page 3
RB: Just to go back to these international versions, you’ve also been invited to be involved with things like the World Economic Forum. Do you feel that is a token movement to invite you in to those spaces? Or is the international economic movement engaging with these issues at a deeper level?
HB: You know, the interesting thing is that the World Economic Forum came to me. I have no idea how they found me. Many people’s work would have been much more accessible and immediately available to them, but they asked me, and have asked me for the last three years — And I’m a faculty fellow there — to participate in their discussions. So to that extent I must take it in good faith. Secondly, they have invited my participation in a range of for a where I certainly did not feel tokenised. If I felt I was a token voice then you know one doesn’t do that kind of thing as much for oneself as for anything else. So I didn’t feel like I was being sidelined or marginalised or speaking as a token.
Now having said that, on their part, there is good faith and on my part there is good faith. They spend their time on me and I spend my time, such as it is, on them. It’s a short and intense meeting. Because I think it might do some good. And indeed, year before last, they asked me to participate in what they called a scenario on migration. Migration was a major theme. And they coupled me with an economist, a very prominent economist on migration, a woman who runs a major Washington legal NGO on migration, and they asked me to do the cultural end of it, and the three of us collaborated, very different perspectives in many ways, collaborated on a scenario which was basically a set of events, we wrote a kind of mission statement or a brief which was then responded to by a number of participants and also informed a number of events around migration. The best way I can answer your question is to tell you what happened.
So, the economic issue — and of course, I’m boiling this down and making it reductive — is about labour, basically, productive labour and how labour patterns work globally and how migration affects the whole question of labour. The legal issue is — again, boiling it down — of legal or illegal migration. Not only to keep illegal migrants out but to create a system where the legalisation of migration then gives migrants various rights, representations and resources. Very important. And I had to think about the ethical, moral, political issues. Questions about how one creates a sense of the public sphere of polity which is not simply appropriating the culture of migrants but giving them the resources, the time and the space to participate in a process of cultural translation, to have their own cultures side by side with other cultures to see how the coming together of cultures produces new and emergent forms of identity which is what I’ve always been most interested in. New and emergent forms of identity which make the home culture and the emergent culture different, I mean, then there is a new conversation, a new dialogue, new values emerge, new forms of art, or identification or new ideas of how we live collectively. More the, you know the work I’ve done on cultural hybridisation… or maybe you don’t…
RB: I do. [laughs]
HB: I shouldn’t presume that you do. But that kind of idea. So that was what I meant to contribute. And how minorities are not simply a question of numbers and they’re not always simply a site of discrimination, although that that’s very important, but how the presence of the minority in your society, whether the minority happens to be a refugee, an exile, is an ethical challenge to the whole society as much as a political challenge. You know, what is the nature of home? What is the nature of hospitality? How do we redefine not only the notion of the neighbourhood but the neighbour as an ethical and a moral problem in our global world?
So those were the things I had scripted myself to contribute. But of course, you know, I then thought, post-9/11 and post the various wars that the world is involved in, there is another form of thinking that has greatly influenced the cultural and the ethical issue of migration and that is the whole notion of security. Now we’re used to seeing the notion of security as part of the safety and sovereignty of nation-states. They’ve got to protect themselves and protect their people. But now the question of security, I suggested at Davos, has actually become a cultural lens. We write the history of all kinds of cultures on the basis of whether they are cultures that will participate in acts of terrorism or not. So the question of the security of the State has become a way of identifying not only a political act but a whole social history and culture of a people. X is a good migrant, Y is not a good migrant. These communities tend to give us safe and secure populations, those communities actually are open to disruption, they’re open to subversion, so the whole issue of security’s no longer a question of the politics of state sovereignty. Security is now a way of looking, it’s a cultural lens, it’s a way of representing and evaluating large sections of the world.
After I spoke at Davos, after that particular session, the Education Minister of South Africa, Kader Asmal, so there is a very significant voice in trying to establish an ethics of global education in South Africa, and he came up to me after the session and he was very generous to me and said he very much liked what I had to say and would I at some point think of going and participating with the South African Ministry of Education and participating in their effort. Now I give you the narrative of what happened in Davos. Was it tokenist? I don’t think the effects of it were tokenist. Were the heads of world government coming to listen to what I had to say? No, they weren’t. But were there some? The planning minister of Jordan, the foreign minister of Mexico. Were there a smattering of people who were very interested in this issue? Yes, there were.
So this year I did a panel on… I said to the people at Davos that writers of various kinds should be heard in the forum and that we should really work hard and putting together forums. I worked hard with the local representative there, we set up a whole series of questions and we had a panel that was reported in the New York Times, in the Culture pages, which I hadn’t seen happen before. And you know, I had wonderful participants. Paul Theroux was there, Amitav Ghosh, Samantha Power’s book on Genocide won the Pulitzer award, you know, so I had different kinds of writers on contemporary world problems, Kazuo Ishiguro was on the panel, you know, The Remains of the Day, and we had a very lively discussion, widely quoted in the article by the journalist, but it did mean that I worked out the questions, a protocol of argument, and it completely sold out, the session, you know this wasn’t a Colin Powell session so it didn’t have 2000 people in it, maybe 250 people but it was completely sold out, people couldn’t get into it, it was reported in the New York Times, so I think the forum is open to having people like me do their work in productive ways and supporting us to do it. That’s my understanding.
Also, I’m not unaware that there’s Porto Alegre, the World Social Forum in India, just before the forum, so the forum has those people who place themselves in relation to the forum saying that they represent other people, but I think the World Economic Forum is really open now to a really lively dialogue with participants from this other international forum.
RB: I want to ask you two things out of that. One about the World Social Forum. But before we get on to that, you spoke about ‘the right type of migrant’, and of course this is a lively debate In Australia, they’re even calling it ‘border protection’. Can you comment on that?
HB: What am I to say? All I hear is bad, bad and worse. I can’t comment in detail on the Australian situation, although my wife, who works on children’s rights with somebody from the Sydney law school and she has a kind of international project.
RB: And of course, we’ve just had the High Court overturn the jurisdiction…
HB: That’s right. So you know, she’s much more involved in a daily way. But I think what you’re seeing in Australia is very extreme now and I think it’s at the extreme end of what’s happening everywhere else. But the question you ask, “who is the good migrant?”, “who is the right kind of migrant?”, “who is the bad migrant?”, it’s very interesting. The problem emerged for me in a conversation at a World Economic Forum meeting with an immigration lawyer from Germany who I’d known for many years and he just happened to be there and we sat down to have a drink. And he said, you know that they say that Mohammed Atta, who piloted one of the planes and lived in Hamburg for many years. And he said, now look, there’s no way that the German government could have moved against him, he was a model migrant. He lived in Hamburg, he had a German girlfriend, there was no question of any violence, he had a job, he paid his taxes. Maybe they said he went to the video store and got some violent movies, but you know, who doesn’t?
The question now is how to you define, how can you even create that border security when there are people who are impeccable in the role of the migrant.
RB: Well, I guess that’s what the Australian government is saying. If we can’t tell, we’re just going to lock them all up.
HB: Exactly. And of course, that is not only a profound violation of international and human rights but that can only I think create exactly the kind of avenging spirit of unfairness and humiliation — we should not forget that humiliation is very much a part of this — that breeds violence and repression. I just think that this idea that you can literally lock up people and make yourself safe is a deep defeat of all the other things that contemporary progress stands for. It really cancels them out. I just don’t think in terms of physical safety, it can ensure that. It’s also a way, by the way, of renouncing the real challenge which is, if you feel you are under attack, with all of the technological sophistication you have, then you should be able to use those new technologies in a way that can protect you but that can also protect you in an effective manner. It’s effectively saying that all this sophistication we have in the technological level doesn’t work at all. The other thing with just locking people up is exactly what happens. If you lock people up, you forget about them, you effectively throw the keys away and the most barbaric violent practices within your own society then come to the fore.