Exile, Statelessness, and Migration by Benhabib Seyla

Author:Benhabib, Seyla
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

Exit, Voice, and the State: Confronting the Fate of the German Democratic Republic

Among the most impressive characteristics of Hirschman as a social and political thinker, besides his graceful capacity to cross the boundaries of the various social sciences, was his penchant for self-subversion.40 He did not tire of questioning his own assumptions. It may have been an irony of fate that the most significant challenge to the exit versus voice binarism that complicated it considerably came from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolution in East Germany in 1989. “The events of 1989,” he wrote, “were not experienced as stemming from an enigmatic turnabout in the functioning of social processes … A problem arises only for the social scientist who seeks a deeper understanding and who, in the course of this attempt, fashions a conceptual framework that initially makes it easier, but subsequently can make it more complicated, to understand what is going on. In that case, of course, our analyst may still come out on top by showing how instructive it is that events should have diverged from the original scheme!”41 Hirschman was referring to the fact that the exit option to West Germany by East German dissidents and opponents considerably complicated the exercise of voice, in that the Communist regime of East Germany had used exit as a safety valve to relieve pressure for changes on their system and regularly deported oppositional intellectuals to West Germany. But at one point, East German citizens themselves refused to leave—although they could—and started to build up an oppositional movement united around the slogan “Wir bleiben hier.” (“We stay here.”) The old socialist revolutionary, who had left Berlin as an adolescent, was clearly fascinated by these events in his partitioned homeland and even more by the way in which German scholars claimed that his exit/voice theory was being tested “experimentally on a large scale” by the upheaval in East Germany.42

The East German case complicated Hirschman’s binarism not only politically but theoretically as well, because Hirschman himself had acknowledged in an earlier essay that he had paid more attention to economic activities and had dealt with the state only briefly in his famous book. Hence, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” needed to morph into “Exit, Voice, and the State,”43 precisely because the state as an association was very different from the market or the firm. Two features of the modern state in particular stood out: territoriality and legitimacy. The modern state-form emerged with the “territorialization” of space, that is with the division of the face of the globe into domains of discrete political and jurisdictional authority. According to this so-called “Westphalian” model, the state is the highest authority with the jurisdiction to control all that is living and dead upon its territory. Historically, very few state forms reached the degree of centralization, coherence, and control that this model seemed to presuppose. In Stephen Krasner’s famous words, “sovereignty is hypocrisy.”44 Nonetheless, unless we are dealing with completely failed states or states in conditions

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