Citizenship is an increasingly important focus in political and social
theory, as well as in philosophy, legal studies, and some of the humanities.
It is also a vital concern in the lives of many “real people.” It figures in
the assurance or denial of rights, economic benefits and social services,
education, due process of law, and opportunities to affect political
decisions; but it does not guarantee equality, fairness, justice, economic
well-being, dignity, or the respect of public officials or fellow citizens.
We need to engage theoretical and normative aspects of citizenship when
considering such topics as democracy and democratization, civil liberties,
political participation, migration and asylum, nationality, culture,
persistent inequalities, discrimination, identity and belonging, gender
equity, race and ethnic relations, human rights, and globalization.
Not surprisingly, the concept of citizenship has become less clear as its
relevance and prominence have increased. This is due in part to conceptual
stretching brought on by the proliferation of its use and the multiplication
of the perspectives of its users;1
Citizenship
has become an exemplar of “conceptual stretching” and “the traveling
problem” (Sartori 1970). Using it to refer
to ever-more varied phenomena in contextually very different
settings makes its meaning fuzzier and risks losing its theoretical,
analytic, and even political utility.
but it also reflects
structural and normative changes in politics, the economy, and some
fundamental values—including what is generally termed “globalization.”
Perhaps the most important of these is migration across state borders. All
of this makes Morris Janowitz's observation (
1980,
1) of a quarter century ago, that “the notion of citizenship requires
continual conceptual, philosophical, and value clarification,” more
pertinent than ever.
Although such clarification would undoubtedly be useful, that is not our
primary aim here. Instead, our essays illustrate and analyze changes in the
world that compel—or should compel—rethinking the idea of citizenship and
its uses, the ways the concept is changing, and the reasons for, and
ramifications of, those changes. We raise more questions than we attempt to
answer. And while much serious discussion of citizenship has tended to shy
away from its crucial normative elements, we do not. Instead, we seek to
chart a direction, though not a single path, toward a new problematic by
calling attention to the salient novel or newly significant issues in
political and social life that revolve around citizenship.
Migration—transnational and international, voluntary and forced, legal or
not—is at the center of the new problematic. It educes the increasing
interconnectedness of polities, economies, and societies; many of the ways
in which the traditional exclusivity of states; jurisdictions is changing;
the “portability” of individual human rights; the status of resident and
transient aliens; relations between citizens and non-citizens; and myriad
related issues.2
There is an enormous,
diverse, and still growing literature on this theme. Some works,
selected to provide a partial background for the work of the
contributors to this symposium, would include Bauböck (1994; 2003);
Benhabib (2004); Carens (2000); Castles and Harding (2003); Heisler
(1986; 2001); Heisler and Heisler (1991);
Iredale, Hawksley, and Castles (2003);
Jacobson (1996); Kastoryano (2000); Ong
(1999; 2003); Sassen (1996); Schuck
(2000); and Schuck and Smith (1985).
It also helps to concretize
both traditional state-centered assumptions regarding citizenship as
loyalty, identity, and belonging and newly significant questions about
membership in the polity and society and, in the broadest terms, the human
and institutional boundaries of obligation and expectations.
Discourses around citizenship have shifted in most of the industrialized
world, and certainly in countries with democratic regimes, from the
inclusion of native populations to three overlapping subjects: cultural or
communal versus individual rights; the rights, treatment, and status of
non-citizens; and the meanings and forms of belonging, identity, and
political membership. Much of our symposium concentrates on these concerns;
and, while the essays that follow do not converge on a single point of view,
they reinforce the sense that these are and will continue to be crucial
issues in intellectual and policy considerations of citizenship.
The title of this essay and theme of the symposium reflect a symbiotic
connection between changes in citizenship and challenges to the way we think
about it. There are changes in citizenship theory and practice, and we need
to consider changing theory and practice. This essay suggests one way of
framing those connections.
From the Traditional through the Modern to the
Post-modern
Until a hundred or so years ago, few people were full, equal citizens
anywhere, even in a formal, legal, sense. Women, minors, those without
property, ethnic, racial, or religious minorities, indigenous peoples,
and others were relegated to second-, third- or non-citizenship status.
Underlying such hierarchical citizenship were normative arguments
intended to justify inequality in a manner analogous to the noble lie in
The Republic. Those who enjoyed full citizenship were
entitled to their status for specified reasons; others were either
rightly excluded (often, it was claimed, for their own good, as in the
case of women and children) or needed to earn inclusion by acquiring
property, literacy, or—as in the case of descendants of slaves in the
United States—grandparents or great-grandparents who had been fully
enfranchised citizens (see Shklar 1991).
Such hierarchies existed among citizens and between them and members of
the society, not only between citizens and foreigners.3
Several contributors to this symposium emphasize
status considerations—i.e., discrimination—between natives and
transnational migrants.
Clear hierarchies of
citizenship, generally accompanied by pronounced inequalities, are also
noticeable at the international level, as Stephen Castles (
2005) and others note. (International or
extra-national aspects of citizenship are important considerations for
the authors of most of our essays, and I shall return to them
below.)
In states that later became developed democracies, ever-larger portions
of populations were incorporated into the citizenry, at least nominally.
With few exceptions—the French Revolution was a notable, if partial
exception—such expansion was driven by elites; needs for soldiers and
revenue, or their desire to avoid unpleasant consequences arising from
the expression of grievances by those outside the circle of citizens who
wanted to be let in (Manicas 1989; Hanagan and Tilly 1999.) As national states
matured, the stratification that had characterized traditional
citizenship was eroded, usually through contestation and sometimes by
violent conflict.
Even in the traditional mode, it mattered less what or who the boundaries
of privilege encompassed or how they were constituted than that they
demarcated inside from outside. As Karl Deutsch showed 50 years ago
(1954, Chap. 1), over the course of two
and a half millennia changes in the size and form of the state were
accompanied by changes in the forms and practices of membership in it.
That, in turn, led to adaptations in ways of thinking about what made a
given form of the state “natural” and in the normative justifications
for buttressing those views. The city-state, multi-state civilization,
empire, feudal fiefdom, absolutist state, and modern national state each
seemed not only the natural, but the only sensible—if not the only
imaginable—setting for citizenship. Each form of the state produced a
set of normatively appropriate identitive, social, cultural, and legal
statuses and roles.
Most people in independent countries had gained at least nominal
citizenship by the middle of the last century; and by the mid-1970s
virtually everyone virtually everywhere had become citizens of a
state.4
Or, with increasing frequency
in recent decades, of more than one state, as Rainer Bauböck's
article in this symposium shows.
This spread of legal,
nominal citizenship—akin to what British sociologist T. H. Marshall came
to term civic citizenship ([1950] 1964)—within and across countries was
the culmination of centuries of social and political change (cf.
Manicas 1989). It followed from both endogenous,
independent efforts within countries and, especially in the non-western
world, from cross-border diffusion. And it became the point of departure
for the construction of modern citizenship.
Modern citizenship, and modern citizenship studies, date from the end of
World War II.5
A strong argument can be
made that major wars accelerated the spread of citizenship, as
well as the growth of the state. The American Civil War and
World Wars I and II have been most often associated with such
development. The literature linking the 13th,
14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S.
Constitution is extensive. See, for instance, Peacock and
Wiseman (1961) and Skocpol (1992).
Marshall ([1950]
1964) argued that the prevalent view of citizenship at
mid-20
th century as a set of civil rights and obligations
was excessively narrow and formalistic. He viewed the gulf between
social classes in Britain as an impediment to the effective practice of
such civic citizenship. The normative thrust of modern citizenship
brought the creation and extension of social programs; the effective
enfranchisement of virtually all holders of nominal citizenship;
6 Consider that it was only after World War
II that women were enfranchised in such “old democracies” as
Belgium and France, and not until the 1970s in federal elections
in Switzerland (although they had the right to vote in the
arguably more important cantonal and local elections). The Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as
the one person-one vote decision of the Supreme Court, were
instances of the extension of political citizenship to those who
already possessed nominal, civic citizenship.
and
efforts to expand the reach of education, social security, and health
care. In Northern and Eastern Europe, real or pretend programs were
undertaken to reduce inequalities in income and wealth under the banner
of economic democracy.
The turn to social and economic aspects of citizenship in the post-World
War II period was only partly the consequence of the generalization of
traditional citizenship. An important, commonly overlooked, factor for
most democracies and the countries in Eastern Europe aligned with the
Soviet Union was the turn from military security to economic and social
security as the raison-d;être of the state.7
The creation of the Cold War blocs, each
anchored by a nuclear superpower and balanced by mutual assured
destruction, vitiated the classic, conventional, view that the provision
of military security was a—perhaps
the—defining function of the
state (
King 1973;
Rose
1976) and the bond that cemented citizens; relationships with
it and with each other. Reliance for security on nuclear deterrence
controlled by others called for new justifications for the state and its
claims on its citizens; and most European states, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Japan, and a small number of other countries (Costa Rica comes
to mind most readily) turned to the provision of social programs for
such justification.
Les 30 glorieux, the rapid and sustained economic growth in the
post-war decades, ushered in the post-modern stage of citizenship. It
generated a sense of material well-being in much of the industrialized
world, leading some to project a “culture shift” toward a
post-materialist era in which psychological, cultural, and
quality-of-life values would rise to the fore (see, most notably, Inglehart 1977; 1990).
It was probably not a coincidence that a value shift occurred toward
multiculturalism near the end of that period of economic optimism,
ushering in what I term here the post-modern stage of citizenship.8
Stephen Castles connects the advent of
multiculturalism to citizenship issues in his essay.
The recognition of group-based claims to end discrimination and for
genuine, not just nominal, equality; the continuing shift toward rights
rhetoric and away from obligations in citizenship practice and theory
(
Janowitz 1980); the rethinking of
long-held notions about assimilation (B. S.
Heisler
1992); and the increasing significance of transnational
migration as distinguished from traditional immigration (
Heisler 1998/1999;
2001;
Heisler and Heisler 1986)
contributed to a growing emphasis on questions of authenticity, cultural
integrity, and collective or group rights—and, most important, in my
view, the legitimacy of multiple identities without a superordinate
identity anchored in the state. These notions have become the focus of
debates in industrialized democracies about “who we are” and who we
ought to strive to be.
9 For the United
States, compare the late Robert Wiebe's Who We Are
(2002) with Samuel Huntington's
Who Are We? (2004).
Consider also recent explicit challenges to the principles as
well as day-to-day policies and practices of multiculturalism by
mainstream politicians, opinion leaders, and large segments of
publics in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands—the countries
that led the move toward multiculturalism. Debates about legal,
but especially illegal, immigration in the United States,
Britain, and elsewhere, as well as contention over such
culturally loaded symbolic behavior in France and Belgium as the
wearing of headscarves by Muslim schoolgirls, also show various
forms and degrees of doubt about the implications of post-modern
citizenship.
Then and Now, Here and There
It is easy to see why scholarly attention has increasingly focused on
this “evolving” story. It is readily researchable, both in the
historical record and through empirical, quantifiable, data relevant for
the study of the behavioral (e.g., voting, participation, attitudinal)
and distributional (i.e., equality/inequality) aspects of modern
citizenship. From the vantage point of theory, discussions of rights and
obligations, active versus passive citizenship, the roles of the state
and civil society, and, most important, the markers of liberal,
republican, or democratic norms permit coherence and scholarly dialogue.
This is one explanation for limiting this symposium almost entirely to
the world of substantially developed, relatively stable, law-based
countries—and often to the democratic, liberal (usually republican)
West.
Citizenship here and now—or, viewed in the developmental perspective,
here in the past, as well as now—is not citizenship in the entire world
or in general, however. To be sure, it is difficult, and sometimes
impossible, to investigate the distance between the legal foundations of
citizenship and citizenship practice; opportunities for meaningful
political participation; the leveling of the functioning of civil
society; access to education; or economic distribution in the parts of
the world outside the frames of reference of most studies of
citizenship. But ignoring what is likely a large majority of the world's
countries and probably a majority of its population has profound
theoretical, policy, and especially normative or ethical
implications.
The essays in this symposium exemplify the recognition of the growing
importance of developments beyond state boundaries for the theoretical
understanding of citizenship today and in the foreseeable future. The
rise of transnational communities, the proliferation of multiple
citizenship, supranational and local government-sited rights regimes,
the progressive incorporation of international laws and human rights
norms into national jurisprudence, and other elements of globalization
are directing our gaze across state borders.
It is not surprising that these challenges stand out in the concerns of
leading students of citizenship. The principles of universal citizenship
have been established in mature democracies. While civil liberties and
opportunities for participation cannot be taken for granted anywhere,
the institutionalization of the legal and philosophical foundations for
full citizenship make it tempting to treat shortfalls as mere shortfalls
in implementation. The main task, according to most of us working on the
subject, is the extension of at least large portions of, if not all,
rights enjoyed by citizens to those who enter the domain of the
democratic state. These are immigrants, transnational migrants, asylum
seekers, and refugees.10
For an elegant
and powerful statement, see Benhabib (2004).
By concentrating on the unfolding of citizenship and related rights
regimes in liberal democracies, are we saying that the circumstances of
people in other—in most—parts of the world are irrelevant or less
relevant for citizenship theory? To be sure, human rights movements and
theory, foreign relations and inter- and non-governmental organizations
do concern themselves with their civil, economic, and social rights. But
should we compartmentalize citizenship and humanitarian concerns? Even
if that is a useful division of labor in the realm of action, is it
appropriate in the realm of theory? A clear answer eludes me.
Liberal Conundrums
And what is the normative or intellectual ethical stance of theory that
assumes, often a priori, the exportability—the universal
validity—of the practices and supporting justifications of the
trajectory of citizenship in the West? Is it the hope that people in
non-democratic regimes, in greatly stressed or failing states, and in
cultures that do not place high (or any) priority on particular
individual or human or group rights will eventually “become more like
us?” We run at least three risks: the pitfalls of historicism; the
arrogance of value imperialism; and the nearsightedness of looking
through or past the state but not below it (Pul
2005).11
Can we be certain
that the most desired, not to say desirable, levels of
citizenship will not rest in the clan, the tribe, the province,
the ummah, or other sub- or non-state entity?
It is important to avoid historicism when speaking of stages of
citizenship. Citizenship in the West did not follow an inexorable path.
The sort of developmental trajectory suggested by the classic historical
narrative of progressive expansion of the body of citizens (e.g., Manicas 1989) should elicit skepticism in the
light of massive reversals of citizenship status in the Third Reich, the
treatment of native-born and naturalized American citizens of Japanese
descent in the 1940s, and the more recent classification of some
citizens as “enemy combatants.” Nonetheless, changes that are
politically, legally, and normatively embedded do matter. While, in
light of the examples just noted, it would be foolhardy to speak of path
dependence, embedding expectations and entitlements about rights and
obligations has political as well as legal consequences, most clearly in
democracies. They affect societies; self-concepts and, in time, become
parts of what Rogers Smith (2003) has called
“stories of peoplehood.” Reconciling violations of such expectations and
entitlements with those self-concepts or stories of “who we are” is
politically difficult—though clearly more so in mature democracies than
in Orwellian totalitarian regimes (Heisler
2005).
Although there is no logically or empirically compelling reason to cast
either of these perspectives into normative terms, they almost
invariably are. It seems difficult to resist the notion that countries
that have moved away from such traditional concerns as the assertion of
the fundamental equality of citizens in law and political personhood and
have become concerned with the material and social conditions of their
populations, making the cultural integrity and dignity of minorities of
various sorts public business, are “more evolved” than those in which
large parts of the population are denied political and cultural rights
and decent economic treatment.
I am not entirely successful in avoiding such a perspective. Nonetheless,
it seems worthwhile to leave open for now the question of whether
Western liberal, largely democratic, highly legalistic notions of
citizenship must—or even can—serve as templates for citizenship
everywhere. Such doubts are reinforced by a recollection of the horrors
perpetrated on the road to the ideas and ideals of citizenship that
might be offered for export. A non-exhaustive list includes slavery,
genocide, cultural repression, and the systematic exclusion of women,
minorities, and the poor. Were any of these factors in the development
of our current notions of citizenship?
Finally, can the norms associated with liberal rights regimes be put in
place democratically? How, if at all, should dominant cultural
majorities be consulted regarding the hosting of immigrants, resident
but perhaps transient foreigners, asylum seekers, or refugees? Public
education and effective political leadership are likely to help, but
will they suffice to achieve a welcome democratically? And, even if we
do not focus on the ongoing constitution design efforts in Iraq, it is
likely that the assurance of citizenship rights and opportunities for
effective political participation will be difficult in an age when
democracy is increasingly operationalized as an election or referendum.
These final paragraphs are suggestions for possible work in the future.
The essays presented here provide useful insights for such work.
Symposium Authors' Bios
Rainer Bauböck is a senior researcher at the Austrian Academy of
Sciences, Institute for European Integration Research, and teaches at
Vienna University and Central European University, Budapest. His main
interests are in political theory and the comparative politics of
citizenship, migration, nationalism, and minority rights. He can be
reached at rainer.baubock@oeaw.ac.at.
Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science
and Philosophy at Yale University and director of the program in Ethics,
Politics and Economics. Her last book, from which much of this article
is drawn, The Rights of Others. Aliens, Residents and Citizens,
has won the APSA's 2005 Ralph Bunche award. She can be contacted at
seyla.benhabib@yale.edu.
Stephen Castles is professor of Migration and Refugee Studies,
and director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.
He has carried out research on migration and multicultural societies in
Europe, Australia, and Asia for many years and is the author of many
books on migration issues, including: Immigrant Workers and Class
Structure in Western Europe (with Godula Kosack, London: Oxford
University Press, 1973); Citizenship and Migration: Globalization
and the Politics of Belonging (with Alastair Davidson, London:
Macmillan, 2000); and The Age of Migration: International Population
Movements in the Modern World (with Mark Miller, Basingstoke:
Palgrave-Macmillan, third edition, 2003).
Martin O. Heisler is professor of government and politics at the
University of Maryland. His main interests and principal publications
have been in the comparative and international politics of migration,
ethnic relations and security. Some of his publications related to the
subject of this symposium include From Foreign Workers to Settlers?
Transnational Migration and the Emergence of New Minorities
(1986), co-editor and contributing author; “Citizenship—Old, New and
Changing,” (1991) co-author; “Contextualizing Global Migration”
(1998/1999); “Now and Then, Here and There: Migration and the
Transformation of Identities, Borders and Orders (2001)”; and “Changing
Theory and Practice in International Relations” (2005). He invites
comments at mheisler@gvpt.umd.edu.
Riva Kastoryano holds a degree in economics from the University
of Paris-Sorbonne and a Ph.D. in sociology from the Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She is the author of, most recently,
Civil Enculturation: Nation-State, School and Ethnic Difference
in The Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and France, (with Werner
Schiffauer, Gerd Baumann, Steven Vertovec, eds.), (translation),
forthcoming. She can be reached at kastoryano@ceri-sciences-po.org.
Aihwa Ong is professor of anthropology and of southeast Asian
studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in
theories and problems of globalization, sovereignty, and citizenship in
contexts of emergence. Recent books include Flexible
Citizenship (1999); Buddha is Hiding: Refugees,
Citizenship, the New America (2003); Global Assemblages:
Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems
(2004); and Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and
Sovereignty (forthcoming).
Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished
Professor and Chair of the University of Pennsylvania political science
department. He is the author of Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics
and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge University Press,
2003) and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S.
History (Yale University Press, 1997), among other works.
E-mail rogerss@sas.upenn.edu.
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