Mobilising (Global) Democracy: A Political Reading of Mobility between Universal Rights and the Mob

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 583-604

  Aradau, Claudia ^a,b,c   Huysmans, Jef ^a,b,c  

^a Identities and Governance   (United Kingdom)

^b Security Programme Director of the Centre for Citizenship ^*  (United Kingdom)

^c OPEN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Democracy; Mass politics; Migration; Mobility; Rights; Simmel

Indexed keywords

EID: 66749086845     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829809103234     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (64)

1. This article is part of European Commission Framework Programme 7 (FP7-SSH) project ENACT - Enacting European Citizenship (217504), http://enacting-citizenship.eu/.
2. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 143.
3. Ibid., 142.
4. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
5. Ibid.
6. For example: John S. Dryzek, 'Transnational Democracy', Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1999): 30-51; Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity, 2001); David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Daniele Archibugi, David Held and Martin Köhler (eds.), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1998); Barry Holden (ed.), Global Democracy: Key Debates (London: Routledge, 2000).
7. For example: Weert Canzler, Vincent Kaufmann and Sven Kesselring (eds.), Tracing Mobilities: Towards a Cosmopolitan Perspective (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008). John Urry's and Saskia Sassen's work contains discussions of political dimensions through the notion of citizenship. But the question of what makes mobility a democratic political practice remains largely absent. John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007); Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
8. Der Spiegel, 'Waves of Would-Be Immigrants Target EU Shores' (2008), http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,561711,00.html. Accessed 1 October 2008.
9. David Mitrany, 'The Functional Approach to World Organization', International Affairs 24 (1948): 350-63; David Mitrany, A Working Peace System (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1966).
10. Karl Deutsch, Sidney A. Burrell and Robert A. Kann, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social and Economic Forces 1950-1957 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968); C. Pentland, International Theory and European Integration (New York: Free Press, 1973).
11. Karl Kaiser, 'Transnationale Politik: Zu einer Theorie der multinationalen Politik', in Die anachronistische Souveränität, ed. Ernst-Otto Czempiel (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1969).
12. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays.
13. On the former, see David Held, 'Democracy and Globalization', Global Governance 3, no. 3 (1997): 1-28, and Henry Teune, 'Global Democracy', ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 581, no. 1 (2002): 22-34; and on the latter, Jan Aart Scholte, 'Civil Society and Democracy in Global Governance', Global Governance 8, no. 3 (2002): 281-304.
14. John S. Dryzek, 'Transnational Democracy'.
15. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays.
16. For example: Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller and John Urry, 'Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings', Mobilities 1, no. 1 (2006): 1-22; Weert Canzler, Vincent Kaufmann and Sven Kesselring, Tracing Mobilities: Towards a Cosmopolitan Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
17. For example: John Urry, Mobilities; John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000).
18. We differ here from Jacques Rancière's reading of democracy, which locates its origins in ancient Athens. The democratic practice privileged here is not simply an-anarche (anarchic disruption of order) but a particular inscription of equality which the circulation of money has made possible in modernity. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement.
19. Although Simmel's sociology of money has inspired a growing literature on mobility, cities and the transformation of money in late modernity, his work has not been linked to political questions of democracy, rights and mass mobilisation. For Simmel's influence on the mobility literature, see Urry, Mobilities; on cities, Ole Jensen, '"Facework", Flow and the City: Simmel, Gofmann and Mobility in the Contemporary City', Mobilities 1, no. 2 (2006): 143-65; on money, John Allen and Michael Pryke, 'Monetized Cultures after Georg Simmel: Mobility, Movement and Identity', Environment and Planning D 17, no. 1 (1999): 51-68.
20. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 100.
21. Ibid., 265.
22. Bill Maurer, 'The Anthropology of Money', Annual Review of Anthropology 35 (2006): 16.
23. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 427.
24. Ibid., 345.
25. Simmel defined sociality as 'the form (realized in innumerably different ways) in which individuals grow together into a unity and within which their interests are realized'. Georg Simmel, 'The Problem of Sociology', in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 24.
26. Practices of mobility simultaneously summon mobility and immobility, fixity and fluidity, and the dichotomy between fixity and nomadism is not adequate for understanding the ways in which practices of mobility constitute the social. For a pertinent criticism of mobility as nomadism, see Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006).
27. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 221.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 223.
30. Georg Simmel, 'The Stranger', in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1964), 402-8.
31. Ibid., 148. Marx has made similar observations on the role of money and the role of universality in the creation of civil society.
32. Anthropologists have noted that money does not necessarily abolish close-knit community relations. Mobility has the potential to change social practices, yet it does not mean it abolishes them. Capitalist modernity itself is not reducible to exchange and abstraction, but is also constituted by relations of production and consumption and inscribed upon pre-capitalist social relations. Unpacking this is, however, beyond the scope of this article.
33. The importance of the sphere of circulation for rights and equality had also been noted by the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School. See, for example, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), and Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Process of National Socialism 1933-1944 (New York: Harper, 1966).
34. Georg Simmel, 'The Poor', in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 150-78.
35. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights; Yasemin N. Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
36. Soysal, Limits of Citizenship, 149.
37. Didier Bigo, 'Frontier Controls in the European Union: Who Is in Control?', in Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and within Europe, ed. Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 49-99; Elspeth Guild, Έxceptionalism and transnationalism: UK Juridical Control of Detention of Foreign "international terrorists'", Alternatives 28, no. 4 (2003): 491-515; Elspeth Guild, The Legal Elements of European Identity: Ell Citizenship and Migration Law (The Hague: Kluwer Law, 2004). The transnational and international legalisation of politics also seeks to work more directly on the global structures of power, thereby enacting a legal constraint upon the authorities, which can be both public and private, operating within these structures. See Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights. A discussion of these is, however, beyond the scope of this article.
38. Jacques Rancière, 'Does Democracy Mean Something?', in Adieu Derrida, ed. Costas Douzinas (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 84-100.
39. Etienne Balibar, La crainte des masses: Politique et philosophic avant et aprês Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 106ff.
40. Pierre Bourdieu, 'The Force of Law: Towards a Sociology of the Juridical Field', Hastings Law Journal 38 (1987): 831.
41. William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfiirt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Jef Huysmans, 'Minding Exceptions: Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy', Contemporary Political Theory 3, no. 3 (2004): 321-41.
42. Balibar, La crainte des masses.
43. Georg Simmel, 'The Web of Group-Affiliations', in Conflict, ed. Kurt Wolff (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1955), 125-95.
44. Michael A. Seidel, 'The Restoration Mob: Drones and Dregs', Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 12, no. 3 (1972): 429-43.
45. Robert B. Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Continuum, 2004), xi.
46. Georg Simmel, 'Metropolis and Mental Life', in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950 [1903]).
47. Simmel, The Web of Group-Affiliations, 125.
48. Seidel, 'The Restoration Mob', 430.
49. This is most apparent with Tocqueville. See Corey Robin's discussion of Tocqueville: Corey Robin, Fear. The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The literature on crowd psychology in the 19th and early 20th century can also be read in this light. For example, in Gustave Le Bon's widely influential account of the psychology of the crowd, the force of the mob lay in its unconscious and instinctual make-up. Yet, the crowds that Le Bon fears are actually revealed to be the 'popular classes' which were organising themselves in syndicates and trade unions and whose claims for transforming social order Le Bon associated with that 'primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilization'. Gustave Le Bon, 'The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind' (Virginia: University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, 1995 [1896]). Le Bon's theory of the crowd shared ideas with two other main works on crowd psychology by Sighele, La Foule criminelle: Essai de psychologie collective (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1901), and Gabriel Tarde, L'Opinion et la foule, 1st edition (Paris: Presses Uni-versitaires de France, 1901 [1989]). For Sighele, crowds are prone to criminal behaviour, while for Tarde crowds are 'excrescences, malign eruptions of the public' (p. 12).
50. Balibar, La crainte des masses.
51. Ibid., 57-99.
52. Ibid., 73-80.
53. Ibid., 82.
54. Ibid.
55. Metaphors of mobs as the sea and the resulting imaginary of storms, floods and fury has been a long-standing topos from Spinoza to Sighele. On the use of the metaphor in Spinoza, see Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (London: Verso, 1999), and Scipio Sighele, La Foule criminelle, 32.
56. Warren Montag, 'Who's Afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the State', South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 4 (2005): 663.
57. Huysmans, 'Minding Exceptions'.
58. While agonistic and pluralistic theories of democracy have also integrated the masses in their conceptualisation of democracy, we differ by our conceptualisation of equality as giving content to democratic practice. Mobility, equality and democracy are intrinsically connected. William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Chantal Mouffe, 'Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?', Social Research 66 (1999): 745-58.
59. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, 'The Critical Legal Studies Movement', Harvard Law Review 96, no. 3 (1983): 561-675.
60. The distinction between these two functions of equality has been made by Jacques Rancière, Solange Guénoun and James H. Kavanagh, 'Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement', Substance 29, no. 2 (2000): 3. For the implications of this distinction for politics, see Claudia Aradau, Rethinking Trafficking in Women: Politics out of Security (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
61. There is a growing literature that discusses the collective politics and agency of undocumented migrants. For a few excellent examples, see Sandro Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga: Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2006); Peter Nyers, 'Taking Rights, Mediating Wrongs: Disagreements over the Political Agency of Non-status Refugees', in The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency, eds. Jef Huysmans, Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik (London: Routledge, 2006), 48-67.
62. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics (London: Verso, 1995), 48.
63. Ibid.
64. The politics of the mob discussed here is different from the concept of populism promoted by Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). Although Laclau also recaptures the split within the people, he sees the formation of the people as a question of 'group identity'. Both mobility as a condition of possibility of the politics of the 'mob' and mobility as a democratic practice of equality are absent from his work. The political reading of mobility is also different from Urry's citizenship of flow that is mainly defined by rights associated with mobility and thus reproduces the limits of opening the political terrain through judicial traditions, largely ignoring the democratic capacity of mobility as 'mob'. Urry, Mobilities.