//features//
Spring 2017
Rethinking Questions of Belonging
An Interview with Seyla Benhabib
Matt Landes
The international community is at a crossroads. Debilitating civil wars in the Middle East and Africa and an accompanying refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions has led to a rise in nationalist sentiments in the United States and Europe. These developments have put international law and senses of homelessness under the microscope.
Given these conditions, it only made sense for The Current to reach out to one of today’s leading critical theorists who has written extensively on the rights of others and transnational law, Professor Seyla Benhabib. She is currently the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and spent the past year as a Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and as a Senior Scholar in Residence at Columbia Law School’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Matt Landes interviewed Professor Benhabib to hear her thoughts on the various crises and ethnonationalist movements flowering around the world, as well as her reflections on Jewish identity during this turbulent time. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Matt Landes: Where is sovereignty right now? Should it go back to the nation-state or should entities like the EU double down on their authority despite recent political and economic hiccups?
Professor Benhabib: I think that we should perhaps begin with trying to understand what sovereignty means. The best way to think about it would be to distinguish between internal and external sovereignty. Internal sovereignty means that there is a designated public authority that has the highest jurisdictional authority over the recognized, established boundaries of a territorial entity. That is a very abstract public law understanding of what constitutes sovereignty. External sovereignty means that this entity has certain privileges and immunities in that other states accept the jurisdiction of that authority as binding upon the citizens of residents of that territory—the kind of mutual recognition that states have to show to each others’ laws. Another aspect of external sovereignty is the principle of the viability of borders, however those are defined. And there are many states in the world that have either never achieved that condition of being able to defend their borders nor is there international agreement on the borders themselves, as is the case of Israel. These are idealized structures—there is always conflict as to whether they are recognized or as to how much real authority an entity can exercise.
So sovereignty implies both recognized authority and capacity. You may have recognized authority but not have the state capacity. Or you have the state capacity—that is, you can de facto control a country, like with Russia in Eastern Ukraine—but you may not be internationally recognized to do so. All sorts of permutations are possible. Since the Second World War and with the emergence of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and increasingly what I call “the emergence of a transnational human rights regime,” the states of the world, whether nation-states, federal states, or small states have bound themselves voluntarily by certain agreements. There is a whole architecture of the international world that has emerged. And when we talk about sovereignty and reactions of the nation-state against sovereignty and so on, first of all we have to understand what we are looking at: the “society of states” where states have bound themselves to various degrees to international and transnational agreements. To make this a little concrete: in the United States, an international covenant of human rights such as the Genocide Convention, for example, needs Senate ratification, whereas in some countries international law automatically becomes part of domestic law as in The Netherlands and South Africa. The United States is complicated––we did not ratify the Genocide Convention that was passed in 1949 until 1988 because the senators of southern states kept objecting with the fear that southern slavery would be condemned as a form of genocide.
The tug between national and domestic interests and international law is an old story. But this whole situation in a sense makes us think of Gulliver’s strings. The Lilliputians have pinned down Gulliver to the ground with all these strings and attachments of international and transnational law. I’m only talking about human rights law here, but consider international trade and environmental agreements, administrative law, et cetera as well. So I think it is naive to think that somehow we can go back to a model of sovereignty that has basically never existed—even the 17th century didn’t correspond to this—and that we can just escape international law and obligations. So, what we see right now is a tug of war between the demands of international and transnational law and sovereign states—particularly sovereign hegemons like the United States. But there is no way to escaping this architecture of the society of states: we can change some aspects, we can bend it here or there, but no state can be part of this world society of states and function without being a part of international and transnational law in some aspects. As Wittgenstein says, “an image holds us captive,” and the image that we have of states is of these individual billiard balls clashing against each other—and that is nonsense. The billiard balls are rather on strings that are drawn in various directions.
ML: Despite these strings you mentioned and the transnational laws that are not going anywhere and that states need in order to exist, there is still this increased sense of nationalism and ethnonationalism. Is this resistance to transnational and international law a fad that will go away? If it goes away, will it be due to the more entrenched necessity that you were just talking about?
SB: I have given you a static picture that is a kind of public law picture. Now let’s put economics, politics, and culture back into this picture because there is always a conflict of interest. What has happened in the last 20 to 30 years or so is that we have entered a new phase of economic globalization. People tend to confuse the transnational legal order with economic globalization—these are not the same. Sometimes they enable each other and sometimes they are in conflict with one another. But at the moment what is happening is a reaction against both economic globalization and some aspects of transnational law. Let’s take it one at a time.
Economic globalization and in particular the entry of India and China into the world market, has created enormous winners and losers. Most economists agree that looked at as a globe, worldwide poverty has decreased because of rising standards of living in India and China, which is not the same for many African countries. This means, however, that even if global inequality has decreased in some measure, intra-national inequality has increased. So, inequality within nation-states themselves has increased. And the United States is among leading nations of the world in terms of unequal income distribution. People who are the losers of this process are understandably angry. Think of the loss of good jobs and ways of life in the Rust Belt. Michael Moore told us much before the last presidential election what was happening in vast parts of the country and what this might lead to politically, though he hoped it wouldn’t. The same is true in the United Kingdom. I just came back from two months in Cambridge, and the communities that voted for Brexit are basically the losers in old industrial towns. And then I should add that there is a big generational divide. The generation in the United States and the United Kingdom who elected Trump and voted for Brexit are predominantly 50 years and older. I’m not sure if this is equally true for Marine Le Pen supporters in France. What we have is a situation where segments of the population are saying “what has happened to us, to our jobs, to our ways of life?” And that is a justifiable claim.
Then there are other forms of ethnonationalism, showing up in countries such as Hungary and Poland that are beneficiaries of the European Union. There is no commensuration between the ethnonationalism in Hungary and Poland and the gains that they have had by being members of the EU. There are some economic grievances on the part of small nations like Hungary and a sense of losing control over immigration. In Poland there is a sense of “losing identity.” But there is also a lot of simply irresponsible, stupid, demagogic politics. I’m not going to mince my words about this because I think that people are being promised solutions by these nationalist movements that are simply vacuous.
Obviously we on the Left have failed to explain to people what is going on and what is the way forward. I felt completely disillusioned by the Labour party in Britain that has sucked up to the nationalists. I thought that Labour would have a kind of democratic, social vision of where Europe could go, but they have caved in as well.
ML: It’s a pretty bleak picture you are painting. Even the left has caved in––the vacuous nationalist promises of the far-right are taking ahold. What then do we do? The left can’t keep caving in. So do they change their platform? Do they need to lecture more? What is it?
SB: (Laughs) I’m not really painting a bleak picture, I think that I am actually just trying to say it as is, because we are in an extremely difficult situation and these right-wing movements and regimes are feeding off of each other. I’ve talked about Europe, I’ve talked about the United Kingdom. But look at what’s happened in Turkey, look at what’s happening in India with Modi, look at what’s happening in the Philippines. We are in some kind of cycle of the emergence of what I call “autocratic presidential regimes.” And we have to try and break out of that cycle.
I’m not as pessimistic as I may sound at all; I’m critical. I’m very impressed with the United States’ resistance to Trump. I went and demonstrated with hundreds of thousands in New York in January. This was tremendous. One of the slogans that I liked best was “What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like!” I thought that was a fantastic slogan. We need to proceed at all fronts. These are global trends and there is room for resistance. My job as an academic and as an intellectual is to try and explain the complexity of the world and dismantle the illusions of nationalism and ethnonationalism while admitting democratic grievances.
On the other hand, as a citizen I go out onto the streets. In terms of institutional resistance right now, our judiciary has been unbelievable. Frankly, I didn’t expect it to put up such a fight against Donald Trump. So you have to start fighting at all levels. I don’t just place faith anymore in the Democratic party alone. I think the Democratic party itself is implicated in some of the blind neoliberalization. They have turned a deaf ear to questions of economic inequality. They haven’t been active enough. I think we have learned a tremendous amount from Bernie Sanders and we can’t forget those lessons. It is just amazing that ten million people in this country voted for an aging Jewish socialist with a Brooklyn accent. I think it’s something to be celebrated. You have to put your shoulder to the wheel wherever you can.
ML: So we have just been talking about why people feel so left behind. Do you think that from academia and critical theory specifically where you and some of your colleagues have been focusing on law there needs to be shift back to the more classical strains of critical theory that focus on sociology and political economy in order to give light to the economic issues that people are facing?
SB: I think we need to integrate these pictures. I don’t call my approach legalistic. I started to work on these issues because I was trying to understand something about the architecture of the society of states that we are in. There were always various angles within critical theory. Theorists such as Franz Neumann who taught at Columbia, as well as Otto Kirchheimer who taught at the New School, were people who focused on legal structures of the totalitarian state, the ideas of class compromise in the 1930’s, et cetera, whereas Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse had a more social theoretical and philosophical perspective. For me these are not mutually exclusive. My colleagues who work on social psychology or the social structure of modern societies also have to pay attention to the world beyond the state as well. We should not knock each other down in critical theory, we should try to integrate our approaches. Neumann and Kirchheimer gave us some of the best analyses of the totalitarian state. Hannah Arendt’s work The Origins of Totalitarianism is quite indebted to what Franz Neumann called the dual structure of the state. Just trying to understand people’s sense of loss of dignity, loss of economic self-worth, loss of recognition and the like is not enough. I respect Professor Axel Honneth, who teaches at Columbia in the Fall term and his thoughts on the importance of recognition, but I also think you need to move back and forth between the small picture and the big picture, between national societies and the world of states in which national societies are embedded.
In my work on critical theory I distinguish two dimensions and call the first “explanatory diagnostic.” You have to provide an explanation of the structures of the world that we are in. And my own work in recent years has focused on the legal structures of this world. But there is also the dimension of “anticipatory utopian” critique, namely the critique of the current conditions and the promise of a better world through some kind of projection of justice and the good life. We have to articulate that as well.
ML: I would like to shift our discussion towards Jewish identity and Israel that your upcoming volume addresses. First, what is this volume and why are you so interested in discussing Judaism and exile right now?
SB: That is a good question. This volume consists of a collection of essays called Exile, Statelessness, Migration: Jewish Themes in Political Thought. I have chapters on Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Shklar, the Eichmann controversy, Butler, and Isaiah Berlin. The volume emerged out of my own sense that in the last ten years I had been nibbling in various disparate writings at questions of Jewish identity and Jewish historical themes. I had been working on Arendt, Adorno, and Benjamin for quite some time and then I wrote a critique of Judith Butler’s book, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. I was struck by the way in which the theme of exile was sometimes explicitly thematized in the writings of these theorists. They were all refugees and migrants. Since my previous work has also dealt with the rights of others —refugees and exiles—I started looking at these thinkers from the standpoint of the experiences of exile and being refugees and to see how this was reflected in their work. While this is true of them biographically it’s not so obvious when you look at the intellectual content of the work. Hannah Arendt who wrote explicitly about the right to have rights and the condition of statelessness is an exception in this regard.
And why these themes now? We are facing the most important refugee crisis in the world since the Second World War. The number of refugees and displaced persons has reached 65 million—the highest number on record. So the reflection and experiences of the thinkers named above do not lose their actuality. Of course, they were persecuted for their religion and ethnicity, which is also sometimes the basis for the persecution of today’s refugees, but not always. They are very often refugees created by conditions of civil war, state collapse and the like. In the various chapters of the book I go back and forth between the condition of today’s refugees and the condition of German Jews (they were not all German Jews since Judith Shklar and Isaiah Berlin were born in Riga, Latvia). I am writing a kind of intellectual history with a kind of systematic angle in order to illuminate the varieties of Jewish refugee experience. Today the important issue is to create that ethical and political space for rethinking questions of belonging.
ML: On that note of belonging, I think it is safe to say that most young American Jews today definitely feel like they belong in America. You can just look at the high level of involvement in the government of American Jews in both the Obama and Trump administrations and also just in general society. Now, contrast that with the increasing alienation they feel with the Israeli government via the entrenched military occupation that is reaching its 50th year. I would dare to say that there is almost no feeling of exile or longing for Israel the way there used to be among American Jews. Would you agree with something along those lines?
SB: Yes, but the theme of exile is almost a metaphysical condition of modernity. It would be too simple to say that you solved that sense of exile, galut, simply by making aliyah and going to Israel and belonging to a nation-state. This was the Zionist vision, and I think it was a narrow solution to a much broader phenomenon upon which these thinkers reflected and cannot be resolved just by the idea of aliyah to Israel. These are different registers. In the one case you are talking about a more fundamental spiritual and ethical dimension of being or not being at home in the world. On the other hand you are talking about a political movement and a political ideology.
It is an aspect of the human condition in late modernity that we have to live with multiple identities and find a way to negotiate among them. The Jews are not the only exilic or diasporic people; look at the vast Indian and Chinese communities all over the world. Portions of the world’s population who live in this diasporic condition and with multiplicities of cultural attachment and allegiances has increased. And why not? That is just fine; if you want to get rid of it you end up with the kind of ethnonationalist garbage that the Hungarian government is trying to feed its people. Wherever they arise, a lot of the ethnonationalisms have an Anti-Semitic subtext. Multiple identities, loyalties, forms of belonging, are the condition of late modernity and they are to be celebrated and not denigrated.
You have a parallel discussion of this in Israel about whether or not Zionist identities were constructed simply from the perspective of Western European Jewry. Jews of Polish, German, and Russian origin dominated in the Zionist movement. Just go to Hebrew University on Mount Scopus and you will see the pictures of all the German Jewish academics hanging on the walls. But what about the place of Mizrahi Jews, the story of the Jews from Latin America and from other non-Arab Muslim countries of the Middle East, such as Turkey where I was born? The whole question of how you can construct an Israeli Jewish identity out of this multiplicity faces them there as well.
If you want to talk about Israeli politics in the narrow sense, of course, Israel has been sleepwalking. There is no territorial settlement, there are no frontiers. Then there is the question of whether Zionism is a form of settler-colonialism: I say yes and no—it certainly had elements of that but it wasn’t just that. I disagree with Butler and many others about that. The Zionist project was an extension of the European disaster and of the extermination of European Jewry into the Middle East. To forget that, as so many today seem to want to do, is wrong. The founding of the state of Israel was and remains crucial to the Jewish peoples of the world, wherever they are. And since I am not a nationalist but a cosmopolitan social democrat, I do not advocate that all Jews should return to Zion and live in Israel. In that sense, I am not a Zionist; I am a post-Zionist, in that I accept the historicity of Israel and believe in the right of the people of Israel to self-determination. The question is: what form should that self-determination take.
The first step is to withdraw from the occupied territories and to put an end to constant land usurpation and the destruction of the property and territory of Palestinians. I really don’t have anything new to say in that respect other than what we already know, namely that what has been taking place in Israel in the last almost half century, is the formation of de facto binational society, in which one nation still has second-class citizenship. The question is whether we can we move towards a truly pluralist democratic state. So you can either have a democratic state of all peoples in Israel, including the Jews, the Christian and Muslim Palestinians, and an increasing number of third-country nationals and refugees from Africa and Asia, who want Israeli citizenship, or you can continue the policy of militarized apartheid and of the deeply polarized state that you have now.
I would only say that there may be something like an intermediate solution. Calls for the end of the state of Israel are wrong-headed—I don’t think that this is going to happen and I don’t think that it ought to happen. But if land usurpation and settlement construction end, if there is official recognition of the Palestinian Authority rather than trying to manipulate them, which the Israeli government is constantly trying to do, if the Palestinians recognize Israel legally, maybe there can be some settlement and power sharing over airspace, water resources, et cetera. There is just a hell of a lot that needs to be done and that can be done, beyond this wrong-headed apocalyptic notion that the state of Israel must be destroyed. We need to come up with some kind of vision of a more integrated, cooperative, federated Israel and Palestine. My sense is that the Palestinians in the West Bank at least know that the destruction of Israel in their charter is a non-starter. The real difficulty is with Palestinian movements like Hamas in Gaza who are caught between Egypt and Israel on the one hand, and who receive funds and support from Iran as well as Saudi Arabia on the other.
So (laughs), Kerry’s hair grew whiter and whiter as he dealt with this situation and I don’t think that Jared Kushner will be able to accomplish very much, thank you. We need to think of more creative solutions. I always go back to Hannah Arendt—whom I know the Zionists hate but they never quite understood what she was saying—who said in the late 1940s that you need a kind of Israel that will be part of a federation of Mediterranean peoples. She included the Turks, the Greeks, the Egyptians, maybe even the Italians in this idea of a Mediterranean peoples. At the moment when the Middle East is in the throes of such massive destruction this seems so utopian but we need to think beyond the murderous politics of nation-states as well as ethnic tribes tearing at each other. I am always for integrated federative solutions because as every international relations scholar will also tell you “peace is a collective good” and can never be achieved just bilaterally. You can see how my interests in international law and my perspective on Israel come together. They are not mutually exclusive—one leads into the other.
Given these conditions, it only made sense for The Current to reach out to one of today’s leading critical theorists who has written extensively on the rights of others and transnational law, Professor Seyla Benhabib. She is currently the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University and spent the past year as a Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and as a Senior Scholar in Residence at Columbia Law School’s Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Matt Landes interviewed Professor Benhabib to hear her thoughts on the various crises and ethnonationalist movements flowering around the world, as well as her reflections on Jewish identity during this turbulent time. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Matt Landes: Where is sovereignty right now? Should it go back to the nation-state or should entities like the EU double down on their authority despite recent political and economic hiccups?
Professor Benhabib: I think that we should perhaps begin with trying to understand what sovereignty means. The best way to think about it would be to distinguish between internal and external sovereignty. Internal sovereignty means that there is a designated public authority that has the highest jurisdictional authority over the recognized, established boundaries of a territorial entity. That is a very abstract public law understanding of what constitutes sovereignty. External sovereignty means that this entity has certain privileges and immunities in that other states accept the jurisdiction of that authority as binding upon the citizens of residents of that territory—the kind of mutual recognition that states have to show to each others’ laws. Another aspect of external sovereignty is the principle of the viability of borders, however those are defined. And there are many states in the world that have either never achieved that condition of being able to defend their borders nor is there international agreement on the borders themselves, as is the case of Israel. These are idealized structures—there is always conflict as to whether they are recognized or as to how much real authority an entity can exercise.
So sovereignty implies both recognized authority and capacity. You may have recognized authority but not have the state capacity. Or you have the state capacity—that is, you can de facto control a country, like with Russia in Eastern Ukraine—but you may not be internationally recognized to do so. All sorts of permutations are possible. Since the Second World War and with the emergence of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and increasingly what I call “the emergence of a transnational human rights regime,” the states of the world, whether nation-states, federal states, or small states have bound themselves voluntarily by certain agreements. There is a whole architecture of the international world that has emerged. And when we talk about sovereignty and reactions of the nation-state against sovereignty and so on, first of all we have to understand what we are looking at: the “society of states” where states have bound themselves to various degrees to international and transnational agreements. To make this a little concrete: in the United States, an international covenant of human rights such as the Genocide Convention, for example, needs Senate ratification, whereas in some countries international law automatically becomes part of domestic law as in The Netherlands and South Africa. The United States is complicated––we did not ratify the Genocide Convention that was passed in 1949 until 1988 because the senators of southern states kept objecting with the fear that southern slavery would be condemned as a form of genocide.
The tug between national and domestic interests and international law is an old story. But this whole situation in a sense makes us think of Gulliver’s strings. The Lilliputians have pinned down Gulliver to the ground with all these strings and attachments of international and transnational law. I’m only talking about human rights law here, but consider international trade and environmental agreements, administrative law, et cetera as well. So I think it is naive to think that somehow we can go back to a model of sovereignty that has basically never existed—even the 17th century didn’t correspond to this—and that we can just escape international law and obligations. So, what we see right now is a tug of war between the demands of international and transnational law and sovereign states—particularly sovereign hegemons like the United States. But there is no way to escaping this architecture of the society of states: we can change some aspects, we can bend it here or there, but no state can be part of this world society of states and function without being a part of international and transnational law in some aspects. As Wittgenstein says, “an image holds us captive,” and the image that we have of states is of these individual billiard balls clashing against each other—and that is nonsense. The billiard balls are rather on strings that are drawn in various directions.
ML: Despite these strings you mentioned and the transnational laws that are not going anywhere and that states need in order to exist, there is still this increased sense of nationalism and ethnonationalism. Is this resistance to transnational and international law a fad that will go away? If it goes away, will it be due to the more entrenched necessity that you were just talking about?
SB: I have given you a static picture that is a kind of public law picture. Now let’s put economics, politics, and culture back into this picture because there is always a conflict of interest. What has happened in the last 20 to 30 years or so is that we have entered a new phase of economic globalization. People tend to confuse the transnational legal order with economic globalization—these are not the same. Sometimes they enable each other and sometimes they are in conflict with one another. But at the moment what is happening is a reaction against both economic globalization and some aspects of transnational law. Let’s take it one at a time.
Economic globalization and in particular the entry of India and China into the world market, has created enormous winners and losers. Most economists agree that looked at as a globe, worldwide poverty has decreased because of rising standards of living in India and China, which is not the same for many African countries. This means, however, that even if global inequality has decreased in some measure, intra-national inequality has increased. So, inequality within nation-states themselves has increased. And the United States is among leading nations of the world in terms of unequal income distribution. People who are the losers of this process are understandably angry. Think of the loss of good jobs and ways of life in the Rust Belt. Michael Moore told us much before the last presidential election what was happening in vast parts of the country and what this might lead to politically, though he hoped it wouldn’t. The same is true in the United Kingdom. I just came back from two months in Cambridge, and the communities that voted for Brexit are basically the losers in old industrial towns. And then I should add that there is a big generational divide. The generation in the United States and the United Kingdom who elected Trump and voted for Brexit are predominantly 50 years and older. I’m not sure if this is equally true for Marine Le Pen supporters in France. What we have is a situation where segments of the population are saying “what has happened to us, to our jobs, to our ways of life?” And that is a justifiable claim.
Then there are other forms of ethnonationalism, showing up in countries such as Hungary and Poland that are beneficiaries of the European Union. There is no commensuration between the ethnonationalism in Hungary and Poland and the gains that they have had by being members of the EU. There are some economic grievances on the part of small nations like Hungary and a sense of losing control over immigration. In Poland there is a sense of “losing identity.” But there is also a lot of simply irresponsible, stupid, demagogic politics. I’m not going to mince my words about this because I think that people are being promised solutions by these nationalist movements that are simply vacuous.
Obviously we on the Left have failed to explain to people what is going on and what is the way forward. I felt completely disillusioned by the Labour party in Britain that has sucked up to the nationalists. I thought that Labour would have a kind of democratic, social vision of where Europe could go, but they have caved in as well.
ML: It’s a pretty bleak picture you are painting. Even the left has caved in––the vacuous nationalist promises of the far-right are taking ahold. What then do we do? The left can’t keep caving in. So do they change their platform? Do they need to lecture more? What is it?
SB: (Laughs) I’m not really painting a bleak picture, I think that I am actually just trying to say it as is, because we are in an extremely difficult situation and these right-wing movements and regimes are feeding off of each other. I’ve talked about Europe, I’ve talked about the United Kingdom. But look at what’s happened in Turkey, look at what’s happening in India with Modi, look at what’s happening in the Philippines. We are in some kind of cycle of the emergence of what I call “autocratic presidential regimes.” And we have to try and break out of that cycle.
I’m not as pessimistic as I may sound at all; I’m critical. I’m very impressed with the United States’ resistance to Trump. I went and demonstrated with hundreds of thousands in New York in January. This was tremendous. One of the slogans that I liked best was “What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like!” I thought that was a fantastic slogan. We need to proceed at all fronts. These are global trends and there is room for resistance. My job as an academic and as an intellectual is to try and explain the complexity of the world and dismantle the illusions of nationalism and ethnonationalism while admitting democratic grievances.
On the other hand, as a citizen I go out onto the streets. In terms of institutional resistance right now, our judiciary has been unbelievable. Frankly, I didn’t expect it to put up such a fight against Donald Trump. So you have to start fighting at all levels. I don’t just place faith anymore in the Democratic party alone. I think the Democratic party itself is implicated in some of the blind neoliberalization. They have turned a deaf ear to questions of economic inequality. They haven’t been active enough. I think we have learned a tremendous amount from Bernie Sanders and we can’t forget those lessons. It is just amazing that ten million people in this country voted for an aging Jewish socialist with a Brooklyn accent. I think it’s something to be celebrated. You have to put your shoulder to the wheel wherever you can.
ML: So we have just been talking about why people feel so left behind. Do you think that from academia and critical theory specifically where you and some of your colleagues have been focusing on law there needs to be shift back to the more classical strains of critical theory that focus on sociology and political economy in order to give light to the economic issues that people are facing?
SB: I think we need to integrate these pictures. I don’t call my approach legalistic. I started to work on these issues because I was trying to understand something about the architecture of the society of states that we are in. There were always various angles within critical theory. Theorists such as Franz Neumann who taught at Columbia, as well as Otto Kirchheimer who taught at the New School, were people who focused on legal structures of the totalitarian state, the ideas of class compromise in the 1930’s, et cetera, whereas Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse had a more social theoretical and philosophical perspective. For me these are not mutually exclusive. My colleagues who work on social psychology or the social structure of modern societies also have to pay attention to the world beyond the state as well. We should not knock each other down in critical theory, we should try to integrate our approaches. Neumann and Kirchheimer gave us some of the best analyses of the totalitarian state. Hannah Arendt’s work The Origins of Totalitarianism is quite indebted to what Franz Neumann called the dual structure of the state. Just trying to understand people’s sense of loss of dignity, loss of economic self-worth, loss of recognition and the like is not enough. I respect Professor Axel Honneth, who teaches at Columbia in the Fall term and his thoughts on the importance of recognition, but I also think you need to move back and forth between the small picture and the big picture, between national societies and the world of states in which national societies are embedded.
In my work on critical theory I distinguish two dimensions and call the first “explanatory diagnostic.” You have to provide an explanation of the structures of the world that we are in. And my own work in recent years has focused on the legal structures of this world. But there is also the dimension of “anticipatory utopian” critique, namely the critique of the current conditions and the promise of a better world through some kind of projection of justice and the good life. We have to articulate that as well.
ML: I would like to shift our discussion towards Jewish identity and Israel that your upcoming volume addresses. First, what is this volume and why are you so interested in discussing Judaism and exile right now?
SB: That is a good question. This volume consists of a collection of essays called Exile, Statelessness, Migration: Jewish Themes in Political Thought. I have chapters on Adorno, Arendt, Benjamin, Shklar, the Eichmann controversy, Butler, and Isaiah Berlin. The volume emerged out of my own sense that in the last ten years I had been nibbling in various disparate writings at questions of Jewish identity and Jewish historical themes. I had been working on Arendt, Adorno, and Benjamin for quite some time and then I wrote a critique of Judith Butler’s book, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism. I was struck by the way in which the theme of exile was sometimes explicitly thematized in the writings of these theorists. They were all refugees and migrants. Since my previous work has also dealt with the rights of others —refugees and exiles—I started looking at these thinkers from the standpoint of the experiences of exile and being refugees and to see how this was reflected in their work. While this is true of them biographically it’s not so obvious when you look at the intellectual content of the work. Hannah Arendt who wrote explicitly about the right to have rights and the condition of statelessness is an exception in this regard.
And why these themes now? We are facing the most important refugee crisis in the world since the Second World War. The number of refugees and displaced persons has reached 65 million—the highest number on record. So the reflection and experiences of the thinkers named above do not lose their actuality. Of course, they were persecuted for their religion and ethnicity, which is also sometimes the basis for the persecution of today’s refugees, but not always. They are very often refugees created by conditions of civil war, state collapse and the like. In the various chapters of the book I go back and forth between the condition of today’s refugees and the condition of German Jews (they were not all German Jews since Judith Shklar and Isaiah Berlin were born in Riga, Latvia). I am writing a kind of intellectual history with a kind of systematic angle in order to illuminate the varieties of Jewish refugee experience. Today the important issue is to create that ethical and political space for rethinking questions of belonging.
ML: On that note of belonging, I think it is safe to say that most young American Jews today definitely feel like they belong in America. You can just look at the high level of involvement in the government of American Jews in both the Obama and Trump administrations and also just in general society. Now, contrast that with the increasing alienation they feel with the Israeli government via the entrenched military occupation that is reaching its 50th year. I would dare to say that there is almost no feeling of exile or longing for Israel the way there used to be among American Jews. Would you agree with something along those lines?
SB: Yes, but the theme of exile is almost a metaphysical condition of modernity. It would be too simple to say that you solved that sense of exile, galut, simply by making aliyah and going to Israel and belonging to a nation-state. This was the Zionist vision, and I think it was a narrow solution to a much broader phenomenon upon which these thinkers reflected and cannot be resolved just by the idea of aliyah to Israel. These are different registers. In the one case you are talking about a more fundamental spiritual and ethical dimension of being or not being at home in the world. On the other hand you are talking about a political movement and a political ideology.
It is an aspect of the human condition in late modernity that we have to live with multiple identities and find a way to negotiate among them. The Jews are not the only exilic or diasporic people; look at the vast Indian and Chinese communities all over the world. Portions of the world’s population who live in this diasporic condition and with multiplicities of cultural attachment and allegiances has increased. And why not? That is just fine; if you want to get rid of it you end up with the kind of ethnonationalist garbage that the Hungarian government is trying to feed its people. Wherever they arise, a lot of the ethnonationalisms have an Anti-Semitic subtext. Multiple identities, loyalties, forms of belonging, are the condition of late modernity and they are to be celebrated and not denigrated.
You have a parallel discussion of this in Israel about whether or not Zionist identities were constructed simply from the perspective of Western European Jewry. Jews of Polish, German, and Russian origin dominated in the Zionist movement. Just go to Hebrew University on Mount Scopus and you will see the pictures of all the German Jewish academics hanging on the walls. But what about the place of Mizrahi Jews, the story of the Jews from Latin America and from other non-Arab Muslim countries of the Middle East, such as Turkey where I was born? The whole question of how you can construct an Israeli Jewish identity out of this multiplicity faces them there as well.
If you want to talk about Israeli politics in the narrow sense, of course, Israel has been sleepwalking. There is no territorial settlement, there are no frontiers. Then there is the question of whether Zionism is a form of settler-colonialism: I say yes and no—it certainly had elements of that but it wasn’t just that. I disagree with Butler and many others about that. The Zionist project was an extension of the European disaster and of the extermination of European Jewry into the Middle East. To forget that, as so many today seem to want to do, is wrong. The founding of the state of Israel was and remains crucial to the Jewish peoples of the world, wherever they are. And since I am not a nationalist but a cosmopolitan social democrat, I do not advocate that all Jews should return to Zion and live in Israel. In that sense, I am not a Zionist; I am a post-Zionist, in that I accept the historicity of Israel and believe in the right of the people of Israel to self-determination. The question is: what form should that self-determination take.
The first step is to withdraw from the occupied territories and to put an end to constant land usurpation and the destruction of the property and territory of Palestinians. I really don’t have anything new to say in that respect other than what we already know, namely that what has been taking place in Israel in the last almost half century, is the formation of de facto binational society, in which one nation still has second-class citizenship. The question is whether we can we move towards a truly pluralist democratic state. So you can either have a democratic state of all peoples in Israel, including the Jews, the Christian and Muslim Palestinians, and an increasing number of third-country nationals and refugees from Africa and Asia, who want Israeli citizenship, or you can continue the policy of militarized apartheid and of the deeply polarized state that you have now.
I would only say that there may be something like an intermediate solution. Calls for the end of the state of Israel are wrong-headed—I don’t think that this is going to happen and I don’t think that it ought to happen. But if land usurpation and settlement construction end, if there is official recognition of the Palestinian Authority rather than trying to manipulate them, which the Israeli government is constantly trying to do, if the Palestinians recognize Israel legally, maybe there can be some settlement and power sharing over airspace, water resources, et cetera. There is just a hell of a lot that needs to be done and that can be done, beyond this wrong-headed apocalyptic notion that the state of Israel must be destroyed. We need to come up with some kind of vision of a more integrated, cooperative, federated Israel and Palestine. My sense is that the Palestinians in the West Bank at least know that the destruction of Israel in their charter is a non-starter. The real difficulty is with Palestinian movements like Hamas in Gaza who are caught between Egypt and Israel on the one hand, and who receive funds and support from Iran as well as Saudi Arabia on the other.
So (laughs), Kerry’s hair grew whiter and whiter as he dealt with this situation and I don’t think that Jared Kushner will be able to accomplish very much, thank you. We need to think of more creative solutions. I always go back to Hannah Arendt—whom I know the Zionists hate but they never quite understood what she was saying—who said in the late 1940s that you need a kind of Israel that will be part of a federation of Mediterranean peoples. She included the Turks, the Greeks, the Egyptians, maybe even the Italians in this idea of a Mediterranean peoples. At the moment when the Middle East is in the throes of such massive destruction this seems so utopian but we need to think beyond the murderous politics of nation-states as well as ethnic tribes tearing at each other. I am always for integrated federative solutions because as every international relations scholar will also tell you “peace is a collective good” and can never be achieved just bilaterally. You can see how my interests in international law and my perspective on Israel come together. They are not mutually exclusive—one leads into the other.
//MATT LANDES is a junior in Columbia College and Features Editor of The Current. He can be reached at ml3587@columbia.edu.