Rescued refugees shipwrecked off Libya arrive in Palermo. Demotix/ Antonio Melita. All rights reserved.
Slawomir Sierakowski: Who are the people flocking
to Europe now? Who are they, what should we call them?
Seyla Benhabib: There is a lot of discussion over this
terminology, whether we should call them refugees or migrants. These people are
coming from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and Libya. All of these
countries are in states of either civil war, as in Syria, or in post-war
conflict situations that still have not settled down, as in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Libya.
According
to the 1951 Refugee Convention definitions, individuals who are fleeing their
country because of persecution – and this persecution can take the form of
civil war, threat to life, based on ethnicity, religion, etc. – are to be
considered Convention refugees. I think it is hard to disagree that these are
areas of the world where there is civil war, where there is continuing
instability, and where the lives of certain human beings are in danger. So, in
the first place, there is reason to call them refugees.
The reason
why there is so much dispute in European public opinion about refugees,
migrants, and so on is the assumption that we do not have any special
obligations towards migrants, but we have special obligations towards refugees.
But is it to be precluded that some of the individuals who are coming also want
better economic and life opportunities for themselves? No, you cannot preclude
that. But international law tells us to observe this distinction.
Say you are
in Iraq, and even in Turkey, and you are not being given a position or finding
employment because you are neither Sunni
or Shia, but a Kurd or an Alewite, your business is being bombed, you are not
being hired, no one is threatening your life, but de facto, even if you are an economic migrant, you are in a
position of destitution, you have no possibilities in life. What are you then – a refugee or an economic
migrant? So we are in this catch 22 situation, where international law gives
protection to refugees and not migrants, yet what we see is a situation where
not just in Europe but the world over these categories are inadequate to deal
with the realities.
SS: Do you have the impression that some EU
politicians or political elites are playing with these two categories, trying
to stop this ‘invasion’ of refugees, that they treat refugees as economic
migrants and are using this to justify the “impossibilism” they use?
Seyla Benhabib: Absolutely. I like the term ‘impossibilism’.
Another term we could invoke is the artificial creation of a ‘state of
exception,’ as Hungary has done.
Of course
these terms are being exploited by states to deflect from their obligations
under international and European law, but also, as we know, in countries like
Hungary, as well as France, the UK, and maybe to a lesser degree in Germany,
there are significant right-wing groups that have emerged in opposition to
migration, to the EU, and this mood is being exploited by many forces.
UKIP in
Britain is an extreme case: the situation in Hungary is an extreme case. There
is little question though that the tragic refugee situation is becoming a ping
pong ball in a political game. This is really terrible, and this is something
that Europeans should have learned to avoid, because if you start playing
politics with the lives of these individuals, what you are doing, without even
saying so, is giving a green light to groups who might want to attack them:
migrants and refugees become the unwanted, the others, who, in Giorgio Agamben’s
words, reside in a state of exception, without anybody protecting them. Thus
they become prey to possible attacks.
SS: You are a philosopher and I would like to
concentrate on the legal and moral aspects of the situation. But let me start
with the economy and briefly ask you: can the EU, or the west, afford this
influx or not? What do you think, from the moral point of view, about the
economic arguments around migration, are they justified or not?
Seyla Benhabib: The economic question has various dimensions.
In general, what migration economists say is that in the short term – let’s
talk about migrants as opposed to refugees – migrants impose a certain burden
on the economy. But in the long term, they benefit it. The distinction between
the short and the long term needs to be made.
Why?
Because, by and large, migrants are young, mobile, and in this case they are
males, although there are a lot of female migrants as well. They begin to
contribute to the economy, and in the long term they end up paying in more than
they take out. Countries like Germany have receding birth rates and an ageing
population and that’s why German politicians have made a very rational
calculation and have opened the country to migrants. The question about
migration is always what the relationship is going to be between migrants’
wages and the existing economy.
The United
States is probably an extreme example, because we don’t have a regulated
marketplace. Migrants come in and undoubtedly, they depress wages in some
sectors of the economy. There’s no question about this. Europe is regulated
differently, so the real question is the relationship between the wages of the
migrants and the wages of the existing population. Is there no contradiction at
times? Yes, of course there is. The more unregulated labor is, the more it affects
domestic wages downwards. But can this be altered by policy? Yes, one can set in
place a Europe-wide policy. This would not be all that different from what
happened in the much-discussed case of the Polish plumber going to France or
the UK to work.
Now with
refugees, the question is somewhat different. A refugee is someone who applies
for asylum status. Asylum status processing is now taking anywhere from 2 to 5
years in many European countries. From what I have read, there are now attempts
to try to speed up this processing of asylum applications, but in most European
countries, refugees who are asylum applicants do not have work permits, so in
that sense they are not exactly economic migrants.
A lot of
them have to receive local aid from the municipalities or whichever local
authority is responsible for them. And this is a very tricky situation, because
in effect migration and refugees are a burden to the local region although they
are admitted at a national level. There is much intense back-and-forth and
tension between national inclusion and local integration. National governments
have to devise intelligent policies for the integration of refugees, even while
they are waiting for their status to be resolved.
I am giving
you a complicated answer, because I fully respect the human rights of refugees
and migrants; but I think it is best to be realistic about the contradictions
they pose for economic policy and not to present the situation as a coherent and
rosy picture. We progressives have to implement a more realistic policy to
resolve some of the burdens and contradictions that this can present, even if
migration revitalizes the economy in the long term.
SS: Some say German politicians are rational in
admitting economic migrants or refugees because they know full well that they
can fill their demographic gap. But others may ask, why do we have 3 million
unemployed Germans?
Seyla Benhabib: In every labour economy there are niches that
are not filled by the national working classes.
I’m not exactly sure why this is, but there are certain jobs that only migrants
do. For example, cleaning jobs in all buildings, or household cleaning jobs.
Speaking from the US experience, jobs for nannies are often filled by Central
American women instead of African-American women. Why?
This is
really a very hard question to answer.
To use post-Marxist terminology, I believe that economic migration is
part and parcel of the national peace that various social classes in advanced
industrial economies have reached among themselves. It just seems that an
unemployed German or Polish worker will not do some jobs that an Iraqi or
Afghani will do. There is some strange segmentation in the labor market that
cuts across national and ethnic lines.
I cannot
say more than this, because this hasn’t really been investigated. As you know,
I lived in Germany for more than 15 years and in the universities, whoever came
to clean the buildings – this was in the 1990s – was inevitably from the
Balkans, and the German worker was the supervisor. So is the migrant taking
away the job from the national worker, or is the migrant helping keep the
social peace between the classes? It’s quite a puzzle to decide.
SS: Why do we fear the Other? Why do some react
like the people of Iceland who voluntarily invited thousands of refugees in,
and why do others react instead as in Slovakia, which only wants to have 200
refugees and only Christians? Why do you think it is like that?
Seyla Benhabib: I was very, very touched by the Icelandic
civil society initiative. I think the most interesting moral of the refugee
dilemma is that civil society groups have displayed a kind of moral sense – I don’t want to call it moral altruism –
but a kind of demonstration of empathy with the suffering of the distant
other. But countries like Slovakia and
Hungary are small nations in the heart of Europe and feel embattled by larger
developments, fearing that they will lose their own identity.
But Iceland
is all the more remarkable, because like Hungary and Slovakia, it is also a very
homogeneous country. They themselves are trying to expand their
self-understanding: what does it mean to be a citizen of Iceland if you are
Libyan, if you are Afghani? And some of the Nordic countries, like Sweden and
Norway, which are very homogeneous as well, are succeeding in creating this
post-national multicultural identity. Denmark, on the other hand, is just as
defensive as Slovakia. It had one of the most progressive assimilation policies
in Europe, but it has moved back to a defensive and conservative posture under
the impact of the Danish caricature controversy and the bombings last summer in
a Danish bookstore. I am not giving you a very precise answer, but just meditating
on the question.
SS: Isn’t it true that as long as there were
homogenous countries in the west, we could support a welfare state? Is this why
migrants seems to present the biggest danger for the welfare state?
Seyla Benhabib: I don’t think that is the case. I think the
relationships between the welfare state, national homogeneity, and migration is
not a zero sum game. Australia and Canada are countries of migration and they
have a welfare state. The US is a country of migration which has a weaker
welfare state, but has unemployment benefits, social security, and a weaker
healthcare system. So national homogeneity and the welfare state are not always
causally related: there are other factors that come into play as well.
We see in
welfare states like Germany, Sweden, Norway, that if you do not absorb a young
working class, you then face the question of who is going to pay the benefits
for the elderly who are taking from the state but not paying into it? A young
labour force is necessary for the welfare state to continue and to flourish.
And that’s why some countries open up to immigration, and others do not.
SS: So people just don’t understand this
because they think they do not want to pay for other people, for people of
different races and religions, and they did not have this problem when they had
to pay for the same people as themselves? Why don’t countries like Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, the Gulf countries, want to accept any refugees?
Seyla Benhabib: Let’s talk a bit about the distribution of
international obligation towards refugees. I’m very irritated about the
following fact: in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the United States was directly
involved in military action. Now morally, if you have a causal responsibility
for creating certain conditions, you also have the responsibility to accept
some of the consequences of your actions. The United States, the United
Kingdom, France are countries who are still actively militarily involved in
these regions in some way or another, and they have a responsibility towards
the refugee problem.
I’m very
disappointed by the reaction of the United States and I’m very disappointed by
the United Nations. I think this is not just Europe’s burden, and it it’s not
just Europe’s responsibility. All countries involved in this region, in the
conflict, have to come to the table.
SS: So you think the United States and Russia
should do something?
Seyla Benhabib: Yes, absolutely I think they should.
SS: What exactly?
Seyla Benhabib: I don’t know too much about Russian migration
or refugee policy, but we all know that Russia has had tremendous influence in
Syria and even Afghanistan, for many, many years. But let’s talk about the
United States. Because it has the blessing of the ocean between it and the
refugees, it simply has no policy at the present and does not grant many visas
to refugees.
The United
States has the luxury of denying refugee visas in its own embassies, or if you
happen to go on a plane, even in the airport your visas are checked, so in fact
what we have done in the United States is that we have made it impossible,
nearly impossible, for overseas refugees to come across the ocean.
Since we
conducted this interview, the Obama Administration has said that it will accept
10,000 refugees but the number should really be closer to 100,000 at least if
it is to meet the USA’s moral obligations toward these countries.
SS: All refugees or Syrian refugees
specifically?
Seyla Benhabib: I’m
talking about refugees from war-torn countries. Afghanis, Iraqis, Syrians. But the United States is also faced with
refugees coming over the land from Mexico and Central America, sometimes
Canada. I feel as if we are morally failing, and I want to get involved in
this. At Yale we have the Human Rights Group, and I want to get involved with
the question of why we aren’t doing more.
We have the
responsibility to do more, this is not just Europe’s problem. And where is the
United Nations? Now to go back to your example of countries like Qatar and
Saudi Arabia, I think these are countries in such internal turmoil themselves,
and I’m not even sure what their status is as signatories of the refugee
convention…
SS: They haven’t signed it.
Seyla Benhabib: Yes, I thought so. Qatar is interesting
because it is an extremely wealthy country that takes in labor migrants from
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, and elsewhere who work in slave-like
conditions. And yet it does not accept its own brethren from Syria. I mean
look, Turkey has accepted 2.5 million refugees from Syria. It’s an enormous
number. Why? Whether there’s a bit of realpolitik, in that President Erdogan
wants to influence Syrian politics, cannot be precluded; but nonetheless, it is
pretty remarkable. Lebanon has accepted and Jordan have each accepted between a
million and a million and a half, so Qatar and other Gulf countries are moral
failures.
SS: Let me move on to more theoretical
questions. In recent decades, and your book touches upon this, the categories
of sovereignty and democratic values are becoming more and more blurred. And
there is a discrepancy between the moral context of the refugee crisis and the
legal situation of refugees. How would you describe this discrepancy so that
regular citizens understand it? Your readers are citizens, what is problematic
in citizenship now?
Seyla Benhabib: From a moral standpoint, human beings are not
divided into citizens, refugees, and migrants. Morality is the obligation we
have to the Other. To take the example of this refugee boy from Syria who was
discovered dead by a Turkish police officer and was carried to the shore, of
course everybody’s moral conscience revolted at the picture of this small boy,
and there are very few human beings who do not feel touched by empathy or who
feel some solidarity with the plight of the refugees and their suffering.
Now
legally, the system of nation states, territorially bounded nation states,
divides us into categories of human beings who are entitled to certain kinds of
rights as opposed to others. The modern state experiment, the American, the
French, the Russian revolutions were based on developing human rights and
citizens’ rights. Human rights express in legal terms the kinds of fundamental
obligations we feel we have to one another so that we will never again treat
human beings in a way that destroys their fundamental dignity. These are
universal human rights formulated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
of 1948. Citizens’ rights incorporate
them, but as a citizen of Poland, you have certain rights, or in the United
States, I have certain rights, which are different than those of a French or a
Turkish citizen.
There are
sometimes theoretical as well as legal tensions between human rights and
citizens’ rights. Human rights have both a moral and a legal component and
citizens’ rights can vary according to certain factors across countries.
Contradictions arise precisely when you are confronted with populations who either
live among you, such as migrants, or with individuals, who in the European
Union are called “Third
Country” nationals. They have different
rights to employment, to political participation than regular EU citizens. Increasingly, we are facing a patchwork
because people are living in each other’s territories and countries for longer
periods of time, as long-term legal migrants.
If you go
to London, there are probably tens of thousands of Poles who live in London.
Now, what are their rights? If you are a
Polish citizen in London, can you vote for the London municipal elections? You
can vote for the European Parliament and you can vote for your own parties at
home, but if you want to vote for London municipal elections, can you? Municipal or regional voting rights vary
greatly across the EU. Now if you are an Afghani or a Turk who is living in
London for the same number of years as a Polish citizen, but you are a third
country national in the EU, do you have the same rights, or don’t you? My book,
The Rights of Others, deals to use
Habermas’s term, with new post-national
constellations. We now live in legal
regimes which acknowledge universal human rights, and where nationality and
citizenship are not the only basis for being granted certain rights; yet there
are still distinctions made among groups of human beings based on their
nationality or citizenship. So I would say, as a mental exercise, think about
the Polish citizen in London, as opposed to the Iraqi or Afghani in London and
you begin to understand the dilemma of these different rights.
If I may
add one more thing: the European Union is an extremely interesting experiment.
I know that these days no one knows if the European Union will survive. I’m a
friend of the European Union, I hope that it will survive, I hope that it will
move forward. Why? Because the European Union has created an impressive
cosmopolitan legal space.
Although
right now it seems that everything is in question, we have to think carefully
about the long-term versus the short-term in politics. 47 countries in Europe
are part of the European Convention on Human Rights, Russia and Turkey
included. 28 countries of the European Union are part of the European Charter
of Human Rights and Freedoms. This
creates an extremely interesting case of legal cosmopolitanism.
The human
being, regardless of citizenship, is now considered entitled to certain human
rights. How does this occur? The interplay and interconnection between these
legal obligations articulated by the Charter and the Convention, this legal
space with its own courts and institutions such as the European Court of Human
Rights and the European Court of Justice, have created an extremely important
example of a kind of post-national consciousness and post-national legal
understanding of rights.
Ironically,
refugees want to come to Europe because they also find this attractive and
beneficial to them, but ironically Europe is beginning to suffer under the
weight of its own contradictions. Precisely because countries of Europe
subscribe to the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as to the
European Charter, they are obliged to treat refugees and migrants in specific
ways. So theoretically, the countries of Europe are committed to cosmopolitanism
vis-à-vis the rights of migrants, but in practice they do not succeed in living
up to those promises.
SS: In your book you talk about more flexible
borders, or as you say, porous borders. Would you say that that is what we are
witnessing now? Do borders work according to the theoretical solutions that you
propose in your book? What works and what doesn’t?
Seyla Benhabib: Obviously, the state system and state
bureaucracy are failing to deal with the various dimensions of the problem. If
the borders are porous, and let’s say Germany has expressed its willingness to
accept 600 000 migrants, what is happening with the building of the fence in
Hungary? Why are refugees who want to reach Germany not being granted porous
access?
I see no justification
for it: there seems to be confusion in the minds of everybody, and European
States are failing in this respect. According to the Dublin Conventions,
refugees need to be granted refuge in the first country that they make contact
with. They have to be processed there. Obviously what needs to be done is that
the Dublin Convention has to be reconsidered, renegotiated. Because in effect if
Germany is saying we are willing to accept those people, we will process them,
then Hungary or Slovakia are just countries of passage, and they should accept
the porousness of borders.
What the
Hungarians are doing by forcing these refugees into camps is not logical,
because in effect they don’t want these people at all. Porous borders are the only viable way in which
nations can co-exist, but obviously we are now living in a situation of crisis
that is generating or attempting to generate the myth that those borders will
be controlled – but this is a myth. The United States built a wall, 13, 14 feet
high, on the Mexican border. Refugees have used a ladder 16 feet high to cross
that border. Hungary has built a fence, but refugees are going to cut it, they
are going to find ways to circumvent it. Porous borders really mean the
acceptance that human beings move across borders, and that they should be able
to move without being criminalized.
SS: What’s the difference between porous
borders and open borders?
Seyla Benhabib: Sometimes I wonder myself why I don’t just
talk about open borders. Porous borders suggest that we still need some kind of
public authority to be responsible for the settled population in a
territory. The puzzle is, how can you
have open borders without a world state?
None of us
wants a world state because we don’t believe that it can guarantee democratic
self-governance. So porous borders is a theory that recognizes the moral and
legal rights of human beings to move across borders, and yet at the same time,
also acknowledges that there is a public authority that is responsible for the
territory of the settled population. Increasingly we see that the nation states
alone are not that public authority.
During the
two wars, the European nation state system collapsed and was then subsequently
reconstituted. Today we are faced with a
global situation where nation states are in crisis again in quite a few regions
of the world — the Middle East, North Africa, South East Asia. The world cries
out for a more coordinated world organization, yet we have to find ways to
reconcile the virtues of democratic representation, civil society,
participation, solidarity, with that kind of vision of global governance.
SS: Isn’t what is terrifying us and politicians
at the moment the sense that this is just the beginning, that not thousands,
but millions of refugees will be coming to the island of Europe? If you look at
the differences and inequalities we have in the world, the regions of crisis
you just mentioned, can there be any other outcome?
Seyla Benhabib: I think that such phrases as mass migration,
of “invasion”, are morally and politically charged terms that create fear and
that do not enable us to think rationally, calmly, and morally about the
situation. Clearly, what needs to be done is some very serious regional
political coordination that will resolve
or attempt to find a solution for instability in the Middle East. I don’t think
that people in Damascus necessarily want to go and settle in Hamburg. Maybe
some do: some don’t. Damascus is a beautiful city, but they are desperate. Part
of the solution has to be a political solution on the level of states
addressing the condition of civil war in Syria.
You know, I
was born in Turkey and personally, as someone from the Middle East, I am very
scared about the way this region of the world seems to be sort of dissolving
before our very eyes. So we need to find a political solution and maybe once
the US-Iran nuclear accord is settled, there will be some kind of a possibility
to come around the table and try to resolve the difficulties of Syria.
But I think
we should object to this language of invasion, hordes, mass migration. It is
not easy to be a refugee, people don’t just put their children on a boat and
watch them die. So I think we should have some more sympathy for what these
people are undergoing, and meanwhile, politicians have an obligation not to
exploit this incendiary language.
SS: The best pragmatic solution would be to
stabilize and to improve the situation in the countries from which refugees are
coming and the regions of crisis. Do you believe it is possible?
Seyla Benhabib: It has to be possible, why not? I think right
now we know that we live in the world of post-hegemony. The United States has
not succeeded in Iraq, it has not succeeded in Afghanistan, and all of a sudden
this new force called Isis has emerged, which caught everybody by surprise.
SS: But Obama didn’t want to go to Syria and
stabilize the situation there.
Seyla Benhabib: No, he didn’t, and this was a big political
mistake. Something should have been done. Not necessarily with American military
force on the ground, but trying to negotiate, trying to get the Russians to the
table. Something similar has to happen for Syria as happened for Iran. Because
Syria has for a long time been a client state of Russia. Particularly the Assad
government. So now there is this new situation with Isis which is scaring
everybody. Is it possible that there will be a Sunni state between the eastern
territories of Syria and North-West Iraq? Nobody quite knows the answer. What
is clear is that Isis has military power that needs to be combatted: I’m sorry
I’m not a pacifist in this regard. But how you can stabilize this quasi-civil
war that was created between the Sunni and Shia?
This is not
all that different from the situation in Yugoslavia where nobody in one family
knew who is a Serb, who is a Croat, who is an Albanian, who is what – I don’t
believe in the essentialist theory of primordial human differences. I think
human differences matter in certain constructions, in certain historical
periods, because there are other forces that bring them to the fore. That’s
what’s happening right now in the Middle East.
We have a
presidential campaign in the United States and it’s a very ugly campaign, so I
don’t see anything happening soon. But it was a failure of the Obama
administration not to try to do anything about the instability in Syria. I know
that many of my American colleagues don’t agree with me.
SS: Some say that Putin is probably more liberal
than 80% of Russian society. We’ve just criticized Obama, but do you think that
Donald Trump is the popular voice of America?
Seyla Benhabib: Oh God, I hope not! I will become a refugee if
Donald Trump gets elected! Donald Trump
is representing something that is much closer to a European anti-refugee and
right-wing nationalist stance than we have seen in the United States. There
have always been these nativist movements, you know, like in the 1920s, the
Know Nothings, who were against immigration, against the Irish, the Jewish,
even the German migrants. Trump is a
regressive politician, taking us back to a certain American white-ethnic
‘nativism.’
But I am
not entirely pessimistic. Bernie Sanders, the first properly social democratic
candidate in America, is also drawing huge crowds. America is in a period of
profound dissatisfaction with establishment politics. Donald Trump represents
something unusual and that’s why the Republican Party is so confused. The
candidates are so lost, because they don’t know what to do with this kind of
nativist language – America for good white migrants only, away with these
Mexicans and Hispanics – this is not the language of America.
SS: So, you have Europeanized Donald
Trump – which is a very nice riposte for a European newspaper.