Experiments with Freedom: Milieus of the Human

1. Introduction: Effervescent Freedoms

Over 150 years ago, Karl Marx proclaimed that capitalism had opened up fractures and fissures in the solid crust of European society. "Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betray oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock" (577). Marx and Friedrich Engels's famous phrase, "all that is solid melts into air" (Berman 5), captures the constant political and cultural upheavals that characterize global modernity. Today, the ruptures and revolutions are associated with contradictory globalizing phenomena. The interplay between a capricious world and experiments with freedoms threatens to render modern norms of citizenship and human rights "antiquated before they can ossify" (Marx and Engels 70).

The explosive growth and destruction of global markets is associated with various kinds of freedoms: freedom from old traditions, old obligations, spatial confinements, and political arrangements. Experimentations with freedoms—at the political, social, and individual levels—have historically accompanied capitalist expansion. The rise of nation-states in a global order has paralleled the growth of a world economy. These parallel developments have greatly complicated the meaning of freedom and obscured our understanding of the various forms it can take. What is citizenship if not the institutionalization of human rights as political membership in a nation-state? What are human rights if not the freedom from basic human want promised by a global community? Indeed, citizenship concepts that appear to us as enduring global norms of human existence are in constant flux, mirroring the constant upheavals of society and the eternal restlessness of capitalism.

Contemporary globalization once again opens up questions about the nature of human freedom and claims in environments of uncertainties and risks. Insecurities linked to mass displacements, economic downturns, and market exclusions highlight the protective limits of citizenship and human rights against a variety of adversities. Here, I distinguish between two categories of individual freedoms. First, positive freedom refers to the rights and claims on the government to provide fundamental means of subsistence such as food, shelter, jobs, and so on. Positive liberty also includes individual rights to equal treatment and protection by the state. Second, negative freedom refers to freedom from state interference in speech, behavior, and movement, that is, the rights to human agency. This freedom is liberty from state encroachment and limitation on individual liberty. Negative liberty can include the exercise of autonomous neoliberal practices across national boundaries, or even freedom to reject democracy. These two understandings of freedoms—individual rights protection in the democratic nation-state, and negative rights to exercise human agency unrestrained by state power—are in constant articulation in transnational movements around the world.¹

Economic globalization is viewed by humanists as an opportunity for transforming citizenship and respatializing claims and entitlements in transnational networks. The claim is that the intensification of interconnectedness associated with capitalism has created opportunities for the rise of feelings and institutions of global solidarity (cosmopolitanism). The proliferation of multilateral agencies such as the United Nations and non-governmental organizations (NGOS), it has been claimed, is interweaving political communities in complex constellations for realizing global common good.

There is the claim that "cosmopolitan citizenship" is developing from the norms of exchange, dialogue, mediation, and mutual understanding that link different sites as "overlapping communities of fate" (Held et al. 445). Other views also claim that spatial freedoms linked to markets and mobilities are key to the formation of liberatory "postnational" identities. Missing from such discussions are the kinds of negative freedoms—freedom from state controls—unleashed in globalized environments.

Experiments with individual freedom do not always result in the realization of Enlightenment ideals of cosmopolitanism or the expansion of human rights. One can say that the ease of crossing borders is associated not primarily with goals of realizing the common global good but with specific individual goals or with political agendas that seek non-democratic visions. This article will discuss these two models of negative freedom—spatially driven affiliations and market-driven autonomous action—that are remaking the meaning of citizenship. These parallel processes of freedom from the nation-states are disembedding elements of citizenship from the territoriality of...