Citizenship and alienage, the two foundational institutions for membership in the modern state, are being partly destabilized through major current transformations. As citizens lose rights due to the new types of policies that reduce social rights and immigrants gain rights through the human rights regime, we see a blurring of the distinctions. Much of this blurring has been obscured by the strong nationalism of particular sectors. But the deeper structural transformation is going in the opposite direction of more the visible and noticed conditions: beneath it all we can detect a denationalizing of a growing number of conditions and struggles. We are seeing emergent centrifugal dynamics that disperse
what used to agglutinate around the national state apparatus. Cities, especially the complex spaces of global cities, are one kind of space where the national is becoming denationalized through the material and discursive practices of a growing variety of actors, from global firms to foreign workers. In this denationalizing Europe becomes less of a community of states, and more a proliferation of networks that decenter Europe away from the national state and onto people and cities. In this process, also, we see a blurring of the distinctions between immigrants and citizens.

1. The Renationalizing of Citizenship: Politically shrill but institutionally weak.

The growth of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is pushing towards the renationalizing of particular features of membership politics (Giugni 2007; White 1999; Vertovec and Peach 1997; Weil 2008; Body- Gendrot and Wihtol de Wenden 2006). Yet, this renationalizing of membership, even when ideologically strong, is institutionally weak given the increased formalization of the EU level. And although the EU level is still thin compared to that of the national state, it is beginning to alter the underlying conditions which have fed the articulation between citizenship and the national state (Baubock 2006). The institutional development of the European Union and the strengthening of the European Human Rights Court push the question of political membership towards a kind of European universalism (Jacobson and Ruffer 2006; Rubenstein and Adler 2000). The denationalizing represented by the EU is fed by the emergence of multiple actors, groups, and communities increasingly keen on broader notions of political membership and unwilling automatically to identify with a national state (Soysal 1997; Tunstall 2006).

These transformations in the EU raise questions about the actual meaning of that renationalizing of membership. Is it an ideational event that can exist even as the institutional settings of membership are becoming partly denationalized. Can growing discrimination against the alien coexist with a strengthening of the right to have rights, notably through the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights confirming rights of immigrants that the national legislatures had tried to withdraw. And can the ideological renationalizing of citizenship coexist with the Europeanising of membership and multiple transnationalisms for identity politics? These changes raise questions about the assertion in most of the pertinent scholarship that citizenship has a necessary connection to the national state. Many of the changes in citizenship and alienage may not yet be formalized and some may never become fully formalized. But they may nonetheless be consequential for some of the issues that concern us in this conference, notably the question of immigration and ethnicity in today’s Europe.

Addressing the question of citizenship and alienage against these transformations entails a specific stance. It is quite possible to posit that at the most abstract or formal level not much has changed over the last century in the essential features of both institutions. The theoretical ground from which I address the issue is that of their historicity and their embeddedness in projects of national state construction in the past
and partial deconstruction in the present, notably the strengthening of the European Union and of the European Human Rights Court. The purely formal features of citizenship and alienage easily obscure some of the microtransformations I am after here. Citizenship and alienage, each have been constructed in elaborate and formal ways. And each has evolved historically as a tightly packaged bundle of what were in
fact often rather diverse elements. The dynamics at work today are destabilizing these bundlings and thereby making legible the fact itself of this bundling of diverse elements and its particularity. Social constructions that mark individuals and groups, such as race and ethnicity, may well become destabilized by these developments.

2. Discursive and Practical Openings for New Actors.

Where the international human rights regime and the new EU institutions have contributed to formalize certain rights and protections, globalization has created less formalized potentials. Critical among these potentials are operational and legal openings for non-state actors to enter international arenas which were once the exclusive domain of national states. Various, often as yet very minor developments, signal that the state is no longer the exclusive subject for international law or the only actor in international relations. Other actors -- from NGOs and First-Nation peoples to immigrants and refugees who become subjects of adjudication in human rights decisions-- are increasingly emerging as subjects of international law and actors in international relations. That is to say, these non-state actors can gain visibility as individuals and as collectivities, and come out of the invisibility of aggregate membership in a nation-state exclusively represented by the sovereign.

One way of interpreting this is to posit that we are seeing an incipient unbundling of the exclusive authority over territory and people we have long associated with the national state. The most strategic instantiation of this unbundling is probably the global city, which operates as a partly de-nationalized platform for global capital and, at the same time is emerging as a key site for the most astounding mix of people from all over the world. The growing intensity of transactions among these cities is creating a strategic cross-border geography which partly bypasses national states. The new network technologies further strengthen these transactions, whether they are electronic transfers of specialized services among firms or Internet based communications among the members of globally dispersed diasporas and interest groups.

These cities and the new strategic geographies that connect them and bypass national states can be seen as constituting part of the infrastructure for global civil society. They do so from the ground up, through multiple microsites. Among these microsites and microtransactions are a variety of organizations concerned with transboundary issues concerning immigration, asylum, international women's agendas, anti-globalization struggles, and many others. While these are not necessarily urban in their orientation or genesis, their geography of operations is partly inserted in a large number of cities. The new network technologies, especially the Internet, ironically have strengthened the urban map of these transboundary networks. It does not have to be that way, but at this time cities and the networks that bind them function as an anchor and an enabler of cross-border struggles. These same developments and conditions also facilitate the internationalizing of terrorist and trafficking networks.

3. A European Politics that Runs through Localities.

Global cities are, then, thick enabling environments for these types of activities, even though the networks themselves are not urban per se. In this regard, these cities make posible people experiencing themselves as part of global non-state networks as they live their daily life. They enact what we have come to call global civil society in the microspaces of daily life rather than on some putative global stage.

This signals the possibility of a transnational politics, in this case European or global politics, that runs through localities --with a difference: a growing consciousness of the recurrence of their particular struggles in other places and countries. They can understand themselves as involved in transnational networks of activists and struggles, yet can remain focused on localized issues and engage local actors in their struggles. This can produce a transnational politics constituted through multiple decenterings into the multiple localities where similar struggles recur. I think of these as non-cosmopolitan forms of transnationalism or globality in that they remain rooted in localized issues. It seems to me important not to conflate globality with the typical meaning of cosmopolitan – we need to qualify such a transnationalism of localities as it is more complex than grand cosmopolitanism, hence my use of non-cosmopolitan globalities. This way of conceiving of globality tells us that disadvantaged individuals and resource-poor organizations, those who are immobile and confined to their locality, are not necessarily
excluded from emergent forms of globality.

4. Spaces for the Politics of Informal Subjects.

The space of the city is a far more concrete space for politics than that of the nation. It becomes a place where non-formal political actors can be part of the political scene in a way that is much more difficult at the national level. Nationally politics needs to run through existing formal systems: whether the electoral political system or the judiciary (taking state agencies to court). Informal political actors are rendered invisible in the space of national politics. The space of the city acommodates a broad range of political activities --squatting, demonstrations against police brutality, fighting for the rights of immigrants and the homeless, the politics of culture and identity, gay and lesbian and queer politics. Much of this becomes visible on the street. Much of urban politics is concrete, enacted by people rather than dependent on massive media technologies. Street-level politics make possible the formation of new types of political subjects that do not have to go through the formal political system.

It is in this sense that those who lack power, those who are disadvantaged, outsiders, discriminated minorities, can gain presence in global cities, presence vis a vis power and presence vis a vis each other. This signals, for me, the possibility of a new type of politics centered in new types of political actors. It is not simply a matter of having or not having power. These are new hybrid bases from which to act.

In these types of cities, informal practices and political subjects not quite fully recognized as such can nonetheless function as part of the political landscape. Undocumented immigrants who are long term residents engage in practices that are the same as those of formally defined citizens in the routines of daily life; this produces an informal social contract between these undocumented immigrants and the community. Subjects who are by definition categorized as non-political, such as "housewives" and “mothers” may actually have considerable political agency and be emergent political subjects, e.g. the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo contesting the military dictatorship in Argentina. Insofar as citizenship is at least partly shaped by the conditions within which it is embedded, conditions which have today changed in certain very specific and also general ways, we may well be seeing a corresponding set of changes in the institution itself. These may not yet be formalized and some may never become fully formalized.

Many of these transformations in the broader context and in the institution itself become legible in today's large cities. Perhaps the most evolved type of site for these types of transformations is the global city. In this process, the global city is reconfigured as a partly de-nationalized space that enables a partial reinvention of citizenship. This reinvention takes the institution away from questions of nationality narrowly defined and towards the enactment of a large array of particular interests, from protests against police brutality and globalization to sexual preference politics and house squatting by anarchists. I interpret this as a move towards citizenship practices that revolve around
claiming rights to the city. These are not exclusively or necessarily urban practices. But it is especially in large cities that we see imultaneously some of the most extreme inequalities as well as conditions enabling these citizenship practices. In global cities, these practices also contain the possibility of directly engaging strategic forms of power, a fact which I interpret as significant in a context where power is increasingly privatized, globalized and elusive.

Biography of Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought; her website is at http://www.columbia.edu/~sjs2/. Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2008) and A Sociology of Globalization (Norton 2007). She has now completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers) http://www.eolss.net.
Her books are translated into nineteen languages, including in Greek (Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, Metaihmio, 2001)*. Her commentaries have been published most recently in The Guardian, Le Monde, Newsweek International, among others. She writes regularly on international politics for OpenDemocracy.net and blogs the financial crisis for HuffingtonPost.com.