Pl.: The theme of this issue of Plurielles is borders. Since our issues are always cross-disciplinary, one finds in them philosophy, literature, and so on. We can begin by approaching the theme on a general level — that of the borders of Europe — and then come back more precisely to Schengen. By way of introduction: in a book devoted to the borders of Europe, Rémy Brague wondered whether it really made sense to speak of the borders of Europe. Between geographical borders, historical borders, cultural borders… What do you think?
CdW.: Let us say that Europe has a difficulty because, unlike the States, its borders are permanently evolving, and it is therefore very hard to define the place of the citizen in relation to that political entity which is Europe — with a population that is itself evolving in its composition as its borders evolve. For what generally characterizes a citizen in his relation to the political entity that is usually the State is precisely the reference to a territory, to a population, to a language, a culture. And in Europe, the identity of Europe is precisely this cultural diversity; for the rest, it is its populations that evolve with each accession, and its borders too that evolve and that are laden with a heavy past, which makes things still more symbolic and therefore freighted with meaning. There, then, is a first element.
One must not forget that, in the past, for many Europeans up to the end of the nineteenth century, most people did not have the right to leave their own country and could enter almost anywhere. The States, when they lived under more or less authoritarian regimes, very often required people to remain at home, whether through serfdom, through the law of the soil, or through a whole series of obligations that people often respected for want of anything better; only those who were truly driven from their homes left, or those who were more enterprising, or wealthier, or who had networks — but most people did not have the right to leave. It went on like that until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Then the far larger migration that struck Europe from the second half of the nineteenth century onward developed mobility, because some countries needed labor, like France, while others considered that they had too large a population, like Germany. But one was still in the configuration where people did not have the right to leave, yet had the right to enter almost anywhere.
Today it is the reverse. People have the right to leave almost everywhere in the world, and they do not have the right to enter most countries, and notably the European countries, which have barricaded themselves precisely by imposing, through visas, a particularly rigorous policy of border control.
So these borders have evolved, since, first of all, the borders were closed on the basis of a whole series of false ideas about migration. That is to say that, when Europe began to close itself to migration at the end of the Trente Glorieuses (the postwar boom years), in 1974, it was thought that the great migratory wave was behind us. It was the beginning of the recession and the end of growth, and it was also thought that migration had been a temporary situation. It was thought that Europe was not destined to be a land of settlement, unlike the United States, Canada, Australia, and so on. It was thought that the migrants would return home, that internal European migration would make up for mobility across the borders of Europe — now turned into external borders — and it was also thought that there would be other alternatives to migration, through, for example, a revaluation of manual labor.
Schengen at the outset: an exploratory system
So all these hypotheses, all these scenarios, proved erroneous, and yet it is on this basis that the whole European apparatus of border control on which we live today was built — that is to say, the Schengen system. So Schengen is something exploratory in 1985: the internal borders are opened and the external borders are closed. Certain countries that are part of the European Union, such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, or Denmark, do not join Schengen. And in reality this system is going to extend to the European scale as the principle of border control in Europe, even if certain countries (these three) are still not part of it, in the Europe of the 27.
So one begins to put in place the freedom of movement, of work, and of internal settlement for Europeans, but this is done progressively. The countries that present a “migratory risk” generally wait a certain time between the moment they enter the European Union and the moment they benefit from the freedom of work and settlement. This was the case, for example, for Spain and Portugal, which, having entered in 1986, obtained the freedom of work and settlement in 1992; it was also the case for Greece, which obtained freedom of movement in 1992. More recently this was the case for the eight countries of Eastern Europe, which wait for a period that varies according to the countries of departure and the countries of reception, under a complex system established in 2004 that may be summed up in the formula “2+3+2”: that is to say that the countries of the West say they will wait first for two years. Some countries said “yes, we will open the borders to labor migration”; this was the case for the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Sweden in 2006. Then the receiving countries, those that did not say yes, may wait three more years on the pretext that they are not ready. They wait two more years; and it is reckoned that in 2011 all the countries of Western Europe will be ready to grant freedom of work and settlement. We are thus in a state of great wariness with respect to Europeans.
And for non-Europeans we are in a wholly security-driven system that was put in place from 1990 onward. The Europe of the labor market has become a security Europe — that is to say that the essential part of migration questions has entered into the European apparatus of Brussels, let us say into the security pillar, and migration is assimilated to a kind of criminalization of mobility that is sometimes confused with terrorism. This justifies the reinforced policy of control of Europe’s external borders, what some call the externalization of borders — that is to say that the border is no longer exercised on the territory of arrival, or only in a limited number of cases, but is exercised at a distance through the visa system put in place from 1986 onward. This is how it goes for non-European countries subject to a visa requirement, which authorizes their nationals to enter European territory for a period of three months: this is the Schengen visa system, granted by the consulates of the European countries on the spot, there where people wish to depart from — a first element of the externalization of the border.
We have, on the other hand, an increasingly secured system of control of computerized data: the Schengen Information System (SIS), Eurodac for asylum seekers (fingerprints), biometric passports, and so on. We thus have an increasingly tight control, if I may put it that way, for non-Europeans seeking to enter. Readmission agreements have been signed: there a border-guard role is asked of the countries that sit on Europe’s external borders, adjoining countries that are just on the other side of the border. This is the case for the countries of the Maghreb, the countries of Eastern Europe — and first of all those that have now entered the European Union, like Poland — and then others that are still on the outside, like Ukraine or Moldova, or again Belarus, which undertake to keep at home or to take back into their territory either candidates for illegal immigration or people who have illegally crossed the borders of Europe. Today the result is that on the other side of Europe, on the other side of the borders, there are countries that have become de facto countries not only of departure but also of reception for a migration coming from farther afield. This is the case for Morocco, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and so on. These countries have become countries of transit and serve somewhat as an airlock at the border, if I may put it that way, for the extra-European migration that seeks to pass through these borders. That is what the border at a distance is, the externalization of borders.
A great fault line of the world
The border also manifests itself in points of encounter that are a symbol of the great fault lines of the world, also because Europe sits at the margins of one of the great fault lines of the world, the Mediterranean. It is a political and cultural fault line, even if there is much dialogue — an economic and demographic fault line. One must not forget that on the southern shore of the Mediterranean 50 percent of the population is under 25 years old. There is already a very significant demographic gap, even if these countries of the southern Mediterranean have for the most part entered a phase of demographic stabilization. They have entered a phase of demographic transition. And by the 2030–2050 horizon the families of these countries will have a size very close to that of European families. So the demographic gap is going to narrow.
By contrast, the social cleavages, as well as the economic and political gap in certain cases, are still far from being bridged. That is an important element.
There is a gap, the same fracture — even if it is different — to the east of the new borders of Europe, with income levels that are in a ratio of 1 to 10, even of 1 to 20, compared with those of the European countries. But there one does not have the demographic gap, because the countries bordering Russia are in the same situation as most European countries. So this borderline is not only a border on paper, it is not only a juridical border with the Schengen system, but it is also a political, economic, cultural, and sometimes religious border too, since beyond Europe there is Islam on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. All of this makes a border.
The border is also a place of passage
Another element, equally important, is that the border is also a place of passage. It is all the more prized for being forbidden. Today there is an economy of the border. That is to say, the more borders are closed, the more the smugglers prosper. It is a bit like Prohibition in the United States in the thirties. The border is forbidden, so a whole economy of the border has formed at the gates of Europe. Fishermen have become smugglers: in the Mediterranean one fishes not only for fish but also for men. Last summer, for example, Africans found themselves clinging to the tuna-fishing nets, given that they had not been rescued in their shipwreck; and today there are many deaths at the gates of Europe on account of these clandestine crossings, but at the same time there is a very powerful economy of passage.
We also have zones of encounter, for example in the East, in Berlin, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall — but this still exists today in Kaliningrad, which is another border point (there were such places in Berlin, in Vienna). There are the great markets where people tried to raise some cash with everything they had at home, so they sold. This too forms borders. The border is also the place of exchange, of barter…: one had this in Poland, in Germany, and then of course in Vienna and at all the crossing points at the gates of Europe. The borders receded as these countries entered the European space. Today, for example, Kaliningrad remains a market. All the people of the area go to do their shopping there, taking advantage of the price differences. It is also a point of encounter between the former Iron Curtain and the European Union.
The internal borders
The border is also internal. Today we have many borders within Europe itself, which are neither geographical borders nor necessarily juridical borders. But there are still some, juridical borders; thus the different statuses of foreigners, which can be ranked hierarchically: there are the undocumented (sans-papiers), the non-resident non-EU nationals, the resident non-EU nationals, the Europeans of the Union who are not in the country of their nationality — with rights that differ. And the principal border in this respect is no longer between the national and the foreigner, but rather between the European and the non-European by right.
But we have many other economic borders. We have the borders of the banlieues (the suburban housing estates), for example, which are a form of border in many European countries: exclusion has become strongly ethnicized, and there it is a border. It is also a border in the heads of people who forge an identity around their territory and who consider that a little farther off is another world. That is a border. It is the border of exclusion, of discrimination, and the discriminated themselves construct other borders. Witness the rise of antisemitism, for example, in the banlieues — a rise linked to satellite-dish channels and to the identity constructions that some build around Islam, for example, another locus for the construction of borders, let us say imaginary and theoretical ones, but which lead to fairly dramatic realities when it comes to confrontations between one group and another.
There are also many very important borders in people’s heads, linked to diverse forms of exclusion and/or discrimination, or to the construction of a self-enclosed world without any mixing.
To conclude on that register, and on the Europe of borders, I would only like to insist on one thing, which is that the Europe that today presents itself as the territory of human rights is surrounded by camps holding people who want to try to penetrate into Europe, but also by camps of those who are detained before being sent back to their country of origin. We have waiting zones in the airports (people waiting to be admitted onto the territory of the European countries). We have detention centers in the European countries of departure, bound for the countries of origin, for those held there. We have more or less informal camps in all the great cities that surround Europe, whether in Ceuta or Melilla or in other crossing points. Europe today is a kind of protected zone that at the same time not only constructs its own barriers but harbors within its territory its own diverse internal borders.
Europe means in principle to be a space of liberty, of security, of justice — and therefore a space more or less without borders, but this space is above all for Europeans. We find again the idea of European citizenship, a citizenship that would be somewhat like a club whose members alone may move about freely. Today the great difference in terms of borders is the difference in the rights of people who have the right to move about almost everywhere in the world, who have the right to universal mobility. With a European or American passport there are few places in the world where one cannot enter. Those who have other types of passport, who have had the misfortune to be born in less favorable countries, have great difficulty moving about. So there is a certain hierarchy of the right to mobility.
A new claim: a freer world for movement
A claim is beginning to emerge: not only that of a world without borders, but also that of a democratization of borders. That is to say, allowing a larger number of people to move about more freely, under better conditions, and to limit the cases of irregular movement that are also places of death and persecution. I believe that this is an extremely important element, one that has great difficulty making headway in the minds of Europeans, because in fact the world they are constructing for themselves is an extremely protected world, very secured, where one runs the risk of shutting oneself up within one’s borders. There are also the borders of the labor market, for example. We have a protectionist system in Europe with European preference in employment. The risk is rather to isolate oneself. To isolate oneself, when Europe is in a world that is moving. There are 3 percent of people in a situation of mobility in the world, or about 200 million people. Europe is also in a situation of competition to welcome the numerous entrants and to stay in the race of creativity and competitiveness; if it continues, in the end, to assimilate its well-being to the idea of the securing of borders, there is a very strong risk of impoverishment.
Pl.: From this perspective we can put two or three historical questions to you. After all, you tend to say that the borders of Europe are borders that are enlarged and at the same time more restrictive than the old national borders… At the same time the question one might put to you is whether, in the end, it is worse than before, in your view, or whether, on the contrary, it is a stage toward something tending toward a continual enlargement. Because, fundamentally, I imagine that someone could object to you that, after all, it is better that the borders be extended to some twenty European countries than to countries isolated from one another… So is this a reproach you are addressing to European construction in general, or is it quite simply a way of saying that we are not at the end of the road of openness?
CdW.: I would tend, rather, to say that it is a reproach I make to the European Union. Because it is a ticket that nonetheless very much favors Europeans over non-Europeans. That is to say that the gap in status today between Europeans and non-Europeans is widening very strongly, and the borders have shifted. I began to work on migration a long time ago now, and when I began to work, most of the undocumented were Portuguese, for example. We have completely forgotten that people who had no passport under the Salazar regime, when they were poorly qualified, crossed the Pyrenees on foot. So the border was there. They were the undocumented. Whereas the Algerians had freedom of movement under the terms of the Évian Accords. Today it is the reverse. Those who come in, let us say, very uncomfortable situations are a certain number of Algerians, among others, who flee Islamism at home for the most part, and possibly employment difficulties, unemployment, and so on. But the Portuguese can move about. The border has shifted. It is no longer the same today, with the European system that strongly encourages free movement within its borders, even though such movement is weak. There are only one and a half million Europeans working in a European country other than their own. That is few. The most numerous are the Poles in the United Kingdom or in Ireland, but on the whole much was wagered on the internal mobility of Europeans, and it remains weak. At the same time they have many rights in this respect, whereas the others have few, and there an enormous gap is widening between the two. And this ruins the possibilities of a true Euro-Mediterranean dialogue, because those who can move about do so — namely those who have long-term residence permits or dual nationality, who are merchants, experts…, who already live on both sides of the Mediterranean in a, let us say, largely transnational space. The others are barricaded behind their borders. Europe tends to worsen the situation of non-Europeans. By contrast, it has greatly improved the status of all the people of the East who were shut up behind their borders and who now move about and sometimes work freely in Europe. But I am not sure that it is ready to enlarge indefinitely today, and one has the impression that a halt has nonetheless been brought to enlargement.
Pl.: Would you then make your own that humorous but real distinction that Zygmunt Bauman made about globalization in Globalization: The Human Consequences (Le coût humain de la mondialisation)? He divided people into two groups, the tourists and the vagabonds. For the one, everything was made easy, and for the other, everything was made difficult. So there would be a kind of accentuation of this phenomenon in Europe. Do you think that is the case — that is to say that, as you put it, the disappearance of borders has erected a barrier?
CdW.: Yes, with respect to non-Europeans, and at the same time it has also had the effect of diluting the categories of people who move about — that is to say that today the difference between the asylum seeker, the one looking for work, the one who comes as a tourist, the undocumented, is something blurred. And many people, over the course of their lives, are all four things at once. They have been undocumented; they may be asylum seekers; they may have looked for work; they may be settled migrants; they may also have been tourists; they may have been students without having the right to work. So in fact the categories are far more blurred than in the past, because Europe has become one of the greatest lands of immigration in the world. We tend to forget this today, and we receive people who not only come from all over the world but who are increasingly educated, increasingly urbanized, and among whom the border between the manual worker, the skilled worker, the asylum seeker… or the candidate for family reunification is increasingly blurred. And precisely according to opportunities, according to whether the border of papers is more or less strong, they will try this or that calling card to enter the European space.
Pl.: Should we deduce from your analysis that you would basically be in favor of an unlimited opening of the borders?
CdW.: Unlimited? Let us say that it is one of the utopias one can put forward. I believe that the border is an aggravation of fractures, a considerable aggravation of the inequalities of economic, political, and cultural development. So the border in a way provokes migration, because people are tempted, want to pass to the other side to see how things go — but I think it is a utopia that is making headway in terms of idea. That is to say that today there is now an arsenal of conventions, charters, and so on, that go in the direction of a greater right to mobility. For example, we had the United Nations charter on the rights of migrant workers in 1990. We also had the United Nations report of 2000 on replacement migration, which says that Europe could become a land of migration because it needs labor, because it is aging. Europe can no longer remain closed to migration. There is also the Global Forum on Migration that took place in Brussels in 2007 and that is in favor of a kind of global governance of migration, which says that migration must be considered a global public good. The mobility of human beings must be considered a global public good. That is an important element. This multilateral decision process is continuing. There will be a meeting in Manila, I believe, next September. So the right to mobility, Bauman’s ideas, the ideas of Étienne Balibar on the democratization of border-crossing, and also the ideas of jurists like Mme Chemillier-Gendreau, who says that people who move about have fewer rights than people who are sedentary — all of this is beginning to spread, and so it ultimately defeats all those who try to construct additional borders. The great loser is the nation-state. Because the State long wanted, and continues to want, to have its borders respected, to remain sovereign over its territory. Everything that is transnational — the crossing of borders as much as the networks that are built up on both sides of the borders, the migrant networks — is a kind of challenge brought to the nation-state. The State is the great loser of this mobility that is becoming generalized.
So the right to mobility is nonetheless beginning to be born as a fundamental human right, and I believe that this is an important message for borders: borders are increasingly called into question as a principle. The idea that the earth belongs to everyone and that all human beings have the right to move about is an idea of Kant’s that is taken up by Bauman, and an idea that continues to make its way today.
Pl.: What would you reply to the argument that an unlimited opening of borders would risk upsetting both the sociological and demographic equilibria of the receiving societies and those of the migrating societies?
CdW.: That is true. At the same time, the world has always been made through mobility. One must not forget the various exoduses, both in the religious texts of the written religions and in reality. The great migrations we have known in the more recent period since the Renaissance are a reality. So in fact migration has always existed. It will continue to exist. It is not because Europe has built borders that migration is going to cease. It will continue, and there are great movements ahead of us: thus Africa, an essentially rural continent, is in the process of urbanizing; in a century its population has gone from 30 percent urban to 70 percent urban. There too there is a phenomenon of transformation and of massive rural exodus that has consequences within the continent but also toward Europe. Asia is the greatest reservoir in the world in demographic terms. So there too one must expect a continuation of mobility on the part of this region. And today, indeed, we are not ready — far from it — for the abolition of borders, but perhaps we are ready to experiment, as we have done within Europe. Europe is the only place in the world where border control has been pooled and where the internal borders have been abolished. That is nonetheless an interesting place of experiment. It is perhaps also the occasion to experiment with other forms of mobility along its external borders, with neighboring countries, for example. And what is above all needed is to secure the mobility of human beings, to ensure that the journey, the search for an improvement of one’s existence, can take place under safer conditions. Today that is far from being the case, with the highly police-driven securing of border-crossing. I think that the idea of mobility is an idea that is making its way. Perhaps we will manage to do away with a certain number of taboos regarding border control in zones broader than the European space, notably with the countries of the Maghreb, for example, and with other regions as well, such as Turkey or Israel…, given that they are our neighbors and our partners. One cannot build a dialogue if there is no mobility on both sides.
Pl.: Do you think that this barrier is due to the twofold problem of the rise of unemployment in Europe and of demographic pressure?
CdW.: There is both. Let us say that unemployment was an argument. For a long time the borders were closed to labor immigration from 1974 onward in the European countries, because it was considered that there was competition between migration and the nationals who were unemployed. It was realized that this was a false equation, since the sectors that continue to draw migrants are not sectors that much attract nationals — that is to say that in all the European countries there is a coexistence of an unemployment rate that holds more or less steady with a fringe of sectoral migration in employment niches that are not much invested by unemployed nationals. So we have a very segmented labor market. The places where migrants go to work, especially if they are undocumented, are not the sectors coveted by unemployed nationals. So we have a kind of complementarity, even though at the margin there are phenomena of competition. The argument of competition no longer counts for much in this respect. By contrast, what has replaced this argument is security. September 11, terrorism — which has also struck in Europe — becomes a powerful element for justifying the security approach to border-crossing. And then the other argument, in my view, is the dimension of the welfare state. The European countries are relatively welfare-state countries, each conceived, through a kind of solidarity among the populations that make it up, as a kind of social State. Many Europeans cannot bear to share with newcomers: they already expressed as much at the time of German reunification. For example, the people of West Germany did not want to pay the pensions of the East Germans. The same argument for the new entrants from Eastern Europe a few years ago, before 2004. And now it is the same argument invoked not only with respect to the undocumented but also to non-Europeans, when it is said that they are costly, that one is not going to pay contributions for these people who have just arrived, who frequent the hospitals too much: the welfare state is today a very strong argument against immigration. I was also forgetting the competition on the labor market of the skilled. That is an important border…
Pl.: Fundamentally, playing devil’s advocate a little, does the hypothesis of a massive migration entirely freed into the European countries not risk causing the equilibrium of the social-protection system to collapse — precisely the social equilibrium on which it rests? If there are five or six or seven million additional migrants in a few years, not all of them will obviously find work. Is there not, nonetheless, a risk run both by the receiving country and even, I would say, by the immigrants themselves? Because what does it mean to integrate under such conditions if one quite simply does not have the means to provide for the needs of those one welcomes?
CdW.: Yes, the capacity for integration, as one says, of the receiving societies is indeed a very important argument. At the same time, what one observes is that the more people have statuses that allow them to move about, the less they settle. This migration is an element, I would not say of development, but of greater prosperity in the countries of departure. This was already observed in the East, and it is sometimes observed in the South when people have long-term residence permits, multiple-entry visas, dual nationality, as it were. Many people today do not necessarily aspire to settle. They aspire to settle all the less in that, on the one hand, they have a hope that things will get better at home — this is the case for the countries of the East — or in that, on the other hand, they build kinds of bridges between the European countries and home. For example, today we have many transnational and entirely legal economic networks between India and this or that European country, notably the United Kingdom. We have the same thing for China, with a very powerful economic diaspora. Those who can move about are those who have papers, prosperity, networks, information, and so on. So it is rather elitist. We have the same thing for the Maghreb: there exist quantities of transnational economic and commercial networks between Marseille, Algiers, and Tunis for people who have papers — that is to say people who have multiple-entry visas, ten-year residence permits automatically renewable, dual nationality. What one observes is that the more borders are open, the more people move about. The more they are closed, the more people settle. Because they cannot leave and come back. Many people today, in a somewhat generalized globalization, aspire to move, to settle into mobility as a way of life. Take the example of the people of the East today, who nonetheless are not at all wealthy people — the example of the Romanians who settle into mobility as a way of life. That is to say that they are here and there permanently. There is a form of dual belonging, of co-presence. They settle into mobility as a way of life because the borders are fairly easy to cross now for them, because they have papers, because they can, through their work in the West, improve their situation in the East — and one can imagine that if it were like this for the South, one would also have many more situations of co-presence than one has today with the South, where the sedentary people are for many of them people who cannot move about, that is to say who have problems of residence, of papers.
Pl.: So, as was done before, people come to work: the family stays at its place of work for ten or fifteen years and then returns home…
CdW.: Exactly! We have many cases of this type: even the African merchants, for example. If you take the train between Paris and Rome, it is full of African merchants who have permanently established a kind of commercial niche between France, Italy, and Senegal, for example, and they move about permanently because they have merchant residence permits that allow them to do so; they have settled into a mobile way of life. So the closing of borders has the effect of braking mobility, and since mobility is a form of adjustment of the great economic, social, cultural, and political fractures, if one closes the borders, one also brakes these modes of adjustment.
Pl.: All in all, if we understand you, you have the impression that the essential thrust of Schengen, in the broad sense of the term, is oriented rather toward braking arrivals from the outside than toward facilitating movement on the inside…
CdW.: The effect of Schengen is more significant in the dimension that was initially considered secondary, which was the closing of the external borders. Much was hoped for in 1985, when this experimental system of the internal mobility of Europeans was put in place, and it was realized that this mobility was not so great after all, because it was observed that, for people to be mobile, there again they need networks — that is to say that someone who is very poorly qualified, who speaks only one language, who has a very limited local network, will live better off unemployment at home, doing odd jobs here and there and living “at his grandmother’s,” than if he goes to look for work far away, where he has no support, no resource. He does not speak the language. So for him the cost of mobility will be very high. If someone is very highly qualified, he can indeed afford the luxury of moving, and he will draw a benefit from it. But the least endowed are the least mobile. That is what one observes today in Europe.
Pl.: In terms of figures, for example — let us say after ten years under the regime of the Schengen Accords, in which about twenty-four countries now take part — has the number of expulsions, of refusals of residence permits, if one compares it with the earlier period, really increased a great deal, or have things, in your view, remained as before? In other words, do these accords form rather a barrier to entry, or have they engendered more expulsions? Has this increased the charter flights, to use a common expression, or reinforced the barbed wire at the entrance to Europe?
CdW.: Let us say that it is hard to compare things, because we were fewer as Europeans. Things take on scale with the number of countries concerned. But it is true that today we have a multiplication of this policy of deterrence — through the grouped flights, for example, through the policies that consist in filtering at the borders in the waiting zones of the airports, and then with the detention centers… Indeed the security dimension has more and more instruments. Is it effective? That is another subject. But it is true that there is a multiplication of the security instruments that one witnesses in Europe, with increasingly substantial means, and at the same time with a certain hypocrisy, because at the same time one lets a clandestine immigration filter through that one knows one needs on the labor market. We have a very strong display policy, stronger than in the past, in border control, to satisfy a certain public opinion in the European countries. At the same time the result is not as effective as is claimed, because, on the one hand, the migrants have a determination to cross the borders no doubt stronger than the European countries have to close them. They are all great entrepreneurs in a way, entrepreneurs of themselves, of their own lives. They consider that they have nothing to lose. So they are very determined. On the other hand, the means that are allocated, which are growing, are not commensurate with the cross-border mobilities of today, which come from all of Africa, let us say down to the equator for example, and from a part of Asia. Indeed the pressure is stronger, and there is a certain hypocrisy, because one knows that if one let no undocumented person through, sectors of the economy would be severely stricken, because there are increasingly strong needs in the critical sectors.
Pl.: If we come a little to European citizenship… in one of your texts of some years ago you insisted a great deal on the fact that to create a true European citizenship there is a whole work of fabrication: it is necessary to have this sense of belonging through culture, through history, through languages. And how do you see this current dynamic? Do you currently see it developing?
CdW.: The process is fairly slow to take shape. Now, the nation-state was not made in a day. There is nonetheless a certain inability of Europe to stage itself. And European citizenship is also about making everyone aware — not only those who have a European passport but all those who live on the territory of Europe — that they are stakeholders in one and the same adventure. We no doubt do not have the talent our predecessors had for staging national festivals. Today Europe is little visible. There have been very good initiatives: the European anthem, the euro, the flag; there is the Museum of Europe in Brussels, which is very successful. But at the same time we have difficulty creating a kind of collective imaginary. There is a deficit of collective imaginary for the European idea, which is fairly striking. We have difficulty building a common European history. There are still many difficulties in this respect, especially when one addresses a population that is increasingly diverse. One must not only teach Europe to Europeans but also to those who live on the territory of Europe.
So there too it is more complex, and the risk of the enterprise is to construct Europe in a way turned inward, for Europeans, but in such a way that this construction of European identity isolates the others still further as non-Europeans. One can be at once inclusive, so that Europeans feel something in common among themselves that differentiates them from the rest of the world in their common history and their common identity; and at the same time one must also be open to the other, who is part of Europe because he lives on European territory. So that is a fairly delicate construction, one that is made on the acceptance of diversity, of multiculturalism, and that must be fairly inclusive, with a staging of Europe much stronger than the one we have today.
Pl.: You have just evoked multiculturalism, with the weakening of the nation-state and, conversely, the development of all sorts of regionalisms: does this not, on the contrary, call into question all these possibilities, such as multiculturalism? Does this not call into question a certain European identity, a certain citizenship? Is there a process working in the opposite direction, as it were?
CdW.: It is a problem of dosage. That is to say that beyond a certain point communitarianism is so strong that people no longer see any borders other than those of the belonging in which they have defined themselves. People settle into a reclusive identity that does not open them toward the outside. Europe is an open identity. So beyond a certain point — I take the example of Kurds in Germany, where they watch only Kurdish television, speak only Kurdish, live solely among themselves: that makes for little openness to the European idea. Other cultures are perhaps more open than that to Europe. It is indeed a problem of dosage. If too large a place is left to multiculturalism, it risks pushing toward a form of identity enclosure. Multiculturalism is good because it makes one aware of the cultural diversity of Europe but, if it is a pretext for rigid and almost hostile identity constructions, with new internal borders, then it becomes very serious, and one is very far from European unity.
Pl.: How is the problem of languages to be managed?
CdW.: There too it is one of Europe’s difficulties. At the same time, diversity is the history of Europe, it is also its richness. So Europe must also know how to build its identity on this diversity.
Pl.: One does not know of many empires that, in one way or another, did not modify the language. There is, however, Austria-Hungary, or the Ottoman Empire, and even then…
CdW.: Yes, there were nonetheless great multicultural empires. In the past Europe governed little. There is room for national identities.
Pl.: In the end the Schengen Accords, which at the outset were experienced and conceived rather to facilitate movement in Europe (visas were abolished, for example), ended up above all making entry into Europe difficult…
Stefan Zweig said long ago, in The World of Yesterday (Le monde d’hier), that the time was far off when, before the Great War, one moved about Europe without a passport. There is a kind of return. And now the borders that were abolished toward the inside have established themselves toward the outside…
CdW.: Yes. Exactly. We are at the opposite of what Voltaire said in the Philosophical Dictionary (Dictionnaire philosophique) to the sovereigns of his time: “Instead of forbidding your subjects to leave your territories, on the contrary, allow them to leave.” Today we are in the inverse situation. Almost all of Europe is now open on the inside, and for leaving — including Albania — but it has become more and more difficult to enter it. So one can leave a territory but one can scarcely enter elsewhere. It is altogether the inverse of what existed 150 years ago.
Pl.: Thank you, Catherine de Wenden.