Abstract
Amidst fantasized projects to build higher, longer, and technologically more effective fences against illegal intruders and arguments for fortifying the borders in the United States and Europe, this work proposes a very different approach to borders. Instead of hardening symbolic, legal, and physical boundaries, the object of this work is to think about softening borders, rethinking notions of sovereignty and democracy for the twenty-first century. This soft border approach envisions democratic practices of social cooperation exercised through multiple and overlapping polities by individuals and groups with complex and fluid identities. It reimagines public spaces through practices of collective action that stretch across existing symbolic and territorial borders and are based on functional interdependencies, intersecting interests, and multiple attachments. It draws on my understanding of borders and the politics of national identity developed with respect to southeastern Europe, but I believe that the arguments apply and are important far beyond this context.
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Notes
Ngai-Ling Sum, “Rethinking Globalisation: Rearticulating the Spatial Scale and Temporal Horizons of Trans-Border Spaces,” in State/Space: A Reader, ed. Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, and Gordon MacLeod (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 208–224.
For the image of different “scapes,” see Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Theorizing Diaspora, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 25–48.
Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
See, for example, Veit Bader, “Practical Philosophy and First Admission,” SAIS Review 20, no. 1 (2000): 39–59; Charles R. Beitz, “Does Global Inequality Matter?” in Global Justice, ed. Thomas Pogge (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 106–122; Simon Caney, Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Joseph H. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 229–253; Robert E. Goodin, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?” Ethics 98, no. 4 (1988): 663–686; Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103, no. 1 (October 1992): 48–75; Thomas Pogge, “Justice across Borders: Brief for a Global Resources Dividend,” in Social Justice, ed. Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 264–285; Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and US Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Kok-Chor Tan, Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
The notion of “interdependence” suggests individual agency in ongoing relationships with others, distinguishing this notion from an abstract notion of independence. See Nancy J. Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom, for an exploration of feminist notions of freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
I disagree with theorists who see the notion of citizenship losing its meaning. See, for example, David Jacobson, Rights across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
To name just a few: Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brenner, Jessop, Jones, and MacLeod, State/Space; Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (London: Edward Elgar Publication, 1992); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000); Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds., Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Kenishi Ohmae, The Borderless World (New York: Harper Collins, 1990); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” 48–75; and Spruyt, Sovereign State and Its Competitors. These works and others are cited at various places in this book.
Julie Mostov, “La formation de l’ethnocratie,” TransEuropeenes: Revue culturelle international no. 8 (Fall 1996): 35–44.
See Julie Mostov, “The Use and Abuse of History in Eastern Europe,” Constellations 4, no. 3 (January 1998): 376–386.
International Crisis Group, Kosovo: The Challenge of Transition, Europe Report no. 170 (17 February 2006), available at <http://wwwcrisisgroup .org/library/documents/europe/balkans/170_kosovo_the_challenge _of_transition.pdf>; Susan L. Woodward, “Does Kosovo’s Status Matter? On the International Management of Statehood,” Südosteuropa 55, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 1–25.
On gender and nation, see, for example, Wendy Bracewell, “Women, Motherhood, and Contemporary Serbian Nationalism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 19, no. 1/2 (1996): 25–33; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Viking, 1998); Mushirui Hasan, ed., Invented Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); Rada Ivekovic, “Women, Nationalism, and War: ‘Make Love Not War,’ ” Hypatia 8, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 113–126; Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov, eds., From Gender to Nation (Ravenna, Italy: Longo Editore 2002); Caren Kaplan, Norma Alcaron, and Minoo Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational Feminism, and the State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2001); Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Julie Mostov, “ ‘Our Women’/‘Their Women’: Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers, and Violence in the Balkans,” Peace and Change 20, no. 4 (October 1995): 515–529; Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (London: Routledge, 1997); Katherine Verdery, “From Parent-State to Family Patriarch: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 8 (Spring 1994): 225–255; and Nira Yuval-Davis and Flora Anthias, eds., Woman-Nation-State (London: Macmillan, 1989).
For the way this played out in Rwanda, see Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Jurgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,” in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), 255–281.
David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal posed this challenge in the early 1990s in Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For examples of related discussions, see Rainer Baubock, Transnational Citizenship: Membership Rights in International Migration (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1994); Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Joseph H. Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Ong, Neoliberal as Exception; Saskia Sassen, “The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 46 (2002): 4–25; as well as an excellent symposium on citizenship, “Changing Citizenship: Theory and Practice,” PS: Political Science & Politics 38, no. 4 (October 2005): 667–699.
This argument recognizes that formal citizenship status is not the only obstacle to equal standing in processes of social choice. See Nira YuvalDavis, “Citizenship, Territoriality and the Gendered Construction of Difference,” in Brenner, Jessop, Jones, and MacLeod, eds., State/Space, 309–325; and Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, 2nd ed. (New York: NYU Press, 2003).
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© 2008 Julie Mostov
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Mostov, J. (2008). Introduction. In: Soft Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612440_1
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