It is hard to make sense of a panorama of such distressing inhumanities: mass starvation of children in Gaza, grinding war in Ukraine, an unhinged United States president taking on the world … and, above and beyond, a careening climate and biodiversity crisis to which the respective protagonists of those conflicts—the Israeli prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump—are utterly indifferent.
Yet the leading sociologist Ulrich Beck provided the conceptual framework to link such apparently disparate events in an overall schema. Beck argued that this was an era of ‘reflexive modernization’, in which rather than modernity being counterposed to tradition—as in Ferdinand Tönnies’ classic dichotomy of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft—it was now modernising over and against itself, in a much less linear and predictable way and with significant ‘side-effects’. This was provoking a ‘counter-modernity’, Beck contended, seeking in an illusory way to restore all the boundaries—from those between states to those between gender roles—which reflexive modernisation seemed to be washing away: ‘All the concepts that modernity dismantles, unmasks and delegitimates are sacred to counter-modernity: of course this includes “tradition” and the “cultivation”, that is, invention of it, but also nature, religion, the nation, the distinction between ourselves and “strangers”, we-they identities and hence their extreme intensification, friend-enemy relationships.’
Netanyahu, Putin and Trump have all retreated into such ‘constructed certitude’, as Beck described it. What appals them is what he called ‘really existing cosmopolitanization’. A play on the Soviet self-delusion of ‘actually existing socialism’, this for Beck was the very real bringing together in a globalised and individualised world of ordinary selves and others in an intercultural milieu, requiring their mutual re-evaluation. It entailed ‘the art of translation and bridge-building’ or ‘situating and relativizing one’s own form of life within other horizons of possibility’. Netanyahu can no more tolerate this in the shape of the ‘two-state solution’, ending the occupation in favour of genuine Palestinian autonomy and Jewish-Arab coexistence, than can Putin accept a Ukraine set on a European trajectory or Trump a world where multilateral networks enmesh his isolationist thrashing around.
