Transcript

The idea in this interview is to cover the main issue of the constitution of collective political subject as a process and as linked to/emerging out of social movements vs focus on individual in liberal democracies.

Often when we read about citizenship and rights, we understand them to be about the rights of the individual citizens. You, however, in your work on sex workers and their mobilisations that we read earlier stress the collective aspect of rights. Why is the collective aspect important?

There is a liberal idea of rights as that of those pertaining to an individual men who owns himself and property. This idea has been heavily criticised, however. Yet, rather than rejecting the idea of rights from the start, it is important, it seems to me, to see how rights are conquered in struggle. Rights are contested, claimed, challenged, verified, enacted, brought to life in many different ways. Collective mobilisation is often at the heart of the struggle of rights. You can see that clearly in demonstrations that invent new rights or claim rights that are not there. For instance, in October 2005, sex workers from 28 countries in Europe gathered in Brussels to claim their rights to mobility, work, and political participation. The collective aspect was extremely important, as the collective subject was carefully thought of to avoid it being dismissed as minoritarian or particular. Sex workers in Brussels did that by bringing together very different categories of people: migrants, regular and irregular, women and men, EU citizens and other citizens from different countries of Europe, sex workers themselves and activists. Their collective mobilisation could thus not be equated to a particular category and a particular interest, which could be dismissed as being destructive of another particular interest.

Is this process of coming together and mobilising important? Seems you are talking here about something that is more than plain socialising?

Mobilisation does emerge out of social relations, common experiences of invisibility and injustice. It draws on particular social relations, while being more than plain socialising. It may be useful to think about how social relations are also changing and in tension: on the one hand, you can have socialising based on belonging to a group, a closed-knit community, family and so on; on the other, modern capitalist societies entail other forms of sociality, which emerge out of interactions with strangers, often mediated by monetary exchanges. These are in tension and can trigger their own forms of injustice. But political mobilisation and the constitution of collective subjects as citizens implies that both are surpassed in a sense. Rights claims ultimately address anybody, not just a particular group. Coming together is also not about money-mediated exchanges but about solidarity-mediated exchanges. Political mobilisation needs the support of social relations but at the same time challenges it by addressing everybody: the rights that sex workers’ claim are not just for themselves, they are ultimately for everybody.

Does this mean then that the difference between citizens and non-citizens becomes irrelevant? Don’t you find this problematic when non-citizens in the EU are extremely vulnerable to repressive state measures such as detention and deportations and this all exactly because they are not-citizens?

This is not to deny that non-citizens experience many forms of injustice and that these injustices are more acute than those experienced by citizens. At the same time, this is an unstable distinction and a distinction which is not just external, but also internal to the very notion of citizenship. Let’s take the Roma in Europe for instance. The Roma from Eastern Europe are now European citizens. Nonetheless their rights as European citizens have been largely non-existent. Since 2004, Romanian Roma have been continually deported from EU states – Germany, France, Italy – even if this has been euphemistically called ‘voluntary repatriation’ and has passed more or less unnoticed for quite some time. Citizens can often be treated as non-citizens, while non-citizens can have citizen privileges (think for instance of the mobility of business people compared to that of other migrants, often coming from the same country). Political mobilisation makes visible these rather complex injustices and challenges them by reclaiming citizenship for those who are ultimately treated as non-citizens. In so doing, they do not only expand citizenship to include some particular categories, but they redefine what it means to be a citizen. In brief, this is not about who is and who isn’t a citizen, but about acting as if a citizen to contest given boundaries.