Why is Political Philosophy not Euro-centric?

Another cost of ignoring Kant.

Not much to add on the philosophical side, but I will note that the EU is no longer entirely sui generis. Russia’s “Eurasian Economic Union” — which was very deliberately created as an alternative and rival to the EU — has freedom of movement among its member countries.

This has combined with the Ukraine War to produce some very curious side effects. On one hand, you have poor Central Asians inside Russia, there to work, being bribed and bullied into joining the Russian Army. On the other hand, you have a wave of young draft-age Russians leaving for Kazakhstan and Armenia. I can testify that last year the coffee shops of Almaty were full of haggard young Russians, very obviously not locals, hunched over laptops.

Meanwhile, to the south, the East African Community is also moving towards freedom of movement. They’re not quite there yet, but within a decade it will probably be possible for a Kenyan or Rwandan to live and work freely everywhere from Tanzania to South Sudan.

Put another way: whatever the philosophical underpinnings, it looks like the practical example of EU freedom of movement is extremely attractive, and is inspiring imitation.

Doug M.

This year’s first Chartbook highlighted how unlikely the EU looks in retrospect, coming after not just wars but ethnic cleansings on an incomprehensible scale:

“World War II forced perhaps 60 million people out of their homes. At the end of the war, border rearrangements and ethnic cleansing set tens of millions more on the move. In Europe perhaps as many as 20 million people were newly displaced after the war or in its very final stages. Often this took the form of chain migrations, with Poles displaced to the West by a Soviet landgrab moving into the homes vacated by Germans who had been shipped to the West. It was everywhere a violent process, driven by resentments and anger, but also haunted by moral qualms, guilt and a sense of risk and fear of impermanence. The right of return is not a question limited to Palestine.”

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-258-war-peace-and-the-return

It does seem like it must have taken a number of real innovations of practical philosophy to get from there and then to here and now.

Thank you so much for your reply! In all philosophical studies I read (maybe not many) the main philosophical question about immigration is whether states have a right to control immigration or not. If political philosophy was instead inspired by the European institutions, the implicit answer would have been “no” and the main question would have been how to understand free movement, is it good for peace as supposed by the “founding fathers”, should it be extended etc.

I find this read of the EU shockingly odd (and oddly Eurocentric). The core of the debate over open borders is not “should we have ‘freedom of movement’ for the 5% of humans in this small geographic area.” Even if political philosophy were inspired by European institutions, it would tell us little theoretically about immigration and open borders… and looking at European politics today, it would tell us empirically that European institutions and societies cannot handle immigration well (at all).

I’ve read the OP, not really the comments.

Point no. 2, about distributive justice between different states — and between peoples living in different states — is — how can I put this gently? — a little strange. Some political philosophers have been criticizing Rawls on this score since shortly after A Theory of Justice was published in 1971. See, e.g., Charles Beitz, “Justice and International Relations,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (summer 1975) and his subsequent book Political Theory and International Relations (1979). There are more recent examples. The notion that people have simply accepted Rawls’s (or Walzer’s) views on this is not right. Thomas Pogge and (I think, haven’t read him) Mathias Risse are two examples of philosophers who don’t. Doubtless there are quite a few others.

“Afaics so-called “EU freedom of movement” is greatly overhyped in two ways: firstly, as Matt says, it’s about bigger (and in practice more forbidding and violent external) borders,”

— As a practical matter, most Europeans would sharply disagree with you.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-01-26-eu-not-worth-having-without-free-movement-say-74-europeans-oxford-survey

This includes the young Europeans I know personally — my kids and their uni-age friends — all of whom are delighted with the ability to jump on a train or bus and end up in Denmark or France without difficulty, and all of whom shake their heads in horrified wonder at the archaic madness of border checks and immigration control.

On a personal note, the nearest border used to run 3 km from our house — for years, we could still see the scar on the hillside where the old Grenze used to be. Now it’s, ummm… [googles] about 1200 km to the nearest Schengen border check.

You can argue that it’s just a bigger cage, but most people are going to disagree.

“secondly it’s fundamentally about labour market efficiency rather than human rights.”

Por que no los dos?

Doug M.

Sorry I posted over-hastily. You clearly meant “most Europeans” by “most people,” which is fine I guess on an OP encouraging people to be more Eurocentric :) The poll is interesting and shows how how crucial FoM is to EU’s popular legitimacy, such as it is. My references to Britain should have been past tense to make it clear we’re now on the wrong side of Frontex. It’s not that you couldn’t travel it’s that accessing medical care and other necessities could be a nightmare, or practically impossible, and this seemed be by design since the purpose of FoM was to get labour power to capitalists.

In Britain supporters of EU tended to talk out of both sides of their mouths on this: to lefties FoM was a utopian universalist entitlement; righties were reassured that “those people” couldn’t claim benefits anyway…

Thanks for this distinction and writing. It’s interesting to consider your point about Europe being discussed less recently as a context.

So you have distinguished between the (a) providence of scholars (discussed previously), and (b) to what context the theory is applied or discussed (so you say it’s not applied to Europe). I’ve heard, contrary to this, that arguments about free movement across borders in South Asia (India / Bangladesh) are not really discussed. The lit. is often focused on free movement to the western countries (or free movement in the abstract, often referring implicitly to movement to western countries). In contrast, most immigrants don’t manage to reach European land or sea. Additionally, (as even some European global justice scholars now recognize) a lot of egalitarian global justice debates take place as if the debates are about the ‘third world’ being passive recipients of benefits rather than them being actors themselves (including in helping develop their theories and articulating demands). Also, we cannot ignore that there are also is a lot of (funded!) research in the EU on EU matters – but you’re right, there’s a lot of stuff there that doesn’t show up much outside of EU countries. I don’t quite understand the point about how if people wrote about the EU, they’d be considered utopian – in many ways the EU was built on peace projects that earlier philosophers such as Kant and Rousseau had written on. I think the Frankfurt Critical Theory tradition* are still too stuck on Europe: Habermas being a very prominent example where he talks about international law, but his example is the EU, which seems very Eurocentric.* (I guess you might exclude them because Frankfurt is in Germany, but there are lots of English colloquiums there, and Habermas has influence in scholars overseas).

But besides (a) the scholar provanence, and (b) what context a theory is discussed, I’d also introduce is also (c) what tradition of thought the theory from. Much is still dominated by historical texts in the western/European traditions (and not so much including much on other ‘non-western’ traditions, a bad term). I’ve read (I can’t find the source now) that universities in Japan and South Korea tend to focus on debates that exist in Anglophone schools because they are likely to get published, even to the extent that the students mainly learn about Plato, etc. in school. Interest in Japanese thought is not really much valued in those schools, shockingly! This is something lamented by some comparative political theorists. I speak more from a political theory perspective (that is from being in a political science department, rather than a philosophy department) and this sense there is some change: lots of political theory jobs in political science departments are for comparative political theory.

(*well parts of of the Critical Theory tradition, but maybe not all of it, there’s been some changes – for a criticism of the Frankfurt tradition and its Eurocentric teleology, see Amy Allen; she includes in her critique people like Forst who explicitly talk about human rights and transnational justice. Thomas McCarthy talks about the importance of incorporating other traditions. And ‘critical theory’ (not capitalized) is another matter.)

„My point is not that European politics should dominate political philosophy, but that it is surprising that it does not.“

As a layperson I would be curious to know what does dominate contemporary political philosophy?

engels @5 quotes a blog post that said:

..indisputably sober and rigorous French philosophers remain almost completely unknown by les philosophes anglo-saxons. Names like Chantal Delsol, Pierre Manent, Pierre Rosanvallon, Rémi Brague and Nicolas Grimaldi are still wholly peripheral, even in political philosophy, where they have made seminal contributions.

I’m not a political philosopher by training or profession, and I’ve heard of at least two of these — Manent and Rosanvallon — both of whom, I believe, have been translated into English. So I suspect that the claim that these names are “wholly peripheral” is something of an overstatement.