Né qui, né altrove - Migration, Detention, Desertion: A Dialogue

Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson (2003)

In this dialogue Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna) & Brett Neilson (University of Western Sydney) discuss several topics. One of their main reflections are about the meaning of camps ("lager") and the fights against camps. Here you can find those parts of the dialogue which are more or less directly refering to the topic of "lager"

9. (Neilson) In Australia too migratory movements have established a new geography, leading to a certain ambivalence of space. The Border Protection Act passed by the parliament in 2001 subtracts certain territories from Australia as far as boat arrivals are concerned. Consequently places like Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef become non-places of a certain type, neither Australia nor not-Australia. Also, following the Tampa incident of August 2001, the Australian government began to pay foreign governments to establish detention centres on their territories: places like the Pacific island of Nauru or New Guinea’s Manus Island. Administered by private security firms, these offshore detention centres register a transformation of sovereignty since, in a certain sense, what it is for sale in these transactions is sovereignty itself. By contrast the relation between the EU and say Poland or the Ukraine seems determined more by political power than by market relations. Insofar as the decisions of these nations are shaped by their ambitions to become part of the EU, however, the question of the market must reemerge.

10. (Mezzadra) One can certainly say that due to these border technologies a certain piece of German sovereignty is displaced into Poland or the Ukraine. For both these countries, the decision to adopt these technologies of border control is linked to their desire to enter the EU. The groundwork for these agreements was laid in the early 1990s, essentially through bureaucratic channels. But the situation is again complex, since the Schengen agreements of 1985 were really concluded between national police forces, and only later (and gradually) signed into European law. In this sense, ‘bureaucratic channels’ have been built which are partially outside of the control sphere of the main institutions of the EU. It is also important to understand the details of the ‘safe third country’ concept. This came into force in 1997, in the frame defined by the Dublin Convention, which laid down criteria for the determination of states competent to examine an asylum application. Under this principle, a number of states contiguous to the EU have been identified as ‘safe third countries,’ meaning that if a migrant passes through one of these territories on their way to the EU, they can now be returned to that country, since theoretically they could have lodged an asylum application there. The concept applies not only to Poland but also to a number of other states whose ‘democratic’ nature is at least questionable. In the case of Germany, Poland, and the Ukraine, however, one can see very clearly how the system functions. Germany is a wealthy EU state that exports its border technologies to Poland, a candidate state for EU entry. In turn, Poland exports these technologies to the Ukraine, a state very much on the backlist for EU integration. This pattern is directly related to differences in political power, and economic power too (since the price of labour in Poland is about three times less than in Germany, and about ten times less in the Ukraine).

11. (Neilson) As you indicated earlier, this question of border control raises important questions about the nature of political space in globalisation. You talk of the ‘third safe country’ principle establishing degrees of externality, but due to the porosity of borders, this externality never really shades into a pure outside. At the same time, you speak freely of an ‘elsewhere.’ Certainly you were active in organizing the large demonstration of 30 November 2002 against the centro di permanenza temporanea (detention centre) on Corso Brunelleschi in Torino. This protest was conducted under the slogan ‘Né qui, né altrove’ (Neither here, nor elsewhere). Can you explain the significance of this slogan, which obviously simplifies a great deal of thought (and practice) but also undoubtedly crystallizes something important?

12. (Mezzadra) The 30 November protest in Torino was probably the largest political action ever held against the detention system in Europe. By using the slogan ‘Né qui, né altrove,’ we wanted first to emphasize that we were taking action against a particular detention centre in a particular place. This was important since as far as the Italian government is concerned the centre in Torino functions particularly well. We also wanted to acknowledge the specificity of the situation in Torino, which is extremely sensitive at the moment due to the crisis at Fiat: the massive insecurity of the workforce, the ongoing actions of the unions, the bailing out of the company by GM, and so on. Certainly this kind of perpetual capitalist restructuring (and the accompanying precariousness of labour) is by now generalized, but its effects are particularly acute in old corporate-industrial cities like Torino. We wanted to recognize this, and in so doing, to point to the connections between such labour market reorganization and the role of detention centres in restricting and controlling labour mobility. In other words, we were asserting that the appearance of the detention centre on Corso Brunelleschi and the crisis at Fiat are mutually implicated at a deep structural level.

13. To see this connection, however, one has to think beyond the purely local circumstances in Torino, to understand the interaction of capitalist restructuring and labour mobility at the global level. Thus the importance of opening the protest to the global dimension, of taking a stance against all such places that strip people of their rights: the detention centres in Poland or in Australia, for instance, as much as the one on Corso Brunelleschi. This is also necessary to avoid some of the ambivalences that have characterized the struggle against detention centres. Often one hears criticisms that suggest a particular centre ought to be closed because the conditions there are inhumane, as if centres were conditions are better would be perfectly justified. Or one finds protests against detention centres from people who would prefer not to have so-called clandestini (illegals) in their neighbourhood. By using the slogan ‘Né qui, né altrove,’ we were indicating that the protest was a matter of principle, a stance against the system of detention as such and not just against one particular centre.

14. (Neilson) One certainly finds similar ambivalences in the struggle against detention centres in Australia. For instance, one prominent platform involves the fact that children are held in detention centres. Thus a common slogan is ‘Kids don’t belong in detention centres’ (as if such places are fine for adults). Another popular slogan is ‘Refugees welcome here,’ which effectively takes the same stance as the government with respect to asylum seekers, but just reverses the response (yes you are welcome, rather than no you are not). This slogan assumes that Australian citizens have the right to welcome or exclude, and to this extent it does not recognize what you have called the diritto di fuga (the right to escape, the right of the migrant to control his/her own mobility). A similar ambiguity is found in the argument that the detention system degrades Australia in the eyes of the world (a point often made in the wake of UN reports about the inhumane conditions in the Australian camps, most prominently the one at Woomera). Here the stance is more narcissistic, as if the detention policy should be stopped to maintain some imagined vision of Australia as a benevolent and humane place. Groups such as ‘Australians against racism,’ which place prominent advertisements against detention centres in newspapers, tend to affirm this logic. I would suggest that the phrase ‘Australians against racism’ is somewhat oxymoronic, given that the nation was built up on the seizure of Indigenous lands, indentured coolie labour, the historical exclusion of Asians … to oppose racism, it seems to me, one first needs to question the constituted power of the Australian state and its correlate forms of identity and subjectivity. At the same time, it is vitally important that such actions are organized at the national level. Your slogan ‘Né qui, né altrove’ registers the importance of local and/or national mobilizations, but it also signals the necessity to open such struggles to the global dimension.

15. This raises another issue about the function of detention centres in maintaining and re-asserting national sovereignty in an era of increased migratory movements. As you noted earlier, these places strip people of their rights. In the Italian campaign against detention centres the word Lager is very prominent. In Australia, the references have more generally been to the penal colonies established by the English (the slogan ‘We are all boat people’ suggests a homology between convict transportees and present-day asylum seekers) as well as the various camps, missions, and ‘homes’ in which Indigenous people were interned (and separated from their families) during the prolonged colonial genocide. Nonetheless, the thought of one Italian thinker, who privileges the example of the Lager, has been instructive for thinkers in Australia who have sought to understand the political structure of the camp. I am referring Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 2000) essays on ‘bare life.’ Agamben’s influence is evident, for instance, in Suvendrini Perera’s (2002) essay ‘What is a camp?’ (published in the first issue of borderlands). It seems to me that this concept of ‘bare life’ is not very present in your thought and writing. Indeed, there are key thinkers in the Italian tradition of operaismo or autonomous Marxism who have polemicized quite strongly against Agamben’s understanding and use of this concept. I am thinking of Luciano Ferrari Bravo in Dal fordismo alla globalizzazione (2001) or the essay by Antonio Negri in Il desiderio del mostro (2001). Is the concept of ‘bare life’ useful or not for understanding the political structure of the camp?

16. (Mezzadra) Let’s begin with the question about the use of the term Lager, since this is something that we discussed very seriously within the Italian movement. Clearly it is necessary to be very careful about the use of this term in the context of the struggle against detention centres. The danger is that one might be seen to confuse current forms of global control with the forms of rule that dominated under European fascism in the early 20th-century. It is thus necessary to affirm that the term Lager is not simply reducible to the camps that existed under European fascism or indeed under Nazism. In fact, the Lager has colonial origins in places such as Cuba and South Africa … or indeed, as you point out, in Australia, which in a certain sense was one enormous Lager. So in using this term, we first want to point to the persistence of colonialism and colonial power relations within contemporary models of government and metropolitan societies. Next, it is necessary to recognize that even the Nazi Lager cannot be immediately equated with the extermination camps at Auschwitz or Treblinka. Beginning in 1933, the Lager were administrative camps established throughout Germany for the internment of political opponents and of the so-called Asozialen (people like gypsies, the mentally ill, or homosexuals) … and not immediately or only the Jews who would eventually be exterminated. So in identifying contemporary detention centres as Lager, we are not equating them with extermination camps (which clearly they are not). This is extremely important, since such an identification would seriously banalize the Nazi genocide. And I think it is also interesting to note that an important book, Autobiografie negate. Immigrati nei Lager del presente, about the detention camps as Lager has been written in Italy by Federica Sossi (2002), a philosopher and activist who has been and is seriously engaged in confronting the heritage of the shoah.

17. The Lager is an administrative space in which men and women who have not committed any crime are denied their right to mobility. In this sense, it is perfectly legitimate to identify present-day detention centres as Lager. It is also valid to point out that such spaces, which are associated with one of the blackest periods in European history, have not disappeared from the contemporary political scene. To the contrary, they have experienced a general diffusion throughout the so-called West (and also in other parts of the world). If one recalls Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which is one of the most important sources for Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life,’ it is significant that she recognizes the colonial origins of the Lager and traces the first appearance of such places in Europe to the concentration camps that appeared after the First World War. These were not extermination camps but places for the internment of men and women who, due to the changes to the map of Europe following the war, had no clear national citizenship (the so-called apatrides or Heimatlosen). In this sense, it is also appropriate to speak of contemporary detention centres as Lager, since they also serve to restrict the movement of people with no clear juridical connection to a particular nation-state or with the "wrong" citizenship.

18. To move more directly to the question of ‘bare life,’ it is important to say that Agamben’s work provides a very powerful set of concepts with which to understand the political structure of the camp. Certainly, his arguments have proved fundamental for activists involved in protesting the existence of detention centres in Italy: I think especially of the description of the peculiar dialectic of exclusion and inclusion which is put to work in the camps. A subject who is not at all recognized by the legal order (the ‘illegal alien’) is included in that order (through the ‘inclusion’ in the detention center) just to be excluded from the space to which the legal order itself applies! This is really a very important contribution to the understanding of the logic of the camp. At the same time, I have the impression that Agamben risks emphasizing too much the exceptional character of the camp (this is an element of his work that derives from Carl Schmitt). The problem is that the logic of domination that functions in the camp is a logic that also operates in other social spaces. This type of domination is really diffused throughout the comprehensive structure of society. You mention some objections to Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’ from exponents of Italian operaismo such as Antonio Negri and Luciano Ferrari Bravo. But it is worth considering what they have to say. Ferrari Bravo finds the concept of ‘bare life’ ambiguous because it excludes the question of labour from the sphere of theoretical observation. Luciano asked himself if one should not look, besides Auschwitz, also at Ellis Island to understand the logic of the contemporary camps. Another exponent of operaismo, Paolo Virno, points out polemically in his book Il ricordo del presente (1999) that the best example of what Agamben means by ‘bare life’ is labour power, labour power as defined by Marx as a form of potentiality. It seems to me that this approach calls to attention the fundamental relation between contemporary detention centres and the comprehensive restructuring of the labour market under global capitalism.

19. The detention centre is a kind of decompression chamber that diffuses tensions accumulated on the labour market. These places present the other face of capitalism’s new flexibility: they are concrete spaces of state oppression and a general metaphor of the despotic tendency to control labour’s mobility, which is a structural character of ‘historical capitalism,’ as has been stressed by a number of recent studies. It seems to me more important to speak of the camps in this way rather than in terms of ‘bare life.’ This is the case even if the concept of ‘bare life’ has brought to light something of the fundamental logic by which these spaces function. Certainly, as Agamben argues, the camp performs a violent act of stripping. But this stripping should be understood in relation to the new forms of life that are produced in global capitalism. If, as many have argued, global capitalism gives rise to new forms of flexibility, then the continuous movement of migrants shows the subjective face of this flexibility. At the same time, migratory movements are clearly exploited by global capitalism, and detention centres are crucial to this system of exploitation. This is one of things that becomes clear in the important book by Yann Moulier Boutang, De l’esclavage au salariat (1998), which has just been translated into Italian. Taking a wide historical view of the capitalist world system, Moulier Boutang argues that forms of indentured and enslaved labour have always played and continue to play a fundamental role in capitalist accumulation. Far from being archaisms or transitory adjustments destined to be wiped out by modernization, these labour regimes are constituent of capitalist development and arise precisely from the attempt to control or limit the worker’s flight. In this perspective, the effort to control the migrant’s mobility becomes the motor of the capitalist system and the contemporary detention centre appears as one in a long line of administrative mechanisms that function to this end.

Published in borderlands ejournal 2003