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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Key Themes in Sociology
- Sprache: Englisch
A significant addition to the growing body of literature on citizenship, this wide-ranging overview focuses on the importance, and changing nature, of citizenship. It introduces the varied discourses and theories that have arisen in recent years, and looks toward future scholarship in the field.
- Offers an analytical assessment of the various thematic discourses and provides guidance in pulling together those discrete themes into a larger, more comprehensive framework
- Identifies the four broadly conceived themes that shape the many discourses on contemporary citizenship – inclusion, erosion, withdrawal, and expansion
- Includes a thorough introduction to the subject
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Seitenzahl: 362
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table Of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
1: Introduction
EXPANSION OR EROSION?
FOUR THEMES
THE FUTURE OF CITIZENSHIP
2: Inclusion
THE DIALECTIC OF INCLUSION AND EXCLUSION
MULTICULTURALISM AS A MODE OF INCLUSION
THE LESSON TO BE DRAWN FROM EXISTING THEORY AND PRAXIS
3: Erosion
DIMENSIONS OF CITIZENSHIP
T. H. MARSHALL AND THE EXPANSION OF CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS
CRITIQUES OF THE WELFARE STATE
THE TRIUMPH OF THE MARKET OVER CITIZENSHIP?
4: Withdrawal
INDIVIDUALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS: TOCQUEVILLE REVISITED
ENTER PUTNAM
THE THIRD WAY AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
5: Expansion
DUAL CITIZENSHIP
WHICH NATIONS PERMIT AND WHICH PROHIBIT DUAL CITIZENSHIP?
NESTED CITIZENSHIP
TOWARD GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP?
6: Future Trends
INTERNAL FACTORS SHAPING CITIZENSHIP REGIMES
CITIZENSHIP AND GLOBALIZATION
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Key Themes in Sociology
This outstanding introductory series covers major theoretical perspectives and key concepts refl ecting contemporary society. Written in an engaging style and accessible format, these concise volumes are designed to stimulate student discussion and thought. Pedagogical features such as primary readings, chapter summaries, key terms, and further suggested reading ensure these student-friendly volumes will be an essential aid to the study of the key themes in sociology.
Published
The Sociology of Gender: An Introduction to Theory and ResearchAmy S. Wharton
Science and Technology in Society: From Biotechnology to the InternetDaniel Lee Kleinman
Citizenship: Discourse, Theory, and Transnational ProspectsPeter Kivisto and Thomas Faist
Citizenship
Discourse, Theory, and Transnational Prospects
Peter Kivisto
Thomas Faist
© 2007 by Peter Kivisto and Thomas Faist
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
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The right of Peter Kivisto and Thomas Faist to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
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First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2007
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kivisto, Peter, 1948–
Citizenship : discourse, theory, and transnational prospects / Peter Kivisto and Thomas Faist.
p. cm. – (Key themes in sociology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-0551-4 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4051-0552-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Citizenship. I. Faist, Thomas, 1959– II. Title.
JF801.K57 2007
323.601–dc22
2006034413
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1Introduction
Citizenship was long a neglected subject in the social sciences, but in a dramatic reversal it has more recently become a focal point for wide-ranging and varied discussions concerning the democratic prospect in an increasingly global society. Indeed, it is fair to say that we are currently witnessing an efflorescence of interest in the future of citizenship, or what David Scobey (2001: 20) has referred to as the “‘return of the citizen’ in public and policy discourse.” Moreover, this efflorescence is a reflection of a growing belief in many quarters that we are living in what sociologist and former President of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso (2000) has referred to as “an age of citizenship.”
This renewed concern stems from two interrelated and shared convictions on the part of those who have entered into the fray: first, citizenship is important, and second, citizenship is changing. However, commentators begin to part company with others when it comes to specifying in what ways citizenship is presumed to be important and similarly over identifying the changes that are thought to be transforming – for better or worse – its significance and character. Not surprisingly, the normative evaluations attached to various prognostications also vary considerably, as do the emotional reactions, which range from deep pessimism to a rather rosy optimism.
At one level, citizenship can be succinctly defined in terms of two component features. The first is that it constitutes membership in a polity, and as such citizenship inevitably involves a dialectical process between inclusion and exclusion, between those deemed eligible for citizenship and those who are denied the right to become members. In its earliest articulation in ancient Greece, the polity in question was the city-state. In the modern world, it was transformed into the nation-state. Second, membership brings with it a reciprocal set of duties and rights, both of which vary by place and time, though some are universal. Thus, paying taxes and obeying the law are among the duties expected of citizens in all polities, while the right to participate in the political process in various ways – by voting, running for office, debating, petitioning, and so forth – is an inherent feature of democracy.
However, at another level, when one begins to look more closely at the substance of citizenship in the world today, it quickly becomes quite clear that there is no singularly agreed-upon answer to the question Derek Heater (1999) posed in the title of his book What is Citizenship? A rather cursory review of the literature reveals something of the capacious nature of recent discussions about contemporary citizenship. In an effort to capture that which is deemed to be novel about the present situation, a proliferation of adjectives are evident in that literature aimed as describing peculiar features of citizenship today. Thus, we find treatments of world citizenship (Heater 2002), global citizenship (Falk 1994), universal citizenship (Young 1989), cosmopolitan citizenship (Linklater 1998), multiple citizenship (Held 1995), postnational citizenship (Soysal 1994), transnational citizenship (Johnston 2001), dual citizenship (Miller 1991), nested citizenship (Faist 2000a and 2000b), multilayered citizenship (Yuval-Davis 2000), cultural citizenship (Stevenson 1997), multicultural citizenship (Delgado-Moreira 2000), cyber-citizenship (Tambini 1997), environmental citizenship (Jelin 2000), feminist citizenship (Lister 1997), gendered citizenship (Seidman 1999), flexible citizenship (Ong 1999), traditional citizenship (Bloemraad 2004), intimate citizenship (Plummer 2003), and protective citizenship (Gilbertson and Singer 2003). And the list could go on.
To further illustrate the multiplicity of terms used to depict citizenship today, one can simply turn to Isin and Wood’s Citizenship and Identity (1999), where the authors describe a contemporary multifaceted citizenship that they characterize as being at once modern, diasporic, aboriginal, sexual, cosmopolitan, ecological, cultural, and radical. All of this clearly signals a conviction on the part of these two scholars that citizenship today is vital, malleable, in many ways novel, and inherently complex. Without necessarily agreeing with all of the particulars of this framing of the contemporary situation, many others concur with this general sensibility regarding an increasingly complex and variegated character of citizenship.
Others, however, offer a considerably less sanguine assessment. From their perspective, citizenship is being threatened by one of a variety of perceived forces that are seen as undermining its salience. The list of culprits is varied, including changes in the nation-state itself, which some have depicted as withering, while for others it is brought about by the shift from welfare capitalism to neoliberalism. Some point to changes in the citizenry itself, claiming that as a consequence of the individualistic tendencies of modern societies, increasing numbers of people no longer possess a willingness to become involved in public life. Still others would locate the source of the problem in larger, macro-level factors generally depicted in terms of the effects of globalization (Putnam 2000; Touraine 2001; Turner 2001; Dower 2003). In contrast to the vibrancy inherent in the preceding perspective, scholars operating with a conviction that citizenship is in trouble typically describe it as anemic, thin, or as merely instrumental.
EXPANSION OR EROSION?
As we sifted through the large – and rapidly growing – body of recent scholarly work on citizenship, largely from the interrelated fields of sociology, political science, philosophy, and cultural studies, we initially distinguished what we identified as two major discourses on the topic: as noted above, the first is concerned with the erosion of citizenship, the second with its expansion. We have also been struck by the fact that spokespersons for each of these positions seem deaf to the other discourse. Thus, at the outset we saw it as our intention in this brief inquiry into the problems and prospects of contemporary citizenship to bring the two discourses into fruitful dialogue, a task we realized was far more easily stated than achieved. To accomplish this objective, we thought that we would first subject each of the two discourses to critical analysis. Next, we would attempt to bring the two into contact with each other. This would lead to our final task, which would have been to distil from these first two tasks our own assessment of the future of citizenship.
However, our self-defined task proved to be more intricate and complicated than we had anticipated. As we looked at the erosion camp, we became increasingly aware that there are in fact two different, though sometimes interconnected, concerns that have been voiced about what is seen as a decline in the efficacy and salience of citizenship: one concerns the rights that accrue to individuals as citizens and the other attends to issues surrounding the obligations of citizenship. In terms of rights, a lively debate is currently underway that addresses the assault on social citizenship brought about by the rise of neoliberal political regimes since the 1970s. Appropriately, this debate is usually framed in terms of T. H. Marshall’s (1964) paradigm of the evolution of citizenship that is linked to the rise and expansion of the modern welfare state. Less explicit in Marshall’s account, but there nonetheless, is a view of the citizen in the modern welfare state as essentially passive – a recipient of rights due to the evolution of an expanded view of what citizenship entails, but not an active participant in democratic decision making (Turner 1993; 2001).
This touches on the obligation side of the coin. Generally without reflecting on Marshall, a number of contemporary theorists have raised concerns about what they perceive to be the steady decline in involvement in public life by ordinary people. This particular topic has been of major concern to those interested in the fate of the public sphere or civil society. Thus, a rather disparate group of thinkers – including but certainly not limited to Benjamin Barber, Robert Bellah, Amitai Etzioni, Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, Robert Putnam, Theda Skocpol, Alain Touraine, and Bryan Turner – have raised in different ways, from different political perspectives, and with different valences, concerns about the decline in civic participation.
If the erosion of citizenship discourse generally offers a rather pessimistic prognosis for the future (even when various nostrums are proposed to combat the problem), the other discourse views citizenship, not as anemic, but as expanding, vibrant, and susceptible to reinvention in ways appropriate to the dictates of globalization. But here too, we discovered that there are actually two, though again sometimes interconnected, discourses. On the one hand, the expansion of citizenship is seen in terms of the progressive inclusion of heretofore marginalized and excluded groups. This particular aspect of expansion pays primary attention to the changing significance of gender and race in shaping an understanding of who is to be incorporated into full membership in the body politic.
One account, seen most explicitly in Talcott Parsons’s (1971) evolutionary functionalism, suggests that among the master trends shaping modern societies is a growing capacity and societal interest in inclusivity. From such a perspective, citizenship serves as a particularly significant mode of identity and solidarity in modern pluralist societies. A competing account, especially evident among social movement scholars, stresses the struggles of marginalized groups in gaining entrée to the public sphere as equals possessing all of the rights of citizens. Be it a focus on the women’s movement, the black civil rights movement in the United States, or similar struggles elsewhere on the part of excluded racial or religious minorities, the main thrust of this approach tends to be reflective of what the American labor leader and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph once said: “Rights must be taken.”
Both of these accounts of inclusion share one thing in common: they presuppose that the locus of citizenship is the nation-state. This assumption has been increasingly challenged by scholars who have raised questions about what they claim to be the erosion in the efficacy of the nation-state while simultaneously pondering whether various trans-state entities such as the United Nations or, at a more regional level, the European Union might be capable of developing notions of citizenship that, in effect, burst the boundaries of the nation-state (Jacobson 1996; Soysal 1994). In part, the argument draws a parallel between the premodern and the modern loci of citizenship. In the former, it was the city-state, while in the latter it became the nation-state. The assumption underpinning this argument is that as we enter what some see as late or advanced modernity (Giddens 1990) and others as the postmodern (Harvey 1989), a similar shift occurs in the locus of citizenship regimes. Given the embryonic character of these emergent trends, it is not surprising that there is little agreement about whether the future suggests the development of a global state (Heater 1999, 2002) or what John Hoffman (2004) refers to as “citizenship beyond the state” – by which he means not only beyond the nation-state, but beyond any sort of trans-state.
The discussions about transcending the boundaries of the nation-state can be seen in the wide-ranging discussions today, not only among scholars but also among politicians and policy makers, about dual or multiple citizenship. Given the reality of expanding numbers of dual citizens residing around the world, it is not surprising that this topic has been of particular interest of late. Much of this discussion is about individuals going beyond the boundaries of any particular nation-state by becoming members of two or more states. As such, at one level the legitimacy or efficacy of the existing global order of states is assumed and not questioned.
A topic that has received somewhat less attention, but is nonetheless equally central to this general line of inquiry, is nested citizenship. It has received less attention because it is a concrete phenomenon only in Europe at the moment, and does not appear relevant to North America, Asia, or elsewhere. However, it should be recalled that the European Community as it was conceived at its founding in the post-World War II period was primarily an economic entity designed to give Western Europe greater clout in world markets, particularly in response to American economic hegemony. It was over the course of several decades that its potential political implications began to emerge, and with it the idea that one might be a citizen of a particular European nation while simultaneously being a citizen of Europe. One question nested citizenship theory raises is whether, for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which is in its early years and is at the moment viewed solely as an economic treaty, might over time evolve into something resembling the European Union (EU). Likewise, might something similar occur elsewhere, be it in the form of pan-Africanism, strategic alliances among the economic powerhouses of East Asia, or in Latin America? These are questions that the idea of nested citizenship raises.
At another level, the transcendence of the nation-state is seen to open up the prospects of world citizenship (Heater 2002). While much of this particular conversation occurs at the philosophical level, the impact of universal human rights regimes and the idea that organizations such as the United Nations have a role to play in insuring the protection of those rights – including the interventions of various sorts into nations accused of rights violations – also gives it real-world evidence to examine and interpret.
FOUR THEMES
The objective we have staked out for this book is in our estimation both modest and important. It is modest insofar as we do not seek to lay out alternative explanations, develop new types of citizenship to add to the already expansive list, or provide a lengthy and sustained argument about what we think the future of citizenship in the next quarter of a century or so is likely to be. Rather, our purpose is, first, to offer an analytical assessment that is useful in locating and making sense of the various thematic discourses on citizenship, and, second, to provide guidance in pulling together those discrete themes into a larger, more comprehensive framework of analysis that is capable of taking all of them into account. We think this is important insofar as it permits a more constructive dialogue across these various discourses.
To that end, the following four chapters will take up the concerns discussed above, structured into the following broad themes: (1) inclusion, (2) erosion, (3) withdrawal, and (4) expansion. In each instance, we make no effort to provide a comprehensive account of the body of scholarship dealing with each theme. Rather, the focus is on the main contours of the state of the argument, and to get at those contours, we have intentionally selected what we think are among the most important works to date – works that have become touchstones for others working in the area. In some cases, we will stay close to the texts themselves by providing exegeses of these works, seeking not only to identify and critically evaluate that which the authors say, but also to point to authorial silences. Some of the texts in question are theoretical while others are chiefly the products of empirical research. There is a decided focus on the Anglo-American world, and in some instances, as with the first half of the chapter on inclusion and the chapter on erosion, the focus is primarily on the United States. In other places, such as the discussion of dual citizenship, we will make use of a somewhat broader range of sources and will survey the current state of the literature. While this might suggest to some readers an arbitrariness in our selections, we think we have managed to tap into the most salient works available to help us to capture each theme’s key features.
Inclusion
Inclusion, the first major theme we address, is an expansive topic that concerns itself both with, on the one hand, the incorporation of people into the ranks of citizens and, on the other, the terms of incorporation. What E. J. Hobsbawm (1962) called the “age of revolution” – framed by the French Revolution and the failed revolutionary upheavals of 1848 – resulted in the triumph of bourgeoisie democracy. Who precisely was to be included in the system as citizens varied by country, but in general there were efforts – sometimes more successful, sometimes less successful – to effect closure in order to prevent certain categories of persons from achieving full citizenship. In some places, this meant that the working class and the poor were to be excluded. In other places, racial criteria were used to differentiate citizens from those who were excluded from full societal membership. In all instances, women were denied the rights of full citizenship by being denied access to the public sphere. Thus, part of the issue of inclusion involves the manner by, and extent to which, heretofore-excluded categories of people have managed to gain entrée into the polity by being accorded full citizenship rights, while at the same time the state has preserved its monopoly on dictating the terms of inclusion and exclusion.
However, more recently, citizenship debates have concentrated on issues related to the terms of incorporation. Of particular significance is the conversation about multiculturalism as a mode of inclusion. Although its meaning is varied and contested, there is general consensus that multiculturalism involves valorizing ethnic and cultural diversity, induced by the presence and activities of ethnonational minorities and aboriginal groups within nation-states and by the impact of immigration. Related to this, considerable attention has been devoted to the matter of “group-differentiated rights” (Young 1989, 2000; see also Kymlicka 1995, 2001), which would include all categories of citizens that do not belong to the majority mainstream, which in the nations of the West has historically meant white males. Among the questions that advocates of group-differentiated rights must wrestle with is whether, to what degree, and for which categories of citizens should such rights be seen as a constitutive part of citizenship. In the somewhat narrower realm of cultural rights, central concerns involve claims pertaining to religion, language, and education. Even more contentious is the matter of granting rights that promote self-government and partial forms of political autonomy for recognized minorities.
Both exogenous and endogenous factors have played a role in stimulating tendencies towards the expansion of cultural rights. In the case of ethnonational minorities, for instance, European integration has in some cases fostered subnational tendencies towards regionalism (as can be seen, for instance, with the Scots and the Welsh in Britain, the Basques and Catalonians in Spain, and the Lega Nord in Italy). Endogenous factors likewise have had similar consequences. Over the past several decades, for example, religious exemption rights have been increasingly granted to members of various immigrant groups, be it exempting Sikhs from wearing motorcycle helmets in Canada or offering halal food in British state school cafeterias. Still, there is much controversy over the granting of such rights. This is evident in the controversy over whether the wearing of headscarves by Muslim schoolgirls in France and women teachers in Germany should be permitted. Both cases remain disputed at the moment. Overall, religious exemption rights are covered by the constitutions of the various liberal democracies, albeit somewhat differently from nation to nation. There is evidence of a path-dependent development towards a convergence of such rights. However, the situation is far less clear when it comes to rights associated with limited self-government, greater autonomy, or even the prospect of independence for ethnonational minorities.
Erosion
The second topic concerns the social rights aspect of citizenship – more specifically, the relationship between citizens and the welfare dimension of modern states. In all of the world’s liberal democracies, providing for the well-being of citizens has entailed the creation of a wide range of enforceable rights that all citizens possess, including social security and pension provisions, unemployment schemes, health insurance, access to education, and so forth. Not only does the range of rights vary from nation to nation, but so does the scope of those rights. Some states – with the United States being the most obvious instance – created relatively thin welfare regimes, while others – with the Scandinavian countries serving as paradigmatic examples – established and have maintained comparatively thick ones. Nevertheless, in all of these nations, citizens have become more, not less, reliant on state protection (Béland 2005).
What is interesting for our purposes are the shifting assumptions about the current condition and the future prospects of the welfare state. As an examination of the relevant social scientific literature reveals, by the middle of the twentieth century the received wisdom was that the welfare state was here to stay, having managed to deal with the most negative effects of inequality while also succeeding in reducing previous levels of class conflict. A typical argument was that during the early phase of industrialization, the primary economic role played by the state involved the facilitation of capital accumulation, which yielded ever-increasing levels of economic productivity. In contrast, once an industrial society reached a mature state of development, this role for the state progressively gives way to a new role wherein the primary task becomes, as A. F. K. Organski, in an emblematic expression of modernization theory, The Stages of Political Development (1965), put it, “to protect the very people who were the greatest sufferers in [the earlier stage of industrial society].” In short, the welfare state was a path-dependent consequence of the internal logic of capitalist development. First, with the assistance of the state, economic structures were put in place to stimulate accumulation and enhance productive capacity. Once that had occurred, it became possible to begin to address the primary unintended consequence of industrialization, which is the generation of unacceptable levels of inequality (the matter of environmental degradation in the early period was not a major topic of concern for modernization theorists).
Within a decade of Organski’s thesis, critics from both the left and right began to question the legitimacy and the economic viability of the welfare state. As the critics point out, the pressures on the welfare state are both exogenous and endogenous. Certainly, the pressure on state–citizen relations concerning social rights has been exacerbated by the effects of globalization on welfare states seeking to compete in international markets in a situation characterized by, as Saskia Sassen (1996: 6) put it, the “global footlooseness of corporate capital.” Globalization has been identified as a factor contributing to the reduction of benefits and the general trend to constrict rather than expand or preserve existing social rights. In terms of endogenous factors, numerous critics of liberal democratic welfare states have contended that the pervasive provision of guaranteed benefits has resulted in an unwelcome and unintended side effect: namely, it has tended to undermine individual autonomy and the capacity of citizens to care for themselves and their families – becoming, in short, increasingly dependent on the various provisions which were designed to enable them to become independent.
In the midst of these intellectual and ideological challenges, the triumph of neoliberalism signaled the advent of a significant attack on existing welfare state policies and programs. While radical exponents of neoliberalism, such as the influential American neoconservative Grover Norquist, suggest in colorful language that their goal is to “strangle,” “starve,” or “drown” the welfare state, other neoliberals are content to cut away at it, reducing as much as is politically feasible its influence over the lives of citizens. In either case, the goal of neoliberalism is the erosion of the welfare state, a goal that has met various levels of success during the past few decades in all of the industrial nations.
Somewhat provocatively, Alain Touraine (2001: 9) has argued that “we have moved from a form of socialism to a form of capitalism, and that the market has replaced the state as the principal regulatory force” [italics in original] in neoliberal regimes. Clearly, neoliberalism calls into question the central claim of postindustrial theory, be it Touraine’s leftist version or Bell’s centrist account, about the central role accorded to the state in directing society. Neoliberal ideology, as Touraine points out, calls for replacing the state by corporate capitalism. Insofar as it succeeds in doing so, the question arises about the future of social rights. If the recent past has entailed the progressive erosion of such rights, does the future suggest more of the same, or is it possible, given the proper constellation of political forces emanating from the new social movements, for there to be a return of a welfare state, albeit a reformulated one, that takes us, in Touraine’s words (2001), “beyond neoliberalism?”
Withdrawal
A third major field of public debate and contention concerning citizenship focuses on the matter of democratic participation and, underlying that, on the question of what it means to speak of the civic virtues of citizens. The first part of this debate is grounded in empirical observation. For decades, political scientists have pointed out that most citizens in representative democracies are neither well informed nor particularly interested in political matters. As the classic study The American Voter (Campbell et al. 1976 [1960]) revealed, citizens’ familiarity with current political events and issues is severely limited. The United States is not all that unique in this regard. Given this general tendency to remain aloof from political engagement, the claim has been advanced that during the last quarter of the past century there has been a growing tendency to withdraw from the public sphere (Putnam 2000). It is quite clear that in many Western democracies, voter turnout has been decreasing in recent decades. Likewise, other sorts of involvements in both strictly political activities (writing letters to politicians, demonstrating, lobbying, etc.) and in more general sorts of civic activities (joining community organizations, volunteerism, etc.) have also experienced declines, sometimes quite dramatic ones.
While traditional political liberalism has been more concerned with protecting individual rights from unwarranted governmental intrusions, and not particularly or primarily concerned with the obligations of citizens to participate in public life, such is not the case with those who embrace classic republican ideals or, more recently, communitarianism. If today’s liberal thinkers, such as those who self-identify as libertarians, express little concern about what the withdrawal of citizens from public life might mean to democratic practice, this has become a major preoccupation of contemporary thinkers who identify as republicans or communitarians. In their view, democracy is not possible without an informed and active citizenry. Thus, they are concerned that the foundation of democratic practice is endangered. Making sense of this particular claim involves two facets. First, it requires assessing the empirical adequacy of the case that is being made that the trend to withdraw from the civic arena is far more pronounced at present than in both the recent and distant past. Second, it entails a critical assessment of the causal factors that have been identified as the main culprits contributing to this withdrawal.
Expansion
Finally, it is the location of citizenship that is at stake. The most characteristic form of citizenship in modern democracies until the present has been single and exclusive citizenship in a nation-state. Some have argued that nation-states have become increasingly weakened and anachronistic as a consequence of globalization, and that we are now on the cusp of a new, postnational age (Soysal 1994). In such a novel set of circumstances, new loci for citizenship are seen to emerge. In a similar vein, among those who do not think the nation-state is in danger of disappearing (for better or worse), there is a growing sense that the typical form is increasingly coexisting with novel forms of citizenship located in some fashion beyond the nation-state. Given that much of the postnational discourse transpired before the events of 9/11 and the subsequent dramatic assertiveness of powerful nation-states, the dialogue at the moment is chiefly shaped by the question of whether and to what extent single-state, exclusive citizenship can coincide with other forms of citizenship.
The most common newer form of citizenship – with deeper roots than the other forms – is dual or multiple citizenship (as we shall see below, multiple is used in two distinct ways). It is defined as a form of overlapping membership in which an individual has full membership in at least two nation-states. A growing number of states have passed legislation permitting dual citizenship, and even in nations that do not permit it, except in limited circumstances, a growing tolerance of such identities is evident. At the very least, nations that do not officially legitimize dual or multiple citizenship are not inclined to prosecute people for holding two or more passports.
This development, it should be noted, marks a significant departure from the received understanding of dual citizenship, which was that it was to be avoided as much as possible in order to prevent the potential problem of dual loyalties. For example, such a view was enshrined in the nineteenth century in the Bancroft Treaties enacted between the United States and various European states and in the Hague Convention of 1930.
It was only three decades ago that Raymond Aron (1974: 638) pondered the question, “Is multinational citizenship possible?” His response was to conclude that he continued to believe “that my initial reaction – that the idea of multinational citizenship is a contradiction in terms – was correct.” However, he added the following proviso that reflected his sense that this was not quite as simple a matter as he had thought: “Yet I admit that the question can arise: the various rights of citizenship are not all of a piece, and do not all relate to the state in the same way.” Since Aron’s speculative essay, the proliferation of dual citizenship regimes has meant that rather than contemplating the prospects of dual citizenship, social scientists today address its reality and the growing demand for its expansion. Not surprisingly, much that has been written in recent years about dual citizenship focuses on state policy making, with an extremely limited literature to date taking up the issue of what it is like to live as a dual citizen in an increasingly globalized world system.
The second new form of citizenship that has become a topic of interest, particularly among Europeans, is that of emerging forms of supranational citizenship. Thomas Faist (2000a: 13 and 2000b) has referred to this type as “nested citizenship.” Describing this as resembling Russian dolls, citizenship is articulated at both the national and the supranational levels. Thus, a person is a French citizen and simultaneously a citizen of Europe – or more specifically of the European Union. David Held (1995) has used the term “multiple citizenship” to describe such a situation, a term that connotes full membership on multiple governance levels. Given that similar forms of citizenship have not arisen elsewhere, the European model has been the sole focus of scholarly attention.
As with dual citizenship, much attention has been devoted to the policy level. However, the idea of nested citizenship has also raised questions about the implications of European citizenship for the more emotive aspects of belonging to particular nations. It has also raised in some places the issue of the relationship between the nation-state and ethnonationalist movements within states. Scottish nationalists, for instance, have argued that they view Britain as an antiquated mode of identity. The goal of those in favor of an independent Scotland is to scuttle the relationship of the region to Britain and instead to embrace the ideal of locating Scotland within Europe. Thus, residents of Scotland would be at once citizens of Scotland and Europe, but no longer of the United Kingdom (Nairn 2000).
Related terms intended to reflect the expansive character of contemporary citizenship include transnational citizenship, global citizenship, cosmopolitan citizenship, and world citizenship. While the first of these most closely approximates dual or multiple citizenship – with a concern for definitions of belonging that involve one or more specific nation-states – the others in various ways are deemed to reflect the emergence of citizenship, or at least citizenship-like features, at a global level. The role of supranational organizations such as the United Nations and the proliferation of INGOs (international nongovernmental organizations) working to advance the idea of universal human rights points to the fact that people are increasingly inclined to turn to suprastate organizations to seek redress for perceived infringements of basic human rights (Tsutsui and Wotipka 2004). While many of these trends are in an early stage of development and much remains unclear about where they might lead, part of the discourse on the expansion of citizenship must reckon with them.
THE FUTURE OF CITIZENSHIP
These four themes – inclusion, erosion, withdrawal, and expansion – reflect the foci of contemporary discourses on citizenship. The renewal of concern in citizenship studies that we noted at the outset is reflected in the various ways that each of these themes has taken shape in recent decades. As the short sketches of these four main fields of debate indicate, citizenship is a pivotal contested concept in contemporary social science theory, but also in political practice. As is true of all contested concepts, discourses about citizenship inevitably have two dimensions, the normative (what should be) and the empirical (what actually is). Citizenship, as we have noted, is a relationship between a citizen and the state, or some entity that is state-like in key respects.
As will become evident in the following chapters, citizenship is at the moment undergoing a significant process of redefinition, following from the claims-making practices of ordinary people, the articulation of the obligations of citizens as prescribed by the state, and the recognition of various rights granted by the state. These three features in tandem point toward the idea of citizenship as status, defined in terms of legally enforceable rights accruing to citizens and a set of obligations, some but not all of which are legally mandated, that citizens are expected to fulfill.
Citizenship establishes the boundaries of the political community. It defines that which is public and that which is private. It also tells us who is in and who is outside of the political community. The boundaries of citizenship are set by the interactive combination of three pivotal dimensions of citizenship in a particular time and place: (1) democratic self-governance (including access to political life); (2) the particular constellation of citizens’ rights and responsibilities; and (3) the matter of identity that comes with the sense of belonging to or being affiliated with a political community.
Finally, we make the following claim. Although all contemporary states define their legal inhabitants as citizens, it is our view that citizenship cannot be conceived without its twin sibling: democracy. In nondemocratic regimes, the legal residents of the state remain subjects rather than being citizens. They have membership and certain duties are required, but they lack the rights of democratic citizenship. Thus, just as manifestly antidemocratic nations have laid claim to the democratic label (witness the former Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites), so they have sought to view their inhabitants as citizens. We think the distinction is important: democracies alone have citizens. That being said, it is also true that real existing nations exist on a continuum, with some being more democratic than others. This clearly has implications for the form and especially the content of citizenship.
It is our sense that the four themes we have identified speak to the major issues pertaining to citizenship in liberal democracies. We are convinced that the discourses we will review in the following chapters are critical to any effort to make sense of the future of citizenship. At the same time, one of the unfortunate but perhaps inevitable consequences of the way these distinct discourses have developed is that there has been little effort to provide an overarching analysis of the condition of and prospects for citizenship, an analysis that incorporates the central thrust of each of the themes while bringing these discrete themes into contact with the other themes. For instance, what does the discourse on the withdrawal from civic involvement mean for the salience of dual citizenship? What does the discourse on the erosion of social rights mean to notions of global citizenship? While we do not propose to conclude this brief book with anything remotely meant to offer definitive answers to these and the multitude of related questions, we do hope to offer a framework that will help to make possible a more expansive and coherent discourse on the future of citizenship in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world.
2Inclusion
This chapter explores two distinct but nonetheless interrelated matters. The first involves the question of who is to be included among the ranks of citizens and (the reverse side of the coin) who is to be excluded. The second involves the matter of the terms or the modes of inclusion. Although there is considerable overlap between these two topics, it is also true that the first received substantially more attention during the nineteenth century and the first two-thirds of the twentieth century than the second, while with the rise of multiculturalism as a highly contested and variable type of incorporation the second has become a major theme in both academic discourse and in concrete social practices and public policies (Kivisto 2005).
As such, the first topic requires a look to the past, while the second more explicitly and evidently concerns the present and its implications for the future. Given that this book is concerned with contemporary citizenship, our examination of the past is not intended to offer anything resembling a comprehensive historical overview of the processes of exclusion or the movements aimed at advancing the cause of expanding inclusion. Rather its purpose is to indicate in what ways inclusion in the former sense of the term remains an unrealized goal and to understand the relevance of inclusion for the emergence of multiculturalism as a new mode of societal incorporation.
The democratic cultures that came to shape the modern nation-states in Western Europe and North America, certainly by the eighteenth century, revived and redefined the idea of citizenship. This involved, at the philosophical level, inheriting and embracing elements of citizenship’s ancient origins in the Greek city-state and in the Roman Empire, while at the same time, at the political level, repudiating and replacing the autocratic model of subjecthood that characterized the feudal era with the idea of the citizen as an active agent in political decision making. It also held out the conviction that the status of the citizen qua
