Dear Arnon, we in the South look at Europe like voyeurs in your swingers club

Dear Arnon,

At the risk of being overly familiar or claiming to share ideas with people I have never met before on a subject that is too vast, I loved the metaphor of Europe as a “swingers club”, and for several reasons. 

First of all: when one lives in the world that you call “Arab”, one experiences profoundly and violently the confusion between sexual freedom and freedom itself that we attribute to Europe. In the so-called Arab world, being liberated sometimes means not so much voting freely, but the freedom to kiss a loved one on the lips, in public. Incidentally, the Islamists in our regions were quick to exploit the cultural misunderstanding to gain the support of the conservatives, machos and patriarchs. Erotic licentiousness, fornication, sin, evil, and moral dissolution are portrayed as the fruits of liberal democracy, if not as liberal democracy itself; salvation will come as a result of guarding against these: through God, through Dictatorship. 

The second reason why I like the metaphor is that in a swingers club, you sometimes encounter voyeurs: a solitary species that comes to watch, in silence, a bodyless witness to the body of another. That is how I have always seen myself when I travel in the West: a: voyeur of European democracy. Prohibited from touching, an aesthete, an admirer, an outsider. 

So, yes: you have to live elsewhere than in Europe to become European, to dream of it and define it. And that elsewhere can be America. But the best way to demarcate Europe is to live in a dictatorship. It is from there, from that blind spot, that European democracy can be defined, by default in a way, by contrast. This means consenting to naivety, shortcuts and facile analysis. This is the condition for believing in democracy: seen from too close, one notices the weave, the imperfections of course, the clumsy stitching.

Do these reservations about European democracy matter when one is surviving in a dictatorship? No. And so, in the so-called “Arab” world, Europe exists, its democracy too: it is, once and for all, what we do not have. It is what we demand or imitate. It is also what we reject in the name of our restrictive identities and of the right to be different after decolonisation. The decolonised are always sensitive and their wariness is that of the survivor. 

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Somewhat unjustly, a little preachily, I would reiterate, often in lectures to Europeans, that “your compromises are our disasters”

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This is a crude, naïve, slightly dishonest theory because it shuts down the proposed discussion between us. But it is also essential to keep a perspective. I am content with this dream of Europe. The rest of my reservations will come later, if I manage to have a future. And as for my doubts, I would rather express them in literature rather than by coming up with definitive definitions. What makes the democracy that I see in this club important?

It is important because of the law of consequences: when democracy deteriorates in Europe, is damaged by excesses and diminished by the effect of barbaric internal invasions by the populists, for me that reinforces dictatorship and authoritarianism and undermines the ideal of democracy. Our dictators have fuelled this shortcut to the spectacle of Europe: “Democracy? It’s chaos, beware of reckless wishful thinking”, they repeat. Somewhat unjustly, a little preachily, I would reiterate, often in lectures to Europeans, that “your compromises are our disasters”.

I’d warn against the meaning of European democracy which goes beyond its geography. I’d talk about Islamism stoked by colonial guilt, about populism boosted by nostalgia for an exclusive identity. It is overblown as rhetoric, but it has the advantage of brutality and accountability: European democracy is a necessity that goes beyond Europe.

Defining democracy

Of course, there is all the rest that exercises us: is democracy exclusive to Western Europe? Is it exportable through landings or NGOs? Is it a local story or a deceptive universality? Is it a cultural or human specificity? The so-called “Arab” world is endlessly searching for definitions, locking itself into the intellectual castes of perpetual decolonisation. Ultimately, people often opt for exile. Because it is better to live in a poorly defined democracy than in a dictatorship where people exhaust themselves defining democracy. 

Democracy doesn’t know how to defend itself, a Tunisian friend would say to me: you can see it in Europe. I do see it: curious paradox where the aim of a land of comforts is to achieve the balance of power through a generalised weakening. 

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Second obvious point: does too much democracy kill democracy? I shan’t say it out loud, but I live in the “South” and that permits resentment: when I scroll through the latest “activist selfies” by campaigners for mosquitoes’ right to bite us, or who deface Van Gogh’s paintings with tomato soup, or who glue their hands to cars to save the world, I wonder whether excessive democracy isn’t killing democracy. 

And the third obvious point? Perhaps I am allowed at least one quote, and here it is, from a poem by Jorge Luis Borges: “He who looks at the sea sees England.” The condensation effect seems brilliant and immediately sets us dreaming: the empire, the vastness, England, adventure, all the ships built, the nautical knots and the end of the known. An entire country defines itself by the abolition of its borders. Everything is nested in the sea and dissolved in it. For once, two different things, the sea and England, represent the same thing while remaining two different things.

So it is with democracy and Europe: anyone from the global “South” who looks at the sea, sees Europe. For a writer, it is a poem by Borges or a delightful metaphor. For an illegal migrant waiting for good weather to row to Spain, everything is in those few words, once and for all: the sea is Europe, in other words, freedom, the afterlife without the corpse, elsewhere, escape, the infinite, sex without sin, swinging and voyeurism, fortune. 

Europe remains a democracy but is unaware of it. This is the final whim of its beauty. The sort of innocence that annoys and becomes cruelty. But we in the “South” know it: we are able to define democracy. Furthermore, when I am invited to Europe, it is to better express the essence of democracy. Because I come from the cosmic barbarism of the rest of the world, because I know what it costs. Because I know where it begins and where it ends. Because an attentive and discreet voyeur has more to say than a swinger busy caressing or biting others. And in this case, the metaphor goes further: what is threatening Europe, is above all that this major place no longer desires itself. 

So yes: let us champion European liberal democracy. For us people of the “South”, from dictatorships, it is the only place to swim to when our countries collapse. And it is the only place where we can shout that democracy doesn’t exist without being arrested by the dictatorship that loves to dress it up. So, for democracy then, let us divide the task: you need to doubt it in order to improve it, and I need to believe it exists in your countries in order to hope for it one day in mine. Because for now, in the so-called “Arab” world, the only swingers club possible is the heavenly paradise. And that is for after death or murder. Yours or mine. 

For centuries, Europe underwent expansion. Through colonisation and the invention of universality. Nowadays, Europe is withdrawing into guilt and apologies. It is the “barbarians” who are imposing themselves to convert Europe in its beliefs which were once superior. Do Europeans have a soul or an animal nature? Is their nudity indecent primitiveness? Should it be veiled or unveiled? Should they be converted and re-educated? 

We all know how this kind of story of an unequal encounter ends up: very badly for one of the two. Europe appears most of all as an island geography. It matters little that it has borders. Contemplating it is to look at the entire sea. What people would dream of, in the good and bad faith of the democratic activist from the “South”, in the naivety and the effort to be made, is for it to be everywhere. For it to remain the proof that the other shore exists. Clandestine migrants in the Maghreb gaze at the sea the way believers gaze at the sky. And with the same false hopes.

Dear Lana Bastašić, Drago Jančar and Oksana Zabuzhko, this is clearly not a reply. The voyeur’s number-one rule is to remain silent.

Kamel Daoud, Oran (Algeria), 15 May 2023

This letter is one of the “Letters on Democracy”, a project of the 4th Forum on European Culture taking place in June 2023 in Amsterdam. Organised by De Balie, the Forum focuses on the meaning and future of democracy in Europe, bringing together artists, activists and intellectuals to explore democracy as a cultural rather than a political expression.

For the Letters on Democracy, five writers envision the future of Europe in a chain of five letters initiated by Arnon Grunberg. The writers – Arnon Grunberg, Drago Jančar, Lana Bastašić, Oksana Zabuzhko and Kamel Daoud – come together during the Forum, in a conversation about the Europe that lies ahead of us and the role of the writer in it.

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