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April 11, 2006
'We are like travelers navigating an unknown terrain with the help of old maps, drawn at a different time and in response to different needs,' Seyla Benhabib writes in her new book, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens So very apt isn't it.
This review of The Rights of Others by Nadia Urbinati in Dissent raises an interesting issue for liberal democratic states. Nadia says:
Transnational migrations and global interdependence are the unknown terrain, state sovereignty and patrolled frontiers the old maps. Contemporary migrations are not an isolated phenomenon explicable in terms of a free choice that immigrants make when they leave their countries of origin and host states make when they receive them. These are epochal transformations that are literally changing the face of entire continents, the social conventions of millions of people. The friction between this new terrain and the old conceptual maps has potentially explosive effects ..... The problem is that liberal democratic states do not regard economic destitution as a form of persecution, while their minimalist definition of democracy is blind to de facto undemocratic regimes. So transnational migration produces blatant contradictions between universal human rights and the extant set of naturalization, immigration, refugee, and asylum policies.
Benhabib holds that democracy is the key to issues of immigration. Her philosophical horizon is defined by what she calls "the paradox of democratic legitimacy," namely the tension between the Enlightenment principle that a universal right to hospitality is due to every human person with the republican (or democratic) principle that political membership (citizenship) is essential for human beings "to have rights." Democracy is the better way to deal with this paradox---if we mean by it not merely a form of government but a set of moral-political values and practices that make for democratic discourse.
Nadia says that Benhabib argues that:
Democratic institutions and practices of negotiation ought to be the source of political attachment for old and new citizens and integrated aliens alike, the means by which they understand how to involve themselves in representative institutions at all levels, from cities and community constituencies all the way up to the nation-state and international society. Democracy is a mode of dialogical interactions applicable at all levels: social and political, domestic and international.
And for migrants as aliens? The aliens outside the nation state trying to get inside? How do democratic negotiations occur between states and migrants?
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The republican ideal is that an individual, by being under a government's jurisdiction, has political rights. They are a citizen simply because they are in the polity. It is not based on accidents of birth or geography. I also think that ideal is the only way nation-states will survive globalisation. Australia is a diasporic as well as immigrant nation already. We collect overseas work visas like candy.
I also do not understand why nation-state allow capital and goods move between nations with impunity, yet discriminate against the movement of labor so heavily. It could be argued that nation-states are an inefficiency in the economic system. Already the economic system is tolerating them less and less.