Migration: "A profound fear that the survival of society is threatened"

Bauman had to leave Poland twice in his life: born in Poznan in 1925, he fled with his family at the outbreak of war in 1939 before the Germans in the Soviet Union. He returned as a political officer. After completing his studies, he taught sociology at the University of Warsaw. In 1967 he resigned from the Communist Party, then lost his professorship and emigrated to Israel, where in 1971 he received a surprise call to the University of Leeds. In numerous works ("Postmodern Ethics", "Rejected Life", "Fleeting Modernity") he analyzed the precariousness of living conditions in the globalized present. He coined the term of the "liquid", liquefied modernity. His new essay on migration and alarmism ("The Fear of the Others") will be published by Suhrkamp Verlag next week. Since the death of his first wife Bauman lives in Leeds with the sociologist Aleksandra Kania, the daughter of former Polish party leader Bolesaw Bierut.

Duncan Elliott / THE MIRROR

Sociologist Bauman

This article is from the SPIEGEL

Issue 36/2016

You are fired!

Digital Edition | Printed issues | Apps | SUBSCRIPTION

SPIEGEL: Professor Bauman, you were a refugee yourself. What do the headlines about the migration crisis, which threatens to overwhelm Europe, solve for you?

Bauman: I am afraid that we are experiencing the beginning of a huge imbalance. The surge of migrants knocking at the gates of Europe, a result of the growing number of failed or already failed states, fuels a profound fear that the well-being and even the survival of society is threatened. And this panic creates a politically explosive emotional state, especially as the politicians awkwardly vacillate between incompatible aspirations: isolation and integration.

SPIEGEL: The mass migration will probably not come to a standstill soon. If Europe is condemned to powerlessness, is it useless to resist quotas and upper limits against the onslaught?

Bauman: Neither will the causes of mass migration be eliminated, nor should the growing ingenuity in the effort to stop them make much sense.

SPIEGEL: But politics can not afford fatalism either.

Bauman: The situation is incurably ambivalent. Panic, as we are currently experiencing it, easily ends in a moral debacle - in the sin of indifference to the tragedies and cries for help of the suffering. Shocking events turn into the routine of normalcy. The crisis is morally neutralized: the migrants and what happens to them or what they do with them are no longer viewed ethically. Once public opinion sees refugees as a security risk, they are beyond the scope of moral responsibility. They are unveiled, objectified, placed outside the room where compassion and solidarity are felt to be needed.

SPIEGEL: Do not security obsession, Islamophobia and the social exclusion of immigrants promote radicalization on both sides?

Bauman: Fear, hatred, resentment and exclusion set a self-fulfilling prophecy in motion. Inclusion and integration are the strongest weapons in the West. There is no other way out of the crisis in which humanity finds itself, than solidarity. The alienation, the barrier between us and the stranger, the established and the outsiders, must be overcome. The first step is to start a dialogue. Strangers must become neighbors.

SPIEGEL: The fear of the stranger, the unknown, is an instinctive reaction, avoiding contact. Locals and immigrants live side by side, not with each other. They do not agree.

Bauman: It separates them from an invisible border of silence. Social and physical closeness have been closely linked for a long time in human history. Today, strangeness has become permanent. The problem of modern societies can not be how to eliminate strangers, but how to live in neighborhoods with them. The coordination between physical and social proximity is disturbed. This is a completely new situation: the foreignness of the strangers is no longer a passing irritation. The strangers remain and refuse to go, although secretly hopes that they will eventually disappear again. They are not guests or visitors, they are not like well-chosen enemies, but also not known neighbors. They remain strangers because they at least partially elude the local rules, the local way of life and insist on their peculiarity.

SPIEGEL: They remain visible because they show their strangeness and their otherness, for example through headscarves and veils. How can one overcome the contradiction inherent in the concept of the stranger that he is with us but not one of us?

Bauman: One has to visualize the situation of the refugee, or rather his dilemma. He loses his homeland without gaining a new one because he flees from misery or violence, because he is not an emigrant. Refugees hang in a vacuum, they are neither sedentary nor nomadic. They are ideal for stigmatization, for the role of the straw doll, which is burned on behalf of the global forces of evil.

SPIEGEL: Uncontrolled immigration embodies the collapse of order. These newcomers, whose uprooting we do not feel responsible for, remind us of our own vulnerability, of the fragility of our prosperity?

Bauman: The refugee is, as Bertolt Brecht wrote in his poem "The Landscape of Exile", a messenger of misfortune. He brings the bad news, the conflicts and storms from afar on our doorstep. It shows us that there are global, not easy-to-imagine forces that work out there, but are powerful enough to affect our lives as well.

SPIEGEL: Is the messenger responsible for the message in xenophobia? We can do little against the difficult forces of globalization.

Bauman: The refugee meets a redirected anger. The scapegoat eases the disquieting and humiliating feeling of our helplessness and existential insecurity that we all face in liquid modernity. This is the chance of the political vote-takers to capitalize on the fears caused by the influx of foreigners. The pent-up fear of the unknown searches for valves. The promise to keep the unwanted foreigners out is a kind of exorcism - the frightening specter of uncertainty is to be driven out.

SPIEGEL: The populist politician is a charlatan and a shaman?

Bauman: Politics today is under the conditions of endemic uncertainty. Its impact is local, while the problems it faces are global. In the transition from the solid to the fluid, fleeting phase of modernity, we experience the increasing separation of politics and power. The unleashed forces of globalization elude nation-state control. Political institutions are proving increasingly unsuited to meeting new challenges. The fragmented society no longer forms a community that erodes the territorial sovereignty of the nation state. He loses his problem-solving skills and thus his protective function.

SPIEGEL: Does democracy, which needs the framework of the nation state, fail before the growing discrepancy between goals and means of effective action?

Bauman: The crisis of democracy results in the eyes of citizens from their actual and supposed inability to deliver. The helplessness of the politicians, their reference to the fact that there is no alternative, they could not do otherwise, is perceived as surrender. The attractiveness of the strong man or woman - Donald Trump in the US, Marine Le Pen in France - is based on the claim and the unproven promise that they could act differently, that in their own person they are the alternative.

SPIEGEL: The announcement that the conditions by walls, entry bans and deportations back in order, undeniably has a seductive appeal.

Bauman: Nationalism and the incantation of ethnic unity are a substitute for the lack of integration factors in a disintegrating society. The nation state will not regain its power. The big cities of the world have long ago become the laboratories of the new mixed companies. They express the tensions between mixophilia and mixophobia in the pluralism of cultures. Foreclosure is a deceptive temptation. The gates are broken, they can not be closed anymore. The legitimacy of the nation state rested on three pillars: military security to the outside, welfare within, commonality of language and culture. This tripod has been broken off.

SPIEGEL: What should be done so that people do not end up in a resurrected world of war against all, against whom Thomas Hobbes at the beginning of modern times recommended the nation state as a guarantor of freedom and security?

Bauman: Umberto Eco, one of the last great polymath scholars, insisted on the fundamental difference between migration and immigration. In political practice, both are constantly confused. Immigration can plan and control a government by law. Migration, on the other hand, is like an uncontrollable natural phenomenon. It just happens, it happens, it defies the authority of any nation state, like an earthquake or a tsunami. In the big cities of the world, groups living in the diaspora are gathering without anybody having planned this process. There are 70 different linguistic, ethnic, religious, ideological communities living in London. They do not assimilate or superficially, unlike the immigrants of the 19th century. The Turks in Germany want to be loyal citizens in Germany, but they also want to remain Turks. Why? They are all products of migration, not immigration. But we continue to pretend that immigration is immigration - predictable, regulable, controllable by governments in Berlin, Paris or London.

Duncan Elliott / THE MIRROR

Bauman in his house in Leeds with SPIEGEL editor Romain Leick

SPIEGEL: Do they have to fail to master the global problem with their national and local resources? Is integration, the goal everyone conjures like a magic wand, a chimera?

Bauman: The stragglers of modernity, which one calls ashamed and mendacious developing countries, stand in front of the doors of the West and will gain entry. This statement leads to a second insight, formulated by the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck, a great colleague: we have long been living, whether we like it or not, in a cosmopolitan situation with leaky borders and universal interdependence. But what we lack is the cosmopolitan consciousness.

SPIEGEL: The cognitive measurement of social space hangs behind real development and leads politics to make wrong decisions?

Bauman: We must begin to develop and promote this cosmopolitan consciousness, the realization of global interdependence. This is a difficult process because it requires a reversal of the mindset. The question must not be any more: what is good for me and my country, say Hungary, but Viktor Orbán should ask: what should Hungary do to make the European Union, to which it belongs, a better and stronger part of the world? do?

SPIEGEL: Britain has said goodbye to Brexit. The solo effort still seems tempting.

Bauman: The citation of the referendum by David Cameron was a major political stupidity. The famous and notorious Staatsrechtler Carl Schmitt defined sovereignty as the right to name the enemy. Identity is the twin brother of enmity: we are who we are because we have a common enemy. This is how people functioned from the original hordes of hunters and gatherers to the nation states of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. In the history of humankind, integration and segregation always belong together: we and the. Integrate or you will be ejected. This is over, "the" are among us, where is the enemy? We need to re-learn the art of integration, renouncing the either-or, if we want to do justice to our situation.

SPIEGEL: Those who do not have access are parked in misery camps. More and more European politicians are pleading to keep them permanently there.

Bauman: These refugees are treated like human waste. They have lost the right to determine and assert themselves. They are outside the law, devoid of any individuality. Their prospect of recycling in host societies is vanishingly small. They are people without identity and without qualities, for us they are unimaginable and unthinkable.

SPIEGEL: No place in the cosmopolitan consciousness. In the age of universality, is the need for a retreat into the community of the like stronger?

Bauman: Have you ever heard the term "retrotopia"?

SPIEGEL: No, but I suspect what you mean by that.

Bauman: Well, I'll tell you my new project: "Retrotopia" will be the title of my next book. 500 years ago, Thomas Morus wrote his work "Utopia", the design of a nowhere country, a still-nieland, a better place that has not yet become reality. Retrotopia is also a place that does not exist, but not because it does not exist but has already existed.

SPIEGEL: In contrast to utopia, it symbolizes the yearning for a past that is transfigured but can not be found again.

Bauman: We dream of a reliable world, a world we can trust, a secure world of conformity. In the centuries following Thomas More, the modern world was optimistic on its way to Utopia. When I was a young man, a long, very long time ago, I was a staunch progress creditor. I was convinced that a society without utopia was unbearable. "Progress," wrote Oscar Wilde, "is the realization of utopias." Utopia is the hope for a better life in the future. Humanity is looking for a better country and sets sail.

SPIEGEL: And today she is trying to go back?

Bauman: We are currently experiencing what is probably the most important turnaround in prevailing thinking. Young people in Europe, and probably in Germany, do not expect profits from the future, but losses. They are the first generation after the Second World War who fear that they can not reach or maintain the standard of living and quality of life of their parents. Apparently, France is the most pessimistic nation in Europe. A large majority worry that the future will be worse than the past. Incredible! Utopias saw the light of day at the same time as modernity and could only develop in the climate of modernity. Its end also signals the end of modernity.

SPIEGEL: The great utopias of the 20th century have failed, they were bloody caricatures of a dream. But the guiding principle of progress remains unbroken, not only in the field of science and technology, but even in morality?

Bauman: In my idea of ​​retrotopia, the angel of history has turned 180 degrees. The values ​​that connect with the two opposite directions of past and future have changed places on the timeline. The disappointment is waiting in the future. Instead of a carefree time, we experience one disaster after another: terrorism, financial crisis, economic stagnation, unemployment, precariousness. The idea of ​​progress today promises less the hope of improving one's personal situation than the fear of being left behind and left behind. So we turn to the past and still move forward blindly.

SPIEGEL: Was not progress always blind?

Bauman: In Franz Kafka's parable "Der Aufbruch" the servant asks: "Where is the Lord riding?" He answers: "I do not know, just away from here, just away from here, always away from here ... that's my goal." This is how Kafka describes the fatality in two sentences. That is the situation in which we are.

SPIEGEL: Could it be that the fatality of history leads humanity into a global civil war rather than Immanuel Kant's unification of a world civil society?

Bauman: A very good question, but I can only draw a road map, I can not say which way to go.

SPIEGEL: What does your card look like?

Bauman: Despite all conflicts, wars and class struggles in early capitalism, our ancestors had an advantage: the morphology of human coexistence forced solidarity. Henry Ford knew that he had to pay his workers properly to ensure his own success. This mutual insurance has been unilaterally terminated by neoliberalism in its form of open society. Social solidarity was displaced in favor of individual self-responsibility. It has become the individual's responsibility to provide for his personal survival in a fragmented and unpredictable world, although his resources for doing so are completely inadequate. The general sense of precariousness that accompanies the process of economic deregulation dissolves interpersonal ties and fuels the mistrust of all against all. Progress stands for the threat of continual change. Everyone is a potential opponent and competitor for the other. This is very disturbing.

SPIEGEL: Is the violence in the insecurity of the meritocracy?

Bauman: All threats are united in the guise of the illegal immigrant. He is the ideal phantom opponent. Instead of stereotyping, he needs to be personalized to defuse hostility against him. He has the right to be considered an individual, not a representative of a category, race or religion. And the only way is through understanding, that is, through dialogue.

SPIEGEL: Tolerance alone is not enough?

Bauman: Tolerance is often just an expression of indifference. Do whatever you want, as long as it does not touch me. If you want to go upside down, please, do it if you like it. In contrast, solidarity, the exploration of the subjects and intentions of the neighbor, the exploration of the stranger: Why are you walking on the hands? Let's talk about it! It is noteworthy that it is precisely Pope Francis's call for a culture of dialogue. Only it enables us to perceive and respect others as legitimate partners.

SPIEGEL: You were in exile yourself, lost your Polish homeland.

Bauman: A Pole in a strange train.

SPIEGEL: Did you ever feel threatened by your identity?

Bauman: I came to Leeds to university when I was 45 years old. Everything was different: language, culture, history. It was certainly a traumatic period. It took me ten years to establish a smooth understanding, a genuine reciprocity with my colleagues in the British academic world. But I did not perceive my problems as identity disorders. The search for identity is part of Retrotopia: Since I can not find happiness in the future, I am stepping back into the past. Historian Eric Hobsbawm said people start talking about identity when they stop talking about commonality.

SPIEGEL: Professor Bauman, we thank you for this interview.

more on the subject

• integration
• refugees
• All topic pages

This article is from the SPIEGEL

Issue 36/2016

You are fired!

Digital Edition | Printed issues | Apps | SUBSCRIPTION