It is urgent to seek spaces of hope for human rights after the theorists clarify how serious citizenship is straitened in terms of globally socio-spatial reorganization.
The dependence on fixed national borders and national absolute sovereignty once were the most practical and effective methods to realize the ideal of human rights.
Since Kant’s age, the processes of global modernity break many geographical and spatial borders, especially the national territorial and social borders. Balibar, Sassen, and Harvey all point out that the national borders are not simply penetrated or disappear in the globalizing process but repeating re-organizing. The problem is that it can be manipulated to appear and disappear mostly in order to facilitate global capital accumulation and to exclude undesirable immigrants. The fixed borders that are extremely crucial for implementing human rights are no longer fixed. What is worse, they become flexible and porous to serve economic globalization, which causes social inequality rather than equality in the society. The discourses of human rights and national citizenship thus meet a dead end in economic globalization. It is important to think beyond the national scope, that is, to consider border area a new site of struggle;
and we may find new possibilities to realize human rights that would affect global order, peace, and ethics among nations and peoples.
Border area may be one possible strategic site for the future development of human rights in the global age. Observing the process that the countries in so-called
“Europe” integrate into the European Union, Balibar grasps the essence of human rights as all the states are compressed into a global world. The integrating process highlights the border areas or what Balibar calls “the peripheral zones.” They are the spaces “where secular and religious cultures confront one another, where differences in economic prosperity become more and more pronounced and stained;” Balibar continues, the peripheral areas “constitute the melting pot for the formation of a people…without [peripheral zones] there is no citizenship…in the democratic tradition” (1-2). Because many different powers contest, co-exist, and tolerate one
another in border areas, these areas would be the places of origin of citizenship and democracy. As Balibar observes, “more and more…borders are creating problems in the heart of civic space where they generate conflicts, hopes, and frustrations for all sorts of people, as well as inextricable administrative and ideological difficulties for states” (109-110). With so many different conflicts taking place in border areas, these sites may be the places of frustration but they also at the same time suggest hope for real democracy that people of different kind may learn to accept and live with one another. Different people may find their spaces in border areas to display and speak for themselves. Border areas may be a hopeful site for various powers struggle for balance and order of democracy at the global scale.
In border areas which may be a hopeful strategic site for developing real democracy and citizenship, the unwelcome immigrants would represent a group that contributes to rather than obstructs the democratization of the borders. It is not simply because they practice their right to move but because their global mobility causes struggles in the border areas (Balibar 49). These struggles would stimulate the border zones to transform and tolerate more and more differences. As Balibar says, “the historical advances of citizenship…have always passed by way of struggles” (Balibar 50). In the history of rights and citizenship formation, struggles are everywhere.
Workers struggle, women struggle, and now it might be the immigrants’ turn.11 The
11 For example, The New York Sun reports that illegal immigrants in New York plan a one-day strike to
“show America what it would be like if there were no immigrant labor or dollars.” It says “immigrants appear to be organizing anyway… Among the city's poorest illegal workers, particularly the flood of recent Mexican immigrants, the idea of showing the city what it would be like to live without their labor appears to be popular and spreading quickly.” Before this strike, there was “an estimated 125,000 immigrants turned out to rally calling for a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws in New York a week ago.” In New York that can be regarded as a border area where all kinds of differences crowd in and confront one another, the immigrants can rally to become a force and struggle for their rights. For more details, please go to: http://www.nysun.com/article/31064?page_no=3
hope that border areas provide is to offer the immigrants and other differences a accumulate/concentrate most global capital of the world, they also attract most immigrants looking for better life chances. On the other hand, as Sassen defines a new kind of “economic citizenship” that are granted to “firms and markets, specially, the global financial markets;” this new form of citizenship “is located not in individuals, not in citizens, but in global economic actors” (“Economic Globalization” 69). The new members benefiting from the economic citizenship are also highly concentrated in global cities. Global city is one of the sites for all the contradictions brought about by global flows. Immigrants, capitals, and economic agents gather in these urban places. Global cities are exactly the true border areas that include all differences.
Sassen further analyzes the characteristics of global cities as a geopolitical strategic site which could be a hopeful stage for the development of human rights.
12 The Guardian reports in 2002 that “immigrant to Britain has doubled over the past 10 years...The level of immigration will run at nearly 250,000 a year—more than two million a decade— for the foreseeable future, according to the study, an influx said to be the equivalent of adding a population the size of Birmingham every five years…[Migration Watch UK] estimates that at least 60,000 illegal immigrants are added to the total every year, of which 35,000 entered legally but overstayed their permission, while the other 25,000 entered undetected.”
For more information, please check the website:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,769425,00.html#article_continue
Noticing the growing importance of global cities that may to certain extent become more powerful than national sovereignty, Sassen believes that global cities can be a great strategic site for “new types of operations” of citizenship (“Repositioning of Citizenship” 18). The strongly authorized governance system and citizenship are disintegrated in globalization.
The loss of power at the national level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the subnational level. The national as container of social process and power is cracked. This cracked casing opens up possibilities for geography of politics that links subnational spaces. [Global] cities are foremost in this new geography.
(“Repositioning of Citizenship” 18; Global City 48)
All the leaking material, resources and power that national authority can not hold and control anymore come together to all global cities to form the sub-national spaces. In the sub-national spaces of global cities, these new powers find new ways of operation and association with one another through conflicts and contradictions. New operation and ways of association bring hope to the feeble who find no chance in the established social and political system. The more flexible sub-national spaces open more opportunities of change and tolerate more struggles.13
In addition, global cities offer the socially weak the spaces to unite in their fights for rights. Sassen notices that what flows to global cities can be categorized as two strategic actors: global corporate capital and immigration/workforce (“Repositioning of Citizenship” 19). The great concentration of corporate power and
13 See the example in the footnote 11.
immigrants assemble simultaneously in global cities as two trends of globalization.
Containing these two trends, global cities “[allow] us to capture, further, not only the upper but also the lower circuits of globalization” (Sassen, Global City 52). The economic advantaged confront with the disadvantaged populations in these cities and cause a series of conflicts and contradictions. In these contradictions, the marginal people will gain strong presence. They are also able to claim their entitlement and rights to place simply by appearing in a large number. The global cities, open for all flowing forces, make it possible for the weak to struggle for rights.
Global cities open up a grand sphere of spaces in which citizenship and various rights can negotiate with one another to deal with the human need of justice in globalization. The hope global cities, like New York and London, can give is not a guarantee of justice and equality. People, especially the socially vulnerable, are still violated and exploited by the international corporations in the global cities. How these cities contribute to the development of today’s citizenship is by being an open space that would endure and contain different claims of rights. In the global cities, the poor who are forced to remain silent about their sufferings could at least find spaces to represent themselves and possibly draw others’ attention to understand how they are ill-treated in the trend of global economy.14
Also approaching human rights issues of the global age from a spatial perspective, David Harvey believes that it is important to re-define concepts of rights so we can comprehend more precisely the difficulties and hopes human rights are facing today. Today the rights of life, global mobility, private property, social security,
14 It is because of the same reason that chapter two examines the representations of illegal immigrants in global city, London, to understand their experiences and processes of struggling for rights.
among others can no longer be separated and regarded as different acts of rights.
Harvey argues that when one person leaves his original social position to enter a foreign land and occupy spaces there, the order of social relations would be re-organized in this society. “The relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’…is…a spatio-temporal construction…Changes in spatio-temporal frame affect self-other relations…” (Harvey, Justice 264). Mobility brings the spatio-temporal change and reconstruction that leads to a full new form of self-other relationship. Since foreigners would influence the receiving society in many aspects, it means that in every scale of social life, the foreigners would try to share the social resources with the citizens no matter the society allows it or not. Their needs in the receiving society are also full-scale and interrelated. For instance, it is impossible to permit their right to life without allowing them having a job to earn their living in the receiving society. With more and more foreigners who immigrate, it is crucial to consider how to understand human rights in today’s context and how to amplify the concept of rights to an extent that could contain different scales of human needs of different people. Human rights are firstly universally defined in 1948 and the social context has changed a lot since then. Therefore, David Harvey intends to redefine human rights to adapt to today’s situation.
Harvey proposes to re-examine and re-define human rights in a spatial way which may possibly satisfy diverse human needs of various scales of globalization.
Trying to find the maximized term that may include all the rights and help to catch the essence of rights in the global age, Harvey suggests “the right to the production of space” or “the right to be different” (Spaces of Hope 87). The new definition is an
amplification of all the acts about human rights. In brief, Harvey re-defines human rights as the right that people should be able to live the lives as they want and to struggle for being different from others. In economics, it may refer to the freedom to choose a favorable job. In politics, it may refer to the freedom to emigrate to another country of better political conditions. The spatial production concept is especially important and appropriate because we now live in a multiscalar society. Living in a specific place, people may simultaneously be affected by different cultures of neighbors, local governmental social policies, global economic trends, and etc.
Because of globalization, life grows more and more complicated, so do human needs.
Harvey observes this multiscalar transformation of human life and human rights.
Human rights should be understood as the freedom that people can decide how to have their lives, so other basic human needs that are not clearly recognized in the Universal Declaration and other covenants as a right may also be included and practiced. Harvey thus recommends adjusting the discourses of human rights to the multiscalar social context in our global age.
Re-defining spatially the human rights concept refreshes our comprehension of social injustice and social order. There are basically two reasons. First, as mentioned above, spatial perspective can contain more scales of life. Any form of social injustice or violation would be examined with multi-dimensions rather than being explained with simple causal relationship. Second, spaces are the last solid ground in globalization. Globalization makes every resource flow except lands and places. No matter how people and capital flow, they must finally land and stay in a specific solid place. Globalization must reorganize and represent its constantly changing global
social order on concrete places. We may perceive more accurately how globalization transforms citizenship and rights and unevenly distributes social resources through spatial studies by simply answering the question, “who has the right to certain places/spaces?”15 Nevertheless, the hope that spatial studies can provide is the more appropriate approaches to understand the social injustice taking place in today’s multiscalar societies.
The struggles of rights in human history represent the political order and relationship between human beings and nations. These struggles would finally determine who could dominate different spaces and exclude others. As an ongoing process, the human rights development consists of a series of endless struggles. From the populace versus the aristocracy, workers versus middle-class, women versus men, slaves versus masters, till today’s immigrants versus citizens, the content of human rights is being rewritten and modified again and again. All these human social struggles continue to redefine the human relationships in all scales of society, including the family, the working place, the political activity, and so on.
As human rights face unprecedented challenges in globalization, people must undergo the disorder and confusion of human relationship and ethics today on the extensive global scale. Globalization leads to restless spatial reorganization. People caught deeply in the spatial reorganizing process are forced to keep adjusting their social position in different scales. The failures to adjust cause social disorder and human rights violations. The contemporary plights of rights involve all human societies from global to local scales. They could be much more complicated than any
15 Answering the question, “who has the right to places (cities, towns, and so on),” chapter three aims exactly to show the spatial representation of global social injustice.
other struggles and chaos human society have been through in history.
To find a new balance for today’s struggles and promote social peace in all scales of human world, it is important to re-extend human rights and rights discourses to a fuller scope. We need another perspective that can correctly depict our dilemmas in practicing human rights. Spatial studies and geographical researches may be one possibility since spaces reflect different human activities of different scales. The following chapters would study the representations of the frontline of today’s human struggles and conflicts, taking place in all the border areas of globalization. From spatial perspective, hopefully we shall see more clearly who are excluded from having rights to produce spaces to survive, and who on earth are struggling in desperation.