manor “The Global Nostalga Epidemic by Edoardo Campanelia- Project Syndicate Project Syndicate Global Bookmark The Global Nostalgia Epidemic Jul 13, 2018 | EDOARDO CAMPANELLA Zygmunt Bauman, Retrotopia, Polity, 2017. Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, Penguin, 2017. Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, HarperCollins, 2017. Simon Heffer, The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914, Random House Books, 2017. Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce, Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics, Wiley, 2018. Philip Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth, Hurst, 2018. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, 2002. MADRID - Surveying today’s world, one might well conclude that it is increasingly trapped in the past. Many people across Europe and North and South America believe that life was better 50 years ago. A majority of Russians still mourn the Soviet Union. And each year, hordes of Chinese descend upon Mao Zedong’s rural hometown, Shaoshan, to pay homage. Whether the problem is rising inequality, economic stagnation, or technological disruption, nostalgia offers relief from socioeconomic angst. But far from being hitps uw: projectsynaicate.orglonpointthe-global-nostal'a-opidemic-by-edoardo-campanla-2018-07 Temanor “The Global Nostalga Epidemic by Edoardo Campanelia- Project Syndicate innocuous, infatuation with a mythicized past is shaping our politics in dangerous ways, not least by creating fertile ground for jingoistic leaders who are happy to. exploit nostalgia for their own ends. Thus, US President Donald Trump promises to “make America great again,” while Chinese President Xi Jinping calls for a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan harbors neo-Ottoman ambitions, while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's political lodestar is the nineteenth-century Meiji Restoration, which laid the foundation for an expansive Empire of Japan. In other cases, nostalgic leaders reject their countries’ historical reversals of fortune. While Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban still harps on the Kingdom of Hungary's territorial losses after World War I, Russian President Vladimir Putin ha described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “a major geopolitical disaster” of the twentieth century. Within the European Union’s founding countries, far-right parties such as Italy’s Lega, Germany's Alternative fiir Deutschland, and the French Rassemblement National (formerly the National Front) want to return to the time when border controls and monetary policy were the prerogatives of national governments. And, of course, in the United Kingdom, hardline “Brexiteers” seem to yearn for a revival of the British Empire. Living in the Past Brexit epitomizes our new age of nostalgia, which is defined by myth, miscalculation, and rising geopolitical tensions. Britain was once one of the greatest empires in history, and some of its citizens have yet to come to terms with its transformation into an ordinary nation-state. The Brexiteers won the 2016 referendum to withdraw from the EU because, as Vince Cable of the British Liberal Democrats put it, “Too many were driven by a nostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white, and the map was colored imperial pink.” Nostalgia, however, is not some woolly, undefined feeling. Despite its romantic flavor, the word nostalgia comes not from poetry or philosophy, but from medicine. In 1688, the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term by merging the Greek word nostos (homecoming) with algos (pain) to diagnose homesickness in Swiss mercenaries fighting abroad. In what Hofer regarded as a medical condition, the yearning to return home often manifested in a combination of paranoia and melancholy, which led patients to idealize the past and denigrate the present. Some of the symptoms of the disease included hearing voices or seeing ghosts, as well as nausea, loss of appetite, pathological changes in the lungs, and brain inflammation. According to Hofer, the strong desire to return to one’s native land could even cause sufferers to lose touch with the present altogether and produce erroneous representations of their surroundings and circumstances. hitps uw: projectsynaicate.orglonpointthe-global-nostal'a-opidemic-by-edoardo-campanla-2018-07 29manor “The Global Nostalga Epidemic by Edoardo Campanelia- Project Syndicate Nowhere to Go The seven books under discussion here help us to understand Brexit and other recent cases of political nostalgia. In Retrotopia, his last book before his death in 2017, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman examines how job insecurity, falling incomes, rising inequality, and declining social mobility can lead people to yearn for a time when national borders were less porous and governments supposedly did a better job protecting their citizens. Bauman shows how such collective anxieties weaken the bonds of civil society and give rise to tribalism. The logical endpoint of this trend is a Hobbesian world characterized by a “war of all against all.” To those who reject a cosmopolitan world that lacks a shared consciousness, nationalism promises a source of identity and security. Bauman argues that, against this backdrop, the future is no longer associated with progress, but rather with stasis or regression, Human beings no longer project their aspirations into utopian visions of an idealized future. Instead, they abandon the search for Utopia, and take refuge in an undead past, a “Retrotopia.” With just a little effort, the past can be “remodeled at will” to provide the “blissful omnipotence lost in the present.” Retrotopia focuses primarily on the symptoms of collective nostalgia, while paying far less attention to root causes, Still, some obvious factors stand out, The denouement of the US-led global order is creating opportunities for post-imperial powers like China, Russia, Turkey, and the UK to reassert their lost status on the world stage. At the same time, globalization and technological change are fueling concerns about employment, leading workers, particularly in the West, to long for the economic security that their parents enjoyed. And all the while, population aging in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia is compounding the problem, not just economically, but psychologically, because nostalgia has a stronger pull on older adults — a phenomenon psychologists call the “reminiscence bump.” Imperial Ignorance hitps uw: projectsynaicate.orglonpoinithe-global-nostaly'a-opidomic-by-edoardo-campanla-2018-07 38