Special Section: Homage to the Work of Zygmunt Bauman

The EUROPEAN BAUMAN

Kevin Robins

W ell, dear Zygmunt, you were a European, indeed you

were. That was always a fundamental aspect of your
thinking and your work, sometimes explicitly and often subter-
raneously. And I will say, in this brief acknowledgment of your
achievement, that the complexity of your lifelong European
entanglement is one of the most interesting aspects of the
Bauman oeuvre. In the context of the dramatic and turbulent
changes that have been occurring in Europe in the very recent
period, since you left us, your dispositions and your gathered
thoughts remain to be drawn upon as intellectual resources,
but also as more than that, politically, too—for you were
always much more than just an academic sociologist.
The Bauman approach to Europe and European issues
was various, let us say, working in different modalities. I
wouldn’t say that it adds up to a cohesive or unified approach
or agenda. And how could it when it was being articulated
over a long time period, when Europe was experiencing many
developments and dramas of transformation? And when your
encounters with its changing reality were through shifting,
and therefore necessarily revisioning, life experiences? Yes,
it was the experience of Europeanness, whatever that might
mean, that was your central concern. And that, inevitably, and
valuably, I believe, made for divergences and conversions of
thought and perspective.
In 2004 Europe: An Unfinished Adventure was published.
It was a little treatise that sets out, from its first pages, to
articulate the possibilities inherent in what Europe has been in
history, invoking the creative potential made available through

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Cultural Politics, Volume 13, Issue 3, © 2017 Duke University Press
DOI: 10.1215/17432197-4211278

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the long history of what may be character-
ized, even if this is no longer a fashionable
terminology, as the “European spirit.” The
history of Europe, Bauman argued, is that
of a “transgressive civilisation,” one that
has always regarded itself as “an in-princi-
ple-unfinished object, an object of scrutiny,
critique, and possibly remedial action” (7).
Let us all who are thinking about Europe
now, in the troublesome times of 2017
and beyond, keep this European ideal and
endeavor in mind—this ideal that the book
endeavors to put forward of “an adventure
called Europe.”
The opening chapter of Europe goes
on to argue that, on the basis of this
ideal civilizational principle—the idea that
“Europe is a mission . . . something to be
made, created, built” (2)—the European
continent has been “allergic to borders—
indeed to all fixity and finitude” (7). You
maintain, in the most civilized spirit, that
“the European life is conducted in the
presence and the company of the others
and the different, and the European life
is a continuous negotiation that goes on
despite the otherness and difference of
those engaged in, and by, the negotia-
tion” (7). Well, in the dark times that we
are experiencing now, in times that seem
intent on the destruction of the “European
life” as set out here, in memory and in
hope, let us not lose sight of this principle,
for it is a principle by which we should
measure the noxious and ugly conduct of
much, perhaps even most, contemporary
political culture.
I am thinking now of Umberto Eco’s
prescient text “Ur-Fascism” (1995), on
eternal fascism, addressing the possibility
of the continuation of European fascism,
with all its cruel intent upon “exploit-
ing and exacerbating the natural fear of
difference.” Can we not smell it now?
Ur-Fascism, says Eco, is characterized
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The EUROPEA N BAUM A N
by its vicious compulsion to “to limit
the instruments of complex and criti-
cal reasoning.” Well, this latter form of
reasoning constitutes the very essence of
Baumanian philosophy and values. How,
I ask, would you, dear Zygmunt, have
responded to the inanities of Brexit talk,
the rise of the Front National in France,
the ascendancy of Viktor Orbán in Hun-
gary, the neofascism of the Slovak revival
movement, and far, far more? And what
would you have said about the Turkish
state’s recent allegations about persistent
Nazism in Europe, its claim that the Dutch
are mere “Nazi remnants,” its denunciation
of an imagined new European crusader
spirit? I ask the latter question because we
once sat together, you and I, in Istanbul,
and could never have imagined that such
things would ever happen. (And let us here
take serious note of that state’s project to
destroy academic culture in Turkey and to
thereby eliminate the very necessary foun-
dation for complex and critical reasoning to
survive in the country.)
In the final period of Bauman writings,
the engagement with the European spirit
finds a new late-style energy of thought
and perception. At this point in your life,
you draw more deeply on your personal
history and experience: the experience,
from childhood onward, of a refugee or an
exile and the resultant sense of “being
dislocated,” whereby “topographical
dislocations” were then translated into
“dislocation from the Zeitgeist” (Bauman
CULTURAL POLITICS
2012: 196–97). There is a complication
and enlargement of vision and intellection,
I would say. In the lecture you gave titled
“Jews and Other Europeans, Old and
New” (2008), you again draw on your own
experience of having been a stranger. The
Jews of Europe, you maintain, “were the
first to experience the harrowing dilem-
301
mas, ineradicable ambivalence and indeed
 Kevin Robins

awesome aporias of modern life” (6). Here dark times, to be and to remain our inter-
you confront a dimension of being, and of locutor, our vital interlocutor.
existential being in the European world,
that is deeper and darker than the ideal of References
an adventure called Europe. It is a ques- Bauman, Zygmunt. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust.
tion not of abandoning the principle of the Cambridge: Polity.
adventure but of the complexification of Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Europe: An Unfinished
an understanding of what Europe is and Adventure. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2008. “Jews and Other Europeans,
has been. As you had already anguished in
Old and New.” Paper presented at the Institute
your classic Modernity and the Holocaust
for Jewish Policy Research, London.
(1989), there was, in the European twen-
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2012. This Is Not a Diary.
tieth century, the project for a judenfrei Cambridge: Polity.
Europe—forever now an immense shadow Eco, Umberto. 1995. “Ur-Fascism.” New York Review of
cast over the European ideal. If your voice Books, June 22.
always had a hopeful tone, then that tone Kingsley, Patrick. 2016. The New Odyssey: The Story of
coexisted, when you spoke about these Europe’s Refugee Crisis. London: Guardian Faber.
things, in complex relation to a dark pitch
of thought.
And let me end on that note of dark-
ness, appropriate I think to any meditation
on the events taking place in Europe today.
The experience of the wandering Jews, as
you put it, “drew out of its exilic darkness
the truth of the incompleteness, frailty and
endemic until-further-notice mode of the
wanderer’s existence” (2008: 5–6). I am
presently on the Greek island of Leros,
which has become one of the temporary,
always temporary, places of shelter for
countless Syrian refugees that have arrived
CULTURAL POLITICS   •  13:3 November 2017

in Europe. Patrick Kingsley (2016) writes

of “the new Odyssey” across the Med-
iterranean and thereby projects a beam
of intense darkness across the idealized
memory of the European adventure. The
new Jews? A new exilic darkness—a new
European story of the painful experience of
harrowing dilemmas, frailty of existence,
and existential predicament. And so, dear
Zygmunt Bauman, you are bound, in these

Kevin Robins is the author, with Asu Aksoy, of Transnationism, Migration, and the Challenge
302

to Europe: The Enlargement of Meaning (2015).

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on 07 June 2018