The New Nomads

How the Migration Revolution is Making the World a Better Place

Felix Marquardt

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781471177385
• eBook ISBN: 9781471177392
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We have lost the plot when it comes to migration. In our collective consciousness, the term 'migration' conjures up images of hordes of refugees fleeing 'their' country, escaping on rafts and coming to invade 'ours'. When we think of migration, we think of (largely unwanted) immigration and its ills. We've got it all wrong. Far from being abnormal, the act of going in search of a better life is at the core of the human experience. And now a new kind of nomad is emerging. What used to be a movement largely from east to west, south to north, developing to developed country is becoming more of a multilateral phenomenon with each passing day. Young people from everywhere are moving everywhere. Or rather, they are moving to where they expect to improve their lives and are turning the world into a beauty contest of cities and regions and companies vying to attract them. They are doing so because movement has become a key to their emancipation. After centuries of becoming sedentary, the future of humanity and the key to its enlightenment in the 21st century lies in re-embracing nomadism. Migration fosters the qualities that will allowour children to flourish and succeed. Our times require more migration, not less. Part memoir, part generational manifesto, The New Nomad is both the chronicle of this revolution and a call toembraceit.

1 THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF MIGRATION

‘I have great faith in fools – self-confidence my friends will call it.’

Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

In Paris on 7 January 2015, two violent thugs meticulously brainwashed by ISIS broke into the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo armed with assault weapons and proceeded to methodically execute the vast majority of those present. The attack and the ensuing manhunt left seventeen people dead. Islamic State soon claimed responsibility. The news reverberated almost instantly around France and the world. In what has become a reflexive instinct of the modern Muslim condition, triggered every time abominations are committed in the name of Islam, Muslims in the West, and especially in France, braced themselves for what might come next.

I had developed a keen interest in Arab Islamic cultures since adolescence and eventually converted to Islam when I married a Tunisian woman in 2003. This was required by the law of the land (we got married near Carthage, now a suburb of Tunis, the capital) but it also sat well with my taste for controversy and a naïve desire to stand up for a religion which I felt was being caricatured both by non-Muslims and by Muslims in the West. The marriage was short-lived – we separated in 2005 – but my faith, which was largely theoretical when we married, had become profound by the time of the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

One of the leitmotifs of my existence has been an urge to bring together people around ideas. I had become close to a raft of leading Muslim thinkers and politicians in the course of my career, and I turned to them, suggesting that we launch a kind of think tank calling for Islamic reform. Among the al-Kawaakibi¹ Foundation’s cofounders were the former deputy prime minister of Malaysia; the mufti of Tripoli in Lebanon; the late president of the Muslim Judicial Council of South Africa; the current president of the French Islamic Foundation; the rector of the great mosque of Bordeaux; and a Palestinian-Austrian cleric who teaches philosophy at Vienna University, authored a doctoral thesis on atheism and was one of the first Muslim theologians in the world to publicly defend the idea of women becoming imams. We pointed to the dangers of Arabo-centrism – the damaging, disproportionate influence of some of the world’s most repressive and retrograde regimes, primarily Saudi Arabia, in defining Islamic norms in a day and age when most Muslims aren’t Arabs.² We questioned the wisdom of simply exclaiming ‘This has nothing to do with Islam!’ in the wake of this and other gruesome attacks by terrorists who thought of themselves as Muslims. (‘Would we agree that the Crusades had “nothing to do” with Christianity?!’ we exclaimed.) We called for a renovation of Islamic thought and a fresh push for the re-interpretation (ijtihâd) of sacred texts to free Muslims from literal, obsolete interpretations.

Converts to Islam are prone to feelings of illegitimacy when comparing themselves to their Muslim-born, and especially their Arab, fellows. As a result, we tend to adopt one of two attitudes. The first, and thankfully the most common, is to become quite reserved. It doesn’t look good for the most recent convert to have the loudest voice. In part, that’s probably because the second attitude is a sharp left turn towards fundamentalism. I had been a minor pundit and a talking head in the media for years, but as a convert – and to be honest, an attention-seeking missile – willing to be critical of fellow Muslims, I had garnered a significant level of recognition among my co-religionists. A few months later, I woke up to find out that a photo of our launch event had appeared in the latest issue of ISIS’s French-language magazine, Dar Al Islam. The caption read: ‘Conference of apostates.’ I was one of the people in the picture. While the text did not contain direct, ad hominem threats, the implication was stark: apostates should be killed.

In the ensuing weeks, France’s Counterterrorism Coordination Unit assigned me two elite police officers who followed me around at all times. For about a week, I felt important. Then, the gloom of living in constant fear and the sheer insanity of never, ever being alone kicked in. After a surreal ten months with these guardian angels (I will remain forever grateful for their service and for the French authorities’ attentiveness to my well-being), I decided to move to a country in which I knew hardly anyone – and where no one knew me. This was a luxury that the other members of the al-Kawaakibi Foundation who lived in France, were threatened by fundamentalists far more often than me, and stood at greater risk, did not have.

That’s how my two Labradors and I landed in Stockholm in the middle of winter, 2016, where I could move seamlessly thanks to my EU passport (I am Austrian and American). I had never visited Sweden and was drawn there mainly because it was unfamiliar. I was dead broke and jobless, subsisting on cash remittances from a few friends and family for several months. My full-time activity during the previous two years had consisted mainly of not drinking or taking any drugs, one day at a time. I was clean and sober after twenty years of active dependence on pot and a shorter but brutal descent into cocaine addiction. But I had no idea what was going to come next.

The Seattle Freeze is how newcomers describe the difficulty of building and maintaining relationships in that city because of a general lack of interest from locals who can feel cold, standoffish and flaky. When I first heard about it, I immediately thought of my experience landing in Stockholm. Back home, a host of people had – quite understandably – been keeping their distance following my addiction problems, but a few friends remained available and supportive. In Stockholm, no one had a clue who I was (which of course was precisely the point) and, to my utter dismay, no one seemed to care.

My seasonal timing could not have been worse. The social hibernation which grips the country between Christmas and April gave rise to a feeling of isolation and even what I’d describe as a form of social anorexia which I had never experienced before, and haven’t since. I had a lot of time to think about the highs and lows, the ins and outs of my life. There had been quite a few. When I got married in Tunisia, the best man had compared me to a chameleon in his speech. This had prompted allusions to Forrest Gump and Woody Allen’s character Leonard Zelig, the human chameleon.

I spent my first winter in Stockholm wandering around Djurgården and the majestic city’s other islands somewhat aimlessly, re-reading the stories of other, more dramatic real-life characters whose unorthodox trajectories had captured my imagination. I reconnected with everyone from the Russian sociopath Eduard Limonov, whose incredible path from controversial poet in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and New York to ultranationalist dissident in Russia was famously chronicled by the French author Emmanuel Carrère, to Lev Nussimbaum, a Georgian Jew who reinvented himself as the Muslim Kurban Said and became what might most aptly be referred to as one of the great bullshit artists of the 1920s and 1930s. I wondered what life had in store for me.

I’ve been a tagger and a petty drug dealer; a speechwriter for CEOs of multinationals like Vivendi and l’Oréal; an errand boy for a law firm on Wall Street; a French hip-hop producer and band manager; a web entrepreneur who briefly found himself in close proximity to the world of internet porn; an advisor on media relations and strategy to heads of states, governments and to the then-CEO of French energy giant Total, the late Christophe de Margerie, who became a close friend and mentor; the founder of a movement encouraging French youths to ‘Scram!’³ and embark on a journey to see the world and find themselves. My job titles have included ‘Communications Manager’ of the International Herald Tribune (IHT),⁴ ‘President, International’ of Cylance, then one of the world’s leading cybersecurity companies, and ‘surface technician’, as the French called my briefly held job as a parking lot cleaner. I have chaperoned a Nobel Peace Prize laureate around Davos and brought a wannabe Indonesian dictator to the Elysée. I have been scolded by Condoleezza Rice for mocking American Exceptionalism in the age of Trump and by my local police chief for smoking joints on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. I have hosted Bill Gates and several heads of states (including some dictators) for dinner. I have also found myself homeless and slept on benches in train stations. And here I was again, unemployed and unemployable.

I can’t say that I don’t find the effect produced by this somewhat grotesque inventory entertaining. I am well aware that other epithets come to mind, too: reckless, dishonest, entitled and of course self-centred, to name a few. This versatility is itself the stuff of privilege; there is no doubt about that, either. As the effects of drugs and alcohol started to wear off over the years, I was able to see the misguided, decadent, dangerous and immoral aspects of this past for what they were, rather than the exhilarating, glamorous existence of my drug-induced fantasies as an international man of mystery. Coming to the realisation that many things I found exciting and valuable were pointless, that many people who didn’t like me much before had excellent reasons to do so and that many others who did like me were just as ill as I was, has been an incredibly enriching process. Learning that not being the self-centred, arrogant jackass I have often been – and could easily become again if I had that first drink or drug – leads to a much happier life is one of the great gifts, indeed miracles, of my existence.

Despite a flawed moral compass and a sometimes staggering cluelessness, with the benefit of a few years sober and clean, I can discern skills and even some virtues that allowed for these baroque situations to emerge, whether they were positive and exciting or grotesque and toxic: eclecticism, resilience, people skills, humour, open-mindedness, a willingness to try new things, the ability to see possibilities and seize on them, to relate to very different people, to clock a room and know what moved people and to connect with them and them with each other. Once I added honesty to the mix and replaced narcissism with self-esteem, I was well on my way to start growing.

These abilities were not the fruit of academic prowess or superior intelligence (despite stellar grades here and there, my overall results as a student were quite mediocre and I ended up dropping out of college). I owe them in no small part to my familial background. I am from a long line of migrants, and they weren’t as fortunate as my siblings and me.

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It is fitting that writing a book entitled The New Nomads has turned into the journey of a lifetime. When I first came up with the idea, I had been attending the World Economic Forum, the elitist gathering of business and political leaders in the Swiss alps, in various capacities, for over a decade. Globalism was not just my worldview; it was my identity and my bread and butter. Up until the moment I started writing, this book was going to be a rather predictable globalist ode to mobility. The rise of nativism, nationalism and populism was already a trend. As I saw it, nomadism was the perfect cure: personal and economic growth as the answer to nationalism and xenophobia.

But something started shifting in my mind following the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. I came to Davos in January 2017 expecting those ‘Committed to improving the state of the world’⁵ to engage in intense soul-searching and to try to figure out what had gone wrong. After all, it was the Thatcherism-lite of Tony Blair and the centrism of Barack Obama, both celebrated in Davos as the pinnacle of political, economic and social development, which had led to these two earthquakes. I soon realised that there would be no soul-searching in Davos. In the view of those present, in short, the people had ‘voted wrongly, against their own interests’. That was that. From climate breakdown to the absurd levels of inequality and populism, the answer of global elites to all our ills remained… more of the same: more growth, more knowledge, more technology, more innovation (oh, and of course: more mindfulness and yoga classes) would save the day. That’s when it hit me: to deal with all these modern fires, our fire brigade is made up of pyromaniacs.

When I started writing this book, I was still a kind of Davos cheerleader and I used the term ‘nomad’ as many of us do these days: as a shorthand for geographical mobility. When I mentioned the title of the book I was working on during my annual pilgrimage to the Alpine resort, I could immediately sense excitement. Many attendees told me they were nomads themselves, because they ‘lived on a plane’, owned a loft in SoHo and a chalet in Gstaad, or that their child, a restless spirit, was wandering the world during a gap year. Nor was it only the Davos types who loved the book’s title. When I mentioned it to members of the overwhelmingly liberal and climate-conscious Western middle class – London’s Remainers, Paris’ Bobos, Williamsburg’s hipsters – they lit up, too. Mobility and restlessness have become the ultimate status symbols of modernity. The nomad is in vogue. You’d almost forget that not that long ago, nomadism was a dirty word. The nomad was the vagrant, the Gypsy, the wandering Jew, all very unwelcome in most parts just a few decades ago.

I noticed something else. When I’d mention my book to many decent, regular folks with more modest means or from working-class culture, the term elicited blank stares. I realised this difference in reaction to a single word, ‘nomad’, was an uncannily effective way of knowing on which side of our polarised societies an individual stands.

I slowly became aware of the violence of the aloof, idealised take on migration of many liberals. It was the corollary of what Chris Hedges describes as ‘inverted totalitarianism’,⁶ and Charles Eisenstein as ‘totalitarian corporatism’.⁷ And it went hand in hand with their aloof, idealised, self-serving take on Humanism, Progress, Enlightenment and on modernity more broadly. I realised that the rise of nativism and anti-migration sentiment is in no small part a reaction to this aloofness.

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The year was 1945. Stalin and Roosevelt knew that a reckoning was coming once the Nazis were defeated. The goal for both was to have conquered as much German territory as possible by the time they met the other camp, to be in a position of power for the negotiations that would inevitably ensue. Breslau, then a medieval German town in the heart of Silesia, now a small Polish city known as Wroclaw, had been buzzing for weeks with rumours of what the Russian troops did to the German civilian populations they encountered as they advanced westwards: looting, torture, rape and murder. Since the end of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1941, Germany and Russia had been fighting a vicious war that included some of the most gruesome battles of all time. The Americans had only just landed in Europe. Germans instinctively knew they were better off in the hands of the Western allied forces, rather than the Russians.

Late one January night, a group of three women left the town on foot, pushing a cart containing their most valuable belongings. The trio was composed of a tall, breathtakingly beautiful and strong-willed woman in the early stages of pregnancy named Sigrid, her mother Charlotte, known as Mimi, and her grandmother Margarethe. The three women started making their way westwards. After walking for several weeks, they were nearly met by Russian tanks not far from Dresden and had to abandon the cart and hide in a ditch.

Soon after, a truck full of German soldiers heading westwards drove by. Sigrid begged the soldiers to let them ride along. They refused at first, because of the suitcase that the three women still carried. Sigrid did away with this last remaining piece of luggage with a sigh, too, and the soldiers let them on board. In the following weeks and months, they slowly made their way westwards across Germany until they reached the small town of Hof in Bavaria in June. Outside city hall, Sigrid sifted through lists carrying thousands of names of soldiers unaccounted for or wounded, as she had done in every town they stopped in. That’s where she saw the name of her husband, Horst.

Horst was no fan of the Nazis; in fact, he hated them. But he was no hero, either. As an engineering student, he had dodged the draft for as long as he possibly could, but by 1943 every last man of fighting age had been conscripted. Still, he had managed to avoid active duty and desk-jockeyed for the German army well into 1944. It wasn’t until April 1945 that he was handed a rifle and sent into combat. He was promptly shot in the arm during a pitched battle against the Americans in the forest near the town of Trier.

By the time Sigrid saw his name on the list in Hof, he was in a hospital in Bad Nauheim, a small town quite close to where the Montana rancher Henry Sieben was born. Sigrid grabbed her mother and grandmother, and the three made their way there. By the time the three women arrived and Sigrid was reunited with Horst, she was beginning to have contractions. On 31 August, she gave birth to a son whom they named Alexander – Axel to his family. Sigrid flourished as an actress and was hired in the mid-1950s by Vienna’s Burgtheater, the world’s oldest German-speaking theatre, where she eventually became tenured and spent her entire career. When she died in 2016, a black flag was hung over the main entrance of the august building.

In the last months of 1968, Axel, by then an assiduous student of law at Vienna University, handed in his application to become a Fulbright scholar. The competition was fierce, and the word among applicants in Vienna was that you should apply for mid-level colleges to ensure you would be selected. Axel thought otherwise, deciding, ‘The hell with it. If I’m going to go to America, might as well reach for the stars.’ His dream was to spend a year in New York City, one in Paris and one in Moscow before coming back to settle down in Vienna. And so, in the boxes where he was to state his preferences in terms of universities should his application be successful, he wrote:

1. Columbia, 2. Berkeley, 3. Harvard.

As he returned from classes on a warm spring af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Transformative Power of Migration
• Chapter 2: Going Places
• Chapter 3: Migration Goes Multilateral
• Chapter 4: The Power of Leaving
• Chapter 5: Get Out!
• Chapter 6: Refugees and Communities – ‘(Don’t) Go Back To Where You Came From’
• Chapter 7: The Limits of Labels
• Chapter 8: Rise and Fall of the ‘Digital Nomad’
• Chapter 9: A Fire Brigade of Pyromaniacs
• Conclusion: Taking the Long Way Home
• Postscript
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright