Forgoing unconditional hospitality on account of fear of loss makes ethics impossible by destroying the possibility of genuine relationality and constructing a self-sustaining state of mass insecurity.

Having rescinded its previous programmatic interference with market-produced existential uncertainty and insecurity, and having on the contrary proclaimed that the removal, one by one, of the residual constraints imposed on profit-oriented activities was the prime task of any political power that cares for the well-being of its subjects, the contemporary state must seek other, non-economic varieties of vulnerability and uncertainty on which to rest its legitimacy. That alternative seems to have been recently located (first and most spectacularly, but by no means exclusively, by the recent US administration) in the issue of personal safety : current or portending, overt or hidden, genuine or putative fears of the threats to human bodies, possessions and habitats – whether arising from pandemics and unhealthy diets or lifestyle regimes, or from criminal activities, anti-social conduct by the ‘underclass’, or most recently global terrorism. Unlike the existential insecurity born of the market, which is if anything all too genuine, profuse, visible and obvious for comfort, that alternative insecurity with which the state hopes to restore its lost monopoly on the chances of redemption must be artificially beefed up, or at least highly dramatized to inspire a sufficient volume of fears, and at the same time outweigh, overshadow and relegate to a secondary position the economically generated insecurity about which the state administration can do next to nothing, nothing being what it is particularly eager to do. Unlike in the case of the market-generated threats to livelihood and welfare, the gravity and extent of the dangers to personal safety must be presented in the darkest of colours, so that the non-materialization of the advertised threats and the predicted blows and sufferings (indeed, anything less than predicted disasters) can be applauded as a great victory of governmental reason over hostile fate: as a result of the laudable vigilance, care and good will of state organs. In France, the Chirac versus Jospin presidential duel of 2002 degenerated as early as in its preliminary stages into a public auction in which both competitors vied for electoral support by offering ever harsher measures against criminals and immigrants, but above all against immigrants who breed crime and the criminality bred by immigrants. 2 First of all, body, personal possessions, home, neighbourhood). On 14 July 2001 Chirac set the infernal machine in motion, announcing the need to fight ‘that growing threat to safety, that rising flood’ in view of an almost 10 per cent increase in delinquency in the first half of the year (also announced on that occasion) and declaring that a ‘zero tolerance’ policy was bound to become law once he was re-elected. The tune of the presidential campaign had been set, and Jospin was quick to join in, elaborating his own variations on the shared motif (though, unexpectedly to the main soloists, but certainly not to sociologically wise observers, it was the extreme right-wing voice of Le Pen that rose to the top as the purest and so the most audible). On 28 August, Jospin proclaimed ‘a battle against insecurity’, vowing ‘no laxity’, while on 6 September Daniel Vaillant and Marylise Lebranchu, his ministers of internal affairs and justice, respectively, swore that they wouldn’t show any tolerance of delinquency in any form. Vaillant’s immediate reaction to the attacks in the United States on 11 September had been to increase the powers of the police aimed principally against the juveniles of the ‘ethnically alien’ banlieues , the housing estates outside Paris where, according to the official version (the version convenient to the officials), the devilish concoction of uncertainty and insecurity poisoning Frenchmen’s lives was brewed. Jospin himself went on castigating and reviling, in ever more vitriolic terms, the ‘angelic school’ of the softly-softly approach, which he had sworn never to belong to in the past and never join in the future. The auction went on, and the bids climbed skywards. Chirac promised to create a ministry of internal security, to which Jospin responded with a commitment to a ministry ‘charged with public security’ and the ‘coordination of police operations’. When Chirac brandished the idea of locked centres for confining the juvenile delinquents, Jospin echoed the promise with a vision of ‘locked structures’ for them, outbidding his opponent with the prospect of ‘sentencing on the spot’. No reminder is needed that little if anything has changed since. More than to anything else, Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s successor, owed his convincing electoral success to playing on popular fears and the desire for a strong power able to arrest and fight back against the further fears bound to plague the future. He goes on using the same game to chase away from the newspaper headlines the news of the unemployment figures relentlessly rising under his presidency and the relentless fall in the incomes of the majority of the French. To do that, he resorts to the tested expedient of collapsing the issue of existential security into that of street violence, and street violence into that of the newcomers from the poor regions of the planet. A mere three decades ago, Portugal was (alongside Turkey) the main supplier of the ‘guest workers’ the German burghers feared would despoil their homely townscapes and undercut their social compact, the foundation of their security and comfort. Today, thanks to its sharply improved fortunes, Portugal has turned from a labour- exporting into a labour- importing country. The hardships and humiliations suffered while earning bread in foreign countries have been promptly forgotten, 27 per cent of Portuguese have declared that neighbourhoods infested with crime and foreigners are their main worry, and the newcomer politician Paulo Portas, playing a single, fiercely anti-immigration card, helped a new right-wing coalition into power (just as Pia Kiersgaard’s Danish People’s Party did in Denmark, Umberto Bossi’s Northern League in Italy, the radically anti-immigrant Progress Party in Norway – and virtually all the mainstream parties in the Netherlands; in other words, in countries that not so long ago sent their children to faraway lands to seek the bread their homelands were unable to offer). News like this easily makes it to the front page (like the panic-mongering, xenophobic title aimed at ruffling feathers, ‘UK plan for asylum crackdown’, in the Guardian of 13 June 2002; no need to mention the banners on the tabloid front pages … ). The main bulk of the planet-wide immigrant phobia stays hidden from Western Europe’s attention (indeed, knowledge), however, and never makes it to the surface. ‘Blaming the immigrants’ – the strangers, the newcomers, and particularly the newcomers among the strangers – for all aspects of social malaise (and first of all for the nauseating, disempowering feeling of 3 while countries too poor to attract significant numbers of neighbours desperately seeking a livelihood, like Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary or Slovakia, turn their wrath against the usual suspects and stand-by culprits: local but drifting, shunning fixed addresses, and therefore perpetual ‘newcomers’ and outsiders, always and everywhere – the Gypsies. A permanent state of alert: dangers proclaimed to be lurking just around the next corner, oozing and leaking from terrorist camps masquerading as Islamic religious schools and congregations, from immigrant-populated banlieues , from the underclass-infested mean streets, the ‘rough districts’ incurably contaminated by violence, the no-go areas of big cities; paedophiles and other sex offenders on the loose, obtrusive beggars, blood-thirsty juvenile gangs, loiterers and stalkers … Reasons to be afraid are many; since their genuine number and intensity are impossible to calculate from the perspective of narrow personal experience, yet another, perhaps the most powerful reason, to be frightened is added: one does not know where and when the words of warning will turn into flesh. Contemporary menaces, and particularly the most horrifying among them, are as a rule distantly located, concealed and surreptitious, seldom close enough to be directly witnessed and very rarely accessible to individual scrutiny – for all practical purposes invisible. Most of us would never have learned of their existence were it not thanks to the panics inspired and boosted by the mass media and the alarming prognoses composed by experts and swiftly picked up, endorsed and reinforced by cabinet members and trade companies – hurrying as they do to turn all that excitement into political or commercial profit. As we, ‘the ordinary people’ occupied with our individual small-scale daily affairs, know of those awesome but faraway dangers only indirectly, it is possible, indeed much too easy, to manipulate our – public – attitudes; to play down or silence the dangers that promise no political or financial gains, while grossly inflating, or even inventing, others, better suited to politically or commercially profitable exploitation. But as Moazzam Begg, a British Muslim arrested in January 2002 and released without charge after three years spent at Baghram and Guantanamo Bay prisons, rightly points out in his book, published in 2006 under the title Enemy Combatant , the overall effect of a life lived under virtually incessant security alerts, such as warmongering, justifications of torture, arbitrary imprisonment and terror, is to ‘have made the world much worse’. Whether worse or not, I would also add: not a bit more secure; most certainly, the world today feels considerably less secure than it did a dozen or two dozen years ago. It looks as though the paramount effect of the profuse and immensely costly extraordinary security measures undertaken in the last decade has been a deepening of our sense of danger , of risk , and of insecurity . And little in the present tendency promises a speedy return to the comforts of security. Sowing the seeds of fear produces rich crops in politics and trade; and the allure of an opulent harvest inspires seekers of political and commercial gain to break open ever new lands to fear-growing plantations … In principle, security concerns and ethical motivations are at cross-purposes: the prospects of security and the intensity of ethical intentions are at loggerheads . What casts security and ethics in principled opposition to each other (an opposition excruciatingly difficult to overcome and reconcile) is the contrast between divisiveness and communion: the drive to separate and exclude which is endemic to the first versus the inclusive, unifying tendency constitutive of the second. Security generates an interest in spotting risks and sorting them out for elimination, and for that reason it targets potential sources of danger as objects of ‘pre-emptive’ exterminating action, unilaterally undertaken. The targets of this action are by the same token excluded from the universe of moral obligation. Targeted individuals and groups or categories of individual are denied human subjectivity and recast as objects pure and simple, located irrevocably at the receiving end of action. They become entities whose sole relevance (the only aspect taken into consideration when their treatment is planned) to those applying the ‘security measures’ on behalf of those whose security is presumed or declared to be under threat is the threat they already constitute, may constitute, or may credibly be charged with constituting. Denial of declared immaterial, if listened to at all. The incapacitation of the humanity of the targets of action goes far beyond that passivity ascribed by Emmanuel Levinas, the greatest French ethical philosopher, to the Other as the object of ethical responsibility (according to Levinas, the Other commands me by his weakness , not strength; he gives me orders by refraining from giving them; it is the unassumingness and the silence of the Other that trigger my ethical impulse). Using Levinas’s vocabulary, we may say that casting others as ‘security problems’ leads to an effacing of ‘face’ – a metaphoric name for those aspects of the Other that put us in a condition of ethical responsibility and guide us to ethical action. Incapacitating that face as a potential (unarmed, non-coercive) force evoking or awakening the moral impulse is the hub of what is understood by ‘dehumanization’. Inside the ‘universe of moral obligations’, Moazzam Begg’s three-year imprisonment without a crime, and torture administered to squeeze out of him an admission of guilt to (retrospectively) justify it, would be an outrage and an atrocity. Deprived of ethically significant ‘face’ by the fact of being classified as a security threat and thereby evicted from the universe of moral obligations, Begg was however a legitimate object of ‘security measures’, declared by the same token to be ethically indifferent or neutral (‘adiaphoric’ in my vocabulary) by definition.