1. Sandro Mezzadra teaches the History of
Contemporary Political Thought at the University of Bologna. He is an active
figure in the alternative globalisation movement in Italy, and has been
particularly involved in bringing the question of migration to the centre of
political struggle in that movement. Sandro is the author of works such as Diritto di fuga: Migrazioni, cittadinanza,
globalizzazione (2001) and (with Fabio Raimondi) Oltre Genova, oltre New York: Tesi sul movimento globale (2001). He
is also a member of the editorial collective of DeriveApprodi magazine, one of the chief venues in Italy for the
critical analysis of contemporary capitalism. We met in Bologna one foggy
January afternoon to discuss the global movement, migration, and border control
in Europe and Australia.
2. (Neilson) In your talk in the seminar
‘Diritto a migrare, diritto d’asilio’ at the European Social Forum you emphasized
that the question of migration had become a central concern for the global
movement in Italy. While the issue of migration had not been a primary concern
at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, it had emerged as a
fundamental question in the lead-up to the Firenze meetings, particularly in
the wake of the G8 protests in Genova. Can you describe how migration became a
central issue for the global movement, giving some detail about concurrent
developments in border control at the European level?
3. (Mezzadra) First it is
necessary to ask what shape the global movement has taken since the first
explosion in Seattle in late 1999. Clearly the central platform of the movement
has been the struggle against neoliberal capitalism, and in particular against
the large agencies of transnational governance such as the World Bank and the
World Trade Organization. I don’t want to deny the analytical importance of the
concept of neoliberalism, which serves to emphasize some of the central
transformations that capitalism has undergone in the past two decades.
Moreover, the ‘mobilizing power’ of the concept cannot be denied, since it has
played a central role in that process of ‘naming the enemy’ that is strategic
in the constitution of a social movement. Nevertheless, the critique of
neoliberalism, as exemplified in publications like Le Monde Diplomatique (very influential within the movement
itself), has tended to depict those who suffer the effects of globalisation in
the global south as mere victims, denying them a position as protagonists or
active social subjects in contemporary processes of global transformation. From
this perspective, migration becomes just one in a long line of catastrophes
occasioned by neoliberalism. And globalisation becomes a process that passes
over the heads of people, something that is inevitable and thus immune to
criticism from anything but a nostalgic point of view.
4. In the first two World
Social Forums held at Porto Alegre, this critique of neoliberalism took centre
stage. One of the consequences was that there were no workshops devoted
specifically to migration and almost all discussion of migration was filtered
through the dominant discourse of global economic devastation. But then
something important happened to alter this. At the protests against the G8
summit in Genova in July 2001, there was a large rally organized by migrants.
Although there had been migrant protests in Italy since the early 1990s, this
was the first encounter between the global movement and grassroots migrant
organizations. The rally was a big success and it resulted in a more or less
permanent mobilization against the Bossi-Fini laws (conditioning migrant
presence in Italy on the possession of a work contract), which were eventually
introduced by the centre right government in summer 2002. Characteristic of
this struggle was a high degree of migrant involvement. On 19 January 2002,
there was another huge self-organized migrant protest in Rome, between 100,000
and 150,000 people, undoubtedly the largest migrant action in Europe since the sans papiers demonstrations in Paris in
1996. And as preparations began for the European Social Forum, the question of
migration assumed a central position in our discussions and plans.
5. In planning the workshops
on migration at the European Social Forum, we insisted that it is necessary not
only to build a critique of the Europe of Maastrict (that is, of the
‘neoliberal’ principles which in 1991-1992 were established by the Maastricht
Treaty as foundations of the economic Europe) but also to build a critique of
the Europe of Schengen (that is, of the new ‘border regime’ whose institution
was promoted in 1985 by the Schengen Agreement on the free circulation of
European citizens and then fulfilled in the 1990s). In other words, we argued
that to conduct a struggle against the terms of European citizenship (as such a
thing takes shape) it is also necessary to question the borders that define
that citizenship. And we approached this very much as a matter of principle.
Looking at Europe through the lens of migration yields very different results
than looking at Europe through the lens of some different concept or
practice--e.g., neoliberalism. Throughout the 1990s, one of the characteristics
of migration politics at the European Union level was a growing harmonization
of nation-state policies and technologies of border control. But this has not
rendered the borders of the EU equal to those of the modern nation-state. The
question of European borders (and the confines of European citizenship) is
extremely complex.
6. (Neilson) Something of this complexity
becomes evident in the article by Enrica Rigo entitled ‘Lo spazio commune di
“libertà, sicurezza e giustizia”’ (2002) published in the latest issue of DeriveApprodi. Rigo describes how
agreements for expulsion between EU nations and so-called ‘safe third
countries’ are in turn supplemented by agreements between these ‘safe third
countries’ and nations further afield from the powerful Western European
states. For example, a migrant who enters Germany through Poland can be
expelled to Poland, which in turn has signed agreements with the Ukraine,
Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. This creates what Rigo calls ‘flows of
expulsion,’ which are partly determined by the subjective decisions of migrants
expelled from the EU.
7. (Mezzadra) This is an
interesting example of the complexity of European borders. Unlike the
institutional version of Europe (created through agreements such as those made
in Schengen and Dublin), the Europe of migratory flows is a global political
space, a space characterized by movements that continually decentralize or
provincialize Europe, to use an expression that has become popular in
postcolonial studies. Migratory movements throw into question the possibility of
identifying an inside and outside to Europe, which was essentially the purpose
of the Schengen and Dublin agreements. As Rigo shows, there is no simple
distinction between Europe’s inside and outside. Rather it is a matter of
degrees: Poland is less external to the EU than the Ukraine. In this sense, the
borders of the EU are much more flexible than those of the classical
nation-state, and this flexibility is directly proportional to that of
migratory movements themselves.
8. What is involved is really
a double movement. First, there are migratory flows that render the borders of
Europe porous, making it possible to see how much of Asia there is in Europe,
how much of Africa … how much of the world. Second, there are regulatory
movements that seek to govern these flows, to contain them within structures of
administration. And this means exporting technologies of border control outside
the official borders of the EU. For example, the border between Germany and
Poland is to date an external EU border, which has been continually forced by
migrants. But rather than seeking simply to reinforce this border, the German
authorities have involved Poland in its management. Having been identified as a
‘safe third country,’ Poland must accept all refugees and migrants expelled
from Germany that entered through its territory. But Poland has in turn
concluded a series of similar agreements, for example with the Ukraine. As a
result, there are now plans to construct detention centres in the Ukraine on
the German model, which already exist in Poland. The point is that this path of
expulsion--Germany, Poland, Ukraine--follows in reverse the path established by
the migrants themselves. Many Asian and African migrants (Latin Americans less
so) enter Germany through the Ukraine. In a certain sense, the migrants are in
control, since their movements establish this geographical route, relegating
the exclusionary measures to the status of a mere response.
9. (Neilson) In Australia too migratory
movements have established a new geography, leading to a certain ambivalence of
space. The Border Protection Act passed by the parliament in 2001 subtracts
certain territories from Australia as far as boat arrivals are concerned.
Consequently places like Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef become non-places of
a certain type, neither Australia nor not-Australia. Also, following the Tampa
incident of August 2001, the Australian government began to pay foreign
governments to establish detention centres on their territories: places like
the Pacific island of Nauru or New Guinea’s Manus Island. Administered by
private security firms, these offshore detention centres register a
transformation of sovereignty since, in a certain sense, what it is for sale in
these transactions is sovereignty itself. By contrast the relation between the
EU and say Poland or the Ukraine seems determined more by political power than
by market relations. Insofar as the decisions of these nations are shaped by
their ambitions to become part of the EU, however, the question of the market
must reemerge.
10. (Mezzadra) One can
certainly say that due to these border technologies a certain piece of German
sovereignty is displaced into Poland or the Ukraine. For both these countries,
the decision to adopt these technologies of border control
is linked to their desire to enter the EU. The groundwork for these agreements
was laid in the early 1990s, essentially through bureaucratic channels. But the
situation is again complex, since the Schengen agreements of 1985 were really
concluded between national police forces, and only later (and gradually) signed
into European law. In this sense, ‘bureaucratic channels’ have been built which
are partially outside of the control sphere of the main institutions of the EU.
It is also important to understand the details of the ‘safe third country’
concept. This came into force in 1997, in the frame defined by the Dublin
Convention, which laid down criteria for the determination of states competent
to examine an asylum application. Under this principle, a number of states
contiguous to the EU have been identified as ‘safe third countries,’ meaning
that if a migrant passes through one of these territories on their way to the
EU, they can now be returned to that country, since theoretically they could
have lodged an asylum application there. The concept applies not only to Poland
but also to a number of other states whose ‘democratic’ nature is at least
questionable. In the case of Germany, Poland, and the Ukraine, however, one can
see very clearly how the system functions. Germany is a wealthy EU state that
exports its border technologies to Poland, a candidate state for EU entry. In
turn, Poland exports these technologies to the Ukraine, a state very much on
the backlist for EU integration. This pattern is directly related to
differences in political power, and economic power too (since the price of
labour in Poland is about three times less than in Germany, and about ten times
less in the Ukraine).
11. (Neilson) As you indicated earlier, this
question of border control raises important questions about the nature of
political space in globalisation. You talk of the ‘third safe country’
principle establishing degrees of externality, but due to the porosity of
borders, this externality never really shades into a pure outside. At the same
time, you speak freely of an ‘elsewhere.’ Certainly you were active in
organizing the large demonstration of 30 November 2002 against the centro di permanenza temporanea
(detention centre) on Corso Brunelleschi in Torino. This protest was conducted
under the slogan ‘Né qui, né altrove’ (Neither here, nor elsewhere). Can you
explain the significance of this slogan, which obviously simplifies a great
deal of thought (and practice) but also undoubtedly crystallizes something
important?
12. (Mezzadra) The 30
November protest in Torino was probably the largest political action ever held
against the detention system in Europe. By using the slogan ‘Né qui, né
altrove,’ we wanted first to emphasize that we were taking action against a
particular detention centre in a particular place. This was important since as
far as the Italian government is concerned the centre in Torino functions
particularly well. We also wanted to acknowledge the specificity of the situation
in Torino, which is extremely sensitive at the moment due to the crisis at
Fiat: the massive insecurity of the workforce, the ongoing actions of the
unions, the bailing out of the company by GM, and so on. Certainly this kind of
perpetual capitalist restructuring (and the accompanying precariousness of
labour) is by now generalized, but its effects are particularly acute in old
corporate-industrial cities like Torino. We wanted to recognize this, and in so
doing, to point to the connections between such labour market reorganization
and the role of detention centres in restricting and controlling the labour
mobility. In other words, we were asserting that the appearance of the
detention centre on Corso Brunelleschi and the crisis at Fiat are mutually implicated
at a deep structural level. To see this connection, however, one has to think
beyond the purely local circumstances in Torino, to understand the interaction
of capitalist restructuring and labour mobility at the global level. Thus the
importance of opening the protest to the global dimension, of taking a stance
against all such places that strip people of their rights: the detention
centres in Poland or in Australia, for instance, as much as the one on Corso
Brunelleschi. This is also necessary to avoid some of the ambivalences that
have characterized the struggle against detention centres. Often one hears
criticisms that suggest a particular centre ought to be closed because the
conditions there are inhumane, as if centres were conditions are better would
be perfectly justified. Or one finds protests against detention centres from
people who would prefer not to have so-called clandestini (illegals) in their neighbourhood. By using the slogan
‘Né qui, né altrove,’ we were indicating that the protest was a matter of
principle, a stance against the system of detention as such and not just
against one particular centre.
13. (Neilson) One certainly finds similar
ambivalences in the struggle against detention centres in Australia. For
instance, one prominent platform involves the fact that children are held in
detention centres. Thus a common slogan is ‘Kids don’t belong in detention
centres’ (as if such places are fine for adults). Another popular slogan is
‘Refugees welcome here,’ which effectively takes the same stance as the
government with respect to asylum seekers, but just reverses the response (yes
you are welcome, rather than no you are not). This slogan assumes that
Australian citizens have the right to welcome or exclude, and to this extent it
does not recognize what you have called the diritto
di fuga (the right to escape, the right of the migrant to control his/her
own mobility). A similar ambiguity is found in the argument that the detention
system degrades Australia in the eyes of the world (a point often made in the
wake of UN reports about the inhumane conditions in the Australian camps, most
prominently the one at Woomera). Here the stance is more narcissistic, as if
the detention policy should be stopped to maintain some imagined vision of Australia
as a benevolent and humane place. Groups such as ‘Australians against racism,’
which place prominent advertisements against detention centres in newspapers,
tend to affirm this logic. I would suggest that the phrase ‘Australians against
racism’ is somewhat oxymoronic, given that the nation was built up on the
seizure of Indigenous lands, indentured coolie labour, the historical exclusion
of Asians … to oppose racism, it seems to me, one first needs to question the
constituted power of the Australian state and its correlate forms of identity
and subjectivity. At the same time, it is vitally important that such actions
are organized at the national level.
Your slogan ‘Né qui, né altrove’ registers the importance of local
and/or national mobilizations, but it also signals the necessity to open such
struggles to the global dimension.
14. This raises another issue about the function
of detention centres in maintaining and re-asserting national sovereignty in an
era of increased migratory movements. As you noted earlier, these places strip
people of their rights. In the Italian campaign against detention centres the
word Lager is very prominent. In
Australia, the references have more generally been to the penal colonies
established by the English (the slogan ‘We are all boat people’ suggests a
homology between convict transportees and present-day asylum seekers) as well
as the various camps, missions, and ‘homes’ in which Indigenous people were
interred (and separated from their families) during the prolonged colonial
genocide. Nonetheless, the thought of one Italian thinker, who privileges the
example of the Lager, has been
instructive for thinkers in Australia who have sought to understand the
political structure of the camp. I am referring Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 2000)
essays on ‘bare life.’ Agamben’s influence is evident, for instance, in
Suvendrini Perera’s (2002) essay ‘What is a camp?’ (published in the first
issue of borderlands). It seems to me
that this concept of ‘bare life’ is not very present in your thought and
writing. Indeed, there are key thinkers in the Italian tradition of operaismo or autonomous Marxism who have
polemicized quite strongly against Agamben’s understanding and use of this
concept. I am thinking of Luciano Ferrari Bravo in Dal fordismo alla globalizzazione (2001) or the essay by Antonio
Negri in Il desiderio del mostro
(2001). Is the concept of ‘bare life’ useful or not for understanding the
political structure of the camp?
15. (Mezzadra) Let’s begin
with the question about the use of the term Lager,
since this is something that we discussed very seriously within the Italian
movement. Clearly it is necessary to be very careful about the use of this term
in the context of the struggle against detention centres. The danger is that one
might be seen to confuse current forms of global control with the forms of rule
that dominated under European fascism in the early 20th-century. It
is thus necessary to affirm that the term Lager
is not simply reducible to the camps that existed under European fascism or
indeed under Nazism. In fact, the Lager
has colonial origins in places such as Cuba and South Africa … or indeed, as
you point out, in Australia, which in a certain sense was one enormous Lager. So in using this term, we first
want to point to the persistence of colonialism and colonial power relations
within contemporary models of government and metropolitan societies. Next, it
is necessary to recognize that even the Nazi Lager cannot be immediately equated with the extermination camps at
Auschwitz or Treblinka. Beginning in 1933, the Lager were administrative camps established throughout Germany for
the interment of political opponents and of the so-called Asozialen (people like gypsies, the mentally ill, or homosexuals) …
and not immediately or only the Jews who would eventually be exterminated. So
in identifying contemporary detention centres as Lager, we are not equating them with extermination camps (which
clearly they are not). This is extremely important, since such an identification
would seriously banalize the Nazi genocide. And I think it is also interesting
to note that an important book, Autobiografie
negate. Immigrati nei Lager del presente, about the detention camps as Lager has been written in Italy by
Federica Sossi (2002), a philosopher and activist who has been and is seriously
engaged in confronting the heritage of the shoah.
16. The Lager is an administrative space in which men and women who have
not committed any crime are denied their right to mobility. In this sense, it
is perfectly legitimate to identify present-day detention centres as Lager. It is also valid to point out
that such spaces, which are associated with one of the
blackest periods in European history, have not disappeared from the
contemporary political scene. To the contrary, they have experienced a general
diffusion throughout the so-called West (and also in other parts of the world).
If one recalls Hannah Arendt’s The
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which is one of the most important
sources for Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life,’ it is significant that she
recognizes the colonial origins of the Lager
and traces the first appearance of such places in Europe to the concentration
camps that appeared after the First World War. These were not extermination
camps but places for the interment of men and women who, due to the changes to
the map of Europe following the war, had no clear national citizenship (the
so-called apatrides or Heimatlosen). In this sense, it is also
appropriate to speak of contemporary detention centres as Lager, since they also serve to restrict the movement of people
with no clear juridical connection to a particular nation-state or with the
“wrong” citizenship.
17. To move more directly to
the question of ‘bare life,’ it is important to say that Agamben’s work
provides a very powerful set of concepts with which to understand the political
structure of the camp. Certainly, his arguments have proved fundamental for
activists involved in protesting the existence of detention centres in Italy: I
think especially of the description of the peculiar dialectic of exclusion and
inclusion which is put to work in the camps. A subject who is not at all
recognized by the legal order (the ‘illegal alien’) is included in that order
(through the ‘inclusion’ in the detention center) just to be excluded from the
space to which the legal order itself applies! This is really a very important
contribution to the understanding of the logic of the camp. At the same time, I
have the impression that Agamben risks emphasizing too much the exceptional character of the camp (this
is an element of his work that derives from Carl Schmitt). The problem is that
the logic of domination that functions in the camp is a logic that also
operates in other social spaces. This type of domination is really diffused
throughout the comprehensive structure of society. You mention some objections
to Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ from exponents of Italian operaismo such as Antonio Negri and
Luciano Ferrari Bravo. But it is worth considering what they have to say.
Ferrari Bravo finds the concept of ‘bare life’ ambiguous because it excludes
the question of labour from the sphere of theoretical observation. Luciano
asked himself if one should not look, besides Auschwitz, also at Ellis Island
to understand the logic of the contemporary camps. Another exponent of operaismo, Paolo Virno, points out
polemically in his book Il ricordo del
presente (1999) that the best example of what Agamben means by ‘bare life’
is labour power, labour power as
defined by Marx as a form of potentiality. It seems to me that this approach
calls to attention the fundamental relation between contemporary detention
centres and the comprehensive restructuring of the labour market under global
capitalism.
18. The detention centre is a
kind of decompression chamber that diffuses tensions accumulated on the labour market. These places
present the other face of capitalism’s new flexibility: they are concrete
spaces of state oppression and a general metaphor of the despotic tendency to
control labour’s mobility, which is a structural character of ‘historical
capitalism,’ as has been stressed by a number of recent studies. It seems to me
more important to speak of the camps in this way rather than in terms of ‘bare
life.’ This is the case even if the concept of ‘bare life’ has brought to light
something of the fundamental logic by which these spaces function. Certainly,
as Agamben argues, the camp performs a violent act of stripping. But this
stripping should be understood in relation to the new forms of life that are
produced in global capitalism. If, as many have argued, global capitalism gives
rise to new forms of flexibility, then the continuous movement of migrants shows
the subjective face of this flexibility. At the same time, migratory movements
are clearly exploited by global capitalism, and detention centres are crucial
to this system of exploitation. This is one of things that becomes clear in the
important book by Yann Moulier Boutang, De
l’esclavage au salariat (1998), which has just been translated into
Italian. Taking a wide historical view of the capitalist world system, Moulier
Boutang argues that forms of indentured and enslaved labour have always played
and continue to play a fundamental role in capitalist accumulation. Far from
being archaisms or transitory adjustments destined to be wiped out by modernization, these labour regimes are
constituent of capitalist development and arise precisely from the attempt to
control or limit the worker’s flight. In this perspective, the effort to
control the migrant’s mobility becomes the motor of the capitalist system and
the contemporary detention centre appears as one in a long line of
administrative mechanisms that function to this end.
19. (Neilson) In Diritto di fuga, you emphasize the importance of recent efforts to
rethink the concept of citizenship for understanding migration in the
contemporary world. In Australia, the question of citizenship was very present
in our discussions during the 1990s, particularly due to the efforts of the
so-called ‘cultural policy’ school, which deployed the Foucauldian concept of
governmentality to argue for the importance of collaboration between
intellectuals and state institutions. For some years during the 1990s, the
theme of citizenship was one identified by the Australian Research Council as a
priority area for government research funding. Citizenship studies began to
appear quite a mainstream form of intellectual and political inquiry, even if
many of the studies that came out emphasized the ways in which citizenship is
no longer exclusively attached to the nation-state. In the wake of the Tampa incident of August 2001, however,
some Australian thinkers began to tackle the questions of migration and
detention more through the concept of sovereignty than through that of
citizenship. I’m thinking of works like ‘Sink the Tampa,’ the postscript to
Anthony Burke’s book In Fear of Security
(2001), McKenzie Wark’s piece ‘Globalisation from below: Migration,
sovereignty, communication’ (2002), which was published on the fibreculture
email list, or the second issue of borderlands
‘On what grounds?’ (2002) (for which I was part of the editorial collective).
The concept of sovereignty seemed important for three reasons: (i) after the Tampa incident the Australian government
began to pay to establish detention centres on foreign territories; (ii) new
legislation border control subtracted certain territories from Australia as far
as boat arrivals are concerned; and (iii) after the failure of the official
reconciliation process that lasted ten years, Indigenous groups issued a new
call for sovereignty through the signing of a treaty. Certainly it is difficult
to speak of sovereignty without also speaking of citizenship (and vice versa),
but these differences also seem important. To what extent has the issue of
sovereignty (and its transformations under globalisation) been a central issue
for those involved in the struggle for migrant rights in Europe?
20. (Mezzadra) I would say
that in Italy things happened the other way around. The concept of sovereignty
has always been central within Italian political discourse and theory, while
that of citizenship has played a marginal role. One way to resigster this is to
consult the well-known Dizionario di
politica (1983), edited by Noberto Bobbio, Nicola Matteucci and Gianfranco
Pasquino, which has no entry for citizenship. Not until the early 1990s did
people like Giovanna Zincone (1992) and Danilo Zolo (1994) began to write
seriously about citizenship, and the debate in Italy has always been closely
connected with that surrounding immigration. In Diritto di fuga and in some other writings (2002), I tried to offer
a radical rereading of T.H. Marshall’s (1949) classical text on citizenship and
social class. This meant identifying two faces of citizenship: the first being
citizenship in the formal institutional sense, and the second associated with
social practices, that is with a combination of political and practical forces
that challenge the formal institutions of citizenship. In this second sense,
the question of citizenship raises that of subjectivity. And while I obviously
value the Foucauldian criticism of the concept of citizenship, pointing out that
this subjectivity is constructed by a number of disciplinary practices, I also
stress that there is an autonomous space of subjective action that can force
significant institutional transformations. For me, speaking of citizenship is
above all a way of moving the question of subjectivity into political theory.
And thinking about citizenship in this second sense is a way of focusing the
debate specifically on migrants, that is, on people who are not recognized as
formal citizens within a particular political space. Migratory movements are
themselves a practice of citizenship that, over the past ten years, has placed
more and more pressure on the borders of formal citizenship. Understood in this
way, citizenship is a concept that allows one to ask how these pressures bear
upon classical political concepts such as sovereignty. So speaking of
citizenship in no way means to stop speaking about sovereignty. Above all,
citizenship is a concept that allows us to put the subjective demands of
migrants at the centre of political discussion.
21. At the same time, the concept of citizenship
extends beyond this very direct reference to migratory movements. One big
theoretical challenge is to individuate the nexus that connects the specific
demands for citizenship expressed through migratory movements to other social
practices that don’t necessary involve the demand for formal citizenship. I
have tried to identify (in a very embryonic way) what is common to subjective
social practices of migration and demands for citizenship expressed within the
so-called West over the past few decades, particularly in the feminist and
workers’ movements. The concept of diritto
di fuga allows this nexus to come into view. I’m not trying to suggest some
sort of leveling homology between migrant struggles and those of feminists and
workers. To the contrary, the connection is absolutely formal and not
immediately communicable. But there is a link as regards labour mobility. Again
this relates to Yann Moulier Boutang’s argument in De l’esclavage au salariat, which identifies the subjective
practice of labour mobility as the connecting thread in the history of
capitalism. In Italy, beginning in the 1970s, there has been an intense
discussion of the worker’s escape from the factory, the refusal of work in
quite a banal and concrete sense. You can see the relevance of this
movement of worker’s escape from the factory discipline in the determination of
the very strategies of managerial control and enterprise organization in the recent book Le
nouvel esprit du capitalisme by Luc Boltanski and Éve Chiapello (1999). They show how ‘flexibility’, before becoming a
keyword of corporate ideology, was recognized at the beginning of the 1970s as
the chief problem of capitalist command, in the shape of labour’s mobility.
Similarly feminism involves a refusal of domestic work and the patriarchal
family, a demand for control over subjective decisions regarding labour
mobility. The category of diritto di fuga
links these subjective practices of mobility to the migrant’s demand for
citizenship, to the migrant’s right to assert control over his/her own
movements.
22. (Neilson) You argue that this subjective
practice of mobility limits the possibility of understanding migration in supposedly
objective terms (the push-pull factors of the global economy, demographic
imbalances, and so on). One important aspect of this argument involves a
critique of multiculturalism, which in your view reduces the singularity of the
migrant’s experience, casting him/her as the representative of a culture,
ethnicity, or community. As you know the discourses and practices of
multiculturalism are quite developed in Australia. Since the 1970s,
multiculturalism has been an official government policy, even if the
institutions that administer this policy have been among the worst hit by the
dismantling of the 20th-century welfare state. Critics often point
to a discontinuity between this official policy of multiculturalism and the
brutal treatment of migrants in Australian detention centres (in which there is
no limited period of stay). Others have argued that there is a continuity
between this policy of detention (ethnic caging) and the merely spectacular and
consumerist ethos of official multiculturalism. I am thinking in particular of
the book White Nation (1998) by
Ghassan Hage, which you cite in Diritto
di fuga. It seems to me you are engaged in a similar project, trying to
think of migration in terms that move beyond multiculturalism. Can you say
something about how your emphasis on the subjective aspects of migration
relates to multiculturalism as understood in the Italian or European context?
23. (Mezzadra) First, let me
talk about the subjectivity of migrants, which is a question with both a
theoretical and a political face. In the theoretical sense, emphasizing the
subjective aspect of migration means moving away from mainstream discourses
that altogether exclude this dimension, talking only of push and pull, of
demography, and so forth. In Diritto di fuga,
I pointed to the need to highlight this subjective dimension to understand the
decision to migrate, the decision to leave unfavorable or undesirable
conditions in a particular place. This is an approach that dovetails with much
of the ethnographic work done with migrants in Italy for example by people like
Alessandro dal Lago (1999) and Ruba Salih (2003). There can be no doubt that
this ethnographic work has delivered a much richer and more complex
understanding of migration than found in mainstream discourses. Above all, it
places migration in the context of a life story in which the subjective aspect
becomes very clear. And this allows a move away from stereotypical narratives
by which the decision to migrate involves a search for liberty or emancipation.
Sometimes this is the case, sometimes not. For instance, many Moroccan women
interviewed in Italy have indicated that they chose to migrate because they
could no longer stand to live in an extremely patriarchal society. In this
case, it’s reasonable to talk about migration as a mode of emancipation. But
one also finds people who offer absolutely banal reasons for migrating, not
just economic problems but also existential ones. One of the first interviews I
ever read was with a young Moroccan who decided to leave his studies in
Casablanca to come to Italy because his girlfriend had left him. These kind of
subjective motives are just as valid as those associated with economic problems
or more general social conditions. Finally, it’s important to recognize that in
emphasizing the subjective aspect of migration, I’m not trying to reinstate
some mythical understanding of Cartesian subjectivity. Rather I’m speaking of
processes of subjectivization in the Foucauldian sense, and while these may
involve pain and poverty they can also involve enjoyment.
24. Moving to more political
questions, it’s necessary to recognize that much of the work done in the name
of solidarity with migrants in Italy has treated them as victims, as people in need
of assistance, care, or protection. Doubtless this work has been inspired by
noble motives, but it also has a certain ambiguity. By exploring the subjective
aspect of migration, one is able to move beyond this paternalistic vision and
to see migrants as the central protagonists of current processes of global
transformation. As regards multiculturalism, it is safe to say that there has
not been much practical experience of multicultural politics in Europe. Here
the discourse of multiculturalism was imported from North America, and the
public debate has always been narrowly linked to migration. As in Australia and
North America, the debate has largely been driven by a certain white
fundamentalism that sees multiculturalism has something to be fought. In Italy,
we have figures like Giacomo Biffi (2000), the Roman Catholic cardinal in
Bologna, who argues that all migrants should be Christians, or Giovanni Sartori
(2002), who has reached a similar position in lay terms, claiming that certain
migrants (especially those coming from Muslim countries) threaten the European
Enlightenment tradition. With a debate that functions at this level, many
people have reflexively taken a position for multiculturalism, particularly
those who identify with the institutional or even the grassroots left.
26. (Neilson) I noticed that in the lead-up to
the 30 November demonstration against the detention centre in Torino, there was
a screening of a video documenting the Woomera breakout of Easter 2002. Almost
all the activists I have spoken with in Italy know about this event, which in
Australia has been the most prominent act of civil disobedience in the struggle
against detention centres. In Italy, of course, the group known as the disobbedienti has played a very
important part in the global movement. Could you say something about the role
of civil disobedience in the struggle against the Lager and within the movement more generally? It would be
interesting to hear your thoughts on the way acts of disobedience have been
cast as crimes and linked to the terrorism threat. What is the significance of
this in the context of the ‘permanent global war,’ the collapse of police and
military powers, discipline and security, etc.?
27. (Mezzadra) I would say
that disobedience, which involves the spectacularization of politics and the
production of exemplary actions, has been extremely important in the phase of
maturation and growth of the global movement. It has certainly been crucial for
creating the impression of an emergence from marginality, for winning a space
on the evening news, for occupying sound-bytes. This kind of action is
absolutely valid in a social context that tends ever more toward symbolization
and spectacularization and, for this reason, it must not be demonized. A
problem emerges, however, when such spectacularization becomes an end in
itself, when it begins to colonize the entirety of political expression. In
such circumstances, disobedience ceases to be one part in a combination of
political actions, losing its connection to a program of political change. To
descend for a moment into the practical politics of the movement, it is
significant that at the European Social Forum the disobbedienti absented themselves from the fort, the main area in
which the seminars and discussions were taking place. Within the fort, there
was a genuine diffusion of disobedient practices as well as serious discussions
about how the movement should proceed. But in this alternative space, the disobbedienti had nothing to do. In this
context, there is a danger that disobedience becomes nothing so much as a kind
of self-promotion. Something like a logo,
one could say.
28. At the same time, this
remains an open discussion, since even people like me who criticize the disobbedienti find it difficult to
identify forms of political action that would be as exemplary as theirs but at
the same time contribute to a deep structural change.
This is a big problem that relates to the motivations of people involved in the
movement. There is important difference between actions that speak the language
of ethics and actions that speak the language of politics, although recognizing
this difference does not mean to devaluate the language of ethics. Perhaps the
importance of ‘ethical’ motivations, which are not to be confused with ‘moralism,’
within the composition of the movement tells us
something very important--and at the same time
absolutely material--about it: it could be interpreted as the subversive side
of a mode of production which tends to value the very subjectivity of the
workers, and so on … Nevertheless it implies a couple of problems. The big
dilemma facing the movement is how to harness and move beyond the utopian
feeling that has been created during the unexpectedly large demonstrations. For
while it is true that the movement has experienced amazing growth, one is left
to ask in between the protest marches that attract hundreds of thousands of people
on the base of these very general (ethical?) motivations: ‘Where is everyone,
what are they doing?’ The challenge is to find concrete points of application
for the movement. One possibility is within the universities, since despite the
recent reforms, there is a new generation of student activists in Italy and
real possibilities for the university to emerge as a laboratory for
experimenting with new political discourses and practices. There have also been
some interesting experiments with connections between the movement and
institutions, especially at the municipal level. For instance, in Cosenza, the
mayor is very open to the movement and interesting things are happening as a
result. I think it is important, however, to keep this experimentation with institutions
at a distance from the project of winning constituted political power at the
level of the nation-state.
29. To move to the question
of repression, I would say that in the context of 11 September and the
‘permanent global war’ the movement does face a different situation. However,
this is not a situation of generalized indiscriminate repression. For example,
we might have this conversation a hundred times without being arrested, but on
the one hundred and first occasion we might be arrested for reasons that appear
quite arbitrary and completely unrelated to anything we have actually
discussed. Certainly the risks of encountering such repression are much greater
for people involved in the movement than in the past. We are operating in a
situation in which there are definitely less fundamental rights or guarantees.
If there is a war in Iraq, for instance, I’m really not sure what opportunities
there will be for taking radical positions against the military action,
although there might be more of a chance in Europe than in the United States.
Anyway, the development of a powerful anti-war movement in the US is of course
a key question for the “global” movement in the next months.
30. (Neilson) I’d say there will be more
opportunities for opposition in Europe, even if by now there is a certain
momentum behind the anti-war movement in the US. Certainly in Europe you can
find mainstream political parties against the war, and this is not the case in
the US or even in Australia (where opposition is often predicated on the position
of the UN Security Council, as if a Security Council resolution in support of
an attack would make this a just war). But how can we understand this new
climate of risk and repression? Should we understand it as a moment of
regression or reaction?
31. (Mezzadra) In general I
try to avoid using the term reaction. I don’t think there have really been
moments of reaction in modern history, at least since the Napoleonic wars …
What we are dealing with is more a question of
reorganization than reaction or regression. I know that Antonio Negri (2002)
has referred to the current situation as a backlash. But this seems to me a
position that emerges from one of the weaker aspects of the book he has written
with Michael Hardt. There can be no doubt that Empire (2000) is a very important text that has opened new spaces
for political thought and action, building a kind of bridge between discussions
that took place in Italy during the 1990s and radical thought and practice in
other parts of the world, not just in English speaking countries but also in
places like Turkey and Korea. In my opinion, however, Hardt and Negri’s
argument risks buying into a progressive, almost linear, model of historical
change. I’m referring to that element of the book that argues that Empire makes
a definite preferable advance over classical nation-state imperialism, the line
of argument that refers back to Woodrow Wilson’s project of instituting a world
government of peace. One drawback of this approach is that it makes it seem
that the Empire that Hardt and Negri describe as emerging in the Clinton years
is the only Empire possible. For me, the theoretical model they themselves
describe (particularly in the seminal chapter entitled ‘Mixed Constitution’) is
much more complex and complicated than this. It is a model that can incorporate
conflict and aggression.
32. Rather than speaking of
backlash or reaction, I think it makes more sense to understand the present
situation as one in which various elements of this mixed constitution are
undergoing a process of redefinition and reorganization. The current conflicts
are internal to Empire and they do not attest a simple movement back into the
period of economic and military nationalism. What we are seeing is a series of
displacements and adjustments within a new form of constitutionalism that is
itself a field of tensions and can pass through different phases of equilibrium
and disequilibrium. This idea of mixed constitutionalism seems to me one of the
strongest aspects of Hardt and Negri’s book and one that works in counterpoint
to the more metadiscursive narrative that sees counter-Empire emerging only to
the extent that Empire succeeds the older system of nation-states in an
entirely linear way. There is a danger of falling into a certain Hegelianism
here, and the only way to get out of it is to begin talking about backlash or
reaction. Certainly it is important to recognize that the book’s utopianism is
one of its most appealing aspects and, as I said before, its opening of new
political vistas has been altogether positive. But it seems to me that the more
progressive aspects of Hardt and Negri’s argument are at odds with some of the
other theoretical excurses they make, in particular the engagement with
postcolonial theory. This is why I favor a moratorium on the use of words like
regression and reaction.
33. (Neilson) Can I ask your opinion on the
argument that according to which Europe is the weak link within this new global
constitution of Empire. This seems to me a central theme in the volume Europa Politica edited by Heidrun
Friese, Antonio Negri, and Peter Wagner (2002) to which you contributed a piece
(with Alessandro dal Lago). It is true that in Europe there exists an already
existing system of supranational administration that suggests the possibility
of constructing new modes of government beyond the nation-state system. This is
true even if, as we discussed earlier, Europe is involved in designing ever
more complex and repressive forms of border control. There are some thinkers in
Italy who argue for the possibility of working for change through the existing
institutions of the EU, for example, through projects such as the Charter of
Nice (the effort to institute a European bill of rights). Others are much more
skeptical. Others again contend that the time is ripe, after the electoral
failures in France and Italy (and the positions of the German and UK centre
left governments on issues such as the war and migration), to begin the work of
reforming the institutional left at the European level. How do you judge these
arguments? Is there a danger that seeing Europe as the weak link in Empire
obstructs the project of constructing alliances and channels of political
communication with social movements outside of Europe?
34. (Mezzadra) Let me begin
by talking about the relations between the movement and the institutional left.
This is clearly a problem that we need to face. At the moment in Italy there is
probably a better chance than in the past to change the institutional left.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the situation has partially improved.
Certainly it is fair to say that the movement must begin to think of new ways
to relate to social and political institutions. This is necessary to achieve
concrete changes. One of the difficulties is that today there exists a
heterogeneous movement of unparalleled numbers and strength in Italy, but we
have been unable to change anything. For instance, we struggled against the
Bossi-Fini legislation, but now it is part of Italian law. We need to draft a
model that will allow us to reach concrete goals. This is not a matter of
reform. Rather it is a question of thinking about new relations with
institutions, of thinking of institutions themselves in a different way.
35. Having said this, it is
clear that the best chance for realizing a new way of relating to institutions
is at the European level. The institutions of the EU are already quite well
established (it is difficult to imagine a “regression” back to the old
nation-state system). So when we begin to think about new relations with the
institutional left, we are not proposing some reform of the Italian left, the
French left … or the German left. We are thinking about new ways to connect to
(and reorganize) the space of European governance. In this respect, what I said
earlier about migratory movements is extremely important. Thinking of Europe in
terms of migratory movements allows us to imagine an entirely different version
of Europe than the one that is presently being constructed at the institutional
level. So the first task of the movement as it begins to experiment with
institutions is to keep open the criticism of the borders of EU citizenship. In
this regard, it is necessary to realize that European constitutionalism implies
a very different model of borders than that characteristic of the nation-state.
The material constitution of EU is complex, flexible, and multi-level. It
continually integrates and reorganizes spaces and functions. And this
definitely opens new opportunities for social movements. At this level, there
are possibilities to use the contradictions that exist with the new
constitutionalism, to occupy gaps formed by these flexible operations (even if
only temporarily). To argue that this is the case simply because the EU
operates at a supranational level is to presuppose a conflict between this new
constitutionalism and nation-state governance. While this may have been the
case in the 1960s or 1970s, the integration of Europe is now something that has been done. Clearly this integration has often served to
strengthen the mechanisms of global capitalist command, but there are also
spaces for alternatives.
36. (Neilson) Finally, can you say something
about the new project you are involved with at DeriveApprodi? While you signal these new possibilities for
institutional connections at the European level, you are also very much
involved in seeking to create new opportunities for communication, exchange,
and dialogue between social movements at the global level. What is the
significance of and reasoning behind this effort of global opening?
37 (Mezzadra) DeriveApprodi began in the early 1990s
as one of the main laboratories in Italy for the critical analysis of post-Fordism
and globalisation. It grew very much out of the operaismo tradition and was strongly linked to a program
of practical political action. But when the global movement erupted in Italy
with the Genova protests of July 2001, it took an altogether different form to
that which the contributors to the magazine had fantasized during the 1990s.
For this reason, the editorial collective decided to launch a new series of the
magazine, which would investigate one of the most innovative aspects of the new
movement, that is precisely its global character. By doing this we wanted both
to step away from a platform based exclusively in the criticism of
neoliberalism and to distinguish our position from that which sees the
nation-state as the last bastion of defense against global capitalism. While
recognizing the continuing importance of mobilizations at the local and
national level, we affirmed that the movement itself presents an alternative
image of globalisation. Indeed, building on some of Hardt and Negri’s arguments
in Empire, we wanted to point to
another form of globalisation, a globalisation of struggles and resistance that
did not simply begin in Seattle but has a long history, including the history
of anti-colonial struggles.
38. At the same time, we claimed
that what took place in Seattle was a kind of explosion that lead to the
construction of a new global imaginary. This was not an anti-globalisation
movement, but one that was itself truly global. And this was the case despite
many of the movement’s limits and contradictions, particularly as regards its
tendency to present a paternalistic face toward struggles in the global south.
It seemed to us that this was the first time in the history of anti-systemic
movements that a movement had emerged that took the unification of the planet
not as an end but as a starting point. For this reason, we planned a series of
three issues to investigate the condition of the movement at the global level,
beginning with an issue on European movements, moving on to
another on Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and finishing with one on North
American and Oceania. The idea is to create a new lexicon or imaginary to begin
the work of articulating struggles within, between, and across different
political spaces. To this extent, the DeriveApprodi
project is very much about the communicability of struggles. It recognizes the
necessity to operate at all levels, (municipal, national, continental …
planetary) without taking the politics of geographical scale (or more precisely
the jumping of scales) as an end in itself. To this extent it differs from much
of the work done in the 1990s that concentrated on global/local or ‘glocal’
connections, moving away from a position that unproblematically equates the
global with the economic (or neoliberal) and the local with the cultural (or
with resistance). Rather, this is a project about the articulation of
struggles, about the construction of a new global imaginary that operates on an
altogether different plane than that of rational Enlightenment dialogue or
happy postcolonial hybridity. But the project is still underway, so we will
have to defer our discussion of it to another time and place.
Brett Neilson is lecturer in the School of Humanities at the
University of Western Sydney, where he is also a member of the Centre for
Cultural Research. He is author of Free
Trade in the Bermuda Triangle … and Other Tales of Counter-Globalization
(Minnesota, forthcoming 2003).
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