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Seyla Benhabib on Rights and the Borders of Belonging

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Seyla Benhabib on Rights and the Borders of Belonging UTBILDNING & DEMOKRATI 2006, VOL 15, NR 1, 109–118 TEMA: PEDAGOGISK FILOSOFI, ETIK OCH POLITIK RECENSIONSESSÄ “Like travellers navigating an unknown terrain”: Seyla Benhabib on rights and the borders of belonging Across many disciplines, including light of the challenges brought on by education, a certain love–hate relation increasingly multicultural, multieth- has developed with globalization, nic, and multinational societies. With swinging between hopeful exuberance such cultural pluralism, nation-states and tragic lamentation, with many in particular can no longer easily hold perspectives precariously balanced on to a unified identity based around between the two. The particular con- a common ethnicity. Moreover, anal- tours of this relation have, of course, yses of the current transformation of taken shape quite differently accord- nation-states have also occurred in ing to the specific issues arising out of light of globalizing influences, such as the various disciplines, and have cov- the development of regional forms of ered myriad issues such as the delete- governance (e.g., the European Union), rious effects of global capital, the the international human rights regime threats facing the natural environment, (e.g., various UN treaties and the Eu- the opportunities afforded by informa- ropean Court of Human Rights), and tion technology, the breaking up of the trans-national institutions (e.g., the nation-state, and the hybridization of WTO and IMF). Thus the complexity culture and identity, to name but a few. of articulating a cohesive set of ques- Not merely an academic matter, how- tions that brings to the fore both the ever, this focus on globalization has changing internal characteristics of flourished in the context of current states and the growing external pres- social movements and political poli- sures of globalization they face is cies that attempt to grapple with the daunting. The conditions and effects broad range of conditions that mark of globalization are elusive and their civil life within and across borders. geography is by no means clear. As Within political theory, there is a Seyla Benhabib (2004) notes, in try- growing concern with how to define ing to chart the as-yet-emerging polit- formations of political community in ical forms of globalization with old maps “we are like travellers navigat- ing an unknown terrain” (p. 6). Benhabib, Seyla (2004): The Rights of Our conventional ways of under- Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. standing nation, citizenship, and com- Cambridge: Cambridge University munity currently seem inadequate to Press. SHARON TODD the task of explaining the conditions of of civil belonging: how does one pre- contemporary civil, social and eco- vent the growing feeling of disenfran- nomic life – they are old maps indeed. chisement among those who do not fit Why is this so? It is certainly not be- the “homogeneous” image of the na- cause cultural and ethnic diversity is a tion, the violent manifestations of new element in the body politic, nor which we witnessed most recently are great periods of migration entirely across France? Responses to such di- novel; and neither has trans-national lemmas of citizenship within the politics emerged only in the past quar- changing features of the nation-state ter century. Rather the newness of the system have relied particularly on two problem emerges, it seems to me, as old ideas. First, has been the problem- the old fictions of homogeneity upon atic return to the traditional image of which nations have been built have homogeneity – whether conceived of begun to unravel at the seams. That is, as a “people,” or an ethnic national part of the West’s “social imaginary of identity – as a way of buttressing the modernity” no longer appears to offer commonality that has united the po- stability to states. According to Charles litical community in the past and that Taylor (2004) social imaginaries are has facilitated, to a large degree, the not simply ideologies that falsely im- nation’s capacity to determine itself. agine reality, but “they also have a Even though this myth might have constitutive function, that of making been constitutive of a sense of national possible the practices that they make belonging, it no longer offers the sta- sense of and thus enable” (p. 183). In bility it perhaps once did; social forces other words, they are inevitable fictions larger than national narratives of unity that all societies cannot live without. simply make this claim impossible to Currently, however, those social and justify in a world where the question political practices once sustained by of membership within states is on the the imaginary of homogeneity have table precisely because these imaginar- actually altered quite considerably. For ies no longer hold. A second response, example, migration has had a tremen- one less troublesome in my view, but dous impact on how nation-states who still not wholly without its problems, previously saw themselves as cultural- has been the turn to cosmopolitanism, ly uniform (in spite of evidence to the which encapsulates the push for more contrary) are actually challenging that expansive notions of belonging in a imaginary through growing participa- world where borders are becoming tion in the public sphere. What politi- increasingly blurred – both because of cal philosophers are at pains to map is the vast increase in migration and also the nascent formation of these new prac- because states are far less independ- tices through a different imaginary lens. ent entities than they were, through free Such lenses, however, are not so trade, political federations, interna- easy to construct, and often old ideas tional law, and human rights treaties. are mobilized and refashioned in the Also an old idea, current uses of cosmo- service of opening up new possibili- politanism nevertheless stake out a very ties. One of the major challenges for different imaginary: citizenship based political theory has to do with issues on an attachment and belonging to a 110 RECENSIONSESSÄ: “LIKE TRAVELLERS NAVIGATING AN UNKNOWN TERRAIN”: SEYLA BENHABIB ... pluralist world. Yet, the issue for cos- standing of deliberative democracy as mopolitanism, as we shall see, is how a dialogic engagement – an aspect of to reconcile its attachments to global her work that I critically discuss be- “universals,” such as human rights, with low in relation to her more recent text its commitment to respect and value the – she focused on the democratic chal- “particulars” represented through diverse lenge to mediate between different cultures and individuals.1 forms of cultural meaning. In terms of It is precisely this terrain navi- her capacity to navigate boldly gated by Seyla Benhabib (2004) in The through debates which have become Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and so polarized, she displays the same Citizens. Here is an attempt to offer a tenaciousness in her newest book. In- new political imaginary that, in my deed, her final chapters on citizenship reading, takes issue with homogeneity, and the post-national European scene on the one hand, and grapples with in The Claims of Culture are really the dual attachments of a cosmopoli- the departure points for The Rights of tan outlook, on the other. Originally Others, so readers familiar with the delivered as part of the Seeley Lecture former will recognize the similarity of Series at the University of Cambridge, themes and argumentative strategies The Rights of Others represents an in the latter. extension of some of her thinking in In this most recent text, Benhabib her earlier work, The Claims of Cul- (2004) addresses herself to the condi- ture (2002). There Benhabib took on tions of political community: how peo- the challenges faced by liberal democ- ple come to belong and achieve polit- racies in light of cultural conflict and ical membership in the context of the what this means for cultural rights, current upheavals of the nation-state gender, and citizenship. Not content system and the vast migration and re- with viewing cultures as homogene- settlement that is one of the hallmarks ous wholes, Benhabib moved beyond of the global era. As the title suggests, the rather stagnant debates between she is concerned with the rights of those multiculturalists and certain demo- who have been “othered” through the cratic theorists. She resisted falling boundaries that states create, bounda- into a trite dichotomy that positions ries which draw distinctions between any concern with culture as hopelessly those who fully belong and those relativistic, on the one hand, and that whose belonging is much more tenu- views all universalism as being either ous. Conferring citizenship (or not) sig- entirely ethnocentric or absolutist, on nifies who is “us” and who is “other” the other. Instead, through her under- within set territorial borders. Moreo- ver it inscribes who has access to so- cial and civil benefits and who is pro- tected under which rights. Benhabib 1. I have elsewhere described the tensions observes that at certain historical junc- within cosmopolitanism in terms of tures the difficulties of political bound- ambiguity, tracing it from Kant’s fa- mous formulation of cosmopolitanism aries become more visible than at oth- in his essay “Perpetual peace.” See Todd ers – and this is one such time (Ben- (forthcoming). habib 2004, p. 18). Insightfully, Ben- 111 SHARON TODD habib does not begin with seeing mi- In situating her response, she locates gration and the fraying of the powers the boundaries of political membership of the nation-state merely as “prob- within a dual context: First is that of lems,” rather she poses them as op- the state’s right to determine who and portunities for rethinking issues of cit- under what conditions citizenship can izenship and global justice. be held, as well as defining which po- Migration, for Benhabib, is a key litical and civil rights that those who element for understanding political are not full citizens are entitled to.
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