Keywords

According to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, contemporary democracies should be based on the principle that every human being is equal in terms of rights and duties, regardless of their origin and residence. However, in many respects, the reality does not correspond to this principle. This is not only because of the inequalities of rights and resources among those who live permanently within current national states but also because there are inequalities in social and political rights between long- and short-term residents. The tension between democratic citizenship as a norm and its application in territorial states raises a series of relevant questions that political sociology has partially sought to address over the past few decades: Who can access and reside in a given territory? Who is legitimately part of the political community in that territorial space? Who defines and how is citizenship defined? Does it correspond to nationality? What territorial boundaries should the demos have?

Many of these questions may seem unimportant in a territorial state with a stable population in a peaceful international system, but they become highly relevant when there is a reshuffling of populations, intense and unpredictable migration processes and increasing interdependence between territories and peoples belonging to nation-states and different democratic regimes. What happens when the boundaries of citizenship lose their clarity and stability, i.e. when a gap opens up between social and demographic changes and the state regulatory framework governing membership of the category of citizens with political rights?

Citizenship is a very old concept and has taken on different meanings since the times of Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic. If a hard core is to be identified, according to Marshall (1950), it denotes the status of belonging to a self-governing political community, with the rights and duties that flow from this status. However, the transformation of status, rights and territorial belongings in recent decades requires a reconsideration of the concept of citizenship. In their Handbook of Global Citizenship, Isin and Nyers (2014: 1) adopt a very broad definition of citizenship as “an institution mediating rights between the subjects of politics and the polity to which these subjects belong”. Asking who is part of a politically defined territory brings the territory as a space for inclusion and the exercise of democratic rights back to the centre of reflection. Therefore, it becomes crucial to understand the relationship between settledness and mobility, civil and political rights, citizenship and nationality, democracy and human rights. In this sense, a territory-oriented approach to politics is crucial to understanding some of the major tensions that mark contemporary democracies.

Population and People

Asking “to whom does the territory belong?” should, at first glance, lead to a simple answer: its population. Population is a constitutive feature of any territorial unit. Usually, there is no territory without population. There are, however, several ways to interpret population. If the approach is demographic, population is considered in terms of births, deaths and migration processes; if the approach is social, it focuses on groups that are less integrated, marginalised or excluded and those who do or do not enjoy full rights. The prevailing connotation of the population is that of a human group seen through its objective characteristics. The emphasis is on its qualification as belonging to a territory understood as a space over which state control is exercised: Population becomes the means by which one questions who resides there, hence, who is “controlled” by the political institutions. It matters little what the subjective opinions of the population are. Rather, the focus is on collective traits, ignoring the fact that the population is an aggregate of individuals who, at least in part, are granted the status of citizens.

When referring to the notion of citizen, the question arises as to which segments of the population present in a territory at a given time are entitled to make political decisions about that territory. Certain categories, such as minors and other persons without political rights, are excluded, even though these same categories are included in the population. This also applies to individuals and groups without nationality, which is recognised as a condition of political rights. It also applies to those who have some rights but not others to which they aspire, for example, a linguistic minority population within a territorial state.

In any case, it seems typical, and this is also true in current democratic regimes, that the decisions of a segment of the population apply to a larger whole that has no way of opposing that decision. In other words, the population does not entirely coincide with the people, that is, the entity designated as having the legitimate power to decide the fate of the community itself. As sociologist Margaret Canovan (2005) points out, each political regime in the Western tradition relies on the people as the source of legitimacy for its actions, its constitution and any changes, including state boundaries. In a representative democracy, the same normative principle also applies. At the centre is the power of democratic control of political elites through the rules and practice of elections. At the same time, political elites, once elected, are called upon to put the will of the people into practice. Although many proponents of contemporary democracies believe the real power resides—and must reside—with political representatives, this does not negate the necessary character of popular sovereignty as the supreme authority for the legitimacy of political representatives, who are selected by the people.

However, if we look at how the term is used in modern democracies, “people” is an ambiguous category. In his in-depth treatment of the concept, Giovanni Sartori (1987: 22 ff.) identifies as many as six meanings: an entity that encompasses everyone, in principle the whole of humanity; an indistinct large part; a group of disadvantaged classes; an indivisible entity, an organic whole; an absolute majority; and a majority limited by the rights of minorities. Each of these meanings recalls different origins and reflects the multiple uses of the term in contemporary politics, words, while “people” sometimes tends to coincide with the “population” as a demographic notion, in other meanings, it is an organ endowed with political authority: people refers as a group of citizens, which are defined as a subject with rights and duties. However, in the uses identified by Sartori, it is assumed that people are a fixed entity that does not change in space and time, and that, as such, it is taken for granted, and that the exercise of popular authority occurs within an homogenous territorial space. In other words, as political theorist Paulina Ochoa Espejo (2014: 466) notes, as it is usual in democratic political theorists, the people are understood as a stable entity, defined once and for all, irrespective of the global transformation of contemporary democracies. Consequently, determining who, among the population, is legitimately part of the people as a community of citizens, that is the boundaries of the people, should be a key issue (Canovan, 1996: 18).

Democratic Authority and Territorial Rights

The first issue concerns the collective dimension of the people as an authority called upon to decide about an established territorial space. If we start from the assumption that the people are the supreme authority politically legitimising control over a territorial space, the people are also the authority that legitimises the exercise of territorial rights. What are territorial rights? They may include a very broad and articulated set of rights: jurisdictional rights over people within the territory; jurisdictional rights over resources within the territory; property rights over resources; and who has the authority to determine residence, immigration and citizenship rights over the territory (Nine, 2012: 12). Thus, territorial rights are assumed to have the force of law over the territory understood as a homogeneous and all-encompassing entity. However, one may ask to what extent it is legitimate to claim control over resources and people (Wellman, 2020). In principle, does the territorial state always have the right to make and enforce the law on its territory? Can it exploit the natural resources available on its territory? Can it design and enforce its immigration policy as it sees fit? Assuming that natural resources are to be understood as belonging exclusively to the country in which they are found, one would have to conclude that, for example, the Brazilian people or their representatives have the right to deforest the Amazon to increase their economic well-being. If a part of the country does not identify with the territorial state (or no longer does), which people should decide the fate of that part? Considering the Brazilian people as sovereign, however, does not necessarily include the interests of the indigenous peoples, who are also Brazilian citizens. Moreover, insofar as the exploitation of the natural resources of South America’s largest democracy affects the eco-system of the entire world, a tension between state sovereignty and citizenship as a transnational phenomenon emerges.

The fact that the people can be defined by certain enduring and homogenous traits is a political construction. The people as an enduring and homogenous entity are the product of a territorial strategy that, using the instruments of law, defines and selects those who from the current population who are to be considered the people as a group with shared political authority.

The population as a demographic concept entails a strong internal heterogeneity, as happens in multinational states (which are composed, for example, of populations of different languages). High diversity also emerges in nomadic or disputed territories, where there is a jurisdictional disagreement. In the case of autonomist or secessionist tendencies, it is indeed part of the dispute to know which people have authority over the legitimate territorial space. The question is to know which democratic regime guaranteed by the national state can legitimately disregard the aspirations of a minority that considers itself discriminated against. In some ways, this is a conundrum that can only be solved through political confrontation, repression or processes of autonomy or separation. A more fundamental—but also a paradoxical—question arises: While the people are the sovereign authority, it is not clear who designates them. According to democratic principles, the people should vote to decide who forms part of the people. But if we need a vote to demarcate the demos, on what basis do we choose who gets to vote to define it? It is a vicious circle that it is often resolved with non-democratic criteria (Ochoa Espejo, 2011).

Citizenship, Nationality and Boundaries

A related key question is determining who, as an individual or group, can legitimately be considered part of the sovereign people, in other words, to whom territorial belonging and related political rights should be granted. The answer is quite simple if one is born and grows up in a more or less stable democratic regime: This is what nation-building in Europe since the second half of the nineteenth century has established in terms of a kind of overlap between nationality and citizenship in mutually exclusive belonging (Habermas, 1992).

Before the modern state, a citizen was defined by residing in the territory, having a certain socio-economic status and paying taxes (Gellner, 1983). There was a passive acceptance of many senses of belonging, and the issue of loyalty to political institutions was all but marginal. With the emergence of national states and liberal democracies since the end of the eighteenth century, however, the principle became established that citizenship primarily concerns culturally homogeneous societies founded on nation-states. The principle of national citizenship became a pillar of the development of the modern state, especially after the French Revolution (Bauböck, 1994; Mackert & Turner, 2017). However, nation-building is also a product of state action and its functioning. As Charles Maier points out: “The authority of states is generally based on the control of territory and its inhabitants. State entities, for the most part, have been seen to police the behaviour, feelings of loyalty, and often the beliefs of those residing within their borders” (Maier, 2014: 26). Indeed, the development of the modern system of states implies an increasing role of institutions in categorising populations and developing demarcations, with the consequence of making some identities more legitimate than others. This involves not only observation and mapping but also the socialisation and stabilisation of a population within a delimited territorial space (Scott, 1998: 2–3, 76–77, 81). This process is expressed, first and foremost, as the construction of a national identity and a people expressing common origins and history. National identity becomes the foundation of citizenship and an indispensable criterion for being included in the people as a sovereign authority. The issue becomes even more crucial when, with the extension of suffrage, the citizen is called upon to decide the fate of the community through the exercise of the vote within the framework defined by the nation-state. The synthesis of people, nation and (individual) citizenship reflects a continuity between the era of nation-state consolidation in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, when European states saw the greatest national mobilisation in their history (Hobsbawm, 1994; Mosse, 2023). In this sense, the rise of nationalism, the modern state, citizenship and political democracy are closely intertwined. The argument can be expressed as follows:

Democratic legitimacy and popular sovereignty require that persons subject to the law and state authority be included, as of right, in the process of forming and exercising that authority. The exercise of state authority primarily concerns those who live under the jurisdiction of that authority. Since states are geographically delimited communities and their borders express the limits of their jurisdictions, democratic states generally have good reason to limit participation in the political process to those who reside within their territorial boundaries. (Rubio-Marin, 2006: 129)

This model was consolidated in the twentieth century, while the notion of citizenship has been expanded as underlined by Thomas Humphrey Marshall in his classic essay “Citizenship and social class”, published in 1950. The development of the “universalist” (i.e. inclusive) welfare state and economic growth after the Second World War contributed to unprecedented access to social dimensions of citizenship for a larger part of population.

However, three important challenges for the tradition model of citizenship have arisen in the past few decades. In the European continent, he first was the introduction with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 of European citizenship, allowing some voting rights and free circulation of persons for EU citizens and associated members of the Schengen Agreement. Moreover, the European national state increasingly recognised binationality, trinationality or more. European citizenship is an important example to partially disentangle citizenship and nationality, although the latter is still crucial. The second challenge is the crisis of universalist models of welfare state under the pressure of neoliberalism, which undermines inclusiveness while boosting individual responsibility and workfare as constraints for social benefits. And the third challenge is the rise of global migration, which has had a strong impact on European countries within and from outside, with an increasing proportion of foreign workers and inhabitants.

Geographical mobility has become the main feature of European integration. More and more individuals live in countries where they were not born and raised. Population movements in recent decades have been among the most intense in contemporary history, especially in terms of immigration to Western (in particular, European) countries. The annual UNHCR Global Trends report of 2019 reveals that, at the end of that year, refugees amounted to an unprecedented figure of 79.5 million people. In its World Migration Report 2020, the UN International Organization for Migration notes that the total number of migrants represents 272 million people out of an estimated world population of 7.7 billion. While a very large majority of people globally reside in the country of their birth (96.5%), more than half of all international migrants (around 141 million) have found their way to Europe and North America.

As a consequence of intense migration processes, but also as a result of the recognition of the principle of universal human rights, which broadens the attribution of rights to people of different nationalities, the capacity for stabilisation and population control within territorial has diminished. Moreover, processes of downward and upward reconfiguration of institutional powers, as in the case of European construction, as well as the cultural fallout of globalisation, have contributed to redefining and models of citizenship in relation to rights of migrants (Isin & Nyers, 2014).

The Migration Challenge

Democratic regimes, especially wealthier countries belonging to the so-called first world, including European countries, are facing consequences of economic globalisation, the effects of wars, poverty and spatial socio-economic inequalities. Meanwhile, transnational migratory flows of people contribute to the rise of a multicultural society and in a context of strong demographic shift. An unprecedented mixture of cultures, lifestyles and affiliations goes along with a decrease in fertility and an overall ageing of the population, as well as growing labour needs. Public opinion, intellectuals and politicians are divided on how best to respond to migration challenges.

The first orientation, promoted first and foremost by economic elites and large supranational organisations, sees immigration as an economic resource. Immigration is seen as a way to meet the demand for labour in various industries and to sustain the welfare state and pension systems. It is believed that immigration can not only co-exist with but also contribute to preserving society’s standard of living and welfare. Therefore, it is considered that a more or less significant share of immigrants from Western or non-Western countries can integrate into the productive world, in particular by making up for the deficiencies of the indigenous labour force, and contribute to the financing of welfare through taxes. Here, a distinction is made between immigration and the recognition of political rights, where the latter is not considered a primary objective. Immigration need not change the boundaries of the people. The second orientation, advocated by many NGOs and left-wing political movements, is that the goal should be the political integration of migrants on the basis of the principle of people understood as bearers of human rights. This position conceives citizenship as being detached from individual nation-state membership, according to Article 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “everyone has the right everywhere to the recognition of his legal personality”.

The third interpretation, of which the constellation of the nationalist and sovereignist right is an expression, focuses on the danger represented by a multicultural society. In contrast to the first, this narrative sees immigration as a threat to welfare and well-being, as well as national identity. In the United States, it is a view shared by various intellectual strands ranging from the alt-right movement, with its aspiration for a right based on the rejection of equality (Main, 2018), to political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose volume Clash of Civilisations (2000) is one of the most-cited books in contemporary political science, and especially Who Are We? The Challenges of American Political Identity (2004), in which he stresses the threats to America from large-scale immigration by Latin Americans, which he says could “divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures and two languages”. Huntington goes so far as to call for immigrants to be forced to “adopt English” and for the United States to turn to “Protestant religions” to “save itself from the threats” of Latin and Islamic immigrants. In France, writers Michel Houellebecq and Renaud Camus have played a prominent public role in calling out the threat that they perceive Islam as posing to the West. Camus is best known for his book The Great Replacement, published in 2011, in which he asserts the existence of a conspiracy by global elites to replace white and Christian European peoples with black immigrants from other cultures and religions, particularly Muslims.

In short, the nexus between immigration and citizenship informs one of the major ideological-political cleavages that characterise Western democratic regimes on both sides of the Atlantic. The politicisation of immigration was anticipated in Europe in the 1960s by the movements of the ecological right, especially of German culture, influenced by eugenics. For this right wing, hostility to the arrival of immigrants was intended to protect the territory, national culture and the natural environment from foreign tendencies and demographic excesses. Like a karst river, the issue resurfaced in different forms in the 1980s and 1990s with the success of nationalist and sovereignist right-wing parties in Europe and the United States. The result was a politicisation of the link between borders, population and identity and claims for a territory understood as an authentic and ancestral bond jeopardised by multiculturalism.

One of the most relevant intellectual justifications of anti-immigrant stance is differentialist racism (Taguieff, 2001). This kind of racism does not claim superiority of some races over others but considers that the only way to defend one’s own is to avoid any form of hybridisation that is considered unnatural—that is, it is based on a principle of territorial exclusivity, according to which the foreigner should stay at home. The territory is understood as a bordered space of national belonging, consisting of a people with a homogeneous cultural foundation based on a specific civilisation or race. It is seen as a bulwark to be defended against the arrival of different cultures perceived as a threat. In Sack’s terms, differential racism strategically filters access to the territory as a protective space. This strategy stresses group belonging, such as religious communities, but also concerns individuals, hence the immigrant’s ability to integrate—or rather, assimilate—national customs and traditions.

Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion

Together with racial differentialism and similar narratives, the citizenship should strictly correspond to nationality and interpreted as antagonistic to universalism and cosmopolitanism. Thus, a tension arises between the universal ideal of human rights, which advocates individual freedoms and equal rights, irrespective of religion, race, language or culture, and the defence of cultural identities and native groups experiencing forms of vulnerability. This tension is not only between universalism and particularism but also inherent in national citizenship. It could be said that the “modern form of the nation is both universal and particular” (Benhabib 2005: 674). In its universal dimension, the idea of a people as humanity emerges, whereby all human beings are bearers of rights. In its particular dimension, people are the expression of specific rights of citizens within certain borders. This creates a tension between the rights prescribed by nation-states and the rights of those who do not benefit from despite being considered, in principle, part of humanity and entitled to rights. This tension exists between claims of territorial sovereignty and international human rights, particularly in relation to the rights of others (e.g. immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers). In this context, determining who constitutes the people and citizen today (i.e. who is also part of the political community and assumes the rights and duties of this membership) (Leydet, 2017) invokes the unresolved problem of the boundaries of the people, hence who enjoys the rights of citizenship in a changing society.

The issue is not only theoretical or ideological but also embodied in the migration policies that characterise nation-states, particularly those of the so-called first world. Each nation-state specifically regulates access to political rights for non-nationals. The main route is undoubtedly the so-called naturalisation, that is the acquisition of nationality as a prerequisite for citizenship. Some countries follow the principle of jus soli, according to which naturalisation is secured by birth in the territory, while others adhere to jus sanguinis, that is, the acquisition from a parent or descendant already in possession of nationality. However, there are wide nuances in application. For example, in countries where jus sanguinis is in force, there are many different approaches to the duration of residence and to verifying that the potential citizen demonstrates legitimate characteristics and aspirations to be part of the community. Although there is no clear trend, two somewhat opposing trends in Western migration policies seem to be emerging.

In most European countries, rules of citizenship are now more open and accessible than in the past. There are three relevant trends that corroborate this shift: The first concerns the softening, in many countries, of ethnic criteria for access to citizenship through the introduction of jus soli aspects; the second is the acceptance of dual (or multiple) citizenship, which constitutes a turning point in recent decades. Exclusive nationality had been a well-established principle in the twentieth century but is now in decline. The third aspect concerns the aforementioned role of the human rights regime, related to its increasing use in national and supranational courts as a principle for the defence of migrants’ rights (Jacobson & Goodwin-White, 2018). The consequence of these trends is the formal weakening of national identity as a component of citizenship, as well as an overall decrease in the rights and opportunities associated with citizenship as such (Joppke, 2010; Spiro, 2009).

The trend is that in many countries, policies against multiculturalism are strengthening, that is, multifaceted opposition to any extension of political rights to foreigners. The chosen path would be assimilation policies and measures to limit naturalisations, for instance by curbing the acquisition of citizenship through marriage, as is the case in the Netherlands, France and Germany (Bonjour & Block, 2016), and by instituting a general strengthening of procedures aimed at subordinating citizenship to nationality. The most recent trends observed in many Western countries, but already present in the 1990s, detect, on the one hand, a narrowing of the possibilities of entry into Western countries and, on the other hand, a legal system that is increasingly selective in terms of ethnicity, religion, nationality and social class (Ellermann, 2020; Koopmans et al., 2012; Schmid, 2020; Zapata-Barrero, 2009). Although it is undoubtedly too schematic to focus exclusively on the extension of political rights to migrants, such as policy represents a relevant issue in the tension between nationality and citizenship.

Beyond Territorial Rights?

In this chapter, we addressed some of the key issues of democratic regimes, such as the definition of the sovereign people and political citizenship. One of the crucial questions is to know who has the legitimacy to decide in the name of the people and give access to citizens’ rights. Who can decide who may or may not enter the national territory, who may reside there and enjoy the rights that long-term residents already enjoy? The seemingly simple answer is “the people”, since democracy means power of the people. But who are the people? The answer again, which often seems obvious, is that the people are the expression of the population that inhabits, resides or belongs to a territory where the democratic exercise takes place. But who enjoys these rights of citizenship? In other words, who is to be considered a member of the political community of a given territory? Here, the historically prevalent and still largely dominant answer is to affirm that the citizen is whoever enjoys nationality within the perimeter of the nation-state.

As we have seen, things today are a little more complicated, and all the notions that relate to the exercise of democracy have become part of an ongoing and multifaced debate. On the one hand, the notion of the people has many more meanings than they may appear to have at first glance; on the other hand, emerging challenges produced by political, legal, economic and cultural processes pose very difficult dilemmas and controversies to be faced and overcome today, as the tension between the recognition of human rights and the expansion of migratory movements, considered by some to be indispensable from the point of view of territorial economic well-being, as well as the spread of feelings and opinions of hostility towards these movements. Crucial tensions arise also between the recognition of human rights (therefore, also of a right that cannot be precluded to people because of their cultural and religious origins) and the defence of the link between nationality and citizenship; but also between the latter link and the recognition of social and political rights for immigrants who live permanently on a territory, who work and pay taxes to the state and the wish to safeguard the rights and prerogatives of the national community. Who has the right to equally decide in a democracy concerns not only migrants but also those who reside within national states characterised by strong regional identities and claims. Therefore, the question arises as to which political authority within a differentiated national space with cultural majorities and minorities has the power to exercise territorial rights. Who may legitimately decide to exploit important natural resources that acquire world heritage status but are nevertheless located within the perimeter of a nation-state that claims absolute sovereignty over them? All these questions are nowadays open and controversial in many territorial states. They involve a debate between strategies of de-territorialisation of rights, both within and outside states, and strategies of de- and re-territorialisation that aim to re-establish control over borders and populations in a world shaped by globalisation and migrant challenges. All these questions are crucial for a territory-oriented approach to democratic politics.