Ebook: Demodernization : A Future in the Past

Editors’ Foreword Medical doctors driving taxis, architects selling beer on street corners, scientific institutes closed down amid rusting carcasses of industrial plants, prisoners beheaded in front of cameras—these images have become all too common since the turn of the twenty-first century. Functioning states such as Iraq, Lybia, and Syria were destroyed and set back by decades, if not centuries, in their development. Prostitution serving wealthy foreigners came to be considered a desirable career choice for women in Yeltsin’s Russia, where 60 percent of high school girls were reported ready to exchange sex for foreign currency (Avgerinos 2006). In other countries, longtime neighbors killed each other, apparently motivated by the newly discovered incompatibilities of religion, language, or origin. Civic nationalism gave way to tribal, ethnic, and confessional identities in Europe, not only in the East, where nationalism is congenitally ethnic, but also in countries like the Netherlands and Finland, hitherto considered paragons of tolerance and civility. Nativism came back in Canada and the United States. Rational arguments of a geopolitical nature were replaced by claims of self-righteousness and moral superiority (e.g., “Axis of Evil”). Fake news became ubiquitous, spreading instantly around the world by the most modern means of communication. Language came to spell magic rather than inform, and mass media became “a tool of obscurantism,” undermining rational thinking (Кара-Мурза 2017, 350). These snapshots are not random: They are all manifestations of demodernization, a phenomenon that can be observed from the banks of the Neva to the valleys of the Euphrates and over to the shores of the Cape of Good Hope and from the deserts of Central Asia to the Spanish countryside, all the way to the city of Detroit. It brings together seemingly disparate trends and helps us form a picture that shows what continues to affect everyday life in the context of neoliberal globalization, whose slogan could well be a parody on Marx: “Capitalists of the world, unite!”

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