Book cover

Europe, we are told, is in crisis. Ten years of economic and political turmoil have deepened divisions, pitting north against south, east against west and citizens against institutions. But should we be pessimistic? In these years, there have also been striking examples of Europeans acting across borders, with civil society and social movements showing that alternatives to the status quo already exist. In their new book, "Citizens of Nowhere" (Zed Books), Lorenzo Marsili and Niccolo Milanese argue that we are in the middle of a great global transformation which renders us all citizens of nowhere. The book narrates their experience of activism as the co-founders of the NGO European Alternatives, but also provides a manifesto for change. Here, they discuss their arguments.

Why did you decide to write this book?

Our work has always combined theory and practice. Ten years ago, an intellectual concern about the direction Europe was taking spilled over and brought us to establish European Alternatives, our transnational NGO. Over the years, we have produced magazines, newspapers, an online journal, articles and pamphlets to accompany and inform our practical organising across borders, and both contributing to and building a transnational public sphere has been a major concern. Today, we have gone back to the writing pad, this time for a book, to provide a theory of what needs to change, and how, that is deeply informed by our practice over the years, and once again, there is a strategy for it to appear in several languages and in several contexts across Europe. Already in 2006 we felt that Europe was in a crucial moment of having to radically change its ways of doing politics: and what has happened since have reinforced this sentiment. We wanted to tell some of the stories of how citizens have been organising another Europe from below over this decade, and situate it in a theoretical framework.

"Citizens of nowhere" was a phrase notoriously used by Theresa May, as you mention in your introduction. Why use this phrase as your title?

In October 2016, at her first Conservative conference after becoming Prime Minister after the Brexit vote, Theresa May said "If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t even know what the word citizenship means". But since Diogenes of Sinope in ancient Greece, the first person to call himself a "citizen of the world", citizenship has always been crucially about contesting authority and borders, expanding the realm of our political rights and responsibilities. Diogenes famously says to Alexander the Great when they meet "Get out of the way of my sun:": he is a rebel who refuses to accept domination by the powerful. We see this side of citizenship totally denied in Theresa May’s phrase, and in a right-wing tactic with long and bloody history, she assimilates tax-dodging businessmen, unscrupulous employers, migrants, human rights defenders and critics of government as the "cosmopolitans", preparing the ground for the kind of "enemy of the people" discourse we constantly get around Brexit.

So partly we wanted to recover the radical dimension of citizenship, associated with cosmopolitanism, and tell some of the stories of citizens of the world throughout history: from Odysseus to the early French Revolutionaries, the first socialists and communists in the International, feminists, members of the resistance in the second world war, people helping refugees and migrants themselves, to Amazon workers organising simultaneous strikes in different countries today. We think such stories can give us hope, inspiration and a history.

We also wanted to recuperate the utopian dimension of citizenship, - and utopia of course means "nowhere": we think that modern citizenship requires an active utopia projected into the future. And finally we want to argue that we are in fact citizens of nowhere in a sense, because we have become citizens of the world: all of us, rich, poor, well-educated or less well-educated, are extremely aware of the interconnected nature of our world, where events sometimes very far away physically can have immediate implications in our lives. And yet very few of us have any political agency to do anything about this.

So we twist Theresa May’s phrase to say that in a way she is right, but not in the way she thinks: unless we invent new forms of political agency beyond borders, we will remain powerless citizens of nowhere.

As we have seen with Europe's treatment of refugees at its borders, citizenship of a particular state remains a defining feature of how we can move around the world. Do you see that changing?

There is no question that national citizenship is hugely determinant at the moment in who can move where and how, but nations are not the only actors: there is an extensive human rights regime in which lawyers, the UN, EU and NGOs as well as individual people can challenge what nations try to do, and there are corporations and business interests that need movements of selected categories workers. The meaning of citizenship has constantly been changing and contested throughout history. The contradictions between the universal vocation of modern citizenship, which since the French Revolution says all people are equal, and national sovereignty which limits who counts as a citizen, are constantly coming to the surface: the fact acting in solidarity with refugees are sometimes celebrated, sometimes condemned as criminals by the nation states shows this tension. We think in a context where mobility is only going to grow, this schizophrenia cannot last. Indeed, the recent decisions of the French Constitutional Court concerning the cases of Cedric Herrou and Pierre Manonni, overturning their prison sentences for helping migrants when they were crossing borders, is a hopeful reinterpretation of the principle of fraternité in the French republic. But of course it comes in a context where the treatment of migrants is worsening, and asylum-seekers are taken hostage by politics, also in France.

You talk about the need to "invent political forms of agency that are equal to the forces which shape our world". Could you expand on what this means?

The most important challenge of our day is to escape the borders of nation states. From multinational tax evasion to climate change, from financial to people flows, we are already inhabiting a post-national world. Our politics, however, has lagged behind. This is no accident: caging us in a national silos has served precisely the purpose of disenfranchising the many and reducing the power of democracy over the market. It may sound paradoxical, but to take back control over our future we need to step beyond the nation state.

Are you optimistic about the future of the European Union?

The future of the European Union is ultimately a matter of what the citizens and residents of the European Union make of it. There is no answer to such question except the one that we can shape collectively through our action. In that sense we are hopeful. But on one condition: regaining ambition and vision. Popular pressure and activism has transformed the most unjust of systems: from apartheid-era South Africa to Latin American dictatorships. Surely making the European Union a realm of shared prosperity is within our reach?

In recent years, the far right has found it too easy to exploit the European Union’s institutional weaknesses, whether it be Orban establishing the precedent that fundamental rights and democracy are optional inside the EU, or Italy’s interior minister Salvini exploiting divisions in Germany over asylum to appear as the person capable of forcing change to Europe’s failed attempt at a common migration policy.

We can take optimism from our capacity as citizens to see that such far-right tactics are a dead end for Europe, and will only make the situation worse. We can take optimism from the many recent examples of citizens organising together to find real solutions to problems: whether it be housing policy in Barcelona, migrant solidarity in Athens or decent pay for Deliveroo workers. From that point we need to organise a transnational response, based on humanity, cooperation and democracy.

In your view, what are the biggest problems facing Europe as a political institution?

Nation states. Think about it: in 2015, Greece attempted to drive through a change of economic policy for the whole of the European Union, in a situation where a majority of European citizens are clearly unhappy with the handling of the financial crisis. And all heads of government - whether left or right - ganged together to block all change. A few months later, and in the context of a large influx of refugees from Syria, it was Germany’s turn to be shunned from fellow heads of government, with the first of a long sequel of inconclusive European summits unable to agree a common migration policy. Or, again, when the European Council discusses measures to have large multinationals actually pay their taxes, countries like the UK or the Netherlands block all progress bowing to the interests of their national economic elites. All these examples point in one direction: if we are able to drive through a genuine European democracy, one where it is citizens transnationally that set the tone and decide the policies, then solutions to the greatest challenges of our time are within reach. But if we remain stuck in the zero-sum game of national vetoes, in a European Union run according to principles of inter-national diplomacy, then the European Union is bound to pile up crisis after crisis until nothing is left but ruins.

Should we be talking or thinking differently about Europe? How so?

There is a worrying trend that sees the debate polarising between an “anti-EU” field - and more often than not nationalist and xenophobic - and a “pro-EU” field that risks looking like an establishment-driven project of maintaining an unequal and untenable status quo. We believe we need to step beyond this false opposition and turn Europe into a genuinely political space of proposal and contestation. We need to discuss and contrast ideas for alternative Europes: i.e. what a common migration policy should like, what a reform of Europe’s outdated economic model would imply, etc. Clearly, the premise for such debate to lead to political action, and hence a change in people’s lives, is for the EU to be democratised. And that is why only a great movement for European democracy can represent a sufficiently ambitious response to the destructive nationalism thriving all around us.

You talk about the need for "new forms of solidarity, new institutions and new parties that go beyond borders". What would this look like in practice?

We need institutions that bring people together across borders to take decisions around their common interests. Think about trade or climate change. Negotiations for multinational agreements are conducted secretly, with heads of governments defending their perceived national interest - and more often than not the interests of the most powerful lobbies - with no institutional structure or political force able to represent the common interest of citizens across borders. But rather than imagining a new, and abstract, international governance system, we have outlined the contours of new political subjects that can bring about this change. Imagine a political party that is able to bring together European and Latin American civil society to devise a common trade agreement that lifts standards upwards for both continents - and then jointly campaign on it in at national and international level. A party which can work both inside and outside of political parties in the institutions, which sees the limitations of formalised politics but which does not surrender the institutions to its enemies.

We think we need new transnational parties that can act like a metaphor and an accelerator for the post-national world of tomorrow. And given that parties and movements ultimately depend on people coming together and setting them up - and not on abstract institutional agreements - this is something that is for us to do, right now.