The ‘Double Law’ of Hospitality: Rethinking Cosmopolitan Ethics in Humanitarian Intervention
| Author | Gideon Baker |
| Published date | 01 March 2010 |
| Date | 01 March 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0047117809348689 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
THE ‘DOUBLE LAW’ OF HOSPITALITY 87
The ‘Double Law’ of Hospitality: Rethinking Cosmopolitan
Ethics in Humanitarian Intervention
Gideon Baker
Abstract
By way of a discussion of the deliberately hard case of humanitarian intervention, this article
considers the merits of an alternative cosmopolitan ethics to that of liberal cosmopolitanism,
one which founds its universalism on an ethics of hospitality rather than the rights of man.
Jacques Derrida describes the ethics of hospitality as defi ned by an unconditional welcome
which nonetheless must become conditional in order to function. This leads to a profound
paradox – an ‘undecidability’ – in the practice of the ethics of hospitality, the implications
of which need to be better understood if the ambition of ‘another cosmopolitanism’ is to
be realised. Interrogating the ethics of hospitality and the undecidability to which it gives
rise in relation to humanitarian intervention, it is argued that responsibilities to others,
which sometimes imply intervention, must always be kept in tension with openness to the
coming of the Other, which limits intervention. Far from being blind or paralysing action,
such ‘bounded undecidability’, it is suggested, actually defi nes the site of responsible, just
decisions in humanitarian intervention.
Keywords: cosmopolitanism, Jacques Derrida, ethics, hospitality, humanism, humanitarian
intervention, Emmanuel Levinas, ‘undecidability’
This article argues for the importance of Jacques Derrida’s work on hospitality
for rethinking cosmopolitan ethics, and specifi cally for grappling with the ethical
minefi eld surrounding the use of force in humanitarian intervention.1 Cosmopolitan
ethics in general, and the ethics of humanitarian intervention in particular, is usually
considered from the standpoint of universality: the violations of universal human
rights characteristic of humanitarian emergencies are understandably drawn on in
most accounts as a justifi cation for intervention. This approach has its problems,
however. One such problem, constituting the point of departure for a Derridean
analysis, is the violence done to singularity whenever universals are enforced, even the
most noble among them. Suzanne Metselaar gives the example of the ‘inhospitality’
of universal human-rights-based Dutch asylum policy towards women in this regard.
Failing to take gender into account, the Dutch government blinds itself to how women
can be identifi ed as political dissidents in their country of origin without having taken
part in conventional dissident activities – for example by taking care of politically
persecuted people through providing food and shelter, acts which are often labelled
as resistance in the country of origin.2 Derrida’s challenge to cosmopolitans, whether
at home (in asylum policy) or abroad (in humanitarian intervention), is to conceive
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[DOI: 10.1177/0047117809348689]
88 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 24(1)
of how it might be possible to respond to the call of the Other without turning the
Other into the Same – a homogenised humanity of interchangeable men and women
with all the violence which this threatens to unique and irreplaceable lives.3
Derrida’s account of hospitality may be of some help in facing up to this not
inconsiderable challenge. Most students of international relations will know
hospitality only via Immanuel Kant’s refl ections on a cosmopolitan right of hos-
pitality as outlined in Perpetual Peace. Kantian hospitality, though universal in
scope, is limited in substance to a right of visitation, and the visitor, considered as a
general category, may indeed be turned away if doing so will not cause his death.4
The dominance of this parsimonious Kantian thought of hospitality leads Derrida to
refl ect that ‘we do not yet know what hospitality beyond this European, universally
European, right is’.5 Seeking to open up the space of hospitality beyond its Kantian
limitations, Derrida’s thought of hospitality is hyperbolic by contrast. Indeed, the
importance of hospitality for Derrida, and why for him hospitality is ethics, is that
it is precisely an unconditional welcome of the stranger in all his strangeness or the
foreigner in all his foreignness. As we shall see, Derrida’s hospitality-ethics thus
involves a signifi cant departure from Kantian hospitality and from Kantian ethics
generally: a shift from conditional to unconditional hospitality which is also a shift
from the universal accounts of otherness characteristic of Kantian ethics towards
a universal openness to the other as Other. In this unconditional welcome of the
foreigner, a foreigner who thereby avoids the violence of assimilation, remaining
absolutely foreign or Other, Derridean hospitality-ethics offers, at least potentially,
a much needed alternative mode of thinking through cosmopolitan duties from the
standpoint of singularity. And, as Derrida puts it, ‘Justice always addresses itself
to singularity, to the singularity of the other, despite or even because it pretends to
universality’.6
Openness to the coming of the Other, or unconditional hospitality, leads however to
a paradox (Derrida calls it an aporia, or no-road) in the practice of hospitality-ethics,
the implications of which will be central to this article. It is impossible, or rather self-
defeating – an unconditional welcome annuls the home of hospitality. But, refusing us
a good conscience about this necessary limitation, conditional hospitality is haunted
by the spectre of the abused or absent guest; it is always too conditional, always
inadequate to the spirit of hospitality which, beyond all limitation, domestication or
assimilation, beyond all violence to the Other, claims no sovereignty over the home
at all, opening the door not only to the invited guest but to the unexpected visitation
of the unknown, nameless stranger. Hospitality cannot be practised without limiting
it, but this delimited practice creates the demand for its unlimited form. The binary,
conditional–unconditional hospitality, then, is indissoluble or inescapable; there can
be no fi nal synthesis or dialectical resolution of the two laws of hospitality. Each pole
is as inseparable from as it is irreducible to the other. Hospitality ‘defi es dialectics’
precisely because there is a ‘double law’ in play – two imperatives pull each act of
hospitality in different directions at the same time.7
The defi ance of dialectics characteristic of the ethics of hospitality implies a very
different understanding of ethics to the Kantian approach dominant in the international
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