Vol. 6, No. 5 (May, 1996) pp. 88-89
RIGHTS ACROSS BORDERS: IMMIGRATION AND THE DECLINE OF CITIZENSHIP
by David Jacobson. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1996. 181
pp. $33.50.
Reviewed by Lawrence M. Friedman, Stanford University School of
Law
The main argument of this book is that citizenship, once a
cornerstone concept of the nation-state, is in decline. Its rival
is the notion of universal, fundamental human rights -- rights
which, presumably, do not depend on borders and citizenship.
These notions are "transforming the nation-state
system." All residents of a state, "noncitizens as well
as citizens," can claim these rights; therefore, the state
"is becoming less a sovereign agent and more an
institutional forum of a larger international and constitutional
order based on human rights" (pp. 2-3).
Of course, universal human rights have been around for a long
time, and the concept helped in fact to legitimate the
nation-state; but the rights were always "construed
nationally"-- there had to be a country, with boundaries,
and with a "people" or "nation" inside those
boundaries (pp. 14-15). Foreigners were simply outside the circle
of those who were protected, or who could try to force a
sovereign nation to respect those rights. Now all of this has
changed, according to Jacobson -- swept away by a tide of
immigration. A flock of new institutions has grown up to support
and enforce these universal rights. The distinction between
citizen and non-citizen has gotten exceedingly blurry. Anybody
who is actually IN a country is entitled to the full protection
of the law, can exercise almost all of the rights of citizens
(except, usually, voting or holding office), and gets to feed at
the same trough of the welfare state as the actual citizens.
All this seems reasonably clear as far as the status of resident
aliens goes. But even for actual citizens, the state' s duties
are "increasingly" determined by "international
human rights codes" (p. 120). At least this is true for the
European countries who have cast their lot with the European
Union, or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, or who signed the European Convention on Human Rights.
Hence, the state is tending to become, in a way, nothing more
than an agent of outside organizations, for enforcing rights and
guaranteeing rights -- the rights get articulated elsewhere; and
if the state does a bad job, it is accountable to its citizens
before these international bodies.
In the United States, too, citizenship as such is less and less
the precious jewel it presumably was in the past. American law,
like European law, now gives aliens a whole basket of rights and
entitlements. (Arguably, then, what is really vital is the green
card; formal citizenship is a frill). The rights of resident
aliens are, to be sure, hotly contested in the political sphere;
but so far to little avail. The state is no longer the same thing
as the "nation," insofar as the concept of a
"nation" implies a population bound together by ethnic
kinship or whatever -- in any event, something more and deeper
than just BEING someplace inside the territory (p. 72). In fact,
according to Jacobson, the development of "rights across
borders" (or, more accurately, independent of borders) puts
in doubt the very "legitimacy of the state, in its classic
nation-state form" (p. 71).
What can we conclude from all this? The author thinks that
identity is becoming "deterritorialized." Communities
can "live in the same locations in a patchwork
fashion;" their "center" need not be located in
the same place as their actual residence (p. 134). What
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he means by this is that (say) the Turkish community in Germany
can have its "center" in Turkey; African-Americans can
treat Africa as "home," and so on. The state no longer
commands the total loyalty of its citizens (did it ever?); and
one result is the kind of cultural pluralism which is so
prominent a feature of modern America.
I think there are a number of important ideas expressed here, but
two things about the general thesis make me a little uneasy. In
the first place, the human rights aspects of the thesis seem to
be mainly relevant to Europe, despite the material about the
United States. The countries in Europe are struggling to define
some sort of union; the process is painful, and it is taking a
long time, but so far at least there has been considerable
movement along the road toward what looks like a dim and emerging
mutant of federalism. If we are talking about rights across
borders, we have to ask, what is a border? It may be that all of
Europe for some purposes constitutes a kind of super-country; and
for other purposes, the supercountry is the European Union, and
the "borders" in question are not the borders of
Belgium or Austria, but the borders of the Union. After all, the
rights that are enforced apply only to people who are physically
inside "Europe." Sri Lankans cannot run to European
judicial organs to complain about oppression in their country;
they have no standing.
The second problem is the fact that human rights may be universal
in theory; but what is the practice? Outside of the small group
of fancy and wealthy democracies, they are violated brutally
every day by a whole coterie of military dictators and local
satraps. They are denounced as bourgeois and hegemonic by the
totalitarian left, sneered at as unsuitable for countries with a
"Confucian" tradition, and, in short, contested in all
sorts of ways. Mass migration and guest workers, to be sure,
create pluralism where it was not to be found before; but
political backlash is also on the rise -- not to mention
"ethnic cleansing." I think it is undoubtedly true that
the message of universal human rights is spreading, through the
media and otherwise, and that it has penetrated into
consciousnesses far from the centers of enlightenment. But
governments at least have a long way to go in many parts of this
unhappy world.
At the very end of the book, Jacobson challenges scholars to
rethink their views of the state. Current theories of political
sociology and international relations are rooted in conceptions
that, he feels, are losing their relevance and bite. His case may
be slightly exaggerated, it may be mainly relevant to the club of
Western democracies; but the challenge is real enough. This is a
thought-provoking book.
Copyright 1996