1.3 The emmigration of foreign workers to spain: a new and relevant  (Page 2/8)

          The old demons of fascism and racism have returned to the European scene, surprising those who believed that conceited narcissistic beliefs had been left behind, buried within the cultured, democratic Europe. It is because gods, like demons, sleep, but do not die. For that reason, everyone in Europe is frightened by those extreme political forces that, throughout serious and real problems like those of unemployment, citizen insecurity, and drugs, urge ample sectors to look for scapegoats; i.e., the poor and the weak, upon which they can discharge their frustrations. A dangerous nationalism is arising in Europe that perceives foreigners, singularly the Maghribian, and those of the Third World as the new Barbarians , increasing the ethnocentric and closed-minded yell of Europe for the European ! The terrorist massacres of September 11, 2001, in New York, and March 11, 2004, in Madrid, have generated even more rejection toward immigrants, particularly Moroccans. The current phenomenon of international migration must be contextualized within the world-wide process of economic globalization, social inequality, and demographic imbalance.

The structural causes of international migration: a globalized, unjustly distributed, and demographically unbalanced world

Until now society had not comprised all of humanity into a global village, interrelated by means of communication and characterized by integration, universalism, and globalization. The world has become a great plaza with people of all races and cultures, and a great market with a large flow of capital, technology, resources, companies, and products. Some analysts have explained the increase of this universalistic integration, among other factors, with the triumph of liberal capitalism, of transnational and expansionistic nature; this would explain the rupture of closed ethnic and cultural borders. With the fall of communist states, prevailing capitalism could have developed a more universalistic, integrating and globalizing dimension. However, the expansion of world-wide capitalism produces other effects such as social segregation, fanatical nationalistic resistance, and the ethnic particularistic bastion. Why do these opposite processes to the universalistic globalization exist? Because capitalism integrates production and the market while increasing competition between the diverse social sectors and countries, and separating the northern and southern parts of the country even more: it creates a hierarchy of unequal structures of economic power into the hands of the industrialized rich countries. This process debilitates the national sovereignty and loyalties of ethnic groups and religions which is the reason why at times these social forces explode in exaggerated ethnic fanaticism, nationalism, or religion. In this sense some authors speak of how our modern society of consumption operates simultaneously a universalistic process of certain economic, cultural, and social homogeneity that could metaphorically detribalize nationalistic structures while simultaneously producing a convex image, an inverse particularistic, ethnocentric, and nationalist process of symbolic tribalization of ethnic identity.