It is evident that in many Western societies, there is a high level of concern about the negative consequences of significant migration.
For a long time, established parties and governments did not take concerns, reservations, and even outright rejection seriously. Legal regulations in a union of states such as the EU may have contributed to making the issue difficult for responsible politicians to deal with.
In reality, little has changed for many years, as illustrated by the example of the UK, where the issue of migration played a major role in the Brexit vote, but subsequent governments have only significantly reduced the numbers since 2024.
As a result, emotions ran high and the issue proved ideal for populists to rally people behind them in order to ultimately pursue an authoritarian agenda.
In addition to the well-known socio-psychological factors that lead to the rejection of migration (strain on social systems/costs incurred, shortage of jobs, foreign cultural practices/religions, different value systems), a look at human history may reveal additional aspects.
Thanks to paleogenetics, we have a fairly good picture of migration flows in Europe over the last few millennia. A recommended book on this topic is "Who We Are and How We Got Here" by David Reich (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Migration pressure has always existed, sometimes with dramatic consequences. The period of mass migration is the most recent example of far-reaching changes in populations across a very large area due to external pressure.
Against this backdrop, there may be something like a collective memory that keeps alive the fear of being overrun and alienated in a community.
From this perspective, the unease felt by significant sections of the population regarding poorly controlled or uncontrollable migration must be taken very seriously. A perceived or projected loss of control certainly has a very high mobilization potential for actors who promise to remedy the situation. An attributed loss of control among those responsible very quickly leads to a delegitimization of their position in this logic. Here, it is certainly advisable to take appropriate action to make it significantly more difficult to attribute a loss of control.
Furthermore, human history shows us something else. Viewed from the outside, there are all kinds of ways in which migration pressure could be dealt with.
It's all there, from the complete assimilation of new arrivals to population exchange. An example of large-scale population exchange is the influx of the Yamnaya people into Europe from the south of present-day Ukraine during the Bronze Age, which can now be traced very well through paleogenetics and the spread of Indo-European languages (even in modern populations today, the proportion of Yamnaya DNA in the genome is up to 50% in Central and Northern Europe, and 18-33% in Southern Europeans).
Of course, science is trying to find out what led to assimilation in one case and exchange in the other.
An important aspect here may be the extent to which the new arrivals bring with them superior cultural skills.
The Yamnayas are believed to have been able to use the wheel, pull carts, ride horses, and thus keep large herds of sheep and cattle (D W Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 2007).
With these cultural techniques, the Yamnayas became significantly more productive, the economy changed fundamentally, and the very different village lifestyles in the various areas were abandoned in favor of a mobile lifestyle.
If we now accept this hypothesis, leave the Bronze Age behind, and consider the current situation in Europe and Germany, we have cause for concern.
So far, Europe as a whole has not managed to create new heavyweights in the tech sector or build large companies with new business models. These are based in the US and, as if to prove that it could have been possible after all, in China.
We struggle economically and emotionally with digitalization, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Innovative asset-light, data-driven business models are foreign to us; we are already thinking about regulation before we have anything substantial in our hands.
The wake-up call provided by the awarding of the Nobel Prize for the theory of creative destruction comes at just the right time. It is not enough to be world champions in invention. Culture and institutions must work together to promote innovation in society; innovative entrepreneurship needs these supportive framework conditions.
The vertical innovation described by the laureates is transformative for an economy, but it only arises where it is desired. Where it is not desired, however, it comes anyway, but not as a friend, rather as a dominator.
Innovation coming from outside is simply not easy to control, and this ultimate loss of control means that society is more at the mercy of upheavals than it is able to help shape them or at least cushion their impact. Viewed from the outside, it is remarkable that the issue of migration has come to the fore in our societies, while our declining capacity for innovation, which obviously has a strong influence on our cultural identity and may even endanger it, is hardly addressed by the relevant social forces.
Both are topics that address potential disruption, with the possibility of a loss of control, which in itself has a high potential for mobilization.
However, the topic of migration is discussed under the heading "Preserve/Seal Off," while the topic of innovation falls more under the heading "Shape/Open Up/Break New Ground." The latter is much more challenging for society. There seems to be a great temptation to focus on preservation when it comes to innovation as well.
This cannot and must not be our future. Let us develop a taste for creative destruction, as described by Mokyr, Aghion, and Howitt, and dare to embark on a new journey together.
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