In a series of 4 lectures the French philosopher Etienne Balibar addressed the tensions between democracy and citizenship through the problem of exclusion in post-national and post-liberal politics.

(Transcribing from my notes)


Internal forms of exclusion (e.g. second generation immigrants in France) are constitutive and antithetical to the ideal definition of a universalized concept of citizenship. French sociologist Robert Castel has discussed the negative discrimination against jobless young people of immigrant, North African, origin, but French nationality, otherwise referred to as the young ‘denizens’ of the banlieu, who are not excluded in the traditional sense, because they partake in the rights formed by the welfare state. Exclusion, in the traditional sense distinguishes between two categories, the entitled and those with no entitlements. For de Tocqueville civil rights represent a form of nobility of the people. Second generation immigrants remain a rather privileged group, compared to starving populations around the world; they are not located outside the system. Internal exclusion, then, does not simply describe a juridical status but a combination of practices, relations, etc. What is sought after is full empowerment, that is, the active capacity to claim rights in the public sphere, not be excluded from the right to vindicate rights, what Hannah Arendt referred to as ‘the right to have rights’. For example, migrants’ detention camps are on the limit of this dis/enfranchisement. What is at stake there is one’s right to speak and fight for one’s rights, to claim rights at all.

Second generation migrants of French nationality face the combined effects of class and race discrimination, leading to a preferential joblessness. Race here represents a genealogical order; they are eternally represented as migrants, foreigners, tied with imagery of the enemy and the treat of an underdeveloped ‘other’, in contradiction to their legal rights (as national citizens). This determines for them a negative individuality, a negative community leading to a violent reaction to the violent exclusion experienced.

The excluded is a fundamentally heterogeneous category, comprising local and global exclusions and the intersections of the two, i.e. excluded on the basis of immobility and mobility. Today there is an inflated use of the category of exclusion, ranging from discrimination to elimination. The metaphoric character of exclusion denotes three categories: empirical phenomena (territorial exclusion); classifications of people or populations; ideal or transcendental notion ‘belonging’ to a community (communication-reciprocity-recognition).

The border (frontier) represents a exclusion double: empirical and transcendental. Empirical phenomena refer to historical-factual exclusion, such as is instituted through the territorialization of borders. Territorialization, maps constitute conditions of possibility for the notion of the universal (underpinning western notions of democracy and citizenship). Transcendental or symbolic phenomena refer to age, sex, cultural/moral differences as legal instruments to regulate individuals and groups within territories. Travel and migration remain ambivalent between the two orders, empirical and transcendental.

In internal exclusion the external border becomes reduplicated inside. It denotes the space of the other, the alien inside, a heterotopia, a space of otherness and alienation, a stranger, monster, pariah, internal enemy. When a political exclusion is at stake it is about being excluded from some kind of community. Community makes reciprocity (of obligations) possible. Exclusion/inclusion makes sense as taking part on reciprocal relations of community. Relationships of exclusion require an implicit or explicit rule of exclusion, which also requires a rule of inclusion, otherwise represented as membership and belonging. Violence is located on the side of both exclusion and inclusion. For example, elements of violence belong to every process of education, i.e. incorporation into the common culture of a group or a country. In this sense, there is an element of barbarity and violence deeply rooted in processes of civilization.

Citizenship combines a rule of inclusion and exclusion, they are two sides of the same coin. E.g. nationality represents a rule of exclusion and inclusion associated with citizenship. But there are degrees of inclusion and gaps and contradictions, there is a grey zone, this is the rule of the rule exclusion. The relationship between exclusion and community works both ways, discriminating between insiders, and outsiders. But also permanent processes of exclusion (mechanisms of discrimination based on sexual, racial, cultural criteria) will produce and reproduce community as institutional and imagined (i.e. a work of fiction).

Internal exclusion represents a negative citizenship, a citizenship that excludes from inclusion, that bars access, as opposed to a positive-constitutive citizenship, a vindication of access, the right to have rights. Therefore we have to opt for a double negativity, the exclusion of exclusion, or else, inclusion as a result or a permanent process.

Exclusion from the community is performed by the community itself, by abstract rules and by concrete practices. Participation of members in the exclusion of others is mostly indirect and institutions and practices of representation here acquire a crucial function. Citizens perform exclusion not simply by themselves but by delegation. Processes of exclusion as political processes and perverse cultural and sociological racism is never simply a result of conflict between communities but always involves implicit demands from nationals to the state. Nationals whose citizenship is emptied of social rights (e.g. workers in the national social state) experience the incapacity of the state to protect acquired rights and prerogatives. They experience the powerlessness of the sovereign. They ask the state to reassert itself and show its preference.

A concept of the political is involved in the exclusion debate. It is not only the friend vs. enemy condition, but, crucially, the friend vs. interior enemy that constitutes the citizenship-exclusion formation. The exclusion from citizenship of the abnormal citizen represents a closure of the national form of citizenship and its universalistic function as recognition of individual rights. Here there is a paradox: citizenship and racism develop in universalistic terms. The nation-state represents an intensive universality, it is a paradoxical combination of closure and universalization. Against this, the cosmopolitical claims political rights to all.

A new regime of citizenship is anticipated: full emergence of rights of circulation as a basic individual right. But this is severely normalized and unequally distributed or denied through national agreements. The floating interior enemy, the terrorist, is associated with control mechanisms and the new ubiquity of borders. The current public sphere is post-national, post-colonial and post-liberal. “Some people are in society without being of society”. Today we are passing from the transcendental to the biopolitical model of exclusion/inclusion. The biopolitical order represents a governmentalized exclusion (positivist exclusion). It generalizes the abnormal and dangerous individual.

Today we are facing an urgent question: what kind of political agency could be retrieved or identified?

Violence is the only possible way in some cases to contradict and contest the denial of rights. Here there is the issue of isolation: isolated categories reacting against exclusion are very rapidly trapped in a dead end, where they either neutralize themselves or they become manipulated. The possibility of transforming or democratizing democracy is not the choice between stability and change/progress, but it is more tragically an alternative between regression and transformation with excluded groups. The opening can come only from communication and developing hybrid, mixed forms of intervention (breaking the imagined community) and protest out of the conflictual situation itself. Powerful forces work to categorize and prevent conflicting groups from discovering and expressing their common interests. We need to develop other forms of integration, where precarity, instability, uprootedness become instrumental.