MISSION STATEMENT
The relationship between politics and science is very old and re-emerges time and again. Lately, the Covid-19 crisis shed light on this relationship again. The IIP asked friends and members of its board to share their thoughts and experiences on the relationship between science and politics. The members are highly qualified to discuss this issue. Most of them are involved in policy advice in one way or the other. They develop policy recommendations in their publications. It is a painstaking effort to convince politicians to pay attention to them. The IIP is starting a debate about the perspectives of experts, academics, and scientists on policy advice. We begin with the blogs of Hannes Swoboda, Pascal Lottaz, Heinz Gärtner, Ursula Werther-Pietsch, Thomas Hajnoczi, Mher Sahakyan, Matthias Dembinski, Waltraut Urban and Fred Tanner.
For Hannes Swoboda who served in the European Parliament and who is now heading several think tanks, science should be some sort of conscience making clear unacceptable failures and contradictions in politicians’ behavior and actions, especially of EU Member States. This implies that politicians would have to show more respect for science and more readiness to listen to them.
Swiss political scientist Pascal Lottaz who researches and teaches in Japan looks at the “the scientific worldview” of the German philosopher Michael Esfeld. Esfeld understands science as the laws of the universe that guide the interaction between the particles that form reality. For him “the science” as a unitary actor in the political process is itself a politicization of science and an abuse of popular trust in the discipline of reason.
The essay by Heinz Gärtner who teaches and researches at various universities and think tanks takes up some of these thoughts of classical novels and puts them in a current context. They portray a rather dark picture about the role of science. However, there is always a possibility that Victor Hugo’s prediction that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has arrived, comes true. Therefore, for politicians and decision takers it would be wise and far sighted to keep an independent academic and scholarly debate alive.
Ursula Werther-Pietsch, a lawyer working for Austrian Foreign and Defense Ministries, asks for truly anticipatory governance with both a holistic production of political knowledge and processes of optimization of policy advice. Inclusive governances is all about a new balance between politics, society and science. Scientists are not to be dependent, ignored or isolated any more. Ideas rise and fall and sometimes the time for them is ripe.
Thomas Hajnoczi, a former official in the Austrian Foreign Ministry, takes up the concrete case of negotiations of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons when scientific evidence played a major role. He concludes that disarmament must be based on science. Scientific studies showed that a limited nuclear war would be enough to cause a catastrophic global climate disruption for years and a worldwide famine, putting as many as two billion people at risk of starvation. Thomas Hajnoczi asks: “The scientific data have been presented, but will politicians act?”
For Armenian scholar Mher Sahakyan, a specialist on China and Eurasia, states must pay more attention to developing a professional network of political scientists and independent think tanks in their countries. Otherwise politicians will never be able to implement policies in a balanced and correct way. He even warns that if country X does not provide enough funding to its research centers, researchers will accept offers of foreign countries and agents. It goes without saying that think tanks and political scientists must also adjust their activities to constant new realities.
Matthias Dembinski, a German think tanker, starts his observation that at first glance good scientific advice makes for better policy. This rather optimistic view contrasts starkly with the pessimistic view, heavily influenced by Niklas Luhmann, that assumes that the social sub-systems of politics and of science operate according to their own functional logics and needs, linguistic codes and cultures. These relations are both a boon and a bane. It is a boon insofar as good scientific advice may indeed enlighten the policy-making process. It is a bane that the organization of science according to its own logic may be impaired by political interventions. Even greater risks loom if the boundaries between the worlds of politics and science dissolve and they become too entangled. Science progresses in a dialogue mainly between scientific positions. At the end of his blog Dembinski offers a few dos and don’ts.
Given this very complex decision process, it is evident for economist Waltraut Urban that the impact of science on politics is limited, with its weight depending partly on its quality, but the relative weight of other decisive factors as well. Science can support politics, but it cannot deliver ready-made solutions, but politicians could take them as a guide and basis for its decisions. Waltraut Urban also observes very soberly that when scientific criteria are applied, implicit value judgments play a role as well, which may lead to different models chosen by different scientists.
Fred Tanner, a Swiss academic who worked for many years at the OSCE, looks at the academic and scientific contribution of diplomatic documents of the OSCE[SI1] . As a sort of gate-keeper a High Level Panel breaks down scientific output into “usable” knowledge that can provide guidance for policymaking. In a “structured fashion” it allows policymakers, states, and international organisations to transfer responsibility to scientists and experts via institutionalised platforms, but the political context drives scope and effectiveness of the work.
This blog series aims to provoke a discussion among the broader public. If you are interested in expressing your opinion on the matter, you are more than welcome to submit your own contribution (up to 3 pages) to heinz.gaertner@univie.ac.at
