MEDIACTIVE Editorial

 

We have a choice

Rosemary Bechler

In seeking to control their borders, European states have developed regimes that once would have been possible only in war-time, including dispersal, detention, and deportation. There is an obvious cost to be paid in rising discrimination, racism and xenophobia. How can those of us who value the dynamism of cultural diversity and international co-operation promote confident new thinking in egalitarian multiculturalism? What are the hopes for a new era of democracy?

Across Europe it is increasingly frequently argued that a precondition for saner public debate about migration is a clamp down on the ‘abuse’ of asylum provision by those whose real aim is economic migration – in spite of the fact that there is little evidence that public opinion does in fact distinguish between economic migrants and asylum seekers, or that it is willing to accept ‘genuine’ asylum seekers. The logic behind this appears to be the ‘majority reassurance’ argued for by David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, a term he uses to advocate a rethinking of multiculturalism. Goodhart’s argument is that, if social cohesion is to be preserved in a welfare state, the main aim of policy in these areas must be to quieten the fears of the majority population that they no longer ‘come first’.

Yet ‘reassurance’ seems an odd term to use in connection with the batch of mutually conflicting policies on migration and race which prevail in the nation-states of Europe today – which include the visible brutalisation of border crossing; the securitisation or militarisation of migration regimes; and the apparent confusion of such systems with measures to sustain that other unreassuring process, the ‘war against terrorism’. (And not the least of the contradictions in policy is EU support for those vested interests in Europe that shore up an unfair international trade regime, and the arms trade, both of which directly contribute to the conditions that lead people into the miseries of becoming undocumented migrants and refugees.) In seeking to assert control over their borders, European states are now developing regimes, and sets of practices, that once would have been possible only in war-time – including draconian measures such as dispersal, detention, and deportation of asylum seekers.

In all of this there is a curious mismatch between implementation and declared intent. European liberal democracies share a common commitment to granting asylum to those in need of protection, a commitment made legally binding by signing the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Yet in contemporary mainstream European politics, such liberal commitments are under siege. A politics based on anxiety is becoming the dominant discourse. The asylum seeker has become a bogey figure, and public policy on migration is couched almost solely in terms of control. The ultimate effect of such discourse, however, is to feed anxiety.

Thus, at present, asylum seekers are forbidden to work in many European countries, whether during the period in which their applications are being processed, or for a set period after their arrival. Refugees can rarely get into a country except as irregular migrants, and once they arrive are obliged to ‘live off social security’. Can one conceive of a system better designed to incite higher levels of xenophobia? Perhaps it is too much to expect that fears about the unravelling of the welfare state will be allayed by research showing that in the long run migrants, whatever their initial status, become net contributors to the receiving society. But such fears will certainly not be allayed by the rhetoric of siege, invasion and exaggerated numbers by government and media alike.

Equally unhelpful was Tony Blair’s undertaking in 2002 to halve the number of asylum seekers to the UK. This approach, careless of the reasons for flight – which are not susceptible to this kind of target-setting – only serves to reassure us that asylum seeking in general is a bogus category. Furthermore, recent government proposals have sought to limit the right to seek asylum in Britain: in 2003 they proposed the setting up of Regional Protection Zones near areas of conflict or natural disaster, which would become the place where asylum claims would be processed; and they also have proposed Transit Zones to be located around the external borders of the EU.

There is an obvious cost to be paid for such policies – in terms of rising discrimination, racism and xenophobia. But once started down this path of characterising asylum seekers as fraudsters and criminals, it seems that ever more has to be done to ‘reassure’ the majority, to ever-decreasing effect. A constant stress on the need for ‘control’ can only add to majority fears.

One typical result of such perversity – an everyday story – was recorded in the papers in April 2004. The usually sedate community of Portishead was up in arms over a routine Home Office planning application for change of use of two rooms in an obscure government office to allow for the interviewing there of asylum seekers. There was no question of any refugees living in the area: they would simply be passing through on their way to the office. Yet packed public meetings, where accusations of ‘racism and xenophobia’ were pitted against counter-accusations of ‘political correctness’, were overwhelmingly against the proposal. The fear was that residents might encounter refugees going to and from interviews; that house-prices in the area would fall; and that crime and violence would rise. Parents would be afraid to let their children play in the street. Not a single refugee was going to live in Portishead: but they might walk down the street.

Isn’t it clear that, while numbers may be halved, reassurance is far from doubled?

The management of migration flows

In November 2003, as editor of an openDemocracy debate on migration in Europe, I was given an opportunity to catch a glimpse of some of the latest thinking on migration and security at a European conference crammed full of migration experts, all taking note of new features of the landscape. These included: the gathering but never officially acknowledged demand for a global professional labour market; the appearance of ‘Global Woman’ – a care chain of low-paid nannies, nurses, sex workers and care tradespeople – imported into the richer countries of the world as if wives had widely disappeared and replacements needed to be found; the continuing destruction of the ‘sticky webs’ of more traditional societies through the pursuit of neo-liberal policies; the blurring of the categories ‘citizen’ and ‘alien’ in such phenomena as transnationality, postnationality, global peer culture; and the hollowing out of the European welfare state, accompanied by a rise in anti-immigration sentiment.

There was agreement amongst the conference participants that they were gathered together not to so much to nobly respond to a human rights obligation, but more to testify to the inescapable fact that Europe has long benefited enormously from its migrants, and that this was one well-kept secret which might soon have to come out into the open.

Migration-related change is widespread in European societies. Although globalisation is frequently understood to take place ‘outside’ our own countries, we live in transnational cultures to a far greater extent than we admit in public discussion. Thus, for example, in Germany in 2003, one in six new marriages were bi-national. These cosmopolitan realities mean that cultures are combining and recombining to increasingly complex and rapid effect; while everyday life is ever more permeated by the perception of global problems to which we do not have the answers.

After EU enlargement in May 2004, an entirely new migration space started to open up at its eastern borders, to add to the considerable back and forth East-West movement which already existed. This means, for example, that some of the 400,000 Ukrainians who have crossed into Poland are already finding themselves positions in private households in Warsaw. New EU members could soon be overwhelmed by insecure or failing neighbouring states, unless a rather more inclusive EU comes to their rescue with a new, burden-sharing, migration regime. Meanwhile, people-trafficking – a 13 billion dollar industry per annum – is now the second largest source of revenue after drugs on the balance sheet of global organised crime. Last but not least, post-9/11, protecting your own people against foreigners has emerged as the acid test for good governance.

Speakers at the conference were duly congratulated for shifting the historically and politically charged preoccupation with the ‘single act’ of border-crossing into a vocabulary of flow management – which would enable a fresh look at the broader systematicities within which mass migration plays itself out. Such a shift of focus could begin to develop the processes and institutions which could be deployed as so many bridges between the increasingly diversified states in the world today: it might help to replace regimes based on false oppositions with systems more closely attuned to the messy reality in which countries are simultaneously senders, receivers and transit routes for migrants. The idea of circulating people and profits might be reintroduced into the discussion. Governments might think of bringing together what have hitherto been discreet approaches to international trade, human rights, public protection, social cohesion. In short, as Saskia Sassen has put it succinctly, such discussion would be a starting point for beginning to ‘re-map the fear’ and to ‘institutionalise the in-between’.

This mood changed abruptly when a young expert from the British Home Office Strategic Policy Team took the podium. Not surprisingly, he opened with a set of reassurances. ’Don’t be too pessimistic about what governments can do,’ he urged. Britain had shown how, viewed rationally as a question of outcomes, targeted incentives and disincentives, once you decide what you want – ‘you want the economic outcome, but not the social or security downside’ – this is perfectly achievable. ‘We’ve halved asylum figures, as we said we would, in nine months, and related crime is down by a quarter’, he announced, with a clear sense of achievement. Given that the name of the game was being seen to ‘manage migration’, such a focus on targets was unsurprising. Yet this contribution highlighted the weaknesses of the conference’s approach to policy.

Of course the policy approach he was outlining was quite the reverse of ‘re-mapping the fear’. A list of migration-related security threats in no particular order issued from the overhead projector – unsafe neighbourhoods, terrorists in hiding, criminal gangs, contagious diseases, unstable regions bordering Europe, a rise in racism and ethnic tensions as a result of divided loyalties, alienation of more established communities, fragmentation of social order, even radicalisation of immigrant populations through poor integration.

The speech slipped seamlessly from talking about the evils of the exploitation of migrants and asylum seekers – by organised crime and unscrupulous employers – to discussing the alleged deficiencies of the migrants themselves, all the way from false asylum claims to the problem of divided loyalties. In a final, if scarcely perceptible, move, this amalgam became merged with ‘the trouble they cause us’. Over ten years, we were told, migration had led to an overall 1 per cent population ‘churn’ in the UK as a whole, which translated to a significantly higher ‘churn’ in cities such as London, of anything between 5 and 8 per cent. Apparently this degree of ‘churn’ is close to acceptable limits, because all the evidence indicates a correlation between such diversity, visible ethnic fracturing in our communities and a marked rise in the host population’s fear of crime – irrespective of any real relationship to the crime statistics.

Thus, there is a real need to reassure people that the foundations of the social order remain intact, through a conspicuous, not to mention draconian, curbing of illegal migration. Otherwise we will never be able to pave the way for the ‘churn’ we know we will need in the future. Thus the speaker acknowledged the need for migrant labour yet simultaneously aligned himself with those who blame migrant workers for a wide range of social ills. This displacement of anxiety onto the figure of the migrant worker points to an underlying weakness in the conference as a whole.

The conference set itself the task of tracking a myriad of migration-related developments (mainly so as to be able to ‘manage’ them more efficiently) but it did not explore the wider social context that might offer other reasons for people’s anxieties and fears – the processes of individualisation and social fragmentation in western society, which are testing national identity and indeed governance to the limit. Such increasing levels of insecurity can easily translate into fear of ‘strangers’, and of diversity and change. Without a more complex diagnosis of the source of such widespread insecurity, it is easy to come up with the wrong bases for ‘reassurance’. Yet, since migrants are standing in for a wide range of other fears, even when we meet the targets set by our fear, we are never reassured. Deep down, don’t we know that ‘the trouble’ hasn’t gone away?

‘Us’ and ‘them’

Britain is not alone in being caught up in this perverse spiral of ‘majority reassurance’. Taking a tour around the EU countries helps us to see that we are dealing with a common syndrome. In each case, one may be urged to appreciate the unique configuration of circumstances, and the equally particular cultural and culturalist response. In spite of this, a gatheringly familiar sense emerges that you have heard all this before.

In Denmark, the present Liberal-Conservative governing coalition, when it came into office in November 2001, somewhat to its surprise found itself on the defensive on the question of immigration, in spite of having pushed through an array of proposals, policies and practices during the preceding years of the Social Democratic/Radical Party coalition which had contributed toward a tighter Danish immigration and integration regime. The hyper-nationalist Danish People’s Party, whose support had dramatically increased during the elections, and whose anti-foreigner arguments had not been confronted by any of the mainstream parties, continued to campaign for a stop to any further inflows of undesirable aliens, and for the reinstatement of Denmark to its former status as a peaceful, ethnically homogeneous and politically sovereign welfare state.

In response, a number of tough policy initiatives started to flow from the newly-formed Ministry for Refugees, Immigrants and Integration under the leadership of Bertel Haarder. Yet this was not enough. In April 2002, a major representative of the Danish People’s Party, and vicar in the Church of Denmark, Søren Krarup, declared that: ‘Danes are increasingly becoming foreigners in their own country … Parliament is permitting the slow extermination of the Danish people’.

Such nationalist positions are beginning to set the dominant tone of public debate, and over the last decade or so they have acted as the main catalyst for the transformation of assumptions and discourses in this sensitive policy field. The assimilationist stance championed by the DPP has gradually been widely accepted across the political spectrum, most emphatically by the government coalition between Liberals and Conservatives.

In many European countries there has been one party that has had a trigger effect in initiating a process through which the national culture has been elevated into an absolute yardstick of ‘core values’ by which newcomers must be measured, and before which their own culture must yield. However narrow or local their own base, it seems that such parties need only tap into this larger reservoir of majoritarian grievance to considerably multiply their effect. Vlaams Blok, Belgium’s far right party, did this in 1991 when Filip De Winter adopted the slogan ‘Our people first!’. Their growing support may secure them the mayoralty in Antwerp in 2006, but as Dyab Abou Jahjah, President of the Arab European League puts it, their full impact is much greater than this: ‘Vlaams Blok talks about assimilation, the other parties talk about assimilation – that’s the power of Vlaams Blok. Vlaams Blok talks about security, so they start talking about security …’

In the same year that Filip De Winter was making his move, in the Netherlands a rather different figure, liberal conservative party leader Fritz Bolkestein, was calling for more attention to be paid to Dutch history and tradition. He expressed contempt for Muslim traditionalism, and in particular the oppression of Muslim women, as well as for multicultural ‘political correctness’. The warm welcome given to Bolkestein’s stance in many quarters suddenly revealed a large reservoir of anti-Muslim sentiment.

The Netherlands had been a much more explicitly multicultural community than Belgium, with a tradition of anti-racism, anti-apartheid solidarity and tolerance. Pim Fortuyn, however, was able to capitalise on this backlash. In a country in which racial hatred was still regarded as barbaric, the meteoric rise of Pim Fortuyn to within an inch of becoming prime minister, on the back of a fierce attack on the taboo on racism and discrimination, bore all the stronger witness to the new omnipresence and saliency of this monoculturalist tendency.

All of a sudden, multiculturalist policies and ideology became the target. They were associated with a recent past in which immigrants had been insufficiently grateful to the host community and appreciative of their superior culture: in short, a period in which they were not told how to ‘behave’; when their ‘integration’ into Dutch society ‘failed’ because public policy was too ‘soft’. In common parlance, the Dutch have long divided the population into those who are ‘autochthonous’ and others who are ‘allochthonous’. The allochthonous category is an undefined mix of ‘others’, seen as more or less problematic. This division was now revisited and reinforced.

In the current Dutch debate, multiculturalism has become a dirty word, generally avoided by politicians. It is seen as a naïve, wimpish way of looking at the world, unrealistic and dangerously blind to the forces threatening modern society. Its opponents focus on the need for anti-terrorism, for the emancipation of Muslim women and girls, and for the protection of gay rights, Jews, and generally the basic rights of the free western world. The result? In spite of decades of anti-racist and more or less multicultural policy, Dutch cities – its schools in particular – have become completely segregated. And the tone of the debate is increasingly harsh and direct: whoever is not with us, is against us.

In Italy as well, after 9/11, the official recasting of migration as an issue of security led to a rise in populist rhetoric in public discourse that focused on crime, violence and the danger to ‘national identity’ posed by migration. The entry of the erratic nativist movement, the Northern League (Lega Nord), into Italy’s governing coalition may again have paved the way.

Lega Nord’s anti-globalisation rhetoric, never precisely defined, but generally warning against a chaotic world of no certainties or firm identities, has a distinctive leftish tinge. One Lega Nord poster invited their ‘brother’ immigrant to ‘go home’ – an invitation hitherto reserved for Nato in the Italy of the 1960s and 1970s: ‘This is our own country. By coming here you help American bankers to take over other people’s economies thanks to globalisation, which makes mincemeat of peoples. If society becomes just a matter of money, everything will be lost: families, children, beliefs and values …’ Curiously, for a party based in one of the most dynamic and EU-oriented regions of Italy, the dream is of a return to the local community, where everybody knows everyone else; the community which speaks dialect, where values are shared.

In October 2003 a series of events provoked a renewed reassertion of ‘Italianity’, at a time when the Lega Nord was already in fierce dispute with the Alleanza Nazionale, over a proposal to extend voting rights to migrants. Following a complaint by Adel Smith, president of the Union of Italian Muslims, a court order ordered the removal of crucifixes from classroom walls in a state-run nursery and primary school in the region of Abruzzo where Smith’s children were pupils. The judgement provoked widespread rage. Across the political spectrum – apart from Rifondazione Comunista – Right, Centre and Left agreed that such religious symbols were a fundamental aspect of Italian identity; they should have their place in the culture to which newly-settled communities were introduced as part of their integration process. The ruling was revoked. But what was interesting was the depth of the reaction to this issue across all levels of society. Almost overnight, a re-Christianised Italian identity, which might have seemed ‘dead’ or at least in crisis, seemed to revive – motivated by the threat of the silent take-over of the nation by Otherness and Islam.

In neighbouring France, the re-assertion of laicism is by no means a different response. ‘Assimilation by education’ is at the heart of the French parliament’s controversial new law enforcing a ban on the display of explicit religious symbols in educational institutions. The ongoing desire of the French centre-right not to lose voters to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National may be one calculation behind the timing of this ban. But in essence, in the face of the visible diversification of the ‘global nation’ on French soil, the French political establishment is resisting a multicultural solution.

With considerable public backing, particularly from the deeply conservative Catholic social current, which views displays of Islamic allegiance as a hostile challenge, official France adamantly affirms cultural assimilation and rejects ‘affirmative action’ – labelled as ‘discrimination positive’ in France – as a means to accelerate the integration of minorities. In a social landscape in which unemployment and crime statistics would be much more shocking if measured according to religious denomination, members of ethnic or religious minorities are not even registered in official statistics, as long as they are French citizens. Yet with the largest Muslim minority in Europe increasingly excluded, alienated, and resistant to assimilation, an equally unhelpful form of denial seems to be under way here.

Even in Germany, despite some significant gestures by Gerhard Schroder, multiculturalism appears to be in retreat today. Some of the background to this is a response to the traumas of the reunification process, which in the space of two years swelled the population by 16 million East Germans, 2.5 million ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union, and a further half a million asylum seekers from Yugoslavia. The same pattern of displacing anxiety about change and insecurity onto a fear of the other seems to be emerging. Thus, according to Cem Ozdemir, the first German MP of Turkish descent – voted Multicultural Man of the year in 2002 by a German radio station – the naturalisation legislation which became law on 1 January 2000 would never have found a majority in today’s post-9/11 world, not only because of worsening relations between Islam and the West, but also because of a general deterioration in the nature of the contact between the majority population and those in Germany that are experienced as ‘foreign’: between the ‘Us’ and the ‘Them’.

The unlikely reconstruction of the national ‘us’

What emerges from even this rapid tour is a certain seemingly inexorable pattern. In each case, instead of any attempt to deal effectively with the challenges of our ‘global nations’ and their visible diversification in this rapidly-changing world, there has been a headline-grabbing invocation, projection, scapegoating and expulsion of the asylum seeker as ‘Them’, which then allows the re-construction of a homogeneous national ‘Us’. This has been an irresistible opportunity that has been seized upon by governments and major sections of their electorates. In the privileged but fragile European welfare state, this response now appears to play a pivotal political role.

This phenomenon is a relatively recent one. Thus, in Italy for example – where rapid modernisation has indeed profoundly transformed the landscape – people have been encountering the new workers with apparent composure for more than thirty years, as they have come into cattle-breeding, fruit-picking, the metal and mechanical industries and catering, encouraged both by the official and unofficial labour market. For millions of Italian families, Somali, Philippine, Romanian and Ukrainian housekeepers, baby-sitters and care-workers have become indispensable. But at some point after government intervened to replace these spontaneous market mechanisms – between 2001, when a centre-right coalition won the elections partly thanks to a noisy, restrictionist campaign, and the dramatic moment at the end of 2003 when Italy beat the world record for the number of foreigners (700,000) coaxed out of the ‘shadow economy’ at any one time – all these individual experiences, good, bad and indifferent, were subsumed into the beleaguered gaze of a national ‘Us’. Immigrant labour might still be used daily to many people’s satisfaction, but ‘We’ were now convinced that the Italian nation as we knew it was under threat, and that, regardless of the power or wishes of any political majority, immigration was now out of control.

This is part of a general pattern, where people have a sense of hopelessness about ‘our’ future, and in their quest for a renewed, positive sense of selfhood, are increasingly prone to voting for ‘our people first’. But this particular form of national identity politics, universally compelling throughout the EU, is hardly a winning formula for a European political class trying to integrate an enlarged Europe, beginning with the attempt to secure it a European constitution through national referendums. There is nothing wrong with the notion of strong nations within a strong Europe, but, given the enlarged EU’s diversity, isn’t it courting defeat to attempt to construct this entity through a concerted backlash against multiculturalism, and the encounter with the Other?

But perhaps the collective gesture of denial is precisely the point. Faced with the complex internal processes of individuation and fragmentation, and the external pull of the supranational, is it any accident that the certainties of a ‘natural’ belonging to a national ‘Us’, with a government which can retrieve top-down control, become highly desirable? Such homogeneity may never have truly existed, but we feel its value most at the point of its vanishing, as mass societies finally give way to negotiated identity-based societies, impossibly complex systems, porous to their external environments, and with unprecedented levels of individual self-determination. Viewed in this perspective, the asylum seekers’ malign fate, like a reverse Prince Charming, is to wake us into a consciousness of our irreparable loss.

For Elena Dingu-Kyrklund, a Romanian specialist in international migration and ethnic relations, who herself married a foreigner and emigrated to Sweden, it is precisely this unacceptable act of personal choice that international migration is seen as championing, as against a much older idea of given collective identities. If ‘nationality’ and ‘citizenship’ are often taken as overlapping terms, it is because of the longstanding assumption that being born into a given society with given features, and affiliated by such innate loyalties as kinship and family, will embed in people a deep-seated commitment to the values and interests of that society. These affiliations are not a matter of individual choice but rather of collective inheritance, based on imposed decisions that in many cases are imbibed unquestioned as a ‘natural’ part of the system, transmitted by one’s ‘family’ background, cultural habits or language.

To the permanent and given bond of birth, we now have to add the possibility of affiliation through the choice of the outsider, creating a bond where none has previously existed. Naturalisation – when outsiders choose for themselves to be accepted by the society/nation/people as an integral and equal component part, without even applying for club membership – questions our birthright and raises the spectre of another way of being. A way of being unprotected in the global fray, risk-taking and self-crafting – something not nearly as unfamiliar to us now as we may wish.

The projection of aggression

It is this pattern which this volume explores. Farhad Dalal anatomises what he sees more broadly as a relationship between the ‘haves’ and ‘must-not-haves’, by thought-provokingly applying radical group analysis of relational identity-formation to the psychoanalytic concept of projection derived from individual experience. The task he sets himself is to take this mechanism, whereby aggressive impulses arising in the internal world of an individual are split off from consciousness, repressed and projected onto some object or person in the external world, whom we now experience as aggressive towards us, and use it to explore the sense of collective grievance at the centre of the phenomenon I have called the national ‘Us’, and the power relations which sustain it.

In posing the question, as Dalal does, of why there is so much animosity towards asylum seekers, he offers us some sharp tools to get closer to this pattern. We begin to see the particular combination of self-determination and victim status that asylum seekers both embody and dramatise in ‘Us’. On the one hand, asylum seekers largely coincide with the victims targeted by traditional western European racists: Slavs, Roma, Arabs, Asians or Africans. Though individual asylum seekers tend to be more wealthy and educated than those they leave behind, overwhelmingly they come from countries seen as politically unstable and economically impoverished.

On the other hand, these people have made a certain choice. It is ‘spontaneous’ – that is, uninvited – asylum seekers which governments seem keenest to curb. Like undocumented migrants, these are people who evade our ever-tightening control, by entering outside ‘normal’ migration channels, or claiming their right by the 1951 Convention to remain in the country until their status is determined. Where economic migrants chosen according to the interests of receiving countries can at least be expected to be duly grateful, asylum seekers are driven by their own needs. They use any means of entry they can. As Dalal reminds us, they enter our body politic through the ‘dark and dirty places’. Women migrants seen to be active in political parties or trade unions find themselves in more trouble than women perceived as dependants, who, without a separate claim, are passively granted leave to remain on compassionate grounds. A wide range of professionals who apply for work permits go free of the stigma which attaches to the same professionals who apply for asylum. For the latter have not waited to be selected, but have taken their futures into their own hands.

Dalal, pondering Freud, wonders if the crucial difference between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ is between people who are too similar, or too different. But it seems to be always a combination of the two. When we fear ‘Them’ or treat ‘Them’ badly, they are all too capable of reminding ‘Us’, unforgivably, of ourselves.

Once this syndrome is under way there appears to be no end to the hostilities required. It is a curious kind of comfort zone to seek, and one which comes at a very high price.

It falls to Zygmunt Bauman, in a devastating meditation on a theme by Rosa Luxembourg, to read into this same drama played out between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ a haunting account of a capitalist planet which is now full up, tracing the attendant expulsion of human waste from the social body in all its literal inhumanity.

We have to heed the warning. Today Britain, with the support of Denmark, the Netherlands and other countries, is leading the way in calling for ‘new approaches’ to dealing with an ‘asylum crisis’, which will once again locate the refugee outside or beyond the domain of justice, whether this is labelled ‘Safe Haven’, ‘Regional Protection Area’, ‘Protection Zone’ or ‘Transit Processing Centre’.

It is impossible to contemplate the reappearance of the model of the ‘camp’ without being visited by the historical European associations arising from the totalitarian population policies of the early decades of the last century. While reference to the annihilation policies of those totalitarian regimes may be dismissed as so much creeping guilt-by-association and exaggeration, there are good reasons to revisit these dynamics. Foremost amongst these, perhaps, and particularly in the post 9/11 context, is the part played by the construction of a state of crisis in that sharp turn towards the inhuman.

Giorgio Agamben elaborated his theory of this ‘state of exception’ in his seminal work Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press 1998), a work inspired by the thinking of Carl Schmitt. Agamben connects the frequent, explicit sense of crisis during the Weimar era with the Nazi government’s 1933 decree for the protection of people and state, which effectively abrogated constitutional rights and freedoms for the duration of the Third Reich. This crisis situation, or ‘state of exception’, Agamben concludes, ‘thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself.’

Placed alongside Bauman’s Dante-esque vision, that of the Hungarian philosopher Gaspar Miklos Tamas is similarly instructive, as he exhorts us to read the warning signs in a process that bears all the features of ‘post-fascism’:

*I take the term ‘fascism’ to refer to a break with the enlightenment tradition of citizenship as a universal entitlement – the concept that underpinned the notion of progress shared by liberal, social democrat and all the other assorted progressive heirs of the Enlightenment. Once the Enlightenment equated citizenship with human dignity in this way, its extension to all classes, professions, both sexes, all races, creeds, and locations was only a matter of time. Universal franchise, the national service, and state education for all had to follow. National solidarity demanded, moreover, the relief of the estate of Man, a dignified material existence for all, and the eradication of the remnants of personal servitude.*

In 1914, he argues, it was this key premise of modern society that fascism was able to undo, by playing upon the inherent contradiction in the concept – the fact that universal citizenship is at once ‘universal’ and yet limited to the nation-state. The Third Reich duly claimed the right for those in power to judge who did and who did not belong to a given civic community:

*Certain categories of people, representing types crucial to the Enlightenment project of inclusion, became non-citizens and therefore, non-humans: communists meant the rebellious ‘lower type’, the masses brought in, leaderless and rudderless, by rootless universalism, and then rising up against the natural hierarchy; Jews, a community that survived the Christian middle ages without political power of its own, led by an essentially non-coercive authority, the people of the Book, by definition not a people of war; homosexuals, by their inability or unwillingness to procreate, bequeath and continue – a living refutation of the alleged link between nature and history; the mentally ill, listening to voices unheard by the rest of us – in other words, people whose recognition needed a moral effort and was not immediately (‘naturally’) given, who can fit in only by enacting an equality of the unequal.*

Tamas describes as post-fascism the re-appearance of this ‘counter-argument’ to European Enlightenment in the modern day. This time round it is deceptively compatible with the dominant forms of electoral democracy and representative government. (There are few greater dangers posed by democracy than the power of a state where legislative primacy, coupled with a highly centralised and powerful administration, is able to claim that government policy is actually derived from the will of the people, and therefore, in the general interest.) It nevertheless means the creation of millions if not billions of non-citizens, from Lithuania to California, who have had their civic and human rights withdrawn: a process of exclusion accompanied by the ethnicisation of everything from state-formation claims to class conflict. It leads to the concept of a ‘core population’ in the capitalist centres, defined increasingly by a new ‘culturalism’ – ‘our policies, practices, routines and ideologies – our people first’.

Towards a multiculturalism that works

In face of this, we too have personal choices to make. Open border activists are one obvious vanguard, resisting the barrier between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and insisting on working with ‘the enemy’. But this will be a multipolar fight-back, including anyone – globaliser and anti-globaliser alike – who perceives the value and dynamism of cultural diversity, international co-operation, or hopes for a new era of democracy.

Not everything is against us. In Europe, the absence of a European political identity is no accident. In their post-war refusal to assert European integration aggressively and negatively against outsiders, its most enthusiastic supporters have hitherto and for the most part rejected every opportunity to stress European identity as being on based on racial or religious identifications. Europe is still a space where we could learn together how best to negotiate its definition.

This in itself makes Europe more open to one of the lessons of 9/11 and its aftermath: that in a world of complex systems and weapons of mass destruction, the attempt to construct a secure identity by the hostile projection of an enemy image only adds to the spiral of violence. Terror has demonstrated that even the largest military power cannot achieve the security we seek through annihilation of the other.

At some point we will have to go back to the insight that the horrified world glimpsed briefly in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 – the importance of what we might call our Mutually Assured Vulnerability: that you have to seek dialogue, you have to seek accord. This can be put in many ways. One useful one is the fundamental liberal principle espoused by the Anglican clergyman J.N. Figgis in the 1910s and rediscovered by Paul Hirst in his advocacy of associative democracy: ‘We cannot claim liberty for ourselves, while at the same time denying it to others’. In the international world, as within our own societies, as the basis for a new definition of social cohesion, there is no survivable alternative to negotiating with the Other.

This is why we have to take particular note of arguments from people such as Dyab Abou Jahjah, born in the Lebanon and based in Antwerp, and current President of the Arab European League. He argues that for a multicultural society to work, there needs to be due recognition and indeed strengthening of different identities – in the League’s case, the culture of people’s origin. Such a strengthening of minority cultures is a precondition for successful integration within and even loyalty to the host societies of Europe. In a properly egalitarian multicultural framework, this could apply to everyone. As he says himself:

*It is always stimulating to have different insights. A lot of ideas in Europe, like a lot of ideas in our community, are rather ethnocentric, and are considered universal when, well, they are not! It is always good, I think, for a human being to relativise him or herself. Europeans help us to do that – perhaps a little too much! – here in Antwerp. Maybe, in the long-term, we can do that for you.*

Meanwhile, as Manuel Castells has argued, innovation in the Information Age relies today on two opposed models. The first is exemplified by the Finnish welfare state, a critical provider of ‘well-taken-care-of-individuals’, and with relatively few immigrants, which in fifty years became the number one information society and the most competitive economy in the world. The second, exemplified by the USA, is a culture open to immigration, but with relatively low levels of social security. The USA absorbs over 200,000 highly skilled new immigrants every year: in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, 30 per cent of the newly created high-tech companies had Chinese or Indian CEOs; and approximately 50 per cent of PhDs in science and engineering are awarded to foreigners, many of whom will stay on in the USA after training.

At present, these models are counterposed to their mutual detriment. This is unfortunate, not least because of the increasingly recognised contribution immigration brings to our health and social care systems. The main threat to US dominance in a complex and violent world are the ‘staggering social problems and lags in education’ directly attributable to the lack of a modern welfare state. In Finland, the reverse is true: the lack of international migration could prove the weak point in its model. However schematic this modelling, it suggests that the broadest alliance of interests for a multicultural future may yet see militant multiculturalists and sections of capital campaigning side by side.

A significant role in the battle for security through inclusiveness will be played by migrants themselves. When I think back over the ‘People Flow’ debate in openDemocracy, the truly memorable moments were those in which migrants insisted on turning back into people. Thus in Migrations, Sebastiao Salgado’s haunting baroque photo-images from the Exodus exhibition in the Barbican, the faces in the images made you wonder ‘what do they make of us?’. Maria, the Romanian illegal migrant in Michael Haneke’s film Code Inconnu, has a late moment of self-disclosure that is a pioneering rope ladder flung over the chasm between us. Zrinka Bralo tells us: ‘The point is – you don’t have to like me, to let me in. I don’t have to be a nice person. You don’t have to agree with me. It is my right …’. Osman Bah, an eighteen-year-old ex-child-soldier, told of his life on two battlefields: Africa first, then Europe. All of these were glimpsed possibilities, of co-operation across the divide between ‘Them’ and ‘Us’.

I would like in particular to thank the following participants in openDemocracy’s People Flow debate: Saskia Sassen, Ulf Hedetoft, Dienke Hondius, Alessandra Buonfino, Ferrucio Pastore, Johannes Willms, Cem Ozdemir, Elena Dingu-Kyrklund, Gregor Noll, Dirk Jacobs, Liza Schuster, Stephen Castles, Zrinka Bralo, Osman Bah, also Daniele Albertazzi, Gaspar Miklos Tamas and Dyab Abou Jahjah

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