70 million refugees and the ethical core of citizenship

There are over 70 million displaced people in the world today, and the number is growing. On present reckoning, it will grow much more strongly in time to come with climate change issues, civil wars and external incursions into various countries.

With the widespread and often unacknowledged or unrecognised flow of migrants of various legal statuses across the world, no form of an enclosed citizenship based on its status and standing stands unchallenged. The statue of citizenship has been toppled from its own edifice. The most important thing here – if citizenship was an idea linked to the nation but also linked to the kind of enlightened world which was put in place as a set of laws, as a set of practices, as a set of cultural ideas to deal with independence, dignity, autonomy, freedom, choice and opportunity: citizenship with all of these aspects – is the umbrella around it: security, safety and autonomy.

Now, if that is the package of citizenship that we have had for 250 years, it seems to me that at the heart of citizenship is the frail and vulnerable condition of the refugee, the migrant, the displaced person, the person without that kind of national citizenship. At the heart – I’m not saying politically or legally – but at the ethical core of the citizen is that palpitating, unresolved problem of the un-homed, the insecure, the vulnerable: those who are deprived of that status.

This is a very important issue. We have to restructure the ethics of citizenship, the morality of our politics, by seeing the side-by-side-ness of citizenship, as we understand it in a traditional sense, and the concept of the displaced or the refugee as another kind of political subject with its own legitimacy but a different historical genealogy. We’ve got to see these two things side by side as a kind of montage of human beings.

Once we look at it like that, then we begin to question a number of our laws and regulations. But we also begin to see how viciously the current administrations, the majoritarian nationalist administrations, that we have across the world attack as their most visible symbol and symptom the displaced, the migrant, the non-citizen. But really, the next attack has always been on citizens themselves.

Across the world today, there are people who stand up for those Muslims in India or the Mexicans in the US or the Kurds in Turkey. I could go on and on about those who are being denied citizenly freedoms. Their protesting on this issue is not in question. Anybody who can protest without being violently swept off is doing that – most right-minded people. Some do it by writing, some do it by protesting. Some do it in activist groups, support groups. That is happening.

There is a very interesting way in which the reform of citizenship – not the abolition of citizenship: that cannot happen because we live in a world governed by nations, territories and frontiers, so we can’t get rid of that – is possible. There is a great opportunity for all of us within our own legal rights and standings as citizens to activate for better immigration laws and practices, to activate for ethics of hospitality, to activate for care in these matters.

Those who are seeking citizenship have great faith in these ideas. They don’t want to abolish them; they want to broaden the moral schema and the political agency of what we already understand as citizens. So, in fact, you don’t have to go out and be shot on the street. And it’s regrettable that many people are for making this claim, but it is from those who are seeking citizenship, who are not citizens, that we get a sense of how we need to reform the law.

We are being led to discover the best of our notions of citizenship by those who have been denied it. It is their faith and their disappointed hope that drives us to demand of our leaders in our countries, in our homes – to use the trope of home – not to feel homeless. It is them inspiring us to ask and to demand of our leaders and our culture and our societies that will expand our notion of home, that will expand our notion of human rights and that will expand our notion of what it means to be a citizen.

It is not that we are accommodating the displaced or the non-citizens. They are setting us on the right track. They are our inspiration. They are allowing us to reform and re-think citizenship in its most inclusive, in its most global, in its most morally challenging way. This is similar to what Fanon said at the Bandung conference and through his work: we do not disavow the Enlightenment – the best of the Enlightenment, minus imperialism, minus colonialism, minus death, minus political prohibitions and prejudices – what we need to do is to reconstruct the best of the Enlightenment.

And that is the great challenge today. It is not one that demands huge political courage or valour; it simply demands a persistent taking of the causes of those who are non-citizens, not only as doing them a favour but as changing our own notions of what citizenship is. When we do that, we unlock the great humanistic cultural creativity that emerges when not only cosmopolitan artists are confronting these problems of non-citizenship or migration or displacement, but the artists that come from those societies and those cultures are giving us a whole new vocabulary of what it means to belong in moments of desperation, of what it means to have hope in moments of hopelessness.

This is a very mutual and reciprocal relationship, and we should see it in that Levinasian sense of the proximity to difference. The proximity to alterity produces a sense of not only how we need to accommodate the other but of how we ourselves, internally, need to confront our own splits, our own ambivalences, our own psychic defences to understand that we too achieve a sense of being at home in ourselves only by including that which is not similar to us, that which cannot be immediately naturalised within ourselves. We have to take the strange, we have to take the different, because that difference exists within ourselves.

This is why when Arendt says alterity is about the difference within my oneness, she gets it so right, yet again; just as she said that savagery or barbarism exists within civility, and the political and ethical project is to try and negotiate that ambivalence. I think she says the same about alterity. So, the question is not about welcoming other identities; it is about understanding one’s own alterity, one’s own differences within, as a way of reaching out and creating a sense of affiliation across differences.