Formas de pago de la compensación económica.

In the previous sections, I showed that the exercise of political power justified only to the members of a nation-state, or to the members of a union of states such as the EU, is simply incoherent because of what its implications are for the democratic principle of legitimization. Furthermore, also the justification of unilateral border control based on the principle of self- determination is unsuccessful. This means that the legitimization of migration policies cannot exclude from the decision-making process those people who are subjected to the effect of the implementation of such policies.

Nonmembers have the right to a democratic say in the matter of migration policies as well as the possibility to participate in a joint action to implement the guarantee of the most

democratic border control possible. I have also showed that the nonmembers, or the agency that represent them, entitled to this political right must be identified through the all-subjected principle proposed by Abizadeh.

In particular, the definition of subjection I gave in the first section of this chapter identifies the nonmembers to be included in the decision-making process for migration policies. It is possible to distinguish three agents who should be participating in the process. These are EU citizens, EU neighboring country citizens and what I named the ‘people of migrants’.

If the first two have at least some sort of representation through the election of national governments and EU institutions, the latter has no international institutional form of

expressing themselves. The refugees come from war zones, or places where political oppression is constant therefore, they cannot rely on their governments to express their opinions and ideas, much less fighting for their rights in foreign countries policies.

The economic migrants, instead, formally have a national government, which could defend its citizens’ right to a democratic say in some intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations (UN) or the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). However, when it comes to practice, this is hardly the case. On the one hand, with regard to OSCE, not all nation-states are part of this organization so many migrants would still be excluded.

On the other hand, the UN could represent a good international place where to raise this political debate. However, as I showed in the second chapter, the migratory process is self- sustaining and emigration and immigration countries’ economies depend on the process itself. Therefore, I think emigration countries would have few political and economic interests in raising this topic on an international level because of the threat of negative consequences for the phenomenon.

This situation leaves migrants on their own. They are denied the right to a democratic say in EU migratory policies, although these policies subject them to coercion because of the decrease in autonomy they experience. As Abizadeh argues, autonomy is, in fact, one of the main factors in determining whether individuals are coerced by political power and therefore in need of a representation because of their right to a democratic say.

For him, coercion can affect an agent’s autonomy in three different ways. Firstly, it may damage or block the development of an agent’s mental abilities. This may or may not be true for the ‘people of migrants’ and I will not examine this option because I think it mostly

depends on individual situations.96

Secondly, coercion inevitably reduce or eliminate the options an agent can dispose of. The closing of borders, I believe, definitely fall into this category since a migrant is reduced of viable options of entering that specific country. It is true, however, as Abizadeh writes that

96 _{Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own}

autonomy does not require the maximization of the number of options; it only requires the accessibility of a number of valuable option. Henceforth, an agent’s autonomy is affected only

if the decreasing of options do not leave enough options available.97 Even with this restriction,

I believe migrants are subjected by EU policies because their number of viable options is

generally speaking extremely low.98

Thirdly, Abizadeh argues that coercion always violate the condition of independence, which is a fundamental characteristic of autonomy. Coercion, in fact, subjects a person to the will of another. In the case of migration policies this is also exacerbated by the fact, that migrants’ options are reduced by the exercise of power of some “intentionally acting agents,

rather than, say, by unpreventable natural disaster”.99 _{It seems to me clear that the ‘people of}

migrants’ fall into this category since their independence is denied by the will of another, a

state or the EU.100

This short analysis on the lack of representation as well as the lack autonomy for the ‘people of migrants’ shows that they are coerced by unilateral EU decisions on migration policies. They are subjected to others with regard to the border control issue and they need a representation in order to express themselves and take part in the decision-making process for migration policy making. What are the consequences of this awareness and the application of the all-subjected principle for EU migration policies?

The first consequence of the all-subjected principle for EU migration policies, in my opinion, concerns the implementation of a representative institution where the ‘people of migrants’ may be heard out. This is also the challenge posed by ‘European migrants crisis’ to democratic theory: an enlargement of the democratic process to implement better and more efficient migration policies as well as the identification of a unbounded political community to which such policies owe a legitimization.

There is also a second consequence for EU migration policies. It derives from the rejection of the sovereignty state view and the self-determination principle. In fact, as I have argued in the last section, the unilateral control of border, especially the right to close them, is legitimized only insofar as it concerns the protection of minority groups. This is not the case, however, of the ‘European migrants crisis’.

Therefore, the decision-making process for the implementation of migration policies must become a joint responsibility of all-subjected agents, or their representative. This means that the decision-making process regarding migration in and outside the EU must be shared or at least legitimized to all the agents involved. As I have shown, these include three categories of

97 _{Ibidem, 57.}

98 _{When I use the term ‘viable option’ here, I intend it similarly to Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen’s}

capability theory of justice where a viable option for a person is defined by his/her own capability to achieve the kind of lives he/she has reason to value. For further details on the topic see Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, The Quality of Life, Oxford England New York: Claredon Press Oxford University Press, 1993.

99 _{For these characteristics of autonomy see Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No}

Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders”, Political Theory 36, no. 1 (2008): 40.

100 _{Arash Abizadeh, “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own}

peoples, and for extension their representative institutions. These are the EU institutions and MS governments, EU neighboring countries governments and the new representative

institution, which would represent ‘the people of migrants’.

This change in the international perspective regarding the ‘European migrants crisis’ would be beneficial both for the efficacy of migration policies as well as for democratic theory as a whole. As Abizadeh says, then, migration policies if so legitimized and decided would grant democratic procedures a better respect for equality and freedom for the people over whom power is exercised. Also, these changes would enhance the participatory political practices of expression, contestation and discursive argumentation. More generally, endorsing Aabizadeh’s words, “democracy represents an attempt to replace relations of force, coercion, or domination with relations governed by fair negotiation, argumentation, and decision- making, and to legitimize the remaining uses of coercion by subjecting them to terms set via

such democratic practices.”101

To conclude, in the next chapter I will face some counter-arguments to these conclusions and I will reply to them.

101 _{Arash Abizadeh, “On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy and the Boundary Problem,” American}

CHAPTER IV