Ginette Verstraete is Professor and Chair of Comparative Arts and Media at Vrije University Amsterdam. She is the author of Fragments of the Feminine Sublime in Friedrich Schlegel and James Joyce and an editor of Placing Mobility, Mobilizing Place: The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World.

TRACKING EUROPE

Mobility, Diaspora, and the Politics of LocationBy Ginette Verstraete

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4563-3

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………………………….ixAcknowledgments……………………………………………………………………..xiIntroduction Mobility, Technology, and the Politics of Location in Europe…………………1ONE Heading for Europe The Global Itinerary of an Idea………………………………….19TWO A Grand Tour through European Tourism……………………………………………..41THREE Europe in an Age of Digital Cultural Capitals…………………………………….61FOUR High-Tech Security, Mobility, and Migration……………………………………….87FIVE Diasporas in the B-Zones Artistic Counterterritories……………………………….111NOTES………………………………………………………………………………155BIBLIOGRAPHY & FILMOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………181INDEX………………………………………………………………………………195

Chapter One

Heading for Europe

THE GLOBAL ITINERARY OF AN IDEA

WITH THE 2004 expansion of the EU into Central and Eastern Europe and the drafting of a European constitution, Europe is talking about Europe again. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany, the possibility of uniting Eastern and Western Europe into a federal United States of Europe has been high on the agenda of politicians and academics alike. After decades of mostly technical debates about institutional economic integration in the aftermath of the Second World War, the big ideological questions are back on the table: “Europe is again on the agenda. Today it is up to writers to say if there exists a European fiction and which geniuses inspire or feed it. Does there exist a sensible thought, a vision of the world, a mode of fiction proper to Europe?” (Nooteboom, De Ontvoering van Europa, 69, my translation). As Western Europe faces the task of extending its common market, represented by the old fifteen members of the EU, to the eastern borders of “Europe proper,” it needs to address the question of the idea, or fiction, under which this expansion becomes possible. Who is going to be included or excluded, and on what grounds? Where does Europe ideally end? For all its apparent self-confidence, Europe has always been a highly unstable, moving concept and an indeterminate region. In the words of Anthony Pagden:

No one has ever been certain quite where its frontiers lie. Only the Atlantic and the Mediterranean provide obvious “natural” boundaries. For the Greeks, Europe had sometimes been only the area in which the Greeks lived, a vaguely defined region that shaded into what was once Yugoslavia in the North and is still Turkey in the South. For most, however, Europe had a larger, more indeterminate geographical significance. It was seen as the lands in the West, whose outer limits, the point at which they met the all-encircling Okeanos, were still unknown. (“Europe,” 45)

As for its shifting eastern border, Pagden continues: “at the end of the fifteenth century it advanced steadily from the Don … to the banks of the Volga; by the late sixteenth century it had reached the Ob; by the nineteenth, the Ural and the Ural mountains” (ibid., 47). Now, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, even Russia may become part of European civilization, along with Turkey. For the first time in more than fifty years, there exists not only the possibility of the European Community’s extending its borders to Asia, but also of reinventing the idea of Europe so that its political and economic realization will occur in the East. Europe, then, is about to be completed, ironically, in the form of a space that projects itself simultaneously as the center and the margin, as the origin and the end. Marking both Europe’s final identity and its point of completion, if not dissolution, in the East, Europe’s future borders inevitably protect as much as they threaten its unification. Europe will soon be disappearing again.

With Europe approaching its indeterminate destiny, it becomes all the more urgent to ask what we are heading for, and how far we can go. This equation between the idea of Europe and a long-distance movement forward, both geographically and symbolically, is as old as the history of modernity itself. The French revolution is a defining moment in this respect. Michael Heffernan, for instance, has argued that during and after the revolution, a new geopolitical awareness emerged in France that swept all over Europe, reinventing the continent as an expansive space to be conquered through progressive movement. Heffernan quotes Mona Ozouf: “From the beginning of the Revolution a native connivance linked rediscovered liberty with reconquered space. The beating down of gates, the crossing of castle moats, walking at one’s ease in places where one was once forbidden to enter: the appropriation of a certain space, which had to be opened and broken into, was the first delight of the Revolution” (The Meaning of Europe, 33). Ironically, this revolutionary spatial awareness found its political realization in Napoleon’s conquests and his concomitant attempts to create a united Europe, the vastness of which required that a military, urban, and governmental grid be imposed from Paris on all territories. Thus emerged a united Europe of dpartements, statistical bureaus, military machineries, and urban esplanades. “The idea of Europe as a balance of power between rival states had no place in the Napoleonic order; this was a Europe forged in the image of a single, revolutionary and imperialist state whose civilisation would henceforth speak for all, whose culture was deemed to possess inherent and unquestionable benefits for all men and women … Thus was the idea of Europe conflated with the idea of France and thus were acts of imperial conquest and domination turned into acts of liberation” (ibid., 39).

Although dominated by war and French imperialism, Napoleon’s Europe bears the imprint of the Enlightenment belief in the domination of nature-space being the ultimate fact of nature-as a necessary condition of man’s liberation. From the eighteenth century onward, accurate maps, rational city planning, territorial boundaries, and cadastral surveys became means of liberating the people of Europe by governing them, and in the case of Napoleon by subjugating them to Paris. This is the paradox of a united Europe, whose ultimate aim is universal enlightenment and whose final border is that of the globe itself: it installs the freedom of the people by rationalizing all of their movements. This paradox goes by the name of civilization or progress and forms a continuous thread in the Enlightenment vision of Europe: from the environmental determinism of Montesquieu, who believes that the mild climates of Europe contribute to a moral order of freedom impossible in the arid lands and extreme climates of Asia; to Rousseau’s notion of “the general will,” or the consent of the people to abide by the rule of law; and Saint-Simon’s utopian vision of a Europe united by the power of science and technology, especially transportation and communication. In the latter case, true liberty, peace, and democracy in Europe emerge along with the cross-border exchange of goods, capital, and people, as these are ruled not by emperors and monarchs but by scientists and entrepreneurs (Heffernan, The Meaning of Europe, 40). What else does this amount to but a geographically, economically, and scientifically integrated Europe, offering freedom of mobility to all, while putting world civilization and world peace in the hands of an elite?

This confusion of freedom, progress, and modernity with the exemplarity of a particular place or elite on earth-Europe and its capital Paris (and at other times Berlin, Rome, and Brussels)-marks the entire history of thinking about Europe. Below, with the help of Derrida, we will deconstruct the logic underlying the properness and property of Europe as this place of spiritual movement. Let me first discuss in greater detail how in Enlightenment thinking the freedom of movement, capitalist accumulation, geographical positioning, and world peace go hand in hand. Our example is Kant’s idea of a world republic, articulated in the 1795 “Perpetual Peace” and the 1784 “Idea for a Universal History,” which extends on a world scale his idea of a federal European Union, which in its turn is based on the expansion of the moral civil state. Ultimately Kant’s world republic is the telos of the European civil order exported on a universal scale.

Crucial to Kant’s concept of the civil order is the underlying belief that man is by nature evil and driven to war with his neighbors. Man’s state of nature is a state of violent expansion into other people’s territory. In fact, nature has used this violent drive forward in order to scatter mankind-and Europeans in particular-all over the world and subdue the earth and its inhabitants to human dominion. But this continuous state of war has so exhausted the human race that man has turned to a social contract in order to protect himself against his violent instincts. Out of these two natural urges-the one destructive, the other self-protective-arise the conditions for the creation of a civil state and, on a higher level, a European federation of states united by the will to peace. Kant’s ideal civil state is characterized by a republican constitution, by which he means a state run by a representative government with separation between the legislative and executive powers, in which all human beings are free and formally equal before the law. Such a state will not easily resort to war with its neighbors, since it first needs the consent of its citizens or those accountable to the citizens. That consent is difficult to obtain if people realize that their own lives are at stake.

Just as individuals are willing to overcome their urge to go out and kill each other by subjecting themselves to the social contract of the republic, so each individual republican state wants to protect itself against its self-destructive tendencies by entering a cosmopolitan federation of states within its region (in this case, Europe), modeled on the ideals of the French revolution. This, in turn, is the prototype for a world federation of states characterized by eternal peace. Ultimately Kant believes that a civilized world republic will emerge as soon as the state’s barbaric urge for military expansion has been transformed into the will for commercial exchange with all other states. At the basis of his idea of the cosmopolitan condition lies a reflective distance from the natural state of war, equaled by a transformation of military into economic expansion. Tired of wasting their energies on war with each other and dependent on each other’s economic resources, the European states will eventually step from savagery into a civilized league of nations governed by a law of equilibrium, civic freedom, and commercial wealth. Once this cosmopolitan league of peace is accomplished, imperialism will come to an end.

Underlying Kant’s idea of European and world federations of peace is the geographical mobility of citizens in search of peaceful alliances, or even the survival of the human race. These citizens also seek wealth through global commerce and communication. The mobility of the politically and economically privileged here functions as the path into European cosmopolitanism. From the perspective of the receiving countries, this means that hospitality vis–vis foreigners is a moral obligation, at least as long as the visitors only stay temporarily, like tourists, and limit themselves to communication and exchange with the original inhabitants. While freedom, equality, and civilization for Kant imply the universal right to travel and possess the earth, no foreigner can violently take over the territory of others in the way the European colonial powers have done. Every host country has the right to resist such invaders:

A special beneficent agreement would be needed in order to give an outsider a right to become a fellow inhabitant for a certain length of time. It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other … Uninhabitable parts of the earth-the sea and the deserts-divide this community of all men, but the ship and the camel (the desert ship) enable them to approach each other across these unruled regions and to establish communication by using the common right to the face of the earth, which belongs to human beings generally … But to this perfection compare the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice which they show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. (“Perpetual Peace,” 103)

If it is in reaction to European imperialism that Kant conceives his ideal cosmopolitan existence, he also believes that it is from within Europe that eternal peace has to be exported on a global scale. In fact, in a footnote to the title of his essay on cosmopolitanism, he admits that his conception of a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view was occasioned by a “conversation with a scholar who was traveling through” (“Idea for a Universal History,” 11) and who later quoted him from that conversation in a notice which remains incomprehensible to all those who have not heard Kant himself on the topic. This is why the philosopher decided to write this essay on the cosmopolitan condition, which, to be honest, now looks much like an intellectual ideal of international communication among traveling European scholars in search of publicity. As Amanda Anderson has put it succinctly, the eighteenth-century idea of cosmopolitanism often mistakenly assumed the whole world shared the privileged position of the traveling European intellectual. Equally, “in the eighteenth century the opening up of trade routes and the advancement of imperial ventures caused powerful self-interrogation among thinkers in Europe. The results of such interrogations often appear naively unaware of their own imbrication in relations of power, or their relation to the logic of capitalist expansion, as instanced in the common Enlightenment view that international commerce”-and, one could add, communication-“would foster world peace” (“Cosmopolitanism,” 268).

History has taught us the geopolitical limits of Kant’s view. Rather than a purely philosophical ideal projected into a distant future, Kant’s cosmopolitanism soon had a place within a European history of commercial expansion: “in 1800 the European imperial powers occupied or controlled some 35 percent of the surface of the planet, by 1878 they had taken 67 percent, and by 1914 more than 84 percent” (Pagden, Introduction, 10). That the subsequent worldwide expansion of the European states in the name of progress, freedom, or simply commerce did not bring universal peace but instead lay at the basis of centuries of colonial atrocities is, according to James Tully, partly prefigured by the Eurocentric setting of the Enlightenment ideas of freedom and cosmopolitanism themselves. I will not go into Tully’s articulate critique of the blind spots within Enlightenment thinking generally, and Kant’s work in particular a critique also expounded by such theorists as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. Instead, I will summarize the arguments here by observing that the idea of Europe as a gradual movement forward into distant places in the name of peace, progress, or liberty has had a reality full of contradictions between theory and practice and between the universal and the situated, the self and the other, the national and the international. What is more, such tensions within the idea of Europe have also taken us far beyond the borders of Europe proper as an idea, geographical entity, and industrial power. As Asad explains, it is not simply the case that Europe expanded overseas, but that it has constantly remade itself through that expansion, often beyond recognition (“Muslims and European Identity,” 220).

(Continues…)

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