Читать книгу Freedom of the Border - Paul Scheffer - Страница 11

Cosmopolitanism is on many people’s lips these days, but might the meaning of this particular ideal be changing in the global village, with its worldwide means of communication? Were the Enlightenment thinkers right to believe that greater knowledge of others increases mutual concern? Or does more contact and mingling make conflicts between cultures all the more extreme? Does contact encourage openness to other cultures or does it evoke a longing for what we regard as our own?

Our moral sensitivity is altered by the ubiquity of news from all parts of the world. On the face of it this is a positive development, since we are more troubled than ever about the fate of victims of Ebola or a tsunami. At the same time, our concern is fleeting, coming and going with the news cycle. Who can truly open their mind to all the bad news that pours in daily? In most instances that continual stream of information, far from inviting us to feel at home in the world, creates a sense of dissociation.

Now that the world is growing smaller, cosmopolitanism needs to be rethought. What in the time of Erasmus and Kant was a distant prospect has become our tangible reality. Circumstances have changed profoundly. When humans were still discovering the world, the ideal of an open society required the removal of borders, but that same ideal may perhaps necessitate further reflection on borders now that the world is coming to us.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk goes so far as to speak of a ‘drama of globalization’.¹ Unease is characteristic of modern times, as people feel themselves to be ‘homeless’ in a chaotic world. The accelerating turnover of people, goods and ideas is prompting a retreat. In our infatuation with mobility and our failure to appreciate that which is fixed, we have overlooked the fact that the social ties from which people derive protection are dissolving without new ties being created in their place.

Sloterdijk believes that every society exists by virtue of a boundary between inside and out.² The question he asks is: where are we when we are in the world? How does a person make new spaces, that are shared with other people, habitable? All of history is the story of animated relationships, he writes. In his lengthy disquisitions on the subject of city walls he has argued convincingly that they did not serve merely defensive purposes. More than anything they were intended to create an animated inner space.

But what if it becomes impossible to find a space of our own? Where can we embed ourselves then? Posing these questions does not make Sloterdijk a nostalgic thinker yearning for the old certainties. He recognizes the weaknesses of earlier cultures, but he also pays heed to the disruptive effect of globalization in our own day. Under pressure from the expanding world market, another side of human life emerges: our longing for shelter and protection. How can we give that desire a contemporary interpretation? Even more importantly, how can we prevent it from taking an aggressive form?

A world in which the crossing of borders is a daily reality increases mutual dependency. A world in which distances are shrinking heightens the experience of diverse people existing together and living alongside each other. That experience engenders new forms of community and cooperation, but it also brings friction and conflict.

Here we come upon one shortcoming of cosmopolitanism, its tendency to underestimate the conflicts that accompany the coexistence of so many cultures and religions. In cities with many newcomers, we have seen how separation between different groups can for some time contribute to the avoidance of conflict. But a moment always comes when isolation no longer works and diverse ways of living come into contact.

At that point conflicts arise, which can be tempered only by an appeal to shared norms. This necessitates having people in positions of public authority who, for example, insist that modern society cannot work without freedom of religion as a rule that applies to all. Anyone who demands the right to pray to a god must accept a responsibility to defend the right to religious freedom for people with a different religion or none. Instead we see on all sides the temptation to limit this right. The shared norms needed in a time of border-crossing are being poorly maintained.

Now that the entire world has come to the city, cosmopolitanism might no longer begin with the accumulation of air miles but with taking a bus to the outer suburbs. Many of today’s world citizens have little knowledge of Rosengård in Malmö, Vénissieux in Lyon, Lozells in Birmingham or Slotervaart in Amsterdam. I know plenty of people who regard themselves as tolerant but who rarely leave the centre of their city and feel uninvolved with the welfare of its periphery.

This betrays an inward-looking attitude, which nevertheless sells itself to the world as openness. We have seen it before. Think of what Rousseau said, with foresight, many years ago. ‘Beware of those cosmopolitans who go to great lengths in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfil around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars so as to be spared having to love his neighbours.’³ Perhaps the champions of human rights are less concerned about the civil rights of their neighbours, and perhaps that explains why tolerance and indifference fit so well together.

We live in a time that suffers from formlessness, a phenomenon injurious to an open society. Zygmunt Bauman describes a world in the grip of compulsive modernization. Changes come faster and faster, so that nothing any longer has a chance to take shape. Before existing elements can coalesce, the latest new thing presents itself. This has everything to do with the pace at which new trends arrive; the turnover rate of tastes is faster than ever. Bauman therefore describes our era as ‘liquid modernity’.

The traditional hierarchy of cultural expression has been overturned. Nowadays elites are perfectly happy to combine high and low culture. There’s little wrong with that, Bauman believes, except when accompanied by indifference among the elites towards the less highly educated population. There was once a civilizing mission, with all the problems that entailed, but now an attitude of ‘each to his own’ prevails. The ideal of everyone being in theory responsible for everything can in daily practice easily tip over into no one being responsible for anything. Globalization, in Bauman’s view, liberates only the upper strata of society.

Nation states once formed the framework within which the ‘edification of the masses’ took shape. That time is long gone and we instead find ourselves chasing after a privatized version of the old dream of a better society. Bauman believes that this leads to disengagement in intellectual circles, or in his words ‘the tendency of the contemporary intellectual elite to reject their role as educators, leaders and teachers – assigned to them and expected by them in the era of nation-building – in favour of another role, one emulating the business faction of the global elite in its strategy of secession, outdistancing and non-engagement’.⁴

Bauman illustrates this lack of concern by looking at how migration is dealt with.⁵ Rousseau’s Tartars are now living in urban housing estates. Attempts to ensure integration have been supplanted over recent decades by an embrace of diasporas, communities that remain focused on their countries of origin rather than living with each other in the countries in which they now find themselves. He recognizes the problematic aspects of the old integration models, but he is not at all happy with what has replaced them. He sees avoidance. All too often we hear people ask: who are we to force our own norms upon others?

What he describes as ‘indifference to difference’ in dealings with other cultures is an expression of the detachment of elites who as far as possible steer clear of social conflicts. They respond not with a plea for diversity based on the freedom of individuals to escape group pressure but instead, Bauman writes, with a multiculturalism that has little backbone and mainly serves to increase the distance between groups.

Indeed, diversity is not a value in its own right. The contributions made by different cultures need to be defended according to the degree to which they increase knowledge and serve the cause of freedom. Child labour, honour killings, exorcism, widow burning, the death penalty, slavery and the burka are or have been cultural traditions, most of them once prevalent in Europe as well as elsewhere. None are worth defending. Ultimately what matters is to allow people to take their fate into their own hands. Diversity is an empty concept, since it encompasses everything. It has no boundaries.

This doctrine of diversity could easily be used to justify a new intolerance. One striking example is the battle over the ‘decolonization’ of public space. Streets or institutions whose names refer to colonial rulers are being given new names. The director of one cultural institution now preparing to be renamed, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, says, ‘People are afraid that a change of name means history is being erased. Why should this fear be more important than the fear that aspects of history go unrecognized? Some fear the erasure of history, others that they are being erased themselves.’⁶

Thus an urgently needed conversation about the colonial era soon ends in stalemate: erasing or being erased. Is that really the issue? The notion that someone’s history needs to move out of the way to make room for someone else’s history does not at any rate seem to me an expression of diversity. A different kind of sensitivity is needed. We can add new names without scrapping the old ones. The Coen Tunnel in Amsterdam need not be renamed so that a square can be named after Surinamese hero Anton de Kom. The Van Heutszen statue did not need to be demolished so that a slavery monument could be built. The principle here should be: broaden the space in which we live together.

Driving out names does not help us to come to terms with colonial history. It’s precisely when painful layers of the past remain visible that we find a need to speak about them. When a society falls under the spell of colour differences, the time is not far away when white too is seen as a colour. This is regarded as a good thing by activists who want to unmask ‘white privilege’, yet arguably it discourages the intermixing that is underway at many places.

Disputes over the colonial past are merely one example of the rise of ‘identity politics’, which brings with it threats to social cohesion. Because if people withdraw increasingly into their own communities, who will make the common interest their prime concern? The forming of political parties based on ethnicity or religion can be seen as an expression of diversity, but all too often it leads to group pressure, so that differences within those groups are suppressed.

We have more yet to learn from the civil rights movement of the 1960s in America. In those years some astonishing writers emerged, such as James Baldwin. In The Fire Next Time (1963) he tried to build bridges.

We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation – if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. To create one nation has proved to be a hideously difficult task; there is certainly no need now to create two, one black and one white.⁷

But this maturing of America would, he believed, require a leap of imagination by white people. ‘What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves … to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to Western achievements, and transform them.’⁸ These are beautiful and true sentences that changed the way colour differences were dealt with.

The notion that the reality of a country has to be measured against the declared belief ‘all men are created equal’ proved fruitful. It expressed a faith that full citizenship is possible. Embracing such a shared norm prompts self-examination and should bring an open society closer to the ideal of equal treatment. In the journey from avoidance through conflict to acceptance, a ‘we’ grows that includes each new group in turn.

In another sense too, cosmopolitanism confers a tendency to underestimate the conflicts that characterize our era. Many people talk about ‘the return of geopolitics’, by which they mean that power appears to be winning out over morality in international relations. Even in the immediate vicinity of the European Union we see states descending into conflict and war. The open society needs to defend itself against the consequences of world disorder. Here we come upon a second shortcoming of contemporary cosmopolitanism, its underestimation of the sometimes violent conflicts that still characterize international politics.

According to French philosopher Régis Debray, we are witnessing a return of the repressed.⁹ In a time when many people embraced the notion of a post-national world, territorial issues returned in full force. One early indication of this was the outbreak of a cruel civil war in Yugoslavia, which created new states and therefore new borders. Everyone is happy to stand and sing ‘We Are the World’, yet there are now four times as many member states of the United Nations as there were when it was formed, as Debray points out.

The world does indeed have more national borders than ever, over a quarter of a million kilometres of them, and this in itself tells a story of political fragmentation.¹⁰ They have increased by more than 25,000 kilometres in Europe alone since 1990, largely because of the breakup of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Over half the borders of present-day Russia are new.¹¹

Debray believes we must learn to draw a distinction between borders and walls.¹² Walls are intended to block human traffic, whereas borders are intended to regulate it. In the public mind the two are frequently confused, because nowadays the concept of a border immediately evokes the image of a fence or a wall. The recognition of borders is in fact the best remedy for the epidemic of walls, Debray argues. In his view, the fences going up all over Europe are a result of the lack of an external border.

Respect for borders makes possible the peaceful resolution of conflict. This is not to say that borders are fixed once and for all, but conflict is never far away when they are disputed. We need only think of the Oder–Neisse line, which Germany was required to recognize as a condition of its unification. The fixing of its Eastern border contributed to the embedding of the new Germany in Europe. Or look at the Israel–Palestine conflict. There too, the recognition of a border between two states is essential for a lasting peace that may make it possible in the future to reach across the border once again.

The best example is presented by the Helsinki accords of 1975, which determined the borders in Europe and so enabled the start of a relaxation of tensions between East and West. Precisely because countries relinquished claims to the territories of other countries, it proved possible to increase the space for human rights in the East. There is a direct connection between the Helsinki accords and the fall of the Berlin Wall fourteen years later. Those who recognize that mutual respect for borders helps to preserve peace will be freed to some extent from liberal embarrassment about borders.

In 2005, dissident turned president Václav Havel said that the stabilization of the borders of the new Russia would be a major contribution to new relationships in Europe. The ‘grey zone’ of countries between the European Union and the Russian Federation in particular necessitates unambiguous agreements. ‘Russia does not really know where it begins and where it ends’, Havel said.¹³ He also said that the recognition of borders contributes to peaceful and productive relationships in a part of Europe that has continually seen borders move or disappear. There is currently no prospect of such recognition; in Ukraine and Georgia, and in Crimea, we have seen violence in recent years.

How different were expectations after the fall of the Wall. In the years after the end of the Cold War, massive cuts were made to everything that had helped to guarantee territorial integrity. Many thought that defence need no longer be a priority. The guarding of borders seemed unnecessary in the years in which a post-national world, a postmodern world if you like, seemed to announce itself.

There was an expectation that after 1989 democracy would increasingly become a generally accepted norm. The reality turned out very differently and the ideal of an open society has not been accepted everywhere by any means. After years in which democracy was on the rise, autocratic regimes in Russia, China, Turkey and elsewhere are gaining ground. In the European Union democracies can open their borders to each other, but in an illiberal world they need to defend their shared outer borders.

Political scientist John Mearsheimer writes that since the collapse of the Soviet Union the behaviour of the great powers has not changed fundamentally. ‘In fact, all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power and are destined to compete for power among themselves for the foreseeable future.’¹⁴ The desire to change the balance of power in their own favour still determines the behaviour of the world’s major powers. They deeply distrust each other and never exclude the possibility of using violence if circumstances favour it.

Mearsheimer stresses the unstable character of international politics. Great powers strive for dominance of their own regions in order to achieve as much security for themselves as possible. They are rarely status quo powers, since they are continually trying to change the international system in ways that will suit them. Their survival depends upon aggressive behaviour. ‘No amount of cooperation can eliminate the dominating logic of security competition. Genuine peace, or a world in which states do not compete for power, is not likely as long as the state system remains anarchic.’¹⁵

This supposedly realistic approach is at odds with liberal ways of addressing international politics. According to liberal teachings, inspired by Kant, it makes an important difference whether or not countries are organized democratically. But, Mearsheimer counters, even if we endorse the theory of democratic peace, it remains ‘unlikely that all the great powers in the system will become democratic and stay that way over the long term. It would only take a non-democratic China or Russia to keep power politics in play, and both of those states are likely to be non-democratic for at least part of the twenty-first century’.¹⁶

It’s hard to argue with that assessment. To the East Europe comes up against rising nationalism in Russia and China, to the South escalating civil war in the Arab nations and to the West declining American power. Joschka Fischer, former German foreign minister, had an apt description of the current era. He looked above all at the declining influence of America, which had for decades guaranteed the security of Europe. ‘The chaotic consequences of the gradual disintegration of the Pax Americana are becoming increasingly clear’, he wrote.¹⁷

So slowly the outlines of the new world disorder are becoming visible, and it is increasingly obvious why the current sense of vulnerability is far more than just a feeling. The fact of having many violent conflicts close to home was for many Europeans an abstraction just ten years ago, but now it is thoroughly tangible. Although for a long time – and certainly since the expansion of the European Union – there have been quite a few unstable countries on its outer borders, the disintegration has become visible to Europeans in its full extent only in recent years. The old continent is hedged about by a series of states where disorder takes violent forms. It is increasingly affected by those conflicts on its borders and has not been particularly successful in protecting itself against them.

We must bring the liberal and realist schools of thought about world politics together so that they can hone each other. In today’s world we clearly see both traditional power politics and the quest for lasting peace. The expanded European Union, where conflicts are fought out over the conference table, is the best example of pacification of ancient enmities. Twenty-seven countries are now engaged in efforts to establish ‘eternal peace’, a project without precedent.

The question is, how can the European Union promote this culture outside its own borders? Are the compromises laboriously arrived at daily in the corridors of Brussels a match for the brutality of international politics beyond its periphery? While geopolitics in relationships within the Union has largely been tamed, the confrontation between countries of the Union and the rest of the world is as much a matter of power politics as ever.

There are two images of Europe. Some see it as a fortress that has sealed itself off, while to others it is a continent with fairly porous borders. I think the latter image comes closer to the truth, since measures taken so far to guard the frontier are inadequate. In the view of many of its citizens, this devalues the meaning of the European Union. A community cannot survive without borders and it therefore needs to guard them. How that is to be done, how far Europe needs to go in its efforts to police its borders, is an open question to which I shall return. The provisional conclusion is clear: if the call for protection is not taken seriously, the Union will lose its legitimacy.

The fragility of cosmopolitanism can be summed up quite simply, based on the above. On the one hand we have underestimated the fact that in a world that is growing smaller, urban conflicts may become more intense. On the other hand we have failed to see clearly enough that in a world that is growing smaller, geopolitical conflicts may become more fierce. Once we recognize both these things, we discover the significance of borders, which help to sustain an open society.

We often hear people expressing concern about the borders of freedom. Here I want to lay the emphasis on the freedom of the border. In order to develop freedom to the full, liberal societies need to defend themselves against illiberal attitudes, both in domestic politics and in foreign policy. These are considerations that contribute to a re-evaluation of borders in a time of globalization.

Contemporary philosophers – such as Sloterdijk, Bauman and Debray – investigate in ways of their own a world in which openness and identity are increasingly in opposition. We need to learn to deal with the tension between the two, a tension that is part and parcel of any lively democracy. An open society cannot exist if there is no middle ground. Pleas for open borders and pleas for closed borders are increasingly at odds, which does not bode well.

Yet it is not easy to navigate between a poorly understood cosmopolitanism and a new protectionism. Italian novelist and cultural critic Alessandro Baricco detects a change in our emotional world. He concludes that individuals have more scope than ever and regards this mass individualism as progress, even though it is at risk of deteriorating into mass egotism. The ultimate outcome is positive. Masses no longer cluster together over the long term. Nothing sticks.

Baricco believes we are done with the slowness of the twentieth century, which as he sees it caused countless disasters. ‘Everything that has need of the steadfastness of immobility ultimately gets a twentieth-century stench and later a vaguely ominous sound as well.’¹⁸ He sums up the worldview that changes reality as follows: ‘Boycott borders, tear down all walls, set up one open space in which everything must circulate. Demonize immobility.’¹⁹

In this borderless flux, markets and morality reinforce each other. Commerce naturally favours the removal of obstacles. Regulations of any kind are experienced as impediments. Morality too wants to reach beyond borders; human rights are valid everywhere and without limit. Hence businesspeople and idealists speak the same borderless language. Here all walls are indeed torn down: this change can easily turn against the social contract, which after all takes shape within borders.

It is beyond dispute that cultures cannot develop in isolation, but freedom can come to grief in a borderless world. Mobility can increase only if there are enough people who feel a bond with a place. In fluid circumstances everything dissolves. Why would this not apply to freedom? The greatest challenge is to ensure that the mobility characteristic of our time can be reconciled with citizens’ rights.

In what follows we will look in more detail at the world inhabited by the average citizen. It will become clear once again that globalization has a wide range of consequences. Along with mingling and enrichment we see alienation and inequality. If these fault lines become even more firmly fixed within our societies, then it’s clear where most people will end up: on the side not of cosmopolitanism but of nationalism.