This week, citizens of the United Kingdom will vote on whether we are to remain part
of the European Union, with some people calling for "Brexit." And if you're gonna vote
there's an interesting question that you may want to consider before you make up your mind.
The Brexit campaign likes to talk about "Sovereignty" - the line is that by leaving the EU Britain
will have more of it. But what is sovereignty? For an indiviaul, sovereignty is like autonomy,
control over yourself - like control over your body. But in a country
no-one really has direct control of things the way we have direct control over our bodies.
So what is national sovereignty?
National sovereignty might mean something like control over the law and of public spending,
But it doesn't seem like this referendum
is entirely about that, since Britain already has those things. When it comes to stuff like financial
policy, healthcare, taxation, education, Parliament already controls all that
and sets the law. It does cost us to be in the EU, to be sure, but remember however much it costs us you
have look at that as a percentage of our total expenditure. If I spend £100,000
on something that sounds like an awful lot, but if I'm a multi-billionaire then it doesn't really matter so much.
Last year, Britain's spending on the EU was just 1.4% of its total government expenditure.
So not a lot.
So if it's not political control and it's not economic control, what kind of sovereignty
are we talking about? Well there is one big thing that we don't have as much control over as members of
the EU and that's immigration - immigration from the EU, anyway, which is just under half of
the total immigration to the country right now. Immigration is a massive issue in this referendum, and
sovereignty over immigration is where we find some very interesting philosophy.
In his essay "Necropolitics," philosopher Achille Mbembe says that the highest, purest
form of sovereignty is the "right to kill," which I put in scare quotes both because it's
dubious and because it's scary. He says, "The ultimate expression of sovereignty
resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who
must die." Like if you go out into the streets and kill someone you'll be punished by the state; when people acting in
the name of the state kill people, that's supposedly fine. Sovereignty is what makes
the alleged difference there.
It's not just the right to kill that sovereignty grants though, it's also the
right to let people die. To exclude them, to abandon them, to shut them out of the city gates, which can
be accomplished by killing, or by putting someone in a "camp."
Camps are an increasingly important idea in political philosophy. A camp is
where you send someone when you exclude them from the protections of the state and set them
apart from the general population. Camps are sometimes literal camps, with fences and walls
and literal isolation, but they're more like a metaphor, a way of describing people's
experiences, than an actual place. In the history of slavery for instance, black skin
was a camp: it marked you out as beyond the normal social and legal rules.
Sometimes camps are built by law, sometimes by social convention; sometimes they're
built all at once, sometimes they're built gradually - people slowly being
separated from the general population. We've talked before about how some countries are building camps
around Muslim people - click that card in the top right if you wanna know more about that.
So sovereignty could be seen as the right to build camps and send people
there. To claim sovereignty is to claim the right to exclude people from the nation, and
here we're starting to get at the immigration issue. Some people think there's too much
immigration and would like to exclude those who are seeking a better life in the
UK. To exclude them from the protections and benefits that come with living here.
See also those like Conservative MP Michael Gove, who doesn't like that there are rules
against deporting people from Britain who would be tortured or executed in the place
that we sent them to. Those rules restrict Britain's "right to exclude," which in that case
really does translate into the right to kill, or have killed.
One thing human brains are great at doing is taking a difficult question and substituting
it for an easier one without us realising. The question, "What should our immigration
policy be?" is difficult to answer - we need to look at things like how many people are coming?
What's that as a percentage of the population growth? Why are they coming? What are the facts on things like taxation, welfare, or
impact on public services? - and it's very easy to miss all of that
and substitute the easier question, "Do I like the sound of these people?" The answer
to that has no bearing on what a good immigration policy is. And not just that, but we need
to be very wary of the ways in which our answer to it might have affected by mistaken information or
stereotypes.
The way we talk about people we want to exclude is very important. Sometimes we might have good
reasons for excluding someone, for instance as a member of the EU we can in fact already
refuse entry to immigrants if we think that they pose a particular risk to public security or health
- but it becomes much easier to put someone in a camp if you believe that they are unsuited
to existing anywhere else. Hence you might sometimes see people say that immigrants of
certain backgrounds can't "integrate" or "don't share our values," or that
they pose a unique criminal threat. In reality crime has very complicated social, political, economic,
and personal causes, but you might sometimes see people simplify those factors slightly.
You might also see a lot of animal and insect-based imagery, like the Prime Minister describing
a "swarm" of people or Katie Hopkins calling migrants "cockroaches." It might just
seem like off-colour poetic imagery, and "Oh no, here come the PC language police!" but again, it's much easier to put someone in a camp
if you're not used to thinking of them as a human being with hopes and
dreams and feelings like you. For that reason, racism is also a very effective tool for constructing camps;
again we've talked about that before. Because talking about immigration is talking about
exclusion, it's very easy for racism and white supremacy to hide in plain
sight as "concern about mass immigration."
Fortunately, there's a litmus test that we can conduct. If we are against immigration, we might want to ask ourselves -
'Do we know how many immigrants are coming to the UK? Do we know what that is as a percentage of population growth?
Do we know what the social and economic and political causes of immigration are, do we know what the facts are about taxation and welfare and impact
on public services?' And if we don't know those things, 'Have we answered the right question? Or have we really answered a question about ourselves?'
That is not to say that all concern about immigration is motivated by racism, of course it's not. But those are the big pitfalls
that can prevent us from formulating immigration policies that actually
do good. And it's important we get these policies right, because as the refugee crisis
worsens the right to exclude increasingly becomes the right to kill, or let die. And
where our own actions have an impact on immigration, it can become
the right to let die as a result of conditions we helped bring about. For instance, climate
change, which we've had a hand in creating, and which will soon create a lot of refugees.
All of which puts the Brexit campaign in a very tough spot: if sovereignty in this case is the right
to exclude, which can sometimes mean kill or let die, then we might want to ask who are they looking
to exclude, why, and how many people are going to die as a result? I'm not saying that's
an impossible question to answer, and I know that Brexit is not entirely about immigration.
But to the extent that it is about "sovereignty," that is life and death serious. When we vote
on Thursday people's lives are gonna be in our hands and like all good philosophers, we need
to think about the ways in which our intuitions on this question may be biased.
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