Bauman: A Chronicle of Our Age

The works of Zygmunt Bauman provide a chronicle of our age. In particular, the period that led from the dismantling of European communism in 1989 to the European crisis of migration in 2015 was one in which the Polish sociologist was at his most ingenious, productive, and impactful. He died in Leeds in 2017 at the age of 91.

The era in which he lived extends from the introduction of the People’s Republic of Poland when he was already in his mid-20s to the collapse of the Soviet bloc in eastern Europe which began in Warsaw in spring 1989. Roundtable talks brought together incumbent communists and the Solidarity opposition. The fall of the Berlin Wall later that year was symbolic more than substantive.

Like many other Jewish intellectuals living in Poland in 1968, Bauman resigned from the Polish United Workers’ Party in January 1968. Following turbulent events in Warsaw in March of that year, attributed to an anti-Semitic faction in the communist leadership engaged in a power struggle with party head Władysław Gomułka, Bauman lost his post at the University of Warsaw, moved first to Israel, then a few years later took a position at Leeds University. His career soared from then on and the university became the premier home of sociology in the UK.

Observing from afar what had happened in Poland during the Solidarność social movement in 1980–1981 which, ten years later, had managed to overthrow the monolithic communist party-state, Bauman focused on what it was in Europe that divided a society rather than what united it. He critiqued communities seeking to exclude others, for example, Mont Saint Michel in France: it was simultaneously a hermetic cloister and an inaccessible, closely guarded fortress. In elaborating on the contingency of hospitality, the imagery of an exclusionary Mont Saint Michel loomed menacingly. It represented a community based on emotional urges that wished to exclude everything considered undesirable, threatening, and dangerous.

Exclusion—what had happened to Bauman in 1968—became a lifelong concern of his in the last books he published in the mid-2010s. He became almost single-mindedly fixated on migrants and the cynical use they were put to by governments, the labor market, people smugglers, and the divisions affecting migrant and refugee applicants—where they were from, what qualifications they had, and whether they were destined to live ‘wasted lives’ or not—a trope in his analysis.

As rarely before, fear was on the minds of politicians and the public in the first decades of the twenty-first century: terror attacks, economic fears such as job security or the ‘precariate’ (Žižek, 2015), fear of establishment parties, fear of populism, anxiety about rapidly-changing national and personal identities (Taras, 2012). Contrary to other observers, Bauman claimed that attachment to human company was a catalyst for fear rather than an antidote for it: ‘the perception of human company as a source of existential insecurity and as a territory strewn with traps and ambushes tends to become endemic’ (2000, p. 91).

Human company as a source of existential insecurity may have been what Bauman had discovered living under the communist system. But when he moved to Leeds he became confounded by the fundamental illiberalism of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s mantra ‘There is No Alternative’ (TINA) that was launched not many years later. The race to the bottom that it produced was exacerbated by the polarizing arrival of refugees and migrants who often could not be distinguished (Angenendt, Kipp, & Meier, 2017), bringing what he considered to be a surplus of unskilled labor to the continent.

In a volume he published as early as 2004 he labeled this reserve army of labor as leading wasted lives. It was in keeping with the popular, simplistic sociological thesis of the time that one-third of society was indispensable and vital to its functioning, another third was insecure and vulnerable, and the last third was unneeded and superfluous.

Bauman’s journey takes us from the era of unadulterated communism to that of unbridled globalization. It is a chronicle that also passes by way of the notion of liquid modernity that he made famous. Simply put, liquid modernity signifies a society that is transitioning from solid modern structures to the relativism, fragmentation, and uncertainty of postmodern life.

As Bauman put it, liquid modernity signified the danger of skating on thin ice: only more speed stops us from falling through into the ice. In Europe the era of free education, secure jobs, and peaceful home life was coming to an end and uncertainty and unpredictability were replacing them.

This sociologist also understood liquid modernity as entailing a shift in society toward more avaricious patterns of consumption. This had a deleterious effect on the poorer classes. In the past they suffered together and stood in solidarity. But in a mass consumer society they were unneeded, even suffered humiliation. The fortunate now confronted increasing poverty and, later, the addition of migrants and refugees joined the stratum of the poor, providing a warning that all of us were a breath away from joining the ranks of the undeserving poor. Fragility and fluidity make everything seem temporal and uncertain. Emotions—like fear, anxiety, envy, and shame—fanned the flames further, exacerbating the sense of insecurity, loneliness, and identity loss.

In many respects Bauman depicted a gloomy vision of societies, confined previously to developing states but now encroaching on Western countries too. It parallels unimaginable socioeconomic inequalities that for many people comprise a shift from plenty to empty.

In this Chapter, I wish to examine not liquid modernity—an area of considerable research over the years—but expendable lives that Bauman assayed in his later years. It is the first appraisal of Bauman in his role as migration politics specialist. Key to examining migration is the resurrected importance of emotions-based research.

Emotions and Hospitality

Among many different emotions, my objective is to consider the infrequently identified emotion of hospitality.Footnote 1 While reason in politics no longer holds a dominating position, its stand-in can involve noble human emotions like hospitality and welcome. French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas insisted that hospitality had by definition to be unconditional, but this was a view that Bauman incessantly wrestled with. Was he able to resolve the virtue of hospitality with the experience of wasted lives?

Hospitality and conviviality are among the virtues now being revitalized in emotions-related research—not to mention value-laden advocacy positions or social networks. Dominique Moïsi (2008) has noted how in place of the clash of civilizations it is more apt to speak of the globalization of emotions. These now dominate some of the social sciences where once reflexive sociology was a criterion (Gouldner, 1970).

Emotion today has, by and large, displaced interest as the critical factor shaping political action. In a letter to his son Johan written in 1648, Count Axel Oxiensterna cautioned: ‘Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?’ The original Latin is: An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur? Sometimes attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, the exhortation was intended to encourage his son, a delegate to negotiations preparing the draft of the Peace of Westphalia, to hold his own among experienced and eminent statesmen (Roberts, 1991).

In turn, Napoleon Bonaparte was more cynical, convinced that fearand self-interest were the main drivers of human emotions. Fear as an existential state is connected to a wide gamut of human emotions, some constructive, others destructive. As a case in point, the administration of Donald Trump appears more vested in emotions than, say, the Russian state is with its old-school calculations of national interest.

Hospitality is different from conviviality, another less-remarked upon emotion. In place of spontaneity, generosity, and emotion-laden expressions, hospitality is more demanding than conviviality and is offered at the owner’s residence where the proprietor is regarded as dominant and controlling. In extreme cases it may even approach droit de seigneur—a feudal lord’s right to have sexual relations with the bride of a vassal on her first night of marriage. Far removed from Levinas’ understanding of the term (discussed next), hospitality establishes the limits of a place, retains authority over it, and regulates the gift that is being offered to the stranger.

For moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum, ‘all societies are replete with emotions: anger, fear, sympathy, disgust, envy, guilt, grief, forms of love. Some have little to do with politics but public emotions take as their object the nation, the nation’s goals, its institutions and leaders, its geography, and one’s fellow citizens seen as fellow inhabitants of a common public space’ (Nussbaum, 2013, pp. 1–2). They can have grave consequences for the advancement of the nation toward its end goals.

Promoting well-meant benign passions in place of hardheaded, cynical interests justifies adopting an emotional approach. Hospitality toward strangers forms part of the process of bringing the study of emotions back onto the research agenda leading to a more inclusive analytic framework.

Reason in politics appears indeed to be downgraded. If it is replaced with the ‘noble’ qualities in the gamut of human emotions, such as hospitality and welcome, then it may even have normative advantages. Nevertheless the appeal of demagoguery and xenophobia is precisely in its emotional rather than rational, charge. As noted by F.G. Bailey in Treasons, Stratagems, and Spoils.

Ordinary Jane and Ordinary Joe are quicker to feel than they are to think; they respond more readily to a message that touches their emotions than to one that requires them to attend to a carefully reasoned argument. Reason does not mobilize support; slogans do. Reasoning is demanding; slogans are comfortably compelling. (Bailey, 2001, p. 8)

The permutations of emotions can be dissimilar depending on whose perspective is considered. In his theory of natural emotions that highlight their motivational effects, Justin D’Arms offers a shorter compendium: amusement; anger; contempt; disgust; envy; fear; guilt; jealousy; pity; pride; regret; shame (D’Arms, 2017).

Frequently the lists of emotions are skewed toward negative ones. Nussbaum (2013) emphasizes that in politics it is these that dominate:

All societies are full of emotion. Liberal democracies are no exception…. The life of even a relatively stable democracy would include a host of emotions—anger, fear, sympathy, disgust, envy, guilt, grief, many forms of love. Some of these episodes of emotion have little to do with political principles or the public culture, but others are different: they take as their object the nation, the nation’s goals, its institutions and leaders, its geography, and one’s fellow citizens seen as fellow inhabitants of a common public space.

For Nussbaum, ‘Such public emotions, frequently intense, have large-scale consequences for the nation’s progress towards its goals’ (2013, pp. 1–2).

I have singled out a benign passion—hospitality—to evaluate Bauman’s perspective on the treatment of refugees and migrants in Europe today. But it is with Emmanuel Levinas, a standard setter who raised the bar high on the treatment of the stranger, with whom we must begin.

Point of Departure: Levinas’ L’inquiétante étrangeté

Inclusion of citizens is the prevailing imperative in the moral philosophy of Levinas. Beginning in the 1960s, he developed a code of ethics on hospitality extended toward strangers. Its importance followed from people’s inability to approach the other, the source of many episodes of horror and violence in human history. For Levinas (1961: IX–XII) violence was paradoxically the result of a striving for unity because unity can be achieved only by excluding anyone regarded as disruptive. A totality is possible only through exclusion of the other.

Almost tautologically, Levinas explained how ‘the other is precisely that which cannot be included in a totality; the other is other, incomprehensibly and unreasonably so’. He insisted on assigning unconditional priority to ethics over ontology, that is, to welcoming strangers over harsh reality. The significance of l’accueuil—welcoming of the stranger—overrode everything else.

The unconditional nature of hospitality is disputed by many writers concerned with migration. Sociologist Meyda Yegenoglu (2005, pp. 141–142) stipulated its contingent nature this way: ‘conditional hospitality is offered at the owner’s place, home, nation, state, or city - that is, at a place where one is defined as the master and where unconditional hospitality or unconditional trespassing of the door is not possible…. the foreigner is allowed to enter the host’s space under conditions determined by the host’.

It was not nationalism, as many writers had pinpointed, that for Bauman was responsible for the exclusion of migrants. Before the 2015 crisis hit, he had praised nationalism as ‘an uplifting and ennobling idea, as well as a humanizing and civilizing practice of solidarity in action’. Indeed, a national home represented a site removed from ‘cut-throat competition and bloody conflicts – a workshop inside which to develop and learn the skills of mutual understanding and assistance, and in which to practice humanity and amiable, warm-hearted togetherness’ (Bauman & Donskis, 2013, p. 120). He regarded Europe as a force for integration and, in hyperbolic terms he may have regretted later on, ‘a banquet of sisterly nations’.

It is a puzzle, then, how the same author could label refugees and migrants as leading wasted lives, unless nationalism had shut the door tight on ‘warmhearted togetherness’ in the interim. But viewing the arrival of a new influx of non-Western refugees into Europe—and that primarily bound for a prospering Germany rather than what were regarded as second rate countries—generated more critical assertions from the Polish sociologist. His critical Marxist thinking on display in Warsaw up to 1968 had been converted into critical postmodern thought.

Indeed in 2013 he refused to accept an honorary doctorate at the University of Lower Silesia because of a combination of right-wing and anti-Semitic attacks on him. Bauman’s disillusionment with the inclusionary power of nationalism, even his disavowal with the politics of migration, had multiple sources. It may have produced harsher invectives against migrants.

A dystopian world was emerging propelled above all by shocking inequalities—a subject that jarred Bauman particularly since he had carried out research in his Polish years on, in retrospect, the miniscule income gaps that existed under communism. The 2019 report at Davos by Oxfam (2019) claims that the world’s 26 richest people now own as much as the world’s poorest 50%. Even if the report is out by 100% so that the 52 richest individuals own half what the rest of people owns, the inequality rates and the Gini coefficients around the world are stupendous.

Levinas’ ethical reflections on hospitality remained constant in Bauman’s analyses. However he was more persuaded by realist, empirical explanations than by ideal types. In Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (2004), he deplored the plight meted out to most migrants. He first sketched out how the ‘images of economic migrants and asylum seekers stand for wasted humans—the waste of globalization’. It seemed perfectly natural and realistic that ‘refugees and immigrants, coming from “far away” yet making a bid to settle in the neighborhood, are uniquely suitable for the role of the effigy to be burnt as the specter of “global forces”’ (2004, p. 66). Was there a scornful tone to stigmatizing refugees as outsiders, or was it merely a descriptive phrase?

Refugees, the human waste of the global frontier-land, are ‘the outsiders incarnate’, the absolute outsiders, outsiders everywhere and out of place everywhere except in places that are themselves out of place—the ‘nowhere places’ that appear on no maps used by ordinary humans on their travels. (2004, p. 80)

Well before the European migration crisis of 2015, Bauman rendered a harsh verdict on the reception of immigrants. They constituted ‘large and growing agglomerations of “wasted humans”, likely to become durable or permanent’ (2004, p. 85). Indeed, ‘Perhaps the sole thriving industry in the lands of the latecomers (deviously and deceitfully dubbed “developing countries”) is the mass production of refugees’ (2004, p. 73).

Bauman blamed the horrors of exclusion primarily on the forces of globalization.

They reshuffle people and play havoc with their social identities, They may transform us, from one day to another, into refugees or ‘economic migrants’… dump at our doorsteps those people who have already been rejected, forced to run for their lives, or scramble away from home for the means to stay alive, robbed of their identities and self-esteem. We hate those people because we feel that what they are going through in front of our eyes may well prove to be, and soon, a dress rehearsal of our own fate. Trying hard to remove them from our sight—round them up, lock them in camps, deport them—we wish to exorcise them. (2004, p. 128)

This was written a decade before Merkel’s decision to allow 1.1 million migrants into Germany while insisting that many others would have to be admitted into other EU states; though farfetched, Merkel perhaps subconsciously had incorporated Levinas’ conception of accueuil.

Liberal and Illiberal Dilemmas

As mentioned, social inequality had been a major research interest of Bauman’s. In his book Liquid Evil: Living with TINA, he outlined the avaricious side of globalization that has had as profound an effect on migrants—maybe even more so—as it has had on settled communities. ‘Steady dismantling of the increasingly deregulated greed-driven economy, growing public insensitivity to rampant social inequality coupled with the incapacity of rising numbers of citizens – now abandoned (since no longer viewed as a potential danger to capitalist order and a seed of social revolution)’ (Bauman & Donskis, 2016, p. 14).

Bauman elaborated on the othering pattern that took place in the migration policies of affluent European countries. They are based on economic rather than country-specific criteria; so much, then, for humanitarian concerns that Merkel claimed she was embracing. Fortress Europe is a ghetto with acceptance criteria that are no longer country specific. This is because, for Bauman, state borders in a liquid Europe are unclear. Instead it is the economic standing of people that has become pivotal.

It is unlikely that at the end of his life Bauman had been made aware that 40% of Syrian refugees had graduate degrees and they could potentially become well-off through fast-tracking their skills in Germany. As he put it, while the affluent are welcome, the penniless—who will cost us—are not. The EU fortress is discriminatory in its accueuil.

In one of his last, most bitter books, Strangers at Our Door, Bauman described the reactions of many Europeans to the migration crisis. They exhibited ‘carnivalesque explosions of solidarity and care’ which accompanied ‘images of successive spectacular tragedies in the migrants’ unending saga’. He observed how ‘Currently, the EU offers Syrians the prospect of heaven (life in Germany), but only if they first pay a crook and risk their lives’ (2016, p. 97). There was no need to refer to terrorist threats posed by migrants. Possessing no entrepreneurial skills, their status was, for Bauman, hopeless: unskilled, unprepared, yet paying off crooks with the last of their savings.

The dystopian world Bauman saw around him, above all for migrants, revealed how far he had travelled from Levinas’ idea of unconditional hospitality. European fears about migrants fed on the perception that strangers had overstayed their welcome. He put it this way: ‘what we fear, is evil; what is evil, we fear’ (2006, p. 54).

Arguably for Baumanhospitality was not a natural law and it was circumscribed. For as long as human history, processes of othering, marginalization, and exclusion have been in existence. Limits on welcoming strangers are much the same as in fifteenth-century Icelandwhere contingent relations between host and strangers followed the seasons.

The world’s oldest parliament, the Alþingi, decided in 1431 that no foreigners (útlenskir menn) could remain in Iceland after 8 September, the feast of the Blessed Virgin when the last ships had to sail from the country. The 1490 Píningsdómur (‘Pining’s Verdict’) provided some leeway: foreigners could overwinter in Iceland if sick, injured, or shipwrecked. But they were not allowed to engage in fishing or trade during this period (Parsons, 2011).

The point of this Verdict was to keep seasonal work seasonal. ‘Outlanders’ were expected to return to their native countries coinciding with the time set in the Jónsbók codebook, in other words, when Icelandic farmers took livestock from summer grazing lands to home pastures.

The parameters of hospitality to strangers were etched in stone, even in a remote periphery of Europe. Once again, contingency was valued more highly than unconditionality, except for the sick, the injured, or the shipwrecked.

Bauman was on the right track in underscoring the contingent nature of hospitality, even though he became susceptible to charges of abandoning the classic models of liberalism and tolerance. The laws of a country, the identity and provenance of strangers, state capacity to absorb greater numbers of foreigners, together with how welcome are social attitudes, all play a role in migration Realpolitik. These constraints are emotions-based, but they also reflect practical necessities as well.

Contemptuous Passions

Illiberal attitudes are often said to originate among the unneeded grassroots underclass; the Shleppers; Emile Zola’s Lumpen; the drunkards and washerwomen. They cannot be permitted to partake in the gift of contingent, let alone unconditional, hospitality, or inclusion, or belonging. They are the doubly wretched of the earth, suffering the dehumanizing effects of being unwanted and unneeded. But are those who oppose the arrival of unskilled migrants and become equated with opponents of humanitarian principles themselves right-wing populists, riffraff themselves, in short, intolerant illiberals?

Just before the height of the migration crisis, in 2014, the unskilled made up 37% of working-age non-EU immigrants in the EU. Non-EU citizens’ employment rates (aged 20–64) fell by six percentage points to 56%. Their risk of poverty or social exclusion increased four points to 49%, twice the level for EU citizens. The 2017 federal elections in which Merkel’s CDU suffered the worst performance in its history showed that election results matter. Populist movements are to blame, it is said, but a series of regional elections since then confirmed the CDU’s failure to elicit popular support. Similar outcomes have occurred in many other EU states.

Pouring contempt on illiberals also has a long history. A case in point may be Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). In it he gave this idiosyncratic definition of the lumpenproletariat. It is both far ranging and very specific.

Alongside debased lecherers with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, charlatans, idlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither.

In other places far from Europe, those stereotyped as illiberals have been classified as rednecks, welfare queens, conches, trailer trash, coon asses—the list goes on.

Xenophobia may reflect the desire on the part of affluent Western European societies to protect their ‘islands of prosperity’ against an outside world troubled by poverty, environmental degradation, interethnic violence, and widespread desperation. Or, absent islands of prosperity, they may just want to guard their societies against unskilled migration or even uncouth nations, Andrei Markovits’ summation of how Europeans look down on Americans (2007).

Recent migration data from many parts of the globe—from Australia to the U.S., from Canada to Sweden—indicate that high-skilled workers are now preferred to unskilled ones. The latter often has no recourse but to seek asylum, framing themselves as refugees who fear for their lives when back in their sending countries. This is at least the sense of Bauman’s criticisms of migration policies reported in his last books.

Work, as Marx insisted, should not alienate but liberate. Yet this has rarely been the case since he wrote 150 years ago. Radical income redistribution remains the way out of this quandary and it can apply to recent migrants as much as to ensconced nativists. In effect, it can incentivize work. On the other hand, Finland’s universal basic income experiment has not worked other than making welfare recipients feel better (Nagesh, 2019).

Even then, however, ‘wasted lives’ remains a tragic blight on social life. It is fair to say that migration-skeptic attitudes have stuck in his hospitality repertoire.

Can We Tolerate the Intolerant Like Bauman?

Bauman’s views described in this Chapter reflect his passage from communist authoritarianism to Western intolerance of political correctness. In both cases the backlash against each of the two has been forceful.

In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper (2013) presented a spirited defense of the open society against its enemies. He unleashed a critique of historicism and a defense of liberal democracy and the open society.

While sharing some of Popper’s anxieties, John Rawls theorized that liberty precedes social justice. But he was uncertain about the ‘paradox of tolerance’ posed by Popper in 1945. It claimed that if a society is tolerant without limits, its ability to be tolerant may eventually be destroyed by the intolerant. He arrived at the paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, society must be intolerant of intolerance.

Put differently, unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with it. An alternative exists: to counter them by use of rational argument, coupled with checks by public opinion. To be sure, some of the ‘intolerant’ may not be prepared to meet their opponents on the level of rational argument, but begin denouncing all argumentation. They may insist their followers not listen to rational argument because it is deceptive. For Popper, suppression of such intolerance would be needed, even if by force.

Rawls was nuanced about claiming—in the name of tolerance—the right not to tolerate the intolerant. In 1971, in A Theory of Justice (1999) he asserted that a just society must tolerate the intolerant for otherwise society would then itself be intolerant, and therefore unjust. To be sure, he, like Popper, believed that society has a reasonable right of self-preservation that supersedes the principle of tolerance: ‘While an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger’.

In replying to the question ‘Should we tolerate the intolerant?’ Michael Walzer (1997) observed that most minority religions benefiting from tolerance are themselves intolerant. In a tolerant regime, such people may learn themselves to tolerate, or at least act as if they possessed this virtue. Another view is that intolerant speech—a signaling of exclusionary attitudes—should be subject to a different standard of justification than violent, repressive, direct action based on exclusionary attitudes.

As we see in Bauman’s case, no such thing as virtuous liberalism exists, only a synthesis of different perspectives that need not be values-based. In the 1960s he had repudiated dogmatic communism and favored reflexive critical Marxism. In the last decade of his life he found unconditional hospitality to be unviable and preferred its pragmatic, conditional variant. To be sure, migration politics was not his forte and reflexivity had become a thing of the past. Exclusionary politics were what he had experienced rather than what he had rationalized. The politics of inequality and the nature of liquid modernity remain his two key legacies.