RISING XENOPHOBIA IN THE COSMOPOLITAN STATE; THE IDENTITY CRISIS

Abstract

Globalization as a phenomenon is quite massive as it extensively reaches out to nations across borders in forging a global identity of belongingness – a sense of commitment beyond borders and domestic divisions. The concept of a borrowed or shared culture fits in a perfect way of merging heterogeneous complexities towards more uniformity in the shared culture and allows a greater exchange of ideas and a chance to appreciate diversity better. This utopian concept hardly substantiates in reality where equality is a virtue appreciated in theory and rejected in practice. The cultural assimilation with diasporic migration seems quite an interesting theory – but in practice, this migration results in more ingroup outgroup identifications than the growth of a multicultural singular identity. Xenophobia is a term used to describe irrational fear, hostility, or hatred towards people from other countries or cultures. As the world transforms into a global village – delimiting boundaries of statehood and increasing interactions, it becomes an important subject matter that behaviourism is affected by the groups that consolidate as an identity. At the core of this identity formation are certain forces – forces of cohabitation, heritage homogeneity, insecurity, and cultural superiority-inferiority to name a few. The problem lies in the incapacity or the inability to set up adequate facilities to shape this intermixing at the personal level taking into account human factors, behaviorisms, and tendencies of securing one’s nation and resources, sharing or restricting them. With limitations in resource capacities, it is an obvious consequence that the battle to secure them would be fiercer. Human evolutionary history bears witness to Darwinian and Lamarckian theories of survival of the fittest and the means to secure the same. In the same way, in a modern context, when resources stand limited, and opportunities numbered, any intrusion or migration into the land will be a source of anxiety to the native citizens.