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The Practice of Global Citizenship
In this novel account of global citizenship, Luis Cabrera argues that all individuals have a global duty to contribute directly to human rights protections and to promote rights-enhancing political integration between states. The Practice of Global Citizenship blends careful moral argument with compelling narratives from field research among unauthorized immigrants, activists seeking to protect their rights, and the ‘Minuteman' activists striving to keep them out. Immigrant-rights activists, especially those conducting humanitarian patrols for border-crossers stranded in the brutal Arizona desert, are shown as embodying aspects of global citizenship. Unauthorized immigrants themselves are shown to be enacting a form of global ‘civil' disobedience, claiming the economic rights central to the emerging global normative charter, while challenging the restrictive membership regimes that are the norm in the current global system. Cabrera also examines the European Union, seeing it as a crucial laboratory for studying the challenges inherent in expanding citizen membership.
- GenresPolitics
330 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2006
About the author
Luis Cabrera
49 books4 followersLuis Cabrera’s work has focused on institutional changes above the nation-state to promote the protection of human rights. His most recent book, The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge University Press 2010), seeks to identify the universal human duties that correspond to individual economic and political rights. His theoretical claims were informed by extensive field work at sites of intense unauthorised immigration in the United States, Mexico, and Western Europe.
His 2004 book, Political Theory of Global Justice, offered an argument based in distributive justice for democratically accountable political integration above the state, up to some form of fully global government. His current book project, The Possibility of Global Political Community, seeks to identify best practices for suprastate democracy through giving fine-grained attention to democracy under conditions of deep diversity in such states as India, and within the European Union.
Before turning to academia full time, Luis worked as a staff reporter for The Associated Press in Seattle, covering criminal justice issues, politics, the anti-corporate-globalisation movement, the Seattle music scene, and the NBA Seattle SuperSonics. He is an associate staff member of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for the Study of Global Ethics.
His 2004 book, Political Theory of Global Justice, offered an argument based in distributive justice for democratically accountable political integration above the state, up to some form of fully global government. His current book project, The Possibility of Global Political Community, seeks to identify best practices for suprastate democracy through giving fine-grained attention to democracy under conditions of deep diversity in such states as India, and within the European Union.
Before turning to academia full time, Luis worked as a staff reporter for The Associated Press in Seattle, covering criminal justice issues, politics, the anti-corporate-globalisation movement, the Seattle music scene, and the NBA Seattle SuperSonics. He is an associate staff member of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for the Study of Global Ethics.
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January 3, 2011
(This was posted on my blog, at www.migrantsrights.org.uk)
The alleged failure of multiculturalism has been a refrain constantly on the lips of mainstream politicians for much of the last decade. David Cameron chose a bad moment this past weekend to add his six pence worth to the negative refrain sung in the past by such luminaries as former Commission for Racial Equality and current Equalities and Human Rights Commission chair Trevor Phillips, and Labour grandee Jack Straw.
The evidence that we are ‘sleepwalking to segregation’ as Phillips put it, is actually very weak. A team of researchers at Manchester University’s Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/ has been looking at the facts on the ground for much of the past decade. Using data drawn from the national census of 1991 and 2001 they concluded that levels of segregation in 48 out of 56 English cities were declining, though two significant increases spatial separation were noted in two localities, with the picture in these cases being more difficult to interpret because of the effect of boundary changes and population definitions.
Yet the point being made by so many politicians is not really whether or not ethnic groups are mixing more often across the UK. Their complaint is that the old doctrines of nationship and Britishness no longer seem to work the same magic as they have done for previous generations. No single ‘British story’ emerges from the myriad tales of national life which the political elites can use as a mirror to hold up to their subjects and say ‘this is the way things ought to be done.’
Many, and not just the political right, blame immigration for this apparent loss of coherence to the life of the nation. Thinkers of a communitarian bent, with the journalist David Goodhart being prominent, argue that the left is also dependent on a revival of nationalism if a progressive direction for politics is going to emerge once again.
But an interesting new book by Birmingham University-based political scientist Luis Cabrera suggests that there may be ways for us to talk about citizenship which gets us beyond the myths of national solidarity which seem less and less compelling as each decades goes by.
The Practice of Global Citizenship uses the work of migrant rights organisations in the United States, Mexico, and Europe to argue that new narratives of solidarity are developing from the practical work of groups which are committed to the provision of aid to groups of migrants forced into precarious existences by the operation of immigration control procedures by national states.
Cabrera sees the operation of control procedures becoming susceptible to critical appraisal because of the direction which moral and ethical systems have taken in the 20th and early 21st centuries. These have generated the perception of duties owed to people with whom one does not share formal citizenship, but a sense of connectedness nevertheless exists because of what we know about the operation of globalised markets and globalised politics.
This much explains the growth of the cosmopolitanism which is now the basis for a whole strand of political thinking. But Cabrera wants to push beyond the striking of ethical attitudes to see what can be done to harness the energy to build new global institutions capable of measures of regulation and governance of global society. When this happens we are in the realm of a new form of global citizenship, which acts to make the exercise of global power accountable by building and sustaining effective international democratic institutions.
He has a candidate for the type of institution which he feels could play the role of rendering global economic power accountable: namely the construction of a parliamentary assembly aligned to the World Trade Organisation. The arguments derived from immigration rights activism are relevant here because Cabrera believes that the progressive reform of migration policy means challenging the ways in which world trade is currently done.
These are timely arguments at a moment when politicians the world over, on the left as well as the right, are so strongly inclined to push the discussion about democratic renewal and the revival of citizenship into nationalist discourses. There will be many strands of argumentation to be picked apart and then put back together as we work out our perspectives on the sort of citizenship compatible with the rights of migrants, and Cabrera has done us the favour of indicating some of the themes we should be prepared to take up.
The alleged failure of multiculturalism has been a refrain constantly on the lips of mainstream politicians for much of the last decade. David Cameron chose a bad moment this past weekend to add his six pence worth to the negative refrain sung in the past by such luminaries as former Commission for Racial Equality and current Equalities and Human Rights Commission chair Trevor Phillips, and Labour grandee Jack Straw.
The evidence that we are ‘sleepwalking to segregation’ as Phillips put it, is actually very weak. A team of researchers at Manchester University’s Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/ has been looking at the facts on the ground for much of the past decade. Using data drawn from the national census of 1991 and 2001 they concluded that levels of segregation in 48 out of 56 English cities were declining, though two significant increases spatial separation were noted in two localities, with the picture in these cases being more difficult to interpret because of the effect of boundary changes and population definitions.
Yet the point being made by so many politicians is not really whether or not ethnic groups are mixing more often across the UK. Their complaint is that the old doctrines of nationship and Britishness no longer seem to work the same magic as they have done for previous generations. No single ‘British story’ emerges from the myriad tales of national life which the political elites can use as a mirror to hold up to their subjects and say ‘this is the way things ought to be done.’
Many, and not just the political right, blame immigration for this apparent loss of coherence to the life of the nation. Thinkers of a communitarian bent, with the journalist David Goodhart being prominent, argue that the left is also dependent on a revival of nationalism if a progressive direction for politics is going to emerge once again.
But an interesting new book by Birmingham University-based political scientist Luis Cabrera suggests that there may be ways for us to talk about citizenship which gets us beyond the myths of national solidarity which seem less and less compelling as each decades goes by.
The Practice of Global Citizenship uses the work of migrant rights organisations in the United States, Mexico, and Europe to argue that new narratives of solidarity are developing from the practical work of groups which are committed to the provision of aid to groups of migrants forced into precarious existences by the operation of immigration control procedures by national states.
Cabrera sees the operation of control procedures becoming susceptible to critical appraisal because of the direction which moral and ethical systems have taken in the 20th and early 21st centuries. These have generated the perception of duties owed to people with whom one does not share formal citizenship, but a sense of connectedness nevertheless exists because of what we know about the operation of globalised markets and globalised politics.
This much explains the growth of the cosmopolitanism which is now the basis for a whole strand of political thinking. But Cabrera wants to push beyond the striking of ethical attitudes to see what can be done to harness the energy to build new global institutions capable of measures of regulation and governance of global society. When this happens we are in the realm of a new form of global citizenship, which acts to make the exercise of global power accountable by building and sustaining effective international democratic institutions.
He has a candidate for the type of institution which he feels could play the role of rendering global economic power accountable: namely the construction of a parliamentary assembly aligned to the World Trade Organisation. The arguments derived from immigration rights activism are relevant here because Cabrera believes that the progressive reform of migration policy means challenging the ways in which world trade is currently done.
These are timely arguments at a moment when politicians the world over, on the left as well as the right, are so strongly inclined to push the discussion about democratic renewal and the revival of citizenship into nationalist discourses. There will be many strands of argumentation to be picked apart and then put back together as we work out our perspectives on the sort of citizenship compatible with the rights of migrants, and Cabrera has done us the favour of indicating some of the themes we should be prepared to take up.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review