ABSTRACT
Zygmunt Bauman and Ernest Gellner were both born in 1925, one in Poland, the other in Czechoslovakia. They grew up in a world heavily influenced by the 20th-century agenda of modernity, which emphasised liberation and rights, especially for nations and individuals. Later, from the 1970s onward, Bauman and Gellner witnessed the emergence of a new agenda for modernity, one that shifted the focus towards the challenges of global rebalancing, regulation and restraint. The old agenda was about dismantling colonial empires, undermining
arrogant aristocracies and challenging all kinds of enslavement. The new agenda is about conservation, control and managing a more crowded planet. It has met resistance: the richest are in no hurry to conform; the old colonial powers are slow to shed feelings of superiority and special entitlement; and the poor’s accumulated resentments feed insurgencies. As a result the new 21st-century agenda has met delay and denial. It has been monumentalised in lofty speech but not yet made the basis for determined and sustained action on a sufficiently large scale. It has been hidden in plain sight. This chapter asks what is at stake for Europe. The inquiry is given sharpness
through a critical comparison between some aspects of the lives and ideas of Zygmunt Bauman and Ernest Gellner. In different ways they each confronted the dilemmas that have shaped both the old and new agendas. One key item on the new agenda is how to cope with fundamental shifts in global power balances without triggering destructive cycles of humiliation and violence. Europe and its near neighbours in the Maghreb and the Levant are at the centre of these power shifts with their attendant dangers. Can Bauman and Gellner help us understand the threats and opportunities these processes bring? We may consider, for example, Bauman’s analysis of liquid modernity and Gellner’s approach to nation-formation processes and the dynamics of Islamic societies. Do they help us make sense of the uprisings and civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa since 2001 and the Eurozone crisis since 2007? In this chapter these issues will be contextualised through a brief discussion
of the biographies of Bauman and Gellner, some of their key ideas, the
challenge to those ideas posed by the new agenda of modernity, and the place on that agenda filled by recent transformations and crises in the Middle East, North Africa and the European Union (EU). It will then be argued that Bauman’s contribution can best be adapted to a world ‘beyond Bauman’ by identifying three distinct versions of his approach to modernity. These three Baumans are mutually contradictory in some respects but each yields rich resources. They are the products of a particular biography that produced certain strengths as well as some inevitable gaps. Gellner’s different biographical path has produced work with some complementary strengths that help fill those gaps. Taken together, the two writers provide us with a useful platform for further inquiry. But let us begin by identifying the two agendas of modernity in a little more detail.
