Instead of speaking of a global humanitarian catastrophe, we should speak of political phenomena humans control. We need the terms of de-globalisation and de-democratisation. Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp* In the contemporary stage of globalisation, immaterial financial capitalism has succeeded industrial capitalism, while the production of global capitalism is characterised by the absence of a world government, of a global political schema, of laws, of constraining rights, and is instead administered by the ‘shock treatments’ of economists, politicians and the military. Neither charters nor conventions can cover over the political emptiness and absence of laws, even if, step by step, they are the way in which a global political schema, law and rights are being constructed. The deregulation of rights in the world of work has been carried out by private agreements between multinational enterprises, which are trying to undermine the State system and rights in relation to work, leading to the transformation of work relations into simple precarious mandates. In these conditions what happens to human kind, called to constitute itself and its world? What happens to work, which was considered by Marx as the possibility of human emancipation? What happens to the common goods necessary for human survival? The actual stage of globalisation, which Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘liquid capitalism’, has brought about the instability, the fluidity of labour relations, precarity and economic and political chaos. Financiers speculate on subprimes, gold, primary materials and even foodstuffs, causing the prices of even elementary foods to rocket. We are seeing hunger riots in Argentina, in Mexico, in the Philippines, in Egypt, in Burkina Fasso, and so on. In these riots hunger shows its real face. It is not a question of lacking food, it is a question of lacking the right to access to food that is necessary for life. Even humanitarian action is coming to its limits. “Instead of giving a bowl of rice to a hungry child, we are now giving him only half” declared a spokesperson for the World Food Program, who has seen the price of food soar (+57% since June 2007). Must we then speak about an ‘economic and humanitarian tsunami’, to use the terms of Louis Michel, the European Commissioner for development? The choice of words is not neutral in debates surrounding the politics of development and immigration. Such a vocabulary suggests that the problem is thought of according to categories which can be called the ‘metaphysics of catastrophe’. But instead of talking in terms of natural disasters or the punishment of gods, we should talk in political terms of phenomena which are under the control of man. We should talk of de-globalisation, and de-democratisation. De-globalisation refers to cosmos, to globe and means in philosophy the loss of the world, of a relationship to the world, an expulsion from the world. Passing over the interrelatedness, the closeness and diversity of the debates about the words cosmos, world, universe, let’s look at the characteristics and traits common to all three terms. What is striking to the reader is the tension between the abyss of chaos and the permanent concern to construct an order by politics (regime), by philosophy (sense), by science (truth). The cosmos indicates a universe thought of as a well-ordered system. World indicates a collection of all that exists, which is formed by the earth and the visible stars thought of as an organised system. Opposed to the order of the cosmos, the totally disordered multiplicity is called ‘chaos’. In ancient philosophy the world is an organised and meaningful totality inside of which each thing finds its natural place. Each ancient philosopher, from Heraclitus to the Stoics, searched for this unique law. The world is also the habitat of man, it is the location and the symbol of human life. Since the 18th century, the universe is the collection of all that exists, considered by philosophers as the totality of all created things, the totality of beings, the collection of things perceived, whether or not understood by human consciousness. Essentially, the three words sum-up the project to avert chaos by different attempts to unify a dynamic totality which may be ordered by a transcendent power or instead be ordered by man himself (in the democratic view of things). De-democratisation leads to the impossibility of trying to realise a democratic regime (demos-cratos, the power of the people) for social life. De-democratisation means therefore, in brief, the privation, the deficit, the democratic absence in society. The theme of democracy (Greece) and its republican side (Rome) is, following Kant, present in the debate over a world government and the limits of universalism. The vision that has dominated international relations is an anarchic, chaotic, authoritarian vision of the international sphere linked to an equilibrium of force (war-making) without even the possibility of imagining the project of genuine democracy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the questions of the transformations in the relationships between economics and politics, of the nature of political regimes and the status of the state, have become research questions in international relations. Alongside this, the development of civil society and of social movements has underlined the limits of tyrannical regimes, imperial authorities based on force, exploitation, submission, corruption and chaos which claim to be an authoritarian democracy ensuring security. After 1989, quite against the hopes of democracy, theories of polyarchy (selection of the leaders) have tried to weaken the substance of democracy (the will of the people, the common good defined in terms of justice and social equality). Between maximalist and minimalist practices and visions of democracy what is at stake is the capacity of the dominant liberal discourse to impose its own interests whilst depending on a facade of consensus, leading to the reification of the effects of capitalism and political apathy. The birth of the modern state (Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke) articulated the displacement of power to a sovereign state over a delimited territory, systems of representation in which a limited citizenry was envisaged (in the dominant currents of political philosophy). But when we find ourselves in a stage of globalisation which has repeated crises of modern capitalism and of international relations, and facing heterogeneous histories and spaces which cover very different realities, a political project can no longer define itself starting from a vision that is sovereigntist, national and territorial, from a vision of the hegemony of the civilisation of industrial, imperial and financial capitalism that encourages identical replicas and blocks-off the possibility of a pluriversal political schema one which would bring together the societies of the planet and respect their heterogeneity. Democracy cannot reduce itself to the procedural and formal approaches which have been imposed. Democracy is not in effect reducible to more or less rational rituals which try to efface antagonisms by the institutionalisation of a forced consensus around a hegemonic and securitarian order. Democracy envisaged in a substantive manner is the reappropriation of a new concept of positive power implying the radical deplacement of our vision of migration and of international relations. But in what way is the situation and place of migration in politics relevant to this? In March 2007, the 120 member states of the United Nations chose migration as the most important tool for socio-economic development. But this link proposed by numerous international organisations, states, NGOs, social movements, researchers, etc between migration and development and more specifically between globalisation, migration and democracy is a long way from being obvious when it is put in comparison with the contemporary construction of a new worldwide order of migration. Today, the politics of migration, caught in the mechanisms of international competition and the obligation of profit, combines a cynical utilitarianism and a war-like approach. Migration is one of the terrains where the processes of de-globalisation and de-democratisation are most visible and have been at work for a long period, and that it is also one of the terrains of the most political innovation at the borders of democracy. Briefly, in countries of immigration we have a choice of two kinds of migration policies, which relate to two kinds of choice of society: 1) the maximal appropriation of social riches by the class of owners who recommend the intensification of work for larger numbers of the national and immigrant population, implying busier, more intense and longer hours of work for all, rigid divisions between legal and illegal, the lengthening of the time of work, the extension in the amount of time spent at work by women; at the political level, this choice relates to a politics of securitarian apartheid. 2) a repartition of social wealth to all those who produce it (in the future, at the present time, and in the past), and the real and free circulation of peoples, the redefinition of the economic and international relations in order to be able to survive, work and migrate in decency; this type of choice leads to the construction of a democratic project and the fighting of certain conflicts (xenophobia, racism, sexism). This fundamental link between migratory policy, economic-socio-political situation and political regime is too often hidden. The politics of the new world migration order are the object of numerous researches in Europe and on other continents. I am not going to make a presentation and a detailed analysis of these here. I will just consider questions of a philosophical and anthropological nature. What new hierarchies in the relations of force are there? What historical hegemonic bloc in the new world order has taken the place of the hegemonic structures following the Second World War which came to an end with the fall of the Berlin wall? What place for migration, what status for migrants? The proposition of the simplification and stabilisation of contracts (replacing their annual renewal, the putting in place of mechanisms for the regulation of a right to “come and go” in the form of a permanent visa for those with a university degree in Europe in order to meet the competition of the United States of America, the opening of national labour markets to those coming only from the European Union) are selective and discriminative regulations. This highly targeted vision of regulation is anchored in the principle of “selective migration”. In the lex migratoria there is not a unique principle to envisage the situation of migration in its totality. Two principles in fact govern the management of the two categories of migrants: on the one hand there is ordered migration, on the other there is the right of peoples to stay in their countries of origin with the means and the tools which combine practices of the police and those of private multinationals. Against these tendencies in the migratory policies political theory and philosophy can formulate three questions of a political order. The first question concerns the place and the transformations of the political schema, of the public space, of the relationships between the public sphere and the private sphere. What is the public political statute of the zones of liberty (of the market) and of security (the perimeters of security) where competition, where inequalities in fact privatise public space, economic activities and the police without public control (states, social partners, trade unions)? What happens to the public space in these conditions? Who controls these new privatised zones? What is the place, the role of the system of states, of international organisations and of other social partners? How should we define the responsibility of businesses and the rights of workers? What becomes of the law? Who governs, who imposes the rules with what references and with what prerogatives? Can we accept that private economic actors impose their laws on other actors, that intergovernmental police themselves control the movement of populations outside of all democratic control? The second question concerns the transformation of human kind by the transformation of work itself. How to analyse and evaluate the transformation of human activity from work to service? In other words, are human workers themselves assimilated to services, to things? What was previously a human work, which constructed a relationship with oneself, with others, with the world, protected by conventions, the law of work, social rights etc., now becomes a service limited in time in a market space outside of public control. Work transforms itself and even disappears in the form of work, in such a way that the product of work is a service and no longer the expression of the essence of the worker. From being workers humans become simple servicers who disappear with that which they have produced after their services are caught in a precarious statute. The third question concerns the existence and the status of a political schema for laws and rights tightly linked to the imagination and to the democratic project. Ours is a finite world where on the one hand the right to the auto-regulation of the market and of the labour market is affirmed by competition, or where it is affirmed that political regulation must intervene but without putting into question the market (for we haven’t found anything better), and, on the other hand, where the dangers and the chaos of our historical époque are denied, an époque in which domination by force at any price has become the norm. Today, the partisans of economic and political auto-regulation affirm that the market economy functions by perfect competition, whilst at the same time claiming that “everything has been broken in the world and everything needs to be reinvented”. They think that economic chaos must stabilise itself, must rule itself rationally. George Soros claims that “markets are made of men just like regulators, and therefore they are imperfect... we must take account of the new paradigm and be ready to adapt constantly the controls. We cannot neglect the incertitude which belongs to markets.” Faced with the incertitude of the markets, George Soros predicts the integrations of a flexible mechanism of regulation and control. We could cite Paul Valery who, during the war of 1914-18, declared that we must learn to live in a finite world. Kant already said this two centuries before. He already underlined that after the conquests there are no more desert zones which can serve as a territory for deportation for evading tensions and wars. He concluded that the principle of hospitality was indispensible to peace and it was the basis of the development of international law. * Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp lectures at the University of Lausanne