7 - Globalization and the Collapsing Distinction between Local and Federal Citizenship

Summary

Chapter 7 brings the three case studies of women, noncitizens, and landowners together to show how, as globalization has caused the public/private distinction to come apart, the distinctively local form of citizenship has seeped into the sphere of national citizenship and threatened the meaning of citizenship. With increasing labor and capital mobility across national borders, nation-states confront the same pressures cities have long faced to confer citizenship on the basis of interest and choice rather than nationality, but there is fierce opposition to doing so on the grounds that it will undermine the basis of national citizenship by fraying the ties of ethnicity, history, and territory that supposedly link the members of the state’s “imagined community.” This opposition takes the form of growing animosity toward free trade, immigration, and the cities that symbolize an open and flexible approach to citizenship.