Abstract
In this chapter we discuss transnational citizenship because, in the long term, there is a good chance of implementing the cosmopolitan cultural model that humanity needs in this time of the Anthropocene. The Westphalian order is already crumbling, and, notwithstanding its avatars, regional integration processes–like the EU—are still the correct alternative to neo-nationalism, while holism in social and natural sciences and cosmopolitanism are moving ahead. Other issues focused in this chapter are migration and human mobility in the context of globalization.
While we agree that dialogue between the Earth science and social and human sciences is essential, the argument advanced in this paper seeks to clarify a distinct social theoretical position. The critical interpretative position here is that Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. This has implications for governance, which point in the direction of Cosmo politics – and thus of a ‘Cosmopolocene’ – rather than a geologization of the social or, in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency.
Delanty/Mota (2018: 35)
In this era, a new critical theory with a cosmopolitan intent has a crucial task. … Its main claim is that, first of all, the cosmopolitan viewpoint, linked to various realities, detects the chasms that threaten the beginning of the twenty-first century. Critical theory investigates the contradictions, dilemmas and the unseen and unwanted (unintentional) side-effects of a modernity that is increasingly cosmopolitan. … The main thesis is then that the cosmopolitan perspective opens up negotiation spaces and strategies which the national viewpoint precludes. … In the debate on globalization the main point does not revolve about the meaning of the nation state and how its sovereignty has been subordinated. Rather the new cosmopolitan perspective of the global power field pushes new actors and actors’ networks, the power potentials, strategies, and organization forms of de-bounded politics, or, in other words, global civil society into the field of vision. This is why the cosmopolitan critique of nation state-centred and nation state-buttressed politics and political science is empirically and politically crucial.
Beck (2003: 54–55)
The new challenge for political theory is to go beyond a narrow state-centred approach by considering political communities and systems of rights that emerge at levels of governance above or below those of independent states or that cut across international borders.
Bauböck (2017: 81)
The Kantian ideal of a world citizenship and current thinking about a ‘contextualized universalism’ can take us to a ‘landed’ cosmopolitism if we consider the real framework of the international relations development in all its social, cultural, political and economic dimensions. … Grounds and possibilities for a transnational citizenship – if not global at least transnational – surge precisely from the transnationalization of the social world.
Pries (2017: 173)
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Notes
- 1.
This is why Donald Trump’s decision to suspend the US payments to the World Health Organization (a political calculation in his search for scapegoats to cover his own incompetence and irresponsibility in dealing with the crisis) was so monstrous and unethical.
- 2.
Thus, for instance, the US has not ratified important international human rights law, such as the 1966 UN International Pact of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and a number of UN member states are not parties to the ILO 169 Convention that prescribes the obligation to hold community referendums before authorizing the construction of infrastructure (e.g. for hydropower) or mining in the countryside.
- 3.
Claims that the EU has a democratic deficit and that it is crucial for the EU’s future to strengthen its democratic legitimacy have continued to arise for at least twenty years. For the greater part of its history, citizens have not been at the centre of the European political system. One response to this was to suggest having a category of Citizenship of the Union in addition to national citizenship. The Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Treaty Establishing the European Community have integrated the Citizenship of the Union into the Treaty of Rome. The rights granted to EU citizens include the right of free movement, the right to vote in communal elections in all Member States, the right of diplomatic protection and the right to petition the European Parliament. These rights were regarded as the first step towards fully fledged citizens’ rights (Efler 2008). More recently, the former Greek Minister of Finance, Yanis Varoufakis, has founded a new political movement (Democracy in Europe Movement, DiEM) with the main objective of promoting the political participation of citizens in European elections in the role of EU citizens (not as nationals of member states of the Union).
- 4.
In another example, it is interesting to realize that even citizens from a European country which is not a member of the EU but a member of the Council of Europe can present a complaint before the European Human Rights Court if they consider themselves to be victims of a human rights violation in accordance with the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights. The same is possible in the Interamerican system of the Organization of American States (OAS) where in human rights cases citizens can individually sue the State at the Interamerican Human Rights Court headquartered in San José (Costa Rica).
- 5.
“The term transnational citizenship is less expansive than its apparent synonyms, world citizenship or global citizenship, and is more clearly cross-border than the term cosmopolitan citizenship. A longstanding cosmopolitan theoretical tradition calls for ‘global’ or ‘world’ citizenship. In contrast, the term transnational citizenship can refer to cross-border relations that are far from global in scope. This is analogous to the distinction between the concepts of global versus transnational civil society. Critics of the concept of global civil society argue that it implicitly overstates the degree of cross-border cohesion and joint action in civil society” (Laxer/Halperin 2003). In the context of this debate, the term transnational citizenship would apply most clearly to membership in the EU, a political community that is clearly cross-border yet certainly not global. However, Bauböck (2003), one of the leading proponents of the concept of transnational citizenship, suggests that the European Union is better understood as a supranational entity, meaning that individual membership requires citizenship in an EU member state. Indeed, according to Fox (2005) it is still not clear “whether the EU’s transnational political experiment is the leading edge of a growing trend or is the exception that proves the rule in terms of the persistent grip of nation states on political sovereignty. So far, the latter seems more likely. Either way, analysts agree that European Union citizenship is still both ‘thin’ and fundamentally grounded in national citizenship” (Fox 2005: 83).
- 6.
Social integration has been in operation in the labour and economic-entrepreneurial sphere in the European Union since the 1990s. In a well-known jurisprudence case of the epoch, the European Council of Ministers decided that, when operating in EU countries with higher rates of pay (such as France, Germany and Austria), companies from countries with lower rates of pay (such as the United Kingdom, Ireland and Portugal) could not pay workers in those countries according to their national standards, but must pay wages according to the rates and labour legislation in the receiving countries: “The example of the posted workers guideline illustrates well the multiple-level governance nature of social policy: Individual nation-states and the European Union Commission were the main actors. Since 1993, service enterprises can be active all over the EU. One of the consequences has been that companies and even individuals can move to another member country, set up business and deliver services according to wages and social wages of their country of origin. It is needless to say that, for example, construction companies from Portugal, the United Kingdom and Ireland went to high (social) wage countries such as France, Germany and Austria. Unemployment among construction workers in the high wage countries increased. The unions charged ‘social dumping’. This was a problem hard to solve in the European Union because multi-level patterns of policymaking are prone to ‘joint-decision traps’ (Scharp 1988) in which efficiency and flexibility are subordinated to political accommodation and procedural guarantees. By 1995, sending countries had no incentive to agree on a guideline, because it would have undercut the competitive advantages of firms from their countries. And the main receiving countries, such as France, Austria and Germany had already implemented national laws to regulate the posting of workers from other EU countries within freedom of services (Faist et al. 1998: 7). However, there have been institutional and political solutions to the problem: (1) Because it was an issue of market competition, qualified majority voting and not unanimity applied (Arts. 47 and 55 EC-A). After seven years of bargaining, the Council of Ministers decided in 1996 on the Directive on the Posting of Workers (96/71/EC) – against the votes of Portugal, the United Kingdom and Ireland. According to this directive the companies from abroad have to pay minimum wages and provide working conditions prevalent in the country of activity. (2) One of the prerequisites of this bargain was that the ‘losers’ such as Portugal, could be partly ‘compensated’: Logrolling arrangements were possible. For example, Germany aided Portugal in building up youth apprenticeship training” (Faist 2000: 9).
- 7.
Consequently, according to Bertrand Badie, what has existed since the collapse of the USSR (or at least since 1994 after a brief lapse of United States ‘unipolarity’ at the end of the Cold War) is a “system without a name”, precisely because its fragmented apolarity can be considered its main characteristic. Badie argues that variables such as a weak degree of inclusiveness and limited deliberative capacity are part of the system’s features. Hence, according to the French scholar, multiple centres of real power do not exist at the present time, and even the G7 and the G20 are informal places where a “diplomacy of connivance” is practised, but they are not real power blocs (Badie 2012: 70–76).
- 8.
A world system is a temporary space zone that “crosses multiple political and cultural units” and that represents an “integrated area of activities and institutions that obey certain systemic rules”. The political units are the nation states which are grouped in the said integrated zone, and their governments are subordinate to the system (Wallerstein 2006).
- 9.
The Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations is named after the French historian and based at Binghamton University in the State of New York. It was founded in September 1976 and is one of the most outstanding centres in the USA for advanced studies in history from the perspective of the dynamics of ‘world systems’.
- 10.
Civil society organizations and indigenous movements that in a country like Guatemala, for example, protest against mining and extractive industries do not blame ‘globalization’ for the presence of this type of economic activity, among other reasons because mining is an activity that has been practised throughout Latin America since the colonial era in close coordination with colonial powers (the world economy of that epoch) and it makes no sense to protest against social-historical phenomena (it would be like protesting against climate change, droughts, earthquakes or floods.) In any case, what is relevant is denouncing the policies that facilitate or induce the occurrence of these natural phenomena and protesting against the said policies, since, in other examples, they increase deforestation, which results in the reduction of rain or the warming of the global climate and in turn determines the increase in the frequency of climatic phenomena such as hurricanes, droughts and forest fires of natural origin, torrential rains and floods, and the melting of polar ice caps and glaciers, etc.
- 11.
According to IR theory, all the problems of ‘agency’ are related to the role played by actors.
- 12.
Transnational organized crime is another piece of evidence: you cannot solve the problem of drug trafficking in isolation in each country. The only way to confront this scourge is through concerted action by all governments that have to deal with criminal structures. Pandemic and epidemic diseases, climate change, food issues, and international migration are other obvious examples that explain why the United Nations proposed the adoption of the 2030 Agenda and the 17 SDGs in 2015.
- 13.
The Theory of Complex Interdependence states, among other things, that today’s international relations are far from being limited to government officials or to the government, and that in fact there are multiple communication channels between civil society actors, with an absence of hierarchy and agenda items such as the diminishing importance of military affairs, etc. (Nye/Keohane 1988).
- 14.
The systems of electronic diffusion of the waves make it possible to implement effectively the oblivion of the distances. Global players live in a world without distances. From the aeronautical point of view, the ground is reduced to a maximum of fifty hours of flight in a single jet. The orbital flights of the satellites and the Mir station, and recently the International Space Station's (ISS) rotations around the globe have become routine around the globe in about ninety minutes. For radio and light messages, the Earth has practically reduced itself to an immobile point- it is rotating, as a temporally compact globe in an electronic felt that surrounds it like a second atmosphere. The terrestrial globalization thus progressed so much that it seems odd to demand that it justifies it (Sloterdijk 2006:199).
- 15.
Consequently, the anti globalization thinking of the nationalist right (Trump, Farage, Le Pen) acquires full meaning.
- 16.
In France, for instance, both the National Front of Marine Le Pen and La France Insoumisse of Jean Luc Melenchon are against globalization.
- 17.
And most probably also of the European Union because obviously Madrid would not like a re-entry of an independent Catalonia to the EU.
- 18.
But this phenomenon also entails risk, because of the increased manipulation of human behaviour by commercial internet corporations (like Amazon) and the surveillance of individuals by authoritarian regimes (AI), as explained by Hariri (2018).
- 19.
Complex Interdependence Theory states, among other things, that international relations today are far from limited to the official government or government contacts and that there are multiple communication channels between different civil society stakeholders – with an absence of hierarchy in the topics on the agenda, as well as decreased importance in military matters when compared to the past, etc. (Nye/Keohane 1988).
- 20.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos believes that there is no “isolated entity” called globalization, as it basically consists of a “series of social facts”. Whenever these social facts change, so does globalization, which in turn is manifested hegemonically through localized globalism (or vice versa) but which also possesses a dimension of “cosmopolitanism and common inheritance of humankind”; this is positive as it is grounded in social struggles, seen as “counter-hegemonic globalization”. This means that in the world “Exclusion and hegemonic processes find different kinds of resistance – grass-roots initiatives, local organizations, popular movements, transnational networks of solidarity, new ways of worker internationalism attempting to counteract social exclusion by opening spaces for democratic participation and community construction, and by offering alternatives to the dominant ways of development and knowledge. In summary, they favour social inclusion. These local/global ties and cross-border activism make up the new transnational democratic movement” (Santos 2009: 229–236).
- 21.
Such as the social responsibility movement within the business and private sector.
- 22.
“The systems of electronic diffusion of the waves make it possible to effectively implant the forgetfulness of distances. Global players live in a world without distances. From an aeronautical point of view, the Earth is reduced to a maximum of fifty flight hours in a single jet. The orbital flights of the satellites and the Mir Station, then recently the round-the-globe rotations of the International Space Station (ISS) have become accustomed to circling the globe in about ninety minutes. For radio and light messages, the Earth has practically reduced to a still point – it is rotating, like a temporally compact globe in an electronic field that surrounds it like a second atmosphere. Terrestrial globalization has progressed to such an extent that it seems odd to demand that it be justified” (Sloterdijk 2006: 199).
- 23.
According to Roberto Savio, statistics of 2018 indicate that the total immigrant flow was 50,000 people, compared with 186,768 in 2017, 1,259,955 in 2016, and 1,327,825 in 2015. Such an astonishing difference could mean that there is a manipulation of information and data. Savio says that a survey of 23,000 citizens of France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and Sweden showed an enormous amount of disinformation among European citizens. For instance, in five European countries, people believed that immigrants were three times higher than in reality. Savio asserts that Italians have the erroneous idea that immigrants form 30% of the population when they form only 10% and that the Swedes are closer to the reality because they think immigrants account for 30%, when in fact they account for 20%: “And Italians think that 50% of the immigrants are Muslim, when in fact it is 30%, conversely, 60% of the immigrants are Christian, and Italians think they are 30%. And in all six countries citizens think that immigrants are poorer and without education or knowledge, and therefore a heavy financial burden. Italians think that 40% of the immigrants are jobless, when it is close to 10% – no different from the general rate. The seventh report on the economic impact of immigration, from Foundation Leonessa that based its research on the statistics of the Italian Institute of Statistics, presented some totally ignored facts. The 2.4 million immigrants in Italy have produced 130 billion Euros, or 8.9% of the Gross Internal Product: an amount larger than the GDP of Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia. In the last 5 years, companies started by immigrants have become 25.8 of the total, with 570,000 companies, or 9.4% of the total. The director of the Pension Italian system, Boeri, said in Parliament that immigrants give to the system 11.5 billion, more than what they cost. He also stressed that Italy is having a demographic crisis, with seven births for eleven deaths” (Savio 2018).
- 24.
Article 13 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states that everyone has the right to freedom of movement and “residence within the borders of each State” and also the right “to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”. This right, incidentally, needs to be differentiated from the right to asylum stated in Article 14, which refers to how the right to asylum “may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations”.
- 25.
It is important to bear in mind that there are two different aspects to this issue: 1) the criminalization of people who enter the US without proper documents or overstay their visa authorization; and 2) the problem of asylum-seekers and refugees. Concerning the former, it is evident that the current US migration policy of criminalizing both workers and refugees opposes the UN Declaration of Human Rights. With regard to the latter, when Trump decided to use migration issues as a banner among his WASP voters in his re-election campaign in 2020, he applied the UN Refugee Convention (1951) category of (supposedly) “third secure country” to countries like Guatemala ruled by a weak and corrupt president, so Guatemala will have to receive non-Guatemalan asylum-seekers who must wait for months and years while the US authorities make a decision about their applications. To this humiliation, Guatemalans arriving at the US border to ask for asylum must add the inhuman decision taken by Trump in another executive order to separate children from their parents as a way of deterring the wave (‘caravans’) of refugees fleeing criminal violence in other Central American countries (like Honduras). Even though an honourable judge stopped that inhuman and merciless policy, children have waited for weeks and months before being reunited with their parents and families, some of them already deported to Guatemala. Some children have also died in the custody of American migratory officials because of inadequate health care and lack of medicines. Since 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic has increasingly been used as a pretext for these ‘express deportation’ policies against asylum-seekers.
- 26.
The antecedents include the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (1990) – unfortunately signed and ratified by only a few States.
- 27.
During a recent trek through the mountains of Cuchumatanes (Guatemala) in 2018, I had the opportunity to interview an indigenous peasant who owned beasts of burden which were carrying food purchased with his savings from trips made as a temporary worker to the USA, where his two oldest sons live and work, without having regular migratory status. Worker mobility – which no wall will stop – is quite expensive for migrants because traffickers charge amounts ranging from US $2,000 to US $6,000 for freight from countries such as Guatemala. Those who emigrate often have to get into debt with loan sharks or banks, or mortgage their properties to afford the trip, and when the trip succeeds, the debt is paid off thanks to the higher wages paid in the US (for instance, in 2020 the average rate of pay for a bricklayer in the US was $26/hour). According to an investigation into migration and remittances in Guatemala undertaken by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 2016, 61.7% of migrant workers explained that their reason for migrating was the “search for better revenues”, compared to 37% “just looking for a job”. In summary and according to the IOM (2017: 18–28), the US $7.27 billion received in family remittances in 2016 (which increased to around $10 billion in 2019) explains the increasing migratory flows from a country like Guatemala to the US. Clearly, cross-border mobility is a strategy adopted by individuals who are in search of upward mobility (de Wenden 2017: 19–20). Another interesting figure from the IOM’s investigation is that out of more than 2.3 million Guatemalan immigrants to the US, about 700,000 – roughly 30% – are in an irregular situation, which is another important reason for demanding the regularization of that ‘minority’ of Guatemalans who lack proper documents (IOM 2016).
- 28.
In my opinion, within the military international subsystem and among the nuclear powers the classic balance of powers approach continues to be absolutely valid. For instance, Trump’s decision to quit the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was immediately followed by Putin’s decision to restart the construction of intermediate range missiles. This dynamic may be regrettable, but it is perfectly understandable when viewed through geopolitical and global balance of power lenses. A similar reaction occurred in Moscow in 2014 when Ukraine’s interest in joining NATO was immediately followed by Russia’s retort over the Crimean peninsula and the Kremlin’s support for the separatist rebellion against Kiev in the Donbass region.
- 29.
For instance, at the end of nineteenth century more than a million Swedes emigrated to the US, as described in the 1990s Swedish movie The Immigrants starring Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow. Yves Lacoste, a French expert on geopolitics, says that migratory flows from countries such as Germany, Ireland, Italy and France demonstrate that workers were attracted by a better paid job market or by the promise of land. According to Lacoste, a survey conducted by the Federal Census Office included a question about the American people’s ancestors by nationalities of origin, which revealed that in 23 of the 50 states involved – the entire Midwest and the West, plus Pennsylvania and Florida – approximately 42.8 million Americans said they were of German descent; 30 million, Irish; 24 million, English; 15.7 million, Italian, 8.3 million, French; 25 million, African; and so on. Lacoste also alluded to the last twenty years, when immigration to the US of people from Latin America and Asia has been of some 40 million and 10 million, respectively. After the collapse of the USSR, there was also an increase in the immigration of Russians and other former communist European countries, including a significant number of top-level engineers and scientists who left their countries after the dismantling of State-sponsored think tanks (Lacoste 2009: 37).
- 30.
According to the quoted IOM report (2016), 21.5% of Guatemalans working in the USA are occupied in construction; 19.3% in services such as trade, accommodation (hotels), and restaurants; 8.8% in mining and industry; 4.7% in financial and insurance entities; 1.9% in transportation; and 15.7% in “other services” (i.e. house cleaning, gardening and similar).
- 31.
It is interesting to mention again the case of Guatemala because its Constitution establishes that those born in the former Central American Federation (which included the Captaincy General of the Kingdom of Guatemala during the colony: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica) have the right to a Guatemalan nationality of origin (as if jus sanguini) if they reside in Guatemala and state this before the competent authorities. It could therefore be asserted that, for historical reasons, the Guatemalan Constitution has an extremely evolved and progressive stance, since citizens from Central American countries have political rights usually reserved for nationals, such as the right to vote in general elections.
- 32.
For example, information randomly searched on the internet about residence permits for relatives of Turkish workers in Germany states: “This residence permit is for Turkish workers and members of their families (spouse or child) already living and working in Germany residence title in the conditions of the EEC/Turkey Association Agreement. Specifically, this residence in Germany is for Turkish people of these circumstances: Family members of a Turkish worker; a spouse or a child of a Turkish worker who has worked in Germany constantly for minimum 3 years from entering Germany, or otherwise the child was born in Germany and lived within a family union; a child of a Turkish worker who has worked in Germany not more than 3 years, who has finished professional training in Germany; Turkish workers having worked for minimum 3 years for the same employer; Turkish workers having worked for 4 years in the same profession. The fee to apply for this residence permit is 28.8 Euro (for persons aged 24-over), and is 22.8 Euro (for those aged up to 24 years). In the meantime the application is free for persons benefiting from SGB II, XII, or asylum seekers.” See at: https://visaguide.world/europe/germany-visa/residence-permit/turkish/.
- 33.
Another random example from the internet shows the requirements for a residence/work permit in the UAE for Egyptian workers: “Egyptian nationals applying for a new employment residence permit in Dubai sponsored by a company in the Dubai Airport Free Zone or the Dubai International Financial Centre Free Zone must now personally appear at a designated UAE visa service centre in Cairo to obtain an entry visa. ... While there may be slight differences in the application process depending on the jurisdiction of the Egyptian national’s employer in the United Arab Emirates, generally, the following is a description of the new process for affected Egyptian nationals to enter the United Arab Emirates: 1. The UAE sponsoring company must obtain a pre-approved entry permit on behalf of the Egyptian worker; 2. The foreign national must register for and attend a medical examination at an approved medical centre in Egypt; 3. The foreign national must pick up their medical results in person; 4. The UAE sponsoring company or the foreign national must schedule an appointment at the UAE visa service centre in Cairo through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MOFAIC)’s electronic portal; and 5. The foreign national must personally pick up their UAE entry visa at the UAE visa service centre in Cairo.
- 34.
As expected, the USA is the only signatory which has not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which, along with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, is one of the two main international UN instruments on the matter of human rights. Some countries, such as Saudi Arabia and some Arab oil monarchies of the Gulf, have never signed it, and other countries, such as South Sudan, which joined the UN after its entry into force in 1976, and have not yet acceded.
- 35.
The Global Migration Group is an inter-agency entity comprised of sixteen United Nations agencies and other international organizations dealing with migration. It defines a “migrant in an irregular situation” as “any person who, by reason of entry without documents or the expiry of the visa, lacks legal status in a country of transit or destination. The term applies to migrants infringing the rules for entering the country and any other person unauthorized to remain in the country of destination”. Further, the 1975 General Assembly of the United Nations approved Resolution 3449 (XXX), which requests that all member states, United Nations organs and specialized agencies utilize in all official documents the term “non-documented or irregular migrant workers” to define workers who “illegally and/or surreptitiously enter another country to obtain work”. Furthermore, in its General Observation No. 2 (2013) on the rights of migrant workers in irregular situations and their families, the Committee for the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families expressed the opinion that expressions like “in irregular situation” or ‘undocumented’ were the appropriate terminology to use when referring to the situation of the said workers. The insistence of the Trump administration on using the term ‘illegal’ to describe migrant workers in an irregular situation is inadequate and needs to be avoided, as it tries to stigmatize and criminalize those persons by relating their irregular migration situation to crimes typified and sanctioned by criminal law (United Nations 2014).
- 36.
The Universal Declaration states that (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. (2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. See at: http://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf.
- 37.
The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration negotiated at the UN was proposed by two facilitators, the Permanent Representatives of Mexico (Ambassador Juan José Gómez Camacho) and Switzerland (Ambassador Jürg Lauber), who stated that “A Global Compact expresses our collective commitment to improving cooperation on international migration. Migration has been part of the human experience throughout history, and we recognize that it is a source of prosperity, innovation and sustainable development in our globalized world, and that these positive impacts can be optimized by improving migration governance. The majority of migrants around the world today travel, live and work in a safe, orderly and regular manner. Nonetheless, migration undeniably affects our countries, communities, migrants and their families in very different and sometimes unpredictable ways. It is crucial that the challenges and opportunities of international migration unite us, rather than divide us. This Global Compact sets out our common understanding, shared responsibilities and unity of purpose regarding migration, making it work for all” (Global Compact 2018: 2). Therefore could Mexico and Switzerland lead the way towards the signing of a world covenant on migration?
- 38.
Migrant workers in an irregular situation in the US are clearly in the position of claiming the right to have rights (as they are non-existent people in legal terms), but through collective action they will be empowered. Empowerment – in the sense of actors’ capacity to make claims – is distinct from rights or “institutionally recognized guarantees and opportunities”. For instance, if, despite being endowed with the human right to education at primary and high schools, young people in an irregular migratory situation in the US cannot go to universities or get jobs when they leave school due to their lack of regular migratory status, it is the empowerment-based approach (in the sense of having the capacity to demand and exercise rights) that works. Indeed, the movement of ‘dreamers’ succeeded in obtaining from the Obama Administration the executive order called Deferred Action for Children’s Arrivals (DACA). It is therefore clear that, as Fox (2005) argues, rights and empowerment can be mutually beneficial despite overlapping in practice and being analytically distinct.
- 39.
However, multinationality is not necessarily expressed in that way in the political system, as countries like the United States, Brazil and Germany claim to be ‘mononational’ while being federal states, whereas Russia, Switzerland and India are federal and admit to being multinational, and other countries (e.g. Bolivia) are ‘plurinational’ without being federal. In another example, in spite of being de facto plurinational, Guatemala has a unitarian mononational type of political regime, as does Mexico, although it is a federation. Evidently, the fears of certain politicians in mononational states such as the UAE is that greater immigration openness will lead to multinationality, something that has been forewarned by scholars such as Huntington (2004).
- 40.
Several articles in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights are applicable to migrants: Article 3: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”; Article 6: “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”; Article 7: “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination”; Article 9: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”; Article 11(1): Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense; Article 11(2): No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed; Article 13: “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”; Article 14: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution”; Article 15: “Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality”; Article 23: “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment”; Article 28: “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”.
- 41.
Some analysts have pointed out an omission in the wording of Article 13 of the Declaration, as the right to exit and return to your own country is not complemented by an obligation from the other states to grant a visa or entry permit to emigrants. However, since the Declaration states that everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State and that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”, it would be illogical if the right of movement (or ‘mobility’) does not includes the right of not being denied residence abroad if you haven’t perpetrated any criminal offences, and migratory irregularity is not a crime. Hence it is clear that the Declaration implicitly assumes that the right to enter and exit different state territories and to move within them cannot be denied. Obviously, national governments also have the rights to regulate immigration flows and to demand a passport with a visa whenever applicable, but when no documents are available this should not be a crime but an administrative fault. Consequently, both the applicable sanctions and the solution to the problem have to be made in the realm of civil – not criminal – legislation. Indeed, there is difference if the lack of documents is evidenced at a border crossing or port of entry (maritime or airport), since in this case the authorities of any sovereign state do have the right to refuse entry to an undocumented person and deport him/her to his/her country. However, if the said situation does not take place at a border crossing, a technical violation of the human right to freedom of movement (such as detaining a person in the street because of his/her appearance and asking for ID documents) might occur. If there is no further infringement of the penal code of that country, the person cannot be detained even if they lack ID documents. In this hypothetical scenario, if the receiving country authorities imposed an arbitrary detention, this would be a violation of human rights. As an example of the seriousness of the problem for one Central American country alone (Guatemala), a report by the International Organization for Migrations (IOM) states: “The Migration Policy Institute estimated that, in 2015, there were 704,000 Guatemalans living irregularly in the United States of America. With this survey, the IOM investigated the immigration status of the persons residing in the United States, through their relatives and confirmed that 73.0% are in a regular situation. This information differs from estimates previously reported, as these estimates were based on the 2010 census and the bias of the irregular population that does not report this information. But 91.0% of Guatemalans residing in Spain are regularized, as well as most of those in Italy (67.4%) and Mexico (57.0%)” (IOM 2016: 39).
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Economic migrants go to the USA because it is a job market, as proven by the fact that, according to the same IOM report quoted above: “Of the total persons sending remittances, 68.0% were working at the time of their parting and 30.0% were unemployed or not economically active, and 2.0% did not provide information. Of those unemployed, 28.1% worked in agriculture; 13.2% in construction, handicrafts and operators; 4.4% as machine operators, fork lift operators, drivers; and 54.3% had other occupations.” The same report confirms that the majority of emigrants to the United States have found a job there that will allow them to regularize their immigration status: “The Guatemalan population living abroad and sending remittances are operators, artisans, mechanics and construction workers (29.7%); they provide services or perform direct sales (18.1%); work as unqualified labour (18.7%); work in agriculture (6.5%); as machine, fork lift operators or drivers (3.7%) or in other occupations (6.7%). 17.3% do not know their occupation (IOM 2016: 41).
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Bauböck himself acknowledges this problem when providing the following explanation to what happens in those countries: “As the situation of immigrant workers in the Arab Gulf States illustrates, a permanent segregation of minorities of immigrant origin goes mostly hand in hand with their social and political disempowerment, which prevents any challenge to the hegemonic conception of national identity” (Bauböck 2002a, b: 11).
- 44.
Incidentally, the “zero tolerance” policy of family separations in countries like the United States not only causes lifelong trauma for child victims of it but is also a serious human rights violation. From May to June 2018, more than 2,500 children were separated from their parents due to the “zero tolerance” ordered by Trump. Forced to back-pedal and return the children to their parents and relatives, by August 2018 more than 500 minors remained under federal custody, among other reasons because more than 400 parents had already been deported to their countries of origin, according to the Spanish newspaper El País in its weekly digest of 18 August 2018. A carefully planned system of transnational nationality would aid international mobility by regularizing immigration status and issuing work permits, so, as Bauböck points out, it should not be an excessively complex bureaucratic procedure to request a letter from an employer to verify and legalize the residence of any migrant worker and grant them the requisite work permit. When such policies are not implemented in countries like the United States it is because most irregular migrants are poor and indigenous (not white), and because of the fear of an increase in the Hispanic population and the political repercussions which an increased non-‘WASP’ (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) population might have on elections in the future. From this perspective, Donald Trump’s stance can be interpreted as a racist reaction by the most conservative sectors of the American constituency in ‘response’ to the progressive constituency that placed Barack Obama in the White House. Given that problem, policies need to be implemented to start changing the mindset of the still numerous segment of the United States population which opposes multiculturality. A sociological mindshift – analogous to the one Maja Göpel advocates for the economy – is most likely to be achieved through education. Bauböck stresses that “the public conception of national unity should be civic rather than ethnic so that immigrants of whatever origin can be recognized as full members” and “transform the public culture of the society in response to immigration.” A transnational citizenship formula that does not involve naturalization would help to ease the fears and reservations of the conservatives highlighted by Huntington (2004).
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“Nevertheless, a multinational interpretation of the immigrant experience has a strong presence in political and media discourses. In receiving societies this perspective may result in three different nationalist approaches to integration: First, a racist discourse on the danger of Überfremdung [The term is untranslatable. Literally it means ‘over-alienation’. It was part of the standard repertoire of National Socialist discourses on ethnic minorities and has recently re-emerged in the anti-foreigner campaigns of the Austrian Freedom Party] – the swamping of host nations by immigrant cultures. Immigrants are perceived as representing alien nations whose intermingling with the host nation should be prevented by stopping new entries, enforcing return and by keeping them segregated while they stay. Second, a culturalist discourse on the need for geographic dispersal and cultural assimilation as the precondition for political integration. In this view, distinct national identities of immigrants are not immutably given by their origins and descent, but they will be consolidated if immigrants form their own communities and maintain their cultural traditions. Third, a liberal discourse that promotes a civic national identity that can be shared by populations of native and immigrant origin. Immigrants are free to maintain distinct cultural and ethnic identities as long as they accept that these will not be promoted through state-sponsored programs of multiculturalism, but they are expected to abandon all political loyalties that tie them to their nations of origin” (Bauböck 2002a, b: 12).
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According to estimates by the National Institute of Statistics and the IOM (2016: 36), 2,301,175 Guatemalans out of approximately 16,545,589 Guatemalan inhabitants) are currently living and working in the United States.
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For example, de Wenden (2017: 92–93) mentions the case of the Mourides community and the role it played in the Senegal diaspora in France.
- 48.
The International Convention on the Protection of Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (ICPMW) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 45/158, dated 18 December 1990, which entered into force early in the twenty-first century, although even now it has not been ratified by the majority of countries receiving a significant influx of migrants.
- 49.
The concept of diaspora refers to people who leave their original homeland and settle elsewhere, but preserve the traditions and culture of their country of origin. In some cases, after residing legally in the host country for generations, the descendants of the original settlers return to their forebears’ country of origin, having recovered their nationality on the basis of jus sanguini.
- 50.
The dissociation between nationality and citizenship is one of the most significant changes to political rights that has occurred in Europe, as the right to vote in local elections has been granted to foreign citizens residing legally in fifteen European countries, including Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and some countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Additionally, by virtue of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, citizens from any member country of the European Union are allowed to vote in local elections from their place of residence, even if they are not nationals (de Wenden 2017: 114).
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Pries’s example of the successful integration of Mexican migrant workers in US society demonstrates that the Trump Administration’s intention to deny jus soli to Hispanic immigrants is not only racist but absolutely nonsensical.
- 52.
Smith defines cosmopolitism as follows: “Cosmopolitanism is a perspective in the study of international ethics that takes as its starting point the idea that all persons belong to a universal community of humanity and enjoy equal moral status as citizens of the world (Lu 2000). The idea that we belong to a community of humanity has been interpreted variously as a claim about the primary object of our sense of identity or allegiance (Nussbaum 1997), the contours of the moral landscape and the duties it imposes on us (Beitz 1999), and the appropriate structure of our political or legal arrangements (Held 1995). The contention that citizens of the world enjoy an equal moral status has also been interpreted in different ways: as a claim that all persons deserve to be shown some kind of equal respect or a claim that their interests deserve to be treated equally in a more substantive sense” (Smith 2007: 27–31); ‘Cosmopolitanism’, Jan 2013; at: http://internationalstudies.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-133.
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“The first principle is that the ultimate units of moral concern are individual human beings, not states or other particular forms of human association. …The second principle (human agency) is the ability not just to accept but to shape human community in the context of the choices of others and of Principle 3, of personal responsibility and accountability, (Principle 4) of consent (a commitment to equal worth and equal moral value, along with active agency and personal responsibility requires a non-coercive political process. … Principles 4 and 5 (‘a legitimate public decision is one that results from consent; this needs to be linked with voting at the decisive stage of collective decision-making and with the procedures and mechanism of the majority rule.) The sixth principle recognizes that if the decisions at issue are trans local, transnational or trans regional then political associations need not only to be locally based but also to have a wider scope and framework of operation. … The seventh principle is a leading principle of social justice: the principle of the avoidance of human harm and the amelioration of urgent need … and the eighth and final principle is the principle of sustainability. which specifies that all economical and social development must be consistent with the stewardship of the world core resources – by which I mean resources that are irreplaceable and non-substitutable”. See Held (2005) “Principles of Cosmopolitanism Order”, in: Anales de la Cátedra, Francisco Suárez, 39: 153–169; at: file:///C:/Users/IRIPAZ/Downloads/1030-1747-1-PB%20(1).pdf.
- 54.
Among the first to remember the importance of Kant on the topic was Habermas (2003: 11–16), who argues that the challenges posed by the great catastrophes of the twentieth century (the two World Wars) and by globalization have invigorated the Kantian ideals of cosmopolitanism, though he acknowledges that the Kantian vision of the eighteenth century cannot be repeated today. Habermas’s basic observation is that the Kantian ideal of world citizens’ rights is tremendously relevant today, just as it was in Kant’s time. Habermas also asserts that in order to reconstruct Kant’s idea of cosmopolitanism, it is essential to think like Kant but also to question his ideas, as Mignolo, and before him the German philosopher Apel (1922–2017), did.
- 55.
On the notion of a ‘World Parliament’, Archibugi states: “The dream of a world parliament is very old, coming back to the fore in particular in the last years (see Falk/Strauss 2003). Such an institution will be the natural and most effective way to bring together the peoples of the Earth, allowing them to deliberate on common issues. It is unlikely that such an organ will have effective powers (at least in the short term), but even as a forum of global public opinion it could have an important role in identifying what the real and the imagined differences are among various civilizations. Such a new institution should complement the UN General Assembly. In the last decade, such a proposal has been supported by a variety of authorities and institutions (for a list of the endorsers, see the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, at: http://en.unpacampaign.org/news/374.php). The basic function of a World Parliament is to allow individuals to have voice and representation in global affairs that is not associated with the voice and representation of the government of the state they belong to. This, in turn, is based on the assumption that the agendas of governments, even when democratically elected, do not necessarily correspond to the interests and the will of their population. A common forum of the citizens of the world is more likely to find workable solutions in cases of controversies. Some of these plans have envisaged a Parliament made of about 600 deputies with a criterion of representation that will favour delegations elected in small nations. According to the Charter, the UN General Assembly can establish such an organ. Such a legislative Assembly should not necessarily be involved in every aspect of global political life, but rather it would concentrate on the most relevant issues either for their impact on global life (such as the environment) or for their political significance (such as major violations of human rights). On other occasions, the World Parliamentary Assembly might limit itself to providing suggestions on what would be the most appropriate constituency to address issues that cut across borders. There are many transitional devices that can lead to the establishment of a directly elected World Parliament. The three principal ones are: i) the formation of an Assembly of the few thousand of International Non-Governmental Organizations recognized by the UN; ii) a Parliament made of representatives nominated by National Parliaments. The European Parliament, prior to the first direct election in 1979, followed this route; iii) a treaty between a selected number of like-minded states, in the hope that other states will follow. The institution of the ICC has followed this route” (Archibugi 2018: 10–11).
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Padilla, LA. (2021). Towards a Transnational Cosmopolitan Paradigm and Citizenship. In: Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene: Politik—Economics—Society—Science, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80399-5_6
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