Transnationalism and Citizenship

Abstract

Discourses on the rights, entitlements, and obligations of citizenship have changed dramatically in the past two decades as a result of the increasingly transnational character of global migration flows, cultural networks, and socio-political practices. The once taken for granted correspondence between citizenship, nation, and state has been questioned as new forms of grassroots citizenship have taken on an increasingly trans-territorial character. Resident non-citizens now routinely live and work in transnational cities throughout the world while maintaining social and political networks linking them to people and places located in their countries of origin. At the same time, the rise of supranational institutional networks and the global spread of the discourse on human rights also challenge received notions of state sovereignty. Some scholars (e.g., Soysal, 1994; Held, 1991) now depict the activities of international human rights agencies and the development of supranational authority structures like the European Union as signs of a new international order premised on the creation of plural authority and “transnational citizenship”. What sense can we make of these developments? What do they mean for the future of the nation-state? What prospects do they hold for the future of localities that become interconnected across borders by political practices and networks that I have elsewhere called “transnational urbanism?” (Smith, 1999,2001)

Most of the empirical examples used in this chapter to flesh out the interplay of transnationalism and citizenship have been drawn from various parts of my new book, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalisation (Smith, 2001), where they are discussed in greater detail.