„Das muss Konsequenzen haben“

Die Schiffshavarie der Pallas als umweltpolitische Diskursdisruption

Abstract

The German Bundestag regularly deals with environmentally relevant incidents and accidents during plenary debates. On November 12, 1998, for example, the accident involving the cargo ship “Pallas”, which ran aground off Amrum, was discussed for the first time. At this point, the actual incident was more than two weeks in the past and had established itself in the discourse as a result of media coverage with a particular focus on crisis management issues. The federal political-institutional reappraisal thus ties in with an already existing environmental policy sub-discourse. As an incident, the “Pallas” represents a reference object with the potential for public positioning and staging, which is discharged in the form of controversial attributions of responsibility. This results in a triad of the disruption dealt with (disruption), the consequences to be derived from it (responsibility) and the actors called upon to implement it (responsible parties). This study combines qualitative-hermeneutic and quantitative-distributional approaches using the example of the “Pallas” accident in order to describe negotiation processes on political responsibility in the context of German environmental policy in more detail.