Transcript

Seyla Benhabib – Conversation With History

Welcome to a Conversation with History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Seyla Benhabib, who is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University, and Director of the program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. She is the author of numerous books, including Critique, Norm, and Utopia, Situating the Self, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, and The Claims of Culture. She is the 2004 Tanner Lecturer at UC Berkeley.

Seyla, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Istanbul, Turkey. I came to the United States in 1970, but I was raised in Istanbul and went to school there, the English High School for Girls for secondary school, junior high, and the American College for Girls for senior high.

How and when did you family come to Turkey?

My family came to Turkey, as we say, in 1492, along with the Ottomans, when they conquered Istanbul from the Byzantium. My ancestor are Sephardic Jews who fled Spain in 1492 when the Inquisition was forcing Jews to convert, or decimating them, forcing them to go underground. At the time, the Ottoman Empire had a policy of giving refuge to the Jewish community escaping from Spain. Why or how this policy was there, whether it was an attempt, also, to capture Eastern Mediterranean trade, or whether it was some ancient rule of hospitality, in any event, as far back as we know, we came to Turkey at about 1492.

How do you think this family history shaped your thinking about the world?

It makes me aware of the fragility of good political institutions. I never take them for granted. I am always attentive to the ways in which, particularly, collective ideologies of purity -- be it religious purity, racial purity, or national purity -- can go wrong. I mean, 1492 is also the period that is referred to in Spanish history as the "second reconquista," or the reconquering of Spain from the Muslims. It is the consolidation of the Catholic kingdom of Spain and authority, and at the same time, its consequence was first the decimation of the Jewish minority, and also to a lesser extent, the triumph over the Muslim community.

So this makes me very distrustful of collectivist ideologies of any kind. It makes me very attentive to what I would like to call practices of good governance and state-building, and makes me realize how fragile and unpredictable the course of history is. So it may be not an accident that in the last decade I have been writing more and more on questions of refuge, asylum, citizenship, and cultural conflict, multiculturalism, and nationality, because I have so much that I can also bring to this. My nerve ends are constantly sensitive to these issues.

Let me ask you about your parents. How do you think they shaped your views of the world? Did they just build on this history that we just discussed?

The family background is in some ways quite typical for Jewish communities. I have a grandfather who was a rabbi, but my father could not even complete his studies, as the Second World War broke out. My parents were married in 1939. My father was for a brief period inducted into the Turkish army, and then it turned out that Turkey stayed out of the war and declared neutrality, and my father subsequently became a businessman.

My mother's history is that she was educated in a French elementary school, and then she went to an Italian high school, so we grew up with a background of multiple European languages at home. At any one point in time, we could shift from Turkish into French, into Ladino, and then came English, and my mom also spoke Italian. So what I would say about the family background is that we were very much part of Europe, that all these European currents of thought -- literature and ideas -- went through us. Even though we were living in a primarily Muslim, and to many understandings, quote/unquote, an "Oriental" community, we were part of this legacy.

My mother was someone who could have studied further if the circumstances of being a woman at that point would have permitted. My mother's mother never went to school. She didn't know how to read and write, which is always a remarkable fact for me when I think back; that her granddaughter is a professor, and yet my grandmother did not know how to read. But my mother was offered a scholarship by Mussolini's Italy to go and study the history of art. Of course, my grandmother said, "You are going absolutely nowhere," and then she was married off the next year. So I come from this mixture of "Oriental" and Western values, where women were educated, but then married off at the age of nineteen or twenty, where you went a certain [level], but you didn't go all the way. You didn't push the envelope all the way.

This diversity, which you must have lived every day in the Istanbul community, must have been an amazing experience in terms of sensitizing you to issues, concerns, and sensibilities that we're just now encountering in big parts of the United States.

Istanbul, itself, was . . . I think it's lessened now, but it was one of the big cosmopolitan centers of, in a way, the old Europe. We not only had this diversity of languages and affiliations in the family, but at the schools that I went to, there were a lot of girls of Greek origin, ethnic Greeks, who had remained in Turkey; I had Armenian friends growing up. This is something that people who know about the Armenian massacres, for example, do not realize, that there were still a substantial number of Armenians who remained in Turkey. I do not have the exact numbers, but I believe they were probably in size as large as the Jewish community, which was about 100,000 when I was growing up in the 1950s. And there were also children of various foreign diplomats, teachers, embassies. Istanbul was a city in which you heard five or six different languages; you could encounter [many] neighborhoods, varieties of food and taste. So the very concept of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, there's also that aspect of it in the older metropolis. A city like Istanbul was quite remarkable.

Where were you educated once you left Turkey and came to the United States?

I came to Brandeis University with a scholarship there.

The Wien.

Yes, funded by Larry Wien, the Wien International Scholarship. I was there for two years and did my degree in philosophy, and then moved to Yale from there.

What drew you to political philosophy? Was it the teachers that you had?

No, I think it was more . . . it was probably several things. First, it was simply the biographical background, and always the sense of being in Turkey but not really being Turkish in the ethnic or national sense, and negotiating those conflicts as I was growing up.

Then of course, in 1968, the student movement. I was in the American College for Girls, which was an elite junior college, and the news of the Vietnam War was coming to us. We had many teachers who themselves were, in many cases, draft evaders who had come to teach in Istanbul in an American school, and had refused to go to the war. So the news of the Vietnam War was what we talked about during our lunch hours. I remember seeing those pictures of people who had been exposed to napalm bombing, etc., and there was a speedy process of politicization. So there was the Vietnam War, there was the student movement, and in Turkey, in particular, there was the emergence of an independent left, a very significant mobilization among the workers. History was knocking at the door, and if you were a thoughtful or reflective person, you had to focus on the political issues.

I'm sure it was also a personal affinity that drew me. I was always interested in philosophy. I have a mind that tends towards abstractions, but I also am interested in seeing the way in which these abstractions and principles are at work, or play themselves out in the course of history.

So I would say that beginning with 1968 and the student movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, the workers' movements in Turkey, politics has never left my life since then.

What was your dissertation on?

My dissertation was on Hegel. It was on Hegel's philosophy of right, his philosophy on the state, and it was called "Natural Right and Hegel: An Essay on Modern Political Philosophy." So it seems in many ways, I was asking the same questions, and I have [still] been asking the same questions. I think most people who do philosophy, I really believe this, have a certain central question, an existential question that accompanies them most of their lives. You write different works, you write different books, but I believe that you are basically asking the same question. For me, the issue starting already in that work was how to reconcile universalistic principles of human rights, autonomy, and freedom with our concrete particular identity as members of certain human communities divided by language, by ethnicity, by religion.

I went to Hegel's philosophy of right because Hegel is one of the first systematic thinkers in modernity who says, "Look, we have three principles in the state. There is morality, there is legality, and then there is ethical life." Morality is what we all should have in common as moral rational beings, legality is the system of rights under which we live, and ethical life is basically the structure of a family, the mark of a civil society, and the concrete state to which we belong. That's what I focused on, and it seems to be for the last thirty years, I have been circling around this question in one way or another, and giving it different answers. But the question seems to me to have remained.

In a second we'll talk about where you are now, what the current iterations are, to use your word. But before we do that, could you help our audience understand what a political philosopher does? At one level it's a silly question, but also it may be a way to then talk about your current work.

What does a political philosopher do? To be a political philosopher is more a vocation than a career. We can be in our universities, and in some context one can be a journalist, one can be a human rights activist, but basically I would say that it is a vocation for thinking about the political. Not just day-to-day politics, but about the phenomenon of the political, that all communities of any degree of complexity organize themselves according to certain principles of justice, equality, reciprocity, and authority. These are anthropological universals. You can go to ancient Indian communities, the aboriginal communities, and there will be a system of power and a system of legitimation, according to which goods are distributed, offices are distributed, and rewards are arranged. So in that sense, the political, understood as this domain, is fundamentally constitutive of our lives as humans. That's why, for example, Aristotle defined the human animal as the zoon politikon, that is to say, the animal who is capable of reasoned speech. And to be capable of reasoned speech, it means also that we are capable of persuading others, and that together we are capable of forming a system of values and system of principles using reasoned speak.

So in that sense, the political is fundamental to the human condition. Particularly today, we live in such a moment of the decline of the political. We live in a period when the political is simply understood as a strategic bargaining of various games. The way a lot of political science understands the political is various interests groups positioning themselves to try to get various gains, whether material, office, or authority. We have a culture at the moment, particularly in this country, that personalizes the political and reduces it to the sensationalistic and to the intimate, so that the political disappears in the sensationalist stories about the individuals.

We are at a very troubled moment as far as political culture is concerned, and so the vocation of the political philosopher becomes more and more difficult. We are part of the process of collective cultural reflection, and some of the work that we do is very close to cultural criticism. The other work that we do may be more systematic and reconstructive in terms of trying to understand what the principles of justice are for modern societies, what distributions should look like in our kinds of societies, what is the basis of authority. But in particular, I think that the political theories must remind one of the significance of the political, as opposed to what counts as politics in the everyday world, and the degree to which politics has almost become an increasingly pejorative term in our culture. "Politicking" is not something to which we attribute a lot of value, but that itself is a major issue and a problem, and it is a decline in public culture, to have come to that point.

What are the prerequisites of doing this kind of work? Obviously, abstract thinking is very crucial to these endeavors. You clearly draw on tradition and history, but as you've just said, you're going back to themes that recur, but, in fact, are being forgotten because of the processes today.

You need a certain kind of training in the history of political thought, first of all. There's a tremendously rich and important tradition, and I personally regret that I do not know as much about the history of political thought outside the Western tradition. I, myself, am more of a specialist, particularly on European and German thought, and it took me many years to acquire the German language proficiency that I have. There is a certain kind of dedication and training to this tradition that you have to have. But there also has to be a passion about politics. There has to be a passionate involvement with it. You must care about the world around you to really want to bring the principles of philosophy to bear upon the world, rather than simply seeing the world as fallen. It's a mess -- most of the time, if you read the newspapers, it certainly appears as a mess -- and the tendency to want to look beyond it may be great. That's why most philosophy looks beyond the world to something else. But the political philosophy is always in a strange situation. She is always caught in mediating very abstract principles with concrete realities, such as to think through, to use Arendt's term, "what we are doing," and to think through what we are doing and where we are going in light of this abstract principle. Of course, it involves training, but as I say, it also involves a passion and a vocation.

You're also, as you just suggested, affected by events and the chaos that those events are producing. In some ways it's an ordering process, a putting together of the facts by referring back to works that we think are not relevant in the first instance, but can be made so. You used the term in your lecture, "iterations." Talk a little about that, what that is. It's rethinking, I guess.

Yes. The term "iteration" seems at first very simply like repetition. You know, you reiterate a phrase, you reiterate in a song. Let's say, you have the jingle, the lyric that keeps coming back.

But iterations are complex processes of appropriating and transforming at the same time. These are cultural and intellectual processes where at times it may seem as if we are simply repeating the original, but what we are really doing is creating new meaning. These processes of iteration are particularly visible in certain domains like legal interpretation, and this is interesting because in any liberal democracy with a constitutional tradition, we live through the reinterpretation, reappropriation, and the reiteration of the past. In other words, what makes a tradition, a body of doctrine, a body of law alive for us in the present is our capacity to appropriate this body of law and yet at the same time to think it through in the present. These are processes of creative rearticulation through which traditions continue themselves, legal doctrine maintains itself.

I would even say that this capacity for iteration (and I refer to this in other works as the narrative constitution of identities), this capacity for narrativity is fundamental to the human condition. Another way to put it would be that we are story-telling animals, and when we are no longer capable of telling stories about ourselves, about our traditions, about our lives together, something critical dries up in the culture. The culture ceases to be a live legacy for it when we can no longer tell the new story, when we can no longer reiterate it and reappropriate it.

So I'm interested in understanding those moments of appropriation and the emergence of the new when it seems as if we are really just continuing the old. Continuing the old is always reinterpreting it from the standpoint of where we are at today.

Do women give a unique contribution to this? In contemporary political science, some of the great thinkers have been women. You've worked on Hannah Arendt, and we'll talk about her in a minute, but Judith Shklar, Hannah Pitkin here at Berkeley, and so on. Is there an interface between being a woman and doing theory well, or was it merely that theory was a place that women were allowed to occupy before the walls of discrimination came down?

That's a complex and fascinating question. I do think it is remarkable that among all theoretical fields -- there aren't that many women in theoretical physics or theoretical mathematics -- political philosophy has produced such significant names in the past century, and hopefully also into our century.

Some of the individuals whom you named, like Hannah Arendt and Judith Shklar, who was my senior colleague and whom I had the pleasure to meet at Harvard, I worked with her for several years, and Hannah Pitkin, whom I do not know personally, but whose work I greatly admire and respect; some of them have reflected upon the particular juncture in their own work and political philosophy.

I think that there is a certain, maybe, puzzle that women bring to the world of politics, which has always seemed so much an exclusively male world. Even today, in very simple numbers, when you look at the level of representation in the House of Representatives in our Congress, or in most parliaments all over the world, there is no parity anywhere. The number of women in the political sphere is usually somewhere between 10 percent to 25 or 30 percent in the most successful social democratic legislatures, for example, in Sweden and Denmark, where you will find higher numbers of women participating. So it has seemed for a very long time that the political has been an exclusively male domain. As Arendt puts it, the political seems to be concerned with honor, recognition in the public sphere, competition, which are very different than the virtues of the private sphere to which women have been historically assigned, which is more about continuing life, nurturing the young, attentiveness to everyday-ness. The virtue of the public sphere may be honor, but the virtue of the private sphere is care and concern.

So it could be that because of this understanding of the political as an exclusively male domain, women who have been outside it, who have been marginalized, have reflective upon this, and have reflected upon this critically. If you are excluded from something, sometimes you can have a better and more creative critical perspective on it. So I think that to a large extent women political philosophers have reflected upon the domain of the political, partially realizing its illusions, partially realizing that it is one sphere among others in human activity, but there has also been this heightened concern about it.

And what is it, really? Hannah Pitkin herself, who is also a feminist theorist, talks about this. In Hannah Arendt's work you have these categories of the public and the private very clear articulated. She always praises the public and the political, in many ways over the private. But on the other hand, only she could have written in the ways she has written about private and the intimacy, or about the principle of natality, that every child that is born introduces a new principle of freedom, and that there is no way to predict what any human being will bring -- this was before cloning! But natality: how does one introduce that into political thought? Inevitably, there are certain gender experiences there that flow into the theory.

Your current work and the subject of your lectures focus on identifying the processes by which universal norms assume an authoritative position, though they're outside the boundaries of the nation state. That is a first rendering on my part of your complicated work. Interestingly, you relate this subject matter to unsolved puzzles in the work of Arendt and Kant in your lectures. So as you grapple with these problems -- and let's talk about those problems -- it's very clear you turn to that tradition to find the iterations, or to help create the iterations. How did you become interested in these subjects of migration, humanitarian intervention, and so on, where there is a search for legitimating new universal norms in a context that transcends the nation state?

The best way to talk about this may be by going back to 1948 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After the experience of two world wars, the nations of this world entered a learning process where it was established that self-governing nations, whatever their differences, had to respect a minimum set of rights and universal norms. So the 1948 declaration initiates what I call the rise of an international human rights regime.

Since then, the number of international treaties and conventions -- a convention, let's say, on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, the convention against cruel and unjust punishment, the convention on the rights of the child, the international covenant on social and economic rights, the international covenant on civil and political rights -- if you look at all of this, there are numbers and numbers of treaties and conventions that have been signed and ratified. Not by all the nations of the world: we have about 190 to 195 recognized nation states or political entities, and not all of them have signed them. In some cases, two-thirds do and one-third has not.

But there is a new moment in the evolution of the international community where we are going beyond what would simply be called international law based on treaty rights. So, for example, let's say the U. S. and Japan, the U. S. and China, have a number of treaties and international obligations to one another that can range from trading to the hunting of tuna fish, etc. Those are international treaty obligations that nations can voluntarily undertake with one another. This has been the norm, also, of much of international law.

But the human rights treaties and the kinds of norm conventions that I'm talking about initiate a new moment, in that these are now almost a kind of ... I will say very carefully, they are almost a quasi-constitutional structure for the international community at large, where what the nations are obliging themselves to are not how much tuna fish can be hunted, or how much Chinese exports can come in and how they are regulated, but very fundamental norms, like the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women. Think of the many countries that are signatories of these, where the internal practices of this country can hardly be assessed to have ceased discrimination against women.

Now, what is this moment in human history when increasingly there is a constitutionalization of a set of norms, and the fact that nation states acknowledge them? I describe this as the cosmopolitan moment, as the emergence of cosmopolitan norms. This is different than international trade law, international treaties, but it is genuinely a novel development for the human community.

At the same time that we have the emergence of these treaties and norms that are becoming more and more accepted by the nations of the world, there is also the fundamental contradiction that nation states are the addressees of these norms. They are the signatories. When you look at whose signature is under these treaties, it's always the state. And yet at the same time, these norms themselves constrain the very action of the states. In other words, the states are both signatories, and yet at the same time, they are constrained. They are constrained by these very norms. If Egypt signs the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women, this has consequences. So Egypt is both the addressee of these norms, but it also has consequences for the way in which, let's say, the rights of women, divorce, property, etc., are dealt with in a country like Egypt.

So in my lectures, I try to reflect upon the rise of cosmopolitan norms and republican self-determination. For us in the United States, these issues became particularly relevant with the decision of the Bush administration to rescind the participation in the International Criminal Court, our own treaty establishing the International Criminal Court, on the basis of the argument that this would give rise to spurious and ill-founded prosecution of American civilians and military. I do not agree with that argument, but I think that we see very clearly that there is a conflict, and particularly for the United States, who spearheaded the development of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with Eleanor Roosevelt, to find ourselves now in this position of saying, "We remain sovereign. The world can go cosmopolitan, but American law is sovereign." I mean, this is simplifying it, [but] I have been thinking about these puzzles.

Now, very briefly, the reason why I went back to Kant and Arendt is that they had a sense, particularly Kant, who is famous for having written a essay in 1795 called Towards a Perpetual Peace which articulates certain conditions that nations must respect if there ever will be perpetual peace. The term "perpetual peace" is also almost like the German term, ewiger Frieden, it's eternal peace, [but] it's also the peace of the cemetery, right? Kant is very aware of the fact that -- this is ironic -- he says: "Nobody expects the philosopher to come out and tell generals and kings" -- this is 1795, we're not talking about democracies -- "how to run the world and how to articulate principles. But if there is going to be perpetual peace among nations, here are the conditions that I will lay out." He say that the constitution of every state must be a republican constitution, that is, it must permit representation; that the nations of the world should move towards a cosmopolitan federation where they regulate their relationships with one another according to laws; and that they should increasingly seek a common body of laws.

He also says in the third definitive article of Perpetual Peace that there is one right that belongs to a human being, as a human being in the world community, and that is the right to hospitality. That is, if someone comes upon your shores through need, or for commerce or barter, and if their purposes are peaceful, you cannot deny them access. You cannot deny universal hospitality, particularly if it will mean their destruction.

So the right to universal hospitality, that is, the right of human beings to seek contact with one another, to seek access to each other's land, to seek access to resources is a fundamental human right. It needs to be regulated, and there is a certain margin as to how much, for example, you owe to the stranger who comes up on your land. What kind of obligations do you owe to this stranger? Kant's own formulation is somewhat more minimal than I would like it to be, because he says you have a right of visitation but not a right of long-term stay. The host can determine that. I would argue that the human right to visitation is more extensive than Kant makes it out to be, and that nations have stronger obligations to exiles and refugees which are different than the obligations to immigrants. But this is a fascinating beginning point for thinking about this.

And what's really interesting, he's writing several hundred years ago, and he's laying the groundwork for a theorist working today to clear some of the confusion about the issues of immigrants, refugees, which we see every day in the headlines. In fact, as you're suggesting, the European Community is a site for experimentation with regard to these matters today, that is, real politicians acting in the real world, having to make decisions which are changing the nation state, and the limits it can impose without consulting these cosmopolitan norms. Is that fair?

Oh, I think that that is absolutely fair. There is the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees in 1951, and its protocol added in the sixties. All states that are signatories to the Geneva Convention have the obligation to conduct themselves vis-à-vis refugees and asylum-seekers in a particular way. The most important aspect of this is that if someone reaches your shores and raises a claim to refuge and asylum, you as the state have an obligation to examine the veracity or truthfulness of that claim and reach a decision. You have an obligation of what is called, in fact, non refoulement. That is to say, you cannot send the refugee back without having examined this claim. You ought not to send the refugee back into the point of danger.

Now, everybody, in many ways, violate this. What we do, for example, with Haitian refugees is that we catch them in the high seas even before they set foot upon the continental United States, because once they have done so, the government is under an obligation to conduct itself in various ways. Even if it does not respect it, it is liable, legally, as a signatory of the Geneva Convention, for its treatment of refugees and asylees, and various kinds of international groups and other NGOs can, in fact, take the government to task, which they have done. So the method becomes preventing them from setting foot on soil in the first place, which is really quite devious. Of course, we now see the criminalization of all these issues in the United States under the Bush administration. All matters of refuge, asylum, and also immigration have become so much absorbed into criminal law. There's this notion of homeland security that [puts us], frankly, in the midst of a frightful mess from the standpoint of international law, which is being flouted.

Now, the situation is presenting itself somewhat differently precisely because, also, the European nation states are forming the European Union. The consequence of forming the European Union is that internal border controls have been eliminated. That is to say, a European citizen can now, in principle, drive from Krakow down to Lisbon without internal border controls. But the elimination of internal border controls does not mean that the question of Europe's external borders has been solved. Continental Europe is a very wealthy environment. It has very extensive rights, and for a lot of the refugees and asylees of the world, it is a very desirable focus. So you have had over the last number of years millions of people trying to enter the boundaries of the European Union. From Moroccans, Kurds, Africans, to people from mainland China, there has always been some crisis about refugees and asylum-seekers within Europe at the moment.

But this has caught it in a difficult moment. Just as they are eliminating internal borders, they're in the situation of having to draw external borders. And so there have been various agreements, like Schengen and Dublin that have tried to control refugees and asylees from coming in, so that we see a very mixed picture at the moment within the European Union of great liberality within the member states, but rather harsh measurements developing towards refuge- and asylum-seekers.

One difference here is that because of the various legal traditions and because of the way in which Europe subscribes, also, to the Geneva Conventions, the practice of trying to stop people in refugee centers before they even touch the European continent has not been that successful. The Blair government is asking for the establishment of so-called refugee processing centers in countries where refugees are coming from, but the European Union has not accepted that, because they realize it's a violation of the Geneva Convention.

So the interesting problem for you, and it was a puzzle for Hannah Arendt too, in the sense that she saw the need for the "right to have rights," as you talk about, but she saw also that in the past these rights had been guaranteed by the nation state by the people coming together and talking about "we, the people." But in fact, it was within a bounded area.

The problem for our times is that globalization is creating movements of people, the need for humanitarian intervention and so on, where a basis for cosmopolitan norms exists outside the boundary of the state. So a lot of this that we see going on in the world that you're just discussing is the iteration of the polity as it grapples with these problems. By focusing on this you're able to move this discussion beyond where Hannah Arendt could take it, because the times have moved on. Is that fair?

Oh, I hope it's also true. I would like to think so. When I finished my book on Arendt in 1996, I was actually looking at the distinction between the public and the private, and her concept of the public space. But by the time I finished the book I was fascinated by her concept of statelessness and the right to have rights. What she meant by this is that the irony of developments in the twentieth century had been that precisely at the point in which individuals did not seem to have a nation or a state to protect them, that precisely at point at which when the sheer fact of being a human being ought to have entitled one to certain rights and to certain protections, it seem as if one had nothing. That to be stateless was basically to become a complete pariah, and that to be a stateless person was also to be rendered in a way rightless. But the whole notion of universal human rights is rights that accrue to us or belong to us in virtue of our humanity, not in virtue of our citizenship or membership.

She was understandably very pessimistic that the right to have rights would ever been guaranteed in an international system. She thought that only the possibility of establishing a political entity to which one belonged would resolve this condition. She was thinking, of course, of refugees from the Second World War, Jewish refugees and stateless peoples. And she said, although she was not a Zionist, "Let's admit the fact that it is only the establishment of the State of Israel that has, in effect, made these individuals into beings entitled to rights."

Her work ended up, to me, with a [conclusion] that there was a problem and there was a solution which she was only half-hearted about, because she did not think that the nation state was a solution to everything. The nation state, let's say, was the solution to the Jews, but it created the Palestinian refugees. So one group was saved, but the other group emerged, and she was very well away of that.

I started thinking about this, and the developments in the arena of international institutions, in the arena of various conventions, the Universal Declarations of Humans Right, the Geneva Conventions. We have gone beyond the point that Hannah Arendt articulated. But what we have not been able to deal with remains the following problem: border crossings are still a quasi-criminal activity unless accompanied by the right kinds of papers. And there's one voice in me that says from a moral point of view the only justifiable argument is for a world without borders. I don't think that that's going to be viable politically; communities will need to govern themselves and there will need to be some borders. But we are at a point when we have no way of dealing with the system of border crossing in terms of quasi-criminal language. On the one hand, in the global world, we have an unprecedented mobility of peoples, we are aware of the needs of refugees and asylees, and not to speak of about the 30 million displaced persons as a result of civil wars within their own countries. And yet the map that we navigate literally is the map of the nation state, and so we have no way as a world community of addressing this problem of border movement and trans-border justice, except through the categories of nation state.

I am trying to problematize, I'm trying to raise this dilemma to people's consciousness, and to think it through. Do I have any concrete and specific solutions to offer to this? I would say that we need to move towards decriminalization of border movements. One has to have a much more universally anchored system of refuge and asylum. I would also plead for the extension of municipal or city rights for long-term residents.

I don't think that it will be possible for us to envisage a world completely without borders, although we can ideally work closer and closer towards it, because there is the question, still, of democratic representation and accountability. And so we are caught in this puzzle. As I say sometimes, this is harsh, but democracies require borders, they require boundaries, in fact, one needs to know who is representative to whom, and who is accountable to whom. So it's very difficult to square the circle.

I think it is possible to have an empire without borders; I don't think it's possible to have a democracy without borders. So this creates the philosophical and moral dilemma that I have been trying to address in these lectures: Can you reconcile cosmopolitanism and democratic self-governance?

Interestingly enough, as a political philosopher you have to do what the system works against, which you were saying earlier, namely, you have to go back and look at the great issues that the political philosophers have worked on through the years: What is a citizen? What is the power of the sovereign? And so on. These are the big questions, and focusing on them can help us clarify the current confusion about what are the rights of man versus what are the rights of the citizen and so on.

Absolutely. Because when we read the newspapers, we are confronted with images, news stories. We have all heard about Guantanamo Bay. But how many of us really know that one of the difficulties about the situation in Guantanamo Bay is that the United States is a signatory of the Geneva Convention, particularly if there are regular, quote/unquote, prisoners of war [incarcerated there]. The question is, who has the status of being a prison of war? As Colin Powell pointed out before his voice was drowned out six months ago, we would be in violation of the fourth article of the Geneva Convention, which requires that prisoners of war be permitted access to counsel. This administration dealt with it by saying that these are illegal combatants, that is, they don't represent a regular enemy army, which we would have to recognize in combat under the Geneva Convention. So the ordinary citizen looks at something like this, looks at a news item, and says, "Well, what is at stake here?" In order to understand what is as stake, we have to go back to these categories.

Let me just give you another aspect of this issue. (I did not talk about Guantanamo in the lectures, but I could have; I was focusing in on Europe.) How many of us know that Guantanamo is a base that we have rented from Cuba for ninety-nine years? The question is, is it part of the sovereign United States or is it not part of the sovereign United States? As we know, there is a recent court decision at the Federal District that is challenging this notion that it is not part of the sovereign United States. Because if it is part of the sovereign United States, they cannot hold the prisoners without access to counsel, without giving them the writ of habeas corpus, without letting them know for what reason, on what basis they are being held accountable. This is in many ways such a legal and political quagmire, not to say scandal. But as ordinary citizens, to be able to think about this, we have to go back all the way and understand the principles on which we have to act as a nation. In that sense, the history of political philosophy is always there with us whether we recall it or not.

On that note, Professor Benhabib, I want to thank you very much for taking the time, and being with us today on our program, and for this fascinating discussion of the work of theory and the implications of globalization. Thank you.

Thank you.

And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

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