Transformations of Citizenship

The topic of citizenship is emerging as a crucial nexus in a political discourse within the context of globalization. I want to emphasize, that the the global economy and economic globalization is a highly strategic event. Most people, most firms, most workers, most places, most local governments are not necessarily transformed or affected by this. Maybe in the lon run in highly mediated ways. But I want to really emphasize that the story of the global economy is a strategic story. It is a story about power rather than about something that encompasses most people. And it is of this particular, some sort of transversal strategic angle that I want to talk about the question of citizenship. There is an enormous set of issues that specify the question of citizenship and the political project that citizenship is, that I will not touch upon - not because they are not important, but because they are not intimately connected to the strategic issue of globalization that I am dealing with.

First I want to speak about the question of the privatization of public sector firms which is of course particularly strong in the cases of the Central European or Latinamerican governments, much more than in the case of the USA. In the European countries the most dramatic issues of privatizations have to with the Telecoms and a limited number of other companies. But the truth is that privatization is not as significant a matter in Europe as it is in some other parts of the world. However, privatization in combination with deregulation have entailed a withdrawal of the state from matters of public. A lot of intention has gone to this. I want to pull out one particular aspect out of this combination of processes. And that has to do with the fact, that privatization and deregulation have consequences for fundamental structures for accountability, in other words, structures through which citizens can make their governments accountable. This is not only a question of a change in a regime of property and a regime of governance, if you want, it is also a question that the democratic space for political action that citizens have shrinks. And it launches a whole new problematic around questions of accountability. My argument is that one of the conseuqnces of globalization that has perhaps not received sufficient attention is the fact that basic structures of accountability shrink.

Let me illustrate this to make it just a bit more concrete. The fact that the international financial markets are not only institutions of enormous power and influence over governments, but that they have in fact attached a certain normativity to their logic that can subject governments to that logic. In many ways governments, including the German or the Suisse government, that means not only Mexico or Brazil, are under an enormous pressure from the intenational financial markets to conduct certain aspects of their economic policy according to a certain logic, which is the logic of the capital market. In Latin America they use the word Neoliberalismo. This concept does not travel at all in the United Stated. People don't know what you are talking about when you say neoliberalism. In Europe it resonates a bit more. It is a whole concept of what it means to do good economic policy, what is sound government policy.

In that sense I have argued in a recent book that in many ways this capacity to extract accountability from your governemnt that used to lay with citizens to a much larger extent than it does today, has now been displaced to the international financial markets. These markets can now extract accountability from national governments in terms of certain kinds of economic policies. In that sense some of the capacity to demand accountability that we associate with citizenship has shifted to these institutions. This is very clear in the case of a country such as the United States oder the United Kingdom, it is extremely clear in Argentina, in Mexico or in Brazil. There are manifestations of this in other countries. Standard and Poor and Moody's are the big two big rating agencies and can rate the Suisse government bonds - this happenend last year - and bring that rating down. The Suisse were very unhappy with this. These credit rating agencies are totally private agencies. They are not publically charged, they are not publically accountable, they are private firms. These agencies now have the power in the global market to rate the quality of the debt of the government of Switzerland, Sweden or of France. They have an enormous power. This is just one mechanism, but there are many others, through which governments find themselves trying to live up to the criteria that are set by the global capital market. This is a very serious issue.

There is an image which is used by Joseph Borocz. He describes what is happening in Central Europe and states that these states have gone from under the hammer and sichel to under the hammer of the auction. This is the history of the last few years and it does have enormous consequences for certain aspects of the autonomy of governments. We as citizens really need to force into the state agendas other than the agenda of the global capital market. I don't know if people in Germany are as aware as we are in other parts of the world, like in the US or in the Latin America countries, about this influence. The logic of the global capital market ist not only a question of raw power, it assumes normative power.

A second issue of citizenship is the other extreme: the ascendency of international human rights regime. In many ways it reduces the significance of nationally based citizenship in terms of rights attached to individuals, no matter what the nationality in question would be. Immigrants and refugees have clearly been a crucial instance through which this international human rights regime has demonstrated some of its influence and power. The European Court of Human Rights has very often made decisions in favour of immigrants and refugees that have gone against decisions of their legislators or their national courts. So we see the ascendence of another side for normativity, which has to do with international human rights that frees up the individual and his or her access to rights from the nationality question.

In somehow my darker moments when I look at the world and I see it as a big, big battlefield there are these two normativities in contest with each other: the normativity of the global capital market that robs us citizens from power to make our governments accountable to our wishes and the normativity of the international human rights regime that grants, what used to be rights only confined to citizens to anybody. These are normativities which never really intersect out there in the "big bad world". But in some ways it is a big contest and the instantiations, where the contest is realized, are on the one hand the global capital market and its influence over governments and on the other the question of immigrants and refugees. They become the strategic actors.

There is third element that I want to emphasize, which is also part of the contemporary history and alters this question of citizenship and who can be a subject for international law. Untill very recently the national state, the sovereign, has been the representative of its people and hence the sole subject of international law. This view (statism) is now under critical attack/examination by feminists, human right advocates, first nation peoples, immigrants etc. This has created just in the last few years other subjects for international law. It can be women groups, NGO's, first nation people. The first national people have gained the right to be subjects of international law. And we get this transformation very clearly in the new constitutions that were written for the Central European countries in the early 90s, in the new South Africa constitution, in the new Brazilian and Argentinian constitution. In the case of Latin America after the military dictatorships there was a whole effort to rewrite the constitutions.

The key point here is, that the representativity of the state cannot just be taken for granted. Just because you have an electoral system does not solve the issue of the state is representative of its people hence the state can be the sole representor of a nation in an international setting. In the case of the new constitutions in Central Europe is the question of who the state represents through its electorial system a problem. There are mechanisms instituted that leave open the question of representativity, so that if you have a group that argues: "We are not represented in the state" - and you hear this more and more around the world by the way - they have recourse to international law. This is a mayor transformation. A shorthand way to describe this is, that there is a move away from statism, where the state is the ultimative representative. But it is not a move away from the state. The state is still the key structure through which question of representation are enacted. However it is not enough for a state to say "I have been democratically elected and so I represent my people". The question of representativity is subjected to further critical inquiry.

These three elements, that I have described, are three mayor axis within which the contemporary history of citizenship finds one critical space. The story I am telling is a strategic, a partial story, not the full account, but it matters in this particular strategic way, that can be summarized under the notion of globalization rather than just national politics.