Freezing time,preparing for the future: The stockpile as a temporal matter of security

Abstract

This article analyses stockpiling as a security device that hoards time, stores power and buffers disruptions. The stockpile is a temporal matter of security by virtue of its ability to freeze time and to prepare for future emergencies. Stockpiling is informed by anticipations of threats but also materially underpins expectations. After unpacking the temporal ontology of stockpiling, the article traces its history as a security device and technology of power. Stockpiling enabled the emergence of the earliest states by establishing the means to store surpluses and centralize power. In modernity, stores became more dispersed as money, commodity exchange and new infrastructures made it possible to procure resources through circulation. In the 20th century, stockpiling became a reflexive security device reactive to risks associated with the disruption of these circulations. Finally, the article illuminates the role of reserves in contemporary German catastrophe preparedness to show that stockpiling remains an important security technique. Yet fiscal austerity and budgetary constraints limit security stockpiling. To compensate for the absence of public security stores, the government is prompting citizens to establish emergency stockpiles. The article offers a theoretical, historical and empirical engagement with stockpiling and thereby further elucidates the material politics of anticipation.

Introduction

28 litres of water; 5.6 kg of grain, bread, potatoes, pasta and rice; 5.6 kg of vegetables and legumes; 3.6 kg of fruit and nuts; 3.7 kg of milk and dairy products; 2.1 kg of meat, fish and eggs; 0.5 kg of fats and oils. According to the emergency stockpile checklist issued by the German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK, 2017b), this is the amount of food needed to survive a two-week food shortage. The list had been around for a couple of years, but it became a matter of public concern in August 2016 after the federal government adopted a new ‘concept for civil defence’ that advised citizens to assemble an ‘individual food supply’ (BMI, 2016: 47) and to store water (BMI, 2016: 46) and medication (BMI, 2016: 49) for emergency situations. Federal Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maiziere presented the report after a series of fatal terrorist attacks took place throughout Europe. Public commentators and members from the opposition parties accused the government of fearmongering, since a catastrophe scenario entailing a prolonged period of food scarcity seemed highly unlikely (Eubel, 2016).

Indeed, the encounter between ‘one of the most archaic means of written enumeration and classification’ (De Goede and Sullivan, 2016: 67) – the list – and one of the most archaic means of accumulating things – the stockpile ¹ – evokes a certain uncanniness, because it is as familiar as grocery shopping and, considering the prospect of disaster, deeply disconcerting at the same time. But what is wrong with stockpiling survival equipment? Does the issuing of governmental advice constitute fearmongering, or is it an act of individualizing collective risks by making each citizen responsible for his or her own survival in a catastrophe? Can the ancient practice of stockpiling still provide security amid the threat ecology of the present, or is it just a pacifier for the fears of the population? This article addresses these questions. It will analyse the role of stockpiling as a security device by unpacking its peculiar temporal ontology, tracing its long and changing history, and illuminating its utilization in contemporary German catastrophe preparedness.

There is little systematic and in-depth engagement with the practices and materialities of stockpiling in current critical security studies (notable exceptions are Elbe et al., 2014; Keck, 2017). Stockpiling seems to be an utterly untimely phenomenon that belongs to the Cold War security landscape, where stockpiled gold still helped to guarantee the stability of the currency, nuclear stockpiles assured peace in the best- or mutual destruction in the worst-case scenario, and stockpiled food in fallout shelters could at least postpone the certainty of death in a thermonuclear war. The fixity of stockpiles seems to be out of place in ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000). Storing too much for too long goes against the grain of just-in-time capitalism, where stored things and capacities not in circulation produce unnecessary costs. Accordingly, scholars in critical security studies focus on the problem of ‘securing circulations’ (Aradau and Blanke, 2010; Lobo-Guerrero, 2008; Salter, 2013) and not on the seemingly rigid stockpile. I will, however, argue that techniques of storing, retaining and accumulating things remain crucial security techniques not in spite of but because of the imperative to secure circulations.

Stockpiling functions as a technique of preparedness (Keck, 2017). As a ‘security device’ (Amicelle et al., 2015), the stockpile establishes a specific relation to the future by virtue of the calculative and anticipatory knowledge devices that go along with it, as well as the material order of reserves. The security stockpile is a time capsule that establishes a nexus between the stored-away past and an unknown, dangerous future, while attempting to preserve the continuity of ongoing circulations. By arresting material flows or by taking something out of circulation (Elbe et al., 2014: 452), the stockpile creates a reservoir of frozen time as a buffer and bridge against interruptions of time-critical circulations. By approaching stores, stockpiles and reserves as temporal ‘matters of security’, this article contributes to debates on materiality and things in critical security studies (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Aradau, 2010; Salter, 2016; Walters, 2014), as well as debates on preparedness and anticipation (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Anderson, 2010; Lakoff, 2007) by showing how the materiality of the stockpile underpins the politics of anticipation. The stockpile is not only a security device but also a technology of power. Stocks and reserves equip those who control them with considerable ‘infrastructural power’ (Mann, 1984). Although the rigid materiality of the stockpile seems to have an affinity to centralized, statist power structures, the infrastructural power of stockpiling has proven to be historically flexible and by no means limited to the storehouse state.

I start by unpacking the materiality and temporal ontology of stockpiles by turning to Martin Heidegger’s (1977) notion of ‘securing of the standing reserve’ and Michel Serres’s (2008: 179) characterization of stockpiles as ‘frozen time’. I then explore the historical origins of stockpiling as a governmental technology of power and security. I excavate the deep history of the state and its intricate relation to storing practices as analysed by theorists like Michael Mann, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and, more recently, James C. Scott. I then contrast this picture of the storehouse state with Michel Foucault’s analysis of modern modes of governing (through) circulation. In a subsequent step, I highlight two crucial episodes from the genealogy of stockpiling in the 20th century: the German Office of War Raw Materials during World War I and the stockpiling of oil during the Cold War era. I argue that in the 20th century, triggered by emergency situations like wars, economic crises and the threats of the Cold War, stockpiling became a reflexive security device to act as a buffer against disruptions of critical raw materials in order to ensure the integrity of ‘vital systems’ (Collier and Lakoff, 2015). I then highlight the significance of stockpiling in contemporary catastrophe preparedness in Germany by showing that stockpiling continues to be an important element in contemporary security apparatuses, but also by pointing out how budget constraints in public government and new calculative and logistical regimes in the private sector severely limit stockpiling projects. This suggests – as I show in the final section – that governmental advice intended to increase the stockpiling activities of citizens is intended to compensate for limited public security resources. The article looks at a variety of cases and fields where stockpiling matters, ranging from energy and food security to military and economic security. It does not pretend to give a comprehensive history of stockpiling or to claim that the insights drawn from the historically and socially situated cases it examines are simply generalizable. Nevertheless, these cases serve as examples in that they seek to make visible the temporal and material features of stockpiling as a security device and to identify critical junctures in the history of security stockpiling. ²

Hoarding time: The ontology of stockpiling and the materiality of time

What distinguishes stockpiling from other storing practices is the temporality associated with it. Unlike archiving, and other ways of storing for remembrance, it is not about retaining what has happened but about looking forward to what might happen. Although it might seem to be a thing of the past, it is in fact a matter for the future. The basic security function of stockpiling is to prepare for future adversities. This not only holds true for states stockpiling critical defense materials, but is also true on a personal level. A rainy-day fund prepares you for the risk of unexpected expenses, and a store of candles prepares one for electricity blackouts and unexpected romance. Advances in bio- and cryotechnologies even make it possible to store body parts against the risk of becoming sick or infertile (Radin and Kowal, 2017a). Stockpiling guarantees continuity in the face of a volatile and contingent future.

Martin Heidegger’s (1977: 27) reflections on the ‘securing of the standing reserve’ help to unpack the intricate temporal ontology of stockpiling and its implication for security practices. In his famous essay on technology, Heidegger regards the ‘standing reserve’ as the specific way the material world exists in the epoch of technology. The standing reserve is a specific ‘mode of existence’. It is devoid of the rich qualitative characteristics of a ‘thing’ that has the capacity to assemble meaningful worlds (Heidegger, 2004). The standing reserve does not matter as a precious item in a unique world, but only counts as part of a larger repository of identical, utterly replaceable and reproduceable material sameness. No thing is a standing reserve in and of itself but only becomes so in relation to a techno-scientific infrastructure that Heidegger (1977: 21) calls the ‘enframing’, which he regards as the anonymous ordering power of the modern, technological world. ‘Enframed’ stuff is a standing reserve. This also holds true for the stockpile proper. Stuff only turns into a stockpile when set aside, maintained and ordered according to a more or less well anticipated set of events. But how should we understand Heidegger’s notion of ‘securing the standing reserve’? In German, Bestand has a double meaning. It can mean ‘inventory’ and ‘stock’, as well as ‘continued existence’ and ‘stability’. With both meanings in mind, ‘securing of the standing reserve’ (Sicherung des Bestandes) stands for the efforts to ensure the continuity of existence against the vagaries of time, against finitude and the precarity and withdrawal of being. ³ Heidegger’s understanding of security elucidates the temporality of security stockpiles. The stockpile (the first meaning of Bestand) secures the continuity (the second meaning of Bestand) of a historically specific form of existence or being (whether this is a socio-technical system or the life of the population) against temporal contingencies and disruptions in the future. Storing is in fact a condition of possibility for a new experience of temporality that abstracts from seasonal rhythms, aging and disruptive, catastrophic events: the constant availability of fresh fruits from the freezer, the possibility to resort to sperm or oocytes from the biobank (Radin and Kowal, 2017a), stockpiled medicine for survival during catastrophic times (Elbe et al., 2014), etc. In endangered-species preservation, cryotechnological storing techniques even promise to smooth out the catastrophic impact of modern societies on the deep time of planetary life by assembling a ‘frozen ark’ (Chrulew, 2017), protecting not only the life of human populations (Joseph’s stocks) but life itself (Noah’s stocks) (Folkers, 2017a: 368–370). A store is a fold in the topology of time. Yet this fold works as a device to produce and preserve ‘a time extracted from any material or identifiable demarcations [that] celebrates a hallucination of presence’ (Crary, 2013: 29).

Michel Serres’s characterization of stockpiles as ‘places where time has frozen’ provides a crucial hint at the material makeup of stockpiles that constitutes their temporality. ‘What do we stockpile, squirrel-like? Power, before using it: dry-cell and storage batteries; dams. Money: bank accounts, insurance, capital. Codes: libraries, computer memory, data banks. Food: cold rooms for meat or fruit, grain silos, dark cellars. Sperm, oocytes, embryos. Time does not always flow. We can find or excavate places where it has frozen’ (Serres, 2008: 179). Characterizing stockpiles as places of frozen time is not just metaphorical. In many instances, cooling and freezing is a requirement for storing. Freezing bio-materials, for example, stops or at least slows down the biological clock by suspending metabolic processes (Radin and Kowal, 2017b: 4). In such a way, storing technologies make use of the entanglements of time and matter. Matter does not exist in time like water in a glass: it is the very ‘stuff of time’ (Ingold, 2012: 439). Thus, time and matter are enfolded in and with each other. ‘Becoming is not an unfolding in time but the inexhaustible dynamism of the unfolding of mattering. . . . Hence it doesn’t make sense to construe time . . . as an external parameter that tracks the motion of matter in some preexisting space’ (Barad, 2007: 180). The becomings of time and matter are so entangled that the modulation of matter also changes its temporality. Time matters and matter ‘times’. That is why stockpiling is the excavation of a place where time is frozen. Yet this excavation does not come for free but requires ‘work without which the temporal flow toward disorder . . . would be quicker’ (Serres, 2007: 86): maintenance and ordering work, energy to cool biobanks, electricity to operate data centres, etc. The frozen time of the stockpile depends on the human and non-human work of stockpiling. Though this work cannot altogether stop the ‘arrow of time’ (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984: 257–290) that characterizes the becoming of the material world, it can slow it down significantly.

The temporality of stockpiling practices does not just reside in the materiality of the stockpile. As a technique of preparedness, stockpiling resorts to a series of anticipatory and calculative knowledge techniques to assess what, when and how much to keep in store. Yet stockpiling is not only enabled by future expectations but also conditions expectations. The material features of reserves make them a crucial element that (infra)structures anticipation. The focus on stockpiles provides a particularly revealing lens on the material underpinnings of future expectations and thereby goes beyond theories that just regard expectations as ‘imaginative’ (Beckert, 2016) or merely a matter of cognition. If, as Niklas Luhmann (1976: 150) asserts, the future is ‘a storehouse of possibilities’, then stockpiles seek to assemble a repertoire of stuff in the present that matches and thereby neutralizes what the future might have ‘in store’. They reduce uncertainty by establishing something to bank on in the face of an unknown future. This has a securing effect in the present even when the future they anticipate never comes to fruition. A case in point is the role of money reserves that act as collateral or pledge to produce market confidence and enable the flow of money (Boy, 2015; Langenohl, 2015). Another example is provided by the nuclear stockpiles that ensured the expectation of ‘mutual destruction’. Weapons stockpiles materially underpinned the expectations in war-game scenarios during the Cold War (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2005) although, fortunately, they never came to be used. By the same token, nothing proves the inadequacy of past expectations like obsolete stockpiles bearing witness to a future that never happened.

Storing power: The deep history of the storehouse state

Stockpiling has a deep history as a security technology. In the Old Testament, Joseph counsels the pharaoh of Egypt to stockpile food during seven fat years for seven meagre years to come. The story already displays a very basic temporal principle of stockpiling: building reserves can safeguard you against future contingencies. Yet stockpiles are not only security devices. They also serve as technologies of power and governance. This can also be seen in the same story, as Joseph uses the stored grain supplies to reduce the Egyptian population to a form of tax-paying servitude (see Genesis 47: 13–24). The history of storing practices is entangled with the ‘deep history of the earliest states’ (Scott, 2017), the emergence of political hierarchies, social stratification and exploitation. According to this understanding, stockpiling practices did not emerge to increase food security (Testart, 1982), but more importantly to store taxes in the form of grains (Scott, 2017: 116–124). ⁴ Michael Mann (1984: 126) even claims that the state was born in a storehouse: ‘in the early history of societies before the exchange of commodities was possible . . . [d]ifferent ecological niches delivered their surpluses to a central storehouse which eventually became a permanent state’. By generalizing similar historical observations, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 444) argue that ‘the stock’ is the quintessential apparatus of capture, since stockpiling leads to a ‘capitalization . . . of power’ and is an ‘articulation . . . of capital’. The stock not only allows the capture of surpluses and the concentration of power, it also captures bodies, binding nomadic people by committing them to sedentary lifestyles. Mann (1986: 46–49) calls this ‘caging’.

Keeping surpluses in a centralized storing place was an important condition for the emergence of a specialized class to administer the store. The storekeepers – usually priests or the chief of a clan – could use their special access to the store to exploit and rule the peasants providing the surpluses. From time to time, they discharged part of the stores and distributed this among the population to alleviate hardship or for festive purposes to gain legitimacy and prestige. Scholars thus regard storekeeping as a condition for the emergence of the ‘redistributive chiefdom’ (Malinowski quoted in Mann, 1986: 60) that eventually became a ‘redistributive state’ (Mann, 1986: 60). However, the redistribution from the stock does not just react to scarcity. If we refrain from seeing scarcity as a state of nature, it becomes obvious that storing goods can also engender scarcity. By holding something back from consumption for later use, it becomes scarce in the present. ‘Precaution [Vorsorge] makes all goods scarce. . . . The proliferation of durable, storable goods increases scarcity’ (Luhmann, 1994: 64). In contrast, hunter-gatherers seem to live in an ‘original affluent society’ (Sahlins, 1998).

Stockpiling retained its ambivalence as a security device and technology of power, although its scope and conditions of application changed with the emergence of money and modern commodity exchange. Resources were no longer concentrated in a central storehouse. Storekeeping became an activity distributed throughout society, as money allowed for the exchange of goods between different ‘ecological niches’ over wide distances. The imperatives of capitalist modes of production often led to a diminishment of stockpiled supplies, because as ‘value in motion’ (Marx, 2010: 137) capital must be in circulation to accumulate. ⁵ Money, in turn, not only acts as a medium of exchange but also as an abstract store of value and therefore as a virtual store of goods. The abstract materiality of money makes it a perfect storage device because it does not just store particular goods but stores the possibility to attain any good in the future. As Ute Tellmann (2017: 153) explains, following John Maynard Keynes, money ‘stores . . . possibility into the future’. However, in contrast to the proverb according to which ‘money does not spoil’, even the abstract materiality of money is subject to waste and decay. Since inflation reduces its value, storing the possibilities inherent in money comes at a cost. ⁶ In this regard, the government of inflation might be seen as the functional equivalent of the maintenance work required to protect stockpiled materials from the tooth of time.

Even though early modern states no longer resembled large storehouses, they still controlled hoarding practices, as Michel Foucault has shown in his account of food security strategies in pre-revolutionary France. The mercantile style of governing food scarcities entailed a prohibition of hoarding when food supplies were scarce. Hoarding and speculating on rising prices was forbidden. The physiocrats who aspired to instil a new governmental rationality in the sovereign state problematized the deficiencies of mercantile economic government and maintained that the best way to prevent food scarcity was to ensure the ‘free circulation of grain’ (Foucault, 2007: 55). They believed that unhindered markets were able to spontaneously allocate scarce resources in an optimal manner. The ‘liberal solution around which the physiocrats rally . . . consists in [suppressing] the prohibition of hoarding so that people are able to store their grain and hold it back, as and when they wish, and as much as they want, thereby relieving the market when there is abundance’ (Foucault, 2007: 60). It became legitimate to store food to react to the ‘nature’ of the market and not just to be prepared for the vagaries of other ‘natural’ phenomena like seasons, the weather and soil fertility.

Foucault’s reflections on physiocrats indicate a (proto)liberal and market-based governmental regime of storekeeping. The ‘stock’ operates less as a coherent, centralized apparatus of capture and more as a decentralized node in the network of a market society. Accordingly, the government should use its infrastructural power to facilitate the optimal flow between the decentralized stockholders. On the one hand, it is supposed to build roads and other channels for the movements of goods (Foucault, 2007). On the other hand, it secures the means of exchange by establishing currencies, controlling inflation (Foucault, 2008: 139) and issuing public credit. This again makes it necessary that states or institutions like central banks keep reserves to stabilize the currency. Nina Boy rightly notes that this investiture of sovereign power (or, respectively, of the storehouse state) enables the ‘divesture of the centralized power of the state’ (Boy, 2015: 538) – that is, the decentralization of governmental activity often associated with Foucault’s work on the history of governmentality. Stocks underpin and enable flows.

Buffering disruptions: Stockpiling as a reflexive security device in the 20th century

Multiple military and economic crises at the beginning of the 20th century challenged the liberal faith in the ability of dispersed private stores and the free circulation of goods to provide security of vital supplies. The liberal system of free-flowing circulations increasingly came to be regarded as a problem rather than a solution to the security and welfare of societies. The ever more intricate networks of progressively more global trade relations and the growing complexity of industrial societies created new bottlenecks in circulatory infrastructures and rendered disruptions of flows potentially disastrous. At least since World War I, a series of high-profile economists, industrialists and politicians began to envision enormous governmental stockpiling projects for military and economic purposes. These stockpiles should no longer function as the principal mechanism for the accumulation and distribution of goods but work as buffer stocks to smooth out disruptions or maldistributions in circulatory processes. The stockpile became a device to secure circulations against the vulnerabilities of circulation. Stockpiling became a reflexive security device reacting to risks constituted by the growing complexity of global and interdependent flows on which modern, industrialized societies depend, and the stockpile became a crucial technology for ‘vital systems security’ (Collier and Lakoff, 2015). This section will illuminate how stockpiling acquired this new role by shedding light on two historical episodes: the German Office of War Raw Materials during World War I and the stockpiling of oil by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) states as a reaction to the oil price crisis of 1973. While the debate on ‘vital systems security’ concentrates on critical infrastructures, these instances stress the importance of ‘critical raw materials’ for the security of vital systems. Stockpiling became one of the key strategies for securing the uninterrupted supply of these materials.

World War I was decisive in making visible the vulnerabilities of modern industrial societies to disruptions in the flow of goods, raw materials, and energy. Shortly after the war started, the British used their domination of the seas to establish a naval blockade of the Central Powers. The blockade had severe consequences for Germany’s supply of imported raw materials. ⁷ Walther Rathenau, a famous German industrialist and politician, was among the first to recognize that these resource shortages could critically compromise Germany’s war-making capabilities. Using his contacts with the Prussian war ministry, he lobbied for a thorough response to prevent shortages of critical raw materials. His intervention was well received, and so he soon found himself heading the newly established Office of War Raw Materials (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung, KRA). Rathenau and his work at the KRA is a particularly interesting place to observe how the problematization of the new vulnerabilities of industrialized countries eventually led to the promotion of stockpiling. ⁸ Before joining the KRA, Rathenau was head of the utility company AEG as well as a prolific author commenting on the contemporary zeitgeist. As a paradigmatic ‘system builder’ (Hughes, 1990), he was well acquainted with problems of stocks and flow in complex industrial systems, and as a public intellectual he lucidly pointed out the broader ramifications of the managerial innovations introduced at the KRA.

As a first step in office, Rathenau initiated attempts to estimate the extent of the raw material shortages. Using sample data on the inventories of 900 German companies, the KRA established a survey of the currently available raw material reserves and their future requisition. It turned out that available stocks would only last a few months because the industries had reduced their storage facilities and warehouse stocks, relying on the continuity of incoming material flows from all over the world (Krajewski, 2005: 202). The KRA then tried to identify bottlenecks in Germany’s industrial production, resorting to what Krajewski (2005: 207) calls ‘material flow research’. This endeavor in many ways resembles what Collier and Lakoff (2015: 26) refer to as the ‘science of flow’ that military strategists and New Deal economists conducted in the USA from the 1920s onwards. These emerging bodies of expertise made it clear that industrial societies depended on a ‘complex of vital systems’ (Collier and Lakoff, 2015: 26) and a series of critical raw materials.

Following this analysis, the KRA began to implement a series of countermeasures to prevent shortages: from rationing and the confiscation of materials both in Germany and in the countries it invaded, to recycling scarce materials or substituting them with new synthetic alternatives. Goods and materials should no longer flow spontaneously, according to liberal laissez faire principles, but according to the needs of the German military. ‘Organisms had to be created for the absorption, storage and distribution of this flow of goods, which rolled in new patterns of movement and with new supplies through the arteries of German traffic’ (Rathenau, 1915: 24). These new ‘organisms’ foreshadowed a new kind of ‘planned economy’ (Rathenau, 1915: 42–44) that Lenin would recognize as the ‘prototype of a socialized economy’ (Scott, 1998: 100). Despite the success of these strategies to administer material flows, Rathenau also insisted that coming wars would demand better preparation and especially the stockpiling of critical materials. ‘It can and should happen never again that we are economically inadequately prepared for a new war [. . .]. Not only do we have to know what we have in the country that is indispensable, but we must also constantly ensure that we have as much in the country as we need. Massive stores (gewaltige Lager) must be established’ (Rathenau, 1915: 45). Stockpiling became an important technique for securing the flow of materials that made both industrialized warfare and industrialized life possible.

In the course of World War I, military and economic experts in other countries similarly started to advocate stockpiling as a response to risks associated with the disruption of material flows. In 1917, US military strategists began to confront the problem that the country was ‘deficient in certain minerals of great importance’ and started to establish strategic stockpiling projects (National Research Council, 2008: A-1). In 1938, the Strategic Materials Act was passed, which issued funds to stockpile strategic raw materials (National Research Council, 2008: A-1). In the same year, Great Britain passed the Essential Commodities Reserve Act to prevent shortages in the event of war. Just like the German war economy during World War I, these stockpiling projects caught the attention of critics of liberal economics. In his 1938 text ‘The Policy of Government Storage of Food-Stuffs and Raw Materials’, John Maynard Keynes referred to the Essential Commodities Act as an example of the feasibility and potential benefits of big government stockpiling projects. Keynes (1938: 460) hoped that, in the future, government stockpiles might not only serve as a ‘war insurance’ but also constitute an instrument to smooth out the trade cycle. ‘It is an outstanding fault of the competitive system that there is no sufficient incentive . . . to store surplus stocks of materials, so as to maintain continuity of output and to average . . . periods of high and low demand. The competitive system abhors the existence of stocks, with as strong a reflex as nature abhors a vacuum, because stocks yield a negative return in terms of themselves’ (Keynes, 1938: 449, emphasis in original).

Despite Rathenau’s advice and his continued influence on German politics (he was appointed foreign minister in 1922), Germany was one of the few industrialized countries that did not establish strategic raw materials stockpiles after World War I, because the Versailles treaty severely restricted German war preparations. Even the Nazis were eager to keep their strategic stockpiling projects in preparation for the coming war secret. In 1934, they established a dummy company that allowed them to start to systematically stockpile oil and aviation fuel in huge underground storage facilities (Karlsch and Stokes, 2003: 180–186). Nevertheless, fuel supplies remained Germany’s Achilles heel throughout the war. As soon as the allies had successfully destroyed the German capacity for synthetic fuel production, they had won the ‘technical war’, as Albert Speer (1969: 357) would later admit.

The supply of oil remained crucial for military operations after the war. But it also became a critical resource for civilian life since it fueled the postwar economic boom in industrialized countries in the West (Mitchell, 2011). The supply of oil became a geopolitical as well as an economic security concern in the West, and the establishment of strategic oil reserves one of the biggest stockpiling projects during the Cold War. Usually these projects are associated with the oil embargo by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1973. However, as historian Peter Graf (2014: 54–58) has emphasized, the dependence of Western nations on foreign oil had already become a widely recognized problem during the 1956 Suez crisis, in which Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser blocked the Suez canal. At the beginning of the 1960s, the OECD had already proposed a series of measures to prepare for similar disruptions, stating that the ‘Suez crisis . . . underlined the fears . . . about the security of oil supplies. . . . [T]his sharp reminder served to encourage such measures as the further diversification of overseas sources of supply and stockbuilding . . . as an insurance against a similar emergency in the future’ (OEEC Oil Committee quoted in Graf, 2014: 54–55).

The 1973 events only intensified efforts to secure oil supplies. In 1974, the International Energy Agency (IEA) was established, its main task being to ‘to meet oil supply emergencies’ (IEA, 1974: 5) by monitoring and coordinating national stockpiling activities and other emergency responses by the member-states (Graf, 2014: 311–314; Mitchell, 2011: 197). The IEA reinforced the measures introduced by the OECD in the 1960s. Article 2 of the founding ‘Agreement on an International Energy Programme’ stipulated that member-countries ‘shall maintain emergency reserves sufficient to sustain consumption for at least 60 days with no net oil imports’ (IEA, 1974: 6). The IEA programme is an internationally coordinated stockpiling project. Although the member-countries are responsible for establishing sufficient emergency reserves, the programme also entails an oil-sharing scheme to prevent countries hoarding their reserves in times of oil shortages and thereby aggravating a situation of crisis.

Stockpiling is only one of the measures used to react to ‘oil supply emergencies’. To buffer supply shortages in the short term, IEA member-countries should implement ‘demand restraints’ (IEA, 1974: 7). Moreover, in the long run, strategies for more energy security were supposed to reduce the dependence on imported oil. The IEA fostered new cooperations with oil-producing countries to diversify the sources for oil imports and promoted alternative energy sources to reduce the oil dependence of its member-states. This underlines the fact that stockpiling became a crucial technology in the larger dispositive of vital systems security. But the stockpiling schemes were never just about preventing absolute shortages. They were also concerned with relative shortages on global energy markets increasing the price of oil. In many instances, the release of oil from the stockpiles – as during the 1991 Gulf War and after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 ⁹ – was supposed to calm markets. In these cases, the securing effect of stockpiling resided in its ability to work on the expectations of global energy markets. Since threats to national (resource) sovereignty were increasingly mediated by global markets, the stockpiling of oil became a crucial security technology because it could promote both geopolitical and economic security concerns.

Between security and austerity: Stockpiling in German catastrophe preparedness

The post-9/11 security landscape is characterized by the proliferation of comprehensive attempts to govern catastrophes of diverse origins, from terrorist attacks, through infrastructure breakdown, to pandemics (Anderson et al., 2015; Aradau and Van Munster, 2011; Kaufmann, 2011). Stockpiling projects were not abandoned with the end of the Cold War but remain an important technique of preparedness (Elbe et al., 2014; Keck, 2017). By looking at contemporary German catastrophe preparedness, I will show how the ancient security technique of stockpiling functions within post-9/11 security assemblages. Germany continues security stockpiling projects other countries have long abandoned. Yet economic and political changes ranging from budgetary constraints in public government and the privatization of infrastructure to new calculative and logistical regimes in the private sector limit the capabilities of even the relatively strong security state in Germany. The German case is thus particularly revealing in showing how stockpiling as a device of the storehouse state operates within late liberal regimes of governmentality.

Contemporary German catastrophe preparedness often resorts to the residues of Cold War stockpiling projects. The strategic oil reserves Germany holds to comply with IEA regulations recently came into play as a potential emergency reserve to buffer the effects of an electricity blackout (TAB, 2011: 233–235). Another longstanding stockpiling project going back to the Cold War is the storage of food. Germany is among the few European countries, which include Finland and Norway, that still stockpile large amounts of foodstuffs for catastrophe situations (BBK, 2012: 171). The federal grain reserve (Bundesreserve Getreide) stores 440,000 tons of wheat, 140,000 tons of oat and 50,000 tons of rye. This is supplemented by the civil emergency reserve (Zivile Notfallreserve), which also includes rice, legumes, powdered milk and condensed milk. There are over 100 large storehouses and granaries strategically located next to areas of high population density. Their location is kept secret to prevent looting in times of catastrophe (BLE, 2016b). The most important feature for the selection of the stockpiled foodstuffs is their storability and relative permanency. The reserves can endure up to ten years in the stores until they have to be exchanged. Parasites such as mice and insects trying to get their share of the food are the biggest threats to such food reserves. If stockpiling causes a freezing of time, then parasites reintroduce the ‘tooth of time’, the wear and tear subjecting the material world to an irreversible trajectory of growing decay. Pest control therefore represents another form of maintenance work preserving the material order and temporal function of the stockpile.

Contemporary security stockpiles are more than just a residue of the Cold War. More recent stockpiling projects respond to novel threats. Hoarding pharmaceuticals in pandemic preparedness (BMG and Robert Koch Institute, 2007) represents a recent and also the most fruitfully discussed stockpiling project in security studies (Elbe et al., 2014; Keck, 2017). But these stockpiling endeavours have also sparked controversy over the costs of storing pharmaceuticals that were ultimately not used because the anticipated epidemic did not turn out to be as severe as expected (Elbe et al., 2014: 441). These critiques are indicative of a general problem of stockpiling in contemporary modes of governing. Emergency stockpiles that may never be put to good use are costly. They have to be stored, and the stores have to be maintained. They require expenditure not only for their acquisition but often also for the disposal of the stored materials. Because of these costs, stockpiling for public security is often at odds with fiscal responsibility. This is an increasing problem because, for late liberal governmentality, ‘good governance’ has almost become synonymous with fiscal responsibility. Budgetary constraints systematically limit governmental activity (Collier, 2005). In Germany, catastrophe situations constitute one of the few exceptions to the balanced-budget amendment fixed by the constitution. This makes possible the release of funds for disaster relief. However, this exception does not apply for longstanding, preparatory stockpiling projects because they are not triggered by an immediate emergency situation. Concerns over fiscal responsibility require that security experts not only estimate how many resources they need to respond to a disaster scenario, but also estimate the cost efficiency of their projects. Drawing on a useful distinction made by Nikolas Rose (1993: 295), one can say that the rationalities of security experts are traditionally dominated by ‘substantive’ calculations, since ‘the objectives of rule’ are ‘directly inscribed into the calculations of rulers’. In the case of stockpiling, this means that experts have to estimate the appropriate amount of buffer stocks for a specified disaster scenario. ‘In contrast, advanced liberal modes of rule have a certain “formal” character. The calculative regimes of positive knowledges . . . are to be replaced by the calculative regimes of accounting’ (Rose, 1993: 295). Increasingly, disaster experts have to combine substantive rationality with the formal rationality of budgetary discipline and fiscal accounting. Or, to put it in the words of the German Civil Protection Strategy, calculations have to take into account both the ‘effectivity’ of security measures and the ‘efficiency’ of fiscal expenses (BBK, 2010: 30). Experts do not just have to estimate what and how much to stockpile, but also how much such endeavours cost and whether this is an efficient use of limited funds.

Though federal disaster experts are busy making assurances that compromises between the substantive rationality of disaster preparedness and the formal rationality of cost efficiency are feasible, the tension between both rationalities has sparked controversy. A good example of this conflict is the issue of additional hospital facilities to accommodate the victims of a mass-casualty incident. While contingency planners argue that 10% of hospital beds should be available for emergency situations, new accounting principles in healthcare make this almost impossible (BBK, 2010: 39; Schutzkommission, 2001: 81, 2006: 59–61). Like its counterparts in many other countries, Germany’s health system has adopted the diagnosis-related groups (DRG) classification as a baseline to account for the cost of patients and to allocate funds to hospitals. As the new accounting principles aim to reduce the cost of the health system, redundant hospital facilities had to be reduced. Accordingly, the federal and state ministers of the interior affirmed – against the advice of disaster preparedness experts – that there ‘is no alternative to the reduction of hospital beds with regard to financing the health system’ (BBK, 2010: 83). What contingency planners regard as buffer stock – 10% of hospital beds kept free – is read as ‘excessive’ through the lens of the new accounting principles.

It comes as no surprise that the private sector is even less willing to establish extensive security stockpiles and buffer stocks. For German catastrophe preparedness, this poses a significant challenge since it relies on cooperation with the private sector – especially in critical infrastructure protection. Private companies have been responsible for the provision of most infrastructure services in Germany since the wave of privatization and market liberalization that began in the 1990s. Even though the government obliges private critical infrastructure operators to establish security reserves, the companies often make use of calculative techniques that allow them to meet regulatory requirements without actually having ample capacities for crisis situations. State actors frequently complain about this problem without being able to do much about it. ‘Although operators largely comply with regulatory requirements, increasingly precise calculations allow them to take greater advantage of room for discretion and to reduce security buffers, which are then missing especially in crisis situations’ (BMI, 2008: 11).

As mentioned above, in the 1930s Keynes (1938: 449) had already highlighted the problem that the ‘competitive system abhors the existence of stocks’. This tendency intensified with advances in business logistics. Since the revolution in logistics during the Cold War (Cowen, 2014: 23–52), and the rise of just-in-time production, companies have reduced their inventories significantly. Warehouses increasingly figure as a ‘prison of value . . . trapping capital in an immobile, and thus unproductive, form’ (Danyluk, 2017: 636), and thus give way to distribution centres designed ‘inside and out to keep goods as mobile as possible’ (Cidell, 2015: 17). With reduced safety stocks, supply chains have become more efficient but at the same time more vulnerable to disruption. They have increased efficiency at the expense of resilience. German contingency planners frequently problematize ‘reduced inventories’ in the context of just-in-time logistics (TAB, 2011: 221). In most cases, this problem remains within the private sector, where companies become more vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. But in some branches, like food logistics, the reduction of warehouse stocks poses a threat to the security of the population. Traditional distribution in food logistics operated via a multilevel distribution system with stores at each level down to the retailer. In recent years, this multilevel system has given way to a more centralized system, which ‘causes the reduction of the amount of stored goods, since each warehouse obtained a security buffer to accommodate fluctuations in demand’ (BBK, 2012: 120). In addition, an increasing amount of stocks in the supply chains of contemporary food logistics are frozen foods and therefore depend on functioning electricity supplies to ensure the integrity of the cold chain (BBK, 2012: 123).

Of preppers and hoarders: The stockpiling self as a storekeeper of last resort

Since both the public government and the private sector are increasingly running out of stock, security experts and governmental programmes seek to enrol citizens as responsible storekeepers. On the one hand, the German government depicts its citizens as contributing to the problem of the lack of security stocks. Private households reduced their stockpiling activity because of lifestyle changes and a potentially dangerous sense of security (BBK, 2012: 163–170). In addition, the population allegedly suffers from a misplaced ‘comprehensive coverage mentality’ (Vollkaskomentalität) (Bundestag, 2012: 47), according to which the state is expected to take care of their well-being in times of catastrophe. But, on the other hand, the government also repeatedly appeals to its citizens to become part of the solution by assembling their own emergency stockpiles. Public agencies seek to assist citizens in compiling their reserves by issuing guidelines on emergency stockpiling. Brochures and information campaigns try to stress the importance of keeping security reserves by pointing out which services are taken for granted and might not be available during a catastrophe (BBK, 2017a: 9). They also offer practical advice for stockpiling: how to preserve food, store it, keep it away from pests, etc. (BLE, 2016a). Finally, they issue comprehensive lists that specify what to stockpile and in what kind of amounts (BBK, 2017b). In addition to the generic lists for a two-week emergency reserve mentioned at the start of this article, there is an online tool, the storage calculator (Vorratskalkulator), that promises to assist users in calculating custom-built emergency food stockpiles (BLE, 2016a).

While the act of stockpiling survival equipment for you and your loved ones seems to be a relic of the Cold War, the governmental interpellation of the stockpiling self might also be understood as an activation strategy typical of a (neo)liberal style of governing. As the state retreats from its traditional welfare functions, it appeals to the prudence of its citizens, making them responsible for their own well-being in turbulent, precarious and sometimes even catastrophic times. The government no longer offers substantive resources to deal with hardship. It just assists its citizens with cognitive devices like the stockpiling checklist or the storage calculator to make rational decisions. It abstracts from the material living conditions of large parts of the population who lack financial and/or physical manoeuvring space to store sufficient survival equipment. However, the appeals to the prudent stockkeeper also differ significantly from other more common interpellations of the ‘neoliberal subject’. Just take the differences between the quintessential ‘neoliberal subject’ extensively discussed in the literature on governmentality – the enterprising self (Rose, 1992) – and the stockpiling self. While the former is supposed to be flexible and mobile, always seeking to optimize his or her assets by making investments and putting things into circulation, the latter just gathers materials without increasing their value. In this regard, the act of stockpiling can be seen to be less akin to the enterprising self than to the hoarder that TV shows and news reports portray as obsessive owing to their inclination to amass random items. The perceived pathology of the hoarder resides in his or her inability to let things go because he or she obsessively clings to a past embodied in objects long out of use. ¹⁰ Unlike the hoarder, the stockpiling self does not store things because he or she clings to the past, but does it to prepare for the future. However, the stockpiling self’s attitude to the future is not as rational, positive and active as that of the enterprising self. The stockpile – in contrast to the investment or the asset – is not intended to bring about a better future, but just to keep a dangerous future from becoming catastrophic. With such a negative and passive attitude towards the future, the emergency storekeeper is situated halfway between the enterprising self and the hoarder. This is what makes the enrolment of citizens as stockpiling selves so contradictory. It is not a straightforward ‘neoliberal’ interpellation of a rational self, because it expects the citizen to commit to a practice that economically prudent agencies like private companies and fiscally responsible bodies of government are increasingly less willing to do. The stockpiling self is not so much an autonomous citizen responsibly taking care of him- or herself. Rather, the stockpiling self functions as an ‘emergency supply’, the storekeeper of last resort, for an increasingly undersupplied system of catastrophe preparedness.

Conclusion

Stockpiling functions as a technology of preparedness because of its unique ontological features. By holding back resources, it freezes time, making it available for future use to bridge disruptions and buffer emergency situations. The temporality of the stockpile is not so much about the ‘becoming’ of matter that recent process philosophies stress. Rather, it is the effect of a particular moulding of matter that temporarily suspends this becoming in order to make a certain set of its potentialities available for the future. By arresting the processuality and eventfulness of matter, it harnesses the securing features of the stored materials. Stockpiling materializes anticipatory security politics since the stockpile is both an outcome of and a baseline for anticipations of potential threats. Its material persistence can stabilize or even enable expectations. Without ever being used in an actual emergency, it can have a securing effect. By stressing the entanglement of matter and time characteristic of the ontology of stockpiling, this article connects debates about the politics of anticipation and matters of security.

The history of stockpiling is as long as that of human civilization. In the earliest times of civilization, the stockpile served as the quintessential power reserve of centralized storehouse states. In modernity, storing activities became more dispersed as money and commodity exchange in tandem with new transport infrastructures made it possible to secure vital resources through circulation. In the course of the 20th century, stockpiling became a reflexive security device reacting to the risks emerging from the ever more complex system of circulations. As an emergency reserve, it seeks to buffer disruptions of complex social-technical flows and thereby helps to preserve the continuity of vital systems. In the current system of German catastrophe preparedness, it still provides essential survival equipment. However, the ability of states to extensively stockpile food, raw materials, energy resources, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment is limited by budgetary constraints, while the super-efficient supply chains of contemporary capitalism operate with only a minimal amount of warehouse stocks.

The article’s focus on stockpiling has revealed a series of frictions within contemporary apparatuses of security, as well as paradoxes of stockpiling. First, though stockpiling goes against the grain of just-in-time capitalism, it becomes important as an emergency buffer precisely because warehouse stocks have been reduced to increase the efficiency of supply chains. In being able to reflectively react to the vulnerability of contemporary capitalist circulations, it is not just an outdated residue of Cold War security, but a timely response to the pathologies of the present. Another case in point is the role of capital buffers in the current Basel III accord (Bank for International Settlements, 2010), which was a response to the problem of the seemingly efficient low rates of equity and high leverage ratio in financial institutions during the 2007–2008 financial crisis (Langley, 2014). Second, stockpiling to prepare for critical shortages in the future might contribute to states of scarcity in the present. While this seems to be a peculiarity of archaic states storing grains or military regimes hoarding critical materials for warfare, the fiscal regimes of austerity have a similar effect. They also withold funds from present use to ostensibly ensure fiscal possibilities of the future and thereby induce states of public fiscal scarcity. Ironically, the rationality of fiscal futurity often prevents proper preparation for catastrophic futures through security techniques like stockpiling. Third, drawing attention to these limitations of security with regard to practices of stockpiling under current conditions of austerity complements the picture drawn by critical security studies scholars who have analysed the rearmament of security since 9/11 through new means of surveillance (Amoore and De Goede, 2005), premediation devices (De Goede, 2008) and illiberal legislation (Opitz, 2011). The perspective of stockpiling reveals that very often the informationally rich security apparatuses are in many ways materially poor; disaster scenarios often only find limited material support in time-conserving emergency reserves; and illiberal security techniques encounter all-too-liberal rationalities of budgeting. Finally, the fact that governments seek to enrol private citizens as storekeepers of last resort reveals the paradoxical subject position of the neoliberal stockpiling self. Governments prompt their citizens that often lack the economic and spatial ressources for emergency stockpiling to engage in something that private corporations and ‘fiscally responsible’ governments are less and less willing to do.