Youths, Migrants and Europe: An Identity Challenge?

The exponential development of the Islamic problem within Western societies, exploded with an accented virulence after the attack to the "World Trade Center", seems to be a direct consequence of the difficulty to internalize the sense of displacement linked to globalization (Bauman). This happens while is registered a progressive loss of importance of “State Nation” as subjects legitimate to regulate tensions and conflicts (Beck), since the coincidence between "Nation" and "State" seems to be definitely broken (Touraine). The “defrosting” of the two political blocks as they came out from the Cold War, has put in discussion geographical maps drawn after WW2 and created the opportunities to develop Neoliberal Theories and free movement of financial capitals within a planetary market, thanks also to the increasing opportunities grown around communications technologies. As an effect not desired, but absolutely inevitable, a movement of spatial and cultural mobility of whole populations has been produced too. If the collapse of borders has made migrations easier, globalization has produced a sort of increasing cultural unity among contiguous territories as well as central and peripheral areas. Cultural differentiations are notably attenuated everywhere, and nowadays they present themselves as constitutive element of a great Global Village of which everybody aims to be part. Differences do not disappear, rather, in the new global frame they claim equal dignity not as additional element but as constitutive essence, contributing to participate to the construction of a new global world. The great consequential remix produced by migration flows, even in the clear difference of their specific components, hardly can be seen as an "alien attack", while differences between “society of departure” and “society of arrival”, from a cultural point of view, become more and more weak to support. Differences tend to flow inside the same container where, instead of keeping distinguished, they blend themselves creating the basis of a deep transformations of personal and collective identities. This is particularly evident in the biographies of the young migrants in their attempt to reach the European myth. Departing from an empirical qualitative research on young migrants, carried out in South Italy, the paper analyses the difficulties to realize, among migrant and autochthonous people, those forms of recognition of identity that leans on the social esteem (Honnet). This can create potential situations of radicalisms, even religious. Within this frame, the paper postulates the emerging of a specific “ordre du discourse” around a regime of truth (Foucault) that, inside the relationship native/alien, could to develop specific forms of biopolitical control on both populations.