Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City

N. Trimikliniotis, D. Parsanoglou, V. Tsianos

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137412317
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137406910
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Business generale

This book examines the relationship between urban migrant movements, struggles and digitality which transforms public space and generates mobile commons. The authors explore heterogeneous digital forms in the context migration, border-crossing and transnational activism, displaying commonality patterns and inter-dependence.

1

Theorizing Migration, Praxis and the Crisis of Migration Crisis

Abstract: The crisis has highlighted an uneasiness of integration policies and politics that stems mostly from the growing irrelevance of generic citizenship. Citizenship in times of crisis and austerity, or what we call austerity citizenship is failing in its basic function the inclusion of noncitizens; even differential inclusion is minimal. Mobile commons as shared knowledge, affective cooperation, mutual support and care between migrants (and other subalterns) extends further the theoretical debates on migration, particularly regarding the autonomy of migration. Moreover, it transcends the limitations of the stale citizenship debates. An net(h)nography of border regimes, as they are deployed around flexible and porous border zones, can elucidate migrant praxis, its repercussions and potentialities.

Trimikliniotis, Nicos, Dimitris Parsanoglou and Vassilis Tsianos. Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137406910.0006.

Migration within the crisis of migration crisis: from differential inclusion and integration to transcending citizenship

Labor, mobility and security are all directly connected with the machinations of sovereignty through differential inclusion of mobile populations.¹ The governing tool of this tripartite relationship is citizenship in general and the specific form it takes in different social formations. This is hardly exclusively confined to modern politics of citizenship; on the contrary, differential inclusion accompanies multiple forms of belonging and multiple forms of the production of difference, which vary immensely in different historical periods and there are numerous examples of these.² Differential inclusion is discussed neither to highlight its historical novelty, nor to allude to some historical uniqueness; rather we underscore the specificity of today’s differential inclusion functions through citizenship, that is, through a specific form of governance regulating the relation between rights and representation or “the double-R axiom” (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2007). Rights are crucial for governing migration by differentiating who is subject to rights and who is not, while representation often defines who is entitled to have rights and what rights.

Cultural identity and collective affects of belonging emerge among mobile and other subaltern populations, generating social subjectivities that in one way or another, explicitly or implicitly, claim rights. In other words, it is representation – and the absence of it – that makes realization of rights possible. Hence generic citizenship is an essential tool of governmentability based on this unstable and dangerous equation of the double-R axiom. What may be termed as “too much representation” of a certain group without rights may potentially generate an explosive social situation, where particularly active groups without any legal, social or political rights can be dangerous for the social order, as the example of the struggles of the sans papiers illustrates. Lack or restricted representation of a social group leads to structural racism and exclusion, as the history of riots shows, from the Brixton and Tottenham riots in the 1980s in the UK to the 2005 Banlieues uprising in France. The two extremes of these can be placed on a scale, where full citizenship is placed on one extreme and total illegalization and invisibility on the other. Where the cut is placed, is a political and social question, a result of struggle in a given social formation at a given time.

We have already referred to the current conditions affected by the austerity-and-crisis that is generating “austerity citizenship” in the context of a broader conservative social and political turn that pushes toward illegalization and invisibility. Citizenship is in this context the specific tool of sovereign governance that regulates the balance between rights and representation and renders certain populations as legitimate bearers of rights while other populations are marked as inexistent.³ But how can we link conceptually migration to citizenship? We draw here from the paradox of the impossible citizenship. The paradox in the operation of citizenship as the regulatory mechanism of inclusion and exclusion is manifested as follows: the more a society moves toward citizenship, the more it creates the conditions for its disappearance as a form of governance. If you include everyone and if you assign rights to everyone, citizenship as such becomes irrelevant. “Citizenship for all” is an impossible condition. Hence, citizenship is in fact not failing by default but it is “designed to fail” (Tyler, 2010), it is always “incomplete” (Gunsteren, 1998). As the international system of states is organized, if a state assigns citizenship to everyone, then this citizenship will not be connected to rights or any other legal status but a mere social ritual rendered meaningless as it would not generate binding effects in the world of borders. In other words, the only way possible to have such as citizenship is in a society without borders.⁴ Citizenship, as shaped within the world organized today, is a function of borders and is correlated with the exercise of sovereign control (Anderson et al., 2009). The more we talk about security, the more we talk about citizenship; this is the predicament of citizenship. It stems from the power of sovereignty to erect and maintain borders; borders that it cannot ultimately fully control. Citizenship cannot be thought outside of sovereignty and control. And control is always about the re-territorialization and capturing of the lines of flight, which traverse and push societies toward their transformation.

In the name of protecting human rights and liberal citizenship, states invoke sovereign control that promotes a tougher take on freedom of mobility and leads to the introduction of restrictive migration measures as pro-human rights policies, as it happens in trafficking cases (O’Connell Davidson, 2008; 2010). Citizenship is thus a form of governance which performs and reproduces exclusion and not inclusion, as it is often assumed. Whatever qualifying attribute we add to citizenship – accidental, activist, irregular, imperfect, biological, sexual, reversible, unrecognized⁵ – it cannot erase a restrictive approach on peoples’ movements; it cannot erase the perspective of control that creates exclusion.

Citizenship is not inherently liberal; nor is there a universal citizenship, despite the aspirations of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789. Citizenship exists as a tool deployed to build and solidify national sovereignty. It is limited to the territorial space of the nation-state and stops where the borders of a country stop, while the rest of national activities (e.g., capital movements, trade, circulation of elite populations, war, etc.) can extend beyond its borders. The limits of citizenship are the limits of sovereignty. But liberal citizenship is not only problematic because it excludes by default everyone who is outside its borders, but also because there is a long history of “denationalizing” dangerous or unwelcomed citizens (Panourgia, 2010) and creating categories of citizenship, which can be viewed as accidental (Nyers, 2006) or reversible (Tsianos and Pieper, 2011). From a global perspective, different national citizenships are bound to the strict hierarchy of the global world system, in which certain countries and their citizenships are far more valued and powerful than others (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991).

Liberal citizenship is a fiction that could not be materialized in the post-WWII period. The term “post-liberal” can explain the ambivalences of citizenship, which push liberal democracies to their limits where they deploy even “illiberal” policies and practices in the name of liberalism (Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Buckel, 2013). The example of the denationalization of one of the most prominent Dutch politicians, the Somali-Dutch Hirsi Ali, exemplifies this form of post-liberal politics. Hirsi Ali, a paradigmatic liberal citizen well known for her critical stance toward Islam in the Netherlands, was stripped of her Dutch citizenship (and her seat in the Dutch parliament) when it became public that some narrative elements of her asylum case were fictional. As soon as the Ministry of Interior revoked recognition of her political refugee status, her application for Dutch citizenship was retrospectively revoked too. What appears from a legalist perspective as a correct procedure, demonstrates the paradox and ultimately the impossibility of liberal citizenship. Hirsi Ali lost her citizenship although she was fully embodying and practicing its core values. In post-liberal conditions, citizenship has to be always protected from expanding too much and including somebody who should not be included. The post-liberal logic effectively questions liberal citizenship by decoupling the lived, embodied existence and the singular subject of rights that a certain nation can provide, by making citizenship ex principio reversible (Tsianos and Pieper, 2011). Not even the concrete acts of citizenship that Hirsi Ali engaged in her lived belonging to the Dutch community could undermine the exclusionary logic of citizenship. Hirsi Ali is the typical subject devoted to liberal citizenship and simultaneously is also the paradigmatic example of its failure in today’s post-liberal conditions.

Therefore, understanding and theorizing migration in terms of differential inclusion and citizenship is a necessary and important step in analyzing the current configuration of sovereign control. But at the same time, when we perceive migration through the lens of citizenship we always contribute to the creation of its others; its outside. This is because citizenship as a nonexclusionary category, citizenship for all, is a contradiction in terms. Citizenship is an important tool for creating possibilities for certain groups to be included, but it can never respond to the question, which migration poses to capitalist sovereignty: what about all those who are mobile and cannot be included; what about the majority of mobile populations?

This brings us to the EU migrants’ integration debates, as to the prescribed path via which, as time goes by, the “third country national,” that is, the mobile populations, would acquire rights approximated to those of citizens, that would eventually lead to citizenship. Integration of migrants became an EU policy area since the adoption of the Council Conclusion on Immigrant Integration Policy in European Union,⁶ which agreed on the Common Basic Principles. The first principles declared that “integration is a dynamic, two-way process of mutual accommodation by all immigrants and residents of member states,” particularly in the current polarized environment and economic austerity, where the question of integration and citizenship becomes a highly divisive issue, as there are opposing views, interests and agendas. Integration agendas very much reflect distinct and often opposing political agendas; as such, if we were to map integration agendas across the EU countries and at the level of EU institutions, we ought to map contestations about the meanings and priorities of integration. Moreover, in order to understand these debates they need to be located in various dimensions of neoliberal transformations in the EU.

Differential inclusion is precisely the policy logic adopted for the development of integration policies as instruments and specific technologies, in the Foucaultian sense of a broader framework which sees neoliberalism as a “mobile technology” (Ong, 2006). Integration is very much part of the EU-led “neoliberal regionalism” and “management of mobility” (Pellerin and Overbeek, 2001; Geiger and Pécou, 2010), both based on the principle that “strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations” (Ong, 2006). Integration is thus the “carrot” and combating illegal migrants is the “stick” of the carrot in the policy for managing mobility. The EU “naturalizes a particular ‘imagined world’ ” (Walters, 2010, 75) by socially constructing as “irregular” certain forms of mobility as well as certain forms of life.

Integration is then an extended toolkit for citizenship-in-the-waiting. This can only be understood in its particular context, taking seriously into account issues relating to class, gender, racialization and migration within EU member-states (see Kontos and Slany, 2010; Anthias, 2012). Also one has to consider specific aspects pertaining to labor migration, exclusion and subordination (Neergaard, 2009) and to the (re)production of precariousness as a specific feature of migrant labor (Schierup, 2007; Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Pajnik and Campani, 2009). Integration must be properly located in and perceived as being closely interconnected to its broader socio-economic and ideological context.

The history and pre-history of integration debates cannot be ignored.⁷ The integration question needs to be radically re-conceptualized. Integration seems so corrupted by use and abuse that it would make sense to ditch it altogether, had we been able to start afresh to achieve what we aim: “access, participation, parity and belonging” (Anthias, 2012). However, even if it was possible to discredit and reject the concept altogether and introduce a new one at discursive or rhetorical level (e.g., in policy documents), this would mean very little in practice, unless the underlying reasons for producing this policy result would radically shift. This means addressing the underlying social, political, economic, ideological and cultural factors which define the policy question to be addressed, which in turn defines the parameters for the direction of the policy entitled to resolve, manage or alleviate the “social question.” If we were to radically transform policy, this would have to come at multiple levels. Critiques, limitations and alternatives to the dominant versions of integration need to be brought to centerstage in the various debates at EU, nation-state and local levels with communities of migrants and social activists’ voices being heard. Discursively, the critiques of migration policies are being aired at different levels, including high-level EU expert conferences; however, they have little effect in actually shifting policy. It seems that institutionally, at EU and nation-state levels, the “condensation of social forces,” in Poulantzian terms, is such that the critiques leave little imprinting on policies so far.

The answer to this puzzle can only be resolved at the level of practicing politics, in the daily struggles that can tilt the balance of forces, rather at a conceptual level. Resistance and alternatives to the dominant logics often need radical rejection. This is why we propose to move on beyond the integration and citizenship debates, to look at the socialities, subjectivities and politics produced by the migrant movements.

From autonomy of migration to the politics of mobile commons

A fundamental shift in perspective is required in order to understand the molecular transformations occurring at societal level; in order to grasp how migrant mobility literally generates or creates rights that we call mobile commons. But what is a common? De Moor and Berge (2007, 1) define “commons” quite broadly: “ ‘commons’ may be a part of the natural world used by humans or it may be a social reality created by humans, such as the internet or an urban space.” Similarly, other influential scholars speak of a concept of the commons as “one of a universal, open access”: “There’s a part of our world, here and now, that we all get to enjoy without the permission of any” (Hess and Ostrom, 2003, 14).

The commons become more or less entrenchments, in the way that E. P. Thompson (1991) has eloquently written when he brilliantly explored the emergence and entrenchment of customs in common in the 18th century. What we are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Prolegomena: In a World Turned Upside Down
• Introduction: Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City
• 1  Theorizing Migration, Praxis and the Crisis of Migration Crisis
• 2  The South-Eastern Triangle: The Spatio-historical Context
• 3  Migrant Subjectivities, Struggles and Turbulence in Three Arrival Cities
• 4  The Right to the City Revisited: Charting and Envisioning Future Struggles and Politics
• Conclusions: The Future Lasts Forever and Its Happening Now
• Bibliography
• Index