Between the right to the place and the rights in the place: the uncertain status of residence between global urges and local resistances

The status of national citizen is joined therefore by a new entity: the formal status of whoever is legally residing in the territory of a state. Although the condition of non-citizen resident is by previous to the far socalled “crises of the state”―the figure of denizen,3 indeed, was already present during the Middle Ages―the process of European integration and, at the same time, the process of regionalisation within single states confers to this condition a new centrality. The system of local citizenship which is gradually arising has some potentialities but, at the same time, involves some evident risks. If, on one hand, the systems of local rights could be considered as more inclusive towards migrants than the national ones, on the other hand they can turn into heavily exclusionary mechanisms. The so called “residence”, that is to say the inscription into the registry office of a town is, in specific terms, the bone of contention between who promotes forms of local citizenship which are at least potentially universalistic and who, on the contrary, defends increasingly particularistic forms of citizenship.