Freedom of the Border. Paul Scheffer
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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