It’s usually the smaller items that convey the biggest news. A few years ago Le Monde reported a study that found seven out of ten French people to be living in the region of France in which they were born. That finding surprised many people, including the reporter involved. After all, we think we live in a transitory world, yet a huge number of people still spend their entire lives close to home. Around 60% of British people live no more than 30 miles from where they resided as fourteen-year-olds.
No matter which university you visit, you’ll always find a research group focusing on mobility in some form or other, usually migration. It’s very rare, however, to find a team of researchers looking at immobility, even though only 3% of the world’s population is made up of immigrants. In Western Europe and the United States, those born in another country account for around 15% of the population, on average, and although it would be wrong to dismiss the changes that migration brings, clearly most people in any given country are not migrants.
This tendency to ignore the majority represents a blind spot that might almost be called a prejudice: mobility is good, immobility bad. It applies at the individual level as well as being an injunction aimed at large groups. The crossing of borders brings progress, since mixing keeps cultures alive. Who would deny that the urge to create and the exploration of boundaries go hand in hand?
And yet the number of international marriages remains limited. Few people leave their homeland to go and work in a foreign country. Few Europeans have sufficient command of another language to use it to discuss profound differences of opinion. More importantly, a sense of lifelong responsibility towards others does not travel well across borders. Despite all the stories about the virtual world we inhabit, proximity continues to matter.
Indeed, we rarely stop to think about it, but in everyday speech we use countless images that involve space: the political landscape, left and right, the opening up of a horizon, the path to the future, the centre ground. Terms like marketplace, battlefield, fault line and domain are more than merely specifications of place, and we sometimes describe grief as a journey, or troubled periods in our personal lives as an uphill struggle.
Post-1989 claims about the “end of history” — the idea that liberal democracy would inevitably win more and more terrain – were accompanied by the notion of the “end of geography”, a sense that distances would evaporate in the global village. Neither proved well-founded; democracy no longer seems inevitably universal, and we all live in worlds that are in many respects still confined.
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