5.2 Migration: An Ancient Philosophical Question

In the spirit of Montaigne, preoccupied by the ‘cannibals’, Kant thinks in his Project of Perpetual Peace that the earth is round and, therefore, intended for all, and calls for the right to hospitality and the movement of people. But, since this transcendent moment of universal thought, a greater feeling of solidarity has not developed, an exit from national or individual egoisms, to aim for the adoption of modes of collective regulation on a planetary scale of the challenges that humanity faces. The attitude towards the question of migration, on the contrary, allows us to doubt it. A requirement for a reorientation of thought is all the more necessary since, in The Law of Peoples, John Rawls,Footnote ⁴ theorist of the idea of justice, is against the Kantian law of a cosmopolitan law (Weltbürgerrecht). The global alt-right speaks less prudishly in terms of invasion and of the ‘Great Replacement’.

Regarding Africa, a historical approach shows that the issue of migration first entered the media, political and theoretical discourse of current Africa in the early 1980s with the expulsions of African immigrants from Nigeria and Gabon, countries then facing the first throes of an economic crisis where the end of the welfare state was in the works. It then became more radical in the 1990s with extreme material scarcity caused by the passive insertion of the subcontinent into neoliberal globalization with structural adjustment policies. By sterilizing the African political scene with its hegemonic alternative (Adjust or Perish), free trade brings the question of autochthony into common discourse with terms such as Ivorianness, Congoleseness, Gaboneseness, Zambianness, the opposition of natives and non-natives, the ‘hygienic’ opposition between real men and cockroaches (inyenzi), ‘dubious citizenship’, the idea of ’true or false Anglophones’, the requirement of a ‘certificate of nationality’ issued by the police or the courts to access the computerized or biometric identity card, and so on. Cynical demagogues used the constitution of electoral lists to bring the question of electoral fraud to the forefront. The use of unregistered immigrants was then denounced.Footnote ⁵ The theme of autochthony takes on a new idiosyncratic accent here because of a neoliberal globalization that sees the return of societies of status and rent. But the question of autochthony is not, however, new in the history of humanity. Indeed, confronted with greater powers in terms of knowledge, wealth and demography, the Greek city in crisis questioned its identity, its roots. Greece then developed categories and statuses to distinguish Greeks from non-Greeks, foreigners and stateless persons, citizens from non-citizens. The law of Pericles in 451 or 450 BCE even prohibited marriage between certain categories, with the risk that their children would be declared bastards (nothoi) – with a double consequence, namely their exclusion from the list of citizens and the reduction of their inheritance rights.Footnote ⁶

5.3 Indigenous Citizenship and the Question of Foreigners According to Plato

The issue of indigenous citizenship autochthony is that of Plato’s Menexenus. This dialogue was much in demand as such at the end of the last century by the European far right. According to Socrates, the role of the funeral eulogy was to ‘celebrate the city in every way and … those who died in war and … the whole line of ancestors who preceded us and ourselves …’.Footnote ⁷ The eulogy praises the origin of the Greeks, noble by birth, because

The Greeks, says Plato in Timaeus (23e) and Critias (109c–110b), are like Erichtonus, born of the earth like Hephaestus. Until Republic (III 414cd; IX 575d), the legend of the natives (autochtones) remains linked to a civic theme: this noble lie allows the creation of a citizenship of affiliation and, therefore, of exclusion. The occurrence of the term ‘foreigner’ in Crito was already inseparable from that of the citizen. In the remembrance of the statutes, it is a question of evoking the insecurity of the exile, deprived of freedom and risking slavery. In a prosopopoeia, the laws demonstrate to Socrates that the condition of citizen, slave of his city in the city is still preferable to that of the exile, this other figure of the fugitive slave abroad. It is a civic lesson linked to autochthony and sedentariness: Socrates is a sedentary person, unlike the sophists, foreigners, itinerants, nomads and specialists in travel. As in Menexenus (237b–238a), citizens must be taught the belief in autochthony, so that they experience feelings of filial piety for their motherland.

The theme of autochthony remains, however, an identity and historical reconstruction. Indeed, the country inhabited at that time by the Greeks was initially that of the Pelagians. Plato also returns from a reflexive and heuristic point of view to this distinction between citizens and foreigners with the Egyptian journey and the discovery of the other, physically and metaphysically. From Gorgias onwards, the figure of the anonymous Stranger becomes recurrent in Platonic dialogue: he constitutes the substitute for Socrates and henceforth leads the game of logoï. The haunting presence of the Stranger as Plato’s spokesman – the Stranger of Elea, the Athenian Stranger, Timaeus of Locri, Diotima of Mantinea or simply Socrates, a stranger in his own city according to Phaedrus – seems to signify the privilege of exotic reason, which always directs the mind towards another world. Plato’s philosophy of otherness makes him relativize the swelling of the similar and the same of ethnocentrism which refuses the other and the different. Plato now establishes against Parmenides the reality of non-being to which the dignity of the other is entrusted. Being explodes into a plurality of genres: being, movement, rest, the same and the other and their mutual relations. In Politics (262a–263a), Plato rejects as a prejudice the division of humanity into Greeks and Barbarians if it is not based on a theory of generic man. This stands in contrast to Aristotle, who developed the theory of climates to justify the exclusion and servitude of certain peoples. Against established norms, the question of foreigners is posed by Plato as a problematic question. As it is no longer possible to think of the same without the other, the question of the foreigner or the other becomes an eminent philosophical question.Footnote ⁹

If the reconstruction of identity shows the historical and temporal relativity of the idea of autochthony, it nevertheless exists from a cultural point of view. Indeed, men who violently conquer a country invest in it anthropologically – by ‘cosmizing’ it, Mircéa Eliade showed in his works:

The creation of a new kòsmos, a new world order, takes up a recurring cosmogonic theme in the history of the founding of cities. The enterprise of ‘cosmization’ rids the earth of the indigenous monster (dragon, sphinx, cyclops, harpies, daughters of Lemnos) and makes it suitable for human habitation. Thus, in the Enuma Elish of Akkad, the process of transforming chaos into cosmos, the creation of a new citizenship, is done in the struggle of the young Marduk against Tiamat, a figure of the indigenous symbolizing chaos, the embryo of the world, the abortion of being. More precisely, Tiamat is the ophidian monster that the young hero massacres. From that moment on, the cosmogonic myth engenders the classical opposition in Semitic and Indo-European mythologies between mortals and immortals, gods and men. Stories of this nature later formed the matrix of Hesiod’s myth of races, where autochthony suggests a transfer of sovereignty. The Hesiodic myth of races thus opposes a divine race in which dikè reigns, a world of titans, giants and dragons characterized by hubris. These two antithetical worlds thus violently oppose each other from an ethnic, moral and political point of view. The Batutsi cosmogony of Rwanda goes in the same direction when it tells of the cosmization of Central Africa – an embryonic universe – by a hero who came from abroad.Footnote ¹¹ In the Greek case, this perspective is inflected by the Eleusinian mysteries that announce a new world where the man to whom they are addressed is without ‘acceptance of borders’.Footnote ¹² For the Eleusinian mysteries this comes from initiation or a demanding educational process. And, for the later Plato, this emotional link to the earth can be relativized by what makes man, namely education, and its reverse face, the relativity of things. It is the Eleusinian and Platonic perspective that will be deployed in a manifest way in the cosmopolitan law to which Rawls opposes himself.

5.4 Kant’s Theory of the Law of Migration

The question of immigration accesses the concept with modernity, following the global expansion of humanity of European origin to enrich itself through trade and conquest. Kant is the one who best expresses, in his To Perpetual Peace (1795), the need for a reception without hostility of immigrants, trade being incompatible with war. Cosmopolitical law implies conditions of universal hospitality which concretely means the freedom of movement of people:

Two limitations emerge, however, from Kantian thought on this subject. First, Kant’s fundamental goal is to justify the commercial expansion of Europeans by giving them the possibility of a circulation of people and goods among other peoples. Then, starting from a contractualist definition of the State, he poses the right of visit as an essential device of the right to hospitality. Such a device does not account for the permanent installation of the visitor as a possible conclusion of the free circulation. Kant could not think of it at the time he thought about, but the reality of permanent installation will, centuries later, lead the Western extreme right to the fantasy of the foreign body generally posed as being impure, in such a way that the danger is then both the immigrant and the migrant who are engaged in mobility. But, since the Kantian perspective remains firmly anti-colonialist, we must go further and observe his demand for a universal city composed of nation-states outside the state of nature. By recognizing themselves as citizens of the world, they guarantee their co-existence in contrast to an international law regulated by the right to war. Kant makes cosmopolitan law something inherent to citizenship. And the citizen of the world must deploy his potentialities through an educational process that abolishes egoism and establishes the awareness of a right of humanity as a universal norm that restricts the sovereignty of nation-states.

5.5 Statelessness and the Resurgence of an Organicist Philosophy

But, with the power acquired by European nations, Realpolitik theses emerge with the resurgence of an organicist philosophy of the Herderian, Fichtean and Hegelian type. This values the power of a community or a State against the Kantian cosmopolitan right to emigrate and to universal hospitality or the need for social and economic rights on a global scale. For example, Kant mentions the right to subsistence at the national and international level in the case of the Eskimos in the ‘First Supplement’ of To Perpetual Peace.Footnote ¹⁴ The Kantian cosmopolitan right was about making the right to immigration expand trade between peoples through ‘gentle commerce’ according to a word from Montesquieu. In fact, beyond the desire to justify European commercial expansion, trade as a vehicle for the progress of humanity towards perpetual peace is taken by Kant in the sense of interaction and circulation. Today, in this spirit, Habermas, in many of his writings, justifies the right to immigration by considering the point of view of immigrants and the historical background that allowed Europe to enrich itself and develop. The Habermasian position is more or less a response to John Rawls’s work The Law of Peoples (1993). Rawls opposes the principle stated by Kant of a cosmopolitan law implying conditions of a universal hospitality which concretely means the freedom of movement of people. Rawls bluntly believes that disordered countries must be prevented by means of ‘just war’ from transferring their excess populations to Western countries. Rawls developed political realism at a time when the question of immigration is once again becoming central to political philosophy. The same causes producing the same effects (the need to flourish, to respond to the call of the open sea, to have new experiences, to find jobs, to enrich oneself, to trade) and, as in past centuries that experienced European immigration, the world has been witnessing an intensification of African, Latin American, Arab, Asian and Eastern European immigration since the decade when Rawls wrote The Law of Peoples. But Rawls analyses its political, socio-economic and spiritual issues in a culturalist way. Appearing with the end of the Cold War, Rawls’s The Law of Peoples appears as one of the speculative manifestos of the Western conception of politics and international relations: here, the guiding principles that prevail are charity (aid or assistance) and indifference. In reality they hide the right of the strongest, the recourse to just war, violent interference in the affairs of other peoples, the fight against immigration from the global South. It is not a question – following the ‘principle of difference’ in his Theory of Justice – of defining a fairer and more egalitarian redistributive structure at the international level. But, under the logic of power, an organicist Realpolitik is opposed to the non-Western world in the name of the priority defence of the interests of Western peoples, in particular human rights. Rawls, therefore, resorts to the opposition between democracy and authoritarian oligarchy, between ‘rich and well-ordered societies’ and ‘disordered’ and ‘poor’ societies. Because the wealth of opulent societies resides in their political and cultural traditions, their knowledge and human capital as well as their capacity for economic and political organization, Rawls rejects any claim to a liberal principle of distributive justice on an international scale. In his eyes, economic injustice results less from the poor distribution of wealth than from factors of internal justice in poor countries: oppressive governments, corrupt elites and decomposed political cultures, unreasonable and oppressive religions towards women, overpopulation.Footnote ¹⁵ Rawls interprets the capitalist economy in a culturalist way by blaming the ‘losers’ in the areas of its collapse for their problems, their archaic cultural models being incompatible with the market: poor people exist in the global South because of their culture and their unreasonable, corrupt and despotic political systems (in the sense of Montesquieu). In light of this reading of the international economic system, Rawls admits for the North ‘the legitimate right of a people to restrict immigration’.Footnote ¹⁶ But he nevertheless demands the right to emigrate to the South without reciprocity, on the grounds that poverty does not concern the North, which should not be subject to obligations of international justice. He asserts peremptorily that a poor state cannot ‘compensate for its irresponsibility in maintaining its territory and conserving its natural resources by engaging in … migration to the territory of another people without their consent’.Footnote ¹⁷

Rawls does not revisit Kantian cosmopolitan law by chance nearly 200 years after the publication of To Perpetual Peace. His aim is to refocus it on the right to migration within the sovereign framework of a few nation-states. For him, it is a question of restricting as much as possible the utopia of a right to global citizenship. From that moment on, in fact, the global refugee and immigrant crisis – the result of historical violence linked to wars, socially brutal economic policies and often abusive restrictions on emigration – argues for the expansion of Kantian cosmopolitan law based on ‘the original community of the surface of the earth’. Rawls opposes such an orientation. He, therefore, limits the debate to human rights, examined from an ‘ideal theory’ opposing ‘liberal societies’ and ‘hierarchical societies’. However, such a perspective is little concerned with the contradiction that arises between the conflicts caused by the promotion of human rights and the interests of Western nationals beyond borders. Stanley HoffmannFootnote ¹⁸ has observed that, in US–Japanese trade relations, between the United States and France in foreign policy and security, Canadian and Spanish fishing practices, democratic states defend first and foremost ‘state interests’ of a geopolitical nature; this can be seen in French interventions in black Africa, as well as in the support given by the Americans or the French to different repressive regimes. He thought that Rawls ends up with ‘a code of conduct that is too thin and too conservative, especially in a world in which interdependence empties sovereignty of the best part of its substance’; Rawls also resorts to vague principles of formation and regulation of possible associations between democratic societies, or the ‘norms of equity’ concerning trade and cooperation agreements.Footnote ¹⁹

We can also observe the use of Kant himself against the Kantian theory of the right of migration. An argument from the Kantian point of view is put forward against radical cosmopolitan law and in favour of control of immigration and the reception of immigrants and refugees by the nation-states of the civilisational area extending from the Rio Grande to the Oder-Neisse. This argument concerns the importance of public debate in Kantian republicanism. Thus, D. Weinstock considers that

From this, a conclusion is drawn: ‘the principle of a sphere of free public debate’ gives right and strength to the Western capacity to control immigration both in terms of the number of immigrants received and the conditions that any Western state will be entitled to impose on them.Footnote ²⁰

As Platonic analyses of foreigners suggest, autochthony was criticized in antiquity and later on by Kant, who affirms the common possession of the earth and the right of all to move freely. Against this conception, the power of European states in modernity has made the doctrine of the right of the strongest triumph with the conquest of America and the Berlin Conference from November 1884 to February 1885. Reinforced, on the one hand, by the economic crisis in the late 1970s and, on the other hand, by neoliberal policies, this tradition, centred on European interests, has imposed itself on continents that can be appropriated by particular or collective powers such as the European Union, with free oceans for circulation and trade, the external enemy (justus hostis) outside the border suspending the guarantees of the Westphalian international legal order and leading to the legalization of unequal rules. In Section 5.6, we shall see that, despite the reaffirmation of the principle to ‘address migration in a spirit of solidarity … in full respect of international law, including international human rights law’,Footnote ²¹ power is expressed in the treaties that regulate the asymmetrical relations between Europe and Africa in general, and on migration and mobility in particular.

5.6 The ‘Readmission Clause’ or Cooperation Beyond the Law

Openness and closure: this is the antinomy at the heart of the organicist philosophy that has emerged since the 2000s from the cooperation and partnership agreements signed in Cotonou, as well as those currently being ratified since 15 November 2023 in Samoa between the Europe of ‘common values’ and the countries of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific. The contradiction is based on one fact: Europe demands that the economic life of the countries of origin of immigrants be opened up to world trade, but subsidises its industry and agriculture, with the consequence of destroying the lives of young rural people and fishermen; it barricades itself against migratory flows from Africa. With the establishment of neoliberal globalization, the closing of European borders to Africans takes on the form of a delusional obsession aimed at contractualizing the statelessness, deportation and undesirability of African immigrants. The paradox is that the partnership philosophy between Europe and Africa promotes in principle, and in an ideal way, privileged relations around equality, dialogue, friendship, reciprocity and solidarity. Where one would have believed that certain situations depend as much on these principles as on politics and not on the market, we observe that, structurally, a double contradiction is linked to African immigration: the desire to integrate into the ‘global economy’ by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 and the closure of the right to migration or freedom of movement, because the objective is to fix Africans in the subcontinent where they can be exploited. Faced with workers who are no longer integrated by capital, excluded or thrown away, Europe assumes an ethical contradiction between an incantatory rhetoric on the promotion of human rights and the inclusion of the statelessness of many Africans as a priority axis of cooperation. A reminder of the facts and data is necessary to try to understand this situation. In its Title XVII, Article 130 u–y, the Treaty of Maastricht sets the political and human framework for development cooperation, namely consolidating democracy and the rule of law, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. In the same treaty, the principle of ‘zero immigration’ is defined, as the European basis for ‘controlling migratory flows’. Since immigration and asylum now fall under Community competences (this will still be the case with the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum adopted on 10 April 2024), it was within the Tampere Community framework of October 1999 that European heads of state and government asked the European Union to include a ‘repatriation’ or ‘readmission clause’ in agreements with African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries. The problem is that this ‘readmission clause’ is in conflict with Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the right of everyone to leave any country, including their own. From this point of view, illegal emigration becomes a concept that contravenes this fundamental rule of international law.

But, in the name of ‘solidarity development’, the ‘readmission clause’ stipulates that ‘each ACP State will accept the return and admit its nationals illegally present on the territory of an EU State while scrupulously respecting the rules of international law’. To put it into practice, the Schengen countries have negotiated with certain countries so that they constitute themselves as a first circle surrounded by a ‘sanitary cordon’ made up of candidates for membership of the European Union, Mediterranean countries, the countries of the former USSR, Turkey, North African countries such as Libya, Algeria and especially today Tunisia which abandon African immigrants in the desert or in the sea at Ceuta and Mellila, turning the Mare Nostrum of imperial Rome into the sea of the dead. These countries receive economic aid if they control transits, clandestine immigration channels or accept the outsourcing of immigrant management (as Rwanda did under Rishi Sunak’s UK premiership). With regard to scrupulous respect for the rules of international law, Switzerland became in the 2000s the laboratory for the policy of ‘readmission’ of stateless persons. It rejects illegal immigrants in Africa, because, for it, ‘all Africans are Ivorians’, according to Courrier international (n° 486, 24 February 2000) and La Lettre du continent (n° 345, 27 January 2000). Without being a member of the EU, Switzerland aims to be integrated into its European environment, by trying to control migratory pressure through the model of three concentric circles: the inner circle includes the member states of the European Economic Community and the Free Trade Association where there is free movement of people; the middle circle assumes flexible control of immigration for the recruitment of a skilled workforce (United States, Canada and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe); the outer circle includes all states that do not respect human rights and neither European culture in the broad sense nor the same living conditions as the Swiss. In the last circle are the African ‘deportees’ – according to a terminology used in Switzerland. Having often benefitted from a residence permit as ‘highly qualified specialists’ or being genuine rejected asylum seekers, these ‘undesirables’ (whether they are Guineans, Liberians, Sierra Leoneans or Jamaicans) are turned back without a legal basis, entrusted for 500 French francs to an Ivorian lawyer, responsible for finding their ‘country of origin’ on the basis of their appearance or morphological characteristics. The ‘clause of readmission’ of heimatlos by any ACP country has a similar operation to the model of ‘deportees’ in Switzerland.

Beyond the formal contradictions with international law, the ‘clause of repatriation’ or ‘readmission’ has a double content: it hypocritically instrumentalizes the phraseology of human rights; it is discriminatory and racist compared to the concrete decisions of Europe. First, Europe’s anti-migratory fantasy towards Africans lacks coherence at a time when young Europeans are emigrating all over the world in search of new experiences and jobs that they cannot find in their home countries. Second, Europe is far from closing itself off to all immigration. The Old Continent selects ‘qualified’ immigration, imposing the predominance of its strategic, commercial interests, its ‘democratic values’ and civilization, not to mention the unspoken things loudly expressed by the extreme right (invasion, ‘Great Replacement’, change of people or modification of the demographic composition). This openness has been paid for at the price of asylum policy, with Germany having opened itself massively, selectively and temporarily to the skills of the Ausländer (IT specialists from the East and the Orient, welcoming millions of Syrians), for the benefit of her labour market policy. In France, in July 1998, there was the discreet dissemination of a circular for the granting of a residence permit to computer scientists, in the spirit of welcoming artists and researchers. In 2022, Europe welcomed eight million Ukrainians without a single cry about the ‘Great Replacement’ or recourse to the principle of ‘remigration’ thought up by Vlams Belang.Footnote ²²

5.7 The Fight against Immigration, the Promotion of Inhospitality and the Rejection of Solidarity

In terms of education, the Edufrance programme formalized a few decades ago the approach of ‘chosen’, ‘qualified’ and ‘cultural’ immigration, with the adoption of the ‘merit-based system of immigration’. Establishing a commercial approach based on the Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurial model, this structure worked to implement a new policy of international relations in higher education. By opening up to the ‘global training market’, it set a few guidelines: no longer giving priority to students from the Maghreb and black Africa, considered too poor; approaching the best students from emerging countries (China, India, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Japan, Canada) which are major exporters of highly skilled young people and future elites. By smoothing out the finicky and discriminatory measures for welcoming the rich regions of the world, we have witnessed a new avatar of the logic of class – or race? – at the international level. With this differentiation, the university partnership has become normative and anthropologically qualifying. Black Africa in particular is integrated into the principle of the Other, the foreigner, even the strange who does not inspire confidence, frightens, threatens. Otherness having become a source of hostility, aid appears as a tool of stigmatization that calls for ‘inhospitality’, rejection and suspicion of immigrants, far from any moral priority of solidarity.

With the conventions between the European Union and the Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States, the Europeanization of the migration issue was achieved in a concrete way by forceps, far from the ethical idea of solidarity on which these organizations are based. Political concerns took precedence over economic issues under the corset of a macro-economic orthodoxy of adjustment to the structure of neoliberal globalization contrary to the ‘spirit of Lomé’: ‘Generally speaking, with regard to the Bretton Woods institutions, many programs or concepts … and the “messages” are sometimes opposed: adjustment slows investment, while the Union had long-term development as its objective, the European Union wanted a partnership while adjustment is an asymmetrical negotiation, the European Union had a regional approach, while structural adjustment programs are national’.Footnote ²³ These contradictions of the ‘new partnership’ are closely linked to the question of the ‘readmission clause’ which empties economic solidarity of any moral content. Since the 1980s, it has essentially been a question of fixing Africans in place, of sending them back or of parking Africans in national reserves or warehouses allowing them to benefit from external aid, because the ‘Empire’ is keen to drive back ‘the new barbarians’: ‘The North/South opposition resurrects this ideology of inequality, of asymmetry … There is no doubt that … the South is now entrusted with the role of the new barbarians facing a supposedly reunified, imperial North, the repository of the universal values of liberal and democratic civilization’.Footnote ²⁴ It is therefore a question of setting up a limes that separates the two worlds in a sort of ‘global apartheid’: ‘Protecting the civilization of the North … by the violent abandonment of the South, identified with barbarism’, by containing ‘the masses of the South’ by creating ‘buffer states’ along the limes that monitor it.Footnote ²⁵ It is a double violence: a process of barbarization of the periphery and a policy of closure and exclusion of the ‘Empire’. A nodal centre of the new partnership between Europe and Africa with the supposed loss of Africa’s geostrategic interest and the emergence of dangers and new needs for cooperation in the East, immigration is part of a defensive and negative ideology of Europe with regard to Africa: ‘Development aid [is useful] in the fight against immigration’.Footnote ²⁶ Rufin summed up this general problem in terms of the fear of ‘submersion’ or ‘invasion’: ‘The only real passion that the South unleashes throughout Europe [is] the fear of immigration’.Footnote ²⁷ In such a conceptual framework, where it is necessary to ‘prevent political and social dangers’, ‘cooperation becomes a tool at the service of the North: it is the instrument of the stability of the South despite development or without it’.Footnote ²⁸ The language used in official EU documents on the new Partnership Framework confirms Rufin’s assertions: ‘The special relationships that Member States may have with third countries, reflecting political, historic and cultural ties fostered through decades of contacts, should also be exploited to the full for the benefit of EU’.Footnote ²⁹

5.8 Closing Exit Options in Migration

Migratory flows are only the visible face of invasions and military interventions (such as that of the West in Libya), proxy wars, mythological rivalries, ideological conflicts, historical violence, material scarcity experienced by a large part of humanity and climatic disasters. This explains the massive

The migratory dynamic shows that the adjustment to the structure of neoliberal globalization is experienced in a painful way by hundreds of millions of Africans. Thrown onto the roads of migration and forced displacement, many fleeing adjustment perish from poverty, die under bullets during ‘food riots’, from cold under the wings of airplanes, drown at sea, die of starvation in the desert, end up as slaves or end up in ‘detention centres’ or ‘waiting zones’ in Europe. This is because the management of European citizenship is now exclusive to third parties, in particular ‘immigrants’ who have been settled on European soil for a long time. In Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple, Étienne Balibar was able to put forward the idea of a ‘hidden apartheid’. ‘Extra-community’ foreigners, in this case Africans south of the Sahara, have been considered ‘undesirable’ since the end of the 1990s, that is to say precisely at the time when the practical effects of the austerity policies imposed by Europe began to be felt and forced Africans into imaginary or physical exile from their world. Also, with a view to establishing total capitalist productivity, theorists have thought about the exit of African societies from the metaphysical era of incompleteness, from the Void to the hegemonic Fullness of classes linked to capital. The concrete objective is to block any exit option, any evasion or any exit from political domination, economic exploitation and social exclusion. The main idea was to counteract the flight from economic exploitation in migration: ‘… escape is still a strategy that constitutes the production of politics and social relations … “Flight” has not disappeared, it has remained as a major mode of historicity south of the Sahara, it persists in undermining civic space, in constraining the process of accumulation of power and wealth and in making predation easier than exploitation’.Footnote ³¹

This is the basis of the Cotonou (2000–2020) and Samoa (November 2023) agreements. Europe, which conceptualizes immigration laws around ‘migration and mobility’ or ‘migration and asylum’, wants to ‘block and push back’ immigrants, sort or collect those who meet the needs of the capitalist system, lock up and push back those who pass through, or else distance and subcontract or outsource migration control to third countries such as Tunisia and Rwanda. To hide the violence of these processes, an irenic ideological discourse was born on the cosmopolitan mix and ‘multiple ancestries’ around mobility, hybridity, fluidity, mixing and wandering. The political and anthropological critique of this mixed vision suspects the desire to render invisible the violence of a differentiation and fragmentation of the workforce. In reality, it is the conceptualization of an indefinite extension of the market without resistance from a human, political or union totality that would oppose it. This hides the violence of the market order, of the ‘commodity form’, under the guise of a fluctuating, destructured and deterritorialized generic human identity.Footnote ³² The ideological discourse on diversity and crossbreeding does not hide the desire to create a class identity divided between those who exploit and those who are exploited. This ideological discourse is contemporary with the strengthening within Africa and on a global scale – thanks to the process of primitive accumulation of capital – of a class power with as corollaries an ethnicization and a racialization of anti-systemic revolts. André Tosel also criticized the thesis of the ‘indeterminacy of the mixed-race multitude’:

In Africa, this process, induced by adjustment, takes forms or inclinations aimed at an identity constitutionalization with the discourse of autochthony with the ideology of ‘I was there before’. Which means I am entitled to more protection and benefits.

5.9 Mbembe and the Limits of Care, Benevolence and Philanthropy in the Face of a Sanctuarized Europe

Achille Mbembe has developed, in a trilogy consisting of Politics of Enmity, Brutalism and The Earthly Community, a new ideology on migration around care, by calling for benevolence, solicitude, attention, vulnerability and suffering. The relationship and morality of care aim to repair both people and the environment. Mbembe now insists on the need for ‘a symbiotic fusion of life and mobility’: moving like life imply crossing ‘lines and barriers’, that is to say, in other words, that moving or the capacity to move without brakes across the world is an essential dimension of being human and, for some people, vital conditions of survival are involved. He also regrets a fact: while displacement involves ‘the entire body’, it turns out that the body parts of some are made available to others, are ‘bioavailable’ – for example, through egg donation. It is, therefore, a question of redefining and reconfiguring the relations of social exchange where the body becomes ‘a privileged site for the extraction of surplus value’, life being thereby calculated and recomposed, because part of its organs or fluids are mobilized for the safeguarding of the lives of others than oneself. The consequence of the shift from fusion to a bifurcation between life and bodies is that all bodies are no longer supposed to shelter the same life and the same breath: they are discount bodies, at the limits of life, the life they shelter being uninsurable because of a relationship of radical inequivalence with insured bodies: at the heart of contemporary migration and work policies are processes consisting of emptying certain bodies of all value and dignity, assigning them to marginal places on different scales of insurability and uninsurability. It is about slowing down the dynamics of interactions between them, creating distance, breaking the relational chains within the social body to institute new models of individualization. Restrictions on freedom of movement are no longer only the work of powerful states; they are at work on a global scale. By deepening the asymmetries of space and time between different categories of humanity, they fuel the ghettoization of entire parts of the world:

Mbembe highlights a double issue. First, there is a psychic issue: in fragmented spaces, stretched temporalities and endless expectations, humans oscillate between invisibility, waiting and erasure, with absolute surveillance implying a policy of ‘cleaning’ at the heart of a transition towards a new system of automation. Second, there is a democratic issue: the contradiction at the heart of the liberal order is found in the tension between freedom and security, order and movement; it is doubled by making a safe society no longer free because of the obsession with controlling appearances, namely ‘who is who, who lives where, with whom, and since when, who does what, who comes from where, who goes where, when, how, why’? Migrants and refugees pay the price of ‘a society of security’.Footnote ³⁵ The question: what to do with those whose existence no longer seems necessary to our reproduction, those who are ‘useless’ or ‘disposable’ – those whose existence is perceived as a physical or biological threat to our own lives, namely those whose movements of exodus and migration can destabilize the still productive and profitable areas? The answers to this dilemma have consisted in ‘territorially excluding all bodies deemed unassimilable, unwanted, illegal, dispensable or superfluous’ as was the case

Added to this at the beginning of the twenty-first century were wars against flows, mobility and circulation that target both individual bodies and entire sections of a humanity deemed worthless. All this stems, says Mbembe, ‘from borderization, decided and implemented in the name of freedom and security … Wars against mobility focus on bodies at a time when national affiliations are used as weapons. Since the right to belong is reserved only for some, the temptation to brutalize others without incurring legal consequences extends in some cases to the organized underworld, the police and the bureaucracy’,Footnote ³⁷ with the dream of national, ethnic, racial or religious purity.

Faced with the epistemic disorientation caused by major political, economic, climatic, technological and imaginary shifts, Mbembe proposes other theoretical imaginations and uses the archives that Édouard Glissant called the Tout-monde, because he wants to get out of the archives of a single province of the Earth.Footnote ³⁸ His goal is to combine the time of human societies with geological and climatic time, the time of plants and animals, microbes, bacteria and viruses, the biosphere and the thermosphere, the oceans, orbital space, the time of all forms of life. From then on, the Tout-monde refers to three distinctive features: a total break with any form of self-closure, whether it takes the form of a territorial, national, ethno-racial or religious enclosure; an opposition to the authoritarian universalization of the colonial enterprise of conquest; an exit from the ignorance desired for our own limits.Footnote ³⁹ It is also part of the horizon of ‘anticolonial and post-Eurocentric thoughts’,Footnote ⁴⁰ in the South and throughout the world. Because postcolonial and decolonial thoughts would deal with entanglements, passages and bridges, multiple genealogies and sinuous and interconnected lines against lines of occupation, walls and prisons to be built of late Eurocentrism.Footnote ⁴¹ To calls for closure, secession, withdrawal and enclosure, Mbembe therefore proposes care and reparationFootnote ⁴². He makes them the basis of truth and justice to reconnect with faith in the future, for an anticipation of catastrophe against a backdrop of anxiety and panic. He is thinking in particular of the global alt-right which anticipates, against minority and immigration activists, the end of the white race, besieged and threatened with extermination. It, therefore, creates on the one hand the fantasy of enclosure and its corollary, eradicating and extirpating violence with a desire for brutality, especially towards the losers, the weakest and most vulnerable, and on the other hand the fantasy of extinction and replacement.Footnote ⁴³

5.10 How to Reconnect with a Future of Solidarity

We believe that this philosophy, on migration as on everything else, is limited to a moral negation of politics, especially international politics. Our situation results from a concentration of capital in a few hands with the dizzying downgrading of the majority that turns against the most miserable, a class of superfluous people against whom there is a certain call for more brutality. Beyond the repression of migration, beyond the idea of a generic mixed-race or migrant humanity and of the Tout-monde, we propose the course of a pandemocracy by means of a generalized material power resulting from the universalization of the industrial revolution. The equality of power that can result from the mastery and universalization of the principles of the industrial mode of production by our peoples still immersed in the agro-pastoral mode of production has a first-rate ethical–political issue. The gap with the capitalist centres that control industrial civilization in fact pushes the latter to choose the right immigrant, to reject the one who is not useful, to expel the undesirables. When industrial civilization will become universal, when the peoples who today provide the strongest contingents of a rejected migration and mobility have got their hands on the principle of modern power, a relative equality will be established in the world. It is at that moment that people will be able to satisfy their needs for health, work, food and accomplishment within their countries. With the same level of power, people will then be able to negotiate the question of migration as the most powerful peoples do today. When the industrial revolution has spread to the peoples of the Periphery, the principle of equality will probably be dominant in the world. ‘The workers of the Centre [of the world]’, to use the old terminology referring to the opposition between the developed world and the under-developed world, will cease to identify with the capitalists of the Western countries who pose as the place of passage of their prosperity, of their protection, while designating the peoples of the South as enemies. With the predominance of equality in the relations between men both within societies and between peoples, the forms of organization in general will become more in conformity with the deep nature of human beings which is fundamentally the same. The peoples will then be able to truly negotiate in all equality to know how to resolve the question of the circulation of the labour force and the hospitality of men and women throughout the world.

From this, some conclusions emerge. With the ‘right to readmission’ of African immigrants, the idea of solidarity at the heart of the partnership philosophy between Africa and Europe is emptied of all content, especially since it draws unspoken racist words towards Africans cast as culturally unassimilable and civilizational incompatible and incommensurable, based on a new racist discourse that puts cultural difference before biological sameness. Then, the resulting economic austerity hinders the mutual recognition of human dignity. Nowhere, under liberal democracy after 1989, have we seen more united people become ‘more human’: social suffering, economic wars, terror of minorities, unleashing racism and xenophobia tear apart the so-called democratic West as well as the rest of the world. Derrida also noted two wounds of the ‘new world order’. First, there is ‘the massive exclusion of homeless citizens from any participation in the democratic life of states, the expulsion or deportation of so many exiles, stateless persons and immigrants from a so-called national territory that already announce a new experience of borders and national and civil identity’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This situation due to ‘external debt and other related mechanisms [that] starve or drive to despair a large part of humanity’Footnote ⁴⁵ results in an ontology that makes ‘the stable and presentable determination of a locality (the topos of territory, soil, city, body in general) an identity of anguish and panic that takes archaic forms. Then there is a second plague of our world economy: ‘Interethnic wars … are multiplying, guided by fantasy and an archaic concept, by a primitive conceptual fantasy of the community, the nation-state, sovereignty, borders, soil and blood’.Footnote ⁴⁶ These phenomena are general. Thus, Africa, under structural adjustment for more than three decades, is prey to a rise in xenophobia, just like Europe, America and the rest of the world. Certainly, the logic of exclusion against African immigrants is less based on racial differentiation than on ethnic arguments – even if racial differentiation is asserting itself in the consciences of the Maghreb, notably in Tunisia where there is now fear of a change in the demographic composition. Xenophobic rejections take extreme forms here, the paroxysmal forms being the Rwandan genocide, ‘a poisoned fruit of structural adjustment’.Footnote ⁴⁷ There is also the enslavement of African migrants in Libya, a result of historic and geopolitical violence. In such a context, ‘the African immigrant is thus a perfect scapegoat. He is often the first to be associated with barbarity and crime. As in ancient Greece, where the foreigner had no right to be there and where Plato recommended ‘the exposure of delinquents … at the border of the country’. In sub-Saharan Africa, the foreigner is expelled manu militari, or even lynched. His death sentence, in a religious and ritual or expeditious and popular sense, is all the more easily approved by the community as it makes it possible to avoid vendettas within the community.Footnote ⁴⁸ Urgently, the migration issue calls more than ever for the acceleration of the inter-African movement of people and goods and for the abolition of visas within Africa. While waiting for the restructuring of a world order that brings more peace, making ‘the right of citizenship’ on the ‘surface of the earth’ requires the democratization of borders, the object of the struggles for conditions of migration and asylum in solidarity.