ABSTRACT
The experience of geographic mobility constitutes one of the essential characteristics of the human experience and, for that very reason, has generated a good number of investigations and methodological paradigms. The extraordinary dimensions assumed by migration since the last decade of the 20th century (qualitatively as well as quantitatively) raise new questions about the significance of transnational mobility in the current context of the global expansion of financial capitalism. On the one hand, the very existence of these transnational populations that maintain regular economic, social, and political intercourse with more than one nationstate (e.g., remittances, immigrant associations, double citizenship) is creating a new articulation between social agents (nationals, foreigners, immigrants) and political and social institutions (the nation-state as well as other supranational organizations such as the EU). On the other hand, transnational migration is questioning the identification between nationality and citizenship as portrayed and legitimized under the “logic of internationality,” 1 which is to say, under a world-system of nation-states. In the last instance, both the practices developed by political institutions (such as ad hoc policies on immigrants and the constitution of supranational institutions such as the EU), as well as the strategies developed by individuals and social groups (such as vindicative campaigns to promote suffrage among immigrants) evince perhaps an urgency and certainly a necessity to transcend the geopolitical setting defined by a world-system of nation states.
