Abstract
The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ provoked a wave of solidarity movements across Europe. These movements contrasted with attitudes of rejection against refugees from almost all EU member states and a lack of coordinated and satisfactory response from the EU as an institution. The growth of the solidarity movement entails backlash of nationalized identities, while the resistance of the member states to accept refugees represents the failure of the cosmopolitan view attached to the EU. In the article, we argue that the European solidarity movement shapes a new kind of cosmopolitanism: cosmopolitanism from below, which fosters an inclusionary universalism, which is both critical and conflictual. The urban scale thus becomes the place to locally articulate inclusive communities where solidarity bonds and coexistence prevail before national borders and cosmopolitan imaginaries about welcoming, human rights, and the universal political community are enhanced. We use the case of Barcelona to provide a concrete example of intersections between civil society and a municipal government. We relate this discussion to ongoing debates about ‘sanctuary cities’ and solidarity cities and discuss how urban solidarities can have a transformative role at the city level. Furthermore, we discuss how practices on the scale of the city are up-scaled and used to forge trans-local solidarities and city networks.
Highlights
When UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke at a conference in Washington DC in April 2016 addressing the forced displacement of millions of people taking place at the time he said: “We are facing the biggest refugee and displacement crisis of our time
We argue that the European solidarity movement has shaped a new kind of cosmopolitanism: cosmopolitanism from below, which fosters an inclusionary universalism, which is both critical and conflictual
Cosmopolitanism from below combines rooted practices and solidarity relations without renouncing to a common ground shared by different solidarity movements
Summary
When UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke at a conference in Washington DC in April 2016 addressing the forced displacement of millions of people taking place at the time he said: “We are facing the biggest refugee and displacement crisis of our time. The implications are twofold: the articulation of cosmopolitanism from below in which civil society plays a major role in the redefinition of being European, in conflict with the EU institutions, and the network of municipalities as a genuine alternative— with all its limitations—to the nation states and nationalism as the dominant answer to the humanitarian crisis of 2015. To illustrate how this happens in practice, we use. The example of Barcelona and its work on defining itself as a refugee city
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