Between separation and integration: Strategies of cohabitation in the era of diasporization and Internet

History braids continuity with discontinuity; those two qualities are in an “and-and,” not an “either-or,” relation. Each chapter of history simultaneously preserves and innovates. The current refugee crisis is not—can’t be—an exception to this rule. Your two interpretations are not oppositions; they complement each other. “Being another chapter” does not mean that there is nothing different taking place.

The most striking difference distinguishing the present “refugee crisis” from the shape of the influx of foreigners immediately preceding it, is that it can’t be administered, monitored, and all-too-all controlled by means until relatively recently assumed to be effective. It is precisely such inadequacy and inefficacy of the orthodox means concerning the latest tide of people knocking at our door that raised the anxiety common to all or most inflows of strangers to the level of “panic.” What that last tide laid wide open is the ongoing transformation of geopolitical conditions under which the movement of populations takes place—a phenomenon whose imminent advent the late Umberto Eco warned of already two decades ego—however, to no effect. What Eco, roughly, suggested was the need to distinguish between emigration/immigration (from, to) and migration (from, but where to?)—two processes ruled by different sets of laws and logics (Eco, 2001).

“The phenomenon of immigration,” as the uniquely visionary Umberto Eco pointed out well before the present-day migration of peoples took off, “may be controlled politically, restricted, encouraged, planned, or accepted. This is not the case with migration” (Eco, 2001, p. 32). Immigration can be controlled politically, but like natural phenomena, migration cannot be: “As long as there is immigration, peoples can hope to keep the immigrants in a ghetto, so that they do not mix with the natives. When migration occurs, there are no more ghettos, and intermarriage is uncontrollable” (Eco, 2001, p. 93). Eco then asked the crucial question: “Is it possible to distinguish immigration from migration when the entire planet is becoming the territory of intersecting movements of people?” And suggested in his reply: “What Europe is still trying to tackle as immigration is instead migration. The Third World is knocking at our doors, and it will come in even if we are not in agreement … Europe will become a multiracial continent—or ‘colored’ one … That’s how it will be, whether you like it or not” (Eco, 2001, pp. 95–96). And, let me add—whether all of “them” like it or/and all of “us” resent it.

The seminal departure in the modus operandi and the consequences of “peoples on the move” is—to deploy Eco’s distinction—the outcome of migration, not immigration: of a self-propelling process, rather than of a politically/militarily supervised undertaking. Heterogeneity of the urban environment can no longer be supposed, perceived, and treated as a temporary irritant, but rather sooner than later is bound to be made null and void, ensued by the cultural assimilation of the currently alien elements: the inevitable—voluntary or imposed—surrender/annihilation of their cultural idiosyncrasies. Cultural heterogeneity is fast becoming—and recognized if not approved—an undetachable and irremovable, indeed endemic, trait of the urban mode of human cohabitation. At the time when Eco wrote down his words of alert, in the city of New York, for instance, the “whites” counted 58% and were ever nearer to becoming a minority; 42% of the “whites” were Jews, and the rest were divided among WASPS, Poles, Italians, Hispanics, Irish, and so on (Eco, 2001, p. 96). Whether we like it or not, we the urban dwellers find ourselves in a situation requiring the development and appropriation of the skills of living with difference daily, and in all probability permanently. After a couple of centuries spent on dreams of cultural assimilation (unilateral) or convergence (bilateral), and on ensuing practices, we begin to face up—even if in many a case reluctantly, and often with unmitigating resistance—to the prospect of the mixture of interaction and friction among a multiplicity of irreducibly diverse identities of neighboring and/or intermixed cultural diasporas. Realization of such prospect does not come easily and the first response is one of denial—or a resolute, emphatic, and pugnacious rejection. Whether the intensity of passions is capable of compensating for that denial’s pragmatic unproductiveness is, however, another question altogether.

Do we need a new humanism for the 21st century, so many voices currently ask. What we do need in my view, and urgently, is the closing of or at least narrowing considerably the “cultural lag” stretching between the novel condition of the world and the increasingly outdated consciousness of its population (particularly its opinion-making elite). The late Ulrich Beck, a most acute master of vivisecting our world’s weaknesses and inanities, argued convincingly that we have been, collectively, cast in a cosmopolite situation (in the sense of becoming irretrievably dependent on each other and bound to exercise reciprocal influence) (Beck, 2006), but we haven’t yet started in earnest to develop (let alone to appropriate and to not to mention deploying) a matching cosmopolitan awareness. Alas, similarly to Eco, Beck was not given attention; his call to act was hardly heard. On a planet crisscrossed tightly by trade routes and information highways, we (including our political elites), we guide our thought and actions by the precepts inherited from the era of territorial sovereignties, moats, drawbridges, stockades, barbed wires, ad hoc coalitions, and walls.

What we call “refugee crisis” is but one of multiple manifestations of the state of “interregnum”—one in which the habitual ways of acting have stopped working properly and bringing familiar results, but the new ways—more adapted to the changed conditions—are still at best stuck at the drawing-board stage. I doubt whether the inclination to single out one or another from the host of such manifestations as “fundamental” or “the biggest”—a proclivity insinuated, aided, and abetted by ratings-greedy media and votes-greedy politicians—is the right and promising way to proceed in our multifaceted, multicentered, and by and large disorganized world. It is high time and perhaps a matter of our shared life and death to face up to the complexity of our common existential condition and see (and, hopefully, deal with) processes in their intertwining, mutual dependence and reciprocal influence. “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”—to quote John Donne (1923, p. 98). That is, for all of us, the humans.

Contrary to the demagogues of all denominations, there are no shortcuts, no quick fixes, no instant solutions to the “current refugee problem,” just as there none to all other problems we confront except the most banal among them.

Speaking of the problems calling for most urgent attention, Pope Francis named recently designing, appropriating, and practicing the art of dialogue—and tackling the catastrophically rising social inequality—and he added right away that both issues need to be inserted in school curricula at all levels (Congregration for Catholic Education, 2014). Chinese wisdom, going back to Confucius’s times, recommends that thinking of a year we ought to sow corn, thinking of 10 years we should plant trees, and while thinking of 100 years we must be educating people.

Author note

Zygmunt Bauman is internationally celebrated as one of the greatest social thinkers of our times. Though he was a professor of sociology at the University of Leeds (and later, professor emeritus), his work transcended conventional disciplinary boundaries, embracing social and political theory, philosophy, ethics, media/communications studies, cultural studies, psychology, and theology. Publications of relevance to this special issue include Strangers at Our Door (Polity, 2016), Europe: An Unfinished Adventure (Polity, 2004), and Liquid Modernity (Polity, 2000).

This is the lecture blueprint Professor Bauman prepared for his scheduled public keynote at the “Connected Migrants: Encapsulation or Cosmopolitanism” academy colloquium, organized by Prof. Sandra Ponzanesi and Dr. Koen Leurs at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 15–16 December 2016 (https://www.knaw.nl/en/news/calendar/academy-colloquium-connected-migrants). Sadly, Professor Bauman developed a serious health condition, and passed away aged 91 on January 9, 2017. We are very grateful the right holders have granted us permission to publish this piece as the preface for the Popular Communication volume 16, issue 1 special issue on “Connected Migrants”.