When trying to question asylum policy, it can always be useful to place this topic in a broader context. This allows us to better understand its issues, to understand how it fits into socio-cultural reality and why it can be affected by deeper dynamics.
Let’s mention a few things, by way of introduction. Deaths at the borders continue to increase, year after year, and yet these macabre figures hardly make the headlines. Where does this indifference to the tragedies of exile come from? And if it is not indifference, then it is positions without nuance, advocating radical solutions, whether closing or totally opening borders. It is difficult to find thoughtful opinions in public opinion, making the effort of sensible argumentation. Debates often boil down to clashes between those who “like” and those who “don’t like”, fueled by the sweeping judgments that spread on social networks.
And where does this skepticism come from in terms of universal values which means that we are ready to accept certain violations of fundamental rights without blinking too much, putting our “good solutions” before our humanist duties? Have the great achievements of the Enlightenment ceased to enlighten us? Shouldn’t we find them again, so as not to let the right of asylum get lost in the dark negotiation of practical arrangements? This article aims to address some of these questions by presenting some recent works which attempt to describe various trends which inhabit the mentalities of the time.
• The loss of ambiguity and diversity. Thomas Bauer, a German Islamologist, observing how Islam has lost its ancient diversity to become in recent decades something erratic and rigid, undertook to identify a comparable evolution in today’s world. Just as nature is suffering a catastrophic loss of biodiversity, human culture is also confronted with standardization, which he identifies in religion, in art, but more generally also in daily life: the same products everywhere. , in the same supermarkets, the same fast food; and humans are all hunched over their cell phones, addicted to their global social networks. There is no longer room for ambiguity and diversity, which intrigue, challenge and require creative efforts of interpretation. In a world that has become univocal, indifference is spreading, because everything appears as indifferent.
But in reaction to this indifference, an opposing movement is also developing. It aims to reaffirm difference by radicalizing it, by positing it as an absolute truth. Ambiguity and diversity are once again chased away, because everything must be clear, polite and one-way, excluding any hesitation, any doubt. Thus, the univocal world finds itself confronted with a polarization between indifference and fundamentalism, the two poles feeding each other, and to escape it, we must rediscover the creativity of ambiguity and diversity.
• The courage of nuance. Drawing inspiration from different sources, more literary and philosophical, the French journalist and essayist Jean Birnbaum proposes, in his pamphlet The courage of nuanceto fight against sweeping assertions and radical judgments, on the rise in a world where, under the influence of social networks, debates are conducted with like and where disapproval is often expressed through insults. Summoning writers and thinkers like Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Raymond Aron and Roland Barthes, among others, Birnbaum shows how nuance each time highlights the singularity of points of view and thus makes it possible to defuse peremptory theses and preserve spaces for respectful discussion. “We are suffocating among people who think they are absolutely right,” Camus already said in the 1940s. These authors were often considered traitors because they refused to be recruited or because they denounced the excesses of a ideology (Stalinist crimes, for example).
There is therefore indeed ethical courage in reaffirming the necessity of nuance, as a form of resistance to the injunctions to choose a side at all costs, to closed discourses, impervious to critical and self-critical distance. And Birnbaum claims, with the support of his authors, humor as a form of distancing, “a mobility without which intelligence runs the risk of sclerosis”.
• The singular, the trap of identity and the universal. Postmodern philosophy (Michel Foucault, or even Jean-François Lyotard) has contributed to discrediting generalizing perspectives, what they call “grand narratives”. Are the latter not a reflection of the power of the strong, masking more or less well the injustices, the suffering suffered by the weak, the small? Therefore, this thought calls for deconstructing these majority discourses to recognize and protect aggrieved minorities, so that they do not find themselves dissolved in a unifying narrative. Underlined here is the plural of the different communities, each of which must be considered in the singularity of its identity. Refusing to submit them to universalist principles allows us to reveal latent power relationships, hidden hierarchies in social organization, for example races or genders. In this unveiling would reside a critical potential capable of transforming these relationships towards greater justice, equality and reciprocal recognition.
Yascha Mounk, a political scientist teaching in the United States and Paris, recognizes that there was initially a “progressive idea” in this postmodern deconstruction. But he also sees a trap, when this tendency to prioritize singular identities is exacerbated so much that the good initial idea becomes harmful. In The identity trapthe author describes how this thought left the walls of universities to be applied in the American political and socio-educational system. Human beings find themselves defined according to identity categories which characterize them first and fundamentally by their belonging to a certain community, and only one: so and so is black, or homosexual, or transgender, etc. Any attempt to transcend this identity characterization becomes impossible.
Mounk sees this as a dangerous reduction to just belonging to his group. It then becomes difficult to broaden allegiances beyond these particular identities and to recognize those who belong to another identity community as a sister or brother in humanity. What separates becomes stronger than what brings together. Another danger that Mounk highlights is that by emphasizing identities, we run the risk of playing into the hands of populist nationalisms. They will quickly create the same divisions, saying that “we, the Americans” (or “we, the Swiss”!) have nothing to do with these foreigners, these “others”, etc. Thus, “right-wing populism and the identity trap feed off each other.”
Mounk then ends his work with a plea for universalism, aiming to reaffirm what brings us together in our singular identities instead of letting them sink into deleterious divisions. The author sees this universalism in the heritage of liberal democracy.
• For a radical universalism. A requirement for universalism that is also underlined by Omri Boehm, an Israeli-German philosopher who has just received the book prize from the Buchmesse in Leipzig. His book titled Radical universalismis inspired by a triple heritage: the Declaration of Independence of the United States; the article “What is the Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant (whose 300th anniversary we are celebrating this yeare birthday); while in the background stands the biblical figure of Abraham who does not hesitate to stubbornly demand that his God act justly. Boehm also seeks a possibility of achieving, beyond identities, a mutual recognition of humans which allows these identities to become stimulating rather than confining. For him, the universal is that of human rights proclaimed loud and clear in the Age of Enlightenment.
And what about asylum in all this?
It is clear that the world’s estimated 110 million displaced people are not getting the attention they should. Their destinies, their misfortunes leave a large segment of the population indifferent. “Too bad if they die,” someone recently replied to me to whom I spoke about the dramas of the Mediterranean. When these exiled people arrive here, they are quickly the subject of virulent remarks, of harsh judgments marking the profound difference between “them” and “us”. This is how the polarization signaled by Bauer between indifference and fundamentalism, particularly of the nationalist and populist type, manifests itself. In this polarization there is something like a vicious circle: the dominant discourses being radical, those who begin to doubt, to ask critical questions, find themselves reduced to silence and therefore returned to powerless indifference , paralyzing.
And it turns out to be very difficult to bring into play the courage of nuance in the sense of Birnbaum. The speeches are stopped, the “for” and “against” clearly distributed, without possible hesitation, whereas Camus considered the “duty to hesitate” as a categorical imperative.
In the way of characterizing these people by generic categories such as “migrants”, “applicants” or “refugees” there is an exclusion. It is no longer possible to grasp them in their plural diversity, like all kinds of human beings like us. What separates “them” from “us” is stronger than what could bring us together. By reducing them to a precise identity, to a label, we resolutely distance them.
This is perhaps what makes us no longer feel inalienably obliged to recognize them in full as human rights, which would make them beings like us. When it comes to asylum, human rights appear to be becoming increasingly negotiable. Thus, the[ex] English Prime Minister does not seem to be shy about saying that the expulsions in Rwanda will take place, even if they violate human rights. And in contradiction with the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees, Europe finances with millions illicit actions to deport thousands of migrants in North Africa, with the sole aim of preventing them from arriving in Europe. To avoid having their hands dirty, European states therefore “subcontract human rights violations to third states”.
So, with Yascha Mounk and Omri Boehm, we must loudly reaffirm the universal, which is something other than the univocal that Bauer fears, a universal which unites us all in our singular identities. The latter have their entire reason for existing, provided however that they do not give rise to irreversible divisions, but generate fruitful interactions. We must reiterate the importance of democratic values which make up this “strength of the community” which, according to the preamble to the Federal Constitution, “is measured by the well-being of the weakest of its members”. We must recognize again and again the inalienable force of human rights.
To put it the Donald Trump way: Make Human Rights great again! [Redonnons toute leur grandeur aux droits humains].
