For a Cosmopolitics of Hospitality
Felwine Sarr, 2024
Hospitality has often been thought of as an obligation nestled at the heart of the practices of human societies, to welcome whoever comes and is called the stranger. These societies have turned it into an ethical problem. The question I’d like to explore with you is how to move from the ethical injunction of the duty of hospitality to a right to hospitality. How can we move from favour (or culture) to law, by instituting a pragmatic principle based on what I call a cosmopolitics of hospitality? This could constitute a response to the impasses of the migration policies of a world, which is inexorably experiencing its cosmopolitan condition.
I will begin by questioning hospitality as an immemorial social practice and the relationship it has with othering. Secondly, I will pose the question of how to Repoliticize Hospitality in light of the cosmopolitan condition of the world, and with the underlying question of how to found a global community. Third, I will explore the legal form that a cosmopolitics of hospitality might take, and its corollary, the need for global economic justice. Finally, I will point out the resources for thinking about a vast social space on the scale of humanity and for building a common world. I will draw particularly on resources inscribed in African cultures and their social engineering by mobilising the notions of Mbokk, Teranga and Aqh theorised by the anthropologist Abdourahmane Seck.
Hospitality as an immemorial social practice
Human societies – regardless of geography or cultural area – have long shared the wisdom of welcoming those who are passing through ; who are going to stay for a while, leave again or end up settling.
- Anne Dufourmantelle reminds us that the law of unconditional hospitality (with no condition of reciprocity and regardless of the identity of the person arriving) appears in all primitive societies, no doubt because it is one of the founding laws of all civilisation. This immemorial law reminds us of the primary, exilic condition of humanity. The rule of unconditional hospitality constitutes this reminder of the fact that the one who receives, may in turn, overnight, be thrown on the road and in need of asylum. It reminds us of the universality of our vulnerable condition as mortals and passers-by. The rule of hospitality is therefore a matter of intelligence, of the possible reversibility of the condition of host and guest. In this original hospitality, there was no condescension. The stranger was received like a king. In this sense, hospitality is a political act. This is undoubtedly reflected in the Latin root of the word hospitality: hostis which means both the host (invited and inviting) and the enemy.
This common root of hospitality and hostility, underlines the worried memory in the welcoming, that the welcomed can potentially be an enemy.
Derrida underlines the impossibility of this unconditional hospitality, which is obliged to be inscribed in the particularity of a law, with the limits that these impose on unconditionality, through its bundle of rights and duties. I will not, however, dwell on this aspect of things.
Welcoming foreigners, despite its bright side, is a trial. It is first a matter of accepting the strangeness of the one who comes.
Hospitality, whether thought of as a moral obligation, a social, cultural or political issue, first of all raises the question of the identity of the person being welcomed. It should be emphasised, however, that the condition of the host, is not necessarily linked to that of the foreigner. One becomes a host through the relationship instituted by hospitality. Here, relationality takes precedence and defines the condition of host, more than strangeness.
But who is this other /Other ? (Whom we welcome)
I will distinguish the other with a lowercase a from the Other with a capital A.
The aother is my neighbour, my fellow man. The Autre is what, in this closeness escapes me ; expression of a radical otherness that arises in any relationship of identity and founds it, specifies Denis Vasse. The aother is the object of a need, often reducible to the data that is organised within the enclosure of my knowledge : It is constantly reduced to my knowing-self. The Aother on the contrary, is what in this reductive activity, remains outside the field of my knowledge and is never fully perceived
The relationship signified by hospitality is a mode of knowledge that allows me to reduce this otherness. It brings together what is distant, so the Aother is made close by hospitality. It is a matter, however, of preventing the other from being infinitely Aother by taming its strangeness. In the relationship that institutes hospitality, there is the individual production of a regime of familiarity that Cameroonian political scientist Nadine Machikou calls a regime of the close. Hospitality also provides for its own overcoming in social incorporation, inclusion or rejection/departure.
Why we need to repoliticise the issue of Hospitality?
Since 2000, 50,000 people have died at Europe’s borders. By protecting itself from foreigners from Africa and the Middle East, Europe is producing deaths. Marina Garces points out that in doing so, Europe is also dying it’s a shared death not of the same kind, nor on the same scale. In addition to the erosion of the humanist ideals and values it professes and claims to uphold, Europe is dying to its own humanity. It has projected itself into the world for several centuries, conquering and colonising lands and seas, resources, able-bodied arms in the service of its project of expansion and enrichment, …today the world is within it and on its doorstep, and it refuses to be affected by it.
Also, Latin American migrants on their way to the United States are dying in increasing numbers at the border between Mexico and Guatemala. The militarisation of this border between the USA and Mexico began in the 1990s. It has led migrants from Mexico and Central America to take risks to escape controls, resulting in hundreds of deaths, mainly due to dehydration and hypothermia in this desert region. On the other side of the Pacific, Australia fights fiercely against the arrival of migrants and refugees, particularly when they try to embark from Indonesia or Timor; as in Europe, it is mainly following shipwrecks that the deaths of migrants who originate from South-East Asia or Afghanistan occur.
One of the developments in contemporary migration policies is the extension of control, both upstream and downstream, of borders. Upstream, migrants are intercepted in so-called transit countries, whose governments receive financial aid and logistical support in exchange. In Europe, Morocco, Ukraine, Turkey and Libya act as gatekeepers; in North America, Mexico plays this role: limiting the number of migrants arriving at the gates of the United States. This outsourcing of migration controls has helped to globalise the phenomenon of border deaths, especially when these third countries, generally unconcerned about migrants’ rights, use brutal methods to carry out the (often infamous) tasks entrusted to them. (It is important to point out that in these countries, human rights activists, in contrast to states provide care to migrants and defend their rights).
The Sahara desert has thus become one of the deadliest regions for migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who aspire to reach the shores of the Mediterranean and embark for Europe. Similarly, an increasing number of Latin American migrants en route to the United States are dying at the border between Mexico and Guatemala. Some European countries are themselves faced with transit migration. In Calais, for example, migrants regularly die trying to cross the border between France and Great Britain.
Border deaths are the result of “structural violence” against migrants, i.e. a multifaceted set of acts of violence perpetrated by actors of different kinds, but within which States play a decisive role. The violence of smugglers and that of transit countries, thus echoing that of states’ migration policies.
We live, however, in a world whose cosmopolitan condition is increasingly shared and inescapable (275 million international migrants in 2023). This means that we live in more than one society, and we will increasingly have to live in more than one society. This reality requires us to think differently about societies, cultures and the place of each individual in the world. The ethical principle embodied in individual hospitality, or a national asylum policy, is insufficient to respond to the crisis of nation-states in the face of mobility (rather than talking about a migrant crisis). It’s about moving from individual, domestic hospitality to public hospitality. Rather than an imperative of hospitality nested in the immemorial culture of societies, we need to work towards a cosmopolitics of hospitality. This could be based on at least two reasons. 1.The imperative need to build a common world. 2.The inescapable nature of our cosmopolitical condition (the irreversibility of the migratory fact). The aim is to anticipate the consequences of the reality of humanity’s common destiny by demonstrating the social, economic and political effectiveness (rationality) of such a response. The late Etienne Tassin, emphasised in this connection (thinking of public hospitality) that ” more than a morality, it is an intelligence of the world to come…“. Finally, a cosmopolitics of hospitality could be based on the mutual recognition of our humanity (and the consequences that flow from it), as a fundamental ethical requirement of a common world. Where (How) to found the world community? One of the archaic foundations of human communities and the feeling of belonging to them is identity (language, territory, customs, skin colour). Anthropology teaches us that we distinguish ourselves from others by establishing boundaries. Demarcation, boundaries, are a necessity for identity. An atavistic expression of identity might be formulated as ” we are what makes us different from others “. Demarcation is equally a necessity for otherness ; because to mark difference is also to recognise the other. A border can be a limit (natural or legal/administrative), but it can also be a place of dual recognition and linking. Moreover, topographical markers (rivers, mountains) only become state borders through political choices. Otherwise, they are places of circulation and exchange. We might wonder about the defence, among some, of the right to compose their own social body, according to their own rules. About their desire to form a community with those who look like them, speak their language, inhabit their terroirs, have the same customs, share the same values as they do. How do we do this when the desire for closure, identitarian withdrawal and populism are always at work, and above all how do we deal with those who do not wish to make a common world? More fundamentally, it’s about answering the question of who is part of the community ? How is it constituted ? To what imaginaries of belonging does it refer ? In short, how do we get away from the atavisms of the land, the terroir and the production of identity by the identical. This raises the more fundamental question of the nature of the bond between humans within human societies. Jean Philippe Pierron reminds us that there is nothing natural about sisterhood and brotherhood. Brothers are often enemies. The epic of Gilgamesh (Gilgamesh and Ishtar), the Bible (which he calls le grand livre des fraternités contrariées), offers several illustrations of this (Cain and Abel, Rachel and Leah). The question of the nature of human bonds, immemorial and universal, has always haunted human societies. If this question arises, it is because there is a brotherhood/sorority that opens and one that closes. How can we move away from a fraternity that pits us against each other, extolling the identity of the same (ours are not the others) towards an open fraternity that links human groups and invents a new cosmopolitanism or meta-community ? What lies at the heart of fraternity/sorority that seems to give way to the logic of identity, in the substantialisation of the bond (through biology or the national reference seen as a preference) ? Can we find in sorority and fraternity the possibility of discovering a broader bond, open to the strangeness of the Other? Philippe Pierron asks: “Isn’t fraternity more of a task than a natural given? A work against the false evidence of the algebraisation of the bond, which makes fraternity a matter of threshold ; more or less distant from a centre for which nature, biology, the clan, would be the points of reference and the unit of measurement. Closed fraternity triumphs in the external recognition of signs of belonging. It is thought of only in terms of what is recognisable or identifiable. Moreover, the fraternal bond is haunted by the possibility of violence and annihilation (proximity of hostis and hospe). How then can we tame otherness outside of surveillance and control ? Human societies are always in tension between destructive forces and pacifying norms, which endeavour to limit the excesses that plague them. The bond is no exception to this tension. The tearing of the fraternal bond calls for the invention of a different kind of sewing of the bond. Thus, fraternity-sorority is a work through which, difference is tamed, experienced, and learns to be compatible with sameness. In order to move away from the archaic community, which is based on traditional ties founded on biology and nature, modern communities have attempted to emancipate themselves from these ties, basing it on shared expectations. Open fraternity extends to others: strangers, the dead, non-humans, those who are not yet here, the living as a whole. This open fraternity/sorority is not one of identity, but of intensity; it dares to attempt the promising experience of the Other. It is therefore a question of no longer thinking of fraternity in the language of surveillance (which aims to contain any possible expression of hostility and violence), but rather in that of care. Mutual care is made possible by the discovery within oneself of this permeability to the other (which is called vulnerability). Judith Butler and Athéna Athanassiou emphasise that the subject is not self-sufficient because of the multiple dependencies and diverse relationalities in which it is caught up. One of the questions is therefore, how to transform hospitality into an obligation to care for life that is momentarily fragile. The foreigner under the figure of the migrant without rights, embodies this vulnerability he has become a being without sociality. Ulysses returning to Ithaca is greeted by Eumaeus the pigherd ; the latter does not recognise him, for Athena has aged him so that he will not be recognised and the test of hospitality will be complete. So that Ulysses is not welcomed because he is recognised as part of the community, but welcomed as any stranger would be. Following in Plato’s footsteps, Michel Agier invites us to politicise Eumaeus’ gesture. The proposal for a cosmopolitics of hospitality that I put forward is that of the constitution of a cosmopolitical regime of the near. A cosmopolitics of hospitality. Legal form and economic imperative To inhabit the world is to be able to move freely in it and fully inhabit its geographies. Making the world the territory and space for human movement is a political choice we can make. The free movement of individuals, if we agreed to it, would not pose all the problems we imagine. Of course, centres of wealth will be attractive and those who are deprived of it would converge there. However, there is nothing to prevent us from imagining and working on mechanisms to better distribute wealth and resources, and to ensure better global territorial equity ; by equipping all areas with capacities in employment, education, health, and economic opportunities. Economists, if they wish, know how to do this. By working towards better global economic justice and producing the right incentives, areas with low human density could attract populations, because they too offer the opportunities for a decent, quality life. This is a major ethical requirement of our time, because economic and social inequalities and disparities are the result of a system of production and distribution of wealth, structurally designed to benefit a minority of individuals, to the detriment of the greatest number. Dismantling this system, dismembering it and rebuilding it on a more equitable basis, as well as being socially efficient, is a civilisational necessity. The resources of this planet, as well as its intellectual and cultural heritage, belong to the common good; they are the fruit of all human experience. The simple fact of belonging to humanity should give every person the right to access resources that ensure their dignity (simply by virtue of their humanity). Thus, we could think of global governance for all issues related to basic living conditions: security, health, food, education. It’s technically feasible. The latest globalisation has led to the emergence of transnational actors, who in admittedly differentiated and unequal ways are already making the world. A number of human activities are transnational, deterritorialised and dematerialised (information flows, financial flows). Climate and health risks, as well as most societal issues, are now global problems. However, the legal and political treatment of the major issues of our time is out of step with this reality. By taking the measure of the global and transnational dimension of the migratory fact, it is possible to govern it by a common law that will be differentiated in its application, because it takes account of the local context. We could, for example, create a global citizenship that would recognise the fundamental rights of individuals and that would be added to their particular citizenships. This would create a legal status for migrants guaranteeing their fundamental rights and thus preserving their dignity as human beings. These peregrinators, known as migrants, would have an inalienable right wherever they are to safety, health, education, in short care, guaranteed by an international treaty that is binding on Nation-States (international convention, supranational rule, to be ratified by States). A cosmopolitics of Hospitality, would thus have a legal and practical content. In 2018 in Marrakech, the outline of such an attempt took place. The UN passed a Pact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. The text set out general principles for the reception of migrants and imposed no legal constraints on states, thus respecting their national sovereignty on this issue. It simply aimed to ensure respect for the human rights of migrants, regardless of their status. This text, although voted by a large majority of member states (162), was strongly criticised and had no practical effect. This failed attempt leads us to think that articulating a cosmopolitics of hospitality through a law founded on humanist principles is imperative, but insufficient. Rules alone will not suffice. It must be made applicable, but first it must be accepted in people’s imaginations before it is translated into normative regimes It is necessary to produce a language, practices and imaginaries of a common world, as well as work on the imaginaries of belonging. Societies that today refuse to welcome foreigners are paradoxically those that need them most for their economy, their demography, the renewal of their culture and their imaginations, in short to avoid their own entropy. How can the need for the other be converted into a desire for the Other ? This involves thinking of Hospitality as an act of recognition and necessary encounter, founded on the Idea of the essential incompleteness of human societies. Human societies need each other. The most stable and resilient are those that have been able to articulate the complementary worlds available to them (or potentially within them). It is about thinking of Hospitality as welcoming the Other into oneself – as a possibility, of being fully oneself. This welcoming of the Other, actualising potentialities of being slumbering in individuals and societies. Humanity is one and plural. Politics is the management of this human plurality. Living can only be done in the midst of humans, but on condition that we are recognised and accepted by them. The act of recognition and the consequences that flow from it (care, reciprocity, fundamental rights…) can be signified by this world citizenship falling under a cosmopolitics of hospitality. To elaborate a vast social space on the scale of humanity, it is necessary to think this act of recognition and reciprocity (here the question of hospitality), outside the sole resources of the Greco-Latin and Judeo-Christian traditions. Senegalese anthropologist Abdourahmane Seck has proposed three concepts, the Téranga, the Mbokk and the Aqh to think about this issue. It draws on these three notions that structure Senegalese sociability and analyses their performativity in the elaboration of a space of togetherness. The approach he proposes consists in starting from the principle of reciprocity as it was expressed in the first language of humans, that of kinship, and this because it was adopted in all societies as a sine qua non condition of living together. The term “téranga” (translated as hospitality, but also meaning welcome/provision), in Wolof culture, refers to the notion of reciprocity. When someone receives a téranga (in terms of gifts, solicitude or benevolence), or is affected by it, they are “literally bound” by this teranga and must “return” it in a better way (like the earth and the seed). Here we see the logic of gift and counter-gift, its asynchronous and deferred nature. There is no strict equivalence between what is sown and what is returned. In this sense, outbidding constitutes a modality of rendering and this reproduces the obligation to render even more (the seeder finds himself, as a result of outbidding, in the position of the one who renders and so on). The teranga is configurative of a specific perimeter of link: The term which means Mbokk, in Wolof, has been, unfortunately translated into French by the notion of parenté or parentèle. Instead, it refers to the community of sharing (what we share and what we have in common). So the perimeter of the social and political bond is the mbokk ; domain of inclusivity, participation, protection, sharing, against a backdrop of continuous and reproducible openness. The term âqh is a common expression, inscribed at the heart of everyday socialities. The notion refers to the realm of due, price and cost. Every thing and every being has it, or is favoured by it. It calls on a semantic universe that is that of justice, balance and equity. By extension, the word âqh evokes the idea of the dignity of a thing or being, its full recognition as an entity sufficient in itself and duly to be recognised as such. The word âqh is what is owed to that thing or being. In social and economic exchanges, the âqh functions as an instance of self-censorship and prevents the protagonists from injuring each other, each wanting to guard against taking away, from behind him, the âqh (due) of his opposite number. Any transaction therefore pits the protagonists against each other, a part of irreducibility. Here, for the question that concerns us, is what we owe to each other’s humanity : recognition and care, and hospitality is an expression of this. The Aqh adds to our need for enjoyment an awareness of the need for the Other. Here, through the act of hospitality, it is a question of guarding against taking part in oneself, the other’s share of life. Coda: building a shared world It is necessary to make the world and to do it differently. It is possible to make the world by the negative (pandemics, ecological crises). The fractures, risks and breakdowns that we are collectively experiencing, and their consequences (ecological, social and political), speak for themselves. There’s no need to dwell on it too much. The national community, which is our primary reference, I would say atavistic, was built on the couple memory/forgetfulness. It seems to me that if we are to build a global community, we need to break out of the conceptual and imaginary prison of the nation and the nation-state. And to do this, the question of the nature of the narratives to be produced to found this global community is fundamental. One of the difficulties in building a common world is linked to the fact that we do not have a common memory. Each human group bases its memory on a singular history. A global community to be built requires a narrative that looks to the future ; and that anticipates the common destiny of humanity. Collapsology, ecology and transhumanism are all such narratives. Some of these narratives configure a community of destiny through the negative (pandemic, ecological crisis). The edifice lacks a narrative based on a positive heuristic that will make us want to make world-common. If we postulate a link of continuity between individual, social bodies and ecosystems. A cosmopolitics of hospitality also implies thinking about new relational ontologies on the scale of the living. But this aspect of things I’ll save for another time.