The Politics of the Inhabitant: You Belong Here

Why does citizenship matter? In short, it matters because citizenship comes with privileges from which those that do not have it are excluded. Think higher risks of deportation, greater exposure to exploitation and smaller social safety nets. But none of this is as politically violent as the exclusion from having a direct say on the policies and laws that govern your life in what are supposedly representative democracies. Rather than being something empowering citizenship, as it is overwhelmingly understood today, it is a source of great inequality.

The arbitrary nature of a nationality-based citizenship is illustrated in its execution. Citizen assemblies in Luxembourg are just the most recent example. The Biergerkommittee Lëtzebuerg 2050 and Klima Biergerrot both acknowledge the importance of including the diverse groups that make up Luxembourg (nationals, residents, and – in the latter case – also cross-border workers). There were no loud calls for the exclusion of non-nationals from these processes and no unsubstantiated claims accusing people who were not Luxembourgish of acting in bad faith. Instead, different processes were set up and adapted to allow for more inclusive deliberations and accommodations were made for the linguistic diversity of the country (see Verhasselt’s text on multilingual deliberative democracy in the latest edition of forum). These two recent projects are a sign that time and time again subjects who are not seen as citizens act as citizens and that should raise enough eyebrows to question why we cling to nationality as the main qualifier for citizenship. The Biergerkommittee and Klima Biergerrot are examples of an implicit recognition that other concepts of citizenship are possible and could lead to better decision-making. If nationality is uncoupled from citizenship, what might take its place?

Belonging is about presence

There is something all humans share, regardless of social, economic, and cultural differences; we physically exist and are therefore always present in some location. Of course, there are differences in the ways in which we occupy space. Some may be living in tiny apartments, while others sit in empty mansions. Some of us may be working, others might be relaxing. Regardless of these differences, we are always somewhere. This physical reality needs to play a bigger role when allocating rights and responsibilities to people. Why should a person lose fundamental rights when they leave one place for another? Admittedly, some might only be somewhere else on vacation, while others are looking to settle down and find a new space. The duration of being somewhere should certainly amount for something, but it does not invalidate arguments linking rights to physical presence rather than a granted status. What should matter is providing people with best chances to thrive. One significant way to achieve this is by providing them with the greatest possible influence on the structures that shape their lives. In a representative democracy such as Luxembourg this means expanding suffrage rights. In the absence of other alternatives and running oneself, this is one of the ways that people can influence what is happening at the national level. Essentially, voting rights are about people’s right to demand changes to their lives from the government that rules them and whose policies they are affected by. But as things currently stand, while citizens are not the only ones affected by the political decisions being taken, they are the only ones who get to have a say. The rest of the residents need to acquiesce. That is why the rights accompanying citizenship need to be reimagined and based on “residency as the measure of being a legitimate stakeholder”, as both citizens and non-citizens, through their presence in a small given territory, share much of their lived experience and co-create the society around them (Hayduk & Coll, 2018, p. 2). 

The essence of my argument isn’t new: all residents in Luxembourg should be granted the right to vote because citizenship does not have to be intrinsically linked to nationality. This argument was made in the run-up to the 2015 referendum. My intention is simply to strengthen the legitimacy of the demand to involve all inhabitants of a space in its governance by linking it to the concept of the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1968).

There are academic points of views which state “that rights and recognition should extend to all persons who are territorially present within the geographical space of a national state simply by virtue of that presence” (Bosniak, 2007, p. 389). Such territorial approaches focus on a person’s geographical presence as a sufficient basis for core aspects of membership and highlight the injustice in a system where “different people enjoy different sets of rights and recognition by virtue of their legal status assignment” (Bosniak, 2007, p. 390). They say that “once someone is in the geographical territory of a state, that person must, for most basic purposes, be treated as fully in” (Bosniak, 2008, p. 3). Ethical territoriality is, thus, about getting rid of the outsider-insider dichotomy in the name of “political inclusion” of everyone residing within the territory of a polity and providing everyone with legal recognition. While I agree with these ethical approaches to territoriality, I understand why people would disagree with them and find presence alone as too flimsy a basis for a polity. Presence, however, is not just about being somewhere isolated from others, presence comes with a lived experience. This lived experience is at the core of the right to the city and is about the conviction that the everyday experience of inhabiting a city “entitles one to a right to the city, rather than one’s nation-state citizenship” (Purcell, 2013, p. 141). In the mind of Henri Lefebvre, who is “often thought to be the progenitor of the idea”, the right to the city is however not “an incremental addition to existing liberal-democratic rights” like a right to housing or a right to potable water (Purcell, 2013, p. 142). No, instead the right to the city is about the “right of inhabitants to physically access, occupy and use urban space” and shape it so that it meets the needs of its inhabitants (Purcell, 2002, p. 103). All its inhabitants.

Welcome to Luxembourg – Where presence meets experience

What does all this talk about the city have to do with Luxembourg? “D’Stad” plays a central role in much of what is happening in the Grand-Duchy, but it is not everything. Well, “the city” for Lefebvre was never about the city as an actual physical space, but instead is “a shorthand for a [different society] that incorporates his vision of urbanity, of the social, physical, and economic relations among people in a fully developed humanly oriented society” (Marcuse, 2010, p. 88). The defining factors of what constitutes the city are instead: i.) perceived space, ii.) conceived space and iii.) lived space (Purcell, 2002, p. 102). The first one is the concrete space “people encounter in their daily environment” (Purcell, 2002, p. 102). The second dimension refers to “mental constructions of space, creative ideas, and representations of space” (Purcell, 2002, p. 102). And the last dimension is the combination of the previous two: “a person’s actual experience of space in everyday life” (Purcell, 2002, p. 102). With space and the city understood in this manner, the right to the city loses some of its boundedness to just the urban and allows for the conceptual reapplication to a Luxembourg-wide level, the production of a common space through daily interactions being the defining factor. The reality in Luxembourg is such that space plays out on a different scale as compared to many other countries. Perceived, conceived and lived space in Luxembourg thus become more conflated, a peculiarity which allows us to reconstruct the right to the city as a right to the country.

This illustrates two things: i.) that in front of the law there aren’t many differences between nationals and non-nationals as many of them are citizens of other European countries and ii.) nation-states set arbitrary conditions in a highly selective manner to decide who should become part of its citizenry (Bauder, 2016, p. 255). A five-year residency before applying for citizenship? A lot of things can be done in five years. Solely basing a person’s right to become a citizen on the time they spent in the country is a bad way to measure the work and community activities a resident engages in. Even if the quality and amount of time spent in Luxembourg were to be taken into account, it is difficult to imagine criteria by which a person’s job repairing the roads in the country can be equated to someone else volunteering in the local scouts group. It then becomes difficult to argue with the conviction at the core of ethical territoriality that “rights and recognition should extend to all persons who are territorially present within the geographical space of a national state, simply by virtue of their presence” and to oppose the expansion of political rights to all residents, especially the right to vote at the national level. Luxembourgers alone do not make up Luxembourg City or Luxembourg on their own. It is the work and toil, the interactions, the emotions and the lives of all residents, Luxembourgish or not, that make the country what it is. And because of that they should have a say in the political processes that govern societal relations. 

Conclusion

I have argued that citizenship linked to nationality needs to be reimagined in Luxembourg as citizenship linked to residency. The small size of the country and the few practical differences between non-national and national make it a country in which extending voting rights to all residents – also known as domicile citizenship (Bauder, 2014) – could be attempted. Would it be practically feasible in the short run? I doubt it. Too many with the privilege of determining the rules of the country would be worried about “watering down” their citizenship and the immediate political backlash would be considerable. But despite living in a “political climate that denies the possibility of alternatives” it is especially important to explore the possible and push for more justice (Bauder, 2016, p. 253). More so as residency-linked citizenship does not deny the importance of nationality. On the contrary, nationality could be considered as the one exception of presence in a given territory. Nationals could have the privilege of enjoying the protection of their nation-state abroad, while simultaneously being considered fully legitimate political actors of the place where they might be. On the other side, nationality could also be used to protect residents from policies such as mandatory drafts or community service, by only making them mandatory for those who have the nationality of the given country. Nationality would thus be given new meaning and value (if there ever really has been a loss in value).

Regardless of where we fall in the debate on citizenship, we need to acknowledge that the lived experience of many “has expanded the understanding of citizenship in important ways beyond rights-based status conferred by the nation state” that do justify conceiving it in terms of relations, affections, practices and presence (Müller, 2021, p. 6). These social processes connect people, whether they happen at a local level or a national one and create obligations of justice between the people in question (Bosniak, 2007, p. 410). The right to the city acknowledges the “common bonds that develop among those who share a physical context” and provide a strong case for rethinking citizenship rights and suffrage (Bosniak, 2008, p. 6). Citizenship and the rights that come with it should be perceived as “aspects of social relatedness rather than as inherent and natural properties of individuals” (Holston & Appadurai, 1999, p. 12). 

Citizenship is an idea with a long political history and temporal circumstances that have shaped it (Isin, 2002, p. 1). Many variations have existed and “intense struggles, conflicts and violence to wrest the right to becoming political” have always been part of it (Isin, 2002, p. 2). Our current interpretation of citizenship through the eyes of the nation is a consequence of this and a reminder that “past forms still have a hold on us today and blur what it means to be a citizen in contemporary society” (Isin, 2002, p. 1). But this past does not mean the future is set in stone. Political communities are created, why not then create one that aims to fix the injustices that exist in contemporary notions of citizenship by linking it to a person’s physical presence and lived experience. Why not choose to be who we are?

“Without a vision of Utopia there is no way to define that port to which we might want to sail” (Harvey, 2000, p. 198)

Elisha Winckel is a young graduate student at The New School in New York. He is utterly convinced that Luxembourg could be so much more than it is now. But we have to expand our imagination. 

Sources

Bauder, H. (2016). Domicile Citizenship, Migration and the City. Migration Policy and Practice, 79-99. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137503817_5. 

Bosniak, L. (2007). Varieties of Citizenship. Fordham Law Review 75(5), 2449-2453.

Bosniak, L. (2008). Ethical Territoriality and the Rights of Immigrants. Amsterdam Law Forum, 1(1), 1-19. 

Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of Hope. Berkley: University of California Press. 

Hayduk, R., & Coll, K. (2018). Urban Citizenship: Campaigns to Restore Immigrant Voting Rights in the US. New Political Science, 1-16.

Holston, J., and Appadurai, A. (1999). ‘Cities and Citizenship.’ In Holston, J. (Ed.). Cities and Citizenship, 1-18. Durham: Duke University Press.

Isin, E.F. (2002). Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lefebvre, H. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Éditions Anthropos.

Marcuse, P. (2010). Right in the Cities and the Right to the City? Sugranyes, A., & Mathivet, C. (eds). Cities for All – Proposals and Experiences towards the Right to the City, 87-98. 

Müller, T.R. (2021). Labour market integration and transnational lived citizenship: Aspirations and belonging among refugees in Germany. Global Networks 22(1), 5-19.

Purcell, M. (2002). Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant. GeoJournal 58, 99-108.

Purcell, M. (2013). Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City. Journal of Urban Affairs 36(1), 141-154.