"Western countries in particular can today no longer be separated from Muslim societies, because they have them within themselves. They are themselves internally globalized"
About this Quote
Beck’s line lands like a polite demolition of the fantasy that “the West” can manage Islam as an external problem. The provocation isn’t demographic; it’s conceptual. He’s telling Western societies that the border they keep reaching for as a solution has already moved inside the house.
The intent is classic Beck: puncture methodological nationalism, the habit (in politics and even social science) of treating the nation-state as a sealed container with a coherent “inside” and a manageable “outside.” “Internally globalized” is his scalpel. It reframes migration, religious pluralism, and postcolonial entanglement not as exceptions or temporary “integration issues,” but as the normal condition of contemporary modernity. If Muslims are “within,” then debates about security, identity, and belonging can’t be outsourced to foreign policy or framed as civilizational clash; they’re domestic governance and civic imagination.
The subtext is a warning about denial: Western liberal democracies can’t keep narrating themselves as culturally uniform while relying on transnational labor, maintaining diasporic ties, and living with the legacies of empire. Calls to “defend Western values” often smuggle in a desire to re-separate what history has fused. Beck implies that this desire produces bad politics: securitization, symbolic loyalty tests, and a brittle majoritarianism that mistakes complexity for contamination.
Context matters. Writing in an era shaped by 9/11, EU expansion, intensified migration, and the rise of identity-driven populism, Beck argues that globalization isn’t just markets and supply chains. It’s neighbors, schools, workplaces, and the everyday friction of plural lives. The quote works because it forces a choice: adapt institutions to internal diversity, or keep chasing an external enemy that’s already part of the “we.”
The intent is classic Beck: puncture methodological nationalism, the habit (in politics and even social science) of treating the nation-state as a sealed container with a coherent “inside” and a manageable “outside.” “Internally globalized” is his scalpel. It reframes migration, religious pluralism, and postcolonial entanglement not as exceptions or temporary “integration issues,” but as the normal condition of contemporary modernity. If Muslims are “within,” then debates about security, identity, and belonging can’t be outsourced to foreign policy or framed as civilizational clash; they’re domestic governance and civic imagination.
The subtext is a warning about denial: Western liberal democracies can’t keep narrating themselves as culturally uniform while relying on transnational labor, maintaining diasporic ties, and living with the legacies of empire. Calls to “defend Western values” often smuggle in a desire to re-separate what history has fused. Beck implies that this desire produces bad politics: securitization, symbolic loyalty tests, and a brittle majoritarianism that mistakes complexity for contamination.
Context matters. Writing in an era shaped by 9/11, EU expansion, intensified migration, and the rise of identity-driven populism, Beck argues that globalization isn’t just markets and supply chains. It’s neighbors, schools, workplaces, and the everyday friction of plural lives. The quote works because it forces a choice: adapt institutions to internal diversity, or keep chasing an external enemy that’s already part of the “we.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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