Globalised Democracies: representing non-citizen residents in the EU

Abstract

Citizenship is an integral part of the democratic system: those belonging officially and legally to a nation-state’s ‘club’ are the ones who can actively participate in political life; more specifically, citizens can voice their democratic will though voting. However, globalisation has changed the way that communities look – no longer can metropoles and cultural centres be considered homogenous representations of a nationality, but rather a patchwork quilt of immigrants, expats, international students, and all in between. Those in this section of the population do not necessarily have the citizenship and rights of their local neighbour and are therefore often excluded from political representation and active political life. In too many places, the democratic process is not representative of its population. Globalisation means that citizenship, as we know it, is no longer an adequate means of enacting democracy in the European Union: the traditional democratic frameworks, procedures and institutions are outdated. So, how are modern societies in the EU combatting this problem? Far from being a sudden phenomenon, regions and organisations across the continent have taken steps to increase the political participation of local non-citizen residents. In this paper, I explore the approaches that have been taken within the European Union to overcome the democratic dissonance on two levels: supranational and subnational. On the supranational level, I examine the ways in which the EU has implemented a complementary citizenship, working to overcome national border limitations, and to what extent this has affected the democratic rights of non-citizen residents. On the subnational level, I explore the procedures in cities, particularly Barcelona, that provide more voting and representation rights, or ‘local citizenship,’ to its non-citizen residents than the national law allows. Perhaps, globalised democracies are the way of the future.

Introduction

Citizenship, in its current form, is for most people in Europe and in the modern world a simple and indisputable part of life. A person is usually born with a legal citizenship, defined by Bauböck in Athenian and Roman terms as membership to a political community, that can be designated according to various criteria.[1]For example, citizenship can be assigned on the basis of jus soli – the (birth)right of soil relating to the location in which a child is born – or more commonly through jus sanguinis, the (birth)right of blood, relating to the citizenship status of one or both of a child’s parents. Besides this, most states have various procedures of naturalisation, and some may even grant citizenship based simply on substantial financial contributions or investments within their borders.[2] In most cases, however, a child will grow up in the state in which they have citizenship, among family and peers that share that citizenship, likely to create strong cultural and social bonds with that national community. In time, the person becomes an adult that, through this national citizenship, has rights and obligations to the state like voting, paying taxes and respecting the law, in addition to being eligible for benefits such as social welfare, government subsidies and consular protection abroad.[3]

These factors encompass the formal aspect of citizenship, or the on-paper parts of what it means, in a legal sense, to be a citizen of somewhere, linking citizenship and nationality. However, the substantive dimension of citizenship plays another crucial and complementary role in the realization of what it means to be a citizen.[4]This dimension denotes primarily the participatory aspects of being a member of a national community, rather than simply fulfilling obligations; it entails having the capability to engage – and then indeed engaging – in political debate, in voting consciously and deliberately, and in being an active part in the politics, society, and governing of one’s community.[5] It is about the making of a citizen and a citizen group, in cultural and symbolic ways as well as socially and politically.[6]

And yet, perhaps, this matter of citizenship is taken for granted by those who live where they come from. An issue arises when considering the real effectiveness of current citizenship practices in metropoles around the world because, as the process of globalisation extends into every corner of the globe, so change the faces of communities: more than ever before do the inhabitants of cities and countries have migration backgrounds and are not formal citizens – either not yet, or those unable to obtain citizenship in the location they reside. This is where the entanglement of citizenship and nationality proves a problem: no longer can metropoles and cultural centres be considered homogenous representations of a nationality, but rather a patchwork quilt of migrants, expatriates, foreign workers, international students, refugees, and all in between. For example, a 2021 New York City report showed that in 2020, 36 percent of the population there were foreign-born residents, and close to half of those residents were non-citizens.[7] In 2020, over 55 percent of the population of Amsterdam had a migration background – being either first or second generation migrants residing in the municipality.[8]These are not trivial numbers; rather, they are significant portions of the population, in many more places than just New York City or Amsterdam, without access to the obligations nor benefits of citizenship. These groups lack the formal avenues for being politically active in their communities, such as having a vote in national elections or a say even in regional leadership, and results in the very real possibility of having little or no political representation – but, of course, are more than likely paying tax in their municipalities or to the state. These non-citizens residents may also not be privy to the benefits and the rights entitling them to live at the same social standard as other citizens, through exclusion from, for example, access to subsidies, favourable financial or work opportunities, or to the safety net that social welfare provides. When entire segments of the population are excluded from the politics, society, and governing of their community, it proves difficult to argue that democracy is functioning effectively in representing the needs and wishes of the people for which it claims to speak. Globalisation means that citizenship, in its current form, is no longer an adequate means of enacting democracy, also not in the European Union: the traditional democratic frameworks, procedures and institutions are outdated.

As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, into a world where the national borders become blurrier, where one side of the earth can be connected to the other faster than ever before, where nations and communities are more diverse than at any point in history, we may wonder: what comes next? In an unstoppably globalizing world, where each of us is linked to the other through the internet, instant messaging and social media, something new is needed to combat the issues and situations that simply transcend national borders. So, how are modern societies in the EU working to disentangle citizenship from nationality, in the legal and substantive senses? Far from being a sudden phenomenon, regions and organisations across the continent have taken steps to increase the political participation of local non-citizen residents. In this paper, I explore the approaches that have been taken within the European Union to overcome the democratic dissonance on two levels: supranational and subantional. Though these two focuses might seem incompatible, on opposite sides of the spectrum, the ultimate focus complemented from both sides is a departure from the nation-state as norm: as succinctly stated by Anthony Moran on the theme of post-national formations and cosmopolitanism, “While the nation-state is still an important institutional form, postnational identities and experiences challenge the boundaries of nation-states, and also national identities.”[9] Thus, on the supranational level, I examine the ways in which the EU has implemented a complementary citizenship in the form of creating EU citizens, working to overcome national border limitations, and to what extent this has affected the democratic rights of non-citizen residents. On the subnational level, I explore the procedures in cities, particularly Barcelona, that provide more voting and representation rights to its non-citizen residents than the national (Spanish) law allows, under a scheme of ‘urban citizenship.’

It is useful to examine how changes over time have reduced the effectiveness of formal, legal citizenship now, and how other types of citizenship – such as sub- or supranational – could be more effective in stimulating the social cohesion and political activeness of contemporary communities. The concept of citizenship has evolved to meet the needs of communities for centuries: once cities and city-states became a common living arrangement in ancient Greece, the need became apparent for a distinction between the freemen of the polis on the one hand, and women, slaves, and foreigners on the other; the Aristotelian conception of citizenship was born.[10]From here, ‘citizens’ – deriving from Latin ‘civitas’ associated with city and civility, and related to ‘denizen’, meaning inhabitant[11] – were established, with the purpose being to delineate exactly who was and wasn’t included in a specific political community.[12]When borders were drawn between one place and the next, and loyalty to the immediate and often homogenous community was most important, national citizenships were developed in which eventually women and the working class were included. This happened markedly around the time of the French Revolution, when the emphasis on a small, elite class of ‘citizen’ was – somewhat violently – shifted to a more inclusive model of who belongs to and can participate in a political community.[13]

There is much more to be said on the history and development of nations and states and their citizenships, but this is unfortunately beyond the scope of this research. However, even just exploring these key iterations in the evolution of citizenship demonstrates that what exists today is not a static or unchangeable fact, and that citizenship can evolve further to meet the new requirements of the contemporary populations that need it in a continually globalising world.

Globalising Democracy

Globalisation is an important feature of contemporary life: it shapes the way governments and corporations act among each other and towards one another, and this invariably affects the daily lives of people living in communities all over the world. Globalisation is described as a process that “embodies the transformation of the spatial organization of the world and its regions, social relations and interactions” and is measured through a number of indicators relating to “intercontinental or interregional flows and structures.”[14] Internationalisation, or the increasing scope and density of interdependence among states, constitutes the political aspects of globalisation, and transnationalisation encompasses the more informal side: the increasing scope and density of links between different peoples and groups that cut across states and national borders. This means globalisation is a two-way process whereby social, political, and cultural dynamics and shape and interact with economic processes, just as much as these dynamics are shaped and interacted with by economic processes, on technological as well as political levels.[15] What this results in, for people and organisations and governments across the globe, is the “widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnected-ness” that continues to extend through modern social relationships.[16] The strains that these historical and ongoing changes put on the traditional notion of national citizenships is thus not hard to imagine.

Indeed, as markets and economies globalise, so populations diversify, and so must the governments and institutions that regulate them globalise and change. State-centrism is no longer an effective method of management, since many previously state-occupied spaces must now be shared with a multiplicity of new actors.[17] State-security and human security can now go hand in hand as globalisation brings the faraway corners of the globe within reach. From a ‘transdisciplinary trialogue’ of historians, economic geographers, and political scientists, Jonsson et. al. describes the purportedly contradictory processes of globalisation and regionalization in that they seem to pull in opposite directions of integration or fragmentation, yet, on the other hand, continually reinforce one another.[18] Essentially, the trialogue argues, as territorial states lose power – economic, political, cultural, or otherwise – to the processes and consequences of globalisation, regions (such as provinces or cities) become stronger actors in the political and cultural spheres of a given locality.[19] This relates insofar that as citizenship is a way for governments to manage and organise their people, a method that also requires a modernisation process to accommodate for the changes brought on by globalisation. Exactly this reason is what underpins the thesis of this research: supranational citizenship moves away from state-centrism to bring political power and representation in a post-national context, in the same yet opposite way that executions of local citizenship leave state-centred policies of democracy and representation behind in favour of ensuring local populations are politically empowered.

New Directions of Modern Migration

Migration is the zeitgeist that continues to characterise the 21st century in both social and political spheres. It is often assumed that migration has increased dramatically in all aspects, but the in-depth analysis of migration patterns since 1960 by Czaika & de Haas establishes that the most impacted, and thus key, aspect is the direction of migration.[20] This directionality of migration in the age of globalisation is linked to shifts in the area of economics and geopolitics: higher levels of development across the world – including higher education levels and access to technology, meaning more awareness of opportunities abroad – increase emigration capabilities from more ‘origin countries,’ and the lifting of exit restrictions in developing and formerly communist or colonised countries increases immigration possibilities. What Czaika & de Haas describe as the rise of “new migration hubs” in Europe, the Gulf, and Asia, are of key interest here: the authors point out that the asymmetric processes of globalisation have seen a shift in Europe, which could formerly be characterised as a source of settlers and emigrants to the Americas and the Pacific.[21] Especially in the time after the Second World War while coming to terms with its devastated and decimated state, European countries became a monolithic source of refugees who traversed the continent and the globe in search of places to live.[22]

Instead, since 1960, there has been a transformation into what the authors call a “global migration magnet,” where the European Union and its metropoles more specifically, have increasing levels of non-citizen immigrants and inhabitants.[23] Much of this had to do with the external labour recruitment of the 60s and 70s, as Europe rebuilt and noted its labour shortages; labour migrants came to Europe and as while there was a degree of return migration, many settled to call their new locations home. Guest and seasonal worker programmes from this time did not end up being as temporary as originally intended, especially in relation to the simplified pathways to permanent residence in many states.[24] This in turn lead to the EU implementing a ‘zero migration policy’ in the 80s and 90s that consequently resulted not in less migration, but more irregular and undocumented migrants entering the region with more possibilities of exploitation due to lack of regulation. Moving forward in time to mid-2010s, the crisis of handling the incoming refugees to the EU once again saw a rise in the visibility of non-citizen residents in Europe, and the refugee crises that arguably seem to characterise the European Union continue in different forms in 2022. The combination of globalisation over time, unstable (sometimes violent) geopolitics, and habitually disorganised approaches to handling migration mean that the issues of moving forward as a notably diverse, heterogenous society remain politically, as a challenge to the incumbent forms of enacting democracy. The consequence has been, in Europe and across the globe, an emergence of reactionary nationalism built on identity politics and policies of exclusion. From this point, and in how it ties to the related phenomenon of urbanisation, the question of citizenship and political participation in communities arises again: significant portions of modern populations in these hubs come to be excluded due to their legal status, despite willingness to participate in civil life and its duties.

Nationalism, Populism, & Policies of Exclusion

On national levels, the changing and modernisation of things such as citizenship is very much challenged by populist and nativist rhetoric in governments across the world. Though postnationalism challenges the institution of the nation state, it doesn’t diminish the cornerstone role it plays in contemporary societies nor the value that many place on having and participating in a national identity as linked to citizenship. Populism, as the thin-centred ideology put forward by Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser,[25]is a rhetoric of the vertical dichotomy between the ‘pure people’ and the ‘corrupt elite’, and the horizontal dichotomy between the former and the ‘others.’[26]Right-wing populist parties conceive of society as made up of these separate, homogenous, and entirely incompatible groups which aim to dilute and obscure the (political) ‘will’ of the aforementioned ‘pure people’ and inhibit access to popular direct democracy. Specifically relevant here is the normative distinction and ethno-nationalist construction of identities: the ‘pure people’ identity is constructed not always by defining who or what they are, but rather by who and what they are not; the focus lies in magnifying the (negative) differences instead of the (potentially positive) similarities. Vertically, from the perspective of a populist party, the ‘corrupt elite’ can be the current governing party, upper-class citizens with some kind of power influence, or the European Union.

More interesting to this study, however, is the construction of the horizontal ‘other’ - these are people that live on the same or similar social level as the rest of their communities, but these ‘others’ could be religious or ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees, those with differing political views, or simply other members of the community that do not ‘belong’ for some reason or another. The identity of the ‘pure people’, then, is defined by its exclusions. Indeed, the fact of the populist phenomenon means that attitudes against open borders, immigration, and even migrants or refugees themselves, exist in politics and governments around the world. This, then, poses a challenge to the inclusion (as opposed to the othering) of those with migrant backgrounds in the political community as not only legal or formal citizens, but as social and cultural members of a citizenship. The idea is to maintain, if not strengthen, the entanglement of nationality and citizenship.

Nonetheless, the goals of populist parties are familiar: just as other supporters of democracy, they want active participation and an effective system of democracy that allows for the most representative governing of a given group of people. The difference, or dissonance, is in that right-wing populist want to represent only the will of the traditional citizens, rather than the patchwork quilt of ‘wills’ in a contemporary society. Optimal political representation involves the ‘general will’ of everyone in a community and achieves this through political inclusion of citizens and non-citizens residents alike. Supranational organisations such as the EU, and metropoles such as Barcelona, work towards goals such as these in a world characterised and undeniably changed by globalisation, migration and asylum-seeking.

Discussion

Current modes of citizenship, thus, seem to no longer be adequate tools for effective democracy, and as a result, the frameworks and institutions of our political system have become dissonant and undemocratic. Non-citizen residents for now often have limited activeness in the political community, fuelling the process of othering and social dissolution, whereas other forms of citizenship could allow for these formally excluded groups to partake in political running of their community and serve as a tool for social and political cohesion. Here, two alternative modes of citizenship are considered, based on similar values of equality and inclusion but executed in two, seemingly contradictory, ways: supranational and subnational citizenship.

Supranational Inclusion

The enactment of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, establishing a citizenship held by all citizens of states that are members of the European Union, a supranational organisation, added a post-national element to citizenship.[27] Citizens of and within the EU have rights and obligations to the European Union, such as being eligible and encouraged to vote beyond national borders in both European and local municipal elections, as well as stand as candidates in both elections. These citizens are urged to participate in a political and democratic life on a supranational level. As a benefit, European citizens are permitted in any fellow member state for travel, work, or study, without discrimination on the grounds of nationality. They can enjoy protection abroad in the consulate of any EU member, and within the EU access official information in any of the Treaty languages. This citizenship creates a motivated and enabled in-group of members who, despite individual nationalities, have a political community in common. On the social level of citizenship, the EU provides a framework in which common values are shared, human rights and freedoms are upheld, equality is respected, and diversity is celebrated.[28] Furthermore, the EU aims to promote equality and non-discrimination for its citizens not only by endorsing these common values, but by investigating the weaknesses and shortcomings in the community and coming to conclusions and solutions on how to tackle the issues that arise. Importantly, in its 2012 consolidated treaty, the EU makes very clear that the European citizenship is in no way intended to ‘replace national citizenships,’ but rather ‘be additional to’ each individual’s existing situation.[29] This European Union initiative is a clear example of a supranational approach to decoupling (a form of) citizenship from nationality – at least to a degree.

Of course, to be eligible for European citizenship, an individual must already have the entangled citizenship and nationality of a specific state. Further, to be able to call on the application of EU law in a national context, an individual must be able to prove that they have engaged in or made use of the rights afforded to European Union citizens. A Dutch citizen living in the Netherlands, for example, cannot use EU law to apply for their non-EU partner’s residence permit – which has lower income and residence requirements than the national criteria – if the Dutch citizen hasn’t used their right to free movement to live (with their partner) in another EU member state.[30] So excluded from the rights and benefits of the EU’s form of supranational citizenship are non-EU citizen residents of EU member states, the same residents also excluded under national citizenship schemes, as well as citizens of EU member states who have yet to engage their EU rights. This means that supranational citizenship, while it operates with national borders and continent-based exclusivity, has limited use for the purpose of including the aforementioned patchwork quilt of non-citizen residents in a given location. However, what it does offer is a model: a real-world, active, and ongoing example of how citizenship can be adapted and extended to suit a globalised society.

Replacing national citizenship is not a feasible answer at this time to the postnational and globalised democracy question. The emphasis of EU citizenship as being additional and complementary is key and helps to temper the discussion on the future of different, additional forms of citizenship. The forces of right-wing populism and nationalism in propping up identity politics make it clear: there are wide concerns about questions of representation and belonging, but supranational citizenships do have a place in this conversation. In the European Commission’s triennial citizenship report, some of the most important statistics come forward to demonstrate the advantages of the initiative for democracy. In the last report from 2020, the Commission found that the voter turnout to the European parliamentary elections of 2019 reached the highest percentage in almost more than twenty years, with over 50 percent of eligible citizens participating.[31] This was up from less than 43 percent in the 2014 European elections, and for comparison, the average voter turnout in the European Union at the most recent national elections was 66.1 percent across the member states[32] – which is not exceptionally high either but shows that there is a rising awareness of the democratic participatory aspect of EU citizenship. This increased turnout has been attributed to young voters participating en masse and many first-time voters making their way to the polls.[33]

It is not hard to see the connection between young Europeans being active in this political community and the ways in which European citizenship has been promoted to them: the Erasmus+ programme – under which university students across the Union can participate in facilitated and often funded exchanges to universities in other member states – was rated as the third most positive result of the EU, surpassed only by ‘peace among EU member states’ and the ‘free movement of people, goods, and services’ within the EU.[34] The programme operates to strengthen the European identity among youth and cultivate active citizenship, not just for students now and the 10 million people that have taken part in the last thirty years, but for all those involved in this border-transcending supranational activity.[35] More initiatives – such as Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters programmes, run by consortia of universities in the EU and valuably supporting non-EU students too – further work to contribute positively in to these goals of integration.[36] Particularly, Erasmus+ focuses on educating its participants about their citizenship to the European community, how and why to participate actively in the political and democratic sphere, and “bringing together young people and decision makers are local, national and Union level,”[37] which in turn has resulted in high representation in elections and, optimistically, a more inclusive and democratic European Union.

As noted, the EU’s version of supranational citizenship is not a perfect alternative to the current exclusions proffered by national citizenship in that it doesn’t provide representation for non-EU citizen residents. What is does offer is much more opportunity for non-national EU citizens to have active, participatory, substantive citizenship in their locations of residence – being eligible to vote in both municipal and EU elections, for example, builds community both politically and culturally. Under globalisation, where it is almost a given that people won’t always live where they come from, this scheme of inclusion is a model for the adaptability of citizenship and a demonstration of the benefits of disentangling citizenship from nationality.

Subnational Participation

On the other side of the coin is subnational or local citizenship,[38] which offers solutions to the exclusions and complications that arise in a globalised world by ‘down-scaling’ the citizenship process. Instead of national or cross-border supranational options, subnational citizenship confines itself to a more immediate location, providing the political and social benefits of citizen membership to residents without the bureaucratic requirements that usually serve to exclude them. As opposed to the current automatic citizenship allocations of jus soli and jus sanguinis or processes of naturalisation, local citizenship operates under the notion of jus domicili, or the right of (political) membership granted on the basis of residence and lost in the same way – by leaving that residence.[39] Under the premise that cities are political communities of a different kind, Bauböck argues for the separation of (local) citizenship from nationality and that this should be asserted through providing full local citizenship to those within their jurisdiction without any discrimination on the basis of nationality.[40] This non-discrimination clause would include immigrants from other parts of the same state (in the sense that they would not be favoured for their passports) as well as those from abroad, essentially creating a cohesive social and political community of residents that all have the same stakes in city: they all influence and face the consequences of local elections, and those elected know that they must act in the best interest of all their constituents – not just for those who (before local citizenship) would need to be pleased for the purpose of re-election. Bauböck argues that urban democracy in modern times can only be strengthened by returning power to city(-states), and that officially formalising local citizenship has two key benefits: firstly, that non-citizen residents in a given city are aware of their rights as full members of the polity and their obligations to utilise their rights of participation; and secondly, that original inhabitants of the city know in definite terms that they share their locality with diverse and contributing neighbours, shared nationality or not. In this way, too, the social dissolution perpetuated by antagonistic othering and political exclusion is confronted and curbed, at least on a metropolitan scale.

A key point here is that implementing citizenship on a local, city-region level need not impact national or federal regulations regarding the naturalisation of immigrants – local citizenship is intended to be a strategy for smaller-scale social and political unity that doesn’t require so many high-level bureaucratic processes. Like the processes involved in the implementation of EU citizenship, a subnational citizenship is intended to be additional to any existing citizenships, not a replacement. The intention echoes that of the EU: to provide a formal identification that gives an individual extra and more relevant rights in a certain situation – be that supranational or subnational. However, an interesting thought is posited in Isin & Nielsen’s Acts of Citizenship: if the city becomes a space in which immigration policy is created and enacted, rather than this being a solely state-level responsibility as per tradition, then how does this influence the idea that change can only happen at the very top?[41] It instead generates new possibilities of state policy reformation, changes in the modalities of membership, and ultimately, in the words of Jacques Derrida, “the construction of solidarities not yet invented.”[42]In tackling issues of social cohesion, political participation, and democracy itself, subnational citizenship answers a number of problems and clears the path for even broader changes to the conception and application of citizenship in the 21st century.

The notion of local, subnational citizenship is not just theory: a number of cities across the globe and in the European Union have implemented policies in their spheres of influence that include non-citizen residents to a higher degree than what the broader national laws might dictate. San Francisco has been characterised as a ‘sanctuary city’ for its policy of allowing all residents with children in school the right to vote in some local elections, irrespective of (national) status;[43] since 2004, Toronto has operated under a policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ which prohibits municipal civil servants from inquiring about a resident’s immigration status, as well as barring them from (being able to) disclose this kind of information to immigration authorities, because the city believes in the provision of city services based on residency rather than citizenship;[44] Grenoble follows the principles of local hospitality and unconditionality, which operate to guarantee access for all residents to public spaces and municipal services.[45] The city of Barcelona, too, has strayed from national Spanish regulations to provide a different kind of (political) membership to the residents of its realm.

Spain endured a tough road to recovery in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and when economic recession hit, the government of the time felt the need to implement strong austerity measures that limited the availability of welfare opportunities to non-citizen residents – legal and irregular alike – including exclusion from accessing healthcare insurance by law.[46]Spain had for a long time been more welcoming and informal to migrants entering the country for work or other reasons, which meant that a reasonably large percentage of the Spanish population were not citizens and consequently suffered drops to poverty and other forms social inequality in the crisis. Importantly, under the austerity measures, the capacity of municipal governments and cities to manage the integration of (undocumented) immigrants was greatly reduced.[47]However, the 2015 elections in municipalities such as Barcelona resulted in ‘new management’ that “manifestly questioned austerity and neoliberal policies” and the assumption of purely top-down governance.[48]Barcelona situated itself as and in step with other sanctuary cities, perhaps particularly due it its high volume of non-citizen residents: the region of Catalonia generally has one of the highest percentages of foreigners at over 21 percent, and the city of Barcelona – home to over 1.6 million people in 2015 – had over 262 thousand foreign nationals from across the globe, 181 thousand of those from outside the European Union.[49]The city had also maintained an education plan since the 1990s in conjunction with more than 40 organisations such as political parties and social groups to improve the education and integration of the children of migrants in public school,[50]demonstrating that Barcelona had long been aware of and actively engaged with its non-citizen population. Essentially, after the 2015 coming to power of the ‘municipalist front’ in Barcelona during the aftermath of 2008, the city established policies and protocols that extended the rights of immigrants at the local level while the state policies were much more restrictive. In this way, Barcelona was able to maintain non-citizen access to social services like registration and healthcare, while offering a defence from police targeting and criminalisation.[51]Migrants were thus effectively brought into the political community, granted subnational belonging in a country that would never offer them national citizenship, and Barcelona built from the bottom-up a citizenship community disentangled from the nation-state.

More recently, Barcelona has focused its local citizenship efforts on the formalisation of its inclusion of non-citizen residents. It works to protect the human rights of migrants through a number of migrant-devoted institutions, and has a dedicated municipal service that collects and addresses the needs of the community. Remarkably, it operates the Barcelona Municipal Immigration Council which “allows migrants and their associations to participate in local policy-making”[52] – creating a tangible democratic outcome that more closely represents the social, cultural and political patchwork-reality of Barcelona in 2022. Formalising local citizenship of non-citizen residents, especially those that are undocumented or irregular, has been the most recent project of the Barcelonians: a policy of proactive registration has been in effect to secure the legal status of Barcelona’s population, based on the legal autonomy that the city and municipality already has.[53] Much of the time, however, the work being done is to fill the gaps in national Spanish regulation and stop people from falling through the cracks; at the same time, opportunities to do even more are still restricted by what Spanish law simply does not allow.[54]

As a model for subnational citizenship, Barcelona offers a vision of what an inclusive, welcoming, global city can look like, and what kind of policies work to provide a more strongly representative and democratic community. There are of course struggles involved with this bottom-up approach to disentangling citizenship from nationality: the national law limitations, the amount of (likely unpaid) work that goes into the organisation and implementation of grass-roots action, and the inability to predict what kind of future the next election or the next global crisis could bring. The resources are scarcer, and broader support may be hard to muster if the local citizenship initiatives are seen as a rebellious act[55]or a betrayal of national(ist) identity. However, until supranational citizenship includes more of the world so as to best represent modern populations, subnational citizenship and the truer democratic potential it offers is an solid alternative to the restrictions of traditional national citizenship.

Conclusion; or, Moving Forward

Neither supra- nor subnational citizenship are perfect and infallibly representative mode of enacting democracy, but accounted for in the preceding sections are the circumstances under which the citizenship needs of populations across the globe have changed in the 21st century, moving away from the nation-state focus of the past years. Globalisation and migration have not only affected economies and politics, but also the social fabric that make up modern communities and the attitudes surrounding them. The traditional model of (national) citizenship no longer encompasses enough of a contemporary population to be an effective method of democracy, and thus, it must adapt.

The key difference between two alternative modes of citizenships discussed above is the way that they are applied: supranational citizenship as a large-scale, top-down endeavour with some obvious snares, while subnational citizenship is more of a bottom-up process that comes from smaller spheres of government and social organisation and effects changes in that way. Though at first glance the two alternatives appear contradictory or at least very different, they share a common aspiration: to bring modern communities together in unity and equality, and to promote active, informed, and enthusiastic participation in the social and political spheres of life, no matter where one comes from or where one lives. Considering the pertinent ongoings, such as globalisation, (the new directions of) migration, the rise of populism, and the re-emergence of nativist nationalism, is valuable in discovering the faults and pitfalls of the current as well as proposed systems.

In a speech for the European Association for the Internationalisation of Education, Taiye Selasi explains that once a person ceases to see themself a national, but rather as a local of a place or many places, they can begin to question the logic of nationalism and the concept of borders, and recognise rhetoric of division and othering. These are the people that become voters and can effect change in their communities, changes that reflect local and global values, rather than nationalist ones: multi-local, post-national, open-minded thinkers that don’t shy from globalisation and a more united future.[56]As with so many things in the contemporary globalised world, these changes and improvements to current norms cannot be impacted by solely one individual, group, nation, or union – but it must begin somewhere. Let it be here, and let it be us.