Magazine / Politics / Fortress Europe / Analysis | 27/08/2007

Fluid Citizenship

In Bulgaria around two million persons a year of a population of seven million are in permanent motion, working abroad, studying, coming back, investing, leaving again. This trend towards overcoming arbitrary socio-political spaces is most evident in the Internet's utopian horizon of absolute mobility. But is the downside to this utopia a loss of public spirit?

Mobility as evasion

The utopia of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and mobility brought about by the liberalization of the Soviet bloc during the 1980s, which climaxed with the collapse of communism, to a great extent legitimated the process of the destruction of the state. However the energy that fuelled this process was ambiguous: there was both the wish among citizens of the Soviet bloc to change conditions at home and establish a better society, and the wish to leave and change one's life immediately. I suggest the term "citizenship pressure" to describe this ambiguity. This pressure holds power at bay and pushes for reforms until they have been made, at which point people are able to leave, pressure is released, and the will to change fades.

Mobility seems to make borders ostensibly disappear.
Photo: Photocase

Labour migration in the Soviet bloc during socialism was restricted to highly qualified specialists – doctors, engineers, teachers, and construction workers. They were exported to Arab and other third world countries, with the state receiving over half their salaries. After the collapse of the regime, the situation slowly returned to "normal"; Soviet bloc countries became a source mainly of low-level labour.[1] The 1990s were the period of transition between these two emigration regimes. A large number of qualified persons, many no longer young, were taken by the emigration panic, not understanding that the world had changed. A Bulgarian joke of those days went that "Only adventurers stay home".

The newly acquired freedom of movement has abolished the existential aspect of the socio-political space one inhabits: any social or political problem can be solved, on an individual basis, by flight. Zygmunt Bauman has called this state "Liquid modernity", pointing out that power no longer operates through coercion and conflict, but through avoidance and evasion. [2] To recall the famous dictum by the British economist Joan Robinson: "There is one thing worse than being exploited – not being exploited". In the new global arrangement, the biggest threat is that power will exit and leave behind chaos.

The same applies to citizens themselves. Citizenship, one might say, operates through avoidance and evasion. Would this imply a new form of democracy, where power tries to attract human flows, such as occurs with clients in the market place? Where political science operates with concepts such as speed of circulation, viscosity, stagnation, or overspill?

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Further articles on the subject » Migration, » Integration, » South East Europe
More from the press review on the subject » Migration, » Integration, » South East Europe