Integration to What? Marginalization from What?: Keynote Address at 19th Nordiske Sociologkongres, 13–15 June 1997, Copenhagen: “Integration and Marginalization.”

The modern world-system has created considerable confusion about what we can mean by integration and marginalization into our societies/states. One of the principles of most sovereign states in the last two centuries is that they are composed of “citizens.” Once there were citizens, there were non-citizens as well. Citizenship became something very valuable, and consequently not something one was very willing to share with others. Despite the fact that citizenship is a cherished good, which gives rise to “protectionist” sentiment, migration is a constantly recurring phenomenon in the modern world, which leads to the issue of national integration. The world revolution of 1968 put into question, for the first time since the French Revolution, the concept of citizenship. What was different about me world revolution of 1968 was that it was an expression of disillusionment in the possibilities of state-level reformism. The post-1968 movements added something new. They insisted that racism and sexism were not merely matters of individual prejudice and discrimination but that they took on “institutional” forms as well. What these movements seemed to be talking about was not overt juridical discrimination but the covert forms that were hidden within the concept of “citizen” The concept of citizenship is, in its essence, always simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary. We should begin to conceive whether we can go beyond or dispense with the concept of citizen, and if so, to replace it with what?