Abstract
This conversation between Zygmunt Bauman and Aleksandra Kania picks up on the themes of crisis, interregnum and the decline of the West. Decline of the West is first of all decline of western civilization. This easily leads to panic about the end of the world; what it really indicates is the limits and constraints of a world system based on nation-states. Spengler and Elias are introduced as interlocutors, in order to open these issues, and those of capitalism, socialism and caesarism. Trump here appears as a wilfully decisionist leader. Populism plays its part, but illiberalism now overpowers neoliberalism. Bauman and Kania engage in this text as interlocutors; this is a record of their own dialogue, and a reminder of its possibilities.
In debates on the decline of western civilization, the notion of ‘civilization’ has many different and changing meanings. Etymologically, the term was derived from the Latin words ‘civilis’ or ‘civis’ (citizen) and ‘civitas’ (city). It appeared in social thought in the second half of the 18th century as a description of an advanced stage in the development of human society or of the process by which a society reaches such an advanced stage, characterized by a complex, centralized, urbanized, stratified structure. Despite the dominating assumption, in the Age of Enlightenment, of the superiority of the civilized world over savage or barbaric forms of social life, a sense of ambiguity in evaluations of civilization’s achievements (particularly the difference between its material and ethical aspects, or civilization and culture) was already being expressed in the 18th century. The plural noun ‘civilizations’ did not become common until the 20th century; then it also led to Samuel Huntington’s anticipation of ‘the clash of civilizations’ (1997). Explanations and predictions put forward for the collapse of civilization focused either on competition, conflicts, and wars between them, or on their internal developmental cycles, vicissitudes, contradictions and tensions.
Note, by the way, that Sigmund Freud still thought it unnecessary, indeed redundant, to supply the noun ‘civilization’, cropping up frequently in his social studies, with an adjective informing which civilization he had in mind; he used that noun in the singular, implying – in agreement with the European majority’s mindset of the time – that adding the term ‘western’ would have been redundant; there was but one – the western – civilization, and it was precisely that uniqueness which set the West apart from the rest of the globe.
Condensing and simplifying somewhat the story of the concept of ‘civilizations’, and particularly that of the ‘western civilization’ that prepared the ground for the present-day ‘decline of the West’ apprehensions occasionally exploding in ‘end of the world’ panics that one can distinguish in it three milestones.
The first: the 1648 ‘Westphalian Settlement’, negotiated by the emissaries of the dynasties ruling over the lands of Western Europe who gathered in Münster and Osnabrück for the purpose of coining a formula allowing an end to be put to dozens of years of gory and devastating post-reformation religious wars. The seminal product and lasting heritage of that gathering was the principle ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ (in a loose, yet correct translation, one that boils it down to the substance of the matter: ‘the land’s ruler decides which of the competing gods the land’s inhabitants must cherish and obey’). In nuce, the Westphalian formula was the principle of the territorial sovereignty of political bodies.
The second: In 1755, Lisbon, at that time awed, admired, and envied as one of the few most impressively blooming economic, intellectual, and political centres of Europe, was visited in quick succession by the triple natural catastrophes of earthquakes, a city fire, and a deluge of unremembered ferocity, and was all but swept off the map. Reactions to that event by the learned, as well as most other publicly voiced opinions, were as swift as they were profound – indeed, radical in the original sense of ‘reaching to the roots of the matter’: Nature, having followed Divine design, had revealed itself blind, deaf, and altogether neglectful and indifferent to reason, justice, and the distinction between right and wrong. Therefore, it should no longer be left to its own resources and logic (or rather illogicality) and should instead be taken under human management. Under that new management, the extant ‘is’ of things and acts wouldn’t be the sufficient reason of their ‘ought’ any longer. Humans would have the right (and calling) to set and re-set the status quo.
The third milestone was the 1848 Spring of Nations. A series of uprisings sending tremors all over Europe, while among themselves recycling the human management of world affairs from that of kings, princes, and other enlightened despots into one of the masses, now renamed into nations. The formula cuius regio eius religio, after replacing ‘religio’ by ‘natio’, was wedded to the transfer of ‘regio’ from prospectively enlightened monarchs to the newly enfranchised ‘le peuple’ – and deployed in the service of the modern nation or state, and of nation-state building. The revised formula was transplanted onto other continents, and at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 to 1921 proclaimed (in the form of the ‘Right of Nations to Self-determination’) a universal principle of worldwide human cohabitation, reconfirmed by the statute of the United Nations.
In State of Crisis (2014), you and Carlo Bordoni analysed how the post-Westphalian model of the modern state entered into crisis with processes of globalization: the modern nation-state, by performing the task of serving the cause of autonomy and independence, is demonstrating its unfitness to act effectively under the condition of a global interdependence of humans. The crisis of territorial sovereignty of nation-states involved the separation of power (the capacity to get things done that flew into global space freed from political control) and politics (the ability to decide which things ought to be done that remained fixed and constrained on the local level), as well as a crisis of democracy related to contradictions and tensions between its basic principles – freedom, equality, and justice. You described this situation as an ‘interregnum’ – a time when old institutions do not function effectively anymore, but new, alternative solutions do not exist yet.
From these milestones, particularly the second one, a string of new departures and transformations took off that prompted, in their turn, a long line of attempts to summarise and evaluate the consequences of such a fateful step, as well as to anticipate the various plausible scenarios of their future impacts. That line veered consistently upwards on the scale of philosophical and public optimism through the halcyon days of the unprecedented growth of Europe’s industry, wealth, territorial conquest, and self-confidence, only to slip down on that scale and start sliding into a space filled by ever darker premonitions under the shocks delivered by the horrors of world wars, the rising gravity and frequency of economic crises, and the first signals of the imminent end to the era of Europe’s imperialism and colonialism. Intimations went on accruing, to be eventually synthesized and condensed into the family of ideas, from a decline of the West, through the collapse of the civilization as we know it, right to the one of the end of world; all such ideas were able to trace their provenance to the rapid shrinking of Europe’s world-wide material domination and spiritual hegemony. Beneath are two examples, derived from many (though by many believed to be most impressive, influential, and convincing).
In 1939, Norbert Elias, a refugee from Nazi Germany who settled in Great Britain, examined the emergence of modernity as the ‘civilizing process’ that changed the social habitus and human conduct, which has increasingly become dominated by manners, or self-restraint and self-approbation. He also showed the emergence of ‘civilized’ behaviour as referring not so much to the elimination of aggressiveness, undue coercion, and violence from human life (followed with all barbarism, brutality, boorishness and cruelty life is all-too ready to supply), but as, so to speak, ‘sweeping all three of them under a carpet’: removing them from the sight of ‘civilized people’, out of the places that such people are likely to visit and to hear about, and to transfer them to the charge of ‘inferior people’, excluded for all practical intents and purposes from ‘civilized society’. Efforts to achieve such an effect went together with the removal, from patrician salons to plebeian hovels, of the kind of behaviour recognized, evaluated, and condemned as barbaric, coarse, crude, discourteous, ill-bred, ill-mannered, impertinent, impolite, inelegant, loud-mouthed, loutish, rude, unseemly, or vulgar – and all in all uncouth and unfit to be used by ‘civilized persons’ and degrading and discrediting them if used.
Elias’s study was completed and published on the very eve of the most barbaric explosion of violence in the history of the human species. Thus the reception of his opus magnum was delayed for 30 years until it was republished in 1969 and translated from German into English. By that time the atrocities of Auschwitz and Hiroshima were discarded in the lumber-room of history and the West had regained and boosted its pride in its civilizing mission. When, in the last decades, violence returned from exile with a vengeance, and vulgar language elbowed out elegant speech from salons and the public stage, numerous disciples and followers announced the advent of a ‘de-civilizing process’ and bent over backward to explain the sudden, unanticipated reversal in the human condition – albeit to little and unsatisfactory effect.
More radical voices went somewhat further: they reached back to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, suggesting that what is happening currently to the civilization of the West is but another repetition of the pattern that each civilization, past and future, must follow in its history. Using his unique botanic metaphorics, Spengler presented that pattern as a succession of Spring, with its bold because naive creativity; Summer, with its maturation of flowers and fruits; Autumn, with their wilting and fading; and, finally, a Winter marked by freezing the creative spirit in half-dead, anything-but-creative mannerisms. As for the case of the West, the passage from (spiritual) culture to mundane, material, matter-of-factly civilization occurred around 1800 – ‘on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect’. Culture-men live inwards. The civilization-man lives outwards in space and amongst bodies and ‘facts’.
Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) and Norbert Elias (1897–1990) are indeed the best examples of striking differences in the theoretical, ideological, and political orientations that inspired criticism of western civilization, its degradation and decay. Nevertheless, common to both thinkers, and to many other authors who analysed the crisis of modern civilization and predicted its demise, is the perception of disparity between their ideals and reality, and an awareness of the contradictions between the premises of modern regimes and their performance.
Elias, a German of Jewish origin, who lived many years in exile, wrote of ‘the strong spurt of rationalization and the…no less strong advance of the threshold of shame and repugnance that becomes more and more perceptible in the make-up of Western men’. He describes it as a ‘fear of social degradation’ or of ‘other people’s gestures of superiority’ related to a defencelessness resulting from ‘self-constraint implanted in the individual by others on whom he was dependent, who possessed power and superiority over him’. Now Elias’s works provide us with an understanding of the socio-psychological mechanisms of exclusion related to the processes of the monopolization of power and the differentiation of the social structure when social functions are increasingly differentiated under the pressure of competition, and forms of non-physical violence become separated from physical force.
Spengler, an adherent of a right-wing German nationalism (though he disdained the Nazis), considered civilizations as the destiny of every culture when it is no longer creative and growing, but merely expanding, and is overwhelmed by rational and critical impulses. The early phase of culture and the ‘inwardly lived experience of “we”’ is forming a ‘people’ as ‘a unit of the soul’ or the ‘spiritual units’ distinguished from a ‘population’, a ‘mob’ or the masses living in the world cities. The passage from culture to civilization is marked by the domination of money’s power that uses democracy as its political weapon. Democracy is equivalent to plutocracy. According to Spengler, ‘only one power that can confront money is left. Money is overthrown and abolished by blood.’ The struggle with money is also a battle between capitalism and socialism. However, the final political constitution of late civilization is ‘caesarism’ – the rise of an authoritarian ruler. The first volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West was published in 1918. Almost a century later, some of his insights and predictions have lost none of their immediate interest and topicality (justifying Theodor Adorno’s project to ‘turn Spengler’s reactionary ideas toward progressive ends’). They seem especially relevant to the current debates on those aspects of the crisis of democracy that are evidenced in the conflicts between neoliberalism and neo-populism, which appear to be the major forces on the political scene in many countries around the world and are accompanied by – as you name it – the ‘strong (wo)men’s’ rising stars.
Victor Orban, Jarosław Kaczynski, Robert Fico, Donald Trump – this is an incomplete list of those who have already managed or are about to make it – that is, to impose a rule that has its sole (and sufficient!) foundation and legitimation in the will of the ruler; in other words, to put into practice Carl Schmitt’s (once a pretender to the role of Adolf Hitler’s court philosopher) definition of sovereign power (see his Political Theology) as a ‘decisionist’ rule. The list of those who avidly watch their audacious and brazen insolence, while full of admiration and itching to follow their examples, is lengthening, and fast. Alas, the public acclaim and demand for the first and for the second, and therefore for the principle of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer put into words by Hitler in 1935 and into flesh promptly thereafter, is growing as fast – and perhaps yet faster. The supply market for would-be ‘one and only’ leaders has turned quickly, and thus far unstoppably, into a market of demand. Trump became the President of the US because he made it clear to Americans that he will be that kind of a leader, and because Americans wanted be led by a leader of that kind.
A ‘decisionist’ leader needs nothing except (spontaneous or contrived, voluntary or imposed) public acclaim to act. His decisions bear no other constraints – not even the one supposedly derived from and/or imposed by genuine or putative ‘higher reasons’ or supreme, indisputable super-human commandments – as in the case of the divinely anointed monarchs of the Middle Ages. A decisionist leader comes close to the absolute: as God in his reply to Job’s questioning, he refuses to explain his decisions, and rejects Job’s (or anybody else for that matter) right to ask for an explanation and expect it to be given. The sole explanation the leader’s resolution required and owed to those affected, and given to them, is the leader’s will.
The ‘certainty’ of things that are important to life happening or not is the most avid of dreams dreamed by people harassed and oppressed by their uncertainty (though that certainty might also be, as William Pitt the Younger observed already in 1783, ‘the plea for every infringement of human freedom’ and ‘the argument of tyrants’). Politics guided by the decisionist principle are the meeting point between the tasty arguments of tyrants and the ravenous appetite of their acclaimers. The new era of liberal democracy (whose imminent advancement Pitt was one of the first to adumbrate) was to be, we may say, dedicated to preventing such a meeting, for the sake of reason and genuine human interests, from happening.
In the course of the subsequent decades merging into centuries, law theorists and practitioners, as well as philosophers of politics, joined forces in order to achieve – and once achieved, to safeguard – that purpose. Their thought and ingenuity was deployed to the pursuit of that objective. In prevailing opinion, the road to fulfilling the purpose (identified for all practical intentions with the passage of power from the kings and princes to people) led through institutional measures: a division between legislative, executive, and judiciary sectors of power, simultaneously mutually autonomous and closely, intimately dovetailed – pressing them thereby to permanently engage in negotiation and agreement, while drawing away from the temptations of solitary, potentially absolute, rule.
That tendency was complemented by another, of a provenance more cultural than institutional. Its manifestation was the slogan ‘liberté, egalité, fraternité’ promoted by les philosophes of Enlightenment and shortly thereafter embroidered on the banners carried from one end of Europe to another by French revolutionary armies. Advocates of that slogan were aware that its three elements only stood a chance of becoming flesh together. Liberté could yield fraternité solely in company with egalité; cut off that medium/mediating postulate from the triad and liberté will most likely lead to inequality, and in effect to division and mutual enmity and strife, instead of to unity and solidarity. Only the triad in its entirety is capable of securing a peaceful and therefore thriving society, well integrated and imbued with the spirit of mutual cooperation. Whether explicitly or implicitly, such a stance came into close association with the ‘classic’ liberalism of the next two centuries, which agreed that humans can be really free only on condition of possessing the capability of making use of their freedom – and only when both qualities, freedom and equality, are obtained can the true fraternité follow. John Stuart Mill drew from his thoroughly liberal convictions socialist conclusions, while Lord Beveridge, the moving spirit and agitator of the universal Welfare State in Britain (as well as the inspirer of the rest of European countries to follow that example), considered and presented the pattern he recommended as indispensable for the implementation of indubitably liberal ideals.
But to cut a long story short: neoliberalism, now the hegemonic philosophy shared by almost the whole of the political spectre (and most certainly the entire part classified by Trump and his ilk as the ‘establishment’ earmarked for annihilation by popular wrath and rebellion), distantiated itself from its predecessor, and indeed, set itself in stark opposition, by doing precisely what classic liberalism fought valiantly to prevent while bending over backward to reverse it in case it was already done: and that by, for all practical intents and purposes, exiling the precept of egalité from the tripartite compact of the Enlightenment’s principles and postulates – even if not always from its entitlement to lip service.
After 30 or 40 years of an undivided and not seriously challenged hegemony of neoliberal philosophy in a country of great expectations and yet, courtesy of its neoliberal rulers, also of their no lesser frustrations, the electoral victory of Trump became all but pre-determined. Given the circumstances, the mistakes and deformations eagerly searched for or construed, and then hotly debated by most opinion-makers, were left the role of icing on a fully baked (over-baked?) cake.
For the self-appointed carriers of great expectations and conquerors of great frustration, the demagogues and haranguers of all brands, in short: personages proclaiming themselves and believed to be strong (wo)men whose strength is measured by their capability of breaking rather than observing the rules of games foisted and cherished by the ‘establishment’, their common enemy – these circumstances amount to a field day. We (I mean here and refer to people worried by their actions and yet more by their not-yet-fully revealed potential) are advised, however, to be sceptical about quick fixes and instant exits from trouble. All the more so, for the options we confront under those circumstances have been drawn from the category of choices between a devil and a deep blue sea.
Liberalism and populism, in their ‘classic’ forms, were opposed as economic and political ideologies. Liberalism, as an ideal type, emphasizes the principle of freedom and the constitutional rights that guarantee the liberties of individuals. Neoliberalism or economic liberalism includes the belief that private ownership and a free market are the foundations of any other liberty. Populism emphasizes the equality and unity of the people, and the concept of democracy as an expression of the general will of the people. It has usually been associated with a naturalist, collectivist, and often strongly nationalistic conception of the social order. Populism considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’. It appeals to all those who feel themselves to be victims, excluded from and deprived of the benefits of modernization, economic development, and the transition to democracy by the corrupt and immoral elites or the ‘establishment’. Populists need a charismatic leader, who has an authoritarian, dictatorial, and nationalistic predisposition; who claims to communicate directly with the people; who is stirring up various resentments, fears, and hopes; and who proposes simple and quick solutions to difficult social problems, and promises to avert damage caused by the economic crisis or by an invasion of immigrants. However, studies on the current resurgence of populism are looking for linkages between neo-populism and neoliberalism, arguing that neoliberalism itself tends to stir up populist tendencies.
Shortly before his death, in his brilliant essay ‘Inventing the Enemy’, the great Umberto Eco drew the following sad conclusion from his numerous studies of the matter: ‘Having an enemy is important not only to define our identity but also to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth.’ In other words: we need an enemy to know who we are and who we are not; knowing it is indispensable for our self-approval and self-esteem. And he adds: ‘So when there is no enemy, we have to invent one.’ A codicil: ‘Enemies are different from us and observe customs that are not our own. The epitome of difference is the foreigner.’
Well, the trouble with a foreigner is that all too often he is indeed foreign – not just in the sense of obeying alien habits, but also – and most importantly – in that of residing beyond the realm of our sovereignty and so also beyond our reach and control. It is not fully up to us to make of such people enemies and put our enmity in practice (unless, of course, they cross boundaries with the intention of settling in our midst). If sovereignty consists in the ‘decisionist’ capacity of acting solely on one’s own will, then many a foreigner is unfit to perform the role that a proper enemy is – according to Eco – called to perform. In many cases (or perhaps in all?) it is better to seek, find, or invent an enemy closer to home and above all inside the gate. An enemy within sight and touch is for many reasons more proficient (and above all easier to control and manipulate) than the seldom seen or heard member of an imagined totality. Already in the Middle Ages the function of the enemy in the case of Christian states was perfectly performed by heretics, Saracens, and Jews – all residing inside the realms of dynasties and churches by which they had been appointed. Today, in the era that favours exclusion over inclusion while the first (but not the second) is fast becoming a routine measure to which well-nigh mechanically to resort, internal choices assume yet more attraction and facility.
The most popular choice among the actual or aspiring strong (wo)men when it comes to casting the role of the enemy (that is, as spelled out by Eco, to the processes of self-defining, integration, and self-asserting) – indeed a fully and truly meta-choice, determining all other choices by association or derivation – is currently ‘the establishment’, that huge rubbish bin able to accommodate all things most harrowing, painful, obtrusive, and troublesome, and, luckily for their choosers and would-be foot soldiers, an under-defined and permanently open-ended collection of have-beens who have outlived their time and are grossly overdue to be relegated to history and recorded in its annals as an aggregate of selfish hypocrites and inept failures. In a simplified rendition: establishment stands for the repulsive, off-putting, and unprepossessing present, whereas the strong (wo)men, ready to send it to the disposal tip where it belongs, appear as guides to a new beginning, after which they who have been naught shall be all.
This is that ‘West’ which – as some of us suspect with horror, whereas some others hope for with joy – is in an advanced state of decline.
So be it. And good riddance.
A study of decay may contain the search for new opportunities for renewal. However, your image of a flood-like liquid modernity does not include a clear vision of an arc that would allow humanity to sail toward a new ground for safe settlement. Instead, you warn and make us aware that in the times of interregnum, no one can construct such an arc nor has anyone the power to build it. Our ‘destination’ remains unknown and the future is unpredictable. Thus, instead of asking what awaits us in the future, we should ask what can we do to make our planet a better place to live on. Elaborating the art of dialogue and the art of living seems to be our way of constructing vessels that enable humanity to survive after the demise of the ‘West’ in liquid modern times.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.