Rainer Bauböck

Towards a political theory of migrant transnationalism

Political transnationalism covers a wide range of phenomena and can be studied using a variety of approaches. In migration research the focus is mostly on migrants’ networks and activities that involve them in politics oriented towards their country of origin. The article argues for a wider conception of political transnationalism from a political theory perspective. It proposes a terminological distinction between international, multinational, supranational and transnational relations and phenomena. What is specific about migrant transnationalism is that it creates overlapping memberships between territorially separated and independent polities. In this understanding, political transnationalism is not only about a narrowly conceived set of activities through which migrants become involved in the domestic politics of their home countries; it also affects collective identities and conceptions of citizenship among the native populations in both receiving and sending societies. Within this general framework the article suggests a set of hypotheses for an explanatory and normative analysis of sending country relations to their emigrants, a task that has hitherto been neglected in political theory.

Transnational Citizenship: Membership and Rights in International Migration.

Part I Membership: territorial boundaries attributed membership foundational consent consent in entry consent in exit membership decisions and associations collective membership and self-determination. Part II Rights: entitlement and liberties special and general rights scarcity and alienability of rights collective rights rights and obligations migration rights.

Expansive Citizenship—Voting beyond Territory and Membership

Voting rights have traditionally been regarded as the core of democratic citizenship. While T. H. Marshall ( 1965 ) described citizenship as a bundle of civil, political, and social rights, political philosophers from Aristotle via Rousseau to Michael Walzer have understood citizenship to be essentially a status of full membership in a self-governing polity. This republican conception explains the central place of electoral rights: citizens are those who participate in collective self-government either directly or through voting for representatives and running as candidates for elective public office. Special thanks to Harald Waldrauch from whose ongoing research on the rights and legal statuses of migrants this essay has greatly benefited.

Reinventing Urban Citizenship

The rise of the nation-state has meant a disempowerment of cities as autonomous polities. This paper argues that urban citizenship should be freed from constraints imposed by national and state-centered conceptions of political community. The focus of the argument is on constitutional politics that would strengthen local self-government by redefining boundaries, membership and rights at the level of municipal polities. Reforms along these lines would strive to reunite cities with their peripheries in common jurisdictions; to mitigate the political impact of residential segregation through representation of urban districts in citywide decision-making bodies; to challenge national monopolies in immigration, trade and foreign policy; to establish a formal status of local citizenship that is based on residence and disconnected from nationality; and would allow for multiple local citizenship and voting rights within and across national borders. The conclusion suggests that an urban citizenship that has been em...The rise of the nation-state has meant a disempowerment of cities as autonomous polities. This paper argues that urban citizenship should be freed from constraints imposed by national and state-centered conceptions of political community. The focus of the argument is on constitutional politics that would strengthen local self-government by redefining boundaries, membership and rights at the level of municipal polities. Reforms along these lines would strive to reunite cities with their peripheries in common jurisdictions; to mitigate the political impact of residential segregation through representation of urban districts in citywide decision-making bodies; to challenge national monopolies in immigration, trade and foreign policy; to establish a formal status of local citizenship that is based on residence and disconnected from nationality; and would allow for multiple local citizenship and voting rights within and across national borders. The conclusion suggests that an urban citizenship that has been emancipated from imperatives of national sovereignty and homogeneity may become a homebase for cosmopolitan democracy.

Studying Citizenship Constellations

The papers in this special issue of JEMS illustrate how the field of citizenship studies is moving towards a much more systematic comparative approach. They also indicate that the gap between political and legal branches might be narrowing. This brief concluding contribution reflects on a perspective that goes beyond the currently dominant framework, without replacing it. For both comparative and normative purposes, we need to study not merely the citizenship traditions, laws and policies of states considered separately, but rather as part of intertwined citizenship constellations.

Temporary migrants, partial citizenship and hypermigration

Temporary migration raises two different challenges. The first is whether territorial democracies can integrate temporary migrants as equal citizens; the second is whether transnationally mobile societies can be organized democratically as communities of equal citizens. Considering both questions within a single analytical framework will reveal a dilemma: on the one hand, liberals have good reasons to promote the expansion of categories of free-moving citizens as the most effective and normatively attractive response to the problem of partial citizenship for temporary migrants; yet, on the other hand, if free movement rights were actually used by too many, this might fatally undermine the sustainability of intergenerational and territorial democratic polities.

Migration and citizenship 1

Abstract This article proposes a notion of citizenship which goes beyond its nominal meaning of ‘membership of a state’. Citizenship is seen as a normative as well as an analytical concept, which refers to the equality and universality of rights embedded in the institutions of political communities. Citizen rights of migrants have to be analysed within a framework which includes both the sending and receiving state. Different bundles of rights are identified, which determine positions of migrants within this frame of reference. The article categorises rights according to their dependence on nominal citizenship and on residence into universal human rights, internal and external citizenship, alien rights and special rights of long term resident alien citizens. The normative content of citizenship can be invoked to challenge the legitimation of inequalities and boundaries between the positions of citizenship, held by immigrants and native populations. Two different approaches to policy changes along these li...

Citizenship policies in the New Europe

The two most recent EU enlargements in May 2004 and in January 2007 have greatly increased the diversity of historic experiences and contemporary conceptions of statehood, nation-building and citizenship within the Union. How did newly formed states determine who would become their citizens? How do countries relate to their large emigrant communities, to ethnic kin minorities in neighbouring countries and to minorities in their own territory? And to which extent have their citizenship policies been affected by new immigration and integration into the European Union? Citizenship Policies in the New Europe describes the citizenship laws in each of the twelve new countries as well as in the accession states Croatia and Turkey and analyses their historical background. Citizenship Policies in the New Europe complements two volumes on Acquisition and Loss of Nationality in the fifteen old Member States published in the same series in 2006.

Introduction: realignments of citizenship: reassessing rights in the age of plural memberships and multi-level governance

The contributions to this special issue of Citizenship Studies generally understand citizenship as referring to a status of equal membership in bounded political communities. This introduction sketches three realignments of citizenship that challenge the common equation between the community of citizens and territorial populations of independent states. First, the imagined co-extensionality of state, nation and people is increasingly challenged by processes of migration and globalization. However, as proposed in Chwaszczas contribution to this issue, the unity of the political people may still be needed as a necessary fiction in order to ensure the diachronic continuity of a democratic polity. Second, as discussed in Bauböcks and Keatings contributions, the territorial boundaries of citizenship are no longer identical with those of states for two reasons. External citizens can claim status and rights from outside the territory and territorial devolution has created new spaces for sub-state models of social citizenship. De Wittes and Guiraudons contributions, finally, discuss the tension between norms of equality derived from principles of citizenship and non-discrimination respectively. As we argue in this introduction, the European anti-discrimination legislation has produced complex realignments of the boundary between negative and positive conceptions of liberty and universal and particularistic norms of equality.

Why European Citizenship? Normative Approaches to Supranational Union

European citizenship is a nested membership in a multilevel polity that operates at member state and union levels. A normative theory of supranational citizenship will necessarily be informed by the EU as the only present case and will be addressed to the EU in most of its prescriptions, but should still develop a model sufficiently general to potentially apply to other regional unions as well. The Article first describes three basic characteristics of such a polity — democratic representation at the supranational level, internal freedom of movement between member states, and regional limits to external geographic expansion — and argues that a multiplication of such regional unions would contribute to a more just and peaceful international order. Building on this modification of Kant’s model for a global confederation of republics, the contribution explores three alternative approaches for strengthening democratic citizenship in the European Union: a statist approach that aims at transforming the EU into a federal state, a unionist approach whose goal is to strengthen union citizenship vis-a`-vis member state nationality, and a pluralist one that specifies citizenship norms for each level and balances them with each other on the basis of the current state of federal integration. These approaches are then compared with regard to their implications for three policy questions: (1) general status differences and inequality of rights amongst EU citizens living in their country of nationality, EU citizens residing in other member states, third-country nationals, and EU citizens residing outside the territory of the Union; (2) voting rights in European, national, and local elections; and (3) access to Union citizenship and to member state nationality.