Lyndsey Stonebridge, historian: “What is new in the migrant crisis is the brutality of our response”

There is a double reward when talking to Lyndsey Stonebridge (Kent, 58 years old). The vision of this Humanities professor from the University of Birmingham on such current issues as the tragedy of refugees, universal justice and human rights, or the effects of violence in the 20th and 21st centuries offers necessary certainties. And the fact that she constructs her speech absolutely guided by the thought of the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, of whom Stonebridge is an accomplished specialist, allows us to satisfy the permanent questions that the most influential minds always invoke: what would Arendt have thought about this? How would you have reacted to this other thing?

Magazine New Statesman notes Stonebridge's new book, We Are Free To Change The World. Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience (We are free to change the world. Lessons from Hannah Arendt on love and disobedience, whose rights Planet has), as one of the most relevant of 2024. She receives EL PAÍS in her small London apartment, in the Brunswick Centre, a modernist hive of homes and businesses in the literary quarter of Bloomsbury. Rejected by many during its construction (1972), today it is an admired historical building. Everything has its moment, if you allow enough time to pass.

Ask. Looking back at recent history, is there anything new under the sun in the current migrant crisis?

Answer. What is new is the brutality of our response. In the last decade, in Europe and the United States, there has been an attempt by the populist right to brutalize the entire process. They have deliberately prolonged waiting times to obtain asylum or have used third countries to host people and process the process.

Q. The speech has resonated. It started in the hands of populism, but has permeated the traditional parties.

R. What should concern us, regardless of the degree to which each person feels threatened by immigration, is the normalization of this policy and this aesthetic of cruelty. For example, by locking them in detention centers. It is true that Europe has had atrocious periods of cruelty, but for our generation this is a new phenomenon. And it's worrying, it corrupts us all. Populism is legitimizing it and using cruelty and violence as a way to inoculate fear and anxiety. It is a pseudo-mysticism, a tribal nationalism. It's not even genuine patriotism. It is based on seeing the other as an enemy.

Q. There is an environment receptive to the message.

R. It's like the debate around Brexit. It seems that there is in many the will, the desire to be deceived. They know there is a high level of cynicism [en el mensaje del populismo]. In the UK people know that a thousand Afghan refugees are not the reason it is difficult for the public health doctor to treat you. But they buy the message.

Q. Hannah Arendt wrote that wonderful essay, We refugees. What can we learn from it?

R. She clearly glimpsed, because she lived it, the key to this tragedy: the fact of being someone without a State, without a home, without roots. Therein lies the problem, she pointed out. If you take away a group's citizenship, if you throw it out of the world, you leave it without visibility.

Q. And without rights…

R. Exact. You only have rights within a political community. We are the ones who grant rights to each other. You can't make people disappear from the planet. It has been tried before. It does not work.

Q. We move away and return to Arendt, like to Albert Camus. It seems that each generation censors them or discovers them…

R. There is something about her that refuses to be categorized. At first I wanted to title my book Thinking like Hannah Arendt. I imagined her telling me: 'You didn't understand anything! I am an anti-totalitarian thinker. You don't have to think like anyone else… but for yourself.' She insisted that each historical context must be understood as something unprecedented. There were no grand narratives to explain what was happening. You have to respond to reality at every moment.

Q. Would you have appreciated this hyperconnected world, with social networks…?

R. I would have hated it. What she feared most was social conservatism. And social networks connect everyone with each other, but they generate a certain type of conservatism, because they cause people to repress and self-censor, or by making it easier for some to deliberately seek to scandalize.

Q. Do they exhaust our ability to think?

R. Our attention has become a commodity that is monetized. Our ability to concentrate has been monetized, to become something that is more like a consumer good. The ability to take action [política] In a genuine way it can only happen in coordination with more people. And the ability to reflect alone, by oneself, also disappears, running out of space. That's why everyone in the West is so tired today.

Q. Would Arendt have been comfortable with the current left?

R. With some things, yes. When 17-year-old Darnella Frazier captured the police killing George Floyd on video, she started a movement. [Black Lives Matter]. Arendt would have celebrated it. He would have seen someone who listens to his inner voice, makes the decision with great courage and changes things. But in the same way he would have viewed all the politics around identities with suspicion. Partly because he thought that any attempt to existentially fulfill oneself based on an identity was fallacious. Humanity is too plural, different and slippery. We never know exactly who we are. If we lock emancipation in the corset of identity, you are tying up that identity and your own freedom.

Q. The war between Israel and Hamas. The eternal conflict of a State that Arendt defended, but without sharing the Zionist impulse.

R. His heart would have been broken. And he would have said: 'I warned you.' He did not believe in a Jewish home, but he did believe in a binational State. He had accumulated previous experience of a Europe dominated by fascism, ethnocentrism and Nazism that led him to the conclusion that nation-states based on a specific ethnicity do not work. You cannot base a nation on exclusion, if only for the mere fact that you will end up surrounded by hostile nations. In 1967, after the war [de los Seis Días], became very concerned about Israel. She believed in Israel, but she was not a Zionist. Today even that distinction cannot be stated without problems, which gives an idea of ​​how far things have come. When you try to erase a people, as is the case with the Palestinians, you are not only usurping their national identity, but you are attacking the plurality of the world. You are attacking the very idea that different people can live in the same place. Thus, we all lose.

Q. Totalitarianism never completely disappears. Putin's Russia and its invasion of Ukraine partly resurrect the 20th century.

R. When Arendt wrote The origins of totalitarianism It was criticized for putting communism and fascism on the same level. But the key is that she detected the imperialist impulse. She understood what was behind that appeal to the Slav consciousness in favor of a great Russia. She would
not have been surprised by Putin's drift. And she would have fully supported Ukraine in its need to preserve the border and its independence.

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