Keywords

1 Introduction

Cosmopolitanism is, first and foremost, a normative idea about global justice, which represents one of the various proposals in dealing with the problem of migration (Brock, 2009; Caraus & Paris, 2019; Nail, 2015). This is contrasted with the traditional approach founded on a treaty-based conception of international law and state negotiations, which come together with the supposed right of a sovereign, that is, a state, to exclude by unilaterally controlling its borders (Walzer, 1983, p. 62). According to a certain view, the current failure of dealing successfully with the problem of migration can be attributed to a large extent to the failure of realising the consequences of and dealing with global interdependence under traditional international law.Footnote 1 For example, the failure of the European Union’s (EU) migration policies, so far, is characteristic of a solution-oriented logic that is premised on negotiations among sovereign states seeking to promote their relatively narrow national interests. The cosmopolitan alternative can take, in my view, different normative forms: (a) the first form recognises that we owe other people duties of humanitarian assistance beyond the state, but nothing more –this is a version of ‘moral cosmopolitanism,’ which I leave aside, because it just fails to go beyond morality; (b) the second form claims we have duties of justice to other people and the best institutional form would be a cosmopolitan order, either under the constitution of a world state (a solution that could notoriously create more problems for freedom), or under other supranational institutional forms; (c) the third form, which also claims we have cosmopolitan duties of justice, leaves open the floor for the possible institutional form they can take. This is also because it sees cosmopolitanism not only as a normative idea, which must be applied top-down, but having also a cognitive and epistemological dimension, which defines the self-understanding of (cosmopolitan) political community, that is based on the notion of cosmopolitan citizenship.Footnote 2

I will try to argue for the third normative form by describing and evaluating a particular instance of migrants’ protests, which occurred in Idomeni Greece during the so called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–16. Looking closely at migrants’ protests in this particular case, there seems to be a certain paradox, which I call ‘the paradox of citizenship.’ The paradox runs as follows: on the one hand, migrants protest against exclusionary policies of citizenship. If citizenship is allegedly always controlled by the state, migrants’ protests seem to contest exactly this authoritative power of citizenship to exclude and control who can enter, who can be a citizen and what citizenship means. This might plausibly create the impression that migrants dismiss the notion of ‘citizenship’ tout court. On the other hand, what they are asking for is a certain status, which, after careful thought, seems akin to citizenship. How can this be possible?Footnote 3 To be sure, there have been efforts to dissolve the paradox by completely scraping the notion of citizenship from what migrants are asking for, mainly by subsuming it under ‘freedom of movement’ and arguing for open borders. I will take another path here, arguing that migrants’ protests, as expressed in the example of Idomeni, Greece, can be interpreted as a revival and redefinition, under modern circumstances of justice, of the old notion of ‘cosmopolitan citizenship.’Footnote 4

2 Closed European Borders and Migrants’ Protests in Idomeni, Greece

It is especially in the case of state borders, that is, of controlling, crossing, and challenging them –a case that is placed at the centre of recent discussions across disciplines in Europe (El Qadim et al., 2020)– that what we have just called ‘the paradox of citizenship’ is particularly revealed. To this task the example of the closure of the European borders between Greece and the Republic of North Macedonia (former FYROM) in 2016 provides a useful and instructive case of migrants’ protests. On March 7, 2016, the EU heads of states and governments declared in Brussels that the illegalised flows of migrants across the East Balkan path had been blocked. This was the result of the closure of borders and the obstruction of their crossing from Greece to North Macedonia, which left more than 46,000 refugees and migrants trapped in continental Greece (Amnesty International, 2016, p. 2). At the same time EU’s promise that a legal way out from Greece for those applying for asylum would be found had remained unfulfilled to a large extent. According to information provided by the European Commission on April 12, 2016, only 615 out of 66,400 asylum seekers for whom there was a commitment that they would be relocated from Greece on September 2015, had moved to another EU member state. Lack of political will on behalf of the receiving countries and the alleged right for state borders control were the basic reasons. Amnesty International accused EU member states of being responsible for failing to implement the agreed system of relocation adopted by Dublin II and therefore for having trapped refugees and migrants in Greece (Amnesty International, 2016).

Until March 8, 2016, when North Macedonia’s borders closed permanently, the vast majority of refugees and migrants reaching Greece continued their journey towards other countries passing through Balkans.Footnote 5 This was the result of a number of reasons. A major reason was and still is the desire of several migrants to reunite with members of their family who live in safe and rich countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom. Another reason was the hope that they could receive help and support from communities of co-nationals that had already settled elsewhere. One last, yet equally important reason, was the complete lack of humane conditions or the ineffective and time-consuming procedures of getting asylum and papers or work permits in many of the receiving countries –a situation that characterised Greece as well. Actually, in the case of Greece the last issue was of particular importance as Greece was convicted in 2013 by the Court of the EU because of the inhumane conditions asylum seekers were experiencing.Footnote 6

The closure of borders between Greece and North Macedonia had the unfortunate result that more than 14,000 of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan (the so-called ‘SIA countries’) were trapped on the Greek side of the borders in Idomeni (The Guardian, 2016). There were extreme needs for food, medical help and shelter, something that had already started to be happening sporadically since 2015 when borders were also sealed at the same place (Amnesty International, 2015). The whole situation ended up in a severe humanitarian and migration governance crisis with people starving and having no shelter against weather conditions. Migrants became desperate since they could neither move forward nor go back. The Médicines sans Frontiers reported cases of refugees having met with severe violence from North Macedonia’s border police (Amnesty International, 2016, p. 10). No refugee was given the opportunity to explain her status or situation. This complex situation created progressively a massive feeling of anxiety, despair and anger. Migrants started, for the first time, to protest. Protests existed before both in Greece and elsewhere in Europe (Atac et al., 2016, pp. 528–9; Monforte & Dufour, 2013; Papataxiarchis Chap. 8 in this volume) but the claims now were different.

The protestors included immigrants, but also and mainly refugees from the SIA countries, who although formerly were allowed to use the Balkan route, they were now blocked because for the first time they were considered to be coming from Turkey that was now characterised as a ‘safe country.’ Their protests between March and May 2016 involved efforts to cross the borders, their refusal to abandon their camps for other places in continental Greece and the occupation of the railway connecting Greece to Europe through North Macedonia blocking all cargos from Piraeus port and creating chaos in Greece’s export flows to Europe. On March 14, 2016, several thousands of people who had been stuck in Idomeni for days or even weeks set off on what was later called a March of Hope and tried to cross into the territory of the Republic of North Macedonia at a place several kilometers away from Idomeni, where no fence had been built, but failed dramatically (Anastasiadou et al., 2017, pp. 61–63). Furthermore, on 23 March 2016, almost 500 migrants blocked the highway from Thessaloniki to North Macedonia, only 1 day after two migrants tried to set themselves on fire in the Idomeni camp. More than 2 months still followed before the Idomeni camp was evicted for good in late May 2016, and during this time migrants kept staging protests and blockades at borders, on the railroad tracks and on the highway, and acts of self-harm, like hunger strikes and lip-sewing, continued to take place (ibid., pp. 63–64).

What is important for us here is basically the claims put forward by migrants. Traditionally, migrants’ claims either refer to advocacy for human rights, humanitarian aid, a fair asylum process and access to labor markets or involve resistance to deportation. The case of Idomeni can be interpreted as an overall different paradigm on two fronts: (a) it presented a paradigm of migrants’ protests, which meant, as shown above, that contrary to most situations, where migrants were passive receivers of aid, they this time took a more active role. One should note here that humanitarian aid, as practiced mainly by Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) or grassroots movements, portrayed an image of victimhood regarding migrants, not only in the sense of innocence, but equally in the sense of powerlessness. Of course, this does not perhaps apply to every single NGO that is activated in the field, nevertheless, a paramount part of the logic of humanitarian assistance in the form of satisfying many of the aforementioned claims reduces migrants’ subjectivity to less than full agency, metaphorically speaking. Sometimes migrants internalise this image and are led to self-victimisation. This was not the case for migrants in Idomeni examined here. (b) It presented a case where protesting took a specific content. Now protesting was about border controls or to be more accurate, the complete ban of border crossing for migrants.Footnote 7 Protests that challenged border controls showed an ‘amazing stubbornness’ (Mezzadra, 2020, pp. 433–434) on behalf of people that did not want to be treated as mere victims but wanted to have their views heard and respected by others despite their not being citizens of the receiving countries.

More specifically, such protests against borders closure, although grounded in a specific context, contested frameworks and assumptions that were also wider in scope. Their targets were not only the particular state they were in, but also the EU’s policies, so their goal was not just articulated in terms of state citizenship, but in terms of something autonomous and independent from it, claiming a distinct political subjectivity detached from any membership in a particular political community. Through protesting migrants constituted themselves as autonomous political agents, and therefore their status was no longer defined by the state they happened to be, but by the very act of contestation. This was moreover interestingly articulated in their refusal to be represented by Greek citizens or NGOs who acted in solidarity to them.Footnote 8 What exactly did they claim and in virtue of what? Did they simply claim their human right to freedom of movement, or something else? We need to find the right conceptual language for comprehending this political subjectivity. This is, in my view, not just a thoroughly descriptive endeavor, but a distinct normative enterprise.

3 Open Borders: Freedom of Movement or Finding a Place in the World?

Contrary to much of the contemporary literature on migration and borders, I would like to stress the importance and the persistence of the notion of citizenship itself, casting some further light on the ‘paradox of citizenship’ mentioned above. It is true that much of contemporary thought on migration, both of liberal and post-marxist origins, argues for the case for open borders and freedom of movement, instead of citizenship.Footnote 9 On the one hand, certain liberals argue that citizenship is as arbitrary a factor, as race, sex and ethnicity for justifying inequalities. Closed borders create injustices, because they differentiate rights based upon one’s origins or political allegiances (Carens, 1987; Carens, 2013). Post-marxists, on the other hand, argue that at the normative level citizenship is always a restriction of mobility, thus at the same time a restriction of freedom (of movement) to cross borders. At the descriptive level, it is also argued that migrants who cross borders do not want to be integrated into the institutional regime of the first hosting country but want to move on. To be sure, movement is part of their identity as migrants. Migration then is autonomous in the sense that it has the capacity to develop its own logics and its own motivation. This has been called ‘autonomy of migration thesis’ (Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013, p. 184).

In my view, both defenses of the case for freedom of movement and open borders fail for various reasons I cannot pursue here in detail but suffice it to mention here the core issues (Hossein, 2013; Owen, 2014; Wilcox, 2009). First, it is revealing that, at the descriptive level, migrants do not ultimately aim at mobility, but the opposite. It is because they are forced to move for reasons of persecution, personal liberty and poor income, that they long for a place where they can feel at home, that is, they can be treated as free and equals.Footnote 10 Second, and at the normative level, our duties towards migrants are sometimes reductively described as duties to protect and enforce their fundamental human right to free movement. I think this is neither what they are asking for, nor what we owe them as a matter of priority. Freedom of movement however important it may be for enhancing autonomy retains, nevertheless, an instrumental value. By definition, movement presumes direction towards a destination (literally and metaphorically speaking) and it is connected with certain goals to be achieved (fleeing from danger, association with others, professional career etc.). The instrumental approach explains why the importance of mobility is a changing parameter.Footnote 11 In the end, freedom of movement takes value and gets importance when it is equally accompanied by a certain status that protects people from being forced to move and secures that they get to decide for themselves where to move to, should other considerations apply. Otherwise, we just talk about the movement of automata, that is, creatures that perform functions according to predetermined instructions, as long as there are no external obstacles to this. However, this is neither a descriptively accurate nor a normatively satisfactory picture.

Hannah Arendt, a migrant, and refugee herself, described in 1951 what is at stake in migration flows nowadays. Her writings on the status of refugees are in my view still relevant and pregnant with important and revealing insights. Migrants, whom Arendt calls ‘rightless,’ suffer from the loss of their homes in the sense of a loss of the entire social texture into which they were born. This means they have lost, in her terminology, a place in the world, ‘which makes opinions significant and actions effective.’ In another formulation ‘they are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action, not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion.’Footnote 12 Together with a loss of government protection migrants have therefore lost what she has famously called as the ‘right to have rights.’ She finally argues that ‘[m]an, it turns out can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him from humanity’ (Arendt, 2004 [1951], pp. 376–377).

According to Arendt’s argument, it seems that there is an important connection between humanity, rights and membership in a polity, or, in other words, the status of citizenship. In Arendt’s conception, humanity is not just being conceived in abstracto but in concreto, which means that it can be sustained and developed not by mere reference to nature or history, but to a specific institutional order. For example, in the social contract tradition outside a political community one finds herself in the so called ‘state of nature,’ a condition variously described as fear of sudden death, insecurity, vulnerability to the arbitrary will of another, and so on. In that sense, every human being has the right and the duty to enter with others and constitute a political community, that is a state. This is the meaning of Arendt’s ‘right to have rights,’ conceived as a universalistic foundation of citizenship. Now, to be sure, the ‘right to have rights’ is not just another right, at least not of the same plane as the rest of rights, but a political status that everyone must enjoy in order to participate in humanity and in order to enjoy other rights (Michelman, 1996). This particular status means one has a voice, a capability to speak and find an addressee for her claims –this is what having a ‘place’ in the world really means. Nevertheless, ιt is most of the times argued that migrants’ status –in our case refugees’ status– should be normatively defined either as a severe basic human rights violation, or more extensively, as a threat of suffering serious harm that undermines human dignity.Footnote 13 Both approaches lead to the claim that we have duties to provide aid, because migrants are above all human beings and in order for them not to lose their humanity, conceived as life, food, movement etc. we should protect them. Open borders are therefore conceived as a human rights or humanitarian correction to the state’s right to self-determination. Yet, I think, this is not the whole story.

Hannah Arendt goes much deeper than the aforementioned two approaches, both at the level of normative foundation and of the nature and scope of accompanying duties. Loss of a place in the world, that is, loss of a home is not unprecedented in history. ‘What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home, but the impossibility of finding a new one’ (Arendt, 2004 [1951], p. 372). The problem is not one of overpopulation, but of political organisation. Furthermore, she argues:

The trouble is that this calamity arose not from any lack of civilisation, backwardness, or mere tyranny, but on the contrary, that it could not be repaired, because there was no longer any ‘uncivilised’ spot on earth, because whether we like it or not, we have really started to live in One World. Only with a completely organised humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether (emphasis mine) (Arendt, 2004 [1951], pp. 376–377).

Arendt’s insight is therefore that what is lost cannot be regained at will, because under current circumstances of justice what she calls ‘One World’ also constitutes the figure of the migrant in our times. Taken at its face value, this argument shows that borders and especially unilaterally border controlling does not just separate places through states, but unify what is separated, otherwise migrants would find themselves in a desert when crossing borders, not in the territory of a foreign state. Thus, we are not merely talking about separate states, but about a unified space that, conceived systematically as the total aggregate of interconnected ‘places,’ excludes whoever has lost what everybody else enjoys. This form of interaction and interdependence creates duties of justice, not just moral duties, because, in that sense, borders can be coercive or dominating when excluding people merely because they are not members of the polity. Exclusion in our sense here means without adequate justification (Abizadeh, 2008, also Koukouzelis, 2019b). From the point of view of the excluded, the latter is already the victim of such a political organisation.

The force of Arendt’s argument is, I think, still, unappreciated or, to say the least, partially appreciated. On the one hand, everyone should have the right to be a member of a particular polity. However, on the other hand, who might have the duty to fulfill this right? There are, of course, states that can do more than others in fulfilling their duties towards migrants, because of their economic power. However, the crux of our argument is that, if it is this political organisation that victimises migrants all states should change their attitude towards them, not because the latter are human beings with certain human rights, but because migrants are thus prevented to act as citizens within a political organisation that already includes them only to ultimately exclude them (Cohen & Van Hear, 2019).

I think this is one of the lessons migrants’ protests teach us. There is a sense that the moment of exclusion makes people migrants, whereas the moment of inclusion reminds us that the same people, conceived before as migrants, are already citizens of a common world. The case of Idomeni, Greece, was one that unveiled efforts to reclaim such a status. When migrants protested, they protested as cosmopolitan citizens.

4 Migrants as Cosmopolitan Citizens

Let us first try to recapitulate and come to a preliminary conclusion. Opening borders and allowing for mere freedom of movement is doubly misguided. First, migrants do not ask to be treated merely as humans, because they do not protest or contest borders as humans, but as (former) citizens who have lost this essential feature that makes their humanity something more than membership in a biological species. Migrants’ protests in Idomeni were an example of this. Second, what we owe them is not just humanitarian assistance, not even just granting them the right not to be deported (non- refoulement), but a specific kind of protection, which goes beyond survival or protecting physical existence. Freedom needs space, albeit not in the sense of geographical space (which is not unlimited), but in the sense of a ‘place’ in a political community (Arendt, 2005, p. 170; Lindahl, 2004, p. 478). Such an approach has further consequences on two fronts. First, focusing exclusively on freedom of movement only works along with a misconception of migrants’ statuses conceived as mere nomadic populations who are rootless. This does not entail that freedom of movement across borders is not important, yet it is not the major characteristic of refugeehood. Second, it puts pressure on the recent ad hoc solutions promoted by the EU, which involve the politics of funding detention camps in the so called ‘secure’ receiving or third countries that supposedly guarantee, at least, survival.

Let us unpack these claims. First, we have in front of us a completely organised world that also has a spherical shape, which means it is finite, as Kant reminds us in The Metaphysics of Morals (Kant, 1996 [1797], p. 489). Second, it is after all a matter of place in the normative meaning of the word, our place in the world, and the impossibility for migrants to find their place in it. It is therefore not a matter of state sovereignty or international relations, but a matter of cosmopolitics, not just morality. In virtue of these two features every human being in this world is at the same time a cosmopolitan citizen. Such a strong statement could attract accusations that we are arguing either for too much, or for too little. Too much, for without a (world) state any talk about citizenship is futile; too little, for mere change of terminology achieves nothing. Nevertheless, arguing for such a status –and citizenship is such a status concept– silences any misleading discussion of whether migrants can be ‘allowed’ to be present somewhere in the world. Migrants are already citizens of a common world of interaction, which means that they should enjoy the status of non-domination by exercising at a minimum the normative anti-power to contest. Without such a normative capacity even a system of human rights can become a system of infantilisation, fostering what we termed in the case of Idomeni as victimhood.Footnote 14 This does not of course give migrants any right to secure permanent settlement, no further criteria applied, but gives them the recognition that whatever is decided for them by citizens of the hosting state or of any state can and should be contested on a fair basis. Note here that this might imply that if such a ‘place’ could be secured or re-established back in the polity migrants have lost, then the duties of justice would have been fulfilled. Admittedly this also puts pressure on dealing with the structural causes of transnational migration, which include, but are not limited to, environmental risks, such as climate change, as long as there is a fundamental lack of the ability to claim remedies regarding the situation other than flight.Footnote 15

Migrants’ protests, as described in the case of Idomeni, can be conceived as a kind of ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ (Ingram, 2016; Kurasawa, 2004; Nail, 2015). These protests provide empirical manifestations of cosmopolitan citizenship through their engagement with a transnational mode of contestation of border controls. In that sense, they challenge methodological nationalism regarding borders. One of the errors of methodological nationalism is that it naturalises borders, which are taken as natural walls, something that is surprisingly enough given the borderless flows of goods and services worldwide. To be sure, borders demarcate politically organised communities, which are self-determined and are necessary because politics must occur somewhere. Nevertheless, they are still social constructions and need to be justified externally, because, as we have seen, they can dominate non-members. The local should be aware how it is connected to other localities and/or non-members, who have lost state citizenship.Footnote 16

Our notion of ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ bears differences, but also some affinities with other similar notions proposed, past and present. Two examples should be enough for our purposes here. First, our notion should be distinguished from the view that migrants’ struggles put in motion a new notion of citizenship, which is formed in and through relations of solidarity that transcends boundaries. The inspiration for that comes from the notion of ‘international citizenship,’ which, according to Michel Foucault (1981) who put it forward, ‘is obliged to stand up against all forms of abuses of power, no matter who commits them, no matter who are the victims. After all, we are all governed, and, by that fact, joined in solidarity.’ Although useful, if taken as a kind of ‘supplementary citizenship’ (Gordon, 2015) the use of solidarity is too quick and neither corresponds directly to migrants’ claims, as presented here, nor is sufficiently political. Second, there is a certain affinity with the notion of ‘citizens without frontiers,’ which wants to describe migrants’ actions that do not only involve physical crossing of borders, but actions that question the very idea of borders (Isin, 2012, pp. 11–12). Furthermore, it exactly sees acts of contestation as acts of citizenship, which transform migrants into ‘acting subjects’ or, in other words, citizens not attached to any specific body politic, but to something that challenges constituted forms of authority, legitimacy and belonging (Caraus, 2018, p. 801). Nevertheless, although it escapes the shortcomings of the one-sided insistence on freedom of movement, this approach gives too much weight on the performative value ‘acts of citizenship’ have, and completely misses the normative content the notion of ‘place’ brings in the discourse. Migrants’ protests instantiate what citizenship means: the capacity to be heard and address people who cannot just unjustifiably dismiss one’s claims.Footnote 17

However, there are also some potential objections. One of them that could be raised to our argument here would be that not all, indeed very few, migrants conceive themselves as cosmopolitan citizens. Migrants can be diverse with many of them having different agendas or wishing to be assimilated to nationalist narratives, therefore they fear rather than endorse cosmopolitanism. This is true as far as protests contain a rich mixture of motives. Yet, first, I do not think this is relevant because migrants’ protests only show that their civic activity (contestation) is not exclusively defined or demarcated by the state they are currently in but should be a part of a more fundamental political status, ascribed to their humanity. Second, cosmopolitan citizenship does not lead to a denial of one’s particular identity. Politics of assimilation has proved to be wrong-headed, and cosmopolitanism is not about the imposition of a single substantive identity, but a political status. Migrants’ protests claim a voice, that is, repeating Arendt’s words, they claim a place in the world, ‘which makes opinions significant and actions effective.’ Third, migrants’ protests have a cognitive and epistemological dimension. As mentioned above, migrants constitute themselves as political agents. There is also a process of translation going on through the activity of contestation. They bring new interpretations of rights, and they also acquire a critical reflexive capacity that might have not existed before. Claiming cosmopolitan citizenship migrants reconnect cosmopolitanism with its Kantian meaning, that is, learning and the expansion of our own horizons. In that sense they broaden the scope of the demos, which extends as far as justification goes.Footnote 18

Despite the current shortcomings of the EU’s migration policies there has been a recent effort on behalf of the EU to present itself as the laboratory of turning the idea of cosmopolitan citizenship into reality. The Lisbon and Rome Treaties defined a new kind of citizenship –European citizenship– as additional to that of the member states. This was built around a ‘free movement’ discourse yet recognised that this should be accompanied by a certain political status. EU citizens who reside in a member state of which they are not nationals have the right to vote and stand as candidates at local elections and in the elections of the European Parliament. In that case the Lisbon Treaty proposed ‘enacting European citizenship’ as it connected citizenship with action that gives individuals the right to make claims to legal and political forms of access to rights –in Arendt’s formulation the ‘right to have rights.’Footnote 19

Our aim in this chapter was mainly to contribute some fresh thoughts to the ongoing debate on migrant mobilities. I take it that the conceptualisation of migrants’ protests in Idomeni, Greece, as part of migrants’ reclaiming a particular status, opens the field for rethinking whether it is truly mobility that matters or something else that comes prior to it. By realising that their urge for protesting is a manifestation of their lost status of citizenship on which they have a claim our contribution seems utterly to be that it is high time that migrants should be treated not just as human beings, but as cosmopolitan citizens. I will conclude by noting that migrants claim cosmopolitanism in yet another respect, which shows why cosmopolitanism is primarily a political concept, not just a moral one, because it reveals itself not as an idealisation of humanity, but as a political concretisation of humanity. This is both a matter of justice and of urgent importance to us. Arendt argues with much insight: ‘The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilisation may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages’ (Arendt, 2004 [1951], p. 384). The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant. I hope it will also be the century of cosmopolitan citizenship.