Culture in a Liquid Modern World by Bauman Zygmunt; Bauman Lydia;

Author:Bauman, Zygmunt; Bauman, Lydia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

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Culture in a uniting Europe

The European Union does not undermine the identities of the countries united in it. On the contrary, it is a champion of identity. More, it is the best insurance of its safety, offering the best likelihood of it surviving, even flourishing.

It is globalization which, by corroding the sovereignty of nation-states, is crumbling the bulwarks of territorial independence which have offered shelter to national identity and a guarantee of its safety over the last two hundred years. It would be breaking up national sovereignty even more eagerly, causing even more fractures, if it were not for the bedrock of solidarity in the European Union. The union intercepts and as far as possible neutralizes the sting of the mighty pressures reaching Europe from cyberspace, that is to say from the ‘space of flows’ free of political restraints. By this means, the union also safeguards nations from the potentially destructive effects of the long-standing and ongoing process (not resulting from its own initiative, and with its relatively minor and far from enthusiastic participation) of splitting apart the trinity of nation, state and territory, so inseparable for the last two hundred years. It is under the pressure of globalization, not of edicts sent out from Brussels, that the postulate and prediction formulated by Otto Bauer a century ago is coming true today: nations are turning from territorially cohesive bodies into ever more mobile and spatially dispersed associations of spiritually allied units.

It is simultaneously turning out that national cultures can well do without the (not so holy, it has to be said) trinity which was regarded as the indispensable condition of their survival during the early days of modern nation-building. According to Ernest Gellner’s memorable thesis, only some of the mix of ethnic, religious and language groups which constituted Europe at the dawning of the nineteenth century had a chance to rise to the status of a nation (and so, in practice, the chance to recast in an authoritative and binding way other aspirants to nation status into ethnic minorities, other aspirants to the dignity of an official national language into dialects, and other candidates to the rank of national church into sects); yet in order to take advantage of the opportunity, nations in spe – in hope – needed their own, sovereign, power-wielding state …

Nation-building had as its goal the realization of the principle of ‘one country, one nation’, that is, in the last analysis, the levelling out of citizens’ ethnic differences. From the perspective of a culturally united and unified nation-state, a diversity of languages or a mosaic of cultures and customs on the terrain under its jurisdiction was just the last relic, not yet quite eradicated, from times past.

Enlightening or civilizing processes presided over and managed by the officials of the countries, already united were to ensure that those remains were not to last long. The community of the nation was after all to play a key role in legitimizing the political unification of the state, and an

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