In these troubled times with attacks from all sides, it becomes crucial to defend the brilliant idea that France has offered to the world: republican universalism, the only possible path to world peace.
What exactly is French universalism?
Universalism, in the French context, is above all a definition of man as man, freeing itself from all contingent determinations of our lives to focus on the essential. To be a man is not about skin color, religion, gender, race, country, nation, ethnicity, a specific body, profession, level of wealth, power, or the set of qualities or defects naturally given by nature to man.
Being a man, on the contrary, essentially, in a way common to all men, is to be « a thing that thinks, that doubts, that asserts, that denies, that knows little, that knows much, that loves, that hates, that desires, that does not desire, that imagines, and that feels » (Descartes, 3rd Meditation, Metaphysical Meditations). This definition can be complemented and slightly modified to say a being that thinks (instead of a thing) and by adding « who imagines, who bleeds, is born and dies, laughs and cries, lives in society and is sociable, questions fate, God, and his place in the universe, works for survival, etc. » (Aristotle’s zoon politicon).
All these considerations, aligning with the Greek definition of man as a being of logos, thought, discourse, science, and myth, apply to all men of all times, without any exception. This is the mark of the universal.
On the other hand, all other particular definitions are criteria of secondary importance and are inessential to our identity and definition. They are of no real importance and even create unnecessary and harmful differences and divisions among people.
The Anglo-Saxon path
The continental voice is the rational voice. Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, presented the English version of this universalism. In Shylock’s soliloquy, he establishes the connection between all men based on feelings, emotions, biology, sensation, and the body.
« I am a Jew! Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. »
Simply replace Jew with any other sensible determination, and you find a form of universality. However, this definition, which could be called purely sensationalist, important as it may be, forgets the essential. It forgets reason, that 2+2=4 is a universal truth, and that every man can access concepts and reason, especially that of man as man.
If we respect all other men, it may be because of their bodies, but primarily because we are all beings of logos.
« All men are born free and equal in rights »
« Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. » The first sentence of Rousseau’s Social Contract, published in 1762, recalls the universality of humanity and succinctly shows its political potential and revolutionary implications for the time. The opposition between freedom and the reality of dictatorship regimes, represented by various monarchies of the time, is immediately posed.
Universalism is the foundation of the freedom and equality of all men with each other. It is essential to understand that this is a metaphysical freedom and equality, inherent in the nature or essence of man, and not the absurd and ultimately deadly pursuit of real equality or unrestrained freedom. We are identical only insofar as we are all human. The rest, concrete reality, contingent existence, is inevitably marked by differences, without which we simply could not exist in the proper sense and which unfortunately sometimes set us against each other. The possibility of life presupposes the difference and distinction of living elements. Without difference, in the indistinct, we would all remain as if in the matrix of the universe, unconscious, undifferentiated. Difference exists, but it must be put in its place, secondary to what unites and brings us together.
Secularism, a practical consequence of universalism
French secularism is misunderstood, even in France itself, because it is forgotten that it is not just multiculturalism or the defense of the possibility of differences. It is, on the contrary, the concrete consequence of the promotion of universalism.
The French Revolution is not only a revolution against the monarchy. It is also a revolution against the role of religion and the creation of a space dedicated to civil life. This secularism will materialize much later after the Revolution, in 1905, with the law on the separation of Church (all churches) and State. It took more than fifty years after the abolition of slavery law in 1848 to achieve this separation. This centuries-long struggle for freedom of conscience is a combat of incredible intensity.
Why secularism? Because it is necessary to allow each citizen to access the universal, and this requires concrete spaces and moments of life outside the influence of differences, especially religious differences. In this regard, religion is inherently excluded from public education. The separation from the Church also means the creation of a « free » school, a compulsory school that is not a religious school in any way. It is worth noting that education was previously directly provided by the Church. The goal of the free school is to foster critical thinking, develop reason, to give everyone the means to access the universal, the law, abstraction, and thus allow each person to rise above and free themselves from all contingent determinations.
Racism, the opposite of universalism
There is a simple and harsh truth that is not pleasant to recall. As soon as one steps out of the realm of the universal, as soon as one abandons the defense of man as man to defend a contingent determination, one falls into intolerance and racism.
A slight push is enough to move from the defense of the oppressed to hatred of the other. Feminism, a movement glorified today, will inevitably include some hatred of men. The defender of immigration will inevitably dislike the citizen, whom he will place beneath the immigrant. The leftist hates the right, and vice versa. The defender of a homeland or a nation will always end up opposing another, etc. Even the anti-racist is not immune to ending up, to maintain the purity of his position, by seeing racists everywhere. We see it every day; any speech opposing self-proclaimed anti-racists is immediately subjected to criticism, or rather, anathema, as extreme right-wing.
The different dimensions of man must either be taken together or subjected to abstraction. But they should never be taken separately. Any emphasis on a contingent and non-essential determination is both a logical error, as the determined becomes superior to the general, and a source of dissension among men, with all those not belonging to the determination being immediately considered as inferior.
Three religions for the same God
It is the same with religions, which all claim to establish an exclusive and privileged connection with the divine. Anyone who is not Jewish, a member of the « chosen » people, is a « goy, » a kind of foreigner, a radical other. Christians are the true chosen ones of God, as clearly demonstrated by the fact that God sent them his son. As for Muslims, they are the ‘true’ religion, and all others are « infidels » against whom Jihad can be unleashed… It is always the need to feel special, superior to others, apart, this rejection of equality, that is at the root of all contempt and conflicts. Each time, the particular connection to the principle or god is the catalyst for a good reason to eventually reject and kill the other. The idea of God is the idea par excellence that should contribute to the unity of all humans, all created by divinity. But, tragically, it is, on the contrary, in the hands of almost all religious people, the vector of the greatest oppositions. The mechanism is the same in Nazism, where belonging to a « superior » race justifies and legitimizes the destruction of the inferior, in an endless list: Jew, Gypsy, homosexual, communist… and ultimately anything that is not Nazi. Everywhere, the rejection of the identical in favor of a difference marking superiority is the criterion of intolerance and war.
Even by defining oneself as anti-racist, or feminist, or leftist, forgetting the universal… one does something terrible which consists of determining oneself and cutting oneself off from the essence of our own humanity. One becomes part of a party, a camp, a determination… in a struggle against all others and always strengthening one’s own determination. One loses the universal, common sense, the general interest. One becomes racist because one has already denied oneself access to the universal.
This is how communitarianism, by putting differences on an equal footing with rights and denying the superiority of the universal over differences, leads us into a deadlock. We cannot build tolerance and cohabitation without relying on common higher principles. All particularities must accept this higher principle of law to allow coexistence. Without this acceptance, peace is only superficial.
The universal is not the acceptance of all principles in contradiction with the universal. On the contrary, it is the struggle, even to defensive war, against any primacy of a particularity. Such is the price to allow the emergence of the greatest number of particularities and diversities and to coexist with others.
Communityism, multiculturalism, wokism, etc.
The most common objection made against universalism is to deny particularities. Taking them into account would require the creation of specific rights, separate, to satisfy the demands of certain communities. The flaw is inherent from the start. The Republic is the union of individuals recognized in their universal dimension. They form a community, a state, a nation, which itself has a vocation to open up, as we will see later, to the entirety of humanity. Communitarianism, in whatever form and content, is a negation of universal community, a retreat into particularity. It is an enclosure outside the universal, a mental imprisonment in determinations that pretend to be universal but are not. These communities must compromise and acknowledge that they themselves rest on free individuals. The group never takes precedence over the individual. Otherwise, freedom and even intersubjectivity disappear.
Wokism, which places the different before the universal and the identical, in a staggering logical misconception, is developing in the West. It is only in the West that the recognition of LGBTQIA+, or the gender question, can be taken into account, regardless of one’s opinion, thanks to openness to individual differences. In nationalist lands, Islam, or in popular democracy, only imprisonment awaits those who do not conform to the contingent difference elevated to a first principle and the resulting group dictatorship. In the Republic, we can enjoy all possible fluidity, change our minds, religions, professions, and now even gender. We can even pretend to be someone else, read books from around the world, discuss political choices. Precisely because we are not closed off to our contingencies but open to transcendence, soul, reason, and morality. However, we cannot play the community against individual rights.
The trap of the struggle against racism without universalism
Any cause that does not defend universalism but, on the contrary, believes it is fighting for tolerance by defending a particularity against others can only lead to racism. Can feminism face its origins and the way it has continuously been encouraged by misandrist women hating men? What beautiful result has it achieved if not a decline in fertility, convincing women that they would only be free by stopping having children? Equality was already in principles and soon in laws. While the fight against violence against women is legitimate, like the fight against all violence, it is devastating to the unity of humankind. It immediately sets and opposes woman against man.
The same arguments can be applied to all defense causes, for blacks, religious minorities, and why not for blondes or bodybuilders? Each time, a quest that pits one group against others denies the quest for justice for the entire human race, not for this or that community. Placing oneself as a member of a community to be defended presupposes from the outset that this community is mistreated by others, it is the root of the victimhood mentality. But it also posits that this community is better and worth more than others, that its difference obliges other men, in the name of that difference, to express their respect. As if simply being human were not enough.
Even worse, any anti-racism advocate will inevitably end up seeing racists everywhere to maintain the idea that they themselves are anti-racist. This is how even universalism has become racism in the eyes of racists. Anti-racist rage, in the confusion of its struggle, becomes the perfect target for the manipulation of true racists, who only need to press the button of the community they want to see triumph over others to rally the lost troops of anti-racism. This reversal of the principle that drove anti-racism mad would undoubtedly give Hegel himself chills.
Only positive struggle for man as man, beyond all particularities, is true tolerance and the true fight against any form of discrimination based on secondary criteria.
Perpetual peace will only exist for citizens of the world
At the end of his career, Kant writes one of his few texts on international relations, the « Perpetual Peace » project. But he warns the reader from the outset with the epigraph of the pamphlet, « Peace is the dream of the wise, war is the history of humanity. » Peace remains for him a utopia, a wishful thinking.
Kant defines war as armed conflict between states, a definition that has become canonical. Based on this definition, there are only two ways to end war. The first is to eliminate all weapons and armies (the third principle of the treaty), to disarm all nations. From the perspective of the definition, it is perfectly rigorous. From the perspective of reality, as we know, almost every day, unarmed peoples will fight with knives, pieces of wood, with their fists and teeth rather than stop fighting. The weapon is only the tool and not the essence.
The second solution, still in line with the definition, would be to eliminate all nations. But this is also impossible. It would be a return to the state of nature, which is already itself a state of war, at least latent. The other possibility is the merger of all countries into a single universal nation. Again, the politically feasible nature of such an organization leaves one pensive. Kant then proposes a third way, more in line with the reality of the existence of nations, and which will be the prelude to the founding of the League of Nations, the federation of nations.
But this Federation will be perfectly effective only when it unites homogeneous and all republican nations, namely all founded themselves on the recognition of the equality of all men. We find here the ancient Stoic idea of the citizen of the world. Or, in other words, by taking up our previous arguments, if the nations we seek to unite consider themselves all superior to the other for one reason or another, if they do not recognize their equality, not only as a nation but also as nations made up of free and equal men, war will continue. The fiction of international law, legal positivism, which consists of considering as equal nations that are not, because they are based on different principles, liberal democracies, popular democracies, dictatorships, theocracies, etc., will not allow peace. We see this every day.
What future for international relations?
What should be done then? We see that the terrain is slippery. Should we fight against all non-republican regimes? Should we dissolve a fundamentally imperfect UN? Should we create the UN but on a smaller scale, only bringing together liberal democracies, as is the case in Europe? There is no perfect answer. However, we can take a realistic counterpoint to this thesis and provide some guidelines:
- Armies will be maintained until there are only republics on earth. Only deterrence and defensive war are acceptable. Democracies will not be created by war to promote hypothetical peace. Violence begets violence. It would create what one claims to fight against. And when war is waged, it must be done following the rules of respect for humanity. (We will not do as the United States did after September 11, attacking a false culprit, Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks). Naivety will not be shown, believing that other non-democratic countries could internationally respect principles of equality that they reject every day for their people. Non-republican nations hate the republic and harbor a fierce hatred that must never be underestimated.
- Promotion of universalism will be done, mainly in our democratic countries, through culture, education, dialogue. Any country refusing equality between nations must be treated with the greatest caution, as the potential enemy of peace it is. This is exactly the case with Russia, which claims to erase Ukraine from the map.
- Fights for freedom and equality must always be made in the name of the universal. Any pressure group forgetting universal principles must be fought in the courts and by legal force.
- Immigration must be conditioned on the formal acceptance of republican equality principles. Religious organizations, in particular, must sign a charter accepting the values of the Republic. Republics will always attract foreigners fleeing tyranny in all its forms. But they must not let others in at the cost of their own principles. Note in passing that it is the universalist principle that turns us into a welcoming land since only universalist regimes, recognizing the human in its main determinations and relegating contingencies to the background, are capable of welcoming other « men. »
- Democratic and republican nations must unite in an international formation allowing them to neutralize any nationalist aspirations among themselves. Their association must be on an equal footing. On the other hand, the union of this supranational organization and other countries should take into account the difference in the nature of regimes and the associated risk.
- They must never find themselves in a relationship of dependence on these regimes. The soft commerce thesis should only work in one direction, and especially not in the other direction! The economy must be subordinate to politics. Reality, which seems to play with us, has given the most intolerant countries the greatest energy resources. Renewables and nuclear are our weapons on this front.
- The same goes for the military question. We must do everything to prevent non-republican countries from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Europe, which considers itself a League of Nations all by itself, must be careful. It does not yet live in Kant’s post-statist and peace world. It must protect itself against non-democracies, and not take as a principle a universalism that does not exist. It is the greatness of Europe to advance in the Kantian project. But this must not become a weakness. There must be no complete economic liberalism with non-democratic countries, contrary to what the WTO advocates.
Responses to objections
Universalism does not fulfill its promise because it is intolerant of difference.
Indeed, universalism is not relativism that would consider all theses as equal. Universalism is a fight for keeping all determinations that oppose us secondary and articulated with universalism. It is also, by relying on what is common to all men, the only doctrine that allows humanity to come together in the greatest possible diversity.
It’s quite the opposite, in fact. Universalism is a fight to not be reduced to deadly particularities that confine man in limited determinations, preventing him from fully enjoying his nature. One should not be afraid, on the contrary, to relegate all differences to the secondary rank that is theirs. How can one accept, when one believes in God, that God is defined as a power asking a man to kill his neighbor, or any other excluding religious mechanism of the same kind? It is rigorously impossible. Universalism is the force to draw on to keep one’s asocial impulses at bay.
Universalism is the false front of colonization.
To this hypocritical accusation, as it only considers that the principle must be honest and intellectually founded, it is easy to respond with the following quote from Kant: « How far from this perfection are civilized nations and especially the trading nations of Europe! To what extremes of injustice do we not see them go when they go to discover foreign countries and peoples! (which means conquer them). » The condemnation is unequivocal. The West that does not respect this principle is just as blameworthy as any other country not respecting it.
Objections claiming that universalism is the false front of white capitalist man fall under the same response.
Food for thoughts 