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164 Chapter 5
the political community who are living under the law. The right of
expatriates to vote therefore means the right to impose obligations on
resident South Africans without having to assume those very same
obligations. Whether or not this right is implied by collective membership
in a nation, it is not implied by collective membership in a democratic
community in which democratic accountability among citizens is the
defining feature.
There might be good reasons in international law why South Africans
may not be stripped of their formal citizenship (nationality) once they have
permanently taken up residence in another country. However, there is no
good reason of democratic theory why such non-resident citizens may not
be stripped of their right to vote. Many democracies (like Canada) allow
non-resident citizens to retain the right to vote for a predefined period of
time only, after which expatriate citizens are automatically stripped of the
right to vote. Again it is useful, as Barry has suggested, to more carefully
distinguish in this regard between nationality and citizenship, as the two
concepts relate respectively to membership in a state for the purposes of
international law and membership in a bounded democratic political
community for the purposes of election law. Membership in the latter
(citizenship in the narrow sense of the term) should be determined with
reference to the value of democratic accountability: those who are directly
subject to the jurisdiction and violence of law should have a say in the
making and administration of the law; those who are not, like expatriate
citizens who permanently live and work outside the jurisdiction of the
state, should not.
The relationship between voting rights and the value of democratic
accountability implied in the territorial jurisdiction of the law, suggests a
close relationship between voting rights and residence. Benhabib has
recently identified the rise of new forms of post-national street-based
citizenship (or denizenship) as a significant reaction to the twilight of
nation-state sovereignty. 80 Post-national citizenship refers to the rise of
political activism on the part of non- and post-nationals living together in
multi-cultural and ethnic inner-city neighbourhoods, who come together
around issues like women’s rights, secondary language education,
environmental concerns, representation on school boards and migrant
employment. 81 The new forms of ‘urban activism’ described by Benhabib
can be understood as a perfect example of the ideal of street democracy
that I defended on a number of previous occasions. 82 Benhabib’s point is
80
81
Benhabib (n 4 above) 263.
This new urban activism and politics need not be centred on voting rights and
integration into representative law-making institutions. Benhabib favours the
institutional recognition of post-national denizenship through voting rights, as has
already taken place at the local government level in the European Union. There are
obvious limits to any focus on voting rights as an entry into transformative postnationalist
and post-national politics. The focus on voting rights tends to reduce
political action to voting, and thus immediately folds the potentially radical idea of a