The Turbulence of Migration

Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity

Nikos Papastergiadis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745668130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This important book traces the impact of the movement of people, ideas and capital across the globe.

1

Introduction: The Turbulence of Migration

The subjects of history, once the settled farmers and citizens, have now become the migrants, the refugees, the Gastarbeiter, the asylum seekers, the urban homeless.

Neal Ascherson, The Black Sea

Migration, in its endless motion, surrounds and pervades almost all aspects of contemporary society. As has often been noted, the modern world is in a state of flux and turbulence. It is a system in which the circulation of people, resources and information follows multiple paths. The energy and barriers that either cause or deflect the contemporary patterns of movement have both obvious and hidden locations. While nothing is utterly random, the consequences of change are often far from predictable. For the most part, we seem to travel in this world without that invisible captain, who can see ahead and periodically warn us to ‘return to our seats and fasten our security belts’. The journey nowadays is particularly treacherous, with financial storms which can break out in Hong Kong and have repercussions in New York, acid rains generated in the north drifting south, the global emission of CFC gases directly affecting the growth of the hole in the ozone layer above the Antarctic, the threat of atomic fallout looming larger as the nuclear arsenals of thirty or more countries are positioned along jagged lines of brinkmanship, and the systemic flooding of the ranks of the unemployed as the chilling technology of economic rationalization bites into every locale. These are just some of the known sources of fear. There may be other storms on the horizon which we cannot name, let alone control, that force people to move.

The turbulence of modern migration has destabilized the routes of movement and created uncertainty about the possibilities of settlement. The scale and complexity of movement that is occurring currently has never been witnessed before in history, and its consequences have exceeded earlier predictions. To take account of this excess, migration must be understood in a broad sense. I see it not just as a term referring to the plight of the ‘burnt ones’, the destitute others who have been displaced from their homelands. It is also a metaphor for the complex forces which are integral to the radical transformations of modernity. The world changes around us and we change with it, but in the modern period the process of change has also altered fundamental perceptions of time and space. Countless people are on the move and even those who have never left their homeland are moved by this restless epoch.

These changes have a profound effect on the way we understand our sense of belonging in the world. It is impossible to give an exact location and date for the emergence of modernity. Modernity has had multiple birthplaces. Giddens’s general definition of modernity, as referring to the institutional changes that took place somewhere around the eighteenth century, is about as accurate as one can get.¹ Throughout the modern period, most people have understood their sense of belonging in terms of an allegiance to a nation-state. This task of conferring clear and unambiguous forms of belonging was never a straightforward operation. Nation-states were from the outset composed of people with different cultural identities. Among the central aims of the project of nation-building was the unification of these diverse peoples under a common identity, and the regulation of movement across their territorial borders. However, the complex patterns of movement across national boundaries, and the articulation of new forms of identity by minority groups that emerged in the past couple of decades, have destabilized the foundations of the nation-state.

This book seeks to examine the interconnected processes of globalization and migration and to explore their impact on the established notions of belonging. It seeks to question the dominant forms of citizenship and cultural identity which defined belonging according to national categories and exclusive practices of identification, by exploring the emergent forms of diasporic and hybrid identities. There is a great urgency in our need to rethink the politics of identity. If the historical and cultural field that shapes contemporary society is increasingly diverse and varied, then we can no longer exclusively focus on the traditions and institutions that have taken root in a given place over a long historical period. The identity of society has to reflect this process of mixture that emerges whenever two or more cultures meet.

The political will to adopt such an approach towards migrant communities and minority groups has not been readily forthcoming. While there is a growing recognition that we are living in a far more turbulent world, a critical language and affirmative structures to address these changes have been lagging behind. A haunting paradox lurks at the centre of all claims to national autonomy: while the flows of global movement are proliferating, the fortification of national boundaries is becoming more vigilant. Every nation-state is at once seeking to maximize the opportunities from transnational corporations, and yet closing its doors to the forms of migration that these economic shifts stimulate. New pressures and new voices have emerged in the cultural and political landscape. Even countries like Germany and Japan, which have boasted of their ethnic homogeneity and aggressively restricted the right to citizenship, are increasingly confronted with the inevitability of seeing themselves as multiethnic societies. As nation-states are losing more and more of their power to regulate activities within their territory, they are becoming increasingly aggressive about the defence of their borders. Tougher laws against asylum-seekers, the rounding up of gypsies and ruthless eviction of ‘economic migrants’ are some of the ways in which governments vent their frustration in a world where they have seemingly lost control but dare not admit it. The need for global action to address local issues has never been more necessary, but there are few signs of supranational co-operation, nor any new agencies with the powers and responsibilities to address human needs on a global scale.

New concepts for a turbulent world

The twin processes of globalization and migration have produced changes in the geopolitical landscape that have compelled social scientists to rethink their conceptual frameworks. Since the 1970s, there has been a growing legitimacy of multicultural perspectives in places like Canada and Australia, which have questioned the dominant political categories for defining citizenship according to birthplace and residence within a nation-state. Previously, most of the literature on migration was staked between the automatic assimilation and the gradual integration of the migrant into the host society. As ‘ethnic elites’ gained authority within the cultural and political circles of the dominant society, they began to argue in favour of new models for representing the process of cultural interaction, and to demonstrate the negative consequences of insisting upon the denial of the emergent forms of cultural identity. Multicultural perspectives on political rights and cultural exchange thus began to have a dynamic role in the reshaping of contemporary society.

Since the 1980s, especially in the American and French academic communities, the concept of class had come under scrutiny. Conservative scholars like Francis Fukuyama saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as the ultimate triumph of liberalism, and the ‘end of history’ in terms of class struggle. Samuel Huntington took a more pessimistic view of the global picture, noting the ascendance of Islam, the rising influence of the east, and predicted cataclysmic ‘clashes of civilization’. Structural changes were definitely occurring, the imperial orders were being dismantled and reconfigured, multi-ethnic societies were becoming the norm, and in contradistinction to these patrician scholars, I believe that the more sober reappraisal of the fundamental social divisions was offered by the new intellectual movements of feminism and postcolonialism.

The concept of space, which in the 1990s was given greater theoretical significance by British geographers like Doreen Massey, added a crucial dimension in the rethinking of the relationship between migration and globalization. In the past there was a tendency to discuss migration in the mechanistic terms of causes and consequences. Space was often seen as a vacant category, reduced to a neutral stage upon which other forces were at play in the narratives of migration. Space was rarely seen as an active part in the field of identity formation. However, it is increasingly evident that contemporary migration has no single origin and no simple end. It is an ongoing process and needs to be seen as an open voyage. Departures and returns are rarely, if ever, final, and so it is important that we acknowledge the transformative effect of the journey, and in general recognize that space is a dynamic field in which identities are in a constant state of interaction. This would enable us to shift the discourse on migration from merely an explanation of either the external causes or the attribution of motivation to an examination of the complex relationships and perceptual shifts that are being formed through the experience of movement. Just as in science there is the new consensus that every entity is composed of interacting forces, there is now an emerging debate in the humanities and social sciences that agency is in a state of mutual transformation with its surrounding structures. Hence, the cultural identity of the migrant will need to be seen as being partly formed by and in the journey, or on what Paul Virilio calls the ‘trajective’, and not as a locked item that preceded the very act of movement.

These political transformations and intellectual debates on nationalism and multiculturalism, class and agency, and space and time provide the broad horizons of this book. More specifically my aim is to explore the parameters of three questions. First, what are the available models for mapping migration and explaining social change? Second, how is migration linked to the broader social changes associated with globalization? Third, how do concepts like deterritorialization, translation, recognition and hybridity expand our understanding of identity and culture in plural societies?

Throughout this book the term ‘turbulence’ appears. I have adopted it from James Rosenau’s work in international relations in order to break out of the mechanistic models for explaining migration. Turbulence is not just a useful noun for describing the unsettling effect of an unexpected force that alters your course of movement; it is also a metaphor for the broader levels of interconnection and interdependency between the various forces that are in play in the modern world. The flows of migration across the globe are not explicable by any general theory. In the absence of structured patterns of global migration, with direct causes and effects, turbulence is the best formulation for the mobile processes of complex self-organization that are now occurring. These movements may appear chaotic, but there is a logic and order within them. An analogy can be drawn with phenomena that were once thought to lack any structure, like turbulent flows, and which are now understood as possessing intricate patterns of interconnection. As Manuel de Landa noted, ‘a turbulent flow is made out of a hierarchy of eddies and vortices inside more eddies and vortices.’² The internal structures of migration have often gone unnoticed. Both the drag effect that is produced on migrants as they are caught in the flow of movement, and the complex linkages that are generated to sustain a momentum, are often overshadowed by the attention given to external forces. I am concerned with the interrelationship between the energy for movement and the effects on its surroundings. What I aim to offer in this book is an account of how the experience of movement has produced novel forms of belonging and stimulated shifts in our understanding of contemporary culture.

To address the contemporary problematic of migration requires a new cross-disciplinary approach. Migration studies are no longer confined to the domain of sociology, demography, politics and economics. Key contributions have also been made by anthropology, history, psychology, geography, philosophy, cultural studies and art criticism. Disciplines like literary theory and political economy, which a decade ago were considered to be poles apart, have now discovered new borders of interest. These new studies have increasingly drawn attention to the complex links between diffuse levels of experience and deep structural changes. For instance, concepts like deterritorialization and hybridity do not reside exclusively in any particular discipline, they have served as ‘bridging concepts’, extending the parameters of analysis and highlighting a mode of explanation which is alert to the role of difference and contingency in contemporary society.

The critical debates on globalization have also significant implications for both migration studies and the classical sociological and anthropological definitions of the boundaries of society and culture. From the moral questions of how judgements are posed across the boundaries of cultural difference, ³ to the political debates on the future of the nation-state and the institutions of governance in a globalized world, ⁴ there is now an extensive programme of rethinking conceptual frameworks. Migration, in its contemporary form, also needs to be understood as an interminable and multifarious process. It could be seen as both the all too visible problem and the invisible catalyst in what Habermas called ‘the incomplete project of modernity’.⁵ Thus the aim of chapters 2 and 3 is to establish a conceptual framework which challenges some of the conventional definitions of migrants and seeks to present broader categories of belonging in modernity.

The twin processes of globalization and migration have shifted the question of cultural identity from the margins to the centre of contemporary debates. Cultural identity, in one form or another, preoccupies the construction of the public sphere. The definition of a criminal code, the provisions for public housing, the rules for immigration, the services established within health and welfare programmes, conception of madness and disability, the understanding and evaluation of artistic production, the formulation of academic curricula, are all issues which can no longer be addressed without some reference to the discourse of anti-racist discrimination, equal opportunity and affirmative action. Increased recognition and negotiation of cultural difference has challenged the very foundations of almost every institution or practice that shapes the contours of social life.

Both the excesses of political correctness, and the ethnocentric backlash against multiculturalism, are symptoms of a deeper uncertainty about how to measure and manage the viability of cultural differences within a given social space affected by globalizing forces. The structures of the local are increasingly formed by elements and ideas from distant sources. As ideas are rapidly imported from elsewhere and membership of local institutions is altered, the identity of society is subjected to new pressures.

Globalization, as I argue in chapter 4, has raised new questions about the institutions of governance and exposed the limits of the nation-state. The influence of transnational corporations, the integration of financial services within the networks of the global stock markets, the ceding of political power to supranational bodies like the European Union, the deregulatory pressures of global competitiveness in the labour market, the emergence of new social movements to tackle global ecological issues, have all, for good or ill, undermined the legitimacy and putative autonomy of the nation-state. While the modern nation-state demanded the undivided loyalty of its subjects, insisted on sovereignty over its territory, and sought to define the identity of its community in singular terms, it remained intrinsically resistant to the rights of ethnic minorities and diasporic subjectivities. Migration may have spawned new diasporic communities and facilitated the critique of the nation-state, but this in itself has not necessarily produced greater levels of freedom and cross-cultural understanding. For, if it was difficult to secure the terms by which minorities could find democratic forms of representation within the political system of the nation-state, it now seems infinitely more precarious under the conditions of globalization.

The ‘chaos’ of global migration

The current flows of migrant labour are now fundamentally different from earlier forms of mass migration. There have been dramatic shifts in the destinations of migration, restrictions on residency and strict limitations on settlement. The great metropolitan centres of the north and west, New York, Paris, London – in terms of migrant influx – have been eclipsed by the capitals of the east and south. Is this because the prospects of work are better elsewhere, or are there other reasons? There are currently more construction cranes in operation in the new economic zones of China than anywhere else in the world. The world’s tallest building is neither a cathedral in Europe, nor an office block in New York, but the twin towers of Kuala Lumpur. Mexico City is swelling at a rate that is stretching its urban infrastructure to breaking-point. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster over 400, 000 people were displaced; the ecology of their homelands ruined for centuries to come. Today people are on the move for a variety of reasons. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area) agreements force peasants to be on the move across the Americas; political and ethnic clashes have displaced millions from their homes in Africa; some of the most educated women in the Philippines accept exploitative contracts to work as housemaids in the Gulf States. Do all these people fit under the term migrant?

The early mappings of international migrations were predominantly Eurocentric. They were defined either in relation to the colonial ventures from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, or to the processes of industrialization and rapid urbanization in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Between 1500 and 1850 approximately 10 million slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas. Between 1815 and 1925 over 25 million Britons were settled in predominantly urban areas of the colonies. The ‘classical period’ of migration referred to the trajectory of peasants from the peripheral rural-based societies to the core industrial countries of western Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia.

For many migrants the first sight of their new country was caught from the deck of their ship. After the First World War, most migrants heading for the United States would have probably disembarked and gone through immigration procedures on Ellis Island, just off New York. The dock and hall of Ellis Island are now part of a museum. At the end of the twentieth century, the aeroplane has become the dominant means of mass transport. Today, migrants mostly arrive by descending into what Marc Auge calls the ‘non places’ of modern airports.⁶ The journey from a Third World village to a First World city can now be calculated in terms of hours. The greater levels of mobility in modernity, however, have not been reciprocated by more hospitable forms of reception.

The current trends of global migration reveal a far more multidirectional phase. In this context, migration is neither directed to, nor exclusively generated by, the needs of the north and the west. The vast majority of migrants are no longer moving exclusively to the north and the west, but also between the new industrial epicentres within the south and the east. While for the earlier periods of migration, movement was generally mapped in linear terms, with clear co-ordinates between centre and periphery, and definable axial routes, the current phase can best be described as turbulent, a fluid but structured movement, with multidirectional and reversible trajectories. The turbulence of migration is evident not only in the multiplicity of paths but also in the unpredictability of the changes associated with these movements. However, this has not meant that the pattern of move...