“Is democracy and the free movement of people compatible? The case for self-governing cities.”
Professor Simon Parker, University of York.
Talk to the Becker House Café, Cornell University, Wednesday 8 February 2023.
In this talk I explore why nation-states are almost universally opposed to the free movement of people across borders and why the defence of secure borders is often justified by governments in terms of protecting the rights of the existing electorate. The alternative to the security state is to be found in the so-called ‘fearless city’ movement where urban administrations stress the need for solidarity regardless of immigration status and nationality. Given the failure of existing nation-states to generate more equitable, tolerant and sustainable societies I argue that the transition to a world of sovereign cities and regions is essential.
Dr Simon Parker is Professor in Politics and Co-Director of the Centre for Urban Research and Co-Chair of the Migration Network at the University of York (UK). He is the author of Urban Theory and the Urban Experience: Encountering the City (2nd edtn Routledge, 2015) and Cities, Politics and Power (Routledge, 2010) as well as numerous chapters and articles on urban and regional studies/urban theory and contemporary European politics. At Cornell, Simon is Visiting Scholar during the Spring Semester in the Department of City and Regional Planning as well as the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
A number of scholars have advanced the argument that without strong border and immigration controls – the ‘social contract’ between citizens and government that was thought to be the foundation of representative government cannot survive (Ekins 2019).
Proponents of this position argue that the majority of people in refugee receiving countries are hostile to the presence of irregular migrants and believe that most are not genuinely facing persecution and are at best economic migrants or at worst “free riders” motivated by the desire to access free healthcare and welfare, and/or to engage in criminal activity up to and including acts of terrorism.
In other words they assert that without very strict controls on “voluntary asylum seeking”, liberal democracies will be increasingly imperilled by xenophobia and intolerance that has and will continue to spill over into “race relations” in general with extremely negative consequences.
Now what I want to argue is that the pro-nation-state / pro-borders advocates have misunderstood the problem that they are seeking to address. It is because the nation-state in the so-called economically advanced world has monopolized “democracy” and its attendant benefits such as economic opportunities through work and enterprise and welfare benefits such as healthcare and education for the exclusive enjoyment of its citizens that membership of democratic societies is seen as a ‘club good’ which must be jealously guarded against non-members who will undoubtedly try to get into the club and use its resources and opportunities for free. This will inevitably mean that existing dues paying members will find their swimming pool is suddenly full of unwanted guests, all the lockers have been taken and there is no room at the “all you can eat” buffet for them.
In other words, the governments of modern liberal nation-states believe in things like equality before the law and universal suffrage but only for their own populations – seemingly oblivious to the fact that the population that they claim to represent is not actually ‘native’ to the territory at all. This is true for the entire continents of America and Oceania where the governing elites almost without exception are derived from European settler-colonial populations.
Meanwhile the wealth on which the excellent club facilities of Western European democracies depends has been extracted through bloody acts of enslavement, plunder and natural resource extraction to the great harm of the indigenous populations and despite the de-colonisation of Africa, Asia and Latin America much of it far from voluntary the systematic looting and exploitation of their natural resources continues through decidedly unfair trade practices and the militarisation and securitisation of the former colonies via conditional aid and debt packages that increasingly requires donor recipients to import the border violence of state actors in the Global North in order to control and prevent irregular migration.
Settlement and the defence of territory
Sovereign states – in the famous phrase of the German sociologist Max Weber – are minimally defined as having a monopoly of the use of force or violence within a given territory. Of course modern states have numerous other features, but the modern state system that most students of international relations students agree emerged following the Peace of Westphalia and it is built on the principle of mutually exclusive autonomous territories. Transgressing the boundaries of another state or threatening another state with harm to its territory or people became the only justifiable cause for war – although of course this is a principle that has been frequently violated by any state powerful or audacious enough to get away with it.
Archaeologists and anthropologists tell us that before the advent of sedentary agriculture, nomadism – or the right to roam freely in search of sustenance, for the purposes of trade and to engage in religious devotion – was how human societies adapted and flourished in the natural world. With the arrival of the homesteading farmer came the need to defend crops and livestock and the extended family from marauders and predators. The earliest polities all emerged as a cooperative enterprise built around collective organised violence and territorial defence.
The ancient city of Ur is now the Iraqi town of Tell el-Muqayyar, the ‘Mound of Pitch’. It was occupied from around 5000 BC to 300 BC at which time the Euphrates flowed through it.
Famous for its ziggurat temples it was the capital of Sumeria in southern Mesopotamia. Part of an empire which extended for thousands of miles.
Weber tells us that cities came into being initially as settlements built around markets that developed along trading routes and on rivers that gave access to the sea.
For Weber, ‘the city is a settlement the inhabitants of which live primarily off trade and commerce rather than agriculture’. Cities concentrated specialist trades, provided military security for the surrounding territory and administrative and ecclesiastical authority to the state as a whole.
Charles Tilly argues that ‘consolidated states’ (the forerunners of the modern nation-state) depended on the character of their urban networks…
Feudalism = hierarchical and static
Market-based cities = dynamic and more socially mobile
Cities →civil society→’bourgeois sphere’→democratic/liberal politics
And it is really the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere according to Habermas (1991) that upscales the city as a commercial network and space of commodification and accumulation into what we now recognise as the capitalist nation-state – but the process required the dispossession of those who used the urban commons outside the city wall to farm and to graze livestock and it also required the wholesale enclosure of agricultural and pastoral land to generate the rural surplus in terms of capital and labour that was to prove so essential to the development of early capitalism and industrialisation.
The idea of the urban commons is as old as the idea of the city itself
But there is another alternative history to that of capitalist urbanisation that is often overlooked by historical sociologists like Weber, Tilly and Mann and that is the history of the continuing struggle against enclosure and the defence of the urban and rural commons.
For example, there were moments especially at the height of the English Civil War when the King had been deposed and Oliver Cromwell had declared a Commonwealth that all sorts of ideas about how a New Jerusalem could be practically constructed, and out of the New Model Army came radical movements for social justice such as the Levellers who called for a radical redistribution of political power but a smaller and more interesting sect led by Gerrard Winstanley were known as the diggers because they literally occupied land – declared it to be in common – and grew crops and built dwellings to raise their families.
The Diggers, virtually alone of all the radical groups during the time of the English Civil War, called for a total reapportioning of the land in the name of the poor, hungry and landless. For them (unlike the Levellers) it was not political rights which would improve the lot of the poor but access to the land. Merely overthrowing the monarch was not in itself significant unless the opportunity were taken to dismantle the whole inequitable system of private land ownership over which he presided and restore the earth to its rightful owners, the common people. (Andrew Bradstock, Peace News 2011)
Real events such as the St George’s Hill occupation of 1649 also inspired later English radical and socialists such as William Morris to found self-managed cooperative communities and to envisage an urban future free from ‘useless toil’ and wage slavery where the resources of the earth would be held in common – as espoused most famously in A Dream of John Ball and News From Nowhere.
Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement later inspired early proponents of the Garden City Movement such as Ebenezer Howard and in turn these inspired the idea of planning for public good by reformers such as Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin in Letchworth as well as Joseph Rowntree in York.
Other examples included Port Sunlight and Bournville near Birmingham, which although built by wealthy industrialists like Lever and Cadbury had the ambition of building new urban communities that would replace the Victorian slums with housing that would offer space, security and wellbeing.
In other words, the original municipalist movement was all about cooperation, public space and the provision of sanitation, housing and education that would be accessible to working people and much of this happened before the introduction of highly restrictive immigration legislation and the compulsory use of passports.
The Alternative – A Return to Sovereign Cities and Regions
Since the nation-state is by definition legitimated and sustained through the use of violence and especially border violence, to have any hope of an equitable world based on peace and the respect for human rights we must look at alternate forms of territorial sovereignty. That alternative requires a rediscovery of the benefits of self-governing cities and regions (or city-regions).
To quote the Financial Times
Humans have spent more time in multi-ethnic empires, or sovereign cities, or ungoverned spaces. [than they have in nation-states]
Unless we are to believe that this was so much teleological foreplay before the end-state of nationhood, we are not hard-wired for one type of government.
Although this particular FT writer does not want to spell it out what they are really saying is that the nation-state is a form of sovereign government that is essentially associated with the rise and consolidation of modern capitalism and the imperially generated clones that were imposed on the former empires of Europe.
But it is clear that capitalism has become increasingly dependent on rather than the master of the nation-state that it originally forged as its exo-skeleton back in the late C18th as Adam Smith’s so-called ‘Nightwatchman State’. In fact the nation-state was critical to the rescue of capitalism’s rescue from its existential crises in the C20th and C21st including the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Financial Crash of 2008 to name only the two most egregious examples.
But the cost of that dependency has been the steady and irrepressible rise of the military-industrial complex and the security state. A multibillion dollar cartel that has entire democratic systems in its pocket and which has made itself invulnerable to democratic control or oversight. International relations defined by the new realism and a return to cameralism and neo-mercantilism in economic and financial policy making has accompanied the harsh imposition of neo-liberalism in the form of austerity for the least well off in the societies of the Global North and ‘structural adjustment’ and unfair trade impositions on the developing world imposed by the World Bank, the IMF and the G7.
As a counter response to this globalist monoculture of the nation-state, metropolitan cities and city-regions from around the world are taking on an internationalist role and they are keen to move away from the xenophobic exclusionary rhetoric of their national governments (Acuto et al 2021).
Thus the Mayor of Palermo – Leoluca Orlando – declared his municipality to be an Arab-Norman and Mediterranean ‘Open City’ which historically it always has been. Open to newcomers especially those fleeing persecution from across the sea. The Palermo Charter insists that all residents of the city must be treated equally and without discrimination regardless of nationality and passport and that every community should have a say in how the city is run via the so-called Cultural Council that advises the mayor and the city executive on a wide range of policy issues. Orlando makes the explicit point that no-one should be forced to live forever in the country of their birth and that freedom of movement is a fundamental human right that cannot be taken away by national governments just because they object to people crossing borders.
Further to the west in Catalunya the Mayor of Barcelona – the former housing rights activist Ada Colau – who helped to instigate the Fearless Cities movement in 2017 also makes the argument for a new form of politics and policy making where fear can be turned into hope.
In the epilogue to the first Fearless City book that brought together the experiences of numerous municipalities around the world committed to an urban future built on solidarity Ada Colau (2017) writes
Neofascism, the far-right movement that is growing in
Europe, takes advantage of this fear by pointing to this ‘Other’
as the cause of all ills. They want to create a division between
‘us’, the good guys, the ones who have always been here, and
‘them’, the unknown, the ones who threaten everything we
have left, the ones who are ‘not like us’.
We have witnessed, dumbstruck, the Brexit referendum
result, the election of Donald Trump, and the tragedy of
millions of refugees barely surviving or dying ‘with nowhere
to go’. These phenomena are the fruits of fear, and must be
defeated.
Now you will not find or hear a leader of any national-state saying these words and that is significant. Why? Because for national political elites solidarity will always end at the border.
Here instead is what Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative of the European Union Foreign Foreign Affairs and Security Policy said to the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges
Here, Bruges is a good example of the European garden. Yes, Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build – the three things together. And here, Bruges is maybe a good representation of beautiful things, intellectual life, wellbeing.
The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica – is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.
Now this is rhetoric which despite Borrell’s denials is explicitly racist and colonialist and it is coming from a top diplomat who is supposed to be very guarded and careful with their language. The unfortunate reality is that by perceiving Europe as being under siege from the human jungle of the Global South with its wars, poverty and now climate change driven mass migration the solution is to extend Europe’s borders deep into the jungle itself.
Returning to Ada Colau and the Fearless Cities movement – hope for the future of human civilisation and the planet itself lies in a return to the principle of the urban commons that inspired the Diggers and utopian thinkers such as William Morris:
Municipalism seeks to do away with these divisions, starting from the place where we all recognize one another as equals: the community. Our neighbourhoods, our towns, our cities. Municipalism is an emerging force that seeks to transform fear into hope from the bottom up, and to build this hope together, in common.
What Colau and Orlando and many other civic leaders and activists around the world are calling for is a ‘globalizing municipalism’.
While this sounds contradictory it is in fact that antidote to a nation-state based neoliberal globalism because to quote Colau finally:
it is aimed at overcoming the divisions between ‘above and below’, ‘us and the others’ in order to create an international network of cities that defend human rights, that fight together against climate change and misogyny and against all the policies that only benefit a few and condemn the rest to uncertainty and fear.
References
Acuto, M., Kosovac, A., Pejic, D., & Jones, T. L. (2021). “The city as actor in UN frameworks: Formalizing ‘urban agency’ in the international system?” Territory, Politics, Governance, 1–18.
Colau, A. et al Fearless Cities (2017).
Ekins, R. (2019) The State’s Right to Exclude Asylum-Seekers and (Some) Refugees. The Political Philosophy of Refuge, p.39-58.
Habermas (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.