How the energy crisis and the war in Iran are dispelling the illusion of fleeting modernity. This is a daily stress test for the infrastructure underpinning the Western way of life.
ISLAMIC TIMES – Rising energy prices, triggered by geopolitical upheavals and exacerbated by the war in Iran, are deeply disrupting routines that were previously taken for granted: travelling, commuting, booking a flight on a whim and heading to the seaside at the weekend.
Who can afford mobility and who cannot has become the new defining social issue – and it is politically more explosive than the sober curves of energy statistics suggest. At the heart of the crisis lies the car, for decades the Germans’ favourite child and, for generations, a symbol of the promise of a free life.
Photo: Freepik.com
Energy crisis and travel: The end of cheap mobility
The current energy crisis builds on a vulnerability that has been brewing for some time: the European economy has become accustomed over decades to cheaper fossil fuel imports, be it gas from Russia or oil from the Middle East.
The war in Iran is suddenly exacerbating this dependence. Even the prospect of a prolonged blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is driving oil prices ever higher; insurance companies are making transport more expensive, whilst refineries and markets are pricing in the uncertainty.
So far, the German government has found no convincing means of curbing the rise in energy prices. How this situation affects the mindset of citizens accustomed to mobility remains an open question.
What appears as volatility in commodity charts translates into cutbacks in everyday life. Car commuters are recalculating their routes; families are postponing holidays, shortening stays or cancelling them altogether. Tour operators report hesitant bookings, airlines are passing on increased kerosene costs, whilst at the same time climate policy pressure is growing to make flights significantly more expensive.
The energy crisis is thus hitting a tourism industry that has been grappling with fragile demand since the pandemic – and consumers torn between climate concerns, fears of inflation and wanderlust.
Photo: Islamic Relief Deutschland
Bauman and fleeting modernity: when mobility becomes a necessity
Zygmunt Bauman described the present as ‘fleeting modernity’: an era in which established institutions are eroding and biographical stability is becoming the exception. Everything is in flux: life courses break down into episodes, relationships become reversible, activities take on a project-based form; security is no longer collectively guaranteed but increasingly organised on an individual basis.
In this world, mobility becomes the defining distinguishing feature. Bauman sketches figures who embody this logic: the tourist, the flaneur or the gambler.
The tourist is not merely a holidaymaker, but a symbol of a lifestyle: always on the move, constantly choosing, perpetually able to walk away from a scene and start afresh. Mobility is not just a physical but also a social phenomenon, encompassing job changes, relocations and digital nomadism. Those who remain mobile stay in the game; those who become immobile are regarded as left behind.
Against this backdrop, the energy crisis takes on a deeper significance. When travel suddenly becomes expensive and unpredictable, when commuting becomes a financial burden, it is not just a comfort zone that crumbles, but a core promise of fleeting modernity: that options are, in principle, unlimited, and that identity can be stabilised through the possibility of changing location at any time. The petrol price crisis is thus, not least, a crisis of late-modern self-definition.
Electromobility: a promise of salvation with built-in contradictions
It is against this backdrop that electromobility emerges as a technological and political promise of clean technology. It is intended to reduce dependence on fossil fuel imports, lower local emissions and, at the same time, preserve the promise of individual mobility.
The electric fleet – from electric cars to electric buses – thus represents a kind of techno-progressive compensation: the journey is to continue, only in a cleaner way.
Yet this promise is fragile. In Europe, electricity itself is part of the energy crisis; high gas prices are driving up electricity costs, and the expansion of renewable generation, grids and storage is lagging political ambitions. The supply chains for battery raw materials are geopolitically vulnerable, from lithium to cobalt, and production is concentrated in a few global hubs.
As a result, electric mobility risks becoming a form of transport reserved for those who can afford the switch: high-earning urban communities who buy electric cars, install solar panels and benefit from government subsidy schemes.
Those living in rural areas, with older vehicles, uncertain incomes and poor charging infrastructure, view the promise of electric mobility with scepticism. Electric mobility can reduce dependence on oil in the long term – but without social support measures, there is a risk that it will widen the gap between the mobile and the non-mobile.
The non-mobile: a political powder keg on the periphery
Rising energy and transport costs are shaping a new social figure: the unwillingly non-mobile. These are the people for whom the daily commute to work is only possible by car because bus services have long since been cut back; those for whom a visit to relatives abroad is thwarted by the cost of flights; those who see holiday travel as part of a ‘normal’ life, but now have to do without it.
In a culture that presents mobility as an expression of freedom and self-fulfilment, enforced immobility becomes a symbolic humiliation. Those who cannot travel, cannot change, cannot be ‘flexible’, experience the dominant narrative of fleeting modernity as a constant affront. This affront gives rise to political potential – not in the sense of constructive shaping, but in the sense of outlets laden with resentment.
Right-wing populist and anti-establishment parties offer simple narratives here: “Climate protection is to blame for your bills”, “those at the top” are said to rule over the rest of the population with their air travel and electric cars.
They promise cheaper fuel, the scrapping of CO₂ prices, the end of “ideological” transport policy – a promise to return to the era of cheap fossil-fuel mobility, which has in fact long since been geopolitically destroyed. Those without mobility thus become the target group of a policy that channels anger but offers no viable response to the structural energy crisis.
Photo: knirpsdesign | Shutterstock
An ecological coercive system? The pandemic as a backdrop for fear
The fear that climate policy might one day lead to an ecological coercive system is fuelled by very concrete experiences: the pandemic. At that time, freedom of movement, travel and gatherings were restricted on an unprecedented scale; border closures, curfews and access controls shaped everyday life.
Many have stored this phase as a shock – not only in terms of health, but as a political and existential imposition. How will modern states organise the energy shortage?
When measures to reduce emissions are now being discussed – speed limits, driving bans in city centres, higher kerosene taxes, stricter rules for short-haul flights – some see these proposals not as democratically negotiated regulation, but as harbingers of a permanent regime of ecological control.
Added to this is a technocratic language that operates with ‘targets’ and ‘instruments’ but says little about distributive justice and public participation. New areas of tension are already forming on the horizon, between those who want to ecologically transform society and those who yearn for the old order.
The decisive factor will be whether ecological mobility policy is perceived as a project that distributes burdens fairly and creates alternatives – for instance through affordable and reliable public transport, support for switching modes, and regional services – or as a top-down regulation that primarily affects those with few options.
In a climate of mistrust, any new measure, even if rationally justified, can be interpreted as further evidence of ecological paternalism.
Conclusion: Mobility as a new social issue
The energy crisis in the context of the Iran war exposes a deep fault line: mobility is no longer a given but has become a scarce resource. In Bauman’s fleeting modernity, which thrives on mobility and choice, this scarcity feels like a systemic failure – it robs an entire culture of its central promise.
Electric mobility offers a path to the future, but no automatic salvation: it can decouple mobility from fossil fuel shocks, it can make cities quieter and the air cleaner, and it can make long-distance travel appear partially ‘greener’.
Yet without social justice in access to this new mobility, without robust public infrastructure and without transparent political processes, it threatens to produce new inequalities. The economic division of society into rich and poor will, in any case, dramatically exacerbate the current energy crisis.
Ultimately, a political decision must be made: will the ecological transition be used to reorganise mobility as a public good – democratically controlled – or will a two-tier society emerge, comprising the mobile and the left-behind, in which the non-mobile become a reservoir for parties exploiting a complex crisis with simplistic slogans?
The answer to this question will determine not only holiday plans, but also the self-image of liberal democracies in the age of energy scarcity.
