Emerging Citizenship Regimes and Rescaling (European) Nation-States

Book excerpt: This chapter examines how state spaces throughout Europe are facing structural tensions as traditional ethnic nationalism increasingly comes into conflict with urban transformations. It argues that European citizenship is experiencing a unique set of city-regional and techno-political dynamics consisting of: (1) geotechnologics (driven by blockchain), (2) geopolitics (driven by dataism; the ideology of the Big Data's determinism), (3) geoeconomics (driven by populism) and (4) geodemocratics (driven by devolution). Given these tensions and their associated claimed rights, how will nation-states evolve? Will the urban age reconfigure the politics of nation-states through new and emerging citizenship regimes? Specifically, will the EU evolve towards a post-national polity from a platform of established nation-states? Or will the EU head for a city-regionalised federal network of nations determined voluntarily and democratically? The chapter develops the concept of emerging citizenship regimes as a new theoretical framework for thinking about state rescaling by proposing four ideal types of citizenship: algorithmic, liquid, metropolitan and stateless. It challenges the existing interpretation of how current citizenship regimes are transforming the city-regional and techno-political configuration of European nation-states.