Foreword

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE LAST TEN YEARS?

If we read once again this concluding lecture of the course that I gave at the Collège de France in 2011, it becomes apparent that, at the time, the scenario was already set. The three concepts upon which the course was structured – resisting dehumanization, responsibilizing global actors and anticipating future risks (see Delmas-Marty 2013b) – are now more than ever fundamental in our societies, characterized by an accelerated globalization. Where does the feeling of having lapsed into a different world come from, then? What happened, what made the air so heavy as to lead us to wonder today if it is still appropriate to use a rational and reassuring tone? Can we truly still claim that legal humanism“is becoming reality”? Between the rage of some and the fear of others, the discourse of reason becomes inaudible and we, dismayed, rediscover Paul Valéry from the 1930s:

“We later civilizations . . . we too know that we are mortal.

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with […] their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied […]. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair. Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence […]. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.”

— Paul Valéry 1919, p. 321-322; English translation p. 94¹

The abyss is surely deep enough to swallow Europe. We knew that the process of integration would be slow (Europe in “small steps”) and complex (“multi-speed” Europe), but we also held it to be irreversible. The treaties promised an “ever closer union among the peoples of Europe” and “harmonization of social progress”. We also knew democracy to be fragile – the only tragic regime, because it always questions itself anew, as Claude Lefort said – but we thought that the triptych of “democracy/human rights/rule of law” would have resisted, building its strength on the centuries required for its creation.

Instead, only a few years have been sufficient to dismantle it without anybody getting alarmed, except for some “well-intented souls” that keep on pursuing ideals of goodness and beauty, by now discredited in the name of the only objective deemed worthy: efficacy. Only a few years have also been sufficient to discover that the sinking of empires of which Valéry spoke (and that keeps on shaking the earth from one end to the other) is a matter that, by now, concerns all of us. Even the ecosystem can collapse. The “collapsologists” sometimes draw inspiration from the geologists who conceived the Anthropocene (the epoch in which humanity has become the transforming factor of the planet) and sometimes from the political scientists who conceived “idiocracy”. Digital networks have erased temporal distances and intermediaries between facts and their interpretation. It could even go so far as to neutralize every form of critical reason: only one truth, mine; only one acceptable identity, mine.

“Uninhibited”, and proudly so, the so-called “populist” movements are acquiring power by encouraging retreat to the alleged refuge of the nation-state (America first). But retreat is impossible and refuge is an illusion since globalization, and the interdependencies that come with it, are irreversible and booming. Thus, in order to realize the existing divergence between the simplicity of the demagogic discourses and the complexity of the interactive, evolving, and often contradictory facts, it is interesting to read once again this so-called “concluding” lecture; and, by doing so, to consider it not so much as the closure of a cycle of lectures, but more as the beginning of a new phase, in which it is necessary to renew our approach to globalization.

Because we were caught up in analyzing the underlying legal reasoning, we would never have imagined that the effects would have developed so swiftly, up to take us where we are today, even though we were not very far from here in any event, since we had already identified various warning signs, now more topical than never. Hence, the idea to publish the present text, written in 2011 and later enhanced with some side comments², like so many small lighthouses that try to shed some light on what happened.

September 2019