ZB Centenary Programme: Theorizing the First Quarter-Century
2025 is the centenary of Zygmunt Bauman. It also marks a first quarter of the twenty-first century – a ‘silver jubilee’ of sorts.
How to understand, how to theorize this arc of time in our collective societal experience? How to conceptualize this first full quarter-century since the turn of the millennium?
Our centenary programme will address these grand societal challenges in the spirit of Zygmunt Bauman's project of chronicling and making sense of social transformation, at a time when collective narratives and shared visions of the future are profoundly threatened.
Some three decades ago, sociologists and commentators of all kinds registered a keen sense of global transformation. Over the course of the 1990s, the millennial moment appeared to loom forth like a promissory event on the horizon. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Cold War had come to an end. ‘Reflexive modernity’, ‘risk society’, ‘post-socialist transition’, ‘creative capitalism’ and – above all – ‘globalization’ were the watchwords of the age.
If the previous era had been Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘short twentieth century’, the prospect ahead was of a new thousand years – and for a time, indeed, a kind of millenarian spirit prevailed. By the year 2000, governments of the centre left had come to power throughout Europe. Each heralded variants of a reconstructed politics of social democracy fit for a more overarching order of free economic movement across borders and boundaries – a ‘third way’, in Anthony Giddens’s influential phrase of the time. The internet had been revolutionizing the new creative-cognitive capitalism of the information economy, presaging a new ‘knowledge society’. Rising power houses of the global South and East – the BRICS and the Asian tiger economies – challenged Western dominance on the international stage, to some degree. Activists and protest movements demanded that ‘another world was possible’. For some observers, an era of ‘multiple modernities’ – of diverse pathways to regional self-determination – was in prospect.
Yet darker notes soon announced themselves. The attacks of 9/11 ushered in an entire decade of questionable military interventions in the name of a global ‘war on terror’, at times aimed indiscriminately at Muslim cultures and societies around the world. Even so, for the populations of the OECD countries, much of the decade of the noughties spelt a time of unprecedented consumer prosperity. Assent to the new dispensation was not uncritical or unconditional but tentative feelings of confidence obtained. Labour protections suffered setbacks and the deregulative agenda of neoliberal policy orthodoxies proceeded apace. But a broad if fragile sense of equity emerged as larger fractions of previously disadvantaged social groups steadily gained access to ladders of career security. The EU absorbed regions of the former Eastern bloc. The US saw its first African-American president. Gradually, liberal-democratic nation-states edged towards more pluralistic, more ‘cosmopolitan’ implementations of their own avowed politics of inclusion, equality and civic participation.
But profound consequences were to be felt in the bursting of the speculation bubbles of 2008, following untrammelled financialization of the global economic system. The banking sector bailouts, which saw the brunt of the losses borne by tax-payers, brought with them a devastating political aftermath for the ensuing decade of the 2010s. Policies of welfare retrenchment and austerity gravely eroded the trust of citizenries in representative bodies and undoubtedly fuelled the rise of populist, neo-nationalist and white-identity mobilizations, culminating in such dramatic watersheds as the Trump election of 2016 and the UK Brexit referendum. All fed on visceral feelings of shattered trust and broken promises – even as other global conflicts and injustices garnered at best cursory attention in the Western media self-consciousness. As the Atlantic military powers withdrew to their bases after the missionary follies of the previous decade, refugee crises erupted across regions of the world from the horn of Africa to Syria, Afghanistan and Israel-Palestine – as they continue to do today.
For well over ten years now, a searing public perception might be characterized as one of pervasive disparities and double standards of the moral norm – of a systemic void of legalities and legitimacies, on both national and international stages. As governments court crepuscular relationships to oligarchy, tax evasion and corporate lobbies, and segments of societies retreat to disinformation-fuelled fictions of conspiring malign agents, post-imperial state powers take cynical advantage – Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine here standing as perhaps the most flagrant example.
If the tragedies of the Covid pandemic of 2020-21 might be said to have found at least one redeeming feature in the fiscal interventions that states suddenly found themselves able to exert over their economies, any more lasting outcome of such actions remains to be seen today. As wage-earners battle rising daily costs of living and vacillate on the brink between radicalized populist disaffection and a politics of the centre that so desperately wishes to ‘hold’, an entire generation of young people now enters the labour-market knowing little but debt and precarity – increasingly doubtful of professional career orientations as materially secure bases for hopes of personal self-actualization, or for lasting intimate relationships or family formation.
As we stand at mid-point in our current decade, an abiding collective feeling of the age might well be read as one of expectations and aspirations repeatedly deflected or deflated, of democratic claims and demands at best expediently managed, while urgent structural solutions to challenges – including not least the escalating global climate emergency – find themselves continually deferred into the future. If ever there was a millennial ‘promise’ of our recent late-modern societal journey, it would appear to be a promise still yet to materialise in any tangible shape.
Written by Dr Austin Harrington, September 2024.