Emeritus professor at Sciences Po, Bertrand Badie is the author of a recent book, Vivre deux cultures: Comment peut-on naître franco-persan? (Living Two Cultures: How Can One Be Born Franco-Persian?), in which he offers a retrospective reading of his long academic career, which sensitivity can be explained by Badie’s biculturality and his detours in a world of multiple horizons. Betrand Badie answers our questions.

In a reflective look back at your intellectual career, a continuum that you relate from your childhood, the origins of your two parents, and the integration—with all its disappointments and uncertainties—of your father in France, you allow your readers, your students, to understand the path that you have followed, from your father’s arrival in France in 1928 to this year 2023, more than fifty years after your arrival at Sciences Po in 1968. What has this retrospective and emotional reading of an intellectual and international career offered you? How can you combine a reflection on affect with scientific neutrality?

Writing this book has also been a discovery, one of buried axioms from past experiences of which I was not even fully aware. But above all, it has helped me to achieve a double task: that of telling my readers and students where I am talking from, and that of discovering that international relations, far from being an extension of the old geopolitics, are the result of complex, profoundly human intersubjectivities, that “fusion of horizons” of which Gadamer speaks (Horizontverschmelzung), even if, alas, this fusion is only rarely fully achieved! This intersubjectivity does not only touch on affect, but also on meaning: ignoring it is already in itself a failure to be neutral. On the contrary, taking it into account rigorously and explicitly brings us closer, if not to the ideal of neutrality, then at least to an “equity” or "equidistance" in the way we treat various actors.

You talk about how your childhood experience of humiliation, because of your origins, has shaped your thinking about this notion (humiliation) at the international level, which you say “still plagues the day-to-day of international relations”. Can you say a few words about this?

Yes, like many others, I experienced this humiliation in my personal life and, worst of all, in what I perceived to be the way my father was treated. My classmates in primary and secondary school labelled me as a “bicot” (as they used to say, a derogatory term for a North African or Middle Eastern person) and involved me in the Algerian war of independence: this was the first international event that made me intimately comprehend what humiliation could be on a global scale. Since then, this theme has haunted me and has been the subject of one of my books (Le temps des humilités, published in 2014).

This more recent book pays tribute to your father, who lived between the Persian and French worlds, an anti-colonialist mediator between the two universes, and necessarily aware of alterity. How did this awareness of the Other contribute to your own vision of the world? Did your mother’s choice to be open to this other culture contribute to your reading of globalisation?

I quickly understood that the sense of alterity was at the basis of international relations, along two mutually supportive tracks: respect for the other in what makes him or her different, and consideration of the ultimate goal (this “fusion of horizons”) of the discovery of the human that makes these differences compatible. The universal cannot be achieved unilaterally by a “superior race” (to use Jules Ferry's words): this inevitable convergence gives globalisation its full meaning and becomes its only conceivable mode of operation and purpose.
In my childhood, listening to Persian and Western music every day, to Ferdowsi’s and Victor Hugo’s poetry, I could not even imagine that these cultural expressions were not from the same world: they made up “my little world” together...
And yes, my mother helped me a lot, she who went so quietly against what she was taught by the provincial society to which she belonged and which was terribly similar to Flaubert's, with its torrents of prejudice....

In fact, everyone speaks “from somewhere”, and knowledge of one's origins allows us to take the necessary—sometimes forced—distance to understand ourselves, and therefore the Other... At which moment in your life were you “born” Franco-Persian?

I think I have always been, because it never occurred to me to choose between my father—who had remained fully Persian—and my mother, who had never given up her origins. And they loved and understood each other... Little by little, I made Auguste Comte lie: I watched the Frenchman I was pass by from my Persian balcony and, with the same insistence, I observed, from the other balcony, the Persian I knew to be!

You mention Edouard Glissant’s concept of creolisation. Can you tell us more about this notion and what it means to you? Are you creole?

We are all creoles, often without knowing it! Because this world is made up of an infinite number of more or less explicit and more or less assumed globalised encounters. The singular identity is nothing more than a myth, so much so that globalisation is doing its work, often quietly! This is what Alfred Grosser said in his lectures that opened my mind when I was a student: I cannot stand this finger pointing at me and assigning me a unique identity...

You write in your book, “Based on my personal experience, I was convinced that humans needed detours to decipher the complexity of the world, or simply, as Georges Balandier put it, ‘to grasp modernity’, which is by definition present everywhere: my detours therefore very quickly led me to Africa, East Asia and Latin America; over time, they succeeded in convincing me of the profound meaning of my biculturality, of which I became increasingly proud as the years went by and I made new discoveries”. Can you tell us about these detours? Do we have to take detours to meet ourselves?

Yes, of course: it is not by staying at home with the shutters closed that you can discover others! Hence the importance of getting to know them and, beyond that, of understanding them, as the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz masterfully showed fifty years ago. This detour can be material, through fieldwork and the value of anthropological knowledge. It can be intellectual, thanks to the intelligence of alterity. It can also be personal when one is lucky enough to belong to two cultures at the same time! This was my chance!

Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.

English version by Miriam Périer and Caitlin Gordon-Walker
French version available here.