Is Citizenship Being Diluted by Globalization? by Leslie Evans

Published at UCLA

Author Leslie Evans

Sociologist Saskia Sassen proposes that international business at one end and poor immigrants at the other are shaping a new status of individual rights no longer tied to citizenship in a national state.

“I do not see us going back to deeply nationalized forms of citizenship.”

Is citizenship going the way of the nation-state in our new globalized world? Saskia Sassen thinks so. The University of Chicago sociologist told a UCLA audience why at a March 25 talk sponsored by the International Institute. She began by acknowledging that there have been no really dramatic changes in the laws defining the standing of citizens in recent years. But that can be misleading, she said, because the legalities of who is a citizen and who is an alien have always had rough edges that are being redefined without the need to draft new legislation. “Their very incompleteness contains the possibility of change, and they must be incomplete to retain flexibility.” Professor Sassen’s talk reported on the research for her forthcoming book Denationalization: Economy and Polity in a Global Digital Age to be published this year by Princeton University Press.

Sassen’s central point was that legal rights that used to be given only to citizens are more and more being claimed by large groups of people who rest their claims on international rather than national law or on relatively new legal concepts such as human rights vested in individuals rather than governments. These changes, which weaken governments but are good for individuals who change states or travel internationally, are a consequence of globalization, which moves more people longer distances more often than the societies in which nation-states were first forged and their legal systems constructed.

For Sassen, the clear definition of a citizen is being eroded at the high and low end: at the top of society by growing numbers of employees of companies with a global reach, staff members of United Nations-type organizations, and people with dual citizenship. At the bottom by growing de facto legal rights of undocumented immigrants.

onderschikt in:1s EN, 2b Analysis, About Culture, About Politics, Democratie, Globalisation, Intercultureel , A-Nationaliteit, Anti-Nationalisme, Globalisatie, nationalisme, Nationaliteit