In the current political moment, a combination of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism has become the dominant state model for much of the world. The democracy/neoliberal consensus emerged from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the decline of state socialism in the latter half of the 20th century. These changes enabled the thickening of geopolitical relationships and globalisation processes, which were supported by new legal and technical arrangements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico, or the expansion of the European Union's (EU’s) sphere and scale of influence. Until the advent of the global financial crisis, this consensus appeared to hold. As the crisis developed, though, the problems with neoliberal capitalism became increasingly obvious: people lost homes when mortgages were foreclosed; they lost work when unemployment levels soared; and they lost income when wage rates were cut. States were reluctant to recognise the role of neoliberal policies in this crisis, even though Peck (2012: 630) insists that periodic returns to crisis are caused by the failure of ‘successive waves of neoliberal reform to generate sustainable economic, social or environmental development’. Instead, most states responded by introducing austerity measures, which included a contraction of public sector spending. This had a disproportionate effect on those people who were already struggling to get by.

For many commentators, states had played a central role in the intensity of the global financial crisis because of their lack of regulation of markets and capital in their support of neoliberal capitalism. Yet, rather than directly address this issue, politicians and political parties sought other explanations for the economic difficulties that their citizens were experiencing. In particular, the attention shifted to the role of migrants in many Western liberal democracies. In states such as the UK and the US, among others, politicians and pundits increasingly began to link economic woes to the presence of migrants, despite little in the way of evidence supporting this link. Migration and migrants became a target for those who sought to divert attention from broader economic, political and social dysfunction, and for those who sought to understand the difficulties that they were experiencing in their everyday lives.

Introduction

The meanings and practices of belonging to places have been affected by the era of globalisation. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are not the first events to have an impact on belonging in this era, but they represent significant jolts, and the specific programmes of Brexit and the Trump administration indicate intentional reconfigurations of existing arrangements. In some cases, these political upheavals have served to intensify existing tendencies, or make existing practices more visible. In other cases, there are new problems, new connections made and new severances of existing connections.

Brexit and Trump have produced so much uncertainty that they are their own crises. They, and similarly disruptive moves for independence in Scotland or Catalonia, remind us that despite performances of state security at borders, the geopolitical order is always vulnerable to destabilisation. If we survey the history of modern Europe, for example, we can see that its borders and identities have changed frequently, with emergence of new nation-states, the disappearance of others, and other partitions and unifications generating new allegiances, championed by an expanding state. Tensions over existing borders and identities clearly remain, sometimes fed by resistance to narratives of unity. Nationalism has served as both an emancipatory and an authoritarian force (Bianchini, 2017). When it comes to questions of citizenship and belonging, both governments and individuals strategically navigate disputed cartographies.

The UK government and the Trump administration have made strong and explicit statements about bringing about change that will alter definitions of who belongs. What are the lasting impacts of such statements and the policies that may follow? What insights can we draw from the sentiments and structures that have been revealed by these crises? Mary Layoun (2001) has argued that ideas about citizenship are never more electrified than in a crisis. In these moments, the state makes an extraordinary effort to set out clear (and usually exclusionary) definitions to establish order, to instil fear and to promote political unity through purified ideas of who belongs. However, in the ordinary lives of citizens on the ground, belongings and allegiances may be much more complex and ambiguous. It is not the goal of this chapter, nor of this book, to predict what will happen in five, 10 or 40 years from now because of Brexit and Trump.

Introduction

On 22 August 2017, Leo Varadkar, the newly elected Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, paid a visit to the US–Canada border. Varadkar was wrapping up his official tour of Canada, where he had sought to closely align himself with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The two leaders were photographed together at state functions, diplomatic trade talks and marching in the Montreal Pride Parade, where they smiled and waved at the crowds in matching button-down shirts and chino combos. While the Canadian tour was intended to consolidate the beautiful friendship that began with a short visit by Trudeau to Dublin the previous month, Varadkar was also on a ‘fact-finding’ mission in light of the potential changes to Ireland's land border as a result of Brexit. With Brexit, the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland will become a European Union (EU) external border, and thus the soft border that currently exists could be radically revised: ‘I have heard some people who are promoters of Brexit using [the US–Canada border] as an example of a solution that could work in Ireland’, Varadkar was quoted as saying, ‘I have heard them describe it as a soft border, I wonder if that is the case?’ (Kelly, 2017). Speaking the following day from the border, he was less equivocal, saying: ‘make no mistake, it's a hard border’ (Anderson, 2017).

For the last three decades, pro-globalisation advocates have been flaunting the promise of a ‘borderless world’ (Friedman, 2006), but practices of bordering have become more complex and uneven (Jones, 2016). While for some groups of people, movement has become frictionless, for others, the right to move has been restricted as borders have been militarised (Jones and Johnson, 2016). In the current context of Brexit and the Trump presidency, the performance of borders, if not the actual practice, is being significantly transformed so that borders are invoked and materially enforced in new ways. However, the intrinsically interconnected nature of the global economy has also meant that the impact of transformations in the UK and the US are having ramifications beyond the territories that they immediately bound. In this chapter, we are interested in how the dominant performance of borders and bordering is being reworked through Brexit and the Trump presidency.

The early 21st century has witnessed a growing politicisation of migration and citizenship. This is a global phenomenon, and one with a long history. Despite assertions of an increasingly borderless and globalised world, a reversal or at least a backlash appears to be taking place. Perhaps such promises were always illusory. The neoliberal loosening of trade regulations across borders has been selective and uneven, with the movement of some goods, information, capital and people eased, while for others, it remains or has been made difficult or impossible.

The current moment is emerging as a crucial period in which the neoliberal consensus, while still strongly asserted, is nevertheless being contested through renegotiations of migration, citizenship and globalisation's promise of a borderless world. Fundamental questions of the right to move and the right to stay, the right to belong, and the right to contest the status quo are in flux. Two watershed moments stand out. On 23 June 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU). The vote in favour of ‘Brexit’ marked the first time that a country had chosen to leave the EU since the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which set up the European Economic Community. Just over four months later, on 8 November 2016, the US elected Donald Trump as its president. A political outsider who had never previously held office, Trump vowed to ‘Make America Great Again’. His campaign pledge both targeted the efforts of the previous president, Barack Obama, and harkened back to a previous golden era when America was great. The Brexit vote in the UK to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump in the US are decisions specific to their countries, but they have strong ripple effects on other countries. They are also indicative of larger political changes taking place around the world, particularly with respect to migration and citizenship policies, which have become both more liberal and more exclusive at the same time. This book explores these changes, connecting them and putting them into context at multiple scales. Through this analysis, a clearer picture of the roots of these politics emerges, as well as of the consequences for mobility, political participation and belonging in the 21st century.

Introduction

This is the age of mobility (Papademetriou, 2007: 27). Contemporary mobility takes many forms (Adey, 2010); it includes the movement of people, things and ideas, and it also includes the infrastructure that makes movement possible. However, movement alone is not mobility. Tim Cresswell (2010: 19) says that mobility has three important and interconnected aspects. The first is physical movement: for example, a person moving from a rural area to an urban area, or between countries. The second is how that physical movement is embodied and experienced. The third is how that physical movement is represented; as an example, is it represented as a threat or as an opportunity? Adey (2010: 34–9) sums this up in a pithy statement: mobility is movement with meaning.

The advent of the ‘new mobilities’ turn in the social sciences and humanities has focused our attention on the centrality of mobility to contemporary life (Sheller and Urry, 2006). In this chapter, we are particularly concerned with the mobility of people, which we categorise in two ways. The first is travel: moving from one place to another and, often, returning, where the stay away is for a short period of time. This broad definition incorporates a wide range of movement, including tourism and business travel. We are particularly interested in travel that crosses international borders. The second is migration. Like travel, this term is difficult to define, and includes internal and international migration, for temporary or permanent time periods, and with a range of different motivations. In this chapter, we are concerned with international migration, and we follow the United Nations’ (UN’s) definition of migration as movement for the purposes of settlement, for at least three months (United Nations Statistics Division, 2017). In this way, we distinguish between international travel and international migration on the basis of settlement intention and length of time. These definitions are, of course, partial and incomplete since the boundaries between a traveller and a migrant remain blurred. This is clearly shown by the diversity of mobile people listed by Sheller and Urry (2006: 207): ‘asylum seekers, international students, terrorists, members of diasporas, holidaymakers, business people, sports stars, refugees, backpackers, commuters, the early retired, young mobile professionals, prostitutes, armed forces’.