1 — In my book Gemeinschaft der Ungewählten (2021) [Unchosen Together], I I set out to argue for what might be called a fundamental right to community. My starting point was quite simple: that we must center our analytical and political attention on lives marked by precarity and uncertainty—lives often dismissed as marginal or trivial. From there, we might begin asking questions such as: What would happen if we told the stories of community, belonging, and equality from the standpoint of those whose communities have been destroyed by violence, whose aspirations for a life free from coercion and harm have been shattered at the borders of power, whose voices remain unheard, and whose claims to equality are routinely denied? Where would we arrive if we succeeded in interrupting the contagious circuits of hate and dehumanization, racism and sexism, imperial modes of life, and capitalist extraction? What might emerge if, instead of being driven by the will to dominate and silence—by the desire to divide and conquer—we allowed ourselves to be moved by the desire to cultivate gestures and practices of non-domination and mutual trust? What kind of world might come into being if we no longer treated the right to associate, to bind ourselves to others, as a privileged and jealously guarded good—but rather squandered it, freely, on everyone? What futures would open up if we devoted ourselves to learning how to “coexist with the other,” rather than defending the supposed right of some to remain separate—from their fellow human beings and from the common good?

2 — Securing such a right to community, I believe, is one of the most urgent tasks of our time. Though we all “have the same right to inhabit the earth,” as Judith Butler (2015) argues—drawing on Hannah Arendt’s reflections—the right to commune is not a universally granted one. It is unevenly distributed, fiercely guarded, and denied to many. The idea of “having come to stay” has never applied to everyone—and still doesn’t. A good life, a life “without fear,” as Judith Shklar puts it, is not a given. Such a life—one necessarily shared with others, free from coercion and violence, and not based on the suffering of others—is the bare minimum required by a democratic ethos of cohabitation. And yet, as philosopher Seyla Benhabib reminds us, we are never “without social relationships and social context.” Even the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany has affirmed this view. In a 2008 ruling, the Court held that the human being exists “necessarily in social contexts.” We become persons only through others—when those others recognize us as someone who, as Benhabib puts it, “deserves the same moral respect as all others.” To live with others is therefore universal—and the precondition of freedom. For only those who can form bonds and participate in the shared practice of community are truly free. Freedom manifests where and when we act reciprocally for one another. This is the internal, constitutive link between freedom, equality, and solidarity. It also explains why denying the right to belong—as well as the destruction or violent appropriation of other communities’ cultural resources and practices, whether language, art, literature, sacred objects, traditions of grief or joy, or the empowering rituals of communality—has long been part of the colonial and imperial repertoire of domination.

3 — And yet, the right to commune is not something we can simply insist upon without qualification—for community is a deeply ambivalent concept. Though the good life is only ever a shared one, community is also a term that has been compromised, corrupted, and rendered difficult. It is an experience and practice that—perhaps especially in Germany—is met with suspicion, and rightly so. The historical reality of fascist “community,” orchestrated by the Nazis and accepted by large segments of the population, makes clear that community has never simply meant belonging, equal participation, and democratic self-governance. It has also meant exclusion, ostracism, and—often—lethal violence and genocide. So how to commune? How to organize the social and political spheres of life in ways that make shared self-rule possible? How to ensure democratic access to life-sustaining infrastructures? These are not easy questions. But they are precisely the questions we must struggle with—because they determine whether the future remains open, participatory, and democratic.

4 — Against this backdrop—and within a theoretical framework that understands an ethos of cohabitation as a nexus of actions, conditions, practices, and social orders—we must ask: What requirements must a right to community meet? Is it a matter of clemency, granted at someone’s discretion? Of mere politeness—offering a chair to the stranger at the door? In other words, is it merely a social convention? Neither clemency nor convention suffices to meet the demands of a democratic form of life, which calls for adherence to constitutional principles and the practical acknowledgment of both human equality and mutual dependence. Should we not instead treat this as an inalienable human right? After all, the international community affirmed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that there are “things we owe to all people, no matter how foreign they may seem to us.” The Declaration also acknowledges a moral right to community: for instance, the right to start a family (Article 16), and the right to belong to a political community (Article 15).

5 — So, if community is what we owe to one another, what must be done? Three points are crucial:

• First, we must unapologetically grant the right to come and to stay to all, and create polities structured by reciprocity, accountability, and response_ability.
• Second, we need a commonwealth that secures and amplifies the moral equality of people in their plurality. Without plurality practiced in egalitarian ways, there can be no shared world.
• Third, the infrastructure of the commonwealth must be built to sustain and nourish everyone. Political theorist Danielle Allen (2020) argues that “economic egalitarianism is required for political equality.” This means organizing land, labor, and capital in such a way that social equality becomes the product of the social bonds we cultivate. The inalienable liberal-democratic right to private property—to the means of social reproduction—must thus be critically interrogated, particularly insofar as it serves as the sacred foundation of prevailing ownership structures.
  

6 — All of this requires that we defend and reinvigorate society—that we reclaim it as a matter of collective care. This means reimagining society as a democratic commune of the many: a community bound together by shared, though also contested and negotiated, matters of common concern. Against the neoliberal mantra of the past decades—“There is no such thing as society”—we must insist: we don’t need less, but more community; not less, but more public spheres, more publicly held power, more democratic deliberation. Without autonomous society, there are no autonomous individuals. Without autonomous individuals, there is no free society. And without deliberation, there can be neither. We are, in other words, autonomous only in relation—with and through others, with whom we are always already entangled in webs of interdependence—not as isolated, economically rational individuals conceived in solipsistic terms.

7 — There is, however, no clear-cut path from here to there. Therefore, we must first understand the world as it is, and identify the systemic barriers that stand in the way of emancipatory futures. Let me briefly name a few crucial points:

• We live in social conditions where the principle of competition has become both the old and the new normal.
• We are witnessing an unprecedented global expansion of the zone of subalternity.
• This expansion is widening the gap between the formal status of personhood (de jure) and the actual experience of personhood (de facto).
• All of this is unfolding in a global context where neoliberalism has eroded democracy, while neo-reactionary and proto-fascist forces continue to colonize its remnants.
  

We must thus understand the world:

• First, in terms of the forces that shape and sustain it—that is, as materially conditioned and politically structured.
• Second, in terms of the historically specific ways we have been formed into subjects—subjects who desire a certain kind of freedom and accept competition as a natural human condition.
• And third, in terms of how the world is imagined, reproduced, and stabilized—how we are co-opted into relations of dominance, and how we come to inhabit those relations. We must ask: What values guide us? Whose voices do we hear? Whose experiences do we consider? From whom do we begin to think and act? What forms of solidarity are made possible—or sabotaged—across lines of gender, desire, identity, skin color, culture, and religion?
  

All of this demands hard work. Ultimately, it depends on collective insight and democratic agreement on cultural, political, and social norms. The alternative to this work is clear: fascism, and the waging of war—against so-called internal and external enemies.

Allen, Danielle, Politische Gleichheit. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen 2017, Berlin 2020.
Benhabib, Seyla, Kosmopolitismus ohne Illusionen. Menschenrechte in unruhigen Zeiten, Berlin 2016.

Butler, Judith, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge/London 2015
Hark, Sabine, Gemeinschaft der Ungewählten. Umrisse eines politischen Ethos der Kohabitation, Berlin 2021.

Shklar, Judith, Der Liberalismus der Furcht, Berlin 2015.