plausibly be said to stem from one of the foundational principles of the liberal worldview. Liberal democracy—and this, after all, is the very reason why many of its advocates regard it as the only legitimate form of government—is an individualistic creed.

What exactly this individualism amounts to is subject to much debate. But liberal individualism does seem to include at least two distinctive claims. First, liberal democracies are supposed to protect individuals against the potentially life-threatening demands of the collectivity. Whereas other regimes would happily sacrifice one of their own to serve the common good, liberal countries recognize that they cannot legitimately ask their citizens to make vast sacrifices from which those same citizens will never profit. Second, liberal countries think that the coercive power of the state is only justified insofar as citizens have—tacitly or explicitly—consented to them. Thus, what liberal countries can ask their citizens to do is limited by what their citizens can reasonably be said to have agreed to.

Both of these claims seem to offer an initial explanation for why the Japanese response to the evolving nuclear crisis has been so tepid. An authoritarian regime might simply have made some of its citizens sacrifice their lives for the collectivity. This is what happened at Chernobyl: the Soviet Union felt no need even to inform its citizens of the dangers they faced by continuing to stay at the plant, trying to stop it from melting down.

An authoritarian regime would call those who sacrifice their lives heroes or martyrs; it would name a street or school after them once they perish. But it would not hesitate a minute before ordering helicopter pilots to risk their lives on behalf of their countrymen. This is, again, exactly what happened at Chernobyl, where helicopter pilots received some of the highest doses of radiation. But the power to sacrifice any individual for the sake of the collectivity, so repulsive and yet so efficient, is not nearly so readily available to liberal democracies.

For instance, it does not seem that we can ask the workers at the nuclear plant to lay down their lives. The fifty that have stayed behind are risking higher levels of radiation than normal, but, as government spokesmen repeatedly insist, these workers must stand down once they reach the “legal” radiation limit. The government has repeatedly raised this limit, but the fundamental conception of how to approach the disaster has not changed–no single individual may be asked to sustain a lethal amount of radiation in order to protect the collective interests of the rest of society. If the workers that have remained behind are “heroes,” as everyone rightly says, the tenets of liberal democracy will not force them to become martyrs. Even with large swaths of Japan in danger, liberalism might still require that a small group of workers be protected.

Yet to blame liberal principles for a botched response may be too rash. Liberal democracies need not be as unsteady in the face of disaster as the Japanese government has been. Perhaps it cannot ask unwilling citizens to lay down their lives on behalf of the collectivity. Perhaps it cannot assume that ordinary citizens have implicitly consented to risk their lives in this manner. But it does, like any other regime, have recourse to the army.

Liberals may have reason to worry about whether or not conscription is legitimate in wartime, but liberal democracies have, in times of peace, never had trouble raising a standing army. Soldiers are well-paid in ordinary times precisely because they have contracted—not with a private entity, but with the state—to risk their lives in the case of an emergency. And unlike the employees of a private company, soldiers can, under threat of very serious criminal punishments, be forced to carry out their duty. Standing armies, long opposed by democrats due to the authoritarian dangers they posed, have for good reason come to be accepted by virtually all liberal democracies: in emergencies, they alone are able to defend democracies without violating the rights of individual citizens. In short, nothing should have stopped or delayed Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan from finding military pilots to fly those helicopters, or from sending soldiers into the Fukushima plant.

IF LIBERAL principles don’t explain what is happening in Japan, what does? Should we simply blame Naoto Kan for his incompetence? Or perhaps resort to some vague talk of Japan’s Confucian culture? I don’t think so. Liberal principles may be off the hook, but the ethos of some liberal societies is not.

The kind of reluctance that seems to have befallen the Japanese government comes particularly easily to liberals because, in times of peace, it connects to our greatest virtues. We liberals like to say of ourselves that we aspire to live in a mutually beneficial scheme of social cooperation. We want, above all else, to refrain from harming each other; indeed, many of us believe that to inflict cruelty upon another is the worst thing we could do. Naturally enough, these principles lead to an extreme reluctance to ask any citizen, even one who has voluntarily joined the army, to risk his life merely because this would be in the interests of the collectivity.

So are the neoconservatives right, after all, in saying that we will inevitably fail to take the necessary steps to protect our citizens? Neoconservatives believe that the institutions of liberal societies are inherently at a disadvantage in responding to emergencies, and so radical institutional changes, culminating in the introduction of a unitary executive, are necessary for the good of all. But this seems to miss the mark. Even in the absence of a unitary executive, it would have been entirely legitimate for Naoto Kan to order a military pilot to drop water over the Fukushima plant, no matter how dangerous that mission was.

What is necessary, however, is an adjustment of the liberal ethos–and, in particular, of our views about what our principles ask us to do in the most desperate circumstances. Even though liberal principles need not produce an exaggerated reluctance to take extreme measures in desperate situations, it may be true that liberal principles tend to make societies overly hesitant about confronting emergencies with the requisite resolve. This is a danger we have to acknowledge honestly—especially if we want to protect our creed from the much more hostile amendments offered by the opponents of liberal democracy.

The great virtue of liberal democracies is that they do not produce the blindly rule-abiding ethos that sent so many Japanese kamikaze fighters to their pointless deaths in the Second World War. This is a virtue we must preserve. But one of the great vices of democracies is that they, under certain circumstances, produce an unwillingness to ask for the ultimate sacrifice of some when countless others are in danger. That is a vice we must preempt.

Having overcome the unthinking ethos of the kamikaze pilots, the Japanese have in turn accepted an ethos that stopped them from asking their army’s pilots to prevent, at great risk, a nuclear meltdown. If we care about keeping democratic institutions viable in a chaotic world, we liberals must endeavor to make sure that this tragic mistake is never repeated.

Yascha Mounk is editor of the Utopian and a PhD Candidate at Harvard University.

*There is good reason to think that this would actually have helped. Most work carried out by the remaining plant employees seems to have been of a worryingly basic kind, like manually pumping water. It seems reasonable to suppose that a few army engineers working in conjunction with ordinary soldiers could have done much to help.