The patronising Kantianisms of hospitality ethics in International Relations: Towards a politics of imposition
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219869362 |
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| Author | Mark FN Franke |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219869362
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(3) 276 –294
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219869362
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The patronising Kantianisms
of hospitality ethics in
International Relations:
Towards a politics of
imposition
Mark FN Franke
Huron University College, Canada
Abstract
The contemporary international regime of law and politics regarding human migration
largely follows Immanuel Kant’s contradictory approach, supporting the cosmopolitical
rights of humans to move and expect hospitality while privileging the rights of sovereign
states to assert territorial security against movement. International Relations scholars
informed by Jacques Derrida’s ethical theory argue that one may press this tension
to positive dynamics through affirmation of the aporia that a secured home is a
requirement for the possibility of the hospitality that might undo conflict between
migrants and emplaced citizens. Yet, the attraction of Derrida’s critical Kantianism and
this revival of hospitality depends on asserting the primacy of habitation to how citizen
subjects stand with respect to foreigners who move. It depends on neglecting how any
assumption of home is not based on a given home but, rather, on movements to impose
the boundaries and bounty of a home. No one faces the movement of others who seek
to make home from the position of home but only also in movements of homemaking.
Both the citizen and the migrant move in forms of imposition. And it is only in a politics
of imposition that rights to move can be affirmed and gain respect.
Keywords
At-home, Derrida, hospitality, impose, Kant, migration
There are record numbers of persons on the move informally in the world today,
and, increasingly, these persons suffer deep erosions to their autonomy and agency,
often caught deeply within technologies of detainment, detention, encampment or
Corresponding author:
Mark FN Franke, Centre for Global Studies, Huron University College, 1349 Western Road, London,
Ontario N6G 1H3, Canada.
Email: mfranke@huron.uwo.ca
869362IPT0010.1177/1755088219869362Journal of International Political TheoryFranke
research-article2019
Article
Franke 277
criminalisation – what Kelly Oliver (2017) refers to as ‘carceral humanitarianism’.
Increasingly and incessantly, persons are forcibly displaced within their homelands, ren-
dered stateless or compelled to move as asylum seekers, refugee claimants or for the sake
of survival while fleeing from poverty, environmental devastation or the violence of
conflict. And, almost invariably, they move to and within territories in which it is excep-
tionally difficult to gain full respect as persons deserving of the basic rights and freedoms
articulated in the fundamental international conventions on human rights (United Nations,
1966/1976a, 1966/1976b). Their claims to legal personality and to human rights protec-
tion are emblematic of the core to this regime of rights. Yet, contradictions between their
claims and the rights of sovereign states within this regime bring perpetual question to
states’ obligations to host persons on the move and to respond to their requests for hospi-
tality, giving states cause to often suspend their own responsibilities and allowing the
majority of these persons to exist in perilous forms of limbo, exception or internment. In
short, the contemporary community of sovereign states establish, as policy, the very core
point of tension inherent to Immanuel Kant’s (1996: [8: 357–360 and 6: 352–353], 328–
331 and 489–490) recommendation, from the 1790s, for the modern international order
with respect to persons on the move. States admit to and give support to principles of his
key notion of Cosmopolitan Right while also reproducing Kant’s lack of concern for the
fundamental inequalities that they necessarily put into place. And, while advocates of the
rights of displaced persons struggle now to find ways in which aporias of Kant’s law of
hospitality may be overcome within the international system of states, that so faithfully
follows his prescriptions otherwise, little is accomplished to erode the advantages of states
over persons on the move in the politics of Cosmopolitan Right. What is missed in these
efforts is that even the most radical principle of hospitality that may be derived from the
Kantian outlook remains premised on geopolitics that normalise the conditions under
which the rights of displaced persons may always be legitimately undermined.
In the first section of this article, I will show how it is that states’ contemporary prob-
lematisations of human movement and displacements as well as states’ undermining of
their rights and freedoms are consistent with Kant’s principle of hospitality within
Cosmopolitan Right, as a component of his general theory of Right. To better understand
how it is that a world of states brought together by and committed to a regime of human
rights protection, particularly with respect to human displacement, can allow for the excep-
tional entrapment of tens of millions of persons and such gross disrespect towards their
rights claims, it is crucial to understand how the Kantian principles of hospitality on which
the United Nations is established, in this regard, license such inhospitality and even hostil-
ity towards persons informally on the move. To underline this point all the more, in the
second section of the article, I show that the most promising efforts to renew Kant’s prin-
ciple of hospitality, to better take up the concerns of migrants, through Jacques Derrida’s
(2001 and Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000) proposal for its radicalisation, necessarily
fail, given the extent to which Derrida’s approach remains entangled within Kant’s rational
geopolitics and neglects the more radical deconstruction required of its spacing of rights.
Without doubt, Derrida provides the best option possible with respect to Kant’s proposals.
We can pursue Derrida’s approaches in ways that reach past Kant. And there are theorists
of International Relations who have made important contributions following his model.
However, as I argue in the third section of this article, the very notion of hospitality itself
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