by Harald Bauder
“We’re touched by their hospitality and they’re touched by our endeavours to support them.” This is how a student nurse delivering medical supplies describes the work of volunteers at an NGO in Poland that supports Ukrainian refugees. Residents in the Netherlands, the UK, and other countries who are opening their homes to refugees from Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine practice a form of “bottom up” hospitality.
Retrieved from https://depositphotos.com/550432906/stock-photo-uzhhorod-ukraine-february-2022-woman.html on April 18, 2022
These are just two of countless examples that illustrate how the reception of refugees and migrants in the Global North is often framed in terms of hospitality. Although nation states may permit these migrants and refugees to cross their borders and entre their territories, hospitality is usually practiced by individuals and local institutions, such as NGOs, faith-based organizations, and municipalities.
Framing the arrival of migrants and refugees in terms of hospitality has a long history in Western political thought, dating back at least to the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. When Kant wrote about hospitality in 1795, he assumed that the world would be subdivided into sovereign territorial states as the dominant and legitimate political agents. Kant then proposed that the peaceful coexistence between such states requires that individuals possess the right to hospitality, which he defined as …
“the right of a foreigner, upon arrival on the land of another, not to be treated with hostility. The latter may refuse the foreigner, provided that this does not cause the foreigner’s ruin; however, as long as the foreigner acts peacefully, may not encounter the foreigner in a hostile way. It is not a right to be a guest, which the foreigner is entitled to …, but a right to visitation, which all humans possess.”
(Kant, 1795 [1946], my translation)
At the time Kant was writing these words, the international system of sovereign territorial states was being established in Europe. Although this system is often associated with the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648 – hence “Westphalian system” – it evolved over a period that spanned centuries.[1] Through European colonialization this system spread around the globe until almost the entire land surface of the earth was claimed by mutually exclusive territorial sovereign states. Today, we rarely question this system but take for granted that states possess the monopoly over regulating human mobility.
Political authority, however, does not rest solely with the territorial nation state and scholars have called for transcending “the limitations of the geopolitical imaginary within which Kantian critique is articulated”[2]. Especially commentators on human mobility often evoke the concept of hospitality in the context of the urban and place-based politics of migrant and refugee inclusion.
When Jacques Derrida wrote about cities of refuge, he framed hospitality in reference to refugees arriving in European cities rather than in sovereign territorial states. Although Derrida referred to Kant’s key passage that I quoted above, he also remarked that Kant’s “limitation on the right of residence … remains for us debatable”[3]. He critiques that “Kant assigns to [hospitality] conditions which make it dependent on state sovereignty”[4]. As a corrective to this situation, Derrida seeks to liberate hospitality from its narrow Kantian conception and instead focuses hospitality on the city.
In a similar effort to detach the idea of hospitality from the territorial state serving as host, other scholars call for a “radical”[5] form of cosmopolitanism that can be observed in cities. Such politics of urban hospitality sometimes challenge the sovereignty of territorial nation states and reimagine cities – rather than the Westphalian state – as the places where migrants and refugees experience hospitality.
[1] MacRae, A. (2005). “Counterpoint: The Westphalia Overstatement”. International Social Science Review, 80.3: 159-160.
[2] Shapiro, M. J. (1998). The events of discourse and the ethics of global hospitality. Millennium, 27, p. 703.
[3] Derrida, J. (2001). On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, p. 22
[4] Derrida, J. (2001). On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, p. 22
[5] Baban, F. and Rygiel, K. (2017). Living with others: Fostering radical cosmopolitanism through citizenship politics in Berlin. Ethics and Global Politics, 10(1), 98-116.