What Does Global Justice Look Like in the 21st Century?
In an interview with Jacobin, the political philosopher Philippe Van Parijs discusses the challenges of achieving global justice today, from winning an emancipatory basic income to accommodating mass migration to rich countries.
High rates of immigration do not make life easier for a generous basic income, but they do not make it impossible. (John Moore / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Asher Dupuy-Spencer
As humanity enters the second quarter of the twenty-first century, pressing injustices seem to be multiplying on both national and international scales. In the United States and many other developed nations, governments are imposing austerity as inequality continues to climb and the AI boom mints a new cohort of powerful billionaires. Globally, violent conflict, climate change, and severe poverty are generating mass migration flows that are confronting many rich countries with significant humanitarian and political challenges.
Philippe Van Parijs is a professor emeritus at the University of Louvain and chair of the advisory board of the Basic Income Earth Network. For decades, he has been a leading figure in political philosophy, writing widely on a range of topics relevant to justice at the national and global levels. Along with G. A. Cohen, Erik Olin Wright, John Roemer, and others, he was part of the “September Group” that pioneered the tradition of analytical Marxism. He is perhaps best known for his advocacy of a universal basic income (UBI); more recently he has written on the dilemmas of justice posed by mass migration.
Jacobin’s Asher Dupuy-Spencer recently interviewed Van Parijs about his work and how it might speak to our current moment. They discussed Van Parijs’s political and intellectual trajectory, the prospects and need for a UBI in the age of AI, and how to think about migration-related problems of justice.
Can you tell us about how you came to the Left? And specifically, how did you get involved with the September Group and the folks associated with analytical Marxism? What were your research interests with regard to Marxist thought?
What most contributed to making me “come to the Left” probably happened in my teenage years: the influence of my maternal grandfather, who spent his life defending Flemish workers settling in Brussels against both exploitation and contempt by the local French-speaking bourgeoisie. Seeing myself as being on the Left made it obvious to me that I should read Karl Marx, even though he was not exactly my grandfather’s favorite author.
I read some of Marx’s minor writings during my studies at Louvain and Oxford. And I spent a large portion of the spring semester I was a postdoc at the University of Bielefeld in 1977 reading the first volume of Das Kapital in German, from the first to the last line, scrupulously writing a summary of every single section.
In the autumn of 1978, I was back in Oxford after a year at the University of California, Berkeley, and attended a seminar given jointly by Charles Taylor, then holder of the Chichele chair in political theory, and Jerry [G. A.] Cohen, then at University College London. The seminar discussed, chapter after chapter, Cohen’s then-forthcoming Karl Marx’s Theory of History. I found Cohen’s intellectual style extremely congenial. In 1981, together with John Roemer and Jon Elster, he invited me to a meeting in London that turned out to be the first meeting of the September Group.
Throughout your career, you have been concerned with different dimensions of justice. Can you walk us through the evolution of your thinking on this topic? How would you situate your thinking in relation to that of John Rawls, whose influence in political philosophy was so dominant in the late twentieth century? And how, if at all, does your work on justice relate to Marxism?
I bought A Theory of Justice in Oxford shortly after my arrival in 1974, but I read it only in 1981, when returning to Belgium after nearly six years spent abroad doing mostly philosophy of science and economics. Compared to Cohen or Robert Nozick, Rawls makes for dull reading. But it did not take me long to become convinced that it was henceforth impossible to discuss social justice in an academically robust way without taking Rawls’s work seriously.
In 1984, I edited the first book about Rawls in French. And the book I published in Paris in 1991 under the title What Is a Just Society? (first in French, but soon translated into Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese) helped the “Latin” academia discover Anglo-American-style political philosophy: not only Rawls, but also libertarianism, communitarianism, and analytical Marxism.
As regards political philosophy, I am probably best labeled a left-Rawlsian rather than a Marxist — like Cohen. But what locates Cohen and me to the left of Rawls is not the same. Cohen finds that Rawls is not egalitarian enough because he takes the selfish motivation of the more talented as given. This is what enables Rawls’s difference principle to justify inequalities as incentives.
I find Rawls not egalitarian enough for two different reasons. One is that he insists that his principles of justice hold only among the “fully cooperating.” It follows that he cannot endorse an unconditional income that would help empower the most powerless citizens. The other is that he restricts the application of his principles of justice to the basic structure of individual “peoples,” that is, individual nations. Rawls’s “law of peoples,” which applies to mankind as a whole, countenances massive inequalities across countries.
You are famous for arguing for a universal basic income. There is quite a bit of mainstream interest in the idea now, but paradoxically the barriers to realizing justice through UBI seem as high as ever. Weak socialist and labor movements, fiscal limitations, and reactionary politics push against the sort of liberatory and generous UBIs you’ve argued for. You’ve also discussed the problem of migration to the implementation of UBI.
Popularity in one corner can have the effect of inducing distrust or even hostility in another. The fact that a handful of tech billionaires proclaim the inevitability of UBI may further boost interest in basic income but does not exactly contribute to overcoming established labor unions’ resistance to the idea.
I don’t believe in the typical AI-based case for UBI. I don’t expect the spread of AI to make the world jobless and therefore in need of a guaranteed income scheme as an alternative to access to employment in order to prevent starvation.
However, I do believe that AI will further contribute to the polarization of the distribution of earning power and wealth. The introduction of a UBI can counteract this trend, provided it is combined with a massive expansion of lifelong learning, which it facilitates.
Whether in terms of administrative manageability, economic sustainability, or political feasibility, high rates of immigration do not make life easier for a generous basic income, but they do not make it impossible. Most of the challenges UBI faces are not different from those faced by existing means-tested, noncontributory social assistance systems. Tackling them will require protective devices similar to those currently in place, such as a minimum period of legal residence before full entitlement kicks in, but above all an effective “integration technology.”
In recent years, you have written more generally about the moral dilemmas facing the developed world when it comes to accepting migrants from the Global South. Could you briefly walk us through those dilemmas?
The basic dilemma was already present when some Flemish towns introduced the first public poor-relief schemes in the early sixteenth century. How can you at the same time provide durably for your own poor and for all the poor people that will flock in from elsewhere once the existence of your scheme is widely known? This is the answer to be found in Juan Luis Vives’s De Subventione Pauperum (1526), the first systematic defense of public assistance: send them back to their own villages, with enough food for the journey so that they are not forced to steal on the way — except if their villages are in a war zone, in which case you should treat them as if they were your own citizens.
A modern version of the same answer was famously formulated on television in 1989 by France’s socialist prime minister Michel Rocard: “La France ne peut pas accueillir toute la misère du monde” (“France cannot welcome all the misery of the world”). Several decades later, the Left of the richer countries is still torn between two imperatives: its constitutive mission of defending the interests of the least advantaged in their own people, and a duty of hospitality toward the many in the world who are even less advantaged and would like to share in the rich countries’ wealth.
It would of course be nice if research could show that there is no dilemma. But in order to prove that there is no significant trade off between opening borders and caring for the worst off among the locals, it is not sufficient to show that immigration has had the effect of boosting GDP or of boosting GDP per capita, or even to show that the sort of selective immigration that has happened in some countries has had a positive effect on the situation of many or most of the worst off among the locals.
Far more is needed to show that letting in anyone who wishes to come would have no negative effect on the access by the worst off among the locals to jobs, housing, schools, public services, and public spaces — or on their feelings of economic and cultural security, or on the financial and political viability of the welfare systems that protect their interests. But accepting that there may be such effects must motivate us to explore ways of reducing them, not make us conclude that borders are best kept closed.
In the near term, many rich countries are confronting demographic declines that will sharply reduce their working-age populations relative to retirees. Couldn’t migration from poorer countries be a solution to this problem?
It could be, is already to some extent, and should become even more so. However, this will only work with selective immigration, which means a brain drain and more generally a skill drain at the expense of poorer countries as a result of the richer countries’ “war on talent.” The point is that the sustainability of our pension systems is not only a matter of dependency ratios but also of the productivity of the active population. Especially in countries where there is a serious immediate or delayed linguistic challenge for the adult newcomers and their children, the productivity of the immigrants cannot be assumed to quickly become equal to that of the locals they are meant to replace — unless a powerful selection mechanism is in place.
Here’s one flat-footed reaction to the dilemmas you raise about migration: We know that most people fleeing extreme poverty or natural disasters or political instability will vastly improve their quality of life by migrating to rich countries like the United States.
Most of the concerns about negative effects of migration on receiving countries, however, are more diffuse and uncertain. Shouldn’t egalitarians prioritize certain improvements in the welfare of the migrants fleeing desperate circumstances over less-certain future harms that are spread out over a larger number of people?
In terms of social justice, I am — against Rawls, Michael Walzer, and many other “egalitarians,” a globalist. Any global equalizing mechanism is prima facie a contribution to greater justice, and migration is a powerful mechanism of this type.
Moreover, I believe that the demographic imbalance between continents is simply untenable. Europe’s population is expected to plummet from 750 to 650 million by the end of the century according to United Nations projections, while Africa’s is expected to soar from 1.5 to 3.8 billion. High levels of transnational migration are both desirable and unavoidable.
In my own city, Brussels, foreign citizens and Belgian citizens of recent foreign origin make up close to 80 percent of the population. The city has two official languages — French and Dutch — the only languages in which public services are legally allowed to be offered. These languages are only known, prior to their arrival, by a minority of immigrants.
The learning and transmission of languages and the adjustment of the linguistic regime of public services are therefore key components of what I called earlier the “technology of integration.” They must not only enable the newcomers and their children to quickly develop locally usable human and social capital; they must also ease local cohabitation while promoting the maintenance of fruitful links with immigrants’ regions of origin.
Since 2020, I have chaired the Brussels Council for Multilingualism set up by Brussels’s regional government. This is one of the causes I intend to keep serving as long as I am physically and mentally up to it. A modest, local, down-to-earth contribution to the huge — and, I hope, tireless — collective effort to make our world less unjust.