City as a Political Idea - UNIV PLYMOUTH

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active participation in the construction of citizenship.

      Citizenship as a concept was initially designed to pull people out of their communities – religious, clan or ethnic – and place them in a neutral space of politics. Citizenship was thus primarily a destructive force, but this destruction was a very important act – such a ‘stripped down’ person, free from restraining bonds, was necessary for the State. So instead of ‘natural’ loyalty, citizenship was premised upon a ‘searching’ loyalty to the State – a more or less abstract being. Today, however, in a situation where many of the national States have withdrawn to neoliberal positions, loyalty to them is replaced by either ethnic and religious loyalties, or by loyalty to supranational and deteritorrialised structures – to the international organisations and large corporations.

      So rightly, researchers such as Mark Purcell see opportunities for the city in this process – in changing the scale at which we perceive citizenship.5 People could move away from the abstract to smaller and more specific communities, which is definitely a path worth considering, but we must be aware that in exchanging abstractions for concrete reality we return to a premodern situation, back to ‘natural’ communities and social bonds. That is what our modern liberal democratic civilisation is afraid of, and in which (quite rightly!) it sees the danger of a fresh outbreak of the war of all against all and the disintegration of our global world. Today, as discussed by Jane Jenson and Martin Papillon, citizenship is still attractive as an idea of inclusive political community, but probably in order for individuals to claim their rights or special privileges and not so that they can feel part of a larger group, unified by common values and dreams.6 Citizenship has a similar importance in contemporary feminist discourse – it is all about equal opportunities, about hearing other voices in public debate, about extending democracy to a ‘feminocratic’ dimension.

      So if we want to discuss the problem of citizenship in reference to the modern city, we are trapped by these contradictory meanings and interpretations. A citizen will thus wrench identity from the ‘traditional’ (family, clan, ethnic) networks and relationships while seeking new hooks, new areas of loyalty. Citizenship seen ‘from below’ will insist on inclusion in the system, the recognition of rights and granting of privileges, but nationality seen ‘from above’ – from the perspective of the authority of the City – will be an attempt to foster and manage an urban community that will minimise conflicts.7 Citizenship of one or the other perspective has purely instrumental importance. However, citizenship in itself means nothing and has no inherent value. Here we touch on the problem of citizenship in urban space; today’s dispute over the City is a dispute over who gets the City. Right to the City is a fundamental issue which also affects citizenship but as I mentioned above, and as argued by Christian Joppke, the concept of ‘citizenship’ is relevant only instrumentally.8 The liberal understanding of citizenship proposed by Thomas Humphrey Marshall is challenged the most in multiethnic and multicultural societies, not only those in which the immigrants arrived – although in their case the weakness of citizenship is the most obvious – but also wherever ‘precitizenship’ social bonds are still strong. The question that arises here is – are all citizens equal, and should they be treated in the same way? A classic liberal answer would be ‘yes’, but this rhetoric of equality is used by both representatives of communities who feel discriminated against and by municipal authorities who use it to justify their non-alignment with movements for equality for disadvantaged communities – and it does not matter whether the discrimination is real or whether it is, like citizenship, a tool to obtain more rights and privileges.

      Another issue raised by both alterglobalist movements and academia is the collapse of the so-called Westphalian order in world politics; the crisis of the liberal-democratic vision of society and the triumph of neoliberalism, reflected primarily in the overwhelming advantage that global corporations have gained over ordinary people. This neoliberal movement of power is very closely linked to the shift of content within the concept of citizenship; from the Citizen, defined by participation in a political community, in the direction of the Citizen-Consumer defined by participation in a system of neoliberal economy.9 Catherine Needham points out several features that distinguish the Citizen-Consumer from the Citizen in the classical sense, and two of them seem crucial to me: an individualised, self-centred relationship with the System (at this stage I would prefer not to define this ‘System’), and the donor-recipient roles – the relationship of a client, not a partner, and of ‘interested’ loyalty. The replacement of the Citizen with the Citizen-Consumer seems another ‘trick’ of the neoliberal system which, by severing all relationships other than those between the recipients of goods and the donors of goods, diminishes us as human beings, as Persons. If in classical philosophy, especially in the Christian philosophies, the richness and multidimensionality of human beings is being constantly emphasised, a model of the Citizen-Consumer reduces a person to their mouth, gastrointestinal tract and rectum (or other similar sequences), supplemented only by a credit card.

      However, as we have seen by tracing the genesis of the idea of citizenship, such an end was written into it. I am suspicious of the Citizen as an abstract construct, detached from the Person (and therefore the human-in-context), because this by definition rejects and reduces the richness of the relationships in which we exist (or once existed?). The Citizen-Consumer, this neoliberal monster, is then an obvious consequence of the liberal Citizen. Economics devoured politics because politics turned out to be pure abstraction and illusion. From this point comes my criticism of the Citizen and an introduction to my idea of the Plug-in Citizen.

      Death of Polis

      Pierre Manent writes, “[City] is the idea of a public space in which people live together, consider and decide together about everything that relates to their common interests. This was, therefore, the idea of possession by a human community of the conditions of their own existence. This was quite naturally, therefore, also a political idea” – and further – “Cities […] are ‘ideologically weak’; they are something ‘individual’ between these two universalisms: the idea of empire and the idea of the mission of the Church.”10 The fact that the City is (also) a political being seems clear, but mostly this politicisation is now understood as the presence of structures and institutions external to the City – of the national state or international organisations. Alternatively, the city is understood as a structure within which to place the political process. The City is then more a decoration than a participant in these processes. It is interesting that the classic understanding of the City as Polis formulated by Aristotle – that is, a primarily political being, a concept in which a certain group of people together have authority over a certain space – now seems to be highly problematic. This is probably because, as correctly formulated by Lefebvre, it is extremely difficult to identify the community in the modern city.11 His dramatic question – to whom does the city belong? – means that yes, we follow the political process in the city, but the City itself is rather a space for policy, not a political idea in itself.12 Even worse, Agamben points at the camp rather than the City as the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the Western world.13 Is the loss of the City, as a potential model of political community, thus a basic drama which results in a loss of community as a whole? Or at least a sense of loss in the belief that the community can produce root units without losing its universal dimension? That the community is the choice of the person rather than a weight of oppression over the individual? But what happens with cities today? What is their position, and why are cities no longer Polis today?

      States are falling apart: functionally, where some fragments are beginning to be more strongly associated with global institutions than the state; or spatially, where cross-border cooperation gives rise to functional regions more strongly associated with each other than with the countries in which they are located. For example, let us consider Tallinn, whose development is to a significant degree driven by Helsinki and Bratislava. It is trying to maintain some independence from Vienna, stressing competition more than cooperation, but it does not matter which strategy the weaker city adopts – cooperation or controlled competition – the effect is similar. What follows is a slow stretching of the structures of these cities and the retraction of the weaker states in the structure of the stronger countries. Unofficial Helsinki government pressure on the authorities of Tallinn is a widely known and commented upon reality. But the cities

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