Be Careful with Your Wishes
History rarely announces when one system ends and another begins.
There is no bell.
No voice says: Feudalism is over. Colonialism begins now.
The old system simply changes its clothes.
Land becomes territory. Territory becomes empire. Empire becomes market. Subjects become workers. Colonies become trading partners. Foreigners become Gastarbeiter. Refugees become numbers.
The words change.
The human need beneath them does not.
And neither does power.
When the World Became Property
For centuries, European powers travelled outward.
They crossed oceans, drew borders, occupied territories and returned with what those territories could provide: spices, cotton, sugar, minerals, oil, labor and wealth.
The justification changed from century to century.
God.
Civilization.
Progress.
Development.
Security.
But underneath these noble words was something much older:
We need something that you have.
The feudal lord had once controlled the land around him.
The colonial power discovered that the land did not have to be nearby.
The world had become larger.
The wish had not.
And then came industrialization.
Factories required resources. Economies required markets. Nations required influence. Empires competed not merely for prestige, but for access.
Power was no longer sitting in a castle.
It had learned to travel.
When Competition Came Home
Europe had divided much of the world among competing empires.
But competition does not remain politely outside your borders.
The same nations that expanded abroad increasingly confronted one another at home.
The First World War did not have a single cause, and colonial rivalry alone cannot explain it. Nationalism, military alliances, arms races, territorial disputes and imperial competition all played their part.
Millions died.
Empires collapsed.
Borders moved.
New countries appeared.
And humanity did what it often does after catastrophe:
It promised itself that it had learned.
Then came the Second World War.
This time the machinery of nationalism, racism, dictatorship and industrial organization produced destruction on a scale Europe could no longer pretend not to see.
Cities disappeared under bombs.
Millions were displaced.
The Holocaust demonstrated where the systematic classification of human beings could lead when prejudice became state machinery.
Again, borders moved.
Again, people moved.
Again, humanity said:
Never again.
And this time it wrote the promise down.
Human rights.
International conventions.
Institutions.
Rules intended to protect human dignity beyond nationality, religion or origin.
It was one of humanity’s better wishes.
But wishes and reality have never had a simple relationship.
Europe Needed Hands
After the war, much of Europe had to be rebuilt.
There were houses to construct, factories to operate, railways to maintain, mines to work and economies to expand.
Prosperity was the new wish. But prosperity required workers. So countries such as West Germany recruited labor from abroad.
Italy.
Spain.
Greece.
Turkey.
Yugoslavia.
Portugal.
Morocco.
Tunisia.
And elsewhere.
Germany gave them a remarkably revealing name:
Gastarbeiter.
Guest workers.
The word contained an entire policy. They were workers because their labor was needed. They were guests because their presence was imagined as temporary.
Come.
Work.
Help us build.
Then go home.
But human beings are inconvenient creatures.
They fall in love.
They marry.
They have children.
They make friends.
They buy furniture.
Their children go to school.
They begin remembering one place while belonging to another.
The worker who was invited for his hands arrived with a heart, memories, language, food, music, fears and dreams.
The economy had invited labor.
A human being had arrived.
When the Guest Stayed
Then the question changed.
It was no longer:
Do we need them?
It became:
Do they belong here?
This is where the vocabulary begins to reveal us.
Guest worker.
Foreigner.
Migrant.
Person with a migration background.
Asylum seeker.
Recognized refugee.
Rejected asylum seeker.
Integrated.
Not integrated.
We create categories because administrations need categories.
But categories have an interesting habit.
After a while, we begin believing that the category is the person.
A man who has lived somewhere for forty years can still be asked where he is really from.
A child can be born in a country, speak its language, attend its schools and still be described as coming from somewhere else.
The guest may stay.
The word sometimes stays longer.
The Direction Reversed
And then something happened that should not have surprised anyone who had been paying attention to history.
For centuries, Europe had gone outward.
European ships, soldiers, companies, missionaries, administrators and traders had travelled to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas.
Resources travelled in the opposite direction.
Raw materials came here.
Wealth came here.
Products came here.
Knowledge came here.
Labor contributed to that wealth.
Political decisions made here changed lives there.
Then, eventually, people began moving in the same direction as the wealth.
Now people go here because here holds the accumulated results of that extraction.
Of course, no refugee stands at a border carrying a history book and saying, “I am here because of colonialism.”
People move for immediate reasons.
War.
Persecution.
Poverty.
Family.
Work.
Safety.
Opportunity.
Climate.
Hope.
And those causes differ enormously from person to person and country to country.
But history does not disappear simply because the person moving does not name it.
The road beneath their feet was built long before they began walking.
And Then We Called It a Crisis
When Europeans moved across the world, history often called it exploration, expansion, settlement, trade or empire.
When people began moving toward Europe in large numbers, we found another word:
Crisis.
Refugee crisis.
Migration crisis.
Border crisis.
Sometimes the word is justified. Large and sudden movements of people can put real pressure on housing, schools, administrations and social systems. Governments have responsibilities both to people seeking protection and to the societies receiving them.
Those difficulties are real.
But language does something interesting again.
We begin talking about flows, waves, numbers, quotas and burdens.
A wave has no mother.
A number has no childhood.
A quota has no brother waiting somewhere.
A statistic does not wake at night remembering the sound of a bomb.
The moment a human being becomes a category, it becomes easier to discuss what should happen to the category.
Racism Did Not Arrive with the Refugees
Racism is often discussed as though it were an unfortunate reaction to modern migration.
It is much older.
Empires needed explanations for why one people could rule another.
Colonialism produced hierarchies not only of territory but of human value.
Pseudo-scientific racial theories gave prejudice the appearance of knowledge.
Nationalism could transform belonging into exclusion:
If we are one people, someone must eventually define who is not one of us.
Modern racism did not simply fall from the sky.
It inherited old furniture.
Some of the labels changed.
Some became socially unacceptable.
Others became coded.
Culture.
Compatibility.
Values.
Integration.
Security.
Not every discussion using those words is racist. Societies genuinely need conversations about laws, shared responsibilities, language and coexistence.
But old prejudices can learn new vocabulary.
Power has always been good at changing clothes.
Integration
And perhaps no word shows the confusion better than integration.
Who integrates into what?
How much?
For how long?
When is integration finished?
After learning the language?
Getting a job?
Paying taxes?
Obeying the law?
Loving the national football team?
Complaining about the weather?
And who decides?
Perhaps integration becomes absurd when it is understood as the disappearance of difference.
A society is not a glass of water into which everyone must dissolve.
People can belong without becoming identical.
The more interesting question may not be:
Have they integrated into us?
But:
What are we becoming together?
That question is more difficult.
Because it requires movement from everyone.
The Old Wish
We have travelled a long way since the frightened human being looked into the darkness and wished to survive.
Safety created shelter.
Shelter created settlement.
Settlement created property.
Property created hierarchy.
Hierarchy created rulers.
Rulers created kingdoms.
Kingdoms became nations.
Nations built empires.
Empires accumulated wealth.
Wealth required labor.
Prosperity attracted people.
Movement created diversity.
Diversity created new questions about belonging.
And now we stand at another border asking:
Who may enter?
Perhaps this is why history feels as though it repeats itself.
It doesn’t.
Not exactly.
The costumes change.
The technology changes.
The borders change.
The vocabulary changes.
But certain wishes remain remarkably familiar.
We want safety.
We want prosperity.
We want belonging.
We want control.
And when we are frightened, we want someone to tell us where the danger comes from.
Be Careful with Your Wishes
None of this means wishes are wrong.
Without the wish for safety, there would be no shelter.
Without the wish for justice, there would be no rights.
Without the wish for a better life, people would never leave what they know and build something new.
The problem begins when we forget that our solutions become structures.
And structures outlive the people who created them.
A border drawn yesterday becomes a fact today.
A temporary worker becomes a permanent minority.
An economic decision becomes a social conflict.
A colonial relationship becomes a global inequality.
A frightened reaction becomes a law.
A word becomes a category.
A category becomes an identity.
An identity becomes a wall.
And then another generation arrives and asks:
Who built this wall?
Usually, the answer is:
We did. Not all at once. Not deliberately. One reasonable wish at a time.
Perhaps that is the lesson running through this entire story—from survival to gods, from land to kings, from kingdoms to empires, from workers to migrants, from borders to belonging.
Human beings wish.
Then we organize the wish.
Then we protect the organization.
Then, one day, we discover that we are living inside it.
So perhaps the question is not whether we should stop wishing.
We couldn’t, even if we tried.
Perhaps we should simply remember:
Be careful with your wishes.
They have a habit of becoming systems.
©MANOUCHEHR ABRONTAN 2026
