In 1889, workers at the London docks went on strike. While stevedores took the lead, they were soon joined by others with more permanent posts and higher incomes. The walkout of some 100,000 men was financed by significant donations that flowed in from as far away as Australia. London's inhabitants were generally supportive of the strike, and the police and the government largely refused to intervene in what they considered a private economic dispute. After four weeks, the employers caved in and agreed to a settlement, mediated by the City's Lord Mayor and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, which came very close to the workers’ original demands.
Eight years later, a similar labor conflict broke out in the port of Hamburg, where it played out very differently. The town's authorities generally sided with employers, who were able to replace the roughly 17,000 workers who walked off the job by hiring replacements abroad. These were protected against retaliation by the police, who cracked down hard on labor demonstrations. Attempts at mediation, undertaken initially and half-heartedly by very few members of Hamburg's elite, quickly fizzled out. After two-and-a-half months, the strike collapsed. None of the original demands were fulfilled, and labor leaders were comprehensively blacklisted. The only element of change was a greater degree of state intervention in working conditions.
At first glance, this juxtaposition reads like a classical account contrasting liberal Britain with repressive Germany. This is not, however, the approach the book at hand takes. Christine Krüger's theoretical approach is informed by modern security studies, where the securitization (translated as Versicherheitlichung) of some risks is seen as an explanation of governments’ ability to justify repressive politics they would not be able to pursue absent the (frequently overstated) threat. Viewed from this perspective, employers in Hamburg were able to securitize the strike, while their London counterparts conspicuously failed to do so. The book seeks to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of why this was the case.
Krüger's well-researched account, which is based on archival sources, newspapers articles, contemporary writings, and the existing literature, begins by describing the meaning of security for various groups of actors. The strikes were about security, and while a party of dialogue sought to counteract a process of securitization, a party of conflict sought to bring it to a head. One difference between Hamburg and London concerned the size and influence of the party of conflict and the party of dialogue among prominent decisionmakers. In part, this was a consequence of chronology: Hamburg's employers, acting hand in glove with the police and the city state's administration, focused on the presence of Tom Mann, a British trade unionist, and his intercepted communications to argue that even minor concessions would be seen as a trade union victory that would lead to further strikes and even greater demands.
Another aspect Krüger emphasizes is the importance of residential segregation. Separated working-class and middle-class quarters could combine with security concerns – about property on the one hand, loss of autonomy through middle-class intervention on the other – to shape individual and collective identities. For example, Hamburg's labor activists, drawing on the experience of the 1892 cholera epidemic, which had been blamed on immigrants from East Europe, sought to argue that the employment of large numbers of outsiders threatened to jeopardize the city's health once again. However, this attempt at securitizing business policies largely failed to gain traction. Yet the possibility of containing the strike and attendant demonstrations within the confines of working-class areas was greater in London (not least because the urban space was much larger), and due to widespread criticism of prior police overreach more dialogue-minded actors were in key positions at the time of the 1889 strike.
Another set of actors important to Krüger's account were scientists who sought to gauge the degree of security threats: Booth's survey of London and less comprehensive and more controversial counterparts in Hamburg are cases in point. Both contributed to the identification of social security as a new type of risk and a new state obligation. In this sense, the defeat of the Hamburg strike paved the way for greater state intervention, though local elites also sanctioned scientists whose findings appeared to favor the labor movement's demands.
Finally, security appeared as a highly gendered concept. Male actors could be expected to assume a higher degree of risk, whereas threats to female actors (through the loss of earnings in consequence of accidents, for example) were a justification for strikes that would resonate with a broader public.
Christine Krüger's research project was conceived in the context of a collaborative research center based in Marburg and Gießen, which seeks to put the framework of modern security studies to historical empirical tests. In view of this, her account offers some particularly valuable insights. Its nuanced approach to the topic of urban labor conflict demonstrates that securitization is often only partial, and that various groups are unlikely to share perceptions of security and security threats even at times of intense conflict. The argument that securitization processes can only be fully understood if they are complemented by an investigation of how images of (in)security shape the boundaries of social groups is an insight that surely goes well beyond labor conflict and these two urban case studies.
What also emerges from Krüger's account is that “Sicherheit” covers a number of terms in English that may or may not be entirely identical: in addition to security, words that appear are safety (from industrial accidents) or certainty (of income), to mention only two. The question of how security as an analytical term relates to historical semantics is another interesting, if mostly implicit point this book raises.
