Austria´s Biotechnology Conflict in the World

Globalisation is a defining reality of our age. Aim of this project is to expand our understanding of this reality in contributing to three interwoven discussions an globalisation conceming 1. the transformation of the nation-state in the course of denationalisation, 2. new conflicts and actors emerging due to globalisation and 3. the role of the public in a supranational polity. The research project will tackle these questions by analytically reconstructing Austria`s biotechnology-controversy within its supra- and international context and tracking Austrian politics of biotechnology in their various manifestations - as informal regulatory science, regulation and law-making, broad public controversy as well as multi-level politics within the framework of the EU. For its variety Austria`s biotechnology-field is well suited for such a model-case: In the early nineties Austria`s accession to the EU implies an intricate intermingling of national and supranational biotechnology-policies. In the middle of the decade a protest movement successfully engages in plebiscitary politics, pushing Austria into an antagonistic stance against the European Commission. Tlms wie have occasion to observe case of national recalcitrance - at least in particular policy-fields - food-labelling and GMO-releases - and in a particular phase of the conflict since in the meantime a -eneral European mobilisation against biotechnology made Austria`s formerly recalcitrant stance European mainstream. Several questions related to the mentioned three debates an globalisation inform the inquiry: Is there, as often asserted, a loss of national sovereignty, or can we also identify "co-operative" relationships between national and supranational levels? How can we characterise the institutional linkages between these levels? What intemal restructuring do constructive biotechnology-policies undergo adapting to the international innovation-tontest? Can we interpret the controversy an agroalimentary biotechnology as a conflict due to the pressures of globalisation? How does transnationafsation influence the intemal structure of protest movements? How does it change their relation to national publics? Are publics bound to the nation-state or do we witness the emergence of a European public? Can public controversies change something on dominante, politics suffering technology-political motives?

The research project looks into the controversy over agricultural biotechnology in order to better understand the interplay of local public protest and international free trade rules. Its central question is whether and how, under conditions of trade liberalisation, mass publics wield an influence on biotechnology policy making. It is stressed that the realm of biotechnology policy-making goes beyond the Nation State and straddles regional, supranational and international levels of political rule-making, while the political mass-public is locally grounded. While an empirical focus of the research project is on Austria, which figures a model case of a biotechnology-aversive public, it adopts European and global perspectives, too. Beyond further analyses under way, the project has thus far generated the following insights: 1. A study of Austria`s current federal and regional biotechnology policy, which aims at barring the cultivation of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) on Austrian territory, makes clear that such a policy can only succeed by abiding by the rules laid down in the EU`s liberal regulatory framework. An outright GMO prohibition, as it was put forward by the Austrian Region Upper Austria, is bound to collide with EU biotechnology regulations. 2. This and a further Austrian case study dealing with an attempt to involve citizens in bio-political debates hint at the hazards of symbolic politics and the potential manipulation of the public in bio-political decision making processes. 3. Another case study analyses the European anti-biotechnology wave against the backdrop of the often lamented lack of a European public and democracy respectively. It demonstrates that the anti-biotechnology movement, in spite of the undeniable national fragmentation of the European Union, constitutes a functional equivalent to the normative desideratum of a European mass-public and thus adds a note of tentative optimism to the debate on the EU`s democratic future. 4. A recurring result in a number of studies is that those actors of the anti-GMO movement who are most successful in framing public discourse are to a high extent internationally networked and coordinated, which stands in contrast to the locally grounded mass-publics themselves. 5. A final study looks at the global consequences of the European anti-GMO movement and the EU policy changes in the wake of it. It finds that, in spite of lasting internal tensions within the EU, the EU manifests as unified actor in the global biotech arena, seeking to universalise a precautionary and transparency-oriented regulatory approach.