STATES OF EMERGENCY - Patrick Lagadec

ConclusionWith our little group of officials and determined actors, we have just made afirst tour of the land of post-accident crises. Along the way, we have planteda number of landmarks, indicating dead ends, firm ground, danger zones, orleads to be followed. We won't go back over all the pages in this travelogue.It should be enough to remember how important it is today to open the blackbox in which the issue of post-accidental crisis has been locked up too long.Nevertheless, the prospect is paralyzing. Like any borderline situation, theexceptional event, turbulence, and destabilization are frightening. Managersmuch prefer to put these awkward moments between parentheses and wait forthings to return to normal before they begin once again to feel involved. Asthe strategy expert Lucien Poirier writes, "This repugnance for thinking andacting on unstable ground sheds light on the malaise politicians and strategymakers feel when confronted with a crisis phenomenon. How can they founda rational action on what seems to be a passing event, turbulence, ortransformation, when they can seize neither its true motives nor the trueactors, nor the enduring effects, beneath the Brownian agitation ofappearances?" (1).The temptation remains strong to go on ignoring the problem, or at mostto perform some feat of magic when events are really too pressing. The trickmay make use of the media: taking responsibility is forgotten in favor ofgestures that burnish the image. It may involve decision-making: the criteriafor choice then come to depend on visibility and demagoguery rather than onpertinence. There is also a great risk that we will put our future deep intohock, for instance by taking disproportionate measures as a reaction to somesmall incident (especially in the areas of evacuations or public health). This inturn is sure to provoke excesses in any ulterior, truly serious event. Thesedangers are present today, with the Chernobyl affair still alive in everyone'sminds. The unwritten rule of the day seems to be, "Nothing would be worsethan not doing too much", though this principle is untenable over the longterm. In the same vein, openness has become a must term trotted out in anypost-accident situation. It would be interesting to see over a longer periodwhat these constant references to openness actually signify. Do they apply to