The important normative issues and societal challenges of our time revolve around borders. Globalization has shifted our attention from the border as a mere geographical line that demarcates a state’s territory to the more complex and even ambiguous functioning of borders. In particular, the movement of people has brought the relational character of borders to awareness: Borders serve to include and exclude, separating and uniting “here” and “there,” and even if boundaries close off an inside with respect to an outside, borders also always signal an openness to what lies beyond.
The two books under review here turn their gaze toward both sides of the border. Hagar Kotef’s Movement and the Ordering of Freedom closely examines the implications of qualifying movement either as normal, regular, and safe or as abnormal, irregular, and excessive. Kotef offers a theoretical inquiry into movement as a manifestation of freedom and critically discusses the split between those whose free movement is preconditioned by the control and containment of others and those who are unfree and cannot change places. She meticulously maps this split onto the history and theory of political liberalism. In The Cross-Border Connection, Roger Waldinger in turn ties “this side” of the border with the “other side” by describing the different ways in which migrants continue to relate to their place of origin and vice versa, and how these relations change over time due to the jagged course a human life takes. It is to the credit of both books that they do not embrace the oversimplified view of globalization as giving rise to a deterritorialized, unbounded world but, instead, seek to critically understand the continuing relevance of borders.
Kotef presents us with a rich and multi-faced contribution to contemporary theories on movement, migration, and border security. Whereas most scholars working on these themes depart from Hannah Arendt’s famous invocation of the right to have rights, Kotef felicitously takes her cue from Arendt’s recovery of the spatiality of the law. As Arendt reminds us that the enjoyment of rights and freedom requires the “legal emplacement” of the individual (a notion prompted by Hans Lindahl), she clarifies that we can only move freely within the territorial and normative boundaries of the state. The central insight Kotef takes from Arendt is that movement can only be free within ordered space. Next to Arendt, Kotef draws on Foucault’s inquiries into the relation among power, security, and the circulation of goods, things and persons that he presented in the courses he taught at Collège de France between 1978 and 1979. She expands upon Foucault’s basic insight that the expansion of ever-wider circulations of things and persons requires the integration instead of elimination of threats into the normal order of movement lest movement not be brought to a stop. Both Arendt and Foucault inform the twofold central claim of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: i) Free movement is always ordered movement, and ii) through the ordering of movement, different subjects emerge that can be divided over two positions: those who rule themselves and are free to move and those who are unfree, immobile, unruly, and therefore need to be controlled by others.
The particular strength of the book is that from the outset, lucidly makes clear what is at stake. Chapter 1 (coauthored with Merav Amir) and Chapter 2 discuss the sophisticated Israeli system of controlling the Palestinian people via its movement within the occupied Palestinian territories. In so doing, Kotef concretely demonstrates how techniques of enabling movement and their unhappy twin of control and containment impact upon the lives of people. The control and subjection of the Palestinian people becomes nowhere more manifest than at the checkpoints where movement is constantly hindered, prevented, and counteracted. For the checkpoints to function as disciplinary apparatuses, Kotef and Amir argue, they make use of what is called the imaginary line. The Palestinians are supposed to line up behind imaginary lines that are not publicly and visibly marked and therefore bound to be transgressed all the time. The checkpoints, internalizing the Israeli border within Palestinian territory, secretly entice people to constantly trespass boundaries, making the Palestinians appear as unruly and unreliable people whose occupation is justified. Both chapters demonstrate the internal relation between security and movement, showing that the “free movement of some is … maximized by [the] effacement of others and their need to move” (Movement, p. 54).
In Chapters 3 and 4, the separation between those who are free to move and those who are unfree and trespass borders in a disorderly manner is traced back to the history of political liberalism. Kotef convincingly shows that self-regulation is the linchpin that allows for the separation in movement. Arguing that free movement and not the free will was essential to those theories from which liberalism originated, she points out that for Hobbes, liberty balances the natural inclination of the body to move and the available possibilities to actualize it: “[T]he degree of one’s freedom is a function of her available space for movement” (ibid., p. 66). For Hobbes, liberty is both negative and positive, and the law is seen as either a chain that man is to be freed from or a fence that hedges in freedom, making man free through law. Kotef argues that it is Hobbes’s concept of self-restrained movement exemplified by servitude that allows him to balance negative and positive freedom. The servant who agreed not to run away and was taken out of his chains by his master is the model for the liberal subject. The servant who does not run restrains himself in order not to be restrained by others, and his self-restrained movement makes him free.
If self-restrained movement distinctively marks the liberal and rational subject, it meets its counterpart in those whose movement is disorderly and excessive and who are therefore to be subjected to the rule of others. Chapter 4 stages the colonized subject over against the liberal subject. On the understanding that free movement can only take place within bounds, this chapter explorers the relation of people to place and settled ownership as a precondition for safe movement. It argues that different modes of relating to the land, such as nomadism or peasant agriculture that physically disperses people in rugged areas, appear from the viewpoint of the state not as movement but as disruptive savagery. The chapter is highly reminiscent of James Scott’s brilliant analyses of people who seek to avoid subjection to a state by moving into impassible rough regions. Yet Kotef squares Scott’s famous quote that the state “has always seemed to be the enemy of people who move around,” with which the chapter opens, with the political philosophy of John Locke. Kotef powerfully argues that even though, in theory and history, political liberalism prides itself on its universal and inclusionary character, it nevertheless assumes a privileged mode of land appropriation and relationship to the ground that excludes other modes of being. This privileged mode is settlement and illuminates why in Locke nomadism, irrationalism and unfree movement are both conceptually and normatively entangled. For Locke (as well as for Hobbes before him), America represented the state of nature in which there is only excessive, disorderly, but no free movement. Unordered movement without settlement explains, according to Locke, why so much land is lying wasted. Because this is not economically rational, the moral duty is to appropriate the newly discovered land and make it productive for humanity. The interrelations among order, settlement, ownership, and movement, in liberal theory, render a possible framework for vacant lands that justifies occupation and the subjection of indigenous people to foreign rule. Demonstrating that the movement of those who have settled and own the land is protected versus those who are controlled, contained, and subjected via their movement, Kotef successfully weaves a thread between the occupation of Palestinian territories and colonialism via the history and theory of political liberalism.
Kotef aims at a critical analysis of the prerogative of the state to “determine who is permitted to enter what sort of spaces.” As argued previously, through this ordering of space and movement different subject positions are produced. In this respect, it is a missed opportunity that she does not inquire into the collective subject formation of democratic politics for which inclusion and exclusion are essential. Indeed, what is ultimately at stake with the prerogative to determine who is allowed to enter where and when is the appropriate basis of collective self-government: Who belongs to the people, and who does not? Admittedly, with respect to the collective subject of politics, Kotef in the final chapter raises the all-important question of how to create unity out of plurality and how to represent this unity. But in particular, her discussion of emanicpatory social movements might have profited from a more profound understanding of the relation between the spatial unity of legal order and political plurality that relentlessly challenges and contests this unity. This relation between legal unity and political plurality is the central theme in contemporary scholarship on border politics that complements Kotef’s reflections on movement and border security.
The politics of movement also predominantly figures in Waldinger’s The Cross-Border Connection. Whereas most academic literature views migrants either as immigrants, focusing on their integration in the receiving state, or as emigrants, focusing on the ties and relation with the country left behind, this book seeks to do both. On the understanding that “every immigrant is an emigrant, every alien a citizen, every foreigner a national” (p. 37), Waldinger targets the social, economic, and political relations that migrants have or do not have with the country of origin and host state.
Although the book lacks a general introduction that properly explains which questions will be asked, how they will be answered, and why this is important, the second chapter raises a promising research question: How does the selection and exclusion at the borders of the host state impact upon cross-border connections? Waldinger claims that border control by states impedes the potential to maintain contacts with the home country, and that this is particularly true for irregular immigrants (p. 27). However, this claim is refuted in Chapter 7, where the strong ties between Mexico and its émigrés are demonstrated by discussing the efforts of Mexico to provide its nationals who irregularly stay abroad with identification papers. From a European perspective, it is fascinating to read how Mexican consuls within the United States relentlessly negotiated with banks, city officials, police, and lawyers to accept and recognize the Mexican consular identification cards. Practical considerations relating to the everyday lives of both irregular immigrants and U.S. citizens (e.g., the identification of victims and the acceptance of illegal immigrants in the banking system, to the benefit of both the immigrants and the economy) demonstrated the use and value of the Mexican consular identification card.
Yet Waldinger clearly sketches the clash between those practical considerations with the claimed right of every state to select and exclude foreigners in its own interest. This clash between the interests of irregular immigrants and the sovereign state refers us back to Kotef’s book, which illuminates why the movement of some people is to be obstructed and stonewalled in order to let the movement of others flourish.
