Some considerations about the metissage of our world

Working in the field of asylum and legal protections for refugees and immigrants brings to carry on many meditations, considerations and to try to give an answer to many questions. Not only, of course, directly related to the law and to its application. The BIG issue concerns the situation we are facing and the future of the world were we live in.

I had many occasions to meditate about all these problems while reading a very interesting essay of Jean-Claude Guillebaud, published in 2008 and whose title is “Le commencement d'un monde. Vers une modernité métisse.”

Are we really facing the beginning of a new world? I think yes and no. What does it mean “a new world”? Is it reasonable to compare an old world to a new one that is substituting the previous one? Of course not, and probably I share this opinion with Guillebaud.

But...it is not possible to deny that things are changing very fast, as fast as never before probably. Or simply we want to be so important in the history that we pretend that we are establishing a record. Never mind, this is not the pivotal issue.

The issue is the change of the world, the fact that the political and economic situation is changing so rapidly that we all are a bit confused. We were used to consider the United States together with Europe as the center of the world, where all things happen and where people from other continents should come to learn. Learn what? Well, basically everything, from technology to democracy and human rights.

This model is definitely over: as Guillebaud states, we are not any more the centre of the world. I thinks it's difficult not to agree with this statement. Nobody would think that the inhabitants of Beijing or Mumbai live in the outskirts of the world. The same applies to big South African or Brazilian cities.

Two important issues:

1. Is that bad? Definitely not. I answer to this question through another question: why should the Western world be the only one that counts?
   
   
2. What does it imply? A huge metissage (mixing of 'races' and cultures) of the world, where it would be extremely difficult to differentiate what is black and what is white, i.e. what is American and what is Asian, European or South-American.
   
   

I definitely love the idea of metissage: a mix of cultures where the mutual respect shall prevail and where we all should be free to develop some components of our heritage, without imposing it to the others.

One cannot deny that the practical implementation of this model is difficult, that tensions naturally arise and that probably many people would prefer to live in a world where...white is white and black is black and they see each other only during the summer holidays (preferably with a certain safety distance).

We may like it or not, but we already live in a metissage-world: is not China, that took the western model of capitalism, an example of metissage? Are not Indian engineers, that are employed in the Indian Silicon Valley, another example? The list can be very long – too long for a blog.

And so what: just don't worry and be happy? No, we can't be happy until the politics (in concrete terms, many political parties and political leaders) will say that the metissage does not exist, or that it is bad and therefore that we should go back...to the old good time where white was white and black was black.

First of all, these old good times never existed. Secondly, it's very difficult to miss those times where we were the center, we were good, we were beautiful and the others were just a problem, or an occasion to accrue our power or our wealth. Please, just let us dream a world where no superpowers exist and where the global rules are not written by a small minority of world citizens.