Leonidas Donskis - Modernity in Crisis: A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging

Modernity in Crisis

Modernity in Crisis

A Dialogue on the Culture of Belonging

Leonidas Donskis

with an Introduction by Sigurd Skirbekk

Modernity in Crisis

Leonidas Donskis, 2011

All rights reserved.

First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United Statesa division of St. Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Donskis, Leonidas.

Modernity in crisis : a dialogue on the culture of belonging / Leonidas Donskis.

Includes index.

eISBN 978-0-230-33919-4

1. Group identityEurope, Eastern. 2. Group identityEurope, Central. 3. Political cultureEurope, Eastern. 4. Political cultureEurope, Central. 5. Europe, EasternPolitics and government1989 6. Europe, CentralPolitics and government1989 7. Europe, EasternSocial conditions1989 8. Europe, CentralSocial conditions1989 9. EuropeCivilization1945 I. Title.

JN96.A58D66 2011

306.20943dc22 2011005480I

First edition: August 2011

To Zygmunt Bauman
with all my gratitude, affection, and love

Contents

Acknowledgments

For encouragement, power of judgment, and my sense of projet de la vie, I am immensely grateful to my dear friend Zygmunt Bauman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, the United Kingdom, one of the greatest thinkers of our times. He became my major inspiration and source of my confidence in myself, my work, and my sense of raison dtre. More than that, he anticipated and identified the emerging trajectories of my thought. I would not have done it myself.

For encouragement, sensible anticipation of the new forms of my professional life and work, and invaluable lessons in the art of academic writing, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my dear friend Robert Ginsberg, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He gave me a second academic life by allowing me to enter the English language academic world of writing and editing.

For a long-standing professional dialogue, valuable advice, and critique, I am indebted to my colleague Sigurd Skirbekk, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oslo, Norway.

My warmest thanks are owed to Lena Pasternak, Director of the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden, for graciously allowing me to spend my happy time at the Center, putting the finishing touches on my book.

Parts of previously appeared in Leonidas Donskis, The European Cultural Canon and the Predicaments of Memory Politics, in Ineke van Hamersveld and Arthur Sonnen, eds. (2009) Identifying with Europe: Reflections on a Historical and Cultural Canon for Europe; Amsterdam: Boekmanstudies, EUNIC and SICA: 103126 (ISBN: 978-90-6650-097-6). I thank Ineke van Hamersveld, Arthur Sonnen, and the Boekman Foundation for their kind permission to incorporate parts of this material.

Parts of previously appeared in Leonidas Donskis, Secrets, Mysteries, and Art, in Timo Airaksinen and Manfred J. Holler, eds. (2009) Homo Oeconomicus 26 (1) Munich: ACCEDO-Verlag: 97121 (ISBN: 978-3-89265-070-6). I thank my colleagues Timo Airaksinen, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Manfred J. Holler, Professor of Economics in the Institute of SocioEconomics at the University of Hamburg, Germany (executive editor of ACCEDO Verlag), guest editors of the special issue of Homo Oeconomicus, for their gracious permission to incorporate parts of this material.

In addition, my warm thanks are given to Professor Airaksinen and Professor Holler for their valuable advice, from which I greatly benefitted working on the book.

I am indebted to my dear colleague Olli Loukola, Docent of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, for his critique and inspiring suggestions.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Mykolas Drunga, a Lithuanian philosopher, translator, and journalist, for translating my unpublished essay on Zygmunt Bauman from Lithuanian into English. This essay laid the foundations for .

I thank Albina Strunga and Darius J. Ross for translating parts of from Lithuanian into English.

I thank all the good people at Palgrave Macmillan with whom I have had the pleasure and privilege of working on my book.

Finally, with all my affection and love, I wish to thank my wife Jolanta for her unfading love and support, which were vital for me to accomplish this book.

Introduction

In 1992, shortly after the breakdown of the Soviet empire, Francis Fukuyama published a book titled The End of History and the Last Man, where he predicted a future free of previous ideological battles. The ideals of the Westliberal democracy, free markets, and human rightshad apparently won worldwide acceptance, at least as standards for modern society.

During the following two decades this optimistic picture of a bright future has been challenged by several events. We have recently experienced an economic crisis, demonstrating that prosperity and wealth for all is not an automatic result of a free market economy. We have experienced a gradual shift in political power from an American superpower to new powers in Asia and elsewhere, and not all of them support Western ideals of democracy. We have witnessed examples of popular distrust and protest, not least in several European countries, against supranational bureaucracies who, in the name of universal human rights principles, will overrule decisions made by local democracies. And, above all, we have witnessed scientifically based predictions of a future in a worldwide ecological unbalance, which are not adequately corrected by any contemporary political ideologies.