Chapter 5
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, democratic political projects, including neoliberalism, have had to negotiate the destabilization of the nation-state consequent of the uneven processes of globalization. In this chapter, we turn more directly to this process of democratic negotiation and we look, in particular, at some of the complex global processes that are destabilizing the traditional territorialized nation-state. This, we reiterate, does not imply the end of the modern state system. It means that globalization—understood as a set of powerful social, economic, and technological processes—is destabilizing that multilayered ensemble of factors that created liberal democracy and that has given dominant meaning to the modern world of states since the seventeenth century.
Approaching Globalization Democratically
Globalization does not have a single logic and does not comprise a singular, tight-fitting material or ideational infrastructure. Neoliberals—Thomas Friedman is exemplary in this respect1—overstate the logical coherence and material unity of globalization. They see the economic integration of capitalism across the globe as globalization’s definitive and determinant logic from which new forms of social life and a potential new humanism of the planet will emerge based on the “economic man” of Western capitalist lore. This neo-deterministic preference for a “one world” order chafes against a democratic ethos, especially as neoliberals like Friedman argue that it is inevitable and those like Mandelbaum argue it is necessary to freedom. For this vision, constraints on the possible choices and paths of development are limited, cultural differences submerge beneath an overarching logic of commodification and economic exchange, and political differences harden into seemingly irreducible oppositions of “us” and “them” (the liberal and illiberal democracies of Fareed Zakaria, for example,2 or in Huntington’s apocalyptic “clash of civilizations”), leaving little room for democratic negotiations of the flows and movements of globalization.
This narrow and audacious neoliberal vision, however, betrays the complexity and disjunctive nature of the assemblages of the transnational and deterritorialized flows that comprise twenty-first-century globalization. As the territorial nation-state loosens its hold on the democratic political imagination, new conditions emerge, and new opportunities take hold for democratic “world-making.” Some of the same technologies, material and informational processes, and knowledge and ideational flows that have brought into being tighter forms of social and political management, and even made technocratic institutions based on neoliberal logics appear benign or even necessary, have at the same time rekindled more radical political drives and imaginaries of democratic participation and organization. New conditions emerge in globalization, viewed from a democratic perspective, not from the inevitable or necessary triumph of the Western narrative of modernity but from the historically contingent freeing up of collective imaginaries from the narrative structures and tropes of the nation-state and the Westphalian states-system.
Consequently, democracy in globalization may take the form of reimagined nation-states, of new regional and federalist constitutionalisms such as are emerging in human-rights courts in Europe and elsewhere, in social-justice movements in civil societies in and around the world, or in local experiments with participatory self-government that draw solidarity and resources from connection to global networks. From the perspective of neoliberal polyarchy, these alternatives appear as overloads of rational decision-making capacities or as irrational demands of immature publics or as idealistic and unrealistic although well-meaning attempts to make the world more just than is possible. From a perspective of a democratic ethos that values a deeper popular participation and that sees in new technologies and global mobilities conditions of possibility for democracy rather than new necessities and tighter constraints, these alternatives embolden action and activate the creative impulses of democratic world making.
This world-making process often involves a significant deterritorialization of social life with many democratic possibilities. Several sociologists have attempted to capture the nature of this deterritorialization process. Manuel Castells, in perhaps the most well-known characterization of this theme, speaks of a “networked society,” which is “made up of networks of production, power and experience, which construct a culture of virtuality in the global flows that transcend time and space.”3 John Urry describes this phenomenon as one that requires the rethinking of the global environment in terms of a new “mobilities paradigm.” In his view, these mobilities confront people in the twenty-first century faster and more directly than ever before. He says: “Physical changes appear to be ‘de-materializing’ connections, as people, machines, images, information, power, money, ideas and dangers are ‘on the move,’ making and remaking connections at often rapid speed around the world.”4 Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has described these rapid global flows as occurring “in and through the growing disjunctures between ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes [italics in original].”5 This implies that the temporality of modernity that inheres in the interactions between different spatial frames (the state, global capitalism, imperial and colonial systems, communications networks, diasporas, etc.) has been constantly taking new forms rather than having conformed to the essentially linear explanations of time and space to be found in traditional modernity narratives.
The point is that the logics that define these networks of relations are now changing, and new ones are emerging that are not confined or related to the logic of territorial states in ways they have been over the last 300 or so years. As Saskia Sassen has recently emphasized, globalization is taking place not just across but also “inside” states, establishing new logics, constraints, and governmental practices for managing not just information flows but also flows of people, identities, physical commodities, violence, and more.6 Moreover, more and more aspects of governance are dependent on information flows that transverse and transform the physical nature of territorial borders. Neoliberals often recognize this process but tend to overstate the way in which a territorialized world order is being superseded under conditions of deterritorialization. We stress here, following Sassen’s insight, that this process of change is more subtle and nuanced, that relations between territoriality and deterritorialization in modern democratic states have always been complex and contested, and that that logic is now being tested and transformed into new ensembles of democratic politics, reinforcing some aspects of liberal democracy, challenging others, and opening up new possibilities for democratic association and action.
In this context, some contemporary democratic theorists have echoed the ancient concerns of Aristotle (see introduction) concerning the acceleration of the deterritorialized age and the negative impact this has on the time left for democratic decision making.7 Seyla Benhabib, for example, stresses the problem of fast-track trade legislation that leaves little room for extended debate and discussion over policies and limits legislative oversight of, for example, neoliberal trade practices.8 There are, likewise, the challenges to democratic accountability associated with the increased speed by which new financial instruments are created and are mutating to take advantage of rapidly changing economic conditions (derivatives and other complex financial securities, for example, that are made possible by computerized information networks). This allows little time for democratic contestation over the logics of financial instruments and seems to limit regulation to “after the fact” legislation. The general concern, as Sheldon Wolin has put it, is that democratic politics requires a “leisurely pace” to ensure genuine accountability and participation, which is increasingly at odds with the current culture of globalization and a speeded up capitalist, consumer culture.9
Other democratic theorists, such as William E. Connolly, are also concerned by the rapidity of globalized life for democratic politics but stress some positive implications of an accelerated world of trade, ideas, and communications.10 In particular, suggests Connolly, there is an increasing ability in the current era for groups and individuals to coordinate effective democratic action through the immediacy of social media and the Internet, as we have seen in the Arab Spring and the various Occupy movements. Another positive factor in this regard concerns the capacity to proliferate real-time information about democratic struggles speedily around the world, creating solidarities across great distances. This has numerous effects that, we suggest, may be creating new democratic political subjectivities, helping to develop ethical-political understandings and enhanced practices of “self-making” that are deepening democratic commitments simultaneously across borders and in local places. In this context, it becomes possible for progressive people to not only support distant democratic movements with money and supplies but also to help create an ethos that folds global commitments to justice and equality into local understandings of democracy. We look at some of these new democratic subjectivities in the final chapter of the book.
Finally, the accelerated pace of air travel has enhanced the importance of diasporic groups around the world and is changing the relation between national and ethnic communities and their home states.11 For example, note the increased importance of Dominicans living in the United States in the recent presidential election there. In June 2011, a new law allotted seven congressional seats in the Dominican congress to Dominicans living abroad, most of whom live in and around New York City. Polling stations were set up in Dominican neighborhoods, and reports suggest that the vote in the United States was crucial to Danilo Medina’s victory in the May 2012 election. Such extraterritorial voting is becoming more and more common. This is also an issue we will touch on shortly as part of a discussion over renegotiated forms of democratic citizenship under globalization.
Suffice it to say, for now, that the new infrastructure of globalization has multiple effects on democracy, operating on multiple registers at once. It affects democracy inside states, and it makes possible new democratic attachments across state borders as established democracies try to adapt to new time signatures of global flows and as the acceleration of contacts creates new conditions for democratic transformation and possibility. It also contains some ironic possibilities for change. For example, the same communication technologies that enhance state surveillance and provide the means for deep repression of democratic movements also enable those movements to organize and communicate, hampering such surveillance and repression and enabling greater democratic interaction. This was evident enough in the way that the Indian peasants of Chiapas in Mexico were able to reach out to the world with their desires for democratic assistance in 1994, as it was to the activists associated with the WikiLeaks affair more recently.
Taken together, these characteristics of contemporary globalization produce several sets of problems and possibilities for democracy. In the remainder of this chapter, we touch on three of these in more detail: (1) the democratic security dilemma in neoliberal globalization, (2) the issue of the “democratic deficit,” and (3) the question of a “globalized” democratic citizenship. We do not argue that these problematics can be traced exclusively to neoliberal ideology and policy but that ways that neoliberalism has influenced dominant policies cannot be ignored as helping to frame the ways they have been understood.
Democratic Negotiations of Security (1): The Neoliberal Way of War
After the Cold War, a “peace dividend” of reduced military spending invoked by the Clinton administration promised to alleviate a contradiction that had emerged in the neoliberal American state. This contradiction resided in the combination of a democracy-promotion strategy that required large state expenditure and an expansive military security presence around the world, with neoliberal deregulation and privatization policies that became manifest in the huge budget deficits during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and G. W. Bush. However, the peace dividend never materialized, and to the extent that the Obama administration has largely adopted a neoliberal economic agenda, this contradiction is not likely to go away any time soon.12
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the contradiction of the neoliberal security policy deepened as the financial pressures of the War on Terror further expanded the U.S. military commitments abroad with the opportunistic invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Military spending spiraled upward13 as the logistics of the wars in the cities of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, together with those of policing the non-state “terrorist” organizations, such as Al-Qaida, furthered the promotion of precision-guided weapons systems and all the complex paraphernalia of modern warfare designed for lethal force and reduced risk to American soldiers.
In this context, neoliberals have sought to turn the inherent contradiction of the post–Cold War era to their advantage, developing what we might call a neoliberal way of war. In the process, they have created a variety of problems and possibilities for democratic theory and practice. This was very evident in the attempts of George W. Bush in Iraq to combine the doctrine of preemptive war with a neoliberal strategy of democracy promotion. Initially, the Bush administration naively assumed that after the war a liberal-democratic government would easily emerge. Expatriate Iraqi leaders were brought back from exile in the West to lead the new democratic Iraq. Market forces were promulgated as the new economic doctrine, the oil fields were to be opened up to foreign investment, labor rights were to be restricted as was the formation of labor unions, and government officials associated with the former regime were arrested or otherwise disqualified from serving in the new democracy. When a liberal-democratic government didn’t emerge, and in the ensuring chaos that did, the United States came to worry that a popularly elected democracy might in fact be a problematic outcome leading to a Shiite-led government with strong ties to Iran. Officials in the United States thus entertained and even encouraged de facto divisions of Iraq into Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni regions that deepened religious and ethnic tensions and conflicts.
In Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the War on Terrorism, neoliberals have pioneered new deployments of forces that can frame warfare as not only legitimate but also as cost effective in the new global battlefields that liberal democracies now face. These deployments rely on mobile weapons rich in computer technologies, utilizing global communications and satellites. War planning creates synergies with the civilian economy, enlisting the scientific, software, and engineering communities through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Automated weapons systems, from cruise missiles to modern drones, promise limited casualties and more effective strikes, increasingly using satellite communications and new mapping technologies to hone their targeting. Increasing technological sophistication along with a faith in the effectiveness of advanced technologies added to the acceptability of the new form of war. It created the representation of the new warfare as limited and “surgical,” a metaphor that draws on legitimations of medical expertise and creates the impression that our violence is careful, discriminate, rationally planned, and respectful of the “patient,” against the indiscriminate, unsophisticated, and irrational violence of the enemy who causes the disease that needs to be fought.
While the battlefield has clearly changed, the liberal drive to control war has persisted and intensified, both to use it as a rational tool of policy (now in the name of national interest defined in terms of establishing and policing a normative, democratic world system) and to use more and more advanced weaponry to control violence on the “battlefield.” The new warfare perpetuates the neoliberal contradiction between expansive military spending and reduced state resources, further justifying neoliberal cuts to social programs. In the case of contemporary technologically intensive warfare, costs are bound to rise (note how nearly all advanced weapons systems have come in substantially over budget) given “Moore’s law,” named for one of the cofounders of Intel that states that the pace of technological change in the computer age is exponential, doubling every two years. This means that new, more advanced technologies will need to be acquired almost constantly, putting enormous, continual pressure on the ability of states to fund social and civilian programs even as troop deployments are reduced.
Traditional liberal, democratic, constitutional, and legislative remedies for resort to war, by making it accountable to a democratic public, were of little help. Constitutional provisions designed to ensure civilian control of the military proved no match for the new form of expansive military deployments. The U.S. War Powers Act, for example, that required Congressional approval for foreign deployments of troops beyond ninety days, failed in the case of Iraq and the War on Terrorism, as the Bush administration easily deployed the tropes of patriotism and rhetoric of ever-present threats and dangers that had a chilling effect and short-circuited criticisms and garnered blanket endorsement in Congress for the war along with vast restrictions on civil rights.
Nevertheless, the Bush administration and the Obama administration have had difficulty framing this new form of warfare in order to generate and sustain public support for the longer-term interventions and continual deployments of military forces and spending on weapons that are needed. This is not for lack of effort. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan still involved large deployments of troops, and the contradictory nature of neoliberal globalist war between cutting state expenditures while engaging in interventionist wars posed considerable problems for the Bush administration. Tours of duty for soldiers had to be extended, sometimes to several years at a time with little time off, and National Guard troops were called up in order to supplement the all-volunteer forces. This exacerbated the social inequalities generated by neoliberal economic policies as the volunteer force drew disproportionately from poor and lower-middle-class men and women, many of whom saw the military as a way to avoid unemployment and to get job training. The result has been that while physical casualties, although still high, may have been kept to politically acceptable levels, the psychological and personal costs to soldiers and their families, as well as on the social fabric of U.S. society, have been enormous through the problems of veteran homelessness and psychological problems. In neoliberal fashion, the Bush administration cut resources for Veterans Affairs, even as the costs of treatment for physical and psychological effects of the war increased. For example, in 2012, there were 349 reported suicides by active-duty personnel in the United States, against 311 deaths in war zones.14 Moreover, the tools utilized to frame the new form of warfare as legitimate and cost effective raise serious questions about the effects on democracy.
In order to limit public criticism, during the Iraq War, information made available to the public was carefully scripted by the military, so much so that some argued that the media presentation was itself part of the war.15 Initial video of massive explosions and news commentary from reporters filmed on their hotel balconies with the bombs bursting in the background created the impression of a controlled battlefield that projected U.S. and NATO power. The surgical nature of the firepower was confirmed in daily, heavily scripted news conferences from the military. Reports of Iraqi casualties and destruction were limited and censored by the military, hiding from the U.S. public the real destructiveness of the war.
The new global media is intensifying the question of democracy and publicity in war. Judith Butler has emphasized the significance of framing the new techno-warfare in particular ways, arguing that the language and discourses through which war is given meaning have become a crucial element of war fighting in the globalization era and of the way in which local and global communities understand and respond to what they see. She proposes that this framing process “does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates in a strategy that selectively produces and enforces what will count as reality.” This is crucial, she suggests, to the success of the contemporary wars of globalization, and she poses this question regarding this “success”:
Can there be the continuation of war or, indeed, the escalation of war, as we are now witnessing in Afghanistan, without first preparing and structuring the public understanding of what war is, and by attempting to suppress any visual, audible, or narrative accounts of war that might help to break open a popular resistance to war?16
Hence the extreme attempts to control the imagery and information about the Iraq War by the Bush administration. Nevertheless, as Butler stresses, the visual presentation of war and violence that works in many ways to undermine democracy and strengthen the (neoliberal) status quo is ultimately susceptible to a variety of reactions, including those that prompt resistance to the new modes of warfare. As we will see in the next chapter, more and more democratic movements in globalization are incorporating principled and strategic nonviolence against a neoliberal way of war that promises to bring high-technology violence selectively to anywhere on the planet that recalcitrant (rogue) states and non-state movements threaten to take hold. Increasingly, an antiwar program is becoming part of progressive democratic ideologies.
Viewed from a democratic point of view, the neoliberal way of war poses moral difficulties. Some are consonant with the nuclear age and with the age of machine warfare more generally.17 One problem is the moral asymmetry that tends to accompany advanced weapons. One of the earliest examples was the machine gun, considered immoral to use by Europeans against one another but perfectly acceptable in Africa and in colonial wars.18 Another is the way the war theater has been an experimental proving ground for testing and developing innovative weapons that both enhanced the destructiveness of warfare and furthered industrial and technological progress in the liberal states.19
Moral questions arise as the violence of war is mediated by machines that distance the soldier from the violence they perpetrate and that have the capacity, and often the aim, of replacing human judgment with split-second decisions. Antiwar liberals have organized against such weapons in the past, often invoking a humanist cosmopolitanism in which killing anonymously and at a distance undermines the human capacity for moral judgment.20 Current campaigns against drones may in fact be having some effect in this regard, as the Obama administration has recently announced a strategy for their more careful and restricted use. If democracy requires citizens who take responsibility for the moral consequences of their actions, and for the actions of their collective publics, which would seem to be implied by claims to act in the public good, many of the weapons of choice and the strategies of distanced, networked warfare—drones, for example—would not only seem to violate democratic principles but to actively undermine the production of democratic selves.
One critic, Paul Virilio, has described the new warfare as no longer driven by control of territory but by control of speed; he calls it war as “chronopolitics.”21 He worries that this means that war is taken out of the hands of human beings and given over to machines, as decisions have to be made instantaneously. Others, including many in the military, also worry about the ethical and political implications of the merger of man and machine in increasingly automated battlefields and in cyber-warfare. More and more new weapons systems involve bio-enhancement machinery, from night-vision goggles to computerized mapping screens attached to helmets that relay real-time, GPS-guided information to soldiers in the field to drugs that enhance a soldier’s senses.22
The rhetoric of the Obama administration has reflected these criticisms, even if his practice has not followed through, and he has softened the rhetoric of a permanent state of emergency. Indeed, Obama came to office on the promise of bringing the war system back under democratic control. He promised to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, citing its inhumanity and violation of international law, and he promised to end the permanent warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. While he failed to accomplish these in his first term in office, his 2014 State of the Union speech reaffirmed his commitments in this regard.
A softened and more multilateralist vision of democracy promotion pervades the Obama administration’s National Security Strategy (2010), which describes the U.S. national interest as “to shape an international system that can meet the challenges of our time.” In this context, the current (2013) United States National Security Strategy is worth quoting at length:
This strategy recognizes the fundamental connection between our national security, our national competitiveness, resilience, and moral example. And it reaffirms America’s commitment to pursue our interests through an international system in which all nations have certain rights and responsibilities. This will allow America to leverage our engagement abroad on behalf of a world in which individuals enjoy more freedom and opportunity, and nations have incentives to act responsibly, while facing consequences when they do not [emphasis added].23
This liberal globalism echoes a core precept of liberal modernity that many neoliberals share—the compatibility and mutual reinforcement of capitalism with a peaceful world order.
The association of liberal capitalism and democracy with a peaceful world order has a long history. In the eighteenth century, Montesquieu and Adam Smith both associated liberal trade with peaceful competition. They both made fundamentally moral arguments for the connection between liberalism and peace. Free economic competition would channel hostilities and differences of interests into more peaceful pursuits and away from political intrigues. And, perhaps most important, both argued that the individuals who would be inclined to free-market competition were incompatible with non-republican regimes, especially those in which the rule of law was not absolute. Free markets, they believed, required political and religious toleration, representation of the capitalist classes in government (those who used their wealth for investment rather than the conspicuous consumption of the nobility), and, most important, the rule of law.24 For Smith, although not necessarily for Montesquieu, the aim of government was to provide a framework of rules and institutions in which “economic man” could flourish. For Montesquieu, the primary justification of commerce was to create moral possibilities by constraining human passions, not the reorganization of government in order to make competitive action in the market possible as it was for Smith or to actively promote the development of markets as for contemporary neoliberals. The culmination of the eighteenth-century arguments was Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, in which he argues that only a federation of republican states in which all accepted the rule of law could produce a world order in which war would be undertaken only for defense and in cooperation with other republican states. He argues that because elites would most likely benefit from war and the majority of the people would most pay the costs, the more influence the people have the less likely governments would be to resort to war.25 We should remember that for Kant people’s influence is not democratic—that is, through participation in governing—but through a liberal public sphere of a free press and free speech.
A more behavioralist version of the Kantian argument has been revived in recent “democratic peace theory” that clearly resonates with the Obama national security strategy. As one of the advocates of the democratic peace theory, Bruce Russett, puts it: “By this reasoning, the more democracies there are in the world, the fewer potential adversaries we have and other democracies will have and the wider the zone of peace.”26 Michael W. Doyle, more attentive to the ways “aggression by the liberal state has also characterized a large number of wars” outside the liberal-democratic “zone of peace,” has been a critic within the democratic peace theory camp of the attempts at forced democratic state building undertaken by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. He recognizes the slippery slope along which the best intentions to create democratic states from the outside veer off into authoritarian reaction and renewed cycles of violence. Both in his writings and as an adviser to former secretary general Kofi Annan at the United Nations he has promoted a more multilateralist and soft-power approach to creating a federation of liberal-democratic states as a way to promote peace.27
On the one hand, the behavioral argument is not surprising. Eliminating difference reduces occasions of conflict, even as it generates new ones as new differences emerge. As the differences that have difficulty being negotiated in the global world manifest themselves less as differences between states, it stands to reason that state-to-state warfare would recede, as has been the case. This point is actually reinforced by Doyle’s finding that as wars between like polyarchal states receded liberals found themselves confronting and engaging in colonial wars and interventions in order to secure raw materials and markets. However, this suggests that rather than supporting a peaceful world, capitalism generates conflicts “beneath” the level of the state that problematize state and human security.
This latter is an insight developed in securitization theory.
Democratic Negotiations of Security (2): Negotiating Global Security
The problematic for democratic security would seem, then, both to contest new modes of warfare that undermine democratic processes and subjectivities and to address, democratically, the challenges of living in a global world in which social relations cut across and through state boundaries and that threaten to unravel social life more generally. The Obama administration’s rhetoric seems to recognize this, although framing it within a narrative that is quite sanguine about the compatibility of neoliberal capitalism, democracy, and peace and of a singular, worldwide disciplinary moral order of states. The security rhetoric of the Obama administration cited above suggests this in his references to “the fundamental connection between our national security, our national competitiveness, resilience, and moral example,” and in his insistence that “nations have incentives to act responsibly, while facing consequences when they do not.”
Securitization theory, however, provides an alternative narrative of a problematic of global security. Securitization theory initially developed as a critical discourse against traditional realist ideas of national security as exclusively military. It is associated with the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, named for the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, which pioneered work on broader understandings of security in a globalized world. Securitization theory seeks to broaden the understanding of security to include threats and dangers in a globalized world beyond the normal military field associated with the Cold War and the Westphalian order of nation-states. For example, one influential text seeks to distinguish and integrate five fields into security studies: military, political, economic, environmental, and societal.28 Securitization theory is constructivist and critical. It aims to not take threats and dangers as given, but to examine how elements of disorder in the world come to be promoted as security threats and dangers.
Securitization theory appropriates insights well known to subaltern scholars and peoples in the global South, that security depends upon reducing or eliminating poverty, enhancing education, providing health care, ensuring stable environmental conditions that can sustain local ways of life, and ensuring social justice that can inform the work of the Economic and Social Council of the UN General Assembly as well as other UN-affiliated agencies. It refashions these insights into a Western social-science idiom, as problems to be solved. By formalizing social and environmental problematics generated in globalization as an operationalizable field of knowledge, “security,” securitization theory provides this insight with an epistemic structure within which a range of fundamental issues in globalization become objects of sustained action. Securitization theory opens up a potential field of political interventions, but at the same time, its insights can be appropriated to limit democratic politics within them.
Securitization theory can be useful for democratizing global problematics, so long as it makes room for alternative perspectives and enters a dialogue democratically with alternative agencies of those concerned with and affected most by the issues that have been “securitized.” “Securitizing” a problematic—that is, framing it as a security issue—makes the problem simultaneously susceptible to technical solutions and to potential political participation by broader publics, enabling participation and input by lay persons (i.e., nonsocial scientists, nonscientists, and nongovernmental experts).29 Global social movements, social justice, and environmental NGOs, as well as local political mobilizations fighting poverty, homelessness, and so forth, have been able to take advantage of these openings, some even gaining observer status at the UN and in other multilateral forums and treaty negotiations. The difficulty is that neoliberalism exploits securitization of social and environmental problematics by stressing market solutions that insulate security from democratic politics and participation and legitimates leaving them to be dealt with by experts within international organizations within which neoliberalism has predominant influence and can therefore control much of the debate.
For neoliberalism, the solution to these problems—of poverty, pollution, ecological damage, human trafficking, and so forth—is the market and economic growth. For neoliberals, the key to a democratic world order is fostering economic growth and the security of the market. Indeed, regulating and managing the flows and externalities of global markets—such as ecological damage, poverty, health risks, and the like—creates new opportunities for furthering the creation of a neoliberal global order through such governmental techniques as ceding state regulatory authority that is more susceptible to democratic political pressures within parliamentary states to international organizations controlled by experts heavily influenced by neoliberal forms of knowledge. It also allows the dominant neoliberal states to dictate, based on economic logics, solutions to global problematics. Thus, for example, the United States was able to weaken and scuttle the Kyoto Protocols on climate change, appealing to the neoliberal mantra of undermining competitiveness and economic growth. The neoliberal problematic in the broader security field can also be furthered by market solutions to creating global institutions to manage social problems, such as empowering private philanthropic and granting agencies such as the Gates Foundation to influence and structure health care and education and relying on voluntary-service NGOs working in conjunction with international organizations and often bypassing state delivery of services. We will turn shortly to how the neoliberal strategies have created a “democratic deficit” and in response generated new arguments for democratizing international organizations by making them accountable to some form of public.
Indeed, securitized social problematics can be objectified in positivistic discourses that constitute them as problems to be solved. One democratic potential of securitization theory, the focus on the ways in which problematics come to be framed and constructed as security issues, is to critique the positivistic attempts to reinforce expert solutions that reinforce polyarchy and the passivity of publics. Global security can be reframed more critically as ongoing political problematics that arise from living in a globally connected world that require continual attentions of multiple subjects coming to the issue fields from different perspectives. The latter can connect to the strategy of Michel Callon and his collaborators in calling for the formation of “hybrid forums” to enable the incorporation of multiple publics in devising strategies to confront technical problems, such as nuclear waste, drawing on actor-network-theory.30 They cite, for example, processes in which lay persons in France were trained and educated for several weeks in the technical and scientific issues of nuclear-waste disposal and then participated on equal terms with political decision makers and scientific experts. Significantly, these lay participants, drawn from the general affected publics, were empowered to propose and construct solutions and programs, not just to verify or agree or disagree with experts. Participatory forums within the International Coffee Organization, in which small farmers, fair-trade organizations, unions representing coffee workers, economists, and decision makers are included have also been used to propose solutions to fluctuations in coffee prices and the domination of markets by large corporations. One important element of a global democratic politics, then, is the contestation over the framing of securitized problematics. From this point of view, the challenge is to create new forms of democratic forums and organizations within which participation by multiple publics can emerge.
Securitization can, however, also be used to deepen the neoliberal globalist project by promoting solutions that rely primarily on market logics and limit or eliminate democratic inputs. For example, we can cite the promotion of pollution-trading schemes for corporations or the economy of voluntary carbon offsets that make individual agents responsible for policing their own contributions to environmental damage as dominant modes of environmental security that justify resistance to more robust and political climate-control and pollution-control treaties. We can also cite the emerging system of global health care in which research and delivery of health care are privatized and depoliticized through a combination of public/private partnerships in universities and reliance on NGOs and international organizations, such as the World Health Organization, funded primarily through private donations and large foundations, such as the Gates Foundation. As we saw in the last section, even military security is being brought under the neoliberal market, both in staffing that relies on all-volunteer militaries, which absorb excess unemployment and structure the military as job-training organizations for the broader economy and military operations, and on private military contractors and deployments of weapons based on cost-benefit calculations, both in terms of costs and lives lost and put at risk.
Debates over global governance, especially about authority and accountability, echo the democratic problem of globalization.
Globalization and the Question of the “Democratic Deficit”
With the Bretton Woods settlement after the Second World War, an international state apparatus began to take shape. While there were disputes at the resort in New Hampshire where the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) were negotiated, there was general consensus that capitalism required more international regulation and management in order to avoid repetition of the Great Depression and the subsequent collapse of world trade. The economy came to be embedded in a liberal, social democratic political project that sanctioned compromises between labor and capital (legalizing trade unions and collective bargaining), with national states willing to use fiscal and monetary policies to achieve full employment and to smooth out business cycles and ameliorate their effects. Social democrats realized that this required coordination with an international order that approached the world economy as a singular whole that required technical, expert management at the international level.
Significantly, in the postwar settlement, the political legitimation of the order would remain within territorial nation-states. No representative system emerged along with the Bretton Woods settlement on a global level, and the legal systems that structured and regulated the capitalist economy remained primarily national. This disjuncture has become an ever-widening gap, from the point of view of social democrats, between the institutionalization of economic power and regulation, which was increasingly transnational, and democratic legitimations of the capitalist state. Over time, the disjuncture deepened as transnational and global corporations grew in power, as finance took advantage of digital communication networks that superseded national control over financial flows, and as a body of international commercial law developed that gave multinational corporations rights against and above states that supposedly were charged with regulating them.31 The result, many social democrats argue, is a “democratic deficit.”
In 1944, Karl Polanyi argued that “normally, the economic order is merely a function of the social, in which it is contained.”32 He argues that, in the nineteenth century, the market economy arose that reversed this condition: the society became “embedded” in the market, and politics came to be understood as separate from, and subordinate to, the economic. In other words, authority and society came to be structured in the service of the market, and “the role of the state became to institute and safeguard the self-regulating market.”33 Polanyi goes on to argue that society rebelled against its colonization by the market, producing reactions by labor and leading to state regulation of the market but not until after the ravages of depression and world war.
Against the embedding of capitalism in a social democratic project of the postwar order, neoliberals, as discussed in chapter 2, seek to separate and insulate the economy from the political and to subordinate the government to the economic logic of the market. Ideologically, neoliberals reject the social democratic idea that a democratic society requires the political regulation of the economy by democratically accountable agencies. In spite of their ideology, however, neoliberals have not dismantled the international state apparatus but have sought to mold it to their aims to produce neoliberal globalism. They created a body of private commercial law enforceable by neoliberal institutions, such as the World Trade Organization and regional trade organizations such as NAFTA, through which transnational corporations can sue states in order to force them to deregulate. They have also promoted market solutions through international organizations to problems as diverse as poverty, health care, and the environment, as we discussed in the previous section.
Many social democrats and democratic theorists also acknowledge that the postwar age of “embedded liberalism” has become untenable. Nevertheless, many social democrats have held firm to social democratic ideals and have sought to broaden and globalize them. They seek new ways to legitimate the global capitalist economy politically by re-embedding the economy in a global liberal-democratic order. Only now, these social democrats argue, the liberal-democratic order needs to be deterritorialized, detached from the territorial state and re-lodged directly in global democratic institutions and practices. Furthermore, the growth over especially the last three decades of an infrastructure of human-rights law and a “global civil society” has made a rethinking of political community necessary, these globalist social democrats argue, for democratic theory. Key claims in defense of this approach are (1) that since people are increasingly affected by global decisions and institutions directly as individuals and not as members of a territorially based community, humanity as a whole, rather than the national community, should be considered the source of popular sovereignty (the “all-inclusive principle”); and (2) that democratic legitimacy requires that all affected by decisions should have a say in making them (the “all-affected principle”). Social-democratic theorizing about global democracy, then, points to a gap between the old—the Westphalian system of territorial state sovereignty—and the new—a reimagined deterritorialized global demos or some system of demoi that inform systems of global governance, which has yet to form.34
In neoliberal global capitalism, power has come to be lodged in unaccountable and unrepresentative institutions and practices—transnational corporations, financial firms and networks, transnational class formations manifest in informal networks and organized nongovernmental organizations, and technocratic international organizations. These have become detached from state regulatory structures and have fostered increasingly undemocratic effects: deepening and persistent inequality both within and across state borders; the degrading of labor, including increasing use of forced labor and human trafficking; destruction of the environment and global commons; and the immunity of corporations from local and national tax, environmental, and labor laws. In response, and sometimes in collusion with transnational powers, democratic states have ceded aspects of sovereign control over their economies and societies to undemocratic international organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, and treaty organizations such as NAFTA. Moreover, states either lack the tools or the political will to control the vast and rapid-fire economic and social networks and flows that comprise global capitalism.35
Therefore, the globalist social democrats argue, the Westphalian system of autochthonous and sovereign territorial states no longer provides a secure scaffolding for democracy, manifest in the weakening of liberal-democratic accountability and representation as set out in national constitutions and representative institutions.36 Jan Aart Scholte describes the problem as one of accountability:
Little democratic accountability has operated in respect of contemporary global governance arrangements. The past 150 years have seen an unprecedented proliferation and growth of suprastate laws and institutions with transplanetary coverage. However, these regulatory instruments have included only weak, if any, formal accountability mechanisms. The leaderships of the organizations have not been subject to direct popular election. Nor has any global governance institution had a democratically appointed legislative arm. Citizens have in most cases been unable to take global authorities to court for redress.37
In somewhat different although complementary fashion, David Held views the problem of democratic legitimacy as one of the consent of those affected by decisions. For Held, the problem is that, in the context of globalization, “communities of fate” stretch beyond the territorial borders of states:
But the very idea of consent through elections, and the particular notion that the relevant constituencies of voluntary agreement are the communities of a bounded territory or a state, become open to question as soon as the issue of national, regional and global interconnectedness is considered and the nature of a so-called “relevant community” is contested.38
This reading of the democratic deficit has yielded three primary, often overlapping, strategies: making the institutions of global governance more accountable and representative, insuring a democratic constitutionalism and juridical architecture of some sort based on the concept of human rights and cosmopolitan norms, and reimagining civil society as a global public sphere.
Many focus on democratizing the institutions and practices of global governance to overcome the “democratic deficit.”39 To overcome the “democratic deficit,” democratic theorists such as Held argue that priority must be given to increasingly democratizing the major existing institutions in which global governance now proceeds—the UN, the World Trade Organization, regional legislatures such as the European Parliament, and more informal regulatory agencies such as those that regulate Internet protocols and domains. Others propose creating some new legal architecture that interconnects local, national, international, and global systems of law as best able to further develop and enforce human rights.40
Held and other global democrats also put their trust in a double reconstitution of civil society. First, civil society becomes global, now comprised of a wide and growing array of nongovernmental organizations, many of which operate inside many nations and have various kinds of status within the United Nations and in other formal international organizations. Second, civil society is transformed in globalization from the sphere of voluntary, non-state associations and the sphere of bourgeois property and contract into a global public sphere in which a form of popular sovereignty is globalized:
This new global civil society is not only inhabited by multinationals and transnationals, whether public or private, but also by citizens, movement activists and constituents of various kinds.41
Social democratic arguments for democratizing global governance through a global civil society / public sphere most often draw on recent “deliberative democratic theory” inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas.42 If these forums are sufficiently open and rational, the argument goes, they can amount to a form of democratic consent, so long as decisions remain open to continual reflection and contestation. This means that the liberal principles of a free press and free speech need to become universally accepted and a plurality of forums, open to all organized interests, must proliferate in global decision-making structures.43
Global democrats, then, seek to reengage with a democratic political sovereignty, against the economic sovereignty of neoliberalism that erodes the idea of democratic citizenship as anything other than a formal shell. Through democratizing global-governance institutions and the emboldening of a global civil society dedicated to furthering the norms of human rights, global democrats seek to return some measure of accountability and political authority to the people. This social democratic liberalism does not guarantee overturning of neoliberal policies but seems to suggest creating institutions through which these will be continually contested by globally organized popular movements. By and large, these arguments put their faith in extending principles developed in the context of state-centered liberal democracies to the global sphere.44
It is, however, as David Held stresses, unclear who comprises the relevant “people” in a globalized age, raising the all important question of citizenship.45 Seyla Benhabib has proposed one new formulation of citizenship:
We are moving away from citizenship understood as national membership increasingly towards a citizenship of residency which strengthens the multiple ties to locality, to the region, and to transnational institutions.46
As the nation-state comes more and more into question as a secure foundation of a democratic community, as both neoliberals and globalist social democrats realize, citizenship becomes a crucial problematic and is increasingly absorbing the attentions of democratic theorists, state policy makers, and citizens themselves.
Negotiations of Democratic Citizenship in the New Global Age
Within democratic theory, citizenship draws boundaries between the democratic community and others. It delineates and distributes rights, privileges, and duties, grounding them in affective attachments to a distinct political community. Citizenship has been a space of conflict, as multiple principles have vied to define its parameters in modernity. Perhaps most important, the liberal principle of universal inclusion based on human individuality and human rights has combined uneasily with the national to form modern citizenship. Add to these the democratic notion that citizens must be active participants in government, and the modern notion of democratic citizenship appears as complex and perennially unstable, its boundaries continually shifting as historical circumstances change.
In social democracies, citizenship came to involve not only principles of political membership and political and civil rights but also a basket of “social rights.”47 That is, citizenship in liberal-democratic states came to mean entitlement to social protections and access to social rights, most notably to health care, to education, to a basic standard of living, and to a job or support while looking for work. These resulted from the labor compromises of the Fordist capitalism that aimed to manage citizenship by reducing class antagonisms through collective bargaining, corporatist collaborations of workers and management, and public policy, such as welfare, unemployment, and government-provided health care. Citizens came to expect the state to provide both political protection and social security. Significantly, this conception of citizenship informed the development of human rights and is embedded in the UN Charter wherein economic rights are prominent, thereby stretching citizenship beyond the territorial nation-state.
Globalization is destabilizing modern citizenship in significant ways. Modern democracies have managed the population movements that have characterized global modernity in the past and in the present through a combination of formal laws of citizenship, immigration, and foreign residency along with informal social and cultural means—prejudices, tropes of national identity, racial identifications, class affiliation, and others. The principle of sovereign territoriality in the Westphalian state-system has been a powerful tool for managing citizenship in modern states. The formal recognition of the right to organize life within the territory of the state enabled the creation of administrative tools of governing by tracking population movements, differentiating them according to criteria of income, race, ethnicity, religion, and so forth, in a national census that made administering government programs easier and allowed targeting of the different needs of different groups. The census was especially important in managing citizenship in colonial states and became a crucial tool of empire and managing the flows of people prompted by colonialism and later globalization. The idea and institution of state sovereignty also helped to empower states to enact laws to regulate population movements, including the forced labor of slavery, and to foster narratives of national identity that created norms of assimilation that admitted some to full citizenship while limiting the assimilation of others (often based on race and class). It also allowed for the management of immigrant populations. Immigration laws, creating legal categories of immigrants, not only limited or increased population flows as needed for cheap labor but also made tracking them easier. In globalization, and especially within the context of neoliberal globalization, especially with the pressures to open borders to the free flow of capital, finance, and labor and the increasing inequalities and subsequently life-chances for people in the various sectors and divisions of the world economy, these systems of immigration law and administration have come under serious strain.
Of course, the tensions in managing modern citizenship are not new. As scholars of nationalism have pointed out, “nation” and “state” in the Westphalian world have never mapped cleanly on each other. Modern nation-states have never been inclusive of all those living within their borders. Nor have all members of the nation been citizens of the nation-state that bears its identity, creating ambiguous ties across borders. This ambiguity is increasing under globalization as notions of citizenship are stretched beyond the nation-state. People are forming “transnational” communities in diasporas (see chapter 4 on Kerala), and with globalization, the host nation-state is for many no longer the sole or even primary organizing principle of belonging, citizenship, or political subjectivity.
Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has made the point well, proposing that
the idea of a sovereign and stable territory, the idea of a containable and countable population, the idea of a reliable census, and the idea of stable and transparent categories—have come unglued in the era of globalization. . . . Above all, the certainty that distinctive and singular peoples grow out of and control well-defined national territories has been decisively unsettled by the global fluidity of wealth, arms, people, and images.48
Thus, while national citizenship remains for most the basis of democratic rights, political organization, and activity, this is no longer exclusively the case. Indeed, many democrats now argue that for democratic citizenship to be realized, it needs to be both dispersed in local communities below the level of the state—as manifest in demands for cultural recognition by minority cultures49 and their distinctive practices and in some cases for regional and cultural autonomy, as with the “original nations” in Canada50—and stretched to transnational and even global associations beyond the state, manifest for example in the ability of citizens to make legal claims in international human-rights courts.
The destabilization of the spatial frame of citizenship has made citizenship an intense site of democratic contestation, manifest in both the rise of anti-immigrant political parties and increasing violence against immigrants. A major part of contemporary democratic politics centers on attempts to prevent minorities within a democracy—electoral minorities, minority cultures, races and ethnicities, or marginalized ways of being (sexual, familial, social)—from being hardened into “others” (groups that cannot or should not be assimilated or accepted by the majority). In heightening the uncertainty about who “we” are (who properly belongs to the nation and political community and therefore is entitled to the rights and protections of citizenship), globalization exacerbates the incentives, as Appadurai suggests, to turn “minorities” into “others,” thereby sanctioning violence against “them” in the name of purifying “us.” The hardening of attitudes in the rich world (from the United States, to Western Europe, to Australia) toward “migrants” seeking sanctuary from poverty and trauma is only the most obvious manifestation of the “them/us” response in recent times. The numerous fundamentalisms, religious, racial, and ethnic, that plague so many societies in the neoliberal global order (often strengthened if not created by the upheavals, inequalities, and political strategies of corporations and wealthy elites seeking to open up markets and heightening ethnic divisions in order to control populations), both rich and poor, are more examples, as Appadurai’s book discusses.
None of this is entirely new, of course. The mix of the old and the new is captured nicely by sociologist John Urry, who is worth quoting at some length. Urry says:
Multiple mobilities have been central to much historical development and are not simply “new.” Thus, over many centuries there were complex trading and travel routes that constituted what we now call the Mediterranean world. The ships, sea routes, and interconnectivity of the slave and post-slave trade engendered what Gilroy terms the “Black Atlantic.” And the complex mobilities of diasporas and transnational migrants are key to examining many contemporary post-colonial relationships. There is a “diasporization” of communities in the contemporary era.
But although these are not new the mobile character of such processes is now much more evident. Analyses of migration, diasporas and more fluid citizenships are central to critiques of the bounded and static categories of nation, ethnicity and state present in much social science. Various works theorize the multiple, overlapping and turbulent processes of migration, dislocation, displacement, disjuncture, and dialogism. These massive contemporary migrations, often with oscillatory flows between unexpected locations, have been described as a series of turbulent waves, with a hierarchy of eddies and vortices, with globalism being a virus that stimulates resistance, and with the migration system’s “cascading” moves away from any state of equilibrium.51
In the neoliberal era, consequently, globalization is updating and intensifying contestation over the boundaries of citizenship, as the transformations of the state and the state-system, together with neoliberalism, generate new forms of “multicultural citizenship” as migrants and host societies learn to live with hybridity and multiple social identities. This, of course, is the everyday experience of millions of migrants living in multiple worlds who seek to contribute as fully fledged citizens in more than one “homeland.” Many recent immigrants, in particular, retain significant ties to their home nations and opt for dual citizenship—thereby limiting total assimilation in their host society. This kind of diaspora experience is becoming more commonplace, and diaspora communities are becoming more active and organized, significantly influencing both their original home politics (often through repatriations of money) and the politics and culture of their adopted homes. In Europe and elsewhere, large nomadic populations, refugees, and economic migrants are moving in and out of states, as people in the age of neoliberal globalization become less attached to their nation-state and more comfortable with hybridity as part of their personal and collective identity.52
Negotiating Citizenship in the European Union
These are themes at the forefront of the debates over citizenship in the European Union, which is an exemplary site of contestation and adaptation concerning the shifting boundaries of democratic inclusion/exclusion in modern societies. European citizenship is first mentioned explicitly in the Treaty of Europe (Maastricht Treaty) in 1992, the document that transformed the European Economic Community into the European Union. Its aim was not to replace national citizenship per se but to complement it with a basket of legal rights that individuals could claim on the basis of citizenship in one of the states of the EU. These included: the freedom of movement and residency, the right to vote and run for the European Parliament, diplomatic and consular protection by member states of the union, and the right to petition the European Parliament. Above all, this legislation was designed primarily to ensure the free movement of those engaged in “economic activity” in their attempts to increase EU penetration of global markets, especially the U.S. market. In spite of its primarily economic motivation, the treaty set the stage for the enhancement of the democratic character of the EU, something undertaken in the Treaty of Lisbon, which went into effect in 2009.
The Treaty of Lisbon extended the legislative capacity and jurisdiction of the European Parliament, previously subordinate to the Council of the EU, which represented states rather than individuals. The treaty also proclaimed the “Citizens’ Initiative,” reaffirmed in 2011, that allows citizens of member states to bring forward new policy proposals to the European Parliament (petitions require one million citizens from a number of member states). The Charter of Fundamental Rights, originally established in 2000, further codified the basic rights of European citizens to dignity, civil and economic freedoms, equality, and nondiscrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion, age, or gender. It also ensured the rights to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence.
Many critics, however, see these provisions as not going very far to creating real democratic institutions that have legitimacy among European citizens. Nor, critics say, are the provisions for free movement and resettlement throughout the union creating a substantial sense of European citizenship. The EU remains, in the eyes of many of its citizens, primarily an elite economic institution that does not reflect or respond to the democratic will of the people. In the current economic crisis, for example, the EU seems unwilling or unable to challenge the neoliberal imposition of austerity policies in spite of considerable democratic protests. Betraying its origins as an economic union concerned to make European capitalism more globally competitive, the EU has thus adopted a thin concept of citizenship, calling for little direct citizen participation and giving little incentive or opportunity for citizens of Europe to participate in meaningful ways in European institutions and decision making.
Nevertheless, some argue that the EU, especially after the Lisbon Treaty, is creating a dynamic that makes a more substantial democratic citizenship possible. Dora Kostakopoulou, for example, has argued that recent acts of the European Court of Justice are enhancing the prospects for a thicker idea of European democratic citizenship,53 while Polina Tambakaki argues that increased democratic possibilities are arising as the EU provides a space in which citizens, as Europeans, can develop the affective attachments to a European demos.54 Tambakaki’s important insight is that if Europe is to become more democratic it will be the result of the reorientation of democratic struggles to encompass multiple levels and sites of contestation in which the solidarities and rights of democratic citizenship are nurtured and given life to confront and contest the undemocratic implications of globalization. In short, Tambakaki argues, it is necessary to go beyond legalistic frameworks and to recognize the EU as a site of democratic contestation and mobilization.
The democratic negotiations of citizenship in Europe are most profound for those on the periphery of Europe. Étienne Balibar insists that understanding the future of democracy and citizenship in Europe requires looking at the millions of migrants subsisting on the periphery of Europe, perched ambiguously inside and outside of the continent and its “thin” democratic principles.55
The “periphery” of Europe here refers to those countries at the boundaries of Europe, both physically and temporally (including those countries that by virtue of the breakup of the USSR have been incorporated into the new Europe and which the European community considers to be of special concern, in the Balkans and Eastern Europe). But due to the expansive population movements and the changing scope of economic activity characteristic of globalization, the periphery is now “inside” Europe, concentrated in the poor areas of its major cities, where the various peoples of Europe’s borderlands, and its post-colonial subjects, have come seeking work, freedom, and asylum. Less fully integrated into the formal and informal rituals of national citizenship, less able to participate in the performances that would create them as full citizens of the state, these new immigrants maintain (and form) transnational and global ties to diasporas and global networks in which national, cultural, religious, and other collective attachments are formed.
The prolonged financial crisis has heightened the negotiations over citizenship and immigration in Europe. Granting asylum or legitimate immigration status to new immigrants remains largely in the hands of individual European states. In 2011, for example, the European Union rejected a proposal by Italy to allow freer movement of refugees from North Africa in Europe. According to the New York Times, “the rejection raised the possibility of tightened intra-European border controls for the first time since visa-free travel was introduced in the 1990s.”56 The success of right-wing, anti-immigrant political parties in many states in Europe has continued, such as the Front National in France, the Independence Party in the UK, the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, the True Finns in Finland, and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands. All have recently gained seats in their national parliaments.
The struggle for citizenship by the “peripheral” peoples of Europe is transforming the conditions, subjects, and meaning of democratic citizenship in the modern world and might become a model for transformations elsewhere where the nation-state is under pressure from globalization and democratic citizenship can be affirmed through transnational political and legal actions. When one pays attention, as Balibar does, to the concrete conditions of the “citizens of Europe,” it becomes possible to envision a more robust democratic European citizenship in the future. As Balibar puts it:
Surely freedom of movement is a basic claim that must be incorporated within the citizenship of all people (and not only for representatives of the “powerful nations,” for whom this is largely a given). . . . Given the above, the right to full citizenship is indissolubly linked to freedom of movement. “Migrants” are not an undifferentiated floating mass. They are precisely travelers (forced, free, discriminated against) who create relationships between communities that are foreign to each other (and therefore work objectively, not to abolish these communities, but rather to soften their isolation). They also create relationships between distant or neighboring territories (working to short-circuit those distances and construct a human counterpart against the universalization of communication and economic difference.57
Democratic citizenship needs to incorporate a sense of plurality and to become more flexible and nuanced. This more nuanced and multispatial plurality in current negotiations of democratic citizenship in neoliberal globalization is evident in transnational justice movements as well as in local democratic experiments and organizations in poorer parts of the world. We turn to these in the next chapter.