Migration research – realutopia of global freedom of movement

In view of the current tendencies of hardened statehood and “migration control”, her book “Limits and freedom of movement” seems like from time: They spell the project of global freedom of movement. How do you get the topic?

The political ideas of open borders and global freedom of movement arose in the 1980s, in the social movements against increasingly restrictive migration and border policy in Europe, North America and elsewhere. When I got to know these demands in the early 2000s, in the context of globalization -critical summit protests and anti -racist “border camps”, I immediately found them. Dying and suffering from the borders of the global north were opposed to an ethically clear idea: open limits and freedom of movement for everyone. But even then I wondered how such a world could work. How should one react to the objection without limits “everything collapsed here”? My impression was that clear answers to these questions in movement and critical science were rare.
A second impulse to write the book was created in 2015 and 2016, around the “short summer of migration”. In this phase, scientific occupation with the idea of ​​open limits experienced a boom. However, I believe that in many texts the political economy of migration and limits, their interweaving with capitalist contradictions and crises, was not or only treated shortened. Therefore, the book aims to strengthen critical-materialistic and political economic perspectives in the debate across open borders.

Interview

Uni Kassel

Fabian Georgi is a political scientist at the University of Kassel. His dissertation »Managing Migration? A critical history of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) «won the Antonio Gramsci Prize for Critical Research in the Migration Society in 2018. In April of this year his book »Limits and Freedom of Exercise was published. A critical introduction «.

What role do citizenship and nationality play in this?

They are concepts that you naturally have to “refer”. However, the point is that perspectives that primarily reflect on the open limits and freedom of movement in liberal understanding of the state, nationality and nationality require the capitalist framework. Therefore, they could not understand what drives border policy repression today and what the conditions of freedom of movement would be in emancipatory form.

Is this also the problem of left -wing and left -liberal positions on the subject? What should abolitionist strategies consider to develop adequate perspectives?

On the one hand, the book is directed against positions that, from the left point of view, explicitly oppose a perspective of freedom of movement, such as the current around Sahra Wagenknecht has been doing for years. Most of the time, the political point of view of such contributions is a national understanding of the wage -dependent. At the same time, the book formulates a solidarity criticism of “radical left -liberal” supporters of open limits. The challenge is not only to “democratize” other ideas of belonging to “Citizenship” and human rights or limits within an increasingly dystopian world system. Because today’s, historically blatant form of border policy repression results from dynamics of the current capitalist formation, a policy of freedom of movement must be connected to the closest of perspectives of a different political economy.

Is Marx still a suitable reference point for such an analysis?

He is certain. My concern is to show which insights and contributions to Marx can contribute to the understanding of today’s border regimes and a policy of freedom of movement. From this point of view, it can be shown, for example, why the dynamics of border policy repression, which has developed today to pre -form a global “fortress capitalism”, has occurred since the 1980s. Why didn’t this dynamic started 30 years earlier or only 50 years later? The reason is that the dialectics of stubborn migration, border policy repression and policies of freedom of movement have its origin in a sequence of contradictions and strategies that have been the starting point in the neoliberal processing of the crisis of Fordism since the 1970s.
It can also be shown that today’s capitalist formation continues because its contradictions are regulated by repressive border regimes. Without repressive border regime, the imperial and reproductions dominated by capital fractions in the global north would break from their own contradictions. Without the symbolic, racist and material hierarchies and divisions that are produced in border regimes, these political groups could not secure their hegemony or at least their precarious dominance for long.

To what extent is this also a perspective critical of capitalism?

The book shows why an emancipatory form of freedom of movement is not within the current authoritarian-neoliberal formation, under conditions of its structural multiple crisis, can be realized. The claim could even lead to unintentional consequences: more compulsion to be mobile for the sale of your own workforce; More competition for a neoliberally destroyed social infrastructure; Fascist backlashs; The forced retreat of privileged groups in “a thousand small fortresses”. Proponents of open borders in particular should not deny such dilemma. Instead, it is important to aggressively combine a policy of freedom of movement with perspectives of socio-ecological transformation.
At the same time, it would be cynical to postpone a policy of freedom of movement until the transformation is complete. In essence, social-ecological transformation and open boundaries present us to the same question: How can the needs of many people-those who already live in one place, as well as those who are new-can be met in a radical democratic, solidarity and ecologically viable manner? Answers to this question that have just shown climate law movement and ecological-materialistic research will ultimately only be found within post-capitalist political economies.

So is freedom of movement a utopia?

The question is whether it is an abstract or concrete utopia, a realutopia. With the concept of concrete utopias, Ernst Bloch described such alternatives that correspond to the material tendencies of a certain historical situation, with them in a way. I try to show in the book that freedom of movement can certainly be understood as a concrete utopia in this sense. The world system is now globalized and intertwined than ever before, economically and ecologically, political and social. The fact that one reacts to this degree of global integration and mutual dependency with a requirement at the same level, with the idea of ​​a global freedom of movement is not foreign to the world, but corresponds to the material situation. In addition, global mobility and transnational way of life are already a reality for hundreds of million people. From this perspective of migration, open boundaries would not create a new situation, but make existing movements and ways of living more secure, democratic and freer.

Who are the “subjects” of freedom of movement?

The subjects of a policy of freedom of movement are initially the movements and the struggles of migration itself, both in their form as stubborn practices of migrating, border crossing and arrival, as well as long -term struggles for staying and social participation. But that not only means the activists from anti-and no-border movement in the narrower sense, but also many people who, in small initiatives or as individual institutions for rights to flee, remain and participate. My hope is that the people, who often use very specific and small -scale for People on the Move, refugees, migrant workers and other groups and fight together with them, from the awareness of acting in the sense of a necessary long -term policy of freedom of movement, strength and orientation.