In the seventeenth century the protestant Isaac de la Peyrière observed that Chinese chronologies were much older than Jewish ones and conjectured that original sin involved only the descendants of Adam, not other races, born far earlier. Naturally he was declared to be a heretic, but, immaterial of whether he was right or wrong from a theological point of view, he was reacting to a fact that no one today doubts anymore: the various dating systems in force in different cultures reflect different theogonies and historiographies, and the Christian system is merely one among many (and I should like to point out that the calculation ab anno Domini is not as old as people think, because as recently as the early Middle Ages years were counted not from the birth of Christ but from the presumed creation of the world).
I believe that the year 2000 will be celebrated even in Singapore and in Beijing, owing to the influence of the European model on other models. Everyone will probably celebrate the coming of the year 2000, but for most of the peoples of the world this will be a commercial convention, not a profound conviction. If China had a flourishing civilization before our year 0 (and we know that before that date there were other civilizations in the Mediterranean basin; all that has happened is that we have agreed to record the age of Plato and Aristotle as «before Christ»), what does it mean to celebrate the year 2000? It means the triumph of the model that I shall not call «Christian» (because atheists will celebrate 2000 as well), but of the European model that, after Columbus’s «discovery» of America—even though American Indians say that they were the ones who discovered us—also became the American model.
When we celebrate the year 2000, what year will it be for Muslims, Australian aborigines, and the Chinese? Of course we could disregard this. The year 2000 is ours, it is a Eurocentric date, our business. But apart from the fact that the Eurocentric model seems to dominate American civilization too—although the American nation includes Africans, Orientals, and Native Americans who do not identify with this model—do we Europeans still have the right to identify ourselves with the Eurocentric model?
Some years ago, upon the constitution of the Académie Universelle des Cultures in Paris, an organization made up of artists and scientists from all over the world, a statute or charter was drawn up. And one of the introductory declarations of this charter, which was also intended, to define the scientific and moral duties of this academy, was that the coming millennium would witness a «great cross-breeding of cultures.»
If the course of events is not suddenly inverted (and everything is possible), we must prepare ourselves for the fact that in the next millennium Europe will be like New York or some Latin American countries. In New York we see the negation of the «melting pot» concept: different cultures coexist, from Puerto Ricans to Chinese, from Koreans to Pakistanis. Some groups have merged with one another (like Italians and Irish, Jews and Poles), others have kept themselves separate (living in different districts, speaking different languages and following different traditions), and all come together on the basis of some common laws and a common lingua franca, English, which each group speaks insufficiently well. I ask you to bear in mind that in New York, where the so-called white population is on the way to becoming a minority, 42 percent of the whites are Jews and the other 58 percent are of the most disparate origins, and of their number the Wasps are the minority (there are Polish Catholics, Italians, Hispanic-Americans, Irish, etc.).
In Latin America, depending on the country, different phenomena have occurred: sometimes the Spanish colonizers interbred with the Indians, sometimes (as in Brazil) with the Africans too, and sometimes languages and populations known as «Creole» came into being. It is very difficult, even if we think in racial terms, to say whether a Mexican or a Peruvian is of European or Amerindian origin. And it’s even harder to decide about, let’s say, a Jamaican.
So, the future of Europe holds a phenomenon of this kind, and no racist or backward-looking reactionary will be able to prevent it.
I believe that a distinction must be drawn between the concept of «immigration» and that of «migration.» Immigration occurs when some individuals (even many individuals, but in numbers that are statistically irrelevant with respect to the original stock) move from one country to another (like the Italians and the Irish in America, or the Turks today in Germany). The phenomenon of immigration may be controlled politically, restricted, encouraged, planned, or accepted.
This is not the case with migration. Violent or pacific as it may be, it is like a natural phenomenon: it happens, and no one can control it. Migration occurs when an entire people, little by little, moves from one territory to another (the number remaining in the original territory is of no importance: what counts is the extent to which the migrants change the culture of the territory to which they have migrated). There have been great migrations from East to West, in the course of which the peoples of the Caucasus changed the culture and biological heredity of the natives. Then there were the migrations of the «barbarian» peoples that invaded the Roman Empire and created new kingdoms and new cultures called «Romano-barbarian» or «Romano-Germanic.» There was European migration toward the American continent, from the East Coast and gradually across to California, and also from the Caribbean islands and Mexico all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Even though this was in part politically planned, I use the term «migration» because the European whites did not adopt the customs and the culture of the natives, but rather founded a new civilization to which even the natives (those who survived) adapted.
There have been interrupted migrations, like those of the Arab peoples who got as far as the Iberian peninsula. There have been forms of migration that were planned and partial, but no less influential for this, like that of Europeans to the East and South (hence the birth of the so-called postcolonial nations), where the migrants nonetheless changed the culture of the autochthonous peoples. I don’t think that anyone has so far described a phenomenology of the different types of migration, but migration is certainly different from immigration. We have only immigration when the immigrants (admitted according to political decisions) accept most of the customs of the country into which they have immigrated, while migration occurs when the migrants (whom no one can stop at the frontiers) radically transform the culture of the territory they have migrated to.
Today, after a nineteenth century full of immigrants, we find ourselves faced with unclear phenomena. In a climate marked by pronounced mobility, it is very difficult to say whether a certain movement of people is immigration or migration. There is certainly an unstoppable flow from the south to the north (as Africans and Middle Easterners head for Europe), the Indians have invaded Africa and the Pacific islands, the Chinese are everywhere, and the Japanese are present with their industrial and economic organizations even though they have not moved physically in any significant numbers.
Is it possible to distinguish immigration from migration when the entire planet is becoming the territory of intersecting movements of people? I think it is possible: as I have said, immigration can be controlled politically, but like natural phenomena, migration cannot be. As long as there is immigration, peoples can hope to keep the immigrants in a ghetto, so that they do not mix with the natives. When migration occurs, there are no more ghettos, and intermarriage is uncontrollable.
What Europe is still trying to tackle as immigration is instead migration. The Third World is knocking at our doors, and it will come in even if we are not in agreement. The problem is no longer to decide (as politicians pretend) whether students at a Paris university can wear the chador or how many mosques should be built in Rome. The problem is that in the next millennium (and since I am not a prophet, I cannot say exactly when) Europe will become a multiracial continent—or a «colored» one, if you prefer. That’s how it will be, whether you like it or not.
This meeting (or clash) of cultures could lead to bloodshed, and I believe that to a certain extent it will. Such a result cannot be avoided and will last a long time. However, racists ought to be (in theory) a race on the way to extinction. «Was there a patrician class in ancient Rome that could not tolerate the idea of Gauls, or Sarmatians, or Jews like Saint Paul becoming Roman citizens, or of an African ascending the imperial throne, as indeed happened in the end? The patricians have been forgotten, defeated by history. Roman civilization was a hybrid culture. Racists will say that this is why it fell, but its fall took five hundred years—which strikes me as time enough for us too to make plans for the future.
Intolerance
Fundamentalism and integralism are usually considered to be closely linked concepts and as the two most obvious forms of intolerance. If I consult two excellent references like the Petit Robert and the Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française, I find in the definition of «fundamentalism» an immediate reference to integralism. Which prompts me to think that all forms of fundamentalism are forms of integralism and vice versa.
But even if this were so, it would not
