Beyond the nation and the state: how Communalist self-government redefines the citizen and the immigrant

Challenging the authority of the State, many municipalities around the world have decided to remedy widespread deficiencies in national immigration policies during the ongoing crisis of the welcoming of refugees. Whether it is under the name of “sanctuary cities”, “rebel cities”, “cities of refuge” or “fearless cities”, cities have organized to welcome and integrate immigrants. These seemingly separate initiatives resonate with a broader movement, alternately dubbed municipalism or communalism, which seeks to transform cities into self-governing entities that challenge the power of the nation-state. Communalism strives to reclaim and exercise popular sovereignty at the municipal level, a scale at which citizens can directly act in the political sphere, instead of at the level of the state, where they are represented by elected bodies which govern them. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the “lost treasures of the revolution”, I will first explain why and how the municipality can be considered as the locus of self-government. Second, I will outline how the relationship of the municipality to the immigrant differs both structurally and empirically from that of the nation-state. Third, I will demonstrate that, since the municipality is the best locus of self-government, it provides a more appropriate framework for securing cosmopolitan norms than does the nation-state. Indeed, after showing how communal self-government and human rights mutually reinforce each other, I will explain how the municipality offers unique potentialities for securing “the right to have rights” defended by Arendt. I will then analyze how the municipality enacts “democratic iterations”, a concept developed by Seyla Benhabib, as it acts in the political sphere to secure the rights of immigrants. Such iterations allow us to consider how communalism redefines the conception of citizenship as post-national and municipalist, thereby offering us a new understanding of what makes a human being part of a demos