ABSTRACT
This chapter further explores the features of cosmopolitanism, but shifts the emphasis from the power of cosmopolitan norms to the broader empirical question raised by Beck as to the extent of the ‘cosmopolitanisation’ of society. He has argued (Beck, 2006) that trans-national migration and the consolidation of human rights are features of an emergent cosmopolitan society in which we see a blurring of distinctions with respect to the rights of citizens and non-citizens. This chapter, however, suggests that the presence of noncitizens on national territory has in fact been accompanied by an expansion of distinctions, as evidenced in the system of civic stratification. The functioning of such a system of differentiated rights is considered alongside the social construction of particular groups as targets of policy and as objects of public concern. However, the chapter also explores the significance of judgements which have effectively placed a limit on the acceptable extent of erosion of rights in this process. In so doing it considers the interplay of formal entitlement and informal status in the process of change, and the implications of the whole account for cosmopolitan thinking. The significant presence of migrants and asylum seekers in sometimes reluctant
host countries has for many (Soysal, 1994; Smith, 1995; Beck, 2006) signalled the uncoupling of nation, state and society, especially when that presence is underpinned by claims to universal human rights. This combination of factors has led Beck (2006) to challenge the ‘methodological nationalism’ associated with territorial understandings of society, and to advocate instead a ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’. Such an approach, he argues, would recognise what he sees as the increasingly ‘mythic’ status of the nation, and the trans-national realities and causalities which are coming to be seen as a universal norm (p. 28). We considered one example in the previous chapter, in relation to the position of asylum seekers and an emergent cosmopolitan paradigm of legal interpretation. In stating his position, however, Beck distinguishes between cosmopolitanism as an ideal and ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ – a condition of really existing ‘cosmopolitanisation’, which may be passive, latent or unconscious (p. 19). Bred of the everyday disruption of bounded national spaces, this cosmopo-
litanisation is seen as a side effect of global forces, not actively chosen and
sometimes consciously resisted. Thus, cosmopolitanisation may transform the ‘experiential spaces’ of the nation-state from within, though often against popular and political will (p. 101). For Beck, this tension inevitably raises the question of how the nation-state deals with difference, and while much of his discussion turns on culture and identity, he recognises that other issues are in play, as global inequalities and trans-national conflicts reappear within the national space. The figure of the trans-national migrant is central to the picture he paints; one in which ‘explosive questions’ arise over the distinction between foreigners and nationals, or citizens and non-citizens, and their status in relation to different kinds of rights (p. 27). In making these observations Beck seeks to promote an imagining of the
national and the trans-national as interlocking and mutually constituting; not an either/or but a both/and perspective, or a world of cosmopolitan nationalism (p. 49). Universal human rights are argued to play a key role in this configuration, superseding the national/international distinction and, according to Levy and Sznaider (2006), carrying the potential for a denationalised understanding of legitimacy. Human rights, they argue, provide a globally available basis for legitimate claims making, and can contribute to the reconfiguration of sovereignty whereby the treatment of citizens (and others) is no longer the exclusive domain of the state. Beck and Sznaider (2006) go further, by seeing in human rights a domain in which the interests of citizens and foreigners may coincide (cf Isin and Turner, 2007). However, Fine (2007) has noted the danger of treating cosmopolitanism as a
law of nature, without exposing its rational necessity to scrutiny or debate, and indeed Beck and Sznaider recognise that there is no necessary relation between internal cosmopolitanisation and the development of a cosmopolitan consciousness. They find that normative theories of cosmopolitanism tend to ignore society and its ‘more banal forms of everyday life’ (p. 22), and they therefore pose the advance of both internal and external cosmopolitanisation as an empirical question. In similar spirit Grande (2006) speaks of a new architecture of governance, though not yet a ‘cosmopolitan state’, in which the nation-state plays an important and indispensible part but no longer stands for ‘society’ in the traditional sense. He sees structural opportunities for the emergence of a cosmopolitan political authority, but argues that its realisation lags some way behind. Grande, like Beck, therefore underlines the need for empirical research in
which the task is not to weigh state autonomy against the force of external constraints, but to explore the ways in which internal and external features of cosmopolitanism can function in combination. Again human rights are cited as an example, whereby the legitimate powers of the national state may be necessary to carry through changes initiated elsewhere – though it may of course be the national state itself which is the object of scrutiny and challenge. While new oppositions will emerge that are not aligned with the traditional structures and cleavages contained within national boundaries, they are still
most likely to be articulated and dealt with at national level (Grande, 2006:103). The ‘container’ view of society is, however, rejected (Fine, 2007:7), in favour of an empirical enquiry into how new dialectics of de-nationalisation and re-nationalisation unfold, and how national and trans-national forces mingle to create cosmopolitan spaces. The present chapter pursues these and related questions in the context of
our cases, showing how the history holds an interest beyond the detail of the judgements themselves. The underlying policy, embraced on different occasions by both Conservative and Labour governments, sought to grapple with what were then growing numbers of asylum seekers1 and in response had asserted a restrictive definition of the national interest. In line with Grande’s (2006) observations above, we therefore see how the national state is pre-eminent in the allocation and administration of rights, unless and until its power is challenged through judicial authority. A central device in this process of management is not so much what Beck (2006:39) terms a ‘blurring’ of distinctions with respect to rights but rather their expansion, through the elaboration of a complex system of legal statuses – what we have here termed civic stratification (Lockwood, 1996; Morris, 2002). The present chapter outlines the concept more fully, before considering the construction of asylum seekers as a ‘target group’ within this system, and the implications of the outcome of legal challenges for cosmopolitan thinking.
