The People Flow debate in openDemocracy underlines the fact that immigration is a peculiarly sensitive issue in European politics at the moment. Perhaps it is understandable why this should be so. After three centuries of European nationalism and inter-state warfare and rivalries, a popular reaction to foreigners in aggregate (rather than as individuals) is to see them as invading forces or enemy spies. Xenophobia, based on fear and insecurity, becomes a hook on which to hang a multitude of real discontents, even if the target is largely irrelevant as a source of those discontents.
Indeed, given these antecedents, perhaps we should wonder (without being complacent) at the long periods of lack of hostility – the lack of success of xenophobic political parties in the past fifty years – rather than the occasional conflicts.
However, the immediate context for present alarms is unique to the present period, and especially the erratic progress of globalisation: the opening of national economies to flows of trade, capital and people, and the impact of this on the restructuring of national economies to accord with new global patterns of economic specialisation.
