Bauder, Harald

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Urban Citizenship: A Path to MigrantInclusionHarald Bauder 2020-01-23T09:00:00If urban citizenship is emancipated from national citizenship, then all inhabitants of amunicipality could be recognised as members of the local communities in which theylive. Such emancipation would mitigate the tension between the de-facto politicalcommunity and the categories imposed by the nation state that exclude peoplewho lack national citizenship or resident status. This tension has recently eruptedinto open conflict between the Trump administration and New York, Chicago, andmany other sanctuary cities in the USA. It can also be observed in solidarity citieslike Berlin in Germany, cities of refuge like Barcelona in Spain, or the “Commune ofReception” (Comuna de Acogida) of Quilicura outside of Santiago de Chile.Earlier commentaries in this forum highlighted various aspects of urban citizenship,such as the exclusion of non-urban populations (Lenard) or the conundrum ofmultilevel frames of legal authority (van Zeben). I am focusing, too, on one particularaspect, and suggest that urban citizenship can be an important mechanism to createinclusive communities.To fulfil its promise, urban citizenship, as Rainer Bauböck correctly points out,should follow the domicile principle (ius domicilii). Emancipated urban citizenshipcould apply this principle to all inhabitants of the city – not only those who carry anational passport or national immigration papers; it would also apply to people whooverstayed their visas or work permits, failed refugee claimants who neverthelessremain in the city, and those who crossed the border without state permission.This means that urban citizenship is about more than extending voting rights toimmigrants; it is about including de-facto inhabitants of the community, especiallythose whom the nation state does not want to live in the country and thus the city.Palermo’s charismatic Mayor Leoluca Orlando articulated the idea behind thisprinciple in an eloquent way. When I interviewed him at his Palermo office earlierthis year, he said: “If you are in Palermo, you are a Palermitan. I’m sorry, but youare a Palermitan. You can leave Palermo if you want. But as long as you are inPalermo, you are a Palermitan." Not everyone may agree that short term visitors andtourists should be counted as members of the urban community. However, Orlando’sstatement makes clear that not national status (or lack thereof) but presence withinthe municipal boundaries matters for membership. Or, in the words of WarrenMagnusson, once migrants have arrived, “they should have the same rights asanyone else.”What makes the city an intuitive scale to define political community and membershipis that it is not a community like the nation that is imagined based on the “culturalartifacts” of nation-ness and nationalism (Anderson 1991: 4). Rather, the urbancommunity is tangible because it is defined by the physical space of the city and the- 1 -way this space is used on a daily basis. As Avner de Shalit remarks, people knowand interact with each other when they go about their daily business in the space ofthe city. The local scale is where a political community exists in and for itself. Thenwhat stands in the way of emancipating urban citizenship?Sovereignty is the problem, not just an obstacleThe question of sovereignty poses a major obstacle to the practical implementationof urban citizenship. Bauböck states that “cities should play a greater role inaddressing global problems, such as the climate crisis or international refugeeprotection, where sovereign states have failed dismally precisely because theirsovereignty hampers cooperative solutions.” In the context of migrant exclusion, Iwould go a step further: the sovereignty claimed by states does not only stand in theway of finding solutions but has created the problem in the first place.We have seen throughout the Global North that migration control and the exclusionof migrants are used strategically by populist politicians to assert territorial statesovereignty. The policies of Donald Trump in the USA, the debate leading to theBrexit vote in the UK, and the successes of the Five Star Movement in Italy, MarineLe Pen in France, and the Alternative for Germany illustrate the effectiveness ofdemonising migrants in feeding anxieties among disillusioned voters over the effectsof globalisation and the perceived loss of national sovereignty (Dauvergne 2008).While some scholars have questioned the nation state’s moral authority to regulatethe movement of people (Carens 1987, Bauder 2017), others are pointing out thatsovereignty itself is not something that exists naturally. Rather, the state needs tocontinuously claim and enact sovereignty through “theatrical performances” (Brown2017: 3), such as by demonstrating that it has the authority to exclude migrants (DeGenova 2010). The idea that a sovereign state can arbitrarily exclude people fromits national community, even if they are already living in the country, has created thevery problem that urban citizenship seeks to solve through including non-nationalresidents.Yes, we are in “urgent need for new narratives” (Bauböck). But these new narrativesneed to go beyond a narrow political imagination that merely affirms the dominantWestphalian political order and its idea of state sovereignty. The European Union isan example of how new political configurations are being created based on politicalneed and practice. The problem, however, is that Europe has only rescaled migrantexclusion from the national to the European level, with the effect that Europe’souter border has become the deadliest one in the world. I believe that the urbanscale can offer an alternative political narrative. Cities in Germany, for example, areproposing to serve as sea bridges (Seebrücken) and have offered to accept migrantsand refugees rescued at sea directly – only to learn that the national government isblocking these efforts.- 2 -Urban citizenship as social practices of inclusion –and exclusionWhen it comes to multi-level governance, new forms of political organisation andnew spatial and territorial configurations have always emerged from social andpolitical practice. We cannot design them as an architect would draw a blueprint fora new house. This architect will only take the techniques and building materials intoconsideration that currently exist. The structure of the future, using yet unknowntechniques and undiscovered materials, is beyond our reach. Similarly, if we relysolely on concepts (such as territorial citizenship) and structures (such as the nationstate) that dominate our political life today, then we will only reproduce and notovercome the problems these concepts and structures inherently produce.What we can do, however, is to look at the urban struggles of sanctuary cities,solidarity cities, and other urban initiatives that accommodate fellow inhabitantsthe nation state seeks to exclude, and explore how the associated social andpolitical practices can be enshrined into law and translated into new frameworksof governance. Urban citizenship, emancipated from national citizenship, is one ofthese practices.We need to be mindful, however, that citizenship is a two-sided sword. Citizenshipis not only a mechanism of inclusion but also of exclusion (as Patti Lenard illustratedin her commentary). Likewise, urban autonomy can create an urban citizenship thatis inclusive of all inhabitants, or that purposefully excludes parts of the population.More than a decade ago, the town of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, tried to tighten therules around housing and employment in an effort to exclude non-status migrants.Around the same time, the Quebec town of Hérouxville introduced a “code ofconduct” that prohibited the stoning of women although it does not have a significantMuslim population and nobody had proposed to introduce sharia law there. Sincethen, many towns and cities have enacted policies that seek to exclude migrantsfrom the local community by instilling fear and denying them rights and accessto basic services. If we focus too much on procedures of governance withoutsimultaneously tackling questions of social exclusion and political oppression infundamental ways, then the emancipation of urban citizenship can easily backfire.References• Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Originand Spread of Nationalism. London, UK: Verso.• Bauder, Harald. 2017. Migration Borders Freedom. London, UK: Routledge.• Brown, Wendy. 2017. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: ZoneBooks.• Carens, Joseph H. 1987. “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders.”The Review of Politics 49 (2): 251–73.• Dauvergne, Catherine. 2008. Making People Illegal: What Globalization Meansfor Migration and Law. Cambridge University Press.- 3 -• De Genova, Nicholas. 2010. “The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, andFreedom of Movement.” In The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, andFreedom of Movement, edited by Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, 33–64. Durham: Duke University Press.- 4 -

Urban Citizenship: A Path to Migrant Inclusion

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Urban Citizenship: A Path to Migrant Inclusion

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