As usual, it’s Bauman (or whoever I’m reading) and me. I offer my analysis of the text and use these posts to advance my own understanding of the text. So please no more emails about not being able to find the exact quotes of what I say in the text.
This is Bauman’s most recent book, and as has been his habit in recent years, it’s organized as a dialogue with a conversation partner Bauman finds interesting. (In this case, it’s Ezio Mauro, an Italian journalist).
Everybody is disappointed with democracy because the only form of democracy we know exists within the confines of a nation state and depends on the capacity of national governments to resolve the issues that matter to citizens.
National governments can no longer do that, though. The problems we face are engendered outside of national borders and can’t fully be solved within them. The Zika virus, international terrorism, the refugee crisis, ISIS, the climate change, the global economic crisis, huge migratory flows – no matter how much some like to fantasize about their nation-state having caused all these problems and, consequently, being able to solve them, deep down we know that this fantasy is stupid. None of these issues will be solved unless there appears some entirely new form of global coexistence that nobody is even trying to imagine right now.
People are terrified that the nation-state democracy is failing and are acting out against it out of fear and disappointment. Turning to reality TV stars to play the role of politicians is a collective way of signaling that we don’t take nation-state politics seriously any more because it offers us nothing of value. Turning elections into a farce is a way of showing the finger to the collapsing system of state management.
[To be continued. . .]
P.S. It is unbelievable that the spellchecker keeps changing Bauman to Batman. I haven’t watched a single Batman movie in my life. Or cartoon, or whatever they are.
Clarissa's Blog 
People seriously think the whole thing is a quote? What?
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No, but what happens is that I never just retell. I always try to engage with what I read. So when people start asking me on what page Bauman mentions showing the finger to democracy, I have to explain that this is me explaining his ideas in a more accessible way. He never mentioned the finger.
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Hm. Question (I am not sure if I disagree with the wording or the idea) – have nation states ever, from their inception, really considered as self-contained bundles of causes?
It is not like epidemics, non-state initiated violence, refugees, migratory flows, economic collapse and even (albeit more limited scale) climate issues were never part of human history up to this point.
From my (both cynical and lazy) perspective, the new and odd thing is not necessarily states failing to deal with these issues, but rather the belief that if a system of government is failing in multiple regards, then there should in principle exist a system that is not.
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Until recently, nobody really needed to know where Syria was because the idea that someone over there would get upset and, as a result, all of us over here would have to change the way we live our lives made no sense. And today we are all quite resigned to the knowledge that there will be more security checkpoints, more hospital evacuations, more dead people in a night club / theater / restaurant / sky scraper somewhere across the world a bunch of people isn’t managing to accept modernity.
In the meantime, half of Spain is still unemployed because a bunch of folks in the US bought houses they couldn’t afford. And a farmer in Germany loses his income because Putin invaded Crimea. And it’s all like that. All of the problems today are about something happening someplace else. Consequently, all proposed solutions are about someplace else: cancel trade, build a wall, close the border, don’t let X come in from someplace else. Always someplace else.
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