VOL. 26. WALLS

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL MEANING OF WALLS

Behind every act of building a wall lies an implicit statement with philosophical stakes. A wall is not merely a material barrier – it conveys the message that within the space it encloses, a specific social order prevails (laws, obligations, privileges, rights and freedoms, traditions, written and unwritten moral rules). Beyond the wall, this order does not apply. Outward-facing, every wall aims to serve as a barrier against external disorder.

Let us imagine a world composed of civilizational islands, each surrounded by high walls. Inside each of them, a distinct order prevails, with specific rights and freedoms. But what lies outside, beyond the walls, between the islands – if not pure disorder?

Hobbes might say that there, the natural state still reigns. As we know from Leviathan, in this natural “order,” “there is no joy for people; rather, they suffer greatly… they live without common authority… in a war of all against all… with no guarantee of their safety except through force… Under such conditions, there is no place for labor, because its fruits are uncertain, and thus there is no agriculture, no seafaring, no consumption of imported goods, no comfortable dwellings, no transportation… there are no crafts, literature, or society… And worst of all, there is constant fear, and human life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

We can extrapolate this grim assertion to nations as well. When there is no common law among them, they do not merely exist in disorder – they live in the same state of potential war of each against each, under the law of force. Of course, this is not always immediately visible. Sometimes war is held back by balances of power, agreed spheres of influence, or random and temporary trade agreements. Other times, only defensive walls prevent aggression or
“illegal” movement and migration, a state that linguistic convention calls “peace.”

In 1795, however, a small book was published that declared this label to be incorrect. In his work Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant argues that such an unstable and insecure condition does not deserve the name “peace”; it is merely a “ceasefire,” a “truce.” When peace is not guaranteed by a reasonable order among the islands accepted by all, but left to the whims of fluctuating balances, episodic treaties, and walls that can always be demolished, it can only be temporary. In this temporary peace, secret plots for new wars or new isolationist fortifications against “the others” inevitably emerge.

Kant’s alternative vision rejects truces. He aims at a peace which the philosopher calls “perpetual” – in German, eternal, ewig. Such a peace requires an internationally accepted rule of law – it is a civic and legal rather than a natural condition among nations. It unites all isolated societies under an universal order with equal standing, because every nation, large or small, Kant argues, is a “moral person,” and together these nations/moral persons constitute “humanity.” It follows that such a peace-order among nations, states, and cultures is not local but universal in its common acceptance and equality. And as a universal order, it is also imperative, carrying binding normative validity. In other words, Kant’s future universal legal order among nations is something that must and will inevitably come into being. The German philosopher was a progressive thinker and believed that this would truly happen. And when it does, all walls, it is implied, will become unnecessary, without a function.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, the anticipated Kantian peace did not materialize in 19th-century Europe, but rather a Metternichian balance – a “concert of the Great Powers.” Then came Europe’s brutal colonization of the world, and for nearly a century and a half, the Enlightenment project of universal peace seemed nothing more than an unattainable utopia. This persisted until the catastrophe of World War II, when the same universal idea was resurrected de profundis, not from utopian norms but from the unfathomable depths of horrors like the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and crimes against humanity. Born from the abyss of absolute negativity, the Charter of Human Rights declared a binding recognition of the inherent dignity of all members of the human family. This document resembles an Enlightenment one, yet is actually of an entirely new type. Recalling If This Is a Man, about the concentration camps, and the “barbaric acts which have outraged the conscience of humanity” (a quote from the Declaration itself), it proclaims, on an entirely new, negative basis, the equal and inalienable universal rights of every person. These rights hold validity outside any local or cultural context, forming the new foundation of the international order between states, striving to ensure freedom, justice, and lasting peace in the world. Here, perhaps for the first time, the word “humanity” is no longer a positive utopian project but already signifies a practical universal community, a real humanity horrified by itself, unable to forget the unthinkable catastrophes. Confronted with the abyss, humanity has pledged to uphold the new universal order of human rights. Many historical events after World War II are understandable only against this negative backdrop, but nothing illustrates this better than the Declaration itself, the Helsinki Accords on human rights signed in 1975 by both the Western and Eastern blocs. And nothing better materializes this universal order between the blocs than the fall of a wall – the Berlin Wall – and, with it, the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Yet ironically, around the same time, a serious critique of the very concept of universality also began. This critique took various forms and channels. One source was anthropology’s growing knowledge of world cultures, revealing just how incredibly different they are – a finding often leading not to universals but to cultural relativism. Two other sources were the anti-colonial critique of Eurocentrism and the feminist resistance to male dominance: post-colonialism and feminism both saw in the very notion of “universality” a hypocritical mask. According to them, behind this mask lay the ugly face of the same patriarchal, racist, Eurocentric colonialism: in the old version, the “universal” always turned out to be white male Europeans, while others – women, colonial peoples, homosexuals, and so on – were in one way or another deemed deviant and thus excluded from the universal human order. At the same time, processes of de-secularization and religious movements in many non-European countries also questioned this Eurocentric and overly Christian universality: Islamic theorists, for example, seriously challenged human rights as based not on communal solidarity, but on European individualism, while multiculturalism upheld the concept of collective cultural rights over individual ones, sparking cultural wars of identities. Europe’s “provincialization” was underway, and with it, Europe’s barbaric deeds, sufferings, and catharses, which had given birth to the practical idea of dignity and universal human rights, were also being marginalized.

Today, the world is again surrounded by walls and wars, as social order breaks down into particular, local variants. What should we do in this new era? Should we abandon the utopian Kantian project, which for a brief period seemed a global legislative reality, born de profundis? This question resounds with a troubling force, especially given the fatigue from liberal democracy and the rise of right-wing national populism and isolationism. The time of walls has returned – the past three decades have seen the practical construction of barriers, fences, and countless new walls: in Belfast, around Gaza, on the West Bank, between Gaza and Egypt, between the USA and Mexico, between Pakistan and India. Countless kilometers of barbed wire now surround Fortress Europe, the European Union. The same societies that, 35 years ago, regarded the Berlin Wall as a monstrous crime and celebrated its fall, are now strangely united in agreement that concrete enclosures and barbed wire are necessary, terribly needed, as though we cannot protect ourselves without them against the invasion of new “barbarians” – migrants, refugees, hidden terrorists, viruses, foreigners, polluters, parasites… The practical idea of a universal order is falling apart before our eyes, replaced by new borders and old concepts of wars and barriers between incompatible civilizations, of imperial spheres of geopolitical influence, and by a cynical politics of balance of powers in which small nations have neither sovereignty nor the right to “moral personality.”

Can the idea of universality be saved? In this brief introduction, I will only suggest one idea for possible salvation. It belongs to Judith Butler, from her article “Universality in Culture”: universality, Butler argues, is an unfinished project, always in statu nascendi, with its very concept continuously expanding, transforming, and reformulating through a risky process of inclusion of ever more excluded individuals and groups challenging its former version. That universality was born in non-universal and unjust conditions (Eurocentric, colonial, and patriarchal) does not negate the normative need for such a concept. Its historical and cultural limitations can and must be continually overcome, with its boundaries and walls transgressed and reconceptualized. With every external contestation, the concept changes and becomes ever more universal, starting to include previously excluded beings in the category of “universal humanity.” This cannot occur without a difficult and risky translation between cultures, perspectives, and social positions. Thus, this type of dynamic universality is always in a state of “not yet”; it is an open and unfinished “future” concept that does not coincide with any ready-made universal consensus but requires constant risky revision, continual negotiation of boundaries, and the dismantling or shifting of walls.

Perhaps the same applies to perpetual peace. In any case, if we do not accept the need for ongoing revisions, we risk working either with a dogmatic and secretly unjust concept of universality or accepting once and for all the cynical logic of power balances and geopolitical spheres of influence. And with them, temporary fragile truces, secret plots, and wars. We would then have to resign ourselves to the fact that we are no longer aiming imperatively for peace, that we have already, implicitly or explicitly, accepted as eternal not peace, but the walls between civilizations and cultures. And even before making this final admission, we would have to abandon the hard-won idea of universal human rights.

I must admit, that seems to me an unbearably high price.

Аlexander Kiossev

WALLS. On the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

Alexander Kiossev is a professor of modern era cultural history, director of Sofia University’s Cultural Centre of and editor-in-chief of Piron electronic magazine. Kiossev has focused his research on reading, the cultural history of communist totalitarianism and autobiographical perspective on history. He has published several books and edited numerous collective studies in English, German and Bulgarian. His publications […]

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