The Great Regression’
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Table of Contents 1. Title page 2. Copyright page 3. Contributors 4. Preface 1. Notes 5. 1: Democracy fatigue 1. Leaders and followers 2. The message from above 3. Vox populi 4. Where is Europe headed? 5. Notes 6. 2: Symptoms in search of an object and a name 1. Notes 7. 3: Progressive and regressive politics in late neoliberalism 1. Neoliberal globalization as the challenge 2. Progressive movements against neoliberal globalization 3. Regressive movements? 4. On movements and counter-movements: some conclusions 5. Notes 8. 4: Progressive neoliberalism versus reactionary populism: a Hobson's choice 9. 5: From the paradox of liberation to the demise of liberal elites 1. Paradoxes of liberation 2. The Janus face of a secular culture and a religious state 3. The big bang of Israeli politics 4. A tragic end 5. The task of the left 6. Notes 10. 6: Majoritarian futures 1. The end of…? 2. Normative threats 3. The migrants’ revolution 4. The populist turn 5. Notes 11. 7: Europe as refuge 12. 8: Overcoming the fear of freedom 1. The neoliberal attack 2. The moral effects of structural transformation 3. The narrative failure of neoliberalism 4. How consent for migration disintegrated 5. The narrative struggle ahead 6. Notes 13. 9: Politics in the age of resentment: the dark legacy of the Enlightenment 1. Notes 14. 10: The courage to be audacious 1. Let's talk about class 2. Cultural alienation 3. Restoring momentum to the European Union 4. A clear view of reality 5. Dilemmas that will remain 6. Notes 15. 11: Decivilization: on regressive tendencies in Western societies 1. Civilization and decivilization 2. Individualization and regressive modernization 3. Decline and the erosion of civilization 4. The decivilizing processes 5. Notes 16. 12: From global regression to post-capitalist counter-movements 1. Emerging counter-movements 2. Learning from the European periphery 3. The social crisis and the limits of middle-classness 4. Globally learned defencelessness and the possibility of Europe 5. Beyond the recession, beyond capitalism 6. Notes 17. 13: The return of the repressed as the beginning of the end of neoliberal capitalism 1. The ‘post-factual age’ 2. Moralization, demoralization and the return of the repressed 3. Cut off 4. Interregnum 5. Notes 18. 14: Dear President Juncker 1. Notes 19. 15: The populist temptation 1. Notes 20. End User License Agreement 2017 Contributors Arjun Appadurai, born 1949 in Mumbai, is Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and Visiting Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2016/17). Zygmunt Bauman, born 1925 in Posen, died 2017 in Leeds, taught latterly at the University of Leeds. He received many accolades for his work, including the Theodor W. Adorno Award (1998) and the Prince of Asturias Award (2013). Donatella della Porta, born 1956 in Catania, is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre of Social Movement Studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. Nancy Fraser, born 1947 in Baltimore, is Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York. Heinrich Geiselberger, born 1977 in Waiblingen, has been an editor at Suhrkamp Verlag since 2006. Eva Illouz, born 1961 in Fès, is Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the EHESS in Paris. She writes regularly for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. Ivan Krastev, born 1965 in Lukovit, is Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and Permanent Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. Since 2015, he has been a regular contributor to the New York Times International Edition. Bruno Latour, born 1947 in Beaune, is Professor at Sciences Po Paris and at the Centre de sociologie des organisations. He has received multiple awards, including the 2013 Holberg Prize. Paul Mason, born 1960 in Leigh, is an English author and award-winning television journalist. He worked for many years for the BBC and Channel 4 News and now writes regularly for the Guardian. Pankaj Mishra, born 1969 in Jhansi, is an Indian essayist, literary critic and author. Amongst other publications, he writes for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the Guardian. In 2014 he received the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Robert Misik, born 1966 in Vienna, is a journalist and political writer. He writes for the daily newspaper die tageszeitung as well as the magazines Falter and Profil and manages the video blog ‘FS Misik’ on the website of the daily newspaper Der Standard. In 2009 he received the Austrian State Prize for Cultural Communication. Oliver Nachtwey, born 1975 in Unna, is a sociologist at the Technische Universität Darmstadt whose research focuses on labour, inequality, protest and democracy. He writes regularly for daily and weekly newspapers and web portals. César Rendueles, born 1975 in Girona, teaches sociology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Wolfgang Streeck, born 1946 in Lengerich, is a sociologist. From 1995 to 2014 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. His research centres on comparative political economy and theories of institutional change. He is a regular contributor to the New Left Review. David Van Reybrouck, born 1971 in Bruges, is a writer, dramatist, journalist, archaeologist and historian. In 2011 he founded G1000, an initiative that campaigns for democratic innovations in Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. His book Congo: The Epic History of a People received several awards, including the ECI Literature Prize, the NDR Kultur Non- fiction Prize and the Prix Médicis essai (all 2012). His articles appear in newspapers internationally, such as Le Monde, La Repubblica and De Standaard. Slavoj Žižek, born 1949 in Ljubljana, teaches at the European Graduate School, Birkbeck, University of London, and at the Institute for Sociology at the University of Ljubljana. Preface Heinrich Geiselberger When a world order breaks down, that is when people begin to think about it. Ulrich Beck 20111 The idea for this book arose in late autumn 2015, after a series of terrorist attacks had shaken Paris and as the debate in Germany about the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees became increasingly fraught. The reaction to these events in politics, the media and general discourse gave the impression that the world was suddenly falling below the standards it had fought hard to achieve and had thought of as secure. Directly associated with terrorism and migration is the fact that all around the globe the number of territories in which a state as such no longer exists is growing. Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, the three countries from which most people seeking asylum in Germany came in 2016, ranked near the top of the ‘Fragile State Index’ compiled by the NGO Fund for Peace in the same year.2 While the blank spaces on the maps had grown smaller and smaller over the centuries, things now appear to be going in the opposite direction. In the age of Google Maps there are a growing number of territories of which one knows very little and which ancient cartographers would have marked with the phrase hic sunt leones. Furthermore, many of the political reactions to the terrorist attacks and the migrant wave fit the pattern of post- democratic gesture politics and what sociologists call ‘securitization’. There are the calls for walls, and there has even been talk of orders to shoot at refugees trying to cross frontiers. The president of France has declared a state of emergency, saying that the country is at war. Unable to tackle the global causes of such challenges as immigration and terrorism or growing inequality at the national level, or to combat them with long-term strategies, more and more politicians rely on law and order at home, together with the promise to make their respective countries ‘great again’.3 In the Age of Austerity, it is evidently no longer possible to offer citizens much in their roles as workers, fellow sovereign citizens, school children or users of public infrastructure. In consequence, the political emphasis has shifted to the dimension of nationality, the promise of safety, and the restoration of the glory of a bygone age. The list of the symptoms of decline could be extended almost indefinitely. We could highlight the yearning for an anarchic, unilateral de-globalization or the emergence of the Identitarian movement, as for example in France, Italy and Austria; or the growing xenophobia and Islamophobia, the wave of so-called hate crimes, and of course the rise of authoritarian demagogues such as Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Narendra Modi. By the late autumn of 2015 all this was accompanied by an increased hysteria and a coarsening of public discourse, together with a certain herd mentality on the part of the established media. Evidently, people could no longer talk about flight and migration without invoking the semantic fields of ‘natural catastrophes’ and ‘epidemics’. Instead of issuing calls for calm and pragmatism or contextualizing events historically and thus helping to see them in perspective, the risks of terrorism and immigration in Germany were turned into the greatest challenge not just since Reunification but even since the Second World War. At demonstrations as well as on the internet, terms such as ‘lying press’, ‘dictatorship of the chancellor’ and ‘traitors to the people’ (Volksverräter) instead of ‘representatives of the people’ (Volksvertreter) became common currency. Symptoms such as these are discussed in the present book under the heading of ‘the great regression’. Beyond the naive belief in progress that might be implicit in that term, it is intended to make clear that the ratchet effects of modernization appear to have lost their force in the most diverse spheres of activity and that we are witnessing a reversion to an earlier stage of ‘civilized conduct’.4 However, the term is intended also to point to a further puzzling phenomenon, namely that in the debates about the impact of globalization we have in some respects fallen back beneath the level that had already been reached almost twenty years ago.