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conversation took place against the backdrop of the Syrian refugee crises, which for Bauman revealed more broadly a crisis of the political and philosophical imagination and the limits of our tolerability.
Brad Evans interviews Zygmunt Bauman
May 2, 2016
Zygmunt Bauman was emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, UK, until his death in 2017. His many books included Retrotopia and Strangers at Our Door, both published by Polity Press.
Brad Evans: For over a decade you have focused on the desperate plight of refugees. Your work draws particular attention to the many indignities and insecurities the refugee faces on a daily basis. You have also stressed how the problem is not entirely new and must be understood in a broader historical context. With this in mind, do you think the current refugee crises engulfing Europe represent yet another chapter in the history of flight from persecution, or is there something different taking place here?
Zygmunt Bauman: It does seem like “yet another chapter,” though as with all political problems, which all have histories, something is added to the contents of its predecessors. In the modern era, massive migration itself is not a novelty, nor is it a sporadic event. It is in fact a constant, steady effect of the modern mode of life, with its perpetual preoccupation with order-building and economic progress. Those two qualities in particular act as factories endlessly capable of producing “redundant people,” those who are either locally unemployable or politically intolerable and are therefore forced to seek shelter or more promising life opportunities away from their homes.
It’s true that the prevalent direction of migration has changed following the spread of the modern way of life from Europe, its place of origin, to the rest of the globe. As long as Europe remained the only “modern” continent of the planet, its redundant populations kept being unloaded onto the still “premodern” lands—recycled into colonist settlers, soldiers, or members of colonial administration. Indeed, up to sixty million Europeans are believed to have left Europe for the two Americas, Africa, Australia during the heyday of colonial imperialism.
Starting from the middle of the twentieth century, however, the trajectory of migration took a U-turn. During this time, the logic of migration changed as it was dissociated from the conquest of the lands. The migrants of the postcolonial era have been and still are exchanging inherited ways of eking out an existence, now destroyed by the triumphant modernization promoted by their former colonizers, for the chance of building a nest in the gaps of those colonizers’ domestic economies.
On top of that, however, there is a rising volume of people forced out from their homes, particularly in the Middle East and in Africa, by the dozens of civil wars, ethnic and religious conflicts, and sheer banditry in the territories the colonizers left behind in nominally sovereign, artificially concocted “states” with little prospects of stability but enormous arsenals of weaponry supplied by their former colonial masters.
Hannah Arendt once used the term “worldlessness” to define those conditions where a person doesn’t belong to a world in which they matter as human beings. This seems to be equally resonant in describing the plight of contemporary refugees. Might the problem here be our framing of the debate in terms of “security”—that of either the refugees or their destinations?
Part of the issue is the way in which the political world is framed and understood. Refugees are worldless in a world that is spliced into sovereign territorial states and that demands identifying the possession of human rights with state citizenship. This situation is further compounded by the fact that there are no countries left ready to accept and offer shelter and a chance of a decent life and human dignity to the stateless refugees.
In such a world, those people who are forced to flee intolerable conditions are not considered to be “bearers of rights,” even those rights supposedly considered inalienable to humanity. Forced to depend for their survival on the people on whose doors they knock, refugees are in a way thrown outside the realm of “humanity,” as far as it is meant to confer the rights they aren’t afforded. And there are millions upon millions of such people inhabiting our shared planet.
As you rightly point out, refugees end up all too often cast in the role of a threat to the human rights of established native populations, instead of being defined and treated as a vulnerable part of humanity in search of the restoration of those same rights of which they have been violently robbed.
There is currently a pronounced tendency—among the settled populations as well as the politicians they elect to state offices—to transfer the “issue of refugees” from the area of universal human rights into that of internal security. Being tough on foreigners in the name of safety from potential terrorists is evidently generating more political currency than appealing for benevolence and compassion for people in distress. And to outsource the whole problem into the care of security services is eminently more convenient for governments overloaded with social care duties, which they are apparently neither able nor willing to perform to the satisfaction of their electors.
Central to your analysis has been to argue how many of the vulnerabilities people now face need to be explained in more planetary terms. Increasingly, individual nation-states seem incapable of responding to the multiplicity of threats defining our interconnected age. Does the figure of the refugee reveal more fully the globalized nature of power and violence today?
Seeing the problem in “more planetary terms” is indispensable to fully understanding not only the phenomenon of massive migration but also the genuine and widespread migration panic that the phenomenon has triggered in most of Europe. The influx of a great number of refugees, and their sudden high visibility, draws to the surface fears that we are trying hard to stifle and hide: those fears that are gestated by the premonition of our own fragilities in society and by the continuously reaffirmed suspicion that our fate is in the hands of forces far beyond our comprehension—let alone our control.
In part, they bring the mysterious and obscure but hopefully distant horrors of “global forces” right into our visible and tangible neighborhood. As recently as a few weeks ago, those newcomers may have felt just as safe at home as we do right now. But now they look at us, deprived of their homes, possessions, security, often their “inalienable” human rights, and of their entitlement to have the respect and acceptance that provide a guarantee of self-esteem.
Following the age-old habit, the messengers are blamed for the contents of their message. No wonder the successive tides of fresh immigrants are resented, to quote Brecht, as “harbingers of bad news.” They are embodiments of the collapse of order—a state of affairs in which the relations between causes and effects are stable and so graspable and predictable—allowing those inside a situation to know how to proceed. Because they reveal these insecurities to us, refugees are easily demonized. By stopping them on the other side of our properly fortified borders, it is implied that we’ll manage to stop those global forces that brought them to our doors.
Those who flee from war-torn situations ignite vociferous debates regarding their correct labeling: the “migrant” or the “refugee”? But both terms can be reductive. Might we need a new vocabulary here to emphasize more the human agency of those who are trying to escape such conditions? After all, as the poet Warsan Shire observed, “no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”
In most cases the choice open to a refugee is between a place where one’s presence is not tolerated and another where one’s arrival is unwanted and disallowed. Similarly, the choice open to the so-called economic migrants is one between famine or a prospectless existence and a chance, however tenuous, of tolerable conditions for oneself and one’s family. This is not any more of a “choice,” in any meaningful sense, than that faced by the refugee fleeing overt physical violence. Each one of us would be horrified by the necessity to make such choices. We do need a language and critical vocabulary for a worldly condition that forces millions of its inhabitants to do so.
Insofar as the label “economic migrant” stigmatizes these victims, its use should be condemned. Such discursive acrobatics leave the causes of these crises unexamined and those responsible untouched by guilt.