An impression of the statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
In a time when migration policy dominates political debates across Europe, philosopher and political theorist Lea Ypi stands out as a compelling voice calling for a radical rethinking of what citizenship means—and for whom it serves. In her public lecture “Migration and Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century,” delivered in May 2025 at the historic Judenplatz in Vienna, Ypi challenged not just governments and institutions, but all of Europe, to examine its conscience.
Who is Lea Ypi?
Lea Ypi is an Albanian-British political theorist and professor at the London School of Economics. Born in Tirana, Albania in 1979, she came of age during the collapse of the communist regime and the tumultuous transition to liberal democracy. These formative experiences shaped her personal and philosophical outlook, which she explores in her internationally acclaimed memoir Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, a finalist for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize and winner of the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize.
Ypi’s academic work covers political theory, Enlightenment thought, Kant, Marxism, and contemporary questions of justice, freedom, and migration. Her voice is not only academic but deeply personal. When she speaks of borders, identity, and the struggle for belonging, it is from both a theoretical vantage point and lived experience.
A Statue, a Story, a Statement
Ypi opened her speech not with statistics or policy recommendations, but with a symbol: a statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the Enlightenment thinker, whose figure stands in Judenplatz with an open hand and a gentle gaze. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, a plea for interreligious understanding set during the Crusades, provides the moral and philosophical lens through which Ypi reflects on the migration crisis.
In the play, Nathan—himself a displaced Jew living under Muslim rule—resists all narrow labels and asks simply: “Isn’t it enough to be human?” For Ypi, this is the heart of the matter: the tendency to divide migrants into categories like "deserving" and "undeserving," "legal" and "illegal," "good" and "bad"—is a betrayal not just of humanism, but of Europe’s own Enlightenment ideals.
Beyond Good Migrants
Ypi tells the story of a childhood friend’s father in 1990s Albania—“Ben the Lame,” a dockworker turned smuggler, who helped people escape to Italy after the fall of the communist regime. Once celebrated as a facilitator of freedom, he died at sea and was later mourned by families who saw him as someone who enabled survival and dignity. “He wasn’t Nathan,” Ypi reflects. “He wasn’t a good migrant. He was a bad one.”
This dichotomy—between acceptable and unacceptable migrants—is at the heart of Ypi’s critique. She challenges the notion that migration is primarily a cultural problem. Rather, it is the consequence of global injustice: wars funded by the same Western states that deny asylum, economic collapse induced by neoliberal reforms, and health inequalities exacerbated by vaccine patents.
The Myth of Free Movement
Western nations have long preached the virtues of “freedom,” including the right to move. During the Cold War, dissidents who fled East Germany or the Soviet bloc were welcomed as heroic symbols of liberty. But when similar people—fleeing post-communist instability or Western-sponsored conflicts—arrive today, they are met with fences, patrols, and suspicion.
As Ypi argues: “Just when former socialist states stopped shooting their citizens at the border, capitalist states started patrolling the seas.” The uniforms changed, the logic of exclusion remained.
Capitalism, Class, and Commodification of Citizenship
One of Ypi’s most searing observations is how citizenship has become a commodity. The very rich can buy their way into almost any country through investor visas and golden passports. At the same time, the poor—those without the right education, income, or "cultural fit"—face impossible hurdles.
This two-tiered system, she argues, turns democracy into oligarchy: a regime where money buys belonging. “When citizenship is bought and sold, it ceases to be a tool for emancipation and becomes one of exclusion,” she says. It is not migration that undermines democracy, but the marketization of political membership.
What’s Really at Stake
For Ypi, the real crisis is not one of borders or integration, but of democratic failure:
A failure of representation, where politicians respond more to donors and polls than to public interest;
A failure of social justice, where inequality continues to rise;
A failure of international solidarity, where global institutions fail the vulnerable.
Migration becomes a scapegoat for these deeper problems. “The migrant did not bring this crisis,” Ypi warns. “The migrant merely reveals it.”
A Call for Enlightenment—Not Nostalgia
In closing, Ypi returns to the Enlightenment, not as a Eurocentric relic, but as a critical, universalist project—one that urges us to think beyond borders, beyond identity, beyond obedience. “Obedience always requires ignorance,” she says. “And we are becoming used to not thinking.”
True cosmopolitanism, in Ypi’s view, isn’t about charity or humanitarianism. It’s about political transformation: building societies in which no one is forced to migrate because of war, hunger, or exclusion.
Her message is clear: Europe’s future cannot be built on walls, nor on nostalgia for greatness. It must be built on justice, equality, and critical thinking—on the courage, as Lessing once wrote, “to think for yourself.”
Further Reading:
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History (Penguin, 2021)