«Esse est percipi vel percipere »

More than ever can we say that the world is put upside down by the tunisian revolution. While F16 of the NATO is bombarding Libya at the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, few thousands of refugees from Tunisia reach the northern coast on board of makeshift boats. How the world can still not see that the later movement is a replica to the first one? It is the same blindness towards the economic injustice that governs the world order. For how long humanity will refuse to admit that emigration, the trauma of the North, is not the problem of the South but the result of the arrogance of the imperialist attitude of the North?
The world was somehow under considering the claim of human rights and democracy in Tunisia. It didn’t want to believe in it and take it seriously until it became a revolution. At that time the fear was that it is going to be spread to the region. We started to talk about a domino effect. It was not that much wrong. The infection went indeed to other countries in North Africa like Egypt and Libya and reached even those of the Golf and the Middle East. Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria will not be spared. But nobody thought really to the way these domino were settled or established. They were in fact exposed to the failure because they were mined by the same illness.
The domino effect works when the game is arranged to work in a determined way. Or, who arranged the regimes which are governing these countries? Wikileaks first and the no more controlled societies then came to denounce the unmoral international policy condemning populations to poverty and humiliation for the only benefit of the multinationals of the North and the political elite of the South. Complicity worked for too much longtime already. It had to end.
Rather than a domino effect, the images of the emigrants boarding on Lampedusa show that it is a butterfly effect. The Italian island halfway between Africa and Europe becomes then the epicenter of a human tsunami. A butterfly moves on the hills of the Atlas and the Alps shake.
The North African youth organizes a Sit In in the Kasbah place in Tunis or the Tahrir square in Cairo and the pillars of The European Union tremble. The effect of the youth uprising doesn’t work in a horizontal way going from the West to the East and vice versa, but in a vertical one going from the South to the North. And this is the proper of the butterfly theory of the chaos: it is not predictable. The Tunisian and Egyptian regimes were considered as fortifications strong enough to hold their societies under control, and it doesn’t matter if they don’t fit with the universal values of democracy and human rights. The arrogance of these regimes and their protectors kept them in a kind blindness preventing them from seeing the fatal ferment. It is then logic that a reaction to any pressure goes right at the opposite direction from where this one is coming.
What happened in these two countries (until now) was a result of a time bomb produced by the global policy based on security. The most sophisticated technology of surveillance and the biggest investment in security measures were not and will never be able to hold a population under eternal control. The reaction of the Tunisian and Egyptian populations is not only against their political leaders, but also against a global postcolonial mechanism. It was boiling since years, artists witnessed this, and social networks accelerated it.
For short, by making themselves seen Tunisian and Egyptian youngsters jumped from being nothing, when nobody looked at them really or ignored them, to stand as an All, because they challenged the whole global system and not only their rulers. It took some time for the world to understand that and to admit that the whole world is concerned, not to say targeted, by the uprising. It would be too perfect that the unrest stays an inside conflict between a third world regime and its population. But, when this regime was for decades supported to keep its population in a kind of natural reserve, when it is used to get its legitimacy only from serving the interest of the northern multinationals, it is then very natural that the uprising target also the source of the evil : the western cupidity.
It is irony of the history that the movement of the Tunisian emigrants doesn’t stop in Italy but precisely at the border of France. One could see in this an answer to the attitude of the former French foreign affairs minister who offered to help the Tunisian police overflowed by an irresistible angry youth. Isn’t it a revenge of an oppressed people against the former colonial power which is still continuing to behave with arrogance and impunity, not only in Tunisia but also in other countries like Libya and Ivory Coast?
No, the few thousands of immigrants boarding on the coast of Italy are in fact a symptom of a deep problem. Nevertheless, the origin of the crisis is not to find in Tunisia, or at least not only in this small country on the north of Africa, it is to find in the deepest point of the occidental mentality that still has a residue of colonialism. Why does Europe drive back these young people, while it accepted other people from the same origin, the former rulers and their families?
Morally speaking, isn’t there legitimacy to this movement? Isn’t it a reaction to the hopeless gesture of Mme Catherine Ashton, Vice-President of the European Commission, offering 258 millions of Euros as a European support to the transition process? Wasn’t it a kind of a confession of a guilty consciousness? Wasn’t it enough? Of course not, says the youth.
Times of “One cries, one is given a feeding bottle; one keeps quiet" are definitely over. They don’t want to be those who are eternally in need of help. They are asking for equality nevermore for charitable help. A real generous gesture would not be anything else but to recognise their rights and their goods. They want Europe to give up with its contradiction: why offering a financial help of hundreds of thousands of Euros while billions of Euros stolen from their countries by the former rulers are sleeping in the European bancs? How can they accept a donation while the Swiss banks refuse to give back the Tunisian state the money they, perhaps legally but for sure unmorally, accepted from the former dictator and his family knowing very well its origin and the price of suffering and humiliation it cost this same youth now knocking at its doors.
Furthermore, what these young people want is not more than what the western used to show as a model of modern, human and economically viable society. The problem starts when they are not given the chance, the time and the means to build it themselves. It starts also when the powerful world thinks that it is possible to impose a model of democracy to the rest of the world. It starts when these young people understand that the real purpose of the western world is to keep them eternally dependent of its aid because its wealth is depending of the weakness of the rest of the world.
This is precisely what the Tunisian youth evinces through its uprising and through its claim weather it is expressed in Tunisia or in the border between Italy and France. And this is exactly what Alain Badiou, the French Philosopher, denounces as a “...moral and humanitarian pretexts that have been used ever since the first colonial conquests” . In other words, as far as the world is divided and as far as it doesn’t see that the problem is not limited to theses societies but it is a crisis of the global world order, as far as the citizenship is not based on a kind of criticism towards the continuously growing power of multinationals without caring about the human dimension of development, there is a very small hope that these flux of young people seeking a better life will stop.


1- «Esse est percipi vel percipere », George Berkeley (1685-1753) in Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge.
2- In an open letter to Jean-Luc Nancy reacting to his article “What the Arab peoples signify to us” in the French daily newspaper Libération of April the 28th, 2011.