Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship

and Civility in the Era of Global Violence

Etienne Balibar

With this pretentious title, I want to continue investigating a nexus of problems,

both theoretical and philosophical, which I already touched upon several times
particularly in my Wellek Lectures at Irvine in 1996.1 The term cruelty is
chosen by convention (but with some literary references in mind) to indicate those
forms of extreme violence, either intentional or systemic, physical or moral
although such distinctions become questionable precisely when we cross the lines
of extremity that, so to speak, appear to us to be worse than death. It is my
hypothesis, generally speaking, that the actual or virtual looming of cruelty repre-
sents for politics, and particularly for todays politics in the framework of so-
called globalization, a crucial experiment in which the very possibility of politics
is at stake. For the speculative idea of a politics of politics, or a politics in the
second degree, which aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of
conditions within which politics as a collective participation in public affairs is
possible or is not made absolutely impossible, I borrow the term civility
which indeed has many other uses. It is certainly an ambiguous term, but I think
that its connotations are preferable to those of, say, civilization, socialization,
police and policing, politeness, etc. In particular, civility does not necessarily
involve the idea of a suppression of conflicts and antagonisms in society, as
if they were always the harbingers of violence and not the opposite. Much, if not
most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss is the result of a blind politi-
cal preference for consensus and peace, not to speak of the implementation
of law and order policies on a global scale. This, among other reasons, is what
leads me to discuss these issues in terms of topography, by which I understand
at the same time a concrete, spatial, geographical, or geopolitical perspective for
instance taking into account such shifting distinctions as North and South,
center and periphery, this side of the border or across the border, global and
local, etc. and an abstract, speculative perspective, meaning that the causes and
effects of extreme violence are not produced on one and the same stage, but on
different scenes or stages, which can be pictured as real and virtual or
imaginary but the imaginary and the virtual are probably no less material, no
less determining than the real.
This paper is based on a talk which I was asked to deliver in November 1999
for the opening of the Graduate Course in Humanitarian Action at the University
of Geneva.2 This will explain why the issues of citizenship and segregation,

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and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
16 Constellations Volume 8, Number 1, 2001

asylum and migration, mass poverty and genocides in the globalized world order
will play a central role in this discussion. These are to me the crucial cosmopo-
litical issues which we should try to locate and connect if we want to understand
how and why democratic citizenship in todays world cannot be separated from
an invention of concrete forms and strategies of civility.
I shall focus on two sets of problems. The first is typically European. I am
thinking of the negative counterpart of the post-national integration and introduc-
tion of European Citizenship, which is not only a revival of so-called commu-
nitarian demands and identity politics, but above all a development of
quasi-Apartheid social structures and institutions. This forms a contradictory
pattern, which in many respects is now becoming highly unstable. The second set
of problems is global: it appears as a systematic use of various forms of extreme
violence and mass insecurity to prevent collective movements of emancipation
that aim at transforming the structures of domination. For this reason and also
with the pattern of state-construction that Thomas Hobbes once described in the
Leviathan as preventive counter-violence in mind I shall not hesitate to speak
of a politics of global preventive counter-revolution or counter-insurrection. But
from another angle this politics is really anti-political, since in a nihilistic way
it leads to suppressing the very conditions of building a polity. Instead, we witness
the joint development of various sorts of wars and a kind of humanitarian action
or intervention, which in many cases becomes an instrument in the service of
precisely those powers who created the distress. Not by chance, in these two sets
of problems the traditional institution of borders, which I think can be defined in
the modern era as a sovereign or non-democratic condition of democracy itself,
mainly works as an instrument of security controls, social segregation, and
unequal access to the means of existence, and sometimes as an institutional distri-
bution of survival and death: it becomes a cornerstone of institutional violence.
This explains in advance why I shall insist on the democratization of borders, not
only as their opening (and perhaps least of all as their generalized abolition,
which in many cases would simply lead to a renewed war of all against all in the
form of wild competition among economic forces), but above all as a multilateral,
negotiated control of their working by the populations themselves (including, of
course, migrant populations). Perhaps new representative institutions should be
set up in this regard which are not merely territorial and certainly not purely
national. This is part of what I would call a cosmopolitics of human rights,
where citizenship and civility are closely associated.

Before giving more detail about the two sets of concrete problems I want to deal
with here, I think that we need some philosophical instruments to place them in
the broader perspective of a reflection on the relationship between human rights
and politics. It is widely accepted and I share this view to a large extent that
here Hannah Arendts work provides a necessary starting point. Allow me a few
considerations on what we can draw from her. In her discussion of imperialism in

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 A Topography of Cruelty: Etienne Balibar 17

The Origins of Totalitarianism she addresses the question of stateless popula-

tions, deprived of any civil and civic rights, which had been immensely increased
in Europe (and elsewhere) after the two world wars.3 In so doing, she inverts the
perspective of political philosophy in a double manner.
First, she reinstalls right in the middle of debates about citizenship and polit-
ical regimes forms of exclusion and situations of extreme violence where the
survival of humans, as mere representatives of the species, is threatened. She did
not want only to assert a humanistic criterion with a view to doing justice, but to
show that it is only through the discovery of a solution for such situations that we
can find a new foundation for the public sphere, where collective political action
(or praxis) takes place, and not only the management of population movements
and policing of social conflicts. In a very similar way, the French philosopher
Jacques Rancire more recently argued that, since the very origins of democracy,
the measure of equal liberty for all in the political realm was based on la part
des sans part, i.e., giving a fair share to those who hold no share in the common-
wealth, or the political recognition of the have-nots. In other words, this would
mean an active transformation of exclusion processes into processes of inclusion
of the discriminated categories into the city or the polity.4 This is exactly
what isonomia in Greek cities was about. In this respect, politics in the strong
sense becomes inseparable from permanent revolution, a notion that Hannah
Arendt might have inherited from Rosa Luxemburg.
From this perspective, the juridical form of equal liberty is clearly not elimi-
nated. But it has to be reworked completely. With respect to the principles of
modern humanism-universalism, a notion of persons without rights is a contra-
diction in terms, since de jure nobody is without rights, not even children or the
handicapped. But if we view positively, for instance, such claims as those of prop-
ertyless peasants in Brazil, whose motto is justice for the rightless when they
demand that paramilitary forces who kill and terrorize the poor be tried and
condemned, or those of migrant workers in France who protest against their being
denied official documents by asking for a droit de cit pour les sans papiers
(legal residence for the undocumented), we can view these demands based on
resistance and the refusal of violence as partial but direct expressions of the
process of the creation of rights, a dynamic which allows the political constitution
to become recognized as popular sovereignty or democracy.
This is one aspect of the lessons we can draw from Arendts reflections on citi-
zenship, but there is another which in a sense is even more relevant today. I am
thinking of the famous argument showing that the history of nation-states has
produced a reversal of the traditional relationship between human rights and
political rights (or droits de lhomme and droits du citoyen) since they evolved
from the originary democratic national revolutions to the generalization of inter-
national conflicts and the development of imperialism. Human rights in general
can no longer be considered a mere prerequisite and an abstract foundation for
political rights that are set up and preserved within the limits of a given national

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18 Constellations Volume 8, Number 1, 2001

and sovereign state, but neither can they be considered to set a limit to the domi-
nation of the political over the juridical; it has become the opposite, as the tragic
experiences of imperialism and totalitarianism in the twentieth century made
manifest. We discovered that political rights, the actual granting and conditions of
equal citizenship, were the true basis for a recognition and definition of human
rights to begin with, the most elementary ones concerning survival, naked life.
Giving a new, unpolitical meaning to the zon politikon itself, those who were
not citizens of some state, who were citizens of nowhere in the world, were no
longer practically recognized and treated as humans. When the positive institu-
tional rights of the citizen are destroyed e.g., when, in a given historical context
where citizenship and nationhood are closely associated, individuals and groups
are chased out of their national belonging or simply put in the situation of an
oppressed national minority the basic rights which are supposed to be
natural or universally human are threatened and destroyed: we witness forms
of extreme violence, creating a distinction between so-called Untermenschen
(subhumans) and humans believed to be supermen, bermenschen. This is by
no means a contingent phenomenon; it results from an irreversible process that
has become common in contemporary politics. It imposes upon democracy the
immediate task of a renewed foundation. The very essence of politics is at stake,
since politics is not a mere superstructure above the social and natural condi-
tions of life, communication, and culture. The true concept of politics already
concerns the very possibility of a community among humans, establishing a space
for encounter, for the expression and dialectical resolution of antagonisms among
its various constitutive parts and groups.
Seen from this angle, the crucial notion suggested by Arendt, that of a right to
have rights, does not feature a minimal remainder of the political, made of juridi-
cal and moral claims to be protected by a constitution; it is much more the idea of
a maximum. Or, better said, it refers to the continuous process in which a minimal
recognition of the belonging of human beings to the common sphere of exis-
tence (and therefore also of work, culture, public and private speech, etc.) already
involves a totality of rights, and makes it possible. I call this the insurrectional
element of democracy, which predetermines every constitution of a democratic or
republican state. Such a state, by definition, cannot consist (or cannot only
consist) of statuses and rights ascribed from above; it requires the direct partici-
pation of the demos. I should say that Arendts argument clearly recognizes the
importance of the egalitarian or insurrectional element constitutive of democratic
citizenship, but there is more: what she displays is the dialectical relationship of this
element and the politics of civility. This comes from the fact that the radically
excluded, those who, being denied citizenship, are also automatically denied the
material conditions of life and the recognition of their human dignity, do not provide
only a theoretical criterion to evaluate historical institutions against the model of the
ideal constitution. They also force us to address the reality of extreme violence in
contemporary political societies nay, in the very heart of their everyday life. This

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 A Topography of Cruelty: Etienne Balibar 19

is only a seeming paradox: the limit or the state of exception (Schmitt) is noth-
ing exceptional. On the contrary, it is banal; it permeates the functioning of
social and political systems which claim or believe themselves to be democra-
tic. It is both an instrument for the continuity of their vested interests in power,
and a permanent threat to their vitality. This is why we should not consider the
choice between access to and denial of the rights of citizenship more generally,
the possibility and impossibility of an inclusive political order as a speculative
issue. It is a concrete challenge. The (democratic) political order is intrinsically
fragile or precarious; if not continuously recreated in a politics of civility, it
becomes again a state of war, within or across borders.

We know that Arendts argument was based on the experience of a catastrophe in

European history: Nazism, World War Two, and the racist extermination of European
Jews, Gypsies, and other groups. She tried to trace back its origins in the evolution
of the nation-form towards imperialism, while at the same time carefully remaining
aware of its uniqueness. We might summarize her idea by speaking of a deadly circle
in which the national constitution of the state had trapped us. The nation-state was at
the same time the sole positive or institutional horizon for the recognition of human
rights and an impossible one, producing the destruction of the universal values it
had supported. Now we must ask ourselves whether we are still living and acting in
the same conditions. If not, we should ask what the claim of a right to have rights
could become in todays politics. This question becomes a burning one when we
observe that, although the nation-form has not simply been withering away, the
conditions of politics, the economy, and culture, the material distribution of power
and the possibilities of controlling it, have become increasingly transnational. Post-
national state or quasi-state institutions have emerged in the general framework of
globalization. The European Community is a privileged case of these develop-
ments. Let us first reflect on some of the contradictory and worrying aspects of this
process, which, seen from another side, holds much promise.
I take it to be a crucial issue to acknowledge that, along with the development of
a formal European citizenship, a real European Apartheid has emerged. In the
long or even the short run, it could obstruct or block the construction of a democra-
tic European community. It could therefore block European construction altogether,
since there is no real possibility of the supranational community being achieved in
an authoritarian way, la Bismarck, even for the sake of accumulating power or
creating a regional power which would be able to match the worlds economic,
political, and military superpower. A supranational European community will exist
only if, compared with existing national constitutions, it means a democratic
surplus for the majority. Let me clarify the issue by asking two symmetrical ques-
tions: Why speak of a European Apartheid? Why speak of Apartheid in Europe?

Why speak of a European Apartheid? This cannot be simply the case because
foreigners are granted lesser rights (more precisely: some categories of foreigners,

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20 Constellations Volume 8, Number 1, 2001

mainly immigrant workers and asylum seekers from the East and the South who
legally or illegally crossed the frontiers protecting the wealthy civilization of
Europe, the Balkan region featuring in this respect a kind of combination of both
extraneities). There must be something qualitatively new. This is indeed the case
with the new developments of the construction of Europe since the 1993 Treaty
of Maastricht. In each and every one of the European nation-states, there exist
structures of discrimination which command uneven access to citizenship or
nationality, particularly those inherited from the colonial past. But the additional
fact with the birth of the European Union (coming after a mere European
Economic Community) is that a concept of Civis Europeanus progressively
acquires a specific content: new individual and collective rights, which progres-
sively become effective (e.g., possibilities to appeal to European Courts against
ones own national administration and system of justice).
Now the crucial question becomes: new rights for whom? It could be,
abstractly speaking, either for the whole population of Europe, or simply for a
more limited European people (I am expanding here the dilemma which is now
taking place in Germany about the distinction between Volk and Bevlkerung,
since this dilemma actually concerns all of Europe and the German controversy
is paradigmatic). It proves very difficult and embarrassing to define the Euro-
pean people as the symbolic, legal, and material basis for the European
constituency. Maastricht solved the problem by simply stating that those and only
those who already possess citizenship (i.e., are nationals) in one of the constituent
national states will automatically be granted European citizenship. But this
which may remind us of debates among the Founding Fathers of the US Consti-
tution already determines an orientation. Given the quantitative and qualitative
importance of the immigrant population permanently residing in Europe (what
French political scientist Catherine de Wenden has called the sixteenth member-
state5), it immediately transforms a project of inclusion into a program of exclu-
sion which could be summarized by three metamorphoses:

from foreigners to aliens (meaning second-class residents who are deemed to

be of a different kind);
from protection to discrimination (this is a very sensitive issue, as shown by the
Austrian case, but again, with some differences in degree and language, it is a
general European problem: since some of the immigrant workers who are
deprived of political citizenship enjoy some social rights, i.e., are included in
social citizenship, it becomes a crucial political issue and an obsession for
conservative forces to have them expelled from welfare, social protection, etc.
what the French National Front has called prfrence nationale, but precisely
because a degree of prfrence already exists in the national institutions, it is
likely to become a prfrence europenne); and finally,
from cultural difference to racial stigmatization, which is the heart of the
creation of the new racism, postcolonial and post-national.

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 A Topography of Cruelty: Etienne Balibar 21

Why suggest a parallel with South African Apartheid? This could only be a
useless provocation. . . Should we really suggest that, while Apartheid has offi-
cially disappeared in Africa, it is now reappearing in Europe (and perhaps also
elsewhere) a further development in the process of the Empire striking back
(Paul Gilroy)? We could think of comparisons with other historical cases of insti-
tutional racism, for example the US, which we know has never completely forgot-
ten the Jim Crow system, and periodically seems to be on the way to recreating it
when conservative policy is on the agenda. . . For his part, my German colleague
Helmut Dietrich, who has long worked on refugees and migrants on the Eastern
Border of Europe, particularly the Balkans, spoke of the Hinterland of the new
European Reich, etc.
Leaving aside the question of how to measure the amount of suffering created
by one or another system and focusing instead on the structures, I suggest two
complementary reasons at least to borrow lessons from the historical example of
Apartheid, i.e., to compare the situation of the regions whence most of the
migrants come, in Africa, Asia, or other parts of Europe, with homelands in the
South African sense. One is that the position of the important group of workers
who reproduce their lives on one side of the border and produce on the other
side, and thus more precisely are neither insiders nor outsiders, or (for many of
us) are insiders officially considered outsiders, produces a steady increase in the
amount and the violence of security controls, which spread everywhere in the
society and ramify the borderline throughout the European territory, combining
modern techniques of identification and recording with good old racial profil-
ing (contrle au facis). This in particular is what the Schengen agreement was
about. The second complementary reason is that the existence of migrant families
(and their composition, their way of life) has become a true obsession for migra-
tion policies and public opinion. Should the alien families be separated or united
(that is, reunited)? If so, on which side of the border, which kind of families
(traditional, modern), which kind of relatives (parents, children), with what kind
of rights, etc.? As I have argued elsewhere, the interference of family politics,
more generally a politics of genealogy, with the definition of the national
community is a crucial structural mode of production of historical racism.6 Of
course, this is also true when the national becomes multinational community.
From all this we might draw the conclusion that a de-segregated Europe, i.e., a
democratic Europe, is far from the agenda. Indeed, the situation is much more
contradictory, since tendencies point in both directions; we are in the middle of a
historical crossroad that is, only partially and reluctantly acknowledged. But I
prefer to insist on another idea, which provides me with the necessary transition to
the next point, namely the fact that these issues typically illustrate a global-local
(glocal) problem. The contradictory and evolutionary pattern of European citi-
zenship-cum-Apartheid (or statutory, ascriptive citizenship) (Rogers Smith) in a
sense is a reaction to real and imaginary effects of globalization. In another sense
it is a mere projection, albeit with historical specificities, of such effects.

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22 Constellations Volume 8, Number 1, 2001

I shall now directly address the main issue that I announced, that of the global
counter-insurrection: not the violence of the border, but the violence without
borders or beyond borders.
Allow me to quote from a recent study of humanitarian action, published by a
Swiss expert, Pierre de Senarclens of the University of Lausanne, who rightly
insists on the importance of official definitions of contemporary violence and also
on the problematic aspects of the justifications they provide for an extension of
the scope and meaning of humanitarian interventions:

In 1981, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution dedicated to a

New International Humanitarian Order. . . . Shortly thereafter, the Assembly gave
its support to the creation of an independent commission on international humani-
tarian questions, which brought together eminent people. . . . The Commissions
1986 report placed within the humanitarian project the principal political and social
challenges of the age, such as environmental degradation, demographic transition,
population movements, human rights violations, weapons of mass destruction,
North-South polarization, terrorism, and drugs.7

He concludes: We consider humanitarianism as a frame of reference for the iden-

tification of important contemporary problems and a formula for their solution.
Later the author shows how, after 1989, the collapse of the Cold War system of
two camps suppressed the limits which the confrontation between the super-
powers had set to political violence, and blurred the borderlines between war
and peace:

No one foresaw the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the prelude to the swift end of
the Cold War. Nor did anyone anticipate the transformations in international struc-
tures and the violence that followed. Toward the mid-1990s, we count more than
fifty new armed conflicts, essentially civil wars. Certain of these conflicts in
Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Chechnia, or Algeria astonish by their violence and cruelty,
by the extent of the destruction and the population movements they provoke. Inter-
national society has never been confronted with so many wars making so many
victims in such a short time.8

In such conditions, we can incline towards diverging conclusions. Either we

think that the multifaceted phenomenon of mass violence and extreme violence
has generally replaced politics, including internal and external relationships of
forces among states, or we fully take into account the fact that the fields of poli-
tics and violence a violence that seems to lack rational organization, not except-
ing self-destruction are no longer separated; they have progressively permeated
one another. It is precisely in such conditions that something called humanitar-
ian action or intervention, both private and public, has become the neces-
sary supplement of politics. I cannot discuss all the aspects of this mutation, but
I would like briefly to address three questions which seem to me to have an
importance for the concept of politics itself.

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 A Topography of Cruelty: Etienne Balibar 23

1. Are we facing an unprecedented spread of extreme violence (or

violence of the extremes)?
I should like to be very careful on this point, which raises a number of discussions
ranging from the issue of old and new wars9 to the highly sensitive moral ques-
tions of why and how to compare genocides in history. Perhaps what is
unprecedented is basically the new visibility of extreme violence, particularly in
the sense that modern techniques of media coverage and broadcasting and the
transformation of images in the end, as we could see for the first time on a grand
scale during the Gulf War, of the production of virtual reality transform
extreme violence into a show, and display this show simultaneously before a
world audience. We also know that the effect of such techniques is, at the same
time, to uncover some violent processes, or scenes of horror (truly horrifying,
such as hundreds of mutilated children in Angola or Sierra Leone), and to cover
up others (equally horrifying, such as babies starving in Baghdad). We suspect
that powerful ideological biases are at work when the coverage of extreme
violence gives credit to such simple ideas as the political transition from the
equilibrium of terror during the Cold War to the competition among victims
through the undifferentiated uses of the legal and moral but hardly political notion
of crimes against humanity. In the end, we become aware of the fact that talk-
ing about and showing the images of everyday horror produces, particularly in the
relatively wealthy and protected regions of humanity, a very ambivalent effect:
raising compassion but also disgust, reinforcing the idea that humankind as such
is really divided into qualitatively different cultures or civilizations, which,
according to one political scientist, can only lead to a clash among them.
I am aware of all these difficulties, but I would maintain that a reality lies
behind the notion of something unprecedented. Perhaps it is simply the fact that
a number of heterogeneous methods or processes of extermination (by which I
mean eliminating masses of individuals inasmuch as they belong to objective or
subjective groups) have themselves become globalized, i.e., operate in a simi-
lar manner everywhere in the world at the same time, and so progressively form
a chain, giving full reality to what E.P. Thompson anticipated 20 years ago with
the name exterminism.10 In this series of connected processes, we must include,
precisely because they are heterogeneous they do not have one and the same
cause, but they produce cumulative effects:

wars (both civil and foreign, a distinction which is not easy to draw in
many cases think of Yugoslavia or Chechnya);
communal rioting, with ethnic and/or religious ideologies of cleansing;
famines and other kinds of absolute poverty produced by the ruin of tradi-
tional or non-traditional economies;
seemingly natural catastrophes which in fact are killing on a mass scale
because they are overdetermined by social, economic, and political structures,

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24 Constellations Volume 8, Number 1, 2001

such as pandemics (think of the difference in the distribution of AIDS and the
possibilities of treatment between Europe and Northern America on one side,
and Africa and some parts of Asia on the other), draught, floods, or earthquakes
in the absence of developed civil protection. . .

In the end it would be my suggestion that the gobalization of various kinds of

extreme violence has produced a tendential division of the globalized world
into life-zones and death-zones. Between these zones (which indeed are intricate,
frequently reproduced within the boundaries of a single country or city) there
exists a decisive and fragile superborder, which raises fears and concerns about
the unity and division of mankind something like a global and local enmity
line, like the amity line which existed in the beginning of the modern Euro-
pean seizure of the world.11 It is this superborder, this enmity line, that becomes
at the same time an object of permanent show and a hot place for intervention.
But also for nonintervention. We might consider whether the most worrying
aspect of present international politics is humanitarian intervention or gener-
alized non-intervention, or one coming after the other. . .

2. Should we consider that extreme violence is rational or functional

from the point of view of market capitalism (liberal economics)?
This is a very difficult question in fact, I think it is the most difficult question
but it cannot be avoided. Again, we should warn against a paralogism that is
only too obvious but nonetheless frequent: that of mistaking consequences for
goals or purposes. (But is it really possible to discuss social systems in terms of
purposes? On the other hand, can we avoid reflecting on the immanent ends of
a given structure, such as capitalism, or its logic?) It seems to me, very
schematically, that the difficulty arises from the two opposite global effects
which derive from the emergence of a chain of mass violence as compared,
for example, with what Marx called primitive accumulation when he described
the creation of the preconditions for capitalist accumulation in terms of violent
suppression of the poor.
One kind of effect is simply to generalize material and moral insecurity for
millions of potential workers, i.e., to induce a massive proletarianization or repro-
letarianization (a new phase of proletarianization which crucially involves a
return of many to the proletarian condition which they had more or less escaped,
given that insecurity is precisely the heart of the proletarian condition). This
process is contemporary with an increased mobility of capital and also humans,
and so it takes place across borders. But, seen historically, it can also be distrib-
uted among several political varieties:

in the North, it involves a partial or deep dismantling of the social policies

and the institutions of social citizenship created by the welfare state, what I call

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 A Topography of Cruelty: Etienne Balibar 25

the national social state, and therefore also a violent transition from welfare
to workfare, from the social state to the penal state (the US showing the way in
this respect, as has been convincingly argued by Loc Wacquant12);
in the South, it involves destroying and inverting the developmental
programs and policies, which admittedly did not suffice to produce take-off,
but indicated a way to resist impoverishment;
in the semi-periphery, to borrow Wallersteins category, it was connected
with the collapse of the dictatorial structure called real existing socialism,
which was based on scarcity and corruption, but again kept the polarization of
riches and poverty within certain limits.

Let me suggest that a common formal feature of all these processes that result in
the reproletarianization of the labor-force is the fact that they suppress or mini-
mize the forms and possibilities of representation of the subaltern within the state
apparatus itself, or, if you prefer, the possibilities of more or less effective
counter-power. With this remark I want to emphasize the political aspect of
processes which, in the first instance, seem to be mainly economic.
This political aspect, I think, is even more decisive when we turn to the other
scene, the other kind of result produced by massive violence, although the
mechanism here is extremely mysterious. Mysterious but real, unquestionably.
I am thinking of a much more destructive tendency, destructive not of welfare
or traditional ways of life, but of the social bond itself and, in the end, of naked
life.13 Let us think of Foucault, who used to oppose two kinds of politics:
laisser vivre et laisser mourir. . . In the face of the cumulative effects of differ-
ent forms of extreme violence or cruelty which are displayed in what I called
the death zones of humanity, we are led to admit that the current mode of
production and reproduction has become a mode of production for elimination,
a reproduction of populations which are not likely to be productively used or
exploited but are always already superfluous, and therefore can be only elimi-
nated either through political or through natural means what some Latin
American sociologists provocatively call poblacin chatarra, garbage
humans, to be thrown away, out of the global city. If this is the case, the
question arises once again: what is the rationality of that? Or do we face an
absolute triumph of irrationality?
My suggestion would be: it is economically irrational (since it amounts to a
limitation of the scale of accumulation), but it is politically rational or, better
said, it can be interpreted in political terms. The fact is that history does not move
simply in a circle, the circular pattern of successive phases of accumulation.
Economic and political class struggles have already taken place in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries with the result of limiting the possibilities of exploitation,
creating a balance of forces, and this event remains, so to speak, in the memory
of the system. The system (and probably also some of its theoreticians and politi-
cians) knows that there is no exploitation without class struggles, no class

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26 Constellations Volume 8, Number 1, 2001

struggles without organization and representation of the exploited, no representa-

tion and organization without a tendency towards political and social citizenship.
This is precisely what current capitalism cannot afford: there is no possibility of
a global social state corresponding to the national social states in some parts
of the world during the last century. I mean, there is no political possibility.
Therefore there is political resistance, very violent indeed, to every move in that
direction. Technological revolutions provide a positive but insufficient condition
for the deproletarianization of the actual or potential labor-force. This time, direct
political repression may also be insufficient. Elimination or extermination has to
take place, passive if possible, active if necessary; mutual elimination is
best, but it has to be encouraged from outside.
This is what allows me to suggest (and it already takes me to my third ques-
tion) that if the economy of global violence is not functional (because its imma-
nent goals are indeed contradictory), it remains in a sense teleological: the same
populations are massively targeted or the reverse: those populations which are
targeted become progressively assimilated, they look the same. They are qual-
itatively deterritorialized, as Deleuze would say, in an intensive rather than
extensive sense: they live on the edge of the city, under permanent threat of
elimination; but also, conversely, they live and are perceived as nomads, even
when they are fixed in their homelands, i.e., their mere existence, their quantity,
their movements, their virtual claims of rights and citizenship are perceived as a
threat to civilization.

3. In the end, does extreme violence form a global system?

Violence can be highly unpolitical, this is what I wanted to suggest, but still
form a system or be considered systematic if the various forms reinforce each
other, if they contribute to creating the conditions for their succession and
encroachment, if in the end they build a chain of human(itarian) catastrophes
where actions to prevent the spread of cruelty, extermination, etc., or simply limit
their effects, are systematically obstructed. This teleology without an end is
exactly what I suggested calling, in the most objective manner, preventive
counter-revolution, or, better perhaps, preventive counter-insurrection. It is
only seemingly Hobbesian, since the weapon used against a war of all against
all is another kind of war (Le Monde recently spoke about Colombia in terms of
a war against society waged by the state and the Mafiosi together). It is politics
as anti-politics, but it appears as a system because of the many connections
between the heterogeneous forms of violence (arms trade indispensable to state
budgets with corruption; corruption with criminality; drug, organ, and modern
slave trade with dictatorships; dictatorships with civil wars and terror. . .). And
perhaps also, last but not least, because there is a politics of extreme violence that
confuses all the forms to erect the figure of evil (humanitarian intervention
sometimes participates in that), and because there is an economics of extreme

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 A Topography of Cruelty: Etienne Balibar 27

violence which makes both coverage and intervention sources of profitable busi-
ness. . . When I spoke of a division between zones of life and zones of death, with
a fragile line of demarcation, it was tantamount to speaking of the totalitarian
aspects of globalization. But globalization is clearly not only that. At the moment
at which humankind becomes economically and, to some extent, culturally
united, it is violently divided bio-politically. A politics of civility (or a poli-
tics of human rights) can be either the imaginary substitute of the destroyed unity,
or the set of initiatives that reintroduce everywhere, and particularly on the
borderlines themselves, the issue of equality, the horizon of political action.

There will be no real conclusion, only an attempt to direct reflection and discus-
sion towards some sensitive issues: the issue of counter-violence, the issue of
international law, the issue of access to citizenship, and what I called insur-
rection. We might think of different kinds of strategies of civility. To discuss
their possible foundation and implementation would be a matter for another,
different paper. Let me simply suggest the following. Since the real and virtual
aspects are so closely interwoven in the nexus of extreme violence or cruelty, it is
very difficult to escape an attitude that privileges either one or the other. This is,
in a sense, what classical concepts of political action always did: they were
mainly directed at either building communities and community-feelings (and I
would certainly agree with Benedict Anderson that all historical communities are
primarily imagined communities) or at changing the world, i.e., in a more
materialistic way transforming social structures, particularly structures of domi-
nation and exploitation (classical Marxism being in this respect a paradigmatic
example). I think that the central character of the issue of extreme violence in
todays politics makes it even more urgent to look for and invent an Aufhebung of
this dualism, not by ignoring its dual aspects but by trying, practically and
concretely, to combine their demands and constraints in a critical manner.
This might explain why, for instance, I would not feel satisfied with the idea
that the foundation of a politics of civility is an insistence on international law,
although I admit that it is a decisive element of democracy on a world scale.
Jrgen Habermas, for instance, has consistently moved in this direction, adding
an insistence on the underlying ethics of communication. But Habermas
neglects the fact that the gates of communication sometimes have to be
opened by force, sometimes in a violent manner, or they will remain locked
forever. International law is necessary here, but not sufficient. From the oppo-
site angle, we might suggest, there is certainly a good case to be made that the
looming counter-revolutionary or counter-insurrectional character of massive
violence calls for a counter-counter-insurrection, a renewal of the idea of
revolution this time, perhaps, a true world revolution directed against the
very global structures that connect violence with capitalism, imperialism, and
what Negri and Hardt now call Empire.14 But, again, there is a difficulty here:
that of falling back into the very symmetry of political methods and goals that,

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28 Constellations Volume 8, Number 1, 2001

since the first socialist and anti-imperialist revolutions attempted to seize power
in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat, has helped extreme violence
to become built into the very heart of emancipatory politics, and helped the
twentieth century become what Eric Hobsbawm called the Age of Extremes.
It is not only the state or the economy that need to be civilized or to become
civil, but also revolution itself. I am convinced that the solution for that
historical puzzle is actively searched for in many places today, but it is not
clearly found or shown.
In the end, in a more cautious and perhaps aporetic manner, I would consider
seriously some suggestions recently made by the Dutch political scientist
Herman van Gunsteren.15 I think that van Gunsteren is right to suggest that all
political communities today including virtual communities, from neighbor-
hoods to cities to nation-states to continents to the globe itself (Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak in this context would prefer the term planet16), from territories
to networks are communities of fate (as opposed to destiny). They are
communities already including difference and conflict, where heterogeneous
people and groups have been thrown by history and economics next to one
another, in such a situation that they cannot spontaneously converge in their
interests or cultural ideals, but also cannot completely diverge without risking
mutual destruction (or common elimination by external forces). Taking inspira-
tion from Arendts critique of the rights of man (and also from Kants formula-
tion in his essay On Perpetual Peace from 1896: in the end they must of
necessity tolerate each others existence), van Gunsteren sets the principle
(meta-political, admittedly): for every individual in every group there must be
at least one place in the world where he/she is recognized as a citizen, and
hence given the chance to enjoy human rights. But, moving just one step
beyond that principle (which in another sense is but a question that interpellates
us), we may simply ask: where is that place? If communities are communities
of fate, the only possible answer is the radical one: any place where individu-
als and groups belong, wherever they happen to live, therefore to work, bear
children, support relatives, find partners for every sort of intercourse. . .
Given what I have suggested concerning the topography of todays globalized
and cruel world, I think we could even say more precisely: the recognition and
institution of citizens rights, which practically command the development of
human rights, have to be organized beyond the exclusive membership in one
community; they should be located, so to speak, on the borders, where so
many of our contemporaries actually live. Which of necessity means an unsta-
ble situation, but also very precise demands. Van Gunsteren is right in this
respect to stress the idea that, from what I would call a point of view of civil-
ity, the important question is permanent access to rather than simply entitle-
ment to citizenship, and therefore humanity (or, as he writes, citizenship in the
making). It is an active and collective civil process, rather than a simple legal
status.

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 A Topography of Cruelty: Etienne Balibar 29

NOTES

1. Etienne Balibar, Extreme Violence and the Problem of Civility (New York: Columbia
University Press, forthcoming).
2. Etienne Balibar, Une politique de la civilit est-elle possible? (Citoyennet, mondialit,
civilit), conference at the University of Geneva, opening session, Diplme de Formation Continue
en Action Humanitaire.
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition with added prefaces (New
York: Harvest, 1973), pt. 2, ch. 9.
4. Jacques Rancire, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, tr. Julie Rose (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1999).
5. Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, La citoyennet europenne (Paris: Presses de la Fondation
nationale sur les sciences politiques, 1997).
6. See, e.g., Etienne Balibar and Emmanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Iden-
tities, tr. Chris Turner (London & New York : Routledge, 1991).
7. Pierre de Senarclens, Lhumanitaire en catastrophe (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1999).
8. Ibid.
9. Cf. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1999).
10. Edward P. Thompson et al., Exterminism and Cold War (London: Verso, 1982).
11. Cf. Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Vlkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum
(Berlin: Dunckler und Humblot, 1988 (1950)).
12. Loc Wacquant, Les prisons de la misre (Paris: Raisons dagir/Darantire, 1999).
13. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford: Standford University Press, 1998).
14. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000).
15. Herman van Gunsteren, A Theory of Citizenship: Organizing Plurality in Contemporary
Democracies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998).
16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten/Imperatives to Re-
Imagine the Planet (Frankfurt/M: Passagen Verlag, 1999).

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