Abstract
This paper is an exploration of the configurations of citizenship that prevail in Paris, a globalizing city where the processes of capitalist change and transnational migration converge. I will focus on the ways that different class segments of its migrant population exercise citizenship in a context in which the ideologies of belonging and membership are being redrawn under the demands of neoliberal transformation. My argument is that efforts made to rework models of citizenship under neoliberalism contribute not only to the realignments of class, but they also galvanise ethnic divisions and sentiments of nativism in France and more broadly in Europe. In making this argument, I draw on the notion of citizenship regime to focus attention on the political, economic and ideological forces that condition the orientations of the state, policies and citizenry in the context of crises and change under capitalism while also problematizing the state capital nexus in relation to the formation of subjects as citizens. This article is a continuation of a larger scholarly project that seeks to explore the ways in which the analytical paradigms of political economy advance our understanding of the different dimensions of migration and capitalist change.
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Notes
According to Sassen (2006: 281) the definition of polity has varied in time and place. In ancient and Medieval Europe, the legal status of the individual was based on the city. As a result of the process of state formation and the emergence of the national state under the Westphalian system, citizenship became based on the sovereign territorial state and nationality became a key component of citizenship. (see also Holsten 2009; Painter 2005; Staeheli 2003).
According to Brubaker (1992: pp. 36–38), formal citizenship designated in a legal sense as “membership in a nation state” grants access to rights and duties to those members of the polity that are designated citizens. Substantive citizenship deals with the extent to which those who enjoy formal legal status of citizen may or may not enjoy rights that ensure effective membership in a national community.
Such supra national authority structures include the European Union, NAFTA, the World Trade Organization as well as the United Nations.
For a discussion of the neoliberalism as a movement, see Timothy Mitchell (2005). Mitchell traces the links between the organizations, actors, intellectuals and think tanks who transformed neoliberalism from a fringe right-wing intellectual current to the most powerful political orthodoxy and political tool in the West and beyond. Such organizations as the Mount Pelerin society, intellectuals of the Chicago School of economics as well as the American enterprise Institute were among the many organizations involved in a neoliberal movement to extend the free market across the globe.
Many analysts have discussed the idea of the urban citizenship. Holston (2009), for example, suggests that urban citizenship is exercised when four conditions prevail, e.g., when urban residence is the basis of mobilization and the agenda of mobilization is about “rights to the city”; when the city is the primary political community for these developments; and when residents legitimate this agenda of rights and participatory practices on the basis of their contributions to the city itself. See also Isin (2000), Sassen (1999, 2006).
Sassen (2005, 2006), for example, offers the model of the “global city” as the embodiment of such processes and key location for such formations of citizenship. The model of the global city has been criticized from many quarters, for being tautological, overdrawn in its discussion of polarization and for being Eurocentric. (see for example Samers 2011). Such criticism is valid, but nonetheless Sassen’s work identifies a series of tendencies to which cities are subjected to in the era of globalization, and in this paper, I draw on her insights on these tendencies without attending to the question of how or whether her model of the global city applies to Paris.
This research is based on continuing fieldwork amongst transnational Chinese migrants in urban centers in France.
An extended exegesis and evaluation of regulation theory is beyond the scope of this paper. In addition to authors cited above, see Tickell and Peck (1992).
Mcleod (1997), for example, has noted the functionalism of its premises and therefore the teleological quality of its assertions. Also see Brenner and Glick (1991), Tickell and Peck (1992), Jenson and Phillips (1995). Jessop and Sum (2006) have revised and rethought regulation theory in response to some of these criticisms.
For a discussion of Fordism and Post Fordism (see Jessop and Sum 2006).
Jessop (2006: 145) describes this shift as involving the move from (1) from Keynesian to Schumpeterian modes of economic intervention; (2) from a welfarist to a workfarist approach to social policy; (3) from the primacy of the national scale to a post-national framework in which no scale is predominant; and (4) from the primacy of the state in compensating for market failures to networked, partnership-based economic, political and social governance mechanisms.
See for example, Pairault (1990).
See for example Yang (1994).
See Guthrie (1998) for discussion of the conditions that are leading to the decline of guanxi in China.
Corporate taxes and individual taxes were cut during his period and the tax structure in France was made more regressive. But only 13 state-owned enterprises were privatized, instead of the 61 that Chirac originally proposed, as the stock market crash of 1987 brought a halt to privatization (see Théret 1991).
In the 1990s, national unemployment rates often reached the level of 40 % (Hargreaves 2007).
See media reports of riots in Le Monde March 28, 2007, and Thursday March 29, 2007, The Guardian.
For example, Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the Front National at that time, publicly lauded the role of certain minorities during the First and Second World Wars. In 2007, Le Pen went to the Chinese cemetery at Noyelles sur Mer to pay tribute to the Chinese coolies who died in France during World War I. (Korman and Liew 2008).
In November 2009, Sarkozy’s government launched a debate over what it means to be French. Town hall meetings were held all over France in a period of 3 months, where citizens were invited to offer their views. Generally regarded as a ploy by the conservative government to pander to the extreme right wing, the meetings were often a venue for the expression of racist and xenophobic comments made by politicians and participants alike. In one meeting I attended held in a working class suburb on the outskirts of Paris, the official panel included a Vietnamese doctor who was showcased as a “successful” immigrant integration, while the debate focused on the issue of the inability of Muslims and Roma to integrate “or follow our rules” as one audience member stated.
Rhein (1998: 445) has noted the decline of foreign population in the middle-class and upper-class suburbs and in the most affluent districts in the city of Paris and a rise in the HLM (habitations à loyer modéré)—public housing.
See Smith (2011) on the dynamics of the development of surplus populations in late capitalism.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks Shawn Parkhurst, Barbara Karatsioli, Anne-Christine Trémon, Sheyla Zandonai and Pauline Gardiner Barber for providing me with the occasions to work through ideas that appear in this paper. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and help in reworking some facets of this piece. Research for this paper was generously supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and Trent University.
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This article is based on presentations made at the American Anthropology Meetings in New Orleans (2010), Montreal (2011) and at a workshop on migration at Dalhousie University in (March 2011).