distant love Ulrich Beck, Guide, Progetti e Ricerche di Sociologia

Scarica distant love Ulrich Beck e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Sociologia solo su Docsity! ae an Pon anne To anu EuEE ae oF ona BE aL nt rH =] Distant Love Ulrich Beck & Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim Table of Contents Title page Copyright page Translator's Note Introduction 1: Globalization of Love and Intimacy: The Rise of World Families 1 Comedies and Tragedies of Distant Love 2 The Landscape of World Families 3 World Families Turn Established Notions Upside Down 4 Towards a Definition of ‘World Families’ 2: Two Countries, One Couple: Tales of Mutual Understanding and Misunderstanding 1 Do ‘Mixed Relationships’ Differ from Others? 2 Lives in Transition 3 Decoding Intercultural Differences 4 Rediscovering the Roots 3: Love Has Two Enemies: Distance and Closeness 1 The Social Anatomy of Distant Love 2 Lost in Translation 3 Love, Marriage and Happiness: Multiplied, Divided, Inverted and Recombined 2 The Multiple Memory 3 Postscript from the Future: the Two Commissions on Love References and Bibliography Index Distant Love Personal Life in the Global Age Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim Translated by Rodney Livingstone polity First published in German as Fernliebe © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2011 This English edition © Polity Press, 2014 The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6180-3 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6181-0 (pb) ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7994-5 (epub) ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7993-8 (mobi) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com common: they are the focal point at which the different aspects of the globalized world literally become embodied. Global society simultaneously generates contradictory features in world families: unrest, confusion, surprise, pleasure, joy, breakdowns and hatred. We inhabit a world in which our loved ones are often far away and those from whom we are distant may well be those dearest to us. The crucial point is that world families differ from the normal single-nation family, which has been the dominant form for so long, especially in Europe, and which has consisted of people speaking the same language, having the same nationality, and living in the same country and in the same locality. But they are also distinct from and represent something more than the multicultural families that have become an integral feature of the landscape in such immigration-friendly parts of the world as the United States and Latin America. World families form new kinds of combination; they come from near and far, from equal and unequal societies, and span whole countries and continents. Whether lovers or relatives in such families like it or not, they find themselves confronting the world in the interior space of their own lives. Thus the conflicts between the developed and developing worlds come to the surface in world families; they acquire faces and names. Here we find the meeting point of different languages, different pasts and different political and legal systems. But when we speak of world families do we not simply adopt a concept that has long since been rendered obsolete by the variety of forms of love and life in Western countries – same-sex couples, single parents, patchwork families, companions for the current stage of life's journey and couples living together in separate houses? The Western observer could be forgiven for thinking so. But in non-Western cultures the concept of the ‘family’ continues to be of central importance. This means that, in what we term ‘world families’, opposing conceptions of ‘family’ collide with one another. We find here the flashpoint of religious wars that strike at the very heart of everyday life: these wars turn on the question of what a family is and who belongs to it, the nature of family and what it should be. In short, they strike at the heart of what constitutes a ‘good family’. All universalist social theories of love overlook these religious wars when they speak about the nature of ‘intimacy’ in ‘modern life’ in general, as did Anthony Giddens (1992), Eva Illouz (2012) and Niklas Luhmann (1986), and we too were guilty of this in The Normal Chaos of Love (1995). They all ignore the fact that what they regard as the universalism of modern love with its various paradoxes of freedom is only one of many possible developments, namely the version that has emerged in the historical, cultural, political and legal context of the West. These religious wars about what constitutes a ‘proper family’ fundamentally put in question all the unfulfilled promises about making freedom, equality and love compatible with one another. Moreover, the universalist approach tends to be confined to a narrow range of experience: love between a man and a woman, between one woman and another, between two men – and perhaps also a child. In this book, by contrast, we take a broader view and examine subjects excluded from a national and universalist framework – love that transcends geographical, cultural and political frontiers, marriage-related migration, motherly love at a distance and baby tourism, as well as global patchwork families. In short, we focus on the globalization of love. It is currently not possible to predict the future development of these chaotic relationships in the age of globalization. This does not mean that we include ourselves in the ranks of the pessimists of distant love, who maintain that we are faced with the prospect of the end of love, and who believe that its numerous shortcomings cannot be made good in principle. We prefer to ask the following question: Could it be that the very things that threaten the world at large will nevertheless register occasional successes in the new forms of love and the family and that we shall master the art of living together by transcending the borders that divide us? 1 Globalization of Love and Intimacy: The Rise of World Families Art, literature, autobiographical novels and stories have given prominence to a new theme: colourful relationships involving love and families extending over countries and continents. These new realities are so widespread and full of surprises that they provide endless material for novelists and the producers of documentaries. There is a growing avalanche of books featuring such issues, exploring them in comic, tragic, ironic or sometimes even shrill tones. They are stories of love, marriage and parenthood across frontiers and cultural boundaries; stories about successful or failing relationships; stories showing how global conflicts come to the surface in the intimacy of family life. Here are three telling examples. accent, who look different from us and whose names sound strange and almost unpronounceable. Many people may feel relieved to read about scenes that might well come from their own lives and that are made unfamiliar as well as brought sharply into focus by the fictional or dramatic treatment they are given. Confusing events are rendered a little more comprehensible when they are shown to be the experience of many other people. We begin to appreciate that they too have difficulty in coming to terms with the new reality of the family; they too find it tricky dealing with the embarrassing situations and faux pas arising from these encounters between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The popular success of the books referred to above may also be due to the fact that they supply a larger context to the irritations associated with these novel ‘diasporic’ family networks. They show how one person's fate resembles that of others; they provide orientation and comfort, as well as practical help in the upheavals of the world society that have intruded into the realm of private experience. The present book, too, is concerned with the turbulences produced by the encounter between proximity and distance. We propose the concept ‘world families’ as the starting point from which to examine the new realities of the family. Our chief questions are these. How can we describe and systematize developments that have long since become daily experience? How has it come about that love and families have become the point of intersection for global events? What happens when national frontiers and international legal systems, immigration laws and the boundary lines between host societies and minorities, between the developed and the developing world, pass directly through the family? What are the implications for love and intimacy if love becomes love at a distance, long-distance love sep​arated by entire countries and continents? To ask such questions is to enter terra incognita, unexplored territory. There are of course countless studies documenting changes in the family (from unmarried couples living together to the decline in the birth rate). And there are also studies of globalized families both in family research and, above all, in migration research and anthropology. But the crucial difference is that they always confine themselves to one aspect of the realities of the globalized family (mixed-nationality couples or cross- border adoption or long-distance relationships). In contrast, our aim is to examine such phenomena in context. It is for this reason that we have decided on the all- encompassing term ‘world families’ in order to inquire what it is that ultimately holds together these different forms. We explore their various meanings and commonalities, as well as their differences and incompatibilities. All this is achieved by means of a ‘diagnostic theory’.1 To anticipate our findings: world families are families in which world conflicts are fought out. Not all families are involved in all conflicts, but all of them are involved in a portion of them. Mixed-nationality couples experience the tensions that exist between two countries or between a host society and a minority group. Immigrant families experience the tensions between the developed and the developing world, the global inequalities together with their colonial history, whose after-effects persist in the minds of those living to this day, producing a reluctance to face the truth in some people and rage and despair in others. We need to forestall a possible misunderstanding. The term ‘world families’ must not be confused with ‘citizens of the world’. The latter expression refers to the caste of the educated upper-middle class, with its knowledge of Chinese literature, French cuisine and African art. In contrast, many of the people who belong to world families in our sense are neither knowledgeable nor open-minded about the world, neither at home on the international stage nor able to speak foreign languages. The breath of the great, wide world has utterly passed them by. Many have never previously left their home village or small town; many are provincial in their outlook and are wary of everything foreign. Some have become members of a world family only as the consequence of violence, civil war or expulsion, or in the hope of escaping from poverty and unemployment at home. Yet others have achieved the same result through dating advertisements on the internet or the accidents of love. In short, external events or actual coercion, rather than enthusiasm or an act of free will, have led many to become part of a global family more or less involuntarily. But, whether voluntarily or not, the different kinds of world family share one common feature: they act as an irritant. They do not fit our preconceived notions of what constitutes a family and is part of its essential nature, everywhere and always. They place a question mark over some of our familiar, supposedly self-evident assumptions about the family. 2 The Landscape of World Families A change of perspective will give us something of a panoramic view of the range of world families. Following examples taken from literature, we can look at instances taken from reality, a description of the forms of the family as we find them in the social reality of the twenty-first century. Global Inequality Becomes Personal Debates about immigration are premised for the most part on a clear line of demarcation between legal inhabitants and illegal immigrants, between those who are officially registered and visible and those who live in the shadows. People who think in the categories of the law make a clear distinction between legal and illegal. Many transnational families are a mixture of legal citizens and their illegal relatives whose lives are determined above all by the fear of discovery. One example is the Palacio family. Estrellita's mother is heavily pregnant. She has crossed the Mexican frontier in order to secure for her daughter the privilege of a birth in the United States and hence of American nationality. Estrellita's mother's brother-in-law is what the Americans call an ‘undocumented worker’. The tightening of the laws on immigration in the United States has driven a wedge between members of the family. While Estrellita's status becomes more privileged, her mother's brother-in-law's fear of discovery intensifies. Among the seven siblings of the Palacio family, their marriage partners and their children, we find American citizens by birth, naturalized immigrants, people with limited rights of residence and undocumented immigrants. Even this brief portrait affords us a glimpse of a ‘melting-pot family’ of a new kind. It is not merely multinational (and perhaps multi-religious); it is also ‘multi-(il)legal’. The Brave New World of Globalized Pregnancy and Birth A married couple from Germany waited two years for the arrival of their twins, who had been born to an Indian surrogate mother. The German authorities refused to issue passports to the children, who had been born in India, because surrogacy is forbidden under German law. The authorities in India – where surrogate motherhood is permitted – treated the children as German because the parents were German nationals. Accordingly, they refused to issue Indian travel documents for the twins. Their father, an art historian, fought a desperate battle in both the German and the Indian courts to be allowed to bring his stateless children to Germany. He was finally successful. The Indian authorities issued passports after all, and the twins were then given visas with which to enter Germany (‘exceptionally’ and ‘for humanitarian reasons’, according to the German Foreign Office). The parents could now adopt their ‘own children’ in Germany by way of an international legal process. Here we see that families are not simply condemned to being steamrollered by globalization. They have long since become agents. With the aid of the new options made available by reproductive medicine, birth and parenthood can be separated and ‘offshored’, like jobs. The scope for action created by medical technology makes it possible to separate conception, pregnancy and parenthood and to reorganize them across national frontiers. What used to be called simply ‘motherhood’ can now be broken down into such categories as ‘egg donor’, ‘surrogate mother’ and ‘carer’. The attempt to combine these different forms of motherhood into a coherent legal form frequently turns into an obstacle race between the different and even conflicting provisions of national jurisdictions. Grandparental Love at Distance Alex has just turned three; he is full of curiosity and energy. He loves muesli and chips and, even more, he loves his cars. He was given a new one yesterday, a big red bus, and this morning he was in a hurry to show it to his grandparents. They love their grandson more than anything in the world. They see him every day. Every day there is a quarter of an hour, and sometimes even half an hour, of ‘Grandma and Grandpa time’, a fixed ritual which is staunchly maintained and respected. It is time reserved exclusively for Alex and his grandparents. A perfectly normal happy family? Yes and no. Those involved live hundreds of miles apart, the grandparents in Thessaloniki and Alex in Cambridge, England. Skyping brings Grandma and Grandpa into the nursery and transports Alex to Thessaloniki, while all of them remain where they are – love at a great distance as love of one's nearest and dearest, defying all distances and frontiers. 4 Towards a Definition of ‘World Families’ Up to now we have spoken of ‘world families’ (or ‘families at a distance’, or ‘global families’) and differentiated them from ‘one-nation families’ (or ‘close-knit families’, or ‘local families’). But what are ‘world families’ actually? How can they be defined? How can we place them in the centre of a new diagnostic theory and of an empirical study capable of inquiring into the globalized landscapes of intimacy, love, parenthood and divorce, etc.? World families are families that live together across (national, religious, cultural or ethnic, etc.) frontiers. They are families that stick together even though they consist of elements that conventionally do not belong together. The glue provided by pre-existing traditions is replaced by active trust. Such families show that they can succeed even though received wisdom says they are doomed to failure; the ‘alien other’ becomes the nearest and dearest. Two basic types may be distinguished. By love at a distance and world families we understand, in the first instance, couples or families that remain together despite living in different countries or continents. They are ‘multi-local world families’, sharing the same culture of origin (language, nationality or religion). An example would be the married woman with children who emigrates from the Philippines to take up domestic work in Los Angeles in order to support her family back home (see chapter 6). By love at a distance and world families we understand, second, couples or families who live in the same place but whose members come from different countries or continents and whose conception of love and the family is essentially determined by their country of origin. To illustrate this we might think of a family in which the husband is American and the wife Chinese and who are living with their children in London (multinational or multi-continental world families). What do these two types of world family have in common? They are the site at which the differences in the globalized world literally become embodied. Whether the lovers or the family members like it or not, they find themselves confronted by the world at the heart of their own lives.2 This definition is straightforward and immediately comprehensible, but on closer inspection it turns out to have one defect: it does not go far enough. It is unable to grasp world families in all their diversity. We can readily think of instances that do not fit our definition or do so only at a stretch. To take but one example, how are we supposed to think of the second or third generations of immigrants from other countries or continents once they have established families with partners from the host society? Our beautifully straightforward definition has evidently reached its limits here. We therefore propose the following addition: whether such families can be numbered among the ‘world families’ depends on whether ‘lasting existential relationships with the “other” culture of origin’ are actively being maintained ‘across national frontiers or continents’. This would be the situation where grandparents in Istanbul see their grandchildren in Ulm every day – via Skype – and tell each other stories. Where there is a close, regular, emotionally important link between the cultures, it appears meaningful to speak of world families. And where will Susan and Liz fit in, two sisters from an Anglo-Pakistani family? Their father, a Pakistani, returned to his homeland shortly after the birth of the younger daughter and has since disappeared. The two girls were born in Lancaster and live there with their mother; they have never been to Pakistan and have no contact with their father's family. But whereas Susan, with her light hair and freckles, takes after her mother in looks, Liz strongly resembles her father, has a darker skin and black hair. She is constantly being asked where she comes from as well as being abused as a ‘Paki’. The two girls live in the same place, Lancaster, speak the local dialect, go to the same church – they both belong to the Church of England – and do not know anyone in distant Pakistan. And yet there is a crucial difference between the two girls. Susan, who can hardly be distinguished from other girls in the majority population, seldom thinks about the Pakistani side of her family. Liz, on the other hand, is constantly reminded of it, feels like an outsider and as if she were not fully accepted. In the light of this brief biographical information, we would say that Susan belongs in the main to a close-knit family (a one-nation family, local family). Liz, on the other hand, is tied to the same country against her will because the majority population turn her into a ‘Pakistani’. Thanks to the accidents of biology or genetics, combined with the stereotypes and prejudices of the society she lives in, she has in a sense become part of a world family. Such examples make it clear that our beautiful, straightforward definition may indeed capture some essential features of the architecture of world families. But in many instances it does not suffice for a confident attribution. Reality is far more varied, richer and more perplexing than is suggested by such box-ticking expressions as ‘geographically separate’ or ‘common culture of origin’. Furthermore, on closer inspection it becomes evident that world family and one- nation family are not absolute antitheses but the two ends of a continuum that contains many intermediate, subsidiary and mixed forms. This blurred picture is not the product of an imprecise analysis; it is rather an essential feature of reality. Looked at in sociological terms, world family and one-nation family are ideal types. The kinds of family we encounter in the real world, however, are frequently not so clear-cut and cannot always be assigned to one category or the other. They are fuzzy at the edges, they form transitional stages, become transformed and find themselves in constant flux. Sometimes they fit better in one box than another, depending on people's life history, a particular biographical phase, external contingencies and, not least (as we shall see in subsequent chapters) social circumstances: government, politics, the legal system, stereotypes of foreigners, etc., etc. This means that the logic of such family constellations is defined in terms of more or less rather than either/or: some are world families for the most part; others are predominantly one-nation families. To sum it up in a different metaphor: there is no such thing as a little bit pregnant, but a little bit of a world family is perfectly possible. Thus our answer to the question ‘What are world families?’ is really straightforward. But it becomes complicated, protracted, detailed and ambiguous when we apply the definition in an attempt to explore the new landscapes of distant love. It may be objected that the concept of ‘families’ in ‘world families’ ignores the diversity of forms of the family that have long since been acknowledged in the field of culturally homogeneous life forms and were a focus of our own study in The Normal Chaos of Love (1995). Is it not anachronistic to speak of world families? Would it not be essential to speak instead of world companions of the moment, world extended families, world post-divorce parenthood, world single parents, etc.? But this is the point. If we take what is broadly speaking the non-Western point of view, world families are in fact families in the traditional sense, far more so than in the Western usage. A concept of world families that resists the culturally homogeneous understanding of family and society must not simply acquiesce in this tension between East and West; it must give it expression. This explains why this question of contextual plurality implicit in the concept of world families finds itself caught up in the trench warfare that rages about the true meaning of the ‘good family’. The contextual nature of world families can be expressed in the following paradox. If we wish to avoid anachronism, we must construct a concept of world families that appears anachronistic from the vantage point of Western observers. (It should be noted, incidentally, that we consciously use ‘world families’ in the plural because it has become customary for sociologists to use the term to include unmarried couples, post-marriage couples, homosexual and heterosexual couples, motherhood, fatherhood, etc.) At this point, at the latest, we have to decide to whom we are referring when we speak of ‘we’. We writers? We sociologists? We Germans? We, the inhabitants of the First World? We members of the human race? The fact that we can ask such questions points to the possibility that the seemingly harmless word ‘we’ has a fatal propensity to obscure world conflicts and to make us forget the particular nature of our own situation. This problem becomes especially acute when we are dealing with world families and the misunderstandings simmering in them. We, the authors, are keenly 2 Two Countries, One Couple: Tales of Mutual Understanding and Misunderstanding Andrea comes from Flensburg, her husband Latif from Iran; Patricia is an African American and lives with Frank, a white man; Rachel, who is Jewish, is in love with Murat, a Muslim. Couples like these whose love crosses national frontiers or ethnic, cultural or religious boundaries used also to exist in former times. They were rare exceptions then but have become far more common over recent decades – in Asia (Shim and Han 2010), the United States (Lee and Edmonston 2005), Europe (Lucassen and Laarman 2009), and not least Germany (Nottmeyer 2009). There are now a growing number of couples who clearly differ from each other in respect of nationality, skin colour, religion or citizenship. Many factors have contributed to this fundamental transformation of love and the family, or, to put it more romantically, to this mutual opening of hearts. In the first place, quite prosaically, social and political conditions have changed. Increasing social mobility now characterizes many countries. More specifically, the legal barriers that once ruled out such ‘mixed’ unions have been dismantled. In many of the US states, for example, laws barring marriages between blacks and whites lasted well into the twentieth century. The position is similar in South Africa, where marriages across the colour line – i.e., between people of different colours – remained difficult until the end of Apartheid in 1994. These legal impediments have now been done away with, not everywhere, but in large parts of the world. This situation has been accelerated by the globalization process and the geographical mobility accompanying it. As a consequence of migration, flight and expulsion, as well as the international division of labour and the cross-border expansion of industry and mass tourism, the number of people who have abandoned their homeland and their culture of origin has been on the increase. Such people cross borders or the boundaries of particular groups for a longer or shorter period of time. They may be born in one place and grow up in another, and live and work, love and marry in a third. Whether it is a matter of French students who go to Germany for work experience or of Swiss tourists who go to Kenya on holiday, encounters between people of differing origins, whether social, geographical or ethnic, are becoming increasingly common. One consequence is the rapid growth in the number of mixed marriages. ‘Opportunity makes lovers.’ But this should be rewritten now and for the future: ‘it's the internet that makes lovers.’ Following globalization, the outstanding feature of online dating lies in the infinite number of possible partners to be evaluated ‘rationally’ according to pragmatic criteria. The internet is bringing about a change in the social quality of love relationships. It uncouples intimacy and bodies, intimacy and the individual human being. This gives shape to a paradox: it creates a space for global intimacy, anonymous intimacy. To what extent does the experience of virtual love contribute to the intensification of intimacy or the release from inhibitions? Or does intimacy now assume different forms? 1 Do ‘Mixed Relationships’ Differ from Others? In politics, the media and the public sphere generally, the new realities and opportunities for love encounter a diversity of reactions. Some people reject them and do whatever they can to attack them as a betrayal of their own (German, Hungarian or Polish) identity, as an offence against race and blood. Others welcome them as the bearers of hope for a new tolerance and understanding, as harbingers of a better, more colourful and peaceful world. We do not intend to discuss these or other judgements in these pages. Instead, we shall inquire into the nature of such unions to see whether they share noteworthy features. Our starting point is straightforward: how far and in what way do such mixed unions differ from relationships where both partners come from the same country, speak the same language and have the same citizenship? The question of the degree to which mixed-nationality or intercultural couples differ from partners from the same or similar backgrounds seems harmless enough but can appear suspect or provoke hostile reactions, depending on context. A cautious approach is recommended in order to keep misunderstandings within bounds. The first truth is as follows: the mixed-nationality couple does not exist any more than does the foreigner. In ordinary life there is a vast difference if a German who was born in Upper Bavaria marries an Austrian woman from Salzburg or a woman from Kenya. In the former case, there is hardly any indication that we are dealing with a mixed-nationality couple, whereas in the latter it is obvious that the Bavarian has married a ‘foreigner’. The prejudices and resistances such couples encounter differ radically in the two cases. They are all the more significant the more obvious it is that the foreign partner is visibly and audibly ‘foreign’. What does the concept ‘foreigner’ mean here? Georg Simmel's famous definition of the stranger as a person who ‘comes today and stays tomorrow’ points to the difficulty of distinguishing between ‘us’ and ‘others’ (Simmel 1908: 509). In other words, the stranger is not someone who belongs to the unknown world out there, but a person whose simple presence puts in question the natives' seemingly ‘natural’ beliefs about who belongs and where the frontiers lie. It is this feature that defines mixed-nationality couples and marriages. The strangers who ‘come today and stay tomorrow’ – in other words, who both belong and do not belong because they contradict the self-definition of the majority – live and love in our midst. 2 Lives in Transition The Burden of Memory Anyone who arrives in Germany as an immigrant has many experiences behind him, often painful ones – experiences that are for the most part remote and alien to those who have spent their lives in the secure prosperity of Germany. They include leaving behind your native country, leaving behind the people there, the language, the landscape, the aromas and the sounds. Leaving behind also perhaps hunger and poverty, perhaps political upheavals, flight and expulsion, right down to massive threats and even the direct use of force – the baggage of memory that the immigrant carries around with him contains many things. He can endure all that because it is his life's history; he cannot dispose of it like a tiresome burden. He carries it around with him into his new life – and his new love. His partner from his new country may not always appreciate why he sometimes overreacts, recoils, and becomes withdrawn or sentimental at moments that seem trivial or harmless to her. What's the matter with him? Why is he suddenly making a fuss? In her autobiographical novel, Lena Gorelik, who had come to Germany from Russia when she was still a young girl, describes a scene that is relevant to the baggage of memories. It concerns two young women with different backgrounds. For the girl who was born in Germany and had grown up there, shopping and trying on clothes was a recognized leisure activity. For the girl who had come to Germany from Russia, shopping brought back memories of being forced to spend hours in queues. She tries to explain this to her German friend: I have spent so much time standing in queues that it will do me for the rest of my life … Shopping was terrible. ‘We have run out of bread’, my mother would say, and I would pretend not to hear her. I'm ready to do whatever she wants, but please, please, don't make me go shopping. ‘So will you just run along and join the queue?’ my mother would say, as if she had not even noticed my sudden silence. So I run along. Buying bread is not so easy, nor is buying anything, for that matter. The first couple of supermarkets I come to won't have any bread; the shelves will be empty for the most part, the only things that will be left are matches and soap; for some unknown reason sufficient quantities of matches and soap were always available in Russia. If I'm in luck the third supermarket would have bread, but you couldn't be sure. I would just have to join the queue and hope the bread won't run out. You could tell from a long way off whether the shelves weren't empty, or at least one shelf. There would be a huge, noisy crowd standing in front of it. Tired-looking people carrying a lot of bags wait impatiently, perhaps quarrelling in advance, though they don't even know what goods might be there for them to buy. (Gorelik 2004: 48–50) If things are going badly it is at moments like these that cracks appear in a relationship, maybe even open conflict. This is because each partner feels alone and misunderstood. When things are going well, one person talks and the other listens, and this can form the foundation of a new, shared world. The indigenous partner obtains a glimpse of life on another continent. A window opens out onto his or her partner's native country, its history and present situation, people and landscapes there. Distant love, then, means travelling in one's mind to faraway places while sitting at home in one's living room. Life in a mixed-nationality, intercultural relationship can be an education in knowledge of the world. Moreover, the foreign continent need not be all that remote geographically. Sometimes it can be found in one's own home town. In the case of partners with the same citizenship but different ethnic backgrounds, the partner who comes from the majority population may well have very little idea about life on the other side of the ethnic divide. If you belong to the club, you do not even see those who are forced to remain outside. People whose skins are white do not even notice the privileges that automatically go along with that – and the fate of those with skins of a different colour. If a white man is married to a black woman, and if the relationship between the two is governed by mutual respect and trust, the white man will over a period of years receive lessons in a very special kind of ethnography: a native land that goes beyond tourist prospectuses and nostalgic idealization; a native land as a place where minorities are exposed to everyday acts of exclusion and discrimination. An example of such ethnography can be found in the writing of Jane Lazarre, a white American married to a black. In her Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons, she describes how her relationship with her husband and sons changed her view of American society: ‘This is the story of a change in a white person's vision through self-discovery to conscience. It is the story of the education of an American woman’ (Lazarre 1996: xxi). I am hearing a story about common, everyday racism from one of my sons. It is a prototypical story of young Black maleness in an American city, 1990s. Khary's [the son's] friend has rung the bell one night and is waiting for him to come downstairs. The friend, also Black and nineteen years old, drives the family car, a Toyota. We live on a racially mixed street in a racially mixed neighborhood, yet when Khary comes downstairs, he finds three cops surrounding his friend who is spread-eagled on the front of the car, being searched. Suspecting he had stolen the car, the cops approached him while he was standing against it, and when he objected, turned him around roughly and began their search. I am outraged and shout: ‘But this is unbelievable!’ ‘Unbelievable?’ my son says angrily. ‘Unbelievable, Mom? It happens to me all the time. If I'm not searched I'm still stopped and questioned, travelling all over Europe. If she had been as dependent on me then as she has since become I would never have married her!’ (ibid.: 146). This may be an extreme case, but it is symptomatic. We see again and again how, when a person moves to a different country in order to be with another person, significant adaptations are required from both partners. The balance of power in the relationship has to be renegotiated and a new equilibrium established. In the absence of this, the relationship will be put under severe strain. If it does work, however, new horizons and prospects will open up to the benefit of both partners. Changing one's world can lead to success or failure, the beginning of the end or the start of a new beginning. Prejudices and Barriers In Germany in the nineteenth century, if a ‘Catholic’ man wished to marry a ‘Protestant’ woman (or vice versa), this was regarded as a mixed marriage and was wrong for that reason. Such marriages could divide families; they were transgressions, rebellions against the imperatives of faith – a sacrilege. Catholic priests and Protestant parsons alike composed diatribes against them, complete with prophetic warnings that God would assuredly punish all sinners, who would be struck down by all manner of evils, from illness and disease in the case of the man right down to the premature death of a child; their houses would burn down and floods would destroy their fields (Beck 2010: 57–9). Such dramas have long since been relegated to the past, at least in Western countries. As secularization has advanced, religious affiliations have declined in significance, in politics as well as in the world of work and private life. This applies with particular force to marriage. In marriage, happiness in this world has assumed priority for most people, both adults and children. Whether one's son-in-law is a Catholic or a Protestant has largely ceased to be an issue that provokes dissension between the generations. The situation is different if one's daughter's choice has fallen upon a foreigner, especially a foreigner from a non-Western background or one with a different colour skin, let alone of Muslim faith. Even today, such features would be all too likely to provoke disapproval in the minds of many families in the majority population. The prejudice and opposition that such unions encounter on all sides constitute a classic theme in the literature on mixed marriages (Sollors 1997). And, even today, as many reports show, we can see that they are capable of triggering very ‘mixed feelings’ (Alibhai-Brown 2001). Following the murders perpetrated by the National Socialists, any open expression of racist attitudes became taboo in Western countries. But in recent years, faced with the sustained inflows of immigrants and the processes of globalization, a demarcation line has become established – in politics, the media and ordinary life – a line based on questions of ethnic origins. It is the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘others’, one's own country and strangers, foreigners – in short, people who simply do not belong here (Beck-Gernsheim 2007b). The idea of a colour-blind society indifferent to questions of ethnic origins has now receded into the remote distance (Williams 1997). The tendency to think in terms of polar opposites can remain dormant over long periods of time before it finally breaks through. It may be triggered, for example, by the question of the future of one's own daughter (and the grandchildren she may be expected to produce). Is it not the parents' duty to issue a solemn warning and make absolutely clear to her what she can expect if she goes ahead and marries an Arab (or a Turk or a black)? If all else fails, you can escape from parental objections by breaking off all contact. But in some countries – above all in Germany – mixed-nationality/intercultural couples may find themselves confronted by more testing obstacles. The enemy here goes by such names as officialdom, authorities, regulations and administration. The obstacles put in one's path by bureaucracy are legendary, even among the members of the majority population, who relish the opportunity to regale one another with amusing stories of obstructive officials. Yet they have very little idea of the powers available to bureaucracy when dealing with ‘aliens’. Such people are forced to submit to endless scrutiny, searches and inspections so as to forestall possible threats. These efforts are further intensified when it comes to marriage and the family, which are the special responsibility of the state. In Germany you have to produce all sorts of papers for this – documents, stamps, certificates, written endorsements and translations. Such investigations may well serve to reassure the native population. But they inevitably lead to a clash between alien worlds. In the well-ordered, air-conditioned offices of German public servants it is hard to conceive what life is like in regions submerged in civil war, poverty and chaos, regions from which people can barely escape with their lives, where a public infrastructure can barely be said to exist, and where there is no functioning registration system in place. How is a German official supposed to deal with all this? How should he judge conditions in such faraway places? All that the media provide him with are pictures of poverty and destitution displaying the gulf between Germany and other countries. This makes mixed couples appear abnormal, suspect even. Is the non-German partner just in search of a visa, a new passport, a residence permit? Are we just looking at a sham marriage? In the light of these circumstances, anyone who perseveres with a proposed marriage must be prepared to navigate an obstacle course: countless visits to the authorities, costly phone calls to embassies, petitions to consulates, the translation of documents, etc. Marriages may be made in heaven, but mixed-nationality unions have to make their way through the limbo of officialdom. Couples of different religions who live in Israel or Lebanon are exposed to even stricter constraints. Neither country recognizes civil marriage and no clergyman will marry couples of different religious persuasion. In other words, marriage in their own country is impossible for such couples. Ways out can be found in the age of globalization. ‘Marriage tourism’ is now an option. Whereas enormous efforts might be needed in one's own country, simpler solutions may well be on offer abroad, provided one can find a pathway through the transnational jungle of legal clauses and regulations. It is no accident that the wave of marriage tourism in recent years has seen the rise of agencies specializing in gratifying couple relationship. Perhaps the challenges are greater in couples who deny the differences by thinking of themselves as an ordinary couple. For this reason, the authors come to the following conclusion: We do not want to diminish the claims of ordinariness. The couples had good reason to claim that they were like most couples in their everyday life. But we also do not want to diminish the duality of their ordinariness. Even if one argues that many same-race couples experience difficulties like those the couples who were interviewed experienced with family opposition, cultural differences, hostile neighbours and so on, there is a set of experiences shared by many of the couples interviewed that are unlikely to be part of the experience of same-race couples. (Rosenblatt, Karis and Powell 1995: 38f.) So are cross-cultural couples different from others? It is obvious that they are frequently exposed to different experiences. This includes primarily their dealings with culturally specific signals, since these generate exceptional force in the case of mixed marriages. 3 Decoding Intercultural Differences In the rapidly growing recent literature dealing with intercultural communication or intercultural understanding (Heringer 2007; Maletzke 1996; Oksaar 1996), one theme stands out strongly: it is the question of the rules governing communication, both verbal and non-verbal, and, above all, the ways in which these rules differ in different cultures. To mention just a few examples: When should we speak, what should we talk about, when should we remain silent and for how long? Is it alright to make eye contact? How loudly may we talk and is it acceptable to display emotion? What form of words shows that we are being polite? What compliments are expected and what presents should we bring and on which occasions? And who should pay these compliments or bring these presents and to whom? And, conversely, which compliments or presents may cause misunderstandings and embarrassment, or even offence? Vasco Esteves is a Portuguese married to a German woman. When he describes his first impressions of Germany, you can still hear the shudder in his voice: I noticed that Germans never looked me in the eye, except of course when they had to speak to me! I noticed this especially in public. In the street, for example, everyone walks past everyone else just as if he were the only person in the world! Even on public transport you can sit or stand opposite someone for an entire journey without exchanging glances with anyone even once. … I must admit also that I had difficulties speaking to people in Germany at first. I couldn't talk properly to my Portuguese friends in cafés because everyone around us was so silent – even though the cafés were full of grannies. The same goes for the tram. I always felt I might be irritating someone when I spoke in public (or were they irritating me?). The explanation turned out to be quite straightforward. What people objected to was not speaking as such but simply people whose voices were too loud! To be sure, it is equally improper to speak in public to someone you don't know unless there is a very good reason to do so. A straightforward question such as ‘Are you going to Frankfurt too?’ is likely to produce the response, ‘What gives you that idea?’ or – in the best case, a succinct ‘No, I get out at the next stop.’ People clearly do not realize (or refuse to admit that it is reasonable) that a general question of this sort is simply intended to begin a friendly conversation or to show interest in another person. … It took me quite a while to realize that, by initiating a conversation or talking too loudly, we (Southerners, North Americans and all other extraverts on the planet) are just intruding into the private lives of ordinary Germans and thus restricting their individual freedom! By the time I realized this I must have given offence thousands of times and presumably caused irreparable damage! (Esteves 1993: 183–5) For the most part we are unaware of such culturally prescribed rules, but it is evident that, the more they diverge, the more they will give rise to misunderstandings, irritations or embarrassing situations. This can be seen in business relations as well and may even lead to deals breaking down (e.g., Thomas 1999). It also applies in private life, in relations between men and women, both on falling in love and later on in married life. In such situations it can be very helpful to recognize that the signals sent out by other people may be culturally specific and that they must be ‘decoded’ culturally. This can forestall the conflicts that arise from misunderstanding their spontaneous utterances or reactions. When a couple from the same background say things like ‘You're crazy’ or ‘I can't stand you’, they understand what is meant because they are familiar with the same associations or images and share the same horizon of meaning. In mixed relationships, however, the ability to decipher or ‘decode’ statements may be wanting. Words uttered in anger may then be taken literally – and indeed too literally. A woman from Northern Europe marries a man from the South, but disagreements soon emerge. In the course of a violent quarrel, he shouts at her in his mother tongue and she, enraged and hurt, at once packs her bags and returns to her parents' house. The woman came from Lübeck and was called Tony Buddenbrook. She felt she had been insulted by her husband, Alois Permaneder, a man from the depths of Bavaria. In a moment of anger, he had shouted, ‘Go to the devil, you filthy slut!’ (Mann 1930: 389). To be sure, what he had said to her in his Bavarian dialect was hardly a term of endearment, but it was by no means the appalling slur on her character that it had seemed to her. As may readily be imagined, this process of cultural decoding is not always straightforward. And it does not become any easier if rage, heightened emotions and disillusionment are involved and the rules of reason have been set aside. Dealing with such situations calls for practice and patience – to say nothing of love, trust and the belief in one's partner and one's relationship. The fact that such difficulties are not insuperable has been demonstrated by all couples who have succeeded in living together and staying together despite national or cultural differences. We may surmise that, with time, they become experienced in detecting and interpreting such culturally determined signals and in reacting to them appropriately. They become everyday experts in a noble art, that of cross-cultural dialogue. thought this was my personal romantic streak, a kind of whim of mine … In Ghana the cooked food is presented in little bowls and people eat when they are ready. It is normal for one to three people to share the contents of a bowl. People eat in the inner courtyard, sitting on low stools. No one uses a table. There is no talking during the meal; food is there to fill your stomach with; it is not a social occasion … I have learned to understand, although not really to have become reconciled to the idea that a man can come to the table and just start eating while I am still in the kitchen, or that he should leave the table when he is finished. Eating habits are still something of a bone of contention in our family, even today. (Knecht Oti-Amoako 1995: 11) Where expectations diverge so widely, food ceases to mean just food. It also means: What do you think of my memories, my traditions, or everything that is familiar to me and I am used to? Do you insist on having everything your own way or will you respect my customs and my preferences? Are you adventurous or are you stubborn and hostile to anything new? Do you like learning about the world I come from or do you reject whatever forms part of my background? Will you just hold back or will you come to meet me halfway? Are you prepared to join in our experiment in living together? 4 Rediscovering the Roots Even couples who over the years have proved themselves to be adepts of the art of intercultural dialogue may find themselves surprised on occasion by the differences in their own lives and backgrounds. These elements of surprise can be found scattered throughout texts and studies dealing with intercultural relationships. Having repeatedly come across similar stories in the relevant literature, we decided to refer to the basic pattern as instances of ‘reverting to the biographical past’. Here are some examples. Ken and Jenny have been married for a number of years, but, although his family is Jewish and hers Methodist, they have never quarrelled about religious matters. At Christmas they have always gone to stay with friends or with Jenny's mother, but after their daughter was born they decided that for the first time they would spend Christmas together at home. And that's when it happened. When Jenny said how lovely it would be if they had their own Christmas tree for once, Ken responded with some irritation. He replied gruffly that he had imagined that they would celebrate Hanukkah – even though he had not given Hanukkah a thought since leaving his parents' house years before (Mayer 1985: 142). Similar stories can be found in a study of mixed couples in France. We learn of an Armenian who is married to a Frenchwoman and has lived in France for forty years. He suddenly wants to discover his roots and goes back to Armenia. Having returned from there to France, he feels the need increasingly to listen to Armenian music. The Frenchwoman is herself of Muslim origin but had converted to Roman Catholicism many years previously. To her husband's surprise, she suddenly begins to visit her original family more frequently and ends up keeping the fasting requirements of Ramadan (Barbara 1989: 55). Provocative Choices How do people arrive at such biographical relapses? The person who is involved in them – much to the surprise of his or her partner – is for the most part surprised too. Nothing in their lives up to then pointed to such an outcome. If anything, the opposite was the case. Many people who enter into a marriage across national or cultural boundaries have no powerful ties to their culture of origin, or, if they have, they have become estranged from it early on, rebelling against their parents' values and outlook (see, e.g., Barbara 1989; Elschenbroich 1988; Hecht-El Minshawi 1990, 1992; Katz 1996; Khatib-Chahidi, Hill and Paton 1998; Schneider 1989). Elschenbroich, for example, writes as follows about mixed marriages between Germans and foreigners: In the dynamics of the parent–child relationship, the choice of partner is a challenge to the parents: ‘I am not the person you imagine I am or want to have!’ … The choice of a foreign, perhaps even exotic partner is an attempt to get rid of the German or the ‘bourgeois’ aspect of one's character. (Elschenbroich 1988: 365) And then, after a few years, but sometimes only after a great many years, comes the regression to the biographical past. One partner begins to take seriously something that was of little importance to him or her hitherto. And the other partner is taken by surprise. Again and again we learn about such ‘elements of surprise’ (Mayer 1985: 145). They seem baffling, and the other partner is disconcerted (Schneider 1989: 7, 57). Finding himself taken aback in this way, a non-Jewish man asks his Jewish wife, ‘If Judaism means so much to you, then why did you not just marry a Jew?’ And this question, or questions like it, recurs with many couples (ibid.: 81). Elschenbroich's study shows how the German men and women who had begun by vehemently repudiating conformism and German narrow-mindedness later develop a strong identification with their own origins. In their relationships with their foreign partners they feel themselves to be ‘more German than ever before’, and they discover, often for the first time, just how deeply their roots are embedded in the value system of their country of origin (Elschenbroich 1988: 368). If circumstances are unfavourable, such regressions generate their own dynamic. It is easy to picture how the misunderstandings build up. Anyone who experiences his or her partner's reversion to the past will begin by feeling confused by the partner's unaccustomed behaviour. This confusion may then turn into a genuine sense of insecurity. He or she will feel put out, injured, rejected and even threatened by the sudden change in a person who now appears as a stranger. This gives rise to a vicious circle of mutual recriminations. Typical Triggers So much for Mayer's explanation. If we consider other relevant studies, we come across much material that supports his findings. For example, although these reversions to the past often strike those affected as disconcerting and even inexplicable, they reveal typical patterns and triggering factors to the outside observer. They are often associated with biographical phases, with family rites of passage of the kind depicted by Mayer. A classical triggering factor is the arrival of children (see, e.g., Barbara 1989: 107ff.; Katz 1996: 164f., 174; Pandey 1988: 135ff.). Contemplating the future of one's children inevitably reminds people of their own childhood and leads to a confrontation with their own past, the process of socialization they experienced, and their own values and wishes – in short, with their own identity. Regardless of the issue at hand, whether considering the style of education, the names given to one's children, questions of religion, language, the stories they are told or the songs with which they grow up, a parent is inevitably confronted by such questions as: What aspects of my own childhood matter to me? What should I pass on to my children? What should they learn to preserve? In other words, if they acquire none of these things, will I become a stranger in my own family? Does that mean that my contribution, my history will be utterly forgotten? Running Away and Looking Back From our own perspective, it makes sense to take up Mayer's argument, build on it and strengthen it. Our suggestion, which is basically quite simple, is that, whereas Mayer focuses on the different phases in the life of a couple or on the family cycle, we can focus instead on the phases in the life of an individual – in other words, the individual's progress from growing up to adulthood and growing old. The author of a study of intercultural marriages observes that ‘Home is a great place to run away from as long as you can go back once in a while’ (Romano 1988: 114). We all know that youth is the time for running away, just as it is the time for searching around for other people, finding them and establishing ties. It is not by chance, then, that for some people choosing a partner is associated with running away – in the sense of establishing a relationship with an ‘other’ (a foreigner, a black, a Jew, or even an other of the same sex – anyone in fact who would be an ‘other’ in their parents' eyes). The point is a demonstration, a provocation, an act of will that signals rebellion. ‘Love’ and ‘asserting one's independence’ – two powerful motives at the same time. What a thrill! Until the day comes when the young become older. As the years pass, the majority lose their youthful passion and calm down. Their gaze ceases to be directed exclusively towards the future; they now look back to the past as well, pondering the lives they have lived hitherto. Many now question things previously taken for granted, and by the same token they find that many things acquire a positive gloss in retrospect, or even come to be viewed sentimentally because images of love, closeness and warmth are easily associated with childhood. With such subtle changes in feeling, the desire grows to revive traditions, celebrations and customs from one's family of origin. Such a turnabout may come as a surprise to outsiders and appear utterly inexplicable. But, as Immanuel Kant ([1784] 1991) remarked, human beings are made of ‘crooked timber’; their emotional lives are not as one-dimensional as is often imagined, but rather multi-layered, complex and ambivalent. And this is true not least of a person's relationship to his or her own past. That relationship is frequently at odds with itself, or, as Werner Sollors describes it, ‘The melodrama of different generations obscures the tension in human desire between the wish to escape ancestors and the yearning to fulfil their legacy’ (Sollors 1986: 221). Now it may be objected that, over the course of years, changes may occur in the thinking and attitudes even in the case of couples of the same nationality, religion or culture. There may well be a shift from running away to a subsequent rapprochement. The crucial distinction, however, is that, where a couple come from different backgrounds, the ‘memory chest’ of each is filled with different contents. And in later life, when people come to root around in their memory chest, retrieve bits and pieces and consider them anew, and when they take the decision symbolically to put this or that part on show in the living-room display cabinet, their partner who lives in the same house may well be taken aback. That is the essence of the surprise element that we called the reversion to the biographical past. If a couple have succeeded in building up enough points in common over the years and have enough shared memories in the memory chest, and if each individual has enough flexibility, imagination and curiosity, unexpected changes of this kind can act as a stimulus for the other partner. In that event the reversion to the past can mark a new beginning for both of them. 3 Love Has Two Enemies: Distance and Closeness ‘Geography spells the ruination of love’, Erich Kästner wrote as early as 1931 (1990: 60). Was he on the mark with his pessimistic diagnosis? How much distance can love survive? How much distance does love need? How does love at a distance transform the ‘nature’ of love, its form, its luminosity and its fascination? Is love at a distance a diluted love, a remnant? Does it symbolize the end of love? Does love at a distance kill off nearby love or does it fan the flames? All these questions have many answers. One is as follows. If the bold lovers of yesteryear regarded themselves as having broken free from the earthly shackles of class and status (as we see from the testimony of novels, plays and the letters of romantic love), new and different hopes inspire the lovers of our own day. Today they want liberation from the bonds of a shared locality, a shared language and a shared citizenship. Looked at in this light, distant love may be thought of as an intensified form of romanticism, one that acts even more radically in stripping away social and cultural bonds, dispensing even with geographical proximity and national and ethnic identity. Regarded historically, there is nothing new in this. Both the European nobility and the wealthy bourgeoisie practised early forms of ‘distant love’, whereas now, at the start of the twenty-first century, ‘world families’ are being reinvented in a more democratic and popular form. While the nuclear family based on the nation-state was supposed to last for ever, it endured in reality no more than a few decades – until the late 1960s, when student unrest and the women's movement started up in the industrialized countries of the West. These movements not only called into question the existence of the nuclear family; they also cast doubt on the inequality between men and women embedded in it and deemed natural (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the retreat from the normal family continues but with an added dimension. The nation-state, which now routinely intervenes in the private space of the individual, finds itself opposed by love and its call for freedom. ‘Love your enemies’ – this venerable biblical injunction now gains a new meaning. It has been secularized, and its reach has been extended into the realm of the personal and the private, not to say the erotic and the sexual. In the present chapter we shall explore what happens to love when it becomes distant love, when it is brave and courageous enough – perhaps even over-exuberant and rash enough – not to be deterred by national boundaries and vast distances. In the process we make a distinction between two forms of distant love. On the one hand, there is the love that is defined by the geographical distance between the lovers; on the other hand, it is the cultural distance between the lovers that is foregrounded. 1 The Social Anatomy of Distant Love Love Without Sex The growth of opportunities to meet new people is not the only novel factor. A further difference is that, with love at a distance, the scope for yearning also changes, namely what love means for the experience of yearning, what it can and cannot achieve in connection with the sensuality of love, the relationship between love, sexuality and intimacy, and the relationship between love and everyday living, love and work.3 To experience love at a geographical distance means believing that an intense intimacy and emotional life is possible even though over extended periods of time sex is something that can only be talked about. Love as transmitted via the media, telephone and internet must necessarily sacrifice much of sensuality. It must dispense with hands, skin and lips touching, with true eye contact and with the ecstasy of orgasm induced by contact with a lover. What remains is the sensuality of the voice, of language, of narrative and listening, of seeing and gazing. Love in the presence of the beloved can be silent, while love at a geographical distance must be kept alive and maintain its fascination simply with language and with looking. That is its opportunity but also its frailty. The one-dimensionality of the means at its disposal can mean that it will have no more than a short life, a swift death. In a culture like that of the West, where direct physical contact and the ability of people to touch each other constitute an essential part of the experience of love, love at a geographical distance is scarcely sustainable in the long run. The ‘pure’ location of distant love is the sound of the voice, the narrative that is familiar with the other person's interior landscape and is able to respond to it – the narrative, in other words, that has mastered the art of intimacy. By intimacy we mean the ability to make the other person feel close despite the actual distance. ‘Art’ here is art in the highest sense. If it is to thrive, this intimacy calls for the exchange of self-portraits in narrative form, in which the two people concerned are present in a quite natural, everyday way. Thus distant relationships are able to break through what would be loud silences in nearby relationships. If the couple have times that are reserved exclusively for a mutual unburdening, this can even lead to a special closeness and intensity. Because their conversation is less exposed to distractions, it can concentrate entirely on speaking or looking, and this creates an opening for broaching essential questions of the relationship between two people. All this notwithstanding, there is something monastic – monkish and nun-like – about love separated by geographical distances. It remains abstract because it is confined to email and Facebook, texting and Skype. In its pure form, distant love is scarcely liveable for non-monks and non-nuns. Normal people need oases of direct love from time to time, a sensuality comprehending all the senses, a love to the point of fulfilment. And for the other times they need the rituals and symbols that remind them of their moments of togetherness, and enable them to rediscover them, preserve them and reinforce them. Intimacy at a distance may sound romantic, but it is a form of romanticism that draws nourishment from the sober virtues of regularity, reliability and long-term planning. Intimacy at a distance depends on firm arrangements if the inner bond is to be sustained (e.g., Skyping every evening, meeting every six months). And this intimacy may always break down, as Erich Kästner notes in his customarily laconic way: When two people are never together, except for two days and one night in every month, their friendship is bound to be undermined, and when that state of affairs goes on for years, as it has done with us, the whole relationship breaks down. That has little to do with the inherent quality of the two persons, the process is inevitable … Of course we became alienated. Neither knew what friendships the other made. We didn't notice how we were changing or why we were changing. Letters are no good. And then we met, kissed, went to the theatre, asked for the latest news, spent the night together and separated again. Four weeks later, the same routine was repeated. Mental proximity and then love by the calendar, with your watch in your hand. It was hopeless. She in Hamburg, I in Berlin – geography spells the ruination of love. (Kästner 1990: 60) But can we not argue with equal justice that geography enables love to blossom? A dialectics of distant love and nearby love prompts the question: How much nearness and how much distance can love survive? Love Without Living Together There are plenty of people to preach to you about both distant love and nearby love. Some recommend distant love as therapy for disappointments in nearby love. Others praise love from nearby as therapy for disappointments in distant love. What is indisputable is that distant love has its advantages, particularly when the couple can adapt it to their own needs and desires. Many people even say that proximity is a myth. They say that the nearby love for which distant lovers yearn is stifling amid the daily routine. Too much closeness destroys love. Distant love keeps it youthful. It releases lovers from the need, the exorbitant need, always to have to keep on declaring one's love. It makes the impossible possible; it reconciles disagreements; it permits both closeness and distance, a life of one's own and a life together. Such diagnoses doubtless contain a kernel of truth. Distant love is based not just on the separation of love and sexuality but on the divide between love and ordinary life. Distant love is like sex without having to launder the bedclothes, like eating without the washing up, like mountain hiking without sweat and aching bones. Who would object to that? Nevertheless, distant love is no recipe for everlasting happiness; it is no holiday on the Isle of the Blessed while all around the majority of couples wither away in a life of routine. For we must not overlook the risks of a life removed from the vicissitudes of ordinary existence. I am thinking here, for example, of the danger of presenting an improved version of oneself in the course of exchanging signs of mutual affection. Or the other danger of idealizing one's partner, ascribing to him or her perfections that will not stand up in the harsh light of reality. Considered in this light, love at a distance means learning how to rhapsodize. Distant love is the love of the Sunday self for the other person's Sunday self, purified of the mundane realities of ordinary life. It is a love in which you do not have to reach an understanding about household routines or the horrors of imminent family visits. But because you experience only aspects of your partner's life, and because you know about much in his or her life only through his or her narratives – in short, because many potential crisis zones are concealed by distance – the relationship lacks the connection to ordinary reality. This allows the imagination to run riot. Relationships at a distance can be deceptive. It is easy to idealize your partner simply because you do not see important aspects of his personality. Or you are tempted to belittle him and project your own disappointments onto him. If I am having a bad time, he should have a bad time too or else he won't love me. One often fails to notice how one's partner develops. Or one has ceased to be the person one's partner still imagines. (Freymeyer and Otzelberger 2000: 161) money. I wanted you there.’ They tell their mothers they would never treat their children in the same way when it is their turn to have children. They would never leave their own children in order to look after those of other people (Nazario 2007: 245f.). A counselling service is not the sort of place attended by people who have their own lives well in hand; it is a service for those who are no longer able to cope. Other reports make it clear that plenty of families survive years of separation without any dramatic ill-effects. Once they are older, many children recognize what their mothers have done for them and the opportunities they have created for them. But, even as young adults, they say they would never consider the option of such a separation for themselves (Parreñas 2003: 51). Distant Love and the Labour Market Why do a growing number of people allow their lives to be shaped by the various patterns of distant love? Why do they acquiesce in the endless recurrence of leave- takings alternating with spells of living alone? They do so because, in the first place, this form of life has its advantages if conditions are favourable. In the second place, this way of life is often not chosen voluntarily but is the consequence of external constraints – such as a job, for which mobility and flexibility are the prime prerequisites of success. As far back as the 1970s, Arlie Russell Hochschild described the demands placed on young aspiring scholars: ‘Take your best job offer and go there no matter what your family or social situation. Publish your first book with a well-known publisher, and cross the land to a slightly better position, if it comes up’ (Hochschild 1975: 49). These demands have not diminished since that time. And they remain especially potent throughout the economy as well as in many other spheres of activity. Many people say that distant lovers are love nomads, love monads who always have everything they need with them on their laptop: their mobile office and their virtual love. Looked at from this perspective, distant love is what remains when work and career overwhelm everything else, sweeping away the frontiers protecting private life. In this sense, distant love is love in a suitcase – a handy parcel that, like the electric toothbrush in one's culture case, can be easily packaged and plugged in anywhere – there, it's working, and my teeth are white and shiny. Becoming ‘one's own entrepreneur’ and plugging and unplugging one's electric toothbrush-love are things that go together admirably. Children no longer have any place in such a society. The ‘we’ of distant love can be summed up in the formula: self-love à deux plus career as a hobby, but without children. This ‘we’ does not acknowledge the existence of the following generation, and in that sense it has no future. It is the residual ‘we’ of the radically individualized society. Those who forego the pleasure of having children are only being consistent if they renounce nearby love. In that event, they will be at liberty to seize global market opportunities for jobs wherever and whenever they present themselves. In an age of global labour markets, distant love is the basic form of love. Taken to their logical conclusion, global capitalism and distant love are two sides of the same coin. It follows that there is an elective affinity between capital, which overrides frontiers and the controls of the nation-state, and distant love, which breaks free from the framework of the normal family (with its shared household and the same citizenship). The fact that distant love breaks with the conventions of the normal family is not just an act of provocation. Rather, it adjusts to the demands of globalized capital, which itself penetrates the realms of intimacy and sexuality, transforming them into spheres compatible with the market. Thus the separation of love from sexuality, everyday life and parenthood cannot simply be consigned – as it is by Niklas Luhmann's theory – to the communication code of love (Luhmann 1986). It must also be viewed as reflecting the correspondence between changes in the forms of love and the dynamics of the world market as it tightens its grip on both external and internal reality. Distant love is the flexible love of ‘flexible human beings’ (Sennett 1998); it is the template in which labour market flexibility has become the principle informing the identity and organization of one's own life. If in future a working life involves five job changes, that means ten profound changes for a working couple. What marriage, what family can survive that? The way out points clearly to distant love with no children. Homosexual and Heterosexual Couples Even in the internal Western discourse on love, the conflict of meanings is intense, with regard to both heterosexual and homosexual couples, and to their models and practices of love and intimacy. Heterosexual and homosexual intimacy and sexuality alike are saturated with sexual stereotypes and patriarchal forms of domination that are in glaring conflict with the supposed autonomy of individuals. In this respect, according to prevailing opinion, inequality is less marked in the case of homosexual couples than with heterosexuals. And, in fact, studies of same-sex couples show both partners seeking new forms of intimacy and striving to soften the hierarchical nature of both their work and their lives (Dürnberger 2011; Kurdek 2007). However, a number of studies show that people's imagination and energy are directed more towards exploring the experience of intimacy than towards efforts to maximize equality between the partners (Connell 1995; Morgan 1996). At the same time, empirical studies allow us to sketch a picture containing unexpected nuances and subtle distinctions. According to them, men and women can seek and find greater equality in intimacy even in heterosexual relationships in which the old patriarchal sexual stereotypes persist more stubbornly in actual life patterns (Connell 1995; Hey 1997; Jamieson 1999; Morgan 1996). The couples have applied reflexive awareness of the malleability of the world and themselves to creating a framework of rules. The dialogue that they engage in, reworking what is fair and what is not, is a practical as well as political, sociological and philosophical piece of personal engagement. Any consequent politicization and personal empowerment has stemmed not only from a preoccupation with their own relationship but a more general engagement with the world. While starting from their own situation, their rules of fairness seek universal principles and are not tied to or derived from knowledge of each other's unique qualities. (Jamieson 1999: 486) It is doubtless rash to relate such findings to distant love and world families, and yet the similarity is striking. In love relationships social distinctions are not abrogated; on the contrary, sexuality, love and the family provide the locus in which disagreements resulting from pre-set conditions are negotiated. The universalism of love, or, more precisely, the promise of universalism, bewitches us, deadens our senses, seduces us and smuggles the world's conflicts into the beds and hearts of lovers. Delusion is the prerequisite of delight. But even where social expectations are unthinkingly introduced into relationships, new resolutions can arise. People who fall in love across the boundaries of inequality frequently succeed in discovering their own forms of intimacy and sexuality. This may well enable them to withstand tensions between the worlds embedded in the family and to negotiate compromises. Marriage Polish Style Versus Marriage American Style Eva Hoffmann, who as a young girl emigrated from Poland to the United States with her parents, gave the book she wrote about her life the title Lost in Translation. In its description of scenes from her life, the book shows how all translations convey no more than an approximation of the original meaning, because words are embedded in experiences, values and horizons of meaning that bear the imprint of a particular cultural background and are lost in the process of translation. One scene begins with an interior monologue during a car journey. ‘We're driving, my Texan and I, in his clunky Chevrolet from Houston to Austin, where we'll visit some friends. The highway is nearly empty and very hot.’ She describes how she had forgotten the landscape of her childhood of which she is reminded by the sight of the Texan landscape. ‘Otherwise, there's nothing but us and the speed of the car and the endlessly receding horizon’ (Hoffmann 1989: 198). In order to open herself up to the freedom that America offered her, she had to learn how to forget the aromas and the natural flora of her youth in Poland. But the memories that come flooding back cause her to panic. There follows an internal debate: Should you marry him? The question comes in English. Yes. Should you marry him? The question echoes in Polish. No. But I love him; I'm in love with him. Really? Really? Do you love him as you understand love? As you loved Marek? Forget Marek. He is another person. He's handsome and kind and good. You don't feel creaturely warmth. You're imagining him. You're imagining your emotions. You're forcing it. So you're going to keep me from marrying him? You realize this is an important decision. Yes, that's why you must listen to me. Why should I listen to you? You don't necessarily know the truth about me just because you speak in that language. Just because you seem to come from deeper within. (Ibid.: 199) For Eva Hoffmann the question ‘Marriage: yes or no?’ yields not one answer but two, one in Polish, the other in American. In her mind's eye she sees the Poland of her childhood, a world in which marriage meant a lifelong commitment, without exception and with no escape, until death do them part. Mindful of this lifelong commitment, her would everything else that had served as a defence (Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson 1972: 20). In other words, two culturally based misunderstandings in a sexual encounter lead to the climax. 3 Love, Marriage and Happiness: Multiplied, Divided, Inverted and Recombined Should marriage be based on love? Is it profoundly immoral or even barbaric if two people marry without being in love? Or is love a highly unreliable companion, far too ephemeral as an experience on which to found a family? Is our aim to find happiness in marriage, or would we be better advised to look for it elsewhere? Is love the most beautiful of all feelings, or is it dangerous because it bewitches the senses and confuses our minds? Different epochs, cultures and nations have produced very different answers to these questions. We shall select four from the cornucopia of relevant models in the present and the past and sketch them briefly. They can be presented roughly in historical sequence as far as their beginning and dominant phase are concerned. But it would be a gross error to suppose that they will disappear completely as new models or patterns of life come to the fore. They continue to exert an influence to a greater or lesser degree, partly covert and partly overt. This applies especially beyond the Central European or Western space. At the opening of the twenty-first century, what we see is not the victory of a single model but the coexistence and rivalry of various models, which have resulted in the emergence of a number of hybrid forms. Marriage, Children, Maybe Love In pre-modern Europe the entity known nowadays as the ‘family’, and studied as such, included, in addition to members of the extended family, maids and servants, etc. The wishes of the individual were subordinated to the needs of the community. Needless to say, passions and even sexuality were not unknown both alongside marriage and before it, but, in the list of what counted in marriage, affection, love and feelings did not occupy centre stage. What was of primary importance was a union that obeyed the rules of property ownership and status. In other words, people made matches for good or ill, got on with their work, and produced and brought up children. People did not expect to enjoy their ‘individual happiness’. The search for happiness was an alien concept. You accepted your fortune or misfortune as it came – in the spirit of resignation to God's will. This does not mean that people were unhappy. To infer that would be to apply the yardstick of contemporary Western society to pre-modern conditions of love and life. The morality of those days was not concerned with sexuality as a source of pleasure; sexuality was directed at the procreation of children, the maintenance of dynasties and families. Lust, to say nothing of the art of sexuality, was condemned by theologians as sickness and sin. The monks, made intimately conversant with the thrills of love through the confessions of their sinful sheep, developed into the pioneers of a black art of eroticism with its prohibitions: he who burns with excessive ardour for his own wife acts disgracefully. Untrammelled love, the passion that lovers feel beyond the bounds of wedlock, is altogether too great. ‘A rational man shall love his wife prudently and not passionately; he shall tame his desires and not allow himself to be inveigled into intercourse’ (St Jerome, cited in Flandrin 1984: 155). Even the sagacious Michel de Montaigne wrote in his essay ‘Of Moderation’: ‘Marriage is a solemn and sacred tie’, in which sexual desire is unseemly, unless ‘the pleasure we extract from it’ is ‘a sober and serious delight’, tempered by a certain kind of strictness; ‘it should be a sort of discreet and conscientious pleasure’ (Montaigne 1908). If in the course of time no affection arose, but on the contrary mutual dislike increased by the day, the married couple were nevertheless indissolubly bound together until death. Divorce was scarcely an option. With the passage of time the anxieties and hopes of parenthood, the shared labours in house and home, the survival of sickness and other crises might even foster the growth of a kind of love and intimacy. This is demonstrated by statements in which married couples testify to their mutual affection. What then is the secret of a happy marriage? One possible answer is that, if you Love, Marriage, Maybe Children, Maybe Divorce By the end of the 1960s the power of the old (family) values had started to wane. A succession of other socially accepted patterns of life began to appear alongside the normal family. Following the massive criticism of the institutions of marriage and the family by the student movement and the women's movement, there was a rise in the numbers of couples living together without marriage. This kind of relationship was highly charged emotionally and associated with loftier expectations. Many people adopted the motto ‘live life to the full without regard to the conventions’ – and this goes for love relationships as well. The freedom to love, the I and the Thou that becomes We, that creates itself as We – this We should become a small infinity for lovers (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). In this model the stability of partnerships and family is based on the shaky foundations of the sentiments of love. In the beginning was the Big Bang of romantic love: the emergence and consolidation of the fleeting experience of love between two free individuals for the formation of partnerships, relationships for the purpose of weddings, marriage and parenthood on the basis of personal choice, guided by sexual attraction in a space full of the promise of unlimited possibilities. Since this love knows no bounds, when it wanes, the foundations of marriage and partnership will have vanished. If the promises of individualized love fail to materialize, those involved will simply be left with an experiment that failed, for whatever reason. This means that it is permissible, even rational, to break it off. A love whose legitimacy was grounded in itself has divorce as its corollary. Thus divorce gradually becomes normal, since every failed attempt to achieve a happy marriage can be followed by a further attempt. Individualized love not only presents people with ever new opportunities for happiness, it also gives them new forms of unhappiness – and the two are indissolubly linked. This is the normal chaos of divorce (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995). Love and Many ‘Maybes’ Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the model of individualized love has become universal. Wherever it assumes a radical form, everything is related to ‘me’ – and that includes the ‘us’. It is an ‘us’ that is one thing above all else, namely a space for self-presentation and self-dramatization. Literature provides succinct illustrations of this development. Earlier on, breaking away from the family, escaping from its grasp, its constraints, was a dominant theme. Nowadays, in contrast, more recent literature focuses on the futility of the desire for a happiness that knows no bounds. Lifestyles in the age of a radical individualization are presented either with sober detachment or else with irony or even satire. If we follow these accounts we see both men and women caught up in the infinite loop of an unquenchable desire for happiness (Hillenkamp 2009; Strauss 1976). There has also been a transformation in the horizons of love. To put it bluntly, everything revolves around sex, around love, around children, around supporting them, and around the acquisition and maintenance of wealth. But the primary concern is how the person with whom I am living, or whom I am marrying, enriches and glorifies me and succeeds in disclosing my self to me. The characters portrayed here as the protagonists of an increasingly intensified process of individualization are not concerned primarily with the relationship or the marriage (though that is a concern). People dress individually. People create themselves individually. The worldwide cosmetics, hairdressing and face-lifting industries produce individual self-dramatizations on a conveyor belt. But the decisive factor that identifies me for all the world to see is my choice of partner – for the time being (Gilbert 2010). No matter whether the partner is rich or poor, Catholic, Muslim or atheist, one thing can be predicted with some certainty: he or she will have at his or her disposal a stock of complex, internalized stories about the miracles of their love and marriage or the wounds inflicted by their separation, stories that can be produced at the drop of a hat, and told and retold. And it is even possible to predict the structure of these marriage narratives that explain to the world how I have become what I am now. Their first characteristic is that they tell the story of two people (and not their parents or relatives, friends, etc.). Before they first met, these two individuals were engaged on a solitary journey through a life full of temptations and mishaps. The screenplay of this individualized odyssey is a saga full of ironic twists and turns, surprises and contradictions. The transition from love to partnership or marriage (and, later on, from marriage to divorce) is treated as an epic journey through a golden haze (or else as tragedy). If you ask a modern Western woman how she met her husband or partner, when, where and how she fell in love with him, she responds with a complex and deeply felt personal narrative that she has carefully constructed, memorized and saved for reproducing on suitable occasions in order to be able to collect the interest due to her in recognition of her original selfhood (the currency of prestige of the age of the sovereign self). It might be fruitful to collate these marital narratives of How-I-became-what-I-am-today and compare them as typical narratives of men and women or else as instances of sexual stereotypes. Doubts (‘She wasn't really my type’); strokes of luck (‘In my narrow student lodgings where we discussed our seminar projects there was really room for only two pieces of furniture, a chair and a bed’); resistance and other obstacles (‘My father turned off the flow of money so as to put an end to our relationship, although its only effect was to bring us closer together’) – these tropes are the core of the narrative structure. In the same way, the end of the narrative is worth analysing. Before the divorce the story would end with redemption (‘Today I cannot imagine what life would be like without him/her’). After the divorce, the doubts that were always there in the background make their appearance (‘Why did I always repress my early doubts and refuse to take seriously the many signs of his/her infidelity?’). And, predictably, the fact that the narrator is not just the victim but also the author of his or her own love story is an integral part of the model of a radically individualized love. He or she ascribes to him- or herself a key role in the unfolding of the story, arising from his or her own decisions (or failures to decide) and actions (or failure to act). But there are limits; the separation, the divorce, is of course the other person's fault! This means that, at the start of the twenty-first century, love is treated as an absolute in the radically intensified Western model, and the contradictions between individualization, happiness, freedom and love form the indispensable precondition of everything: partnership, marriage, parenthood, the shared household and the shared finances. But also of separation and divorce. And the second marriage. A fixed sequence? Such a thing no longer exists. Instead, we see a series of phases, of biographical stages and transitions. At family parties the husband meets the former husband, the third wife of my first husband turns up too; my children start quarrelling with your children and our children. Marriage and divorce are both revelations of one's own self. A Clash of Love Cultures World families often consist of a patchwork of the different models. One and the same family may well contain, e.g., a secular daughter, a strict fundamentalist father, a half- secularized, half-religious mother, and a fundamentalist son who was born in the West but who holds anti-Western views. In other words, a family of this kind embodies the contradictions between old and new models of love, sexuality, marriage and the family in ways that may coexist but which may well lead to conflict within it. We can see here in exemplary fashion how world families may represent a microcosm of divergent but interconnected lives in which pre-modernity and the first and second modernities jostle for supremacy (Beck and Grande 2010). We may distinguish three basic positions in the current sociological debates. Love and intimacy in the modern world may be seen as ‘characteristic of the nation-state’, as ‘universalist’ or as ‘cosmopolitan’ (see also the Introduction). In the context of the nation-state, the core of the family is a secular version of the Holy Trinity: one household, one nationality and one identity. But lovers and the family have long since made their escape from this model and have been trying out a kind of solidarity between strangers. The universalist approach is akin to this. It combines the great transformations of love and intimacy with the development of European modernity, or, more precisely, with the historical emergence of the conflict between freedom, equality and love (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Giddens 1992; Illouz 2012; Luhmann 1986, inter alia). In this instance the particular nature of the European tradition is misinterpreted as the universal route to the paradoxes of the freedoms of modern love (an error that also disfigured our earlier diagnosis of the ‘normal chaos of love’). The cosmopolitan approach, however, which we sketch in the present book, shows how in world families the European, and more generally the Western, model of love and the culture of love and the family derived from other world regions are partly woven together and partly subsist in a state of conflict. Looked at in this way, world families combine elements of tradition and modernity, proximity and distance, the familiar and the foreign, similarity and difference – combinations that bridge different epochs, countries and continents and reflect the turbulences of the globalized world in the intimate realm of private life. Note 3All this is terra incognita! Apart from the first autobiographical reports (such as those by Freymeyer and Otzelberger 2000; Brunold, Hart and Hörst 1999), nothing has been written on this subject; what follows is therefore a sketch of our impressions, which stand in need of confirmation or otherwise by empirical research. 4 Cosmopolitan Communities of Fate Whether we are discussing mixed-nationality couples, distant love, immigrant domestic workers or baby tourism – the patterns of love and types of families that we have brought together under the heading ‘world families’ – one thing is clear. They can be understood only from a cosmopolitan point of view, not from a national or universalist perspective. At the same time, it is no less true that profound changes of the kind that we have identified in relations between the sexes can also be detected in a different form in other aspects of society. This explains why the transformations we can see in relationships between couples or within families do not seem exceptionally odd or exotic; they fit in with a larger process of development, a basic tendency of modernity in the early twenty-first century. At the present time, we are witnessing not only the emergence of world families but also the increasing overlap between the world religions, the growth in risks across the world, etc., all of which take place against the background of a world market that increasingly invades every facet of life. Hitherto our world was defined essentially by the nation-state, a form of society that permeated politics, the economy and everyday life. That world is now in the process of being transformed into one in which nation-states are changed from within and the contours of a world risk society become more and more visible. We describe this process as one of cosmopolitanization. This means more than merely globalization or growing transnationalism. It is more than the quantitative increase in the interconnections between countries and continents. Cosmopolitanization refers to a state of interdependence between individuals, groups and countries that is not just economic and political but also ethical, transcending national, ethnic, religious and political boundaries and power relations. These mutual dependencies form a kind of cross-border community or even numbers of such communities, each with a common destiny (Beck 2006; Beck and Grande 2010). Regardless of national frontiers and geographical distances, these cross-border communities are to be found in a vast variety of forms and locations – whether as love (see world families) or as economic rivalry on the world market (high-wage economies versus low-wage economies), or again as threats to mankind (climate change, nuclear power, etc.). Cosmopolitanization as a cross-border community with a any personal interaction between donors and recipients. Kidney donors and recipients are mediated via the world market but remain anonymous to each other. Nevertheless, their relationship is existential, vital for the survival of both, albeit in different ways. The henceforth indissoluble union with the distant, alien other – which is what we call cosmopolitanization – makes no assumptions about personal acquaintance, personal contact or any mutual knowledge. In short, cosmopolitanization in this sense may include dialogue with the other, direct communication (in the case of mixed-nationality marriages), but it can also occur as a speech-free, contact-free union (as in the case of kidney transplants). In this latter example, we discern the lineaments of the human condition at the start of the twenty-first century. The contrasts between national and international, inside and outside, ‘us’ versus ‘the others’, are all overwhelmed by the advance of modernity and have become anachronistic. They evaporate and melt into new forms.4 ‘Fresh kidneys’, transplanted from one body to another, from the globalized South to the globalized North, are by no means exceptional. They are symptomatic of a widespread development. Love, parenthood, the family, the household, careers, work, the labour market – the institutions and entire aspects of life of disparate worlds find themselves joined together and transformed in their innermost being. The weaving together of these disparate worlds can be seen on supermarket shelves, in the labels of the different foods, on restaurant menus (if you pay, you can eat the food of the entire globe); it permeates art, the sciences, the world religions and bursts in upon us in the form of global risks, such as climate change or the world financial crisis. In the German debates, some dismiss globalization as a current fad; others raise it to the status of a new destiny for mankind. But both extremes imply that it is all happening ‘somewhere out there’. It is generally supposed that nation-states continue on their way unperturbed. Cosmopolitanization, however, shifts these interconnections between the world's regions so that they become manifest somewhere beneath the level of the nation-state. Distinctions between ‘national’ and ‘international’ are blunted if more and more people work in a cosmopolitan way, make love in a cosmopolitan way, marry in a cosmopolitan way, live, travel, go shopping and cook in a cosmopolitan way. Such distinctions lose their edge if the inner identity and political loyalty of more and more people pertain not to a single state, a single country or native land, but to two or even three at the same time; if more and more children are born to mixed-nationality families, grow up with several languages, pass their childhood partly in one country, partly in another, or even in the virtual space of television and the internet. Whoever makes so bold as to proclaim that multiculturalism is dead is blind to the reality. What we are witnessing is the death not of multiculturalism but of the monoculturalism of the nation-state. The growing integration of different worlds is now irreversible, and the changes it introduces into the nation-states are fundamental. 2 The Power of Capital The dismantling of national trade barriers that followed rapidly upon the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the East–West conflict has led to a redistribution of power between nation-states, on the one hand, and worldwide economic agents, on the other. Companies are the gainers in this process because (like world families) they can cut the umbilical cord binding them to a single place or a single nation-state (Beck 2005). Several factors have contributed to this change. First, new communication technologies and frontiers open to capital and information flows enable jobs to be exported to wherever wages, safety regulations, welfare contributions, etc., are lowest. Second, modern information technologies make it possible to create social proximity even where geographical distances are great, and hence to build cooperation between the different branches of a company in whatever countries they are located. By setting up trans​national forms of organization, companies are able to take on workers in distant countries and continents, combining the strengths of one location with those of another in a different country. Third, transnational concerns have the power to play off countries and production sites against one another by luring them into a global competition for the lowest wages, the lowest tax rates and the best infrastructure. In the same way, they can ‘punish’ countries that are thought to be too expensive or hostile to investment by closing down plants and moving production facilities elsewhere. Fourth, and last, transnational businesses can manage their assets so that they invest, produce, pay tax and have their home base in different localities and in this way construct an impenetrable jungle out of the different strands of the production process. They can thus exploit the benefits and disadvantages of different locations – a game that can be highly profitable for people able to manoeuvre between different national jurisdictions. This is how economic interests succeed in throwing off the shackles of the nation- state and democratic controls. This process leads to a separation of politics and actual control, a process fraught with consequences (Bauman 2010: 203). In earlier phases, the nation-state had succeeded in developing political and administrative mechanisms that could tame industrial capitalism and ensure that the social and cultural wounds it inflicted on society were kept within bounds. Since this was achieved within the framework of the nation-state, a kind of marriage between politics and power came into being. This marriage has evidently come to an end. Power, transformed and diffused, has been partly moved to cyberspace, to the markets and to mobile capital, and partly shifted onto the shoulders of individuals who have to