The emergence of mistrustful civic vigilance in Finnish, French, German and Spanish nuclear policies: ideological trust and (de)politicization

Abstract

High levels of public trust in institutions and generalised interpersonal trust in “the unknown other” are generally seen to facilitate decision-making on nuclear energy and waste. However, earlier research has highlighted the potential virtues of mistrustful “civic vigilance” and politicisation as means of enhancing the robustness of policy decisions. Drawing on expert and stakeholder interviews as well as secondary material, this article examines the role of the largely neglected ideological dimension of trust in shaping the emergence of civic vigilance in the form of counter-expertise in four countries with distinct trust profiles: Finland as a “high-trust society”, France and Spain as “societies of mistrust”, and Germany as an intermediate case. The article concludes by stressing the co-evolution of civic vigilance with ideological and institutional trust, processes of (de)politicisation, and with the historically shaped and continuously evolving context. Strong ideological trust in the state has in Finland hindered the development of mistrustful counter-expertise, but has in France and Germany provided a foundation for its emergence, whereas the weakness of ideological trust in the state has in Spain undermined civic vigilance. The hypothesis that politicisation – opening up the debate and policymaking to broader publics – fosters the emergence of mistrustful civic vigilance holds for Finland, and largely for France and Germany, whereas in Spain, the particular form of politicisation – as “nuclearisation of politics” – has hampered the development of counter-expertise.

Keywords:

• Nuclear power
• radioactive waste management
• trust
• politicisation
• history of nuclear power

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank our interviewees for their insights that were vital for this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The average of trust in national parliament and government, legal system, police and the news media.

2 For the sake of simplicity, we use the term trust to encompass both its traditional meaning as a normative judgment concerning an individual or entity, and confidence, that is, a belief based on earlier experience that certain events will occur as predicted (Earle and Siegrist 2006; Kinsella 2016).

3 We do not specifically address the related concept of distrust, which denotes the absence of trust, reflecting fundamental suspicion and cynicism (see the introduction to this special issue).

4 http://www.honest2020.eu/

5 Interview with two anti-Fennovoima activists, 13 June 2014.

6 Expressions used by the interviewees (13 June 2014) included: “Emotions (…) in Finland, they don’t carry much weight”; “We refuse to answer questions such as ‘how do you feel now, after decision X by authority Y?’”; “you have to be emphatically matter-of-fact and calm”; and “we don’t refer to Fukushima in our campaigning”.

7 In a local newspaper poll, 62% of the respondents viewed the participation of Russians in a Finnish NPP project as a security threat, given the current world political situation (Kaleva 2019).

8 Association pour le contrôle de la radioactivité dans l’Ouest.

9 Commission de recherche et d’information indépendantes sur la radioactivité.

10 Translated from German by the authors.

11 Citizen attendance is low even in the statutory meetings of the local information committees (NOP-7).

12 The frequent references by our Finnish, French and German interviewees to rational, fact-based argumentation were indeed virtually absent from the discourse of the Spanish interviewees.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 call, Euratom training programme, Grant Agreement 662268; and the European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF), grant number 794697-TENUMECA.