In(visible) border

...5th part

There is a tendency to expand the realm of freedom by providing the cities with more public spaces where strange people can meet and engage at least in a temporary interaction, talk to each other, sometimes strike a friendship and establish more or less durable relations with each other.

(...)There is a tendency towards keeping a distance, building walls, drawing borders, spatial separation. It is most pronounced in the United States of America, but visible more and more in European countries. A tendency to divide the city into a collection of voluntary and involuntary ghettos.

On the one hand, “gated communities”, where people who can afford it hide themselves in a closely guarded territory, surrounded by armed guards on the watch for twenty-four hours a day and keeping the strangers out. If you can’t afford to buy yourself into a gated community, at least you buy better locks to put on your door, burglar alarms and closed-circuit television to keep strangers away, or you join the local ‘neighbourhood watch’ vigilante group to keep strangers away.

And there are ever spreading involuntary ghettos, into which people are dumped without being asked, not because they want it but because they are not allowed to go out. When applied to some particularly ‘rough’ districts of the city, the expression “no go area” means different things to people outside and the people inside.

For the first, it means “I’d rather not go in”, “I’ll keep away”. But for the people who are inside “no go area” means “I can’t go out”, “I’m not allowed to get out from here”.

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

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In(visible) border

...4th part

«Cities in which more than half of mankind live today, spend most of their lives, are the places on which the outcomes of the chaotic and uncontrolled globalisation processes converge. Three of the outcomes are particularly important in shaping the conditions of insecurity that mark contemporary life.

First, our cities are the dumping grounds for the globally produced problems: pollution of water or air, warming up of the planet, these are global products, side effects of the chaotic nature of the globalising process. But it is the municipal authorities and the city residents that have to worry about making air for breathing and water for drinking, and defend the living conditions in the city themselves against the dangers arising from climatic changes. The massive migration of people around the world, the rising numbers of homeless economic migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, is also a product of globalising processes; they all end up inside the city in their search for bearable life conditions, and providing such conditions becomes a task falling on the shoulders of the city and its residents.

Second, it is the city that turns into the principal battlefield where freedom and security, two paramount values indispensable in a life worth living, meet, struggle, and seek reconciliation. Third, city turns today into the main laboratory in which local solutions to global problems are sought, designed, experimented with and put to test; at the same time however, city offers the type of surrounding most conducive to the acquisition of skills, the arts, abilities and habits that may help enormously in confronting, tackling and possibly resolving those global issues exactly where they ought to be handled – on the global scene. Cities are laboratories where the ways and means of human peaceful cohabitation, cross-cultural dialogue and understanding are developed.

Cities were always the places where strangers lived together. It is in fact the definition of the city: the place where strangers live together permanently while keeping their differences and without stopping being strangers. Each time you walk from home to your working place or to a shop or a cinema, you meet hundreds of people who are complete strangers to you and who will remain strangers after your meeting. For this reason, city life always evoked contradictory sentiments. »

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

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In(visible) border

...3rd part

«Since the world out there is insecure and we cannot defuse the dangers it emanates, let us lock ourselves up and fence ourselves off its morbid impacts. Let us surround ourselves by closed-circuit television, by immigration officers on the borders, the specially trained dogs, which will put every moving person under suspicion and draw every passenger through the checks meant for criminals and terrorists. Let us buy and fix more secure locks for our doors. Let us hire more armed guards to guard the part of town where we live and keep strangers away.

These sort of things, we hope against hope, may stop the oozing insecurity we so deeply feel at the outer border of our country or local community, at the threshold of our home, and prevent it from seeping inside. It’s, I repeat, a vain hope. It won’t stop companies and jobs from vanishing. It won’t stop our savings for old age suddenly disappearing. It won’t save demands for skills from evaporating. It won’t make human bonds stronger and more reliable.»

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

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In(visible) border

... 2nd part

«Our present obsession with borders is the product of the hopeless hope that we can actually insure ourselves against all sorts of risks and dangers, that we cut ourselves off from threats vague unnamed threats, with which the world we live in seems to be saturated. To put it in a nutshell, one could say that our obsession with borders today comes from the hopelessness of our hopes, from the fact that we are desperately trying to find local solutions to globally produced problems, though such solutions don’t exist and cannot be found. There can be only global solutions to global problems. But such global solutions are, thus far, beyond our reach.

All historically created tools of collective action are local. They reach as far as the borders of the nation state. We don’t have any effective tools of collective action above this level. The point, though, is that real power, power to do things and have them done, has evaporated from these local institutions. In our increasingly globalised world there is local politics without power and global power with no politics – politically unconstrained power. After two or three hundred years of modern history, of very close, sometimes friendly, sometimes stormy, cohabitation of power and politics inside the nation state, there has been a divorce. We are forced therefore to use the only tools of effective collective action we have, which are local tools, in the hope that they will somehow protect us from the uncontrolled, unbridled and impenetrable dangers from the global powers we do not control. We suffer uncertainty, fears, nightmares, which emanate from the processes over which we have no control, of which we have only very partial knowledge, and which we certainly are, we fear, too weak to master.

It all boils down to the vague feeling of insecurity.»

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

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In(visible) border

« “Many Cultures, One Humanity”.

It’s a beautiful frame for thinking in our contemporary liquid order and very complex, very difficult, very risky, very dangerous world. A frame where our thinking, our concern with our own lives and the lives of people around us is placed between these two extremes. Many cultures is the reality. One humanity is an ideal destination, purpose, task. Many cultures is the past; that is what we inherited from millennia of human history. One humanity is the future, first predicted by Immanuel Kant who wrote more than two hundred years ago about the universal unification of humankind. Few people read his predictions. Recently Kant’s little book about the future of mankind was rediscovered and suddenly everybody became interested, which is a very good sign because it shows the awareness, the consciousness that unity of mankind is on agenda. A topical issue, and growing in stature.

There is one invisible third element between many cultures on one side and one humanity on the other. Invisible but necessary. The middle element is the border. Border is what separates and at the same time connects cultures. These days, we are obsessed with borders. That’s a paradox, a logical paradox, but not psycho-logical. A logical paradox, because in our fast-globalising world borders become less and less effective. They lose their effectiveness and therefore their practical importance. But as they lose their importance, they acquire more and more significance and tend to be over-saturated with meaning. It doesn’t stand to reason… Psychologically, however, this is hardly paradoxical, since the less successful we are in keeping intact the borders we have drawn, the more obsessive we become in drawing them again and again. We are indeed obsessed today with drawing borders. The less they are effective, the more we are obsessed. Why? What is the reason? »

Zygmunt Bauman
New Frontiers and Universal Values
Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona 2004

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