European Journal of Social Theory

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At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in Translation?

Etienne Balibar
European Journal of Social Theory 2010 13: 315
DOI: 10.1177/1368431010371751

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 European Journal of Social Theory
13(3) 315–322
At the Borders of ª The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1368431010371751
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Democracy in Translation?

Etienne Balibar
Université de Paris-X, Nanterre and University of California, Irvine

Abstract
Borders are never purely local institutions, never reducible to a simple history of conflicts
and agreements between neighboring groups and powers. Borders are already global,
ways of dividing the world into regions and thus make possible place and a ‘mapping
imaginary’. Borders are characterized by an intrinsic ambivalence that derives from
their internal and external functions, as the basis of collective belonging and state
control over mobility and territory. The construction of political space takes place
through modes of translation between inside and outside that the border signifies.

Keywords
borders, citizenship, democracy, Europe, migrants

I will start out expanding on what I used to call a ‘phenomenological approach’ of the
border as institution – and in a sense an institution of institutions, which exhibits some
of its fundamental characteristics inasmuch as it is historically framed and used by polit-
ical practices as much as it determines them and sets its quasi-transcendental conditions.
I used in the past, with respect to the repressive functions performed by the border espe-
cially with respect to strangers, or some strangers, but also some nationals, the formula ‘a
non-democratic condition of democracy’. I would tend now to emphasize the much more
ambivalent characteristics of this condition, which institutionally represents both close-
ness and aperture, or their permanent dialectical interplay. A phenomenology of the bor-
der, thus, is a very complex undertaking. It is clearly one of the major objects of
reflection and points of interdisciplinary cooperation of anthropologists, historians, geo-
graphers, political theorists, etc. today. Even philosophers may have something to say
from within their intellectual tradition and disciplinary logic. To adopt the institution

Corresponding author:
University of California 312 Humanities Hall, Irvine, CA 92697
Email: ebalibar@uci.edu
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316 European Journal of Social Theory 13(3)

of the border as a privileged vantage point in the discussion on cosmopolitics and its
tensions does not produce the same effect as adopting, say, the point of view of culture,
or territory, or urban society, although there clearly are reciprocities to be highlighted
between these different paradigms. Why do I use the expression ‘phenomenology’, in
a sense that certainly owes as much to the Hegelian idea of a historicity of experiences
in which the individual and the collective are mutually conditioning each other, as to a
Husserlian, Heideggerian and hermeneutic concept of meaning? In previous essays
I suggested, somewhat metaphysically, but in fact following a suggestion from Kant’s
early Latin dissertation on the ‘regions of space’, that borders are never purely local insti-
tutions, never reducible to a simple history of conflicts and agreements between neigh-
boring powers and groups, which would concern only them, bilaterally, but in fact are
always already ‘global’, a way of dividing the world itself into regions, therefore places,
therefore a way of configuring the world or making it ‘representable’ as the history of
maps and mapping techniques testifies. Hence the development of a ‘mapping imagin-
ary’, which has clearly as much anthropological importance as the imagination of histor-
ical time and is probably not to be separated from it. I should add that borders are,
therefore, constitutive of the transindividual relationship to the world, or ‘being in the
world’ when it is predicated on a plurality of subjects. This might already explain why
the imagination of borders has a privileged relationship with utopias, albeit in a very con-
tradictory manner. Either it works through the assumption of their closure, their enfor-
cing, when utopian societies are imagined as isolated from the world, or it works
through the anticipation of their suppression, their abolition which would give rise to
a ‘borderless world’ for the whole of mankind. But the borders are not only structures
of the imagination; they are first a very real institution, albeit not with a fixed function
and status. And as conditions for the construction of a collective experience, they are
essentially characterized by their intrinsic ambivalence.
Here I generalize a reflection on the category of the foreigner and ‘foreignness’ that I find
in particular in Bonnie Honig’s excellent book on Democracy and the Foreigner (2001), to
which I will return. This ambivalence begins with the fact that borders are in fact both inter-
nal and external, or subjective and objective, i.e. imposed by state policies, juridical con-
straints, controls over human mobility and intercourse, but also deeply rooted in
collective identifications and the assumption of a common sense of belonging. It continues
with the fact that borders are in fact at work within opposite paradigms of the construction of
the political, particularly with what I call the paradigm of war and the paradigm of transla-
tion, and with competing, antithetic models for the construction of the ‘stranger’, or the
institution of the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which are both exclusive and
non-exclusive. As a consequence, while recognizing the importance of the border in the
development of utopian discourses, I prefer to consider in Foucauldian terms that the border
as such is a heterotopia or a ‘heterotopic’ place in history and society (Foucault, 1994
[1984]), i.e. both a place of exception where the conditions and the distinctions of normality
and everyday life are ‘normally suspended’, so to speak; and a place where the antinomies of
the political are in a sense manifested and become an object of politics itself. It is borders, the
drawing and the enforcing of borders, their interpretations and negotiations that ‘make’ or
‘create’ peoples, languages, races and genealogies. Let me try to indicate three moments of
this heterotopic phenomenon of borders from the point of view of their current
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Balibar 317

transformations, especially across and beyond Europe. The emergence of something called
‘European borders’ with the problematic characteristic of being constantly dislocated is
indeed one of the main concerns underlying this very sketchy theorization.
The first element in this description that I want to emphasize is the fact that borders
and frontiers (or borders qua frontiers: I leave aside the very interesting idiomatic distri-
bution of these terms in various languages) are simultaneously defined as functions of
warfare (including the interruption of warfare in the form of territorial settlements and
an equilibrium of power sanctioned and codified by international law), and as functions
of translation, or linguistic exchange, in what I suggest calling a philological model of
the construction of the political space, particularly the nation in modern history, where
the appropriation of a collective identity but also its equivalence with others mainly rests
on the establishment of a correspondence as tight and effective as possible between lin-
guistic communities and political communities with the same boundaries, enforced and
developed through education, literature, journalism and communication – as Benedict
Anderson (1991) famously demonstrated in his study of ‘imagined communities’ (and
the becoming hegemonic of the national form of the state).
This is not to say that the construction of borders for and through war and the
suspension of war, and the model of the construction of borders and their interior-
ization through the community of language and the possibility of translation (trans-
lation being the activity that takes place when you are on the border itself, either
very briefly or for a very long period, sometimes for the whole of one’s life), this
is not to say, I repeat, that the two models are completely external to one another.
On the contrary they are bound to continuously interfere and merge. In a sense, or in
specific circumstances, war arises over translation and translation remains a war –
because in particular translation involves a confrontation with the conflictual differ-
ence, or the irreducible, unspeakable ‘diffe´rend’ with the other in Jean-François
Lyotard’s (1983) terminology, that can be displaced but not abolished, and returns
under the very appearance of consensus and communication. This reciprocity of war
and translation around and within the establishment of lasting cultural power struc-
tures or hegemonies has been particularly emphasized by post-colonial studies which
concern both the old peripheries and the old ‘centers’, where so-called ‘universal’ or
‘international’ languages have been created and institutionalized. This is, for
instance, one of the major themes of reflection in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work Pro-
vincializing Europe (2000) where he insists on the conflictual relationship between
antagonistic ways of ‘translating’ life worlds, or the experience of the world, into
labor, i.e. abstraction in the merchant and capitalistic sense, and history, i.e. major-
itarian and minoritarian traditions and belonging. Perhaps we could suggest that
what characterizes the experience of the world of globalization in which we find
ourselves today, a world both virtually common and deeply divided among incom-
patible representations of the sense of history, is a new intensity of this overlapping
or indecision of the relationship between war and translation, more generally power
and discourse. This would come also, on the side of war, from the fact that war has
been immersed in a much more general economy of global violence, which is not
less but more murderous, and in fact includes permanent aspects of extermination.
Ethnocide or culture wars are part of this economy.
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318 European Journal of Social Theory 13(3)

The pattern of a ‘global civil war’, on a Hobbesian model, that is looming in such
diverse interpretations as those proposed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Toni Negri and
Michael Hardt, or Giorgio Agamben, is useful here but it is also misleading because it
tends to blur and quickly reduce to unity the enormous heterogeneity of the processes
of violence involved in this global economy, ranging from so-called ‘new wars’ which
involve state and non-state actors, subverting the forms of international law, to the seem-
ing natural catastrophes which foremost affect the populations already targeted by mass
impoverishment which make them ‘superfluous’ from the point of view of the capitalist
rationality, and tendentiously pushes them to the edge of survival. On the other hand, it
should become progressively clear that the labor of translation which permanently con-
fronts the antinomy of equivalence and difference, acknowledging the irreducible nature
of the untranslatable elements and producing through its confrontation with this ‘impos-
sible’ task a universal community of languages, or a ‘pure language’, as Walter Benjamin
explained in somewhat messianic terms in his famous essay on ‘The task of the transla-
tor’ (1991 [1923]), has also become a much more complex and conflictual work with the
process of globalization, especially as it is seen ‘from below’, i.e. not from the global
Republic of Letters, but by the working populations themselves. It is not only that in
a postcolonial world the hierarchy of world languages, therefore of possibilities of trans-
lation towards the same ‘languages of reference’, which serve as general equivalents for
all the others, is becoming less and less indisputable and unilateral, but becomes also
continuously enforced in a brutally simplified manner through the monolinguistic disci-
pline of internet communication. It is also that the association of linguistic hierarchies
with borders and collective identities appears much more clearly as a form of national
and transnational power structure: there is as much violence and latent political conflict,
as much questioning of established sovereignties, in the possibility of Algerian citizens
simultaneously using their historical languages on a par, including French, as there is for
Urdu, Turkish, Arab, and African languages, to be recognized as equal parts of the ‘con-
versation’ among the populations of multinational and multicultural Europe, therefore
granted the same educational and administrative status as the ‘genuinely European’
national or regional languages (some of which for centuries have been expropriated,
i.e. no longer ‘belong’ to the populations of European descent). I suspect that similar
problems could be raised with respect to Spanish and Asian languages within the North
American space.
This brings me quite naturally, in spite of the schematic character of these remarks to
the second aspect that I wanted to emphasize in order to suggest the possibility of a phe-
nomenology of borders as a preliminary to the understanding of the cosmopolitical issue.
In his book, Postmodernity and Its Discontents, Zygmunt Bauman who is certainly one
of the great anthropologists of the cultural side of ‘globalization’ today, has emphasized
that ‘all societies produce strangers, but each kind of society produces its own kind of
strangers, and produces them in its own inimitable way’ (Baumann, 1997: 17). I take this
formula to mark an important step in the story of sociological and philosophical reflec-
tions on the figure of the stranger and the foreigner (the duality of categories in English
already marking the difficulty of assessing priority to the interior or the exterior, the jur-
idical or the cultural aspect), which derives from the famous essays by Georg Simmel
and Alfred Schütz, and continues today with new developments by Paul Gilroy, Homi
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Balibar 319

Bhabha, Bonnie Honing already cited, etc. The question whether it was the existence of
borders that created the stranger, imposing an institutional mark of otherness on the com-
plexity of cultural and local differences, or the pre-existing difference among nations and
genealogies, or quasi-genealogies, that led to the institution of borders and the closure of
territories, was never completely solved, but it would seem that the establishment of the
new borders of Europe, and the way they are enforced against the self-determination and
the right of circulation of migrant and refugee populations, not in spite of the continuous
relocation of these borderlines which are also police demarcations, but precisely because
of this discretionary character, as embodied in the Schengen rules, shed a brutal light on
this issue. In previous essays, I had intentionally given this discussion a provocative
dimension by suggesting that the introduction of a notion of European citizenship based
on national membership within the European Union, i.e. incorporating anybody who is
already a national citizen in any of the member states, and excluding anybody, however
permanently settled and economically or culturally integrated, who comes from extra-
communitarian spaces, produces something like a European apartheid, a reverse side
of the emerging European community of citizens.
The exclusionary aspect of this would be a universalistic community, arising from the
simple fact that differences of nationality, distinguishing the national and the foreigner,
which formerly applied in the same manner in each nation-state to aliens, are now cre-
ating a permanent discrimination: some foreigners (the ‘fellow Europeans’), in terms of
rights and social status, have become less than foreigners, they are in fact no longer
exactly strangers, which is not to say that they feel no difference, I return to this in a min-
ute; while other foreigners, the ‘extra-communitarians’, and especially the immigrant
workers and refugees from the South, are now, so to speak, more than foreigners, they
are the absolute aliens subject to institutional and cultural racism. To this general idea,
sociologists like Alessandro Dal Lago and Sandro Mezzadra, and political scientists like
Didier Bigo, but also others, who work very concretely on the development of the ‘nor-
malized state of exception’ to which migrants are increasingly subjected in Europe in
order to maintain the distinction between legal and illegal categories of immigrants
(paradoxically in the name of security, which this distinction permanently undermines),
have added another element: the violent police operations continuously performed by
some European states (with the help of neighboring non-European subject states, such
as Libya or Morocco) on behalf of the whole community, including the establishment
of camps, amount to a kind of permanent border war against migrants. The extent to
which this policy is intentional can be disputed, but what I draw from this analysis per-
sonally, and especially from the growing indiscernibility of the concept of police and the
concept of war that it involves (also present in other forms of sovereign violence in
today’s world), concerns the tendency towards a reduction of the notion of the foreigner,
or the ‘real stranger’, to a notion of virtual enemy, which can be activated depending on
the logic of power permanently running after the recuperation of its lost sovereignty, or
the imaginary possibility of controlling populations and territories in a completely inde-
pendent manner.
The reduction of the figure of the stranger to that of the enemy is perhaps one of the
clearest signs of the crisis of the nation-state, or the historical national form of the state,
as already signaled by Hannah Arendt with respect to the ‘stateless’ populations. It also
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320 European Journal of Social Theory 13(3)

shows that the crisis of the nation-state, concentrated on its borders but also continuously
dislocating these borders, does not coincide with a linear process of withering away. On
the contrary, it makes the nation-state, or a combination of nation-states, return to a rel-
atively lawless status and mode of exercising power, which strongly suggests a compar-
ison with the early modern moments in the construction of the monopoly of violence that
Marx interpreted as so many aspects of the ‘primitive accumulation’. They probably
have something to do perhaps with a new phase of primitive accumulation of capitalism
on the global scale. But – to return once again to the suggestions made by Bonnie Honig
in her Democracy and the Foreigner, they also testify to an extremely ambivalent char-
acter of the political process involved. In fact, whole populations of strangers are now
oscillating between the condition of outsiders and insiders in the construction of a
post-national and especially post-colonial order, for which Europe appears as a sort of
violent, conflictual ‘laboratory’. In short, they could become, and they actually very
often do become, either internal enemies, looked at with suspicion and fear by the offi-
cial institutions and the ‘majoritarian’ population, or additional citizens, whose very dif-
ference reproduces the fabric of rights and the democratic legitimacy of the institutions.
Their inclusion in the domain of the ‘right to have rights’ would illustrate what French
political philosopher Jacques Rancière called granting the shareless their share. Indeed,
this symmetry is heavily unbalanced, but it is never completely destroyed, or better said,
it is at stake in the daily process of resistances and vindications of basic rights on the part
of the foreigners, which make them members of an active community of citizens, even
before they are granted formal citizenship, thus concretely anticipating a cosmopolitical
transformation of citizenship.
I want, however, to qualify this consideration, which may sound very optimistic
indeed (leaving behind the famous distinction of the optimism of the will based on the
pessimism of intelligence), by adding a complication. This will be, much more briefly,
my third and last point. I became aware of this, which I submit for critique and discus-
sion, when I started reflecting on the consequences of the failed attempt at establishing a
European Constitution two years ago (a Constitution strongly advocated by Jürgen
Habermas, let us remember in passing), which the current arrangements will not correct,
I believe, and its relationship to the development of so-called populist attitudes in
Europe, more explicitly a revival of nationalist feelings, of which the strangers are the
inevitable victims – and not only when they come from outside Europe, but from Europe
itself, i.e. between its own ‘peoples’. What is cause and what is effect in this matter can
be disputed, perhaps it does not matter so much, and we must develop a symptomatic
interpretation. The French and the Dutch played the role of the bad Europeans in the
story, but you may remember that former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, not a bad
connoisseur, shortly after the event, declared his conviction that, if popular referenda has
been carried on everywhere in Europe, the result would probably have been a ‘No’ in a
majority of countries, including the UK and possibly Germany. I don’t believe that we
are dealing here with a simple example of the perpetual conflict between a reactionary
nationalism and an enlightened cosmopolitanism. And I also don’t think that the reason
for the failure of the federal project lies entirely in the social and economic causes
emphasized by the Left, especially in France, when it insisted that the draft constitution
had been rejected because it completely endorsed a legitimization of the neo-liberal
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Balibar 321

conception of the public sphere, and a dismantling of the collective social rights. This
can be disputed and in any case, even if it is largely true, which I tend to believe, it would
not produce political effects of nationalist revival on its own. It could also – at least ide-
ally – foster a development of pan-European social movements among workers, for
which some of the democratic advances written in the Constitution (notably in the Char-
ter of Fundamental Rights) could serve as an instrument. So there must be something else
as well. I believe that it can be looked for in the vicious circle created by the addition of
different kinds of xenophobia directed, on the one hand, toward the other European peo-
ples, the ‘fellow Europeans’ if you like, in each European country, and the xenophobia
directed, on the other hand, against non-European populations of migrants (or of migrant
descent) – with highly ambivalent cases such as Romanians, Balkan peoples in general,
but also Turks or populations of North African descent who have been part of ‘European
history’ for centuries now in a colonial or semi-colonial framework.
This is what I call the difficulty – or the cosmopolitical difficulty – for Europe to deal
with its double otherness, or its internal otherness and its external otherness, which now
are no longer confronted in absolutely separated spaces. This is also the difficulty for
Europe to completely distinguish between its internal borders (between member states)
and its external borders (with the rest of the world, and especially the South, but also the
East, and perhaps some day the American West), or abolish this distinction and return to
a classical status of the border and the definition of the stranger. To put it concretely
in one phrase, I do believe that European racism directed against immigrant
‘extra-European’ populations, which largely hinders the possibility of developing social
movements against neo-liberal policies, results from a projection of the nationalist
feeling opposing European nations to one another, and which the European construction
in its current form has only superficially recovered – racism forming, in fact, a derivative
for a repressed mutual xenophobia. But I also believe that the reverse is true: it is the
inability of European nations, and in fact the unwillingness of European states, each for
itself, to grant migrants and populations of migrant descent an equal status in terms of
rights and recognition, not to mention the permanent temptation of populist parties and
leaders to instrumentalize anti-migrant fears and hatred for domestic purposes, which
prevent Europeans from imagining that, as a single political constituency, they could
address their most urgent common social and political problems, thus giving rise to a
new more ‘cosmopolitical’ moment in the history of democratic citizenship. There is
something like a ‘missing nation’ in the middle of Europe, made up of several long-
established migrant communities with different histories but a similar final destiny, and
also some common cultural characters easily seen as threats to European culture. Once it
could be called the ‘16th nation’, when there were fifteen official member states, now it
could be called the ‘28th nation’. And it is this missing nation in the middle, which
returns in a fantastic manner as a virtual internal enemy, which makes it so difficult for
all the other nations to perceive themselves as building a single constituency. Which
automatically deprives them of the capacity to collectively resist or influence the global
trends of politics, culture, and economy.
This would quite naturally take us towards the next, and in a sense the most difficult
question, from the philosophical and the political point of view, namely the question of
the nature of subjects of cosmopolitics, qua agents of reciprocal or correlative interaction
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322 European Journal of Social Theory 13(3)

across borders, or possibly though a certain use of borders, a certain democratization of

borders, inasmuch as they differ from the ideal, abstract, ‘cosmopolitan man’, or ‘citizen
of the world’, of the classical utopia. This is, in my opinion, precisely the point where the
issue of translation has to be recognized as a crucial issue in contemporary intellectual
debates especially when transformations of citizenship are at stake.

Acknowledgement
This article is based on a public lecture at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck Col-
lege, University of London, Tuesday 6 November 2007.

References
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Routledge.
Bauman, Zygmunt (1997) Postmodernity and Its Discontents. New York: New York University
Press.
Benjamin, Walter (1991 [1923]) ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, in Gesammelte Schriften Vol. IV
1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, pp. 7–21. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differ-
ence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, Michel (1994 [1984]) ‘Des espaces autres’, in Dits et e´crits, Vol. IV, pp. 752–62. Paris:
Gallimard.
Honig, Bonnie (2001) Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1983) Le diffe´rend. Paris: Minuit.

Bio
Etienne Balibar is emeritus professor (Philosophie politique et morale) at the Université de
Paris-X Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities (Department of French and Italian,
Department of English and Comparative Literature), University of California, Irvin. Past and
current research subjects include: philosophical anthropology (the subject and the citizen), extreme
violence and the problem of civility, politics as war and war as politics, individuality and
transindividuality, borders and the representation of the stranger, universalism and cosmopolitics.
Book publications include: Politics and the Other Scene (London and New York: Verso, 2002);
L’Europe, l’Ame´rique, la Guerre. Re´flexions sur la me´diation europe´enne (Paris: Editions La
Découverte, 2003); We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

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