Prononcé par Wim Decock, professeur à la Faculté de droit et de criminologie de l'UCLouvain, et Bart Raymaekers, professeur et conseiller « 2025 » du recteur de la KU Leuven.
Seyla Benhabib: Enlightenment’s persistence
Dear Professor Benhabib
American political philosopher and theoreticist Seyla Benhabib's (b1950) background reads lias a path leading to global citizenship. She grew up in multicultural Istanbul; her Jewish-Turkish family, goes back to descendants of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492. The Vietnam War and student uprisings sparked her interest in politics. In 1970, she left for the United States to study philosophy and received her PhD from Yale University in 1977. Currently, Benhabib is an emerita at Yale and teaches at Columbia Law School.
Benhabib is a supporter of cosmopolitanism - the politically yet to be realized antithesis of economic globalisation. She is internationally respected for her work on the tension between universal human rights and national borders. Her strength is her ability to extend political-philosophical ideas from the Enlightenment on this to today's world. The theme is more topical now than ever. Benhabib was partly inspired by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant: in 1795 he saw already the 'right to general hospitality' as a precondition for 'eternal peace'. Such hospitality allows people to go wherever they want without fear.
Benhabib goes a step further by applying that right to general hospitality not only to visitors, but also to asylum seekers and refugees. After all, state borders are once arbitrarily determined and always subordinate to human rights. That does not mean Benhabib advocates open borders; she favours "porous borders" that guarantee the rights of foreigners while protecting the democratic state. Countries may not close their borders to foreigners without question, but they may impose restrictions on migration: provided human rights are respected and there is room for 'democratic iterations'. By the latter, Benhabib means that political decision-making in a democracy is a continuous adjustment process.
Seyla Benhabib has penned an extensive body of work as an author. Her best-known books discuss the work of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas; her most recent publications focus on migration. . Benhabib has already received many awards for her work; for instance, she has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995. So now she adds a joint honorary doctorate from KU Leuven and UCLouvain to her list of honours.
As my colleague Bart Raymaekers has already pointed, you have earned yourself a name as one of the main political and social philosophers of our time. Yet your work has reached an audience far beyond philosophy departments around the world, especially among jurists and lawyers.
As a matter of fact, besides your principal appointment at Yale University’s Department of Political Science, you have also been an adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School in New York for several years now. You have contributed to making think jurists “outside the box”, especially in matters related to migration law, the rights of minorities, the rights of women and constitutional law.
On the basis of your critical thinking, which is constantly nourished by your reading of the likes of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, you are able to cast into doubt fundamental distinctions that have been around for more than 70 years now.
I am thinking of your critique of the distinction between “refugees” and “economic migrants”, a distinction usually grounded in international law, and, more particularly, in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. In an interview with Slawomir Sierakowski, a Polish sociologist, back in 2015, you once expressed your critique against the international law framework for dealing with refugees in a very straightforward manner: “But if you are, for example, in Iraq, or even in Turkey, and you cannot find employment because you are Sunni or Shia, a Kurd or an Alawite, or your business is being bombed – no one is threatening your life, but you are in a position of destitution, you have no possibilities. What are you then, a refugee or an economic migrant?”
And yet, your critical attitude does not prevent you from looking at issues from both sides of the story. You keep insisting on nuance, not on radicalization, on seeking compromise rather than conflict. That is an attitude which is part of the DNA of Louvain’s intellectual tradition since 1425, and one of many reasons why we are very happy that you are now joining our community as an honorary doctor from both KULeuven and UCLouvain.
Let me quickly illustrate your extraordinary capacity at looking at both sides of the story.
In the debate on the rights of the stateless, refugees and migrants you have not been pleading for utopian forms of borderless states. For people to be able to govern themselves in a democratic way, with respect for their local values and sensibilities, borders are absolutely needed, you have shown, even if those borders need to remain porous.
Similarly, you may have been very critical about international law on some occasions, yet, more recently, you have been one of the most courageous defenders of international law, especially against the culture of suspicion, which, as you are well aware of, has been nourished by several currents in post-colonial legal and political theory.
It is a historical fact that international law emerged in the sixteenth century in the context of European expansionism. It is also true that international law further developed in the nineteenth century in a context marked by even more aggressive forms of economic exploitation and colonialism, especially during “the scramble for Africa”. We cannot deny, either, that the current international order, built after the second world war, was engineered by Europeans and Americans.
Yet, you refuse the line of argument that seeks to confuse the origins and the legitimacy of some of the universal values that have come to be protected under international law. From the sinful origins of international law, we should not conclude that many of its rules and institutions are illegitimate. We should not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Universal human rights, even if originating in early modern colonialism, remain crucial to defend the dignity of every single human being on the planet, and perhaps even the planet itself. International institutions, however much masterminded by former colonizers and their allies, remain essential to seek justice in an unruly world.
As you have pointed very recently, South Africa’s case against Israel before the International Court of Justice is perhaps just one of the paradoxical instances of the spread of cosmopolitan ideals and the universal value of international law.
As the saying goes, one should not refuse medicinal herbs, even if they are grown abroad.
Congratulations, once again, dear Seyla, on receiving the honorary doctorate!
Discours de Seyla Benhabib
Honorable Rectors, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Colleagues, and Dear Students
I am deeply grateful for the honor you have bestowed upon me in awarding me the degree honoris causa, and also for your kindness and understanding that for health reasons I could not travel to Brussels, but I will do so in May, in a few months.
Like many political philosophers, political scientists and legal scholars, I too, have been preoccupied by the diagnoses of the death of democracies (David Runciman), democratic decline and/or backsliding. The rise of autocracies and authoritarian regimes from Turkey to India, from Hungary to Brazil and Poland - (the latter two countries only changing direction through recent contested elections), is well-known. In the United States, one of the oldest democracies in the world, we are facing a real threat through the candidacy of Donald Trump in the upcoming elections of October 2024, who has made no secret of his contempt for the institutions of liberal democracy.
Some rejoice at the end of the WW II international order and its institutions which these crises of liberal democracies herald, observing that this order has never meant the rule of law, democratic representation and social welfare for many young nations in Africa and Asia. They point out that this so-called “rule-based” order has been accompanied by superpower interventions leading to military coups, by proxy wars, and by so-called humanitarian interventions. And it is not only nations of the Global South but women all over the world and people of color whose voices have also been excluded, repressed and forgotten who are expressing their anger and rage.
I have devoted my life’s work to showing that there are resources within the tradition of Critical Enlightenment and Critical Theory extending from Kant, Hegel and Marx to Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, as well as Foucault, Derrida and Balibar, to accommodate these criticisms. We need to take the dialectic of Enlightenment seriously as a process of inclusion and exclusion; progress and regression; freedom and oppression.
Learning from Immanuel Kant, I have defended a cosmopolitanism of world citizenship; but citizenship has always been a category of inclusion and exclusion: whom do we consider worthy of having the “right to have rights?” in Hannah Arendt’s unforgettable words? Who do we exclude and why? What is the color of citizenship and what is the gender of citizenship?
For Kant, cosmopolitan right was the right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility when he/she arrived on the shores of the other as long as his intensions were peaceful. But the stranger does not have the right to stay; s/he enjoys only a right of visitation (Besuchsrecht). The right to stay on the territory of another, as opposed to a short visitation, is a privilege to be granted by the sovereign. We can all seek access (Zugang) to the lands of the other but not entry (Eingang), the granting of which must remain a sovereign privilege. Today we know that these old 18th century formulations of Kant were intended to defend the Enlightenment desire to come to know the world and to encounter the other, and also less charitably, to exploit their riches and resources. But since the world is a round globe (Erdkugel), and we cannot expand on it infinitely without encountering others we must have laws which govern our interactions. We need these rules and laws not only because we must share the earth with beings like us but also because the encounter with the other is never innocent and benevolent.
As Jacques Derrida has observed, the root of hospitality in Latin – hospes – is the same as hostis- the stranger, the other. So Kantian hospitality is always also “hostipitality.” Hostility and hospitality are not easy to distinguish from one another. It would be almost trivial to observe that not even the major liberal democracies of the world who are signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention have overcome this ambivalence between hospitality and hostility. As Zygmunt Bauman once remarked, “strangers are dangers.” But must this always be so?
I have argued that it is possible to defend a cosmopolitanism which goes beyond Eurocentrism by engaging in complex multicultural dialogues. I have also argued that we must remain true to the Enlightenment ideals of private and public autonomy. Private autonomy is the right of the individual to pursue his or her sense of the good; while public autonomy is the right of a polity to define the collective conditions of its existence within defined jurisdictional boundaries.
In conclusion, I am deeply grateful for the honor you have given me by the award of this degree.