Post-Snowden Discourses and Governmental Practice in Germany
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Media and Communication (ISSN: 2183–2439) 2017, Volume 5, Issue 1, Pages 7–16 DOI: 10.17645/mac.v5i1.814 Article Outrage without Consequences? Post-Snowden Discourses and Governmental Practice in Germany Stefan Steiger 1,*, Wolf J. Schünemann 2 and Katharina Dimmroth 3 1 Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany; E-Mail: [email protected] 2 Institute of Social Sciences, Hildesheim University, 31141 Hildesheim, Germany; E-Mail: [email protected] 3 Institute of Political Science, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 52074 Aachen, Germany; E-Mail: [email protected] * Corresponding author Submitted: 31 October 2016 | Accepted: 20 January 2017 | Published: 22 March 2017 Abstract In 2013 Edward Snowden’s disclosures of mass surveillance performed by US intelligence agencies seriously irritated politi- cians and citizens around the globe. This holds particularly true for privacy-sensitive communities in Germany. However, while the public was outraged, intelligence and security cooperation between the United States and Germany has been marked by continuity instead of disruption. The rather insubstantial debate over a so-called “No-Spy-Agreement” between the United States and Germany is just one telling example of the disconnect between public discourse and governmental action, as is the recent intelligence service regulation. This article considers why and where the “Snowden effect” has been lost on different discursive levels. We analyze and compare parliamentary and governmental discourses in the two years after the Snowden revelations by using the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) to dissect the group- specific statements and interpretive schemes in 287 official documents by the German Bundestag, selected ministries and agencies within the policy subsystem. These will be analyzed in reference to actual governmental practice. Keywords cyber security; discourse analysis; dispositive analysis; German–US intelligence cooperation; surveillance Issue This article is part of the issue “Post-Snowden Internet Policy”, edited by Julia Pohle (WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Germany) and Leo Van Audenhove (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium). © 2017 by the authors; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu- tion 4.0 International License (CC BY). 1. Introduction ceptable” (Troianovski, Gorman, & Torry, 2013). While crit- icism was also expressed in parliament and a commission When the Snowden revelations exposed the extensive of inquiry was set up in early 2014, actual cooperation surveillance practices established by the US National Secu- with the US remained relatively stable. Furthermore, in rity Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communi- 2016 the federal government proposed a new legislative cations Headquarters (GCHQ) in June 2013, international framework for the German foreign intelligence agency criticism loomed large. Among US allies, Germany has Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) that was approved by the been one of the most vocal critics of the revealed surveil- German Bundestag in October of the same year. The lance measures. Chancellor Angela Merkel most promi- new law, according to many experts (Bäcker, 2016; Papier, nently expressed German discomfort in October 2013, 2016; Wetzling, 2016), legalizes extensive governmental when she said “spying among friends is completely unac- surveillance practices and may even be unconstitutional. Media and Communication, 2017, Volume 5, Issue 1, Pages 7–16 7 It is this seemingly paradoxical mismatch between specifies our methodological approach. To illustrate the harsh criticism and stable cooperation that we are going reluctant German reactions, the third section presents to analyze within the scope of this article. Our main re- a short analysis of the most important practical events search questions are therefore: How is it possible that following the Snowden revelations; this part sheds light Germany was a vocal critic of the revealed spy practices on the measures the German government has actually and nevertheless maintained a stable cooperation with taken to deal with the revelations. Our empirical analy- the US? As even a superficial look into the public and po- sis of governmental and parliamentary discourse is then litical debates in Germany reveals, there has clearly been presented in the fourth section. A final conclusion sums a “Snowden effect” in Germany, which has brought the is- up our findings. sue of mass surveillance to the fore of public policy. Why has it not led to a significant change in regulation or the 2. Discourses, Dispositives and What Happens in practices of governmental agencies? Where and why did between: Theory and Methodology the Snowden effect get lost within different discourse for- mations (parliamentary, governmental)? Discourse research has gained ground in political science Up to now, research on governmental reactions in recent years (pars pro toto: Hajer, 2002; Howarth, Nor- to the Snowden revelations has been published only val, & Stavrakakis, 2000; Wodak & Krzyzanowski, 2008). scarcely. When discussed, German government reac- Even in international relations and security studies, dis- tions have been covered with a focus on arguments course analysis (DA) has become more popular, and the legitimizing surveillance measures (Schulze, 2015). We scope of DA methodology has considerably broadened will go further by also analyzing the parliamentary de- (for cyber security and online communication issues see bate and investigating the practical implications of pos- for instance: Balzacq, 2011; Gorr & Schünemann, 2013; sible discursive shifts with a deeper look into the disposi- Xiao Wu, 2012). First of all, we adhere to a Foucauldian tives (institutions, regulations and practices). In the exist- discourse theory (Foucault, 2002), which makes the dis- ing literature, one can identify slightly different perspec- course a socio-historically specific knowledge formation tives on the German reaction to the disclosed practices. that appears materially manifested in social communica- These views seem to be facilitated by an emphasis on ei- tion. Moreover, we apply an approach developed from ther practical consequences or rhetoric. Emphasizing the the combination of Foucauldian discourse theory and harsh criticism following the revelations, Bersick, Chris- the Sociology of Knowledge tradition in sociology. The tou and Yi (2016, pp. 176–177) state that: Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse ([SKAD] Keller, 2008) has been developed by German sociologist In the case of Germany, the Snowden affair even un- Reiner Keller since the late 1990s. One crucial advan- dermined the general belief in the normative founda- tage of SKAD in relation to other discourse analytical ap- tions of the US–German relationship and gave rise to proaches is that it brings the actor back into focus. SKAD previously unheard-of criticism of the United States furthermore provides the analyst with a research frame- by German members of the federal cabinet. work encompassing a set of basic interpretive schemes, which complement the interpretive analytics otherwise Other scholars emphasized that practical relations (es- adopted from Foucault. pecially security cooperation) between the US and Ger- Corpus-building is one of the first and most impor- many remained stable in the aftermath of the revela- tant steps of any solid discourse research. For this study, tions. Segal (2016, p. 150) concludes that “even at the we chose an actor-oriented approach. This was relatively zenith of the public backlash, cooperation between the easy for the parliamentary debate, as we selected all US and German intelligence agencies never stopped”. Se- Bundestag protocols dealing with cyber security issues gal tentatively argues that this reaction was motivated by using the search function of the official Bundestag by the German “dependence on US intelligence capabil- database, entering the search terms “cyber security” and ities” (Segal, 2016, p. 143), but his claim is not built on “cyber attack”. We cut and parsed the resulting proto- significant empirical data from the German administra- cols to include only the sections that dealt with the rel- tion or parliament. We would like to substantiate this de- evant issue, since a single Bundestag debate may deal bate and take those findings as a starting point for our with a variety of topics. For governmental actors and analysis. We agree with Bersick et al. (2016) that lead- agencies, we identified ministries and investigative au- ing politicians in Germany voiced strong criticism against thorities as the key actors in German cyber security pol- the US (and the UK) regarding the revelations, and we icy, i.e. the policy subsystem (Sabatier, 1988). The iden- also acknowledge in concurrence with Segal (2016) that tified actors were the Federal Government, the Federal practical implications remained marginal, as is clearly un- Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the derlined by the latest developments. But together, both Federal Ministry of Defense, the Federal Ministry for Eco- observations set the puzzle that we are investigating. nomic Affairs and Energy, the Federal Ministry of Justice In order to provide an answer to our research ques- and Consumer Protection and the Federal Office for Infor- tions, the article will proceed in four steps. The next sec- mation