On February 7th 2023, the European Studies Centre hosted Tony Barber (Financial Times), Gavin Jacobson (New Statesman), and Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute) to launch Jan Zielonka’s new book The Lost Future and How to Reclaim It (Yale University Press, 2023). The panel was chaired by ESC Director Othon Anastasakis.
The panel started with Professor Zielonka, from our college, introducing his main argument: democracy is myopic, no matter who is in charge. In terms of space, democracy is myopic because it is confined to the borders of nation-states although most current problems are local or transnational. In terms of time, democracy is short-sighted because it is a prisoner of current voters and when tough decisions are to be made, the future is being sacrificed. The internet revolution plays an important role here because it changed dramatically the notion of time and space, but democracy hardly took notice. We need to empower public actors that benefited from the digital revolution most or else democracy will falter. In essence, we need to gradually move from the world of states to world of networks, local, national and transnational.
In Jacobson’s interpretation, the book’s argument can be read as a response to the unresolved problems of democracy from the 1990s. Of course, the question of how to solve the problem of time began in the second century at least. Polybius, for example, wrote that all governments seemed to collapse due to an eternal cycle of monarch, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, mob rule, Caeserism, and chaos. Then, during the French Revolution, the acceleration of industry, culture, and technology was recognized as the tool to stabilize society and prevent its collapse. Acceleration reached its climax in the 1990s during the Cold War because, here, change was the only part of politics that was permanent and certain. The era created circulations of capitalism, confining life to repetitions in the grocery store, at work, and in other everyday aspects of industrial privilege. Here, time and space conflated together because there was an eternal present moment with no “elsewhere” to seek.