Etienne Balibar's name does not immediately come to mind as a spatial or ecological thinker. A student of Louis Althusser, Balibar was first known for his structural re-reading of Marx, especially for his contributions to Reading “Capital” (1965) in which he studied modes of production, reproduction and the reconstruction of social relations. The mode of analysis he employs in his work of the 1960s and 70s already “spatializes” the world through emphasis on social structures and practices. Since co-authoring with Immanuel Wallerstein a volume entitled Race, Nation, Class (1988), he has devoted much of his writing to problems of democracy in relation to globalization. He identifies two flows, a flow of transnational capital that sets a “trend” (of the kind Baudrillard and Virilio identify) and a massive flow of population. Both are the consequence of decolonization and now, especially, of globalization. Movements of population show him that we need to rethink what we mean by “space” on national, European and worldwide plateaus. He analyzes the relation that moves across subjects and citizens, and militates for an active rethinking of culture and politics at a time when decolonization, economic globalization and forced migration require affirmation of the grounding principles of Marx's political economy.

Balibar raises questions about borders, the construction of territories, the nation-state and the construction of global world-space. More than describing complete spaces, he focuses, in the wake of Marx, on the articulation of action on and across their plateaus. Balibar urges us, however much we mediate our relations with the world through technology, to think and act, at once individually and collectively, as subjects with agency and as active citizens. The subject has to be complemented by a citizen who is not merely the victim of marketing strategies, as we have seen in Baudrillard's economy of the sign. Less pessimistic than Virilio, Balibar does not exclude the possibility of such a citizen. For him, the concept of citizenship is tied to the rights of citizens on one level and, no less intimately, to those of “foreigners” on the other. All move and dwell in three geopolitical spaces of increasing scale: the French nation-state, the European Union and a world-space.