Abstract
Transnational migrants and their struggles have become central for rethinking cosmopolitanism from below. This chapter builds on the theoretical and empirical arguments of the critical cosmopolitan perspective and proposals for methodological cosmopolitanism, which shifts the angle from which the social sciences look at social reality. Who is regarded as a relevant social actor to put forth cosmopolitan claims is crucial. Nevertheless, the author suggests that equally important is what struggles are taken into consideration. She suggests that cosmopolitan critical social theory can be usefully oriented by the concept of recognition toward the experiences of harms and wrongs as pre-political motivations for social struggles and the related articulation of claims. Migrants’ lived critique is an expression of their struggles against structural misrecognition that is mediated by the geopolitics of borders and the structures of global capitalism, and the claims they voice that arise from these struggles need to be taken into consideration in the process of articulating cosmopolitan norms. In the first part of the chapter, the author offers a critical explanation of the geopolitics of borders within capitalist globalization in order to outline the social relations and practices that bring about the structural misrecognition of forced transnational migrants. In the second part, she examines the lived critique of forced transnational migrants through the concept of recognition. She argues that while forced transnational migrants do not necessarily share a cosmopolitan consciousness, they can be defined as cosmopolitan actors if conceptualized as a structural group. In the concluding part, she compares the viewpoint of migrants’ lived critique with that of organized migrant protests that have obtained political visibility but may provide only partial foundations for cosmopolitan critical social theory. She suggests that the claims arising from migrants’ lived critique expand the normative horizons of cosmopolitan imaginaries to include a more radical critique of global capitalism. In this sense, it engages in struggles also for the benefit of those who do not migrate.
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Notes
- 1.
The book on migrants’ protests edited by Tamara Caraus and Elena Paris (2019) presents several examples of migrant activism that from their very foundations do not challenge the institution of the nation-state as the authority defining the dividing line between inclusion and exclusion, such as Sans-Papier, the Dreamers, A Day Without Us marches, etc.
- 2.
Migration is one of the examples that reveal the co-optation and neoliberal reframing of human rights. Aleksandra Ålund and Carl-Ulrik Schierup (2018) analyzed the evolution of the Global Forum for Migration and Development and pointed to the strategies of the selective inclusion of human rights arguments as signs of their pacification and co-optation. They argue that it is manifested in a shift from migrant labor rights toward moral migrant rights and by the marginalization of labor unions. However, the mobilization of moral arguments shifts attention to protection and partial improvement of migrant conditions at the expense of migrants’ claims for global social justice and of systemic changes of the structures producing forced migration (see also Likić-Brborić 2018).
- 3.
Offshoring practices and illicit financial flows are regarded as a fundamental accompanying effect of global capitalism. However, its premise is not a borderless world but a selectively bordered world. Borders make it possible to establish different legal jurisdictions, which allows mobile capital to escape public control. While the state is no longer the main organizing principle, it is still the executive power and enabler of global capitalism (Robinson 2014).
- 4.
As only 2% of all migrants living in Europe in 2017 came from Africa (UN 2017), this media representation sheds a clear light on the racial formation of “European” whiteness built in opposition to the blackness as a product of colonial expansions and as an inherent part of modernity.
- 5.
Globally, the vast majority of refugee, according to the conventional definition of the term, are hosted by developing countries. In 2018, under the common understanding of the term, there were 25.9 million international refugees, 3.5 million asylum-seekers, and 41.3 million internally displaced people, 84% of whom lived in developing countries, while 33% were being hosted in the least developed countries worldwide (UNHCR 2019).
- 6.
While the global migration agenda operates in a nation-state-centered institutional framework, which takes the perspective of the state and its claim to territorial sovereignty as a starting point, non-state actors are increasingly influencing the discursive framing of human mobility and migration policies (Likić-Brborić 2018; Betts 2013). Moreover, the enforcement of migration management requires an elaborate system of surveillance of human mobility, militarized border controls, and deportation channels. On the surface, it seems that the security and military industries respond to the states’ demand. However, Martin Lemberg-Pedersen shows how in subtle ways private security companies under the guise of expert consultancy became the key actors in formulating the EU’s border control policies (Lemberg-Pedersen 2013; Lemberg-Pedersen et al. 2020).
- 7.
The report More Than a Wall by Todd Miller analyses the emergence and functioning of the border industrial complex in the USA (Miller 2019). However, despite focusing on border enforcement, the complex is not strictly tied to an institution of the nation-state as the involved transnational corporations and transnational financial actors operate globally.
- 8.
Leslie Sklair (2003) redefined the classic definition of the capitalist class based on ownership of the means of production to include other forms of capital besides economic, i.e., political, knowledge, and cultural capital. According to Sklair, the transnational capitalist class today includes not only the owners of the major corporations and the managers who run them (the corporate fraction) but also globalizing politicians and bureaucrats at the international, national, and local levels who align with global capital (the state fraction), professionals in the global labor market (the technical fraction), and actors in control of the media (the consumerist fraction) (Sklair 2003: 17–23).
- 9.
Beck (2006) calls it the false cosmopolitanism of a transnational capitalist class and global elites, who merely instrumentalize cosmopolitan arguments to reproduce and consolidate the current geopolitical and economic arrangements on a global scale.
- 10.
Although methodological nationalism is presented as a neutral approach, it is based on concealed ideological assumptions that have to do with the territorial sovereignty of nation-states and the conceptualization of society as a social unit that overlaps with the territory of the modern nation-state. As a result, it operates with a naturalized idea of nation-state and borders. The cognitive bias of methodological nationalism dominates in real politics and also in the social sciences, migration studies, and political theory. It distorts the view of the social reality of migration with a receiving state bias and a predominant focus on immigration, which frames migration as a problematic deviation from the norm (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002; Sager 2018; Castles 2010).
- 11.
Young argues that “structural injustice is a kind of moral wrong distinct from the wrongful action of an individual agent or the repressive policies of a state. Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting in pursuit of their particular goals and interests, for the most part within the limits of accepted rules and norms” (Young 2011: 52).
- 12.
Alison J. Ayers has criticized the concept of civil war, which, according to her, is not only ideologically convenient but also “rests upon the highly problematic conception of the state as a reified entity, with interests and capabilities analytically separate from the totality of global social relations within which states inhere” (Ayers 2010: 155). However, the causes of such economic or political conflicts are historically embedded in global geopolitics – a colonial past, the geopolitics of the Cold War, or the subsequent War on Terror – and are exacerbated by today’s global capitalism.
- 13.
Out of the total number of 258 million “international” migrants worldwide in 2017, about 30% (78 million) were living in Europe and 21% in North America. Moreover, intracontinental migration prevails over intercontinental migration mobility. For example, in 2017, 67% of all European migrants remained in Europe, while 53% of all African migrants were in Africa (UN 2017).
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
Achille Mbembe’s essay on Afropolitanism was published in 2005 and is available at http://africultures.com/afropolitanisme-4248/
- 17.
I leave aside the discussion on overall norms of global justice. In this chapter, I focus only on one aspect of global justice which requires radically altering global economic and geopolitical structures. Today’s configuration of borders brings about structural misrecognition of forced transnational migrants not only in terms of limiting their mobility but also, and perhaps more pressingly as it concerns majority of people who do not migrate, in terms of limiting their self-development in places they are forced to leave as the borders are functional for global capital to escape taxation, regulation, and public control.
- 18.
Arguments for inclusion can be made gradually, but the exclusion of others should not form the foundational logic of the argument.
- 19.
However, it is important to point out that there may be very different motives and foundations behind the political argument “to help migrants in their home country.” Even the concept of the “root causes” of migration gets distorted in political debates, usually patching up manifestations (such as poverty or unemployment) of deeper structural problems.
- 20.
In the next step, cosmopolitan critical theory needs to elaborate an institutional proposal for putting these normative claims in practice. In my view, Iris M. Young’s (2011) model of differentiated global political responsibility is a fruitful starting point.
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Uhde, Z. (2021). The Structural Misrecognition of Migrants as a Critical Cosmopolitan Moment. In: Schweiger, G. (eds) Migration, Recognition and Critical Theory. Studies in Global Justice, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72732-1_14
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