MOBILISE · ‘Stay home’: emergency, (im)mobility, and the liberal subject

‘Stay home’: emergency, (im)mobility, and the liberal subject

The key aim of the MOBILISE project was to investigate how restrictive (im)mobility measures, imposed to limit the spread of COVID-19, have challenged and (re)shaped the relation between emergency, (im)mobility and the liberal subject. The key focus was to investigate the meaning - and possible transformation - of EU citizenship under conditions of (im)mobility. If what constitutes European citizenship is freedom — freedom of movement, of assembly and, above all, of choice — is our conceptualisation of the ‘liberal citizen’ applicable during times of emergency? Do emergencies require a radical change in citizens’ attitude? Did we assist, during COVID-19 pandemic, to a transformation of EU citizens from active subjects into passive ones? Did any EU governments attempt to operate this transformation? Since the COVID-19 emergency, many academics have focussed on the health and security dilemmas that the current pandemic has generated, the many emergency measures that governments have introduced, the lack of democratic scrutiny and the many restrictions imposed upon the citizenry, particularly lockdown measures and social distancing and stay-at-home policies. At the beginning of the pandemic, most studies tended to focus on the many technologies of control that discipline and transform citizens into subjects. By focusing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics, discipline, and sovereignty (1977; 2002; 2008), studies largely concentrated their attention on states’ power to impose certain technologies of control that (biologically) transform subjects into disciplined and docile bodies. If we were to look at the many COVID-19 emergency norms that most of the EU states have introduced to ban, restrict or encourage certain behaviours, as well as the role of medical experts in advising which health measures and mechanisms of surveillance and monitoring to adopt, it seemed that Western countries were adopting a biopolitical approach. However, by focusing on biopolitics, discipline and sovereignty, little attention was given to citizens’ capacity to contest sovereign decisions, and more specifically on the interrelation between political systems and modalities of subjection. By scrutinising the level of (non-)conformity as well as the reasons for it, it has been possible to map not only how common EU citizens have experienced the pandemic, but most importantly, what kinds of subjects/citizens have emerged out of it. Who is the ‘citizen of emergency’? Or perhaps even better: what defines a good citizen during an emergency? Is it freedom? Is it democratic participation? Or is it responsibility? What does it mean to act as a responsible citizen? Should recent protests be investigated through the prism of citizenship and freedom, as traditionally done? Or should protests-during-emergencies be investigated through a different prism? These are some of the key questions that the MOBILISE project has investigated.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union