POLITICS VERSUS SCIENCE: APPORTIONING ... - Buffalo State

1995: 233) living under weltbürgerrecht [world/cosmopolitan law] (Habermas, 1999:
xxvi). There is a sense that Europeans, founders of the modern nation-state, are in the
process of inventing a new kind of government, one based on shared norms rather than
the power of the state. (Or neo-medievalism, as it is sometimes described in the
literature!)
Critics of cosmopolitanism, however, point to its base in rational enlightenment.
Policy networks depend upon shared rules and norms; the incentive for compliance boils
down to the notion that it is the way people who “reason” would want to live.
(Habermas' now famous unshakable faith in "reason.”) This point of view has been
ridiculed as naive by conservatives (whether the majority of the polity can be reasoned
with and will, in turn, reason with others, is a philosophical conundrum generating as
much debate today as it did in the 18 th Century) and ethnocentric (whose values?) by
postmodernists.
What is the prospect, then, for a food safety regime governed by policy networks?
THE EFSA: GOVERNING THROUGH THE INVISIBLE
COLLEGES OF POLICY NETWORKS
Although only time will be reveal whether Europe is inventing a model for
postnational governing, our narrower task is to understand the efficacy of policy
networks in the European food safety regime. Fortunately a great deal of work has been
conducted by sociologists who have focused on the interaction of scientists or science as
a social system.
Price (1963), Storer (1966), Kuhn (1970), and Crane (1972), social constructivists
(Lievrouw et al. 1987), view science as a social organization guided by a set of shared
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