Z.B.: 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. In a culture that ennobles the pursuit of self-betterment and happiness by raising it to the rank of life purpose and meaning, it is nothing less than utter hypocrisy to condemn those who try to follow this precept but are prevented from doing so by lack of means or proper papers.

B.E.: When dealing with the racial and cultural politics of the refugee you have used the metaphor “setting fears afloat” to emphasize how the refugee has become the signifier upon which many of our contemporary fears and anxieties are projected. Mindful of what you address above in respect to the politics of (in)security; is there not a danger that the heightened focus on the refugee adds to the scapegoating by presenting the problem as defining of our times (hence truly polarizing the debate and driving it to the extremes)?

Z.B.: As Hegel warned nearly two centuries ago, the owl of Minerva, that goddess of wisdom, spreads its wings at dusk. By this I mean that we tend to learn only what defines “our times” in retrospect, once they are over. And rarely even in hindsight do we learn this definitely. Eric Hobsbawm, perhaps the greatest historian of the modern era, gathered courage to attach a name of the “Age of Extremes” to the 20th century only in 1994. And even then he felt the need to apologize for such attachments:

“Nobody can write the history of the twentieth century like that of any other era, if only because nobody can write about his or her lifetime as one can (and must) write about a period known only from outside, at second or third-hand, from sources of the period or the works of later historians (...) This is one reason why under my professional hat as a historian I avoided working on the era since 1914 for most of my career.”

Let’s heed the advice/warning by the great historian and resist the temptation to overemphasize what Thomas Hylland Eriksen has called, with particular reference to the power of the media, the “tyranny of the moment.” The refugees might have indeed more entitlements than most other categories to hold the status of “the defining scapegoats” of “our times” — but for how long? In my latest book I write that our insecurities keep “floating,” as none of the anchors we cast proves to be solid enough to hold them in place with any degree of permanence. So it may go with the refugee, who embodies in the clearest way the liquidity of fear in the contemporary moment. Right now, at least, that liquidity creates a sort of affinity between the strangers at our doors and the mysterious, seemingly omnipotent global forces that pushed them there. Both stay staunchly beyond our reach and control, ignoring our deepest wishes and our most ingenious “solutions.”

B.E.: It is arguable that one of the “intellectual casualties” of the war on terror has been the humanitarian ideal the world might be transformed for the better. Do we perhaps need a new humanism for the 21st century?

Z.B.: In his “Cosmopolitan Vision” Ulrich Beck captured the predicament brilliantly: We have been already cast (without having been asked) into a cosmopolitan condition of universal, humanity-wide interdependence. But we are still missing, and have not yet started in earnest to compose and acquire, an accompanying cosmopolitan awareness. This creates a kind of cultural lag, as William Fielding Ogburn would call it, the evidence of which is the treatment of the refugee. They may well remain the collateral victims of this lack of understanding until such time that we try in earnest to attend to that lag’s institutional, state-based foundations.

As Benjamin Barber crisply put it in his manifesto “If Mayors Ruled the World,” “today, after a long history of regional success, the nation-state is failing us on the global scale. It was the perfect political recipe for the liberty and independence of autonomous peoples and nations. It is utterly unsuited for interdependence.” He sees that nation states are singularly unfit to tackle the challenges arising from our planet-wide interdependence, in that they are “too inclined by their nature to rivalry and mutual exclusion,” and appear “quintessentially indisposed to cooperation and incapable of establishing global common goods.”