Mobility in the Modern Western World

ion. Th ey aspire toward the universal and have no regard for the particular. In this sense, they are simply yet another form of representation of mobility alongside choreography charts or time-lapse photography. Unlike these other forms of representation, however, rights play a central role in the formation of liberal democracy. Th e right to mobility is central to the list of rights considered, as we have seen, to be fundamental (even when not strictly legal). In fact, the list provided by Zechariah Chafee puts the right to move alongside the rights to religion, a free press, assembly and speech.39 Indeed, the right to move is the fi rst fundamental right in the new European Charter of Rights, and features in the formal constitutions of nations as diverse as Mexico, Canada, Japan, Germany, and Ghana. It is also identifi ed as a universal right in Article 13 of the United Nations U niversal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) which guarantees both movement within the borders of each state and the right to leave and return to a country. Mobility is the only specifi cally geographical right RT52565_C006.indd 162 4/13/06 7:39:27 AM Mobility, Rights, and Citizenship in the United States • 163 identifi ed as fundamental in this way. Th ere is no equivalent right to stay still or to have a place of residence, for example. Th e notion of rights, as a form of legal representation and practice, has been critiqued by those on the left who fi nd the notion of the universality of rights problematic. Th e claims made for rights as being fundamental or natural or universal hides the context in which rights have been produced. In “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx called the nexus of rights and citizenship into question within the logic of historical materialism. “Political emancipation certainly represents a great progress” he writes, “[i]t is not, indeed, the fi nal form of human emancipation, but it is the fi nal form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order. It goes without saying that we are speaking here of real, practical emancipation.”40 Here he praises the development of liberal conceptions of liberty by noting that they are a distinct improvement on the stasis of feudalism. But, as always, he notes that they are a product of their context—the context of capitalism within the nation-state. Indeed, it is the state rather than nature that confers rights. Marx argues that rights—the rights of man—are rights for individuals rather than groups, the community, or species-being. “None of the supposed rights of man,” he continues, “go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.”41 Th e legal scholar Duncan Kennedy continues the line of critique opened up by Marx when he reminds us: Rights talk was the language of the group—the white male bourgeoisie—that cracked open and reconstituted the feudal and then mercantilist orders of Western Europe, and did it in the name of Reason. Th e mediating power of the language, based on the presupposition of fact/value and law/politics distinctions and on the universal and factoid character of rights, was a part of the armory of this group, along with the street barricade, the newspaper, and the new model family.42 Central to the problem with rights talk, though, is the way in which rights are represented as universal and abstract or fundamental. Th is p rocess of reifi cation lets rights stand in for events and practices that are, in fact, determinedly particular. To subsume each and every act of human mobility within a framework of rights serves to reproduce the isotropic plane of other forms of abstraction discussed in earlier chapters. Th e e quation of human mobility with that of exports, for instance, hides the s pecifi city of RT52565_C006.indd 163 4/13/06 7:39:27 AM