Citizenship

Introduction

Citizenship, by one common definition, refers to “the formal status of membership of a political and legal entity,” with that entity bestowing upon its citizens particular “rights and obligations” in turn (Bellamy 643). In the Western world of the modern age, said political and legal entity has quintessentially come to be understood as the nation-state. As we shall see, however, a supranational entity like the European Union can just as well be conceived as the locus of citizenship (Olsen). In a similarly elastic sense, the criteria that qualify for the citizen’s specific type of membership are open to debate, as are the contents of its accompanying rights and obligations. This makes it clear that citizenship is not a transhistorical given. It must rather be viewed as a context-dependent institution that is constructed and potentially modified through complex social and administrative negotiation, even as it comes with heavy normative impact: Once formally installed by a given sovereign community, and while endowing the members within its domain with legal equality, it treats as unequals those outside its domain at the same time – i.e., non-citizens such as permanent residents, migrants, asylum-seekers, or other kinds of minorities. “Citizenship in this view is not just a name for membership, but a title or a rank that separates, excludes, and hierarchizes” (Isin and Nyers 4).
Citizenship can thus be said to serve as a powerful instrument of “social closure,” in the words of Rogers Brubaker, internally inclusive yet building boundary and demarcation toward the external (21-34). Against that backdrop, it is essential to recognize that if citizenship itself is a product of historical contingency and negotiation, so, too, are the social stratification patterns of hierarchy and division it produces. Along those lines, citizenship is more than a nominal status, conferred upon passive individuals by some abstract governance like the nation-state. Rather, it can also be actively appropriated and fought for by those same individuals. In fact, contemporary scholarship is particularly interested in this last aspect of “acting out” citizenship (Olsen 171), and while researchers agree that “legal citizenship remains important to accessing […] rights,” any pluralist democratic society today at the same time “depends on the creative and autonomous capacities of political subjects whose performance of citizenship is […] the guarantee of the vitality […] of the polity” (Isin and Nyers 3-4). Terminologically, the former, top-down perspective is concerned with citizenship’s “formal” element, while the latter, bottom-up perspective is concerned with its “substantive” element (Bottomore 65-73). This suggests a dialectical interplay which will structure the following remarks, as situated, in necessarily stylized form, in the pertinent European context in which the idea first came about.

Republican and Liberal Antecedents

Historians have indeed distinguished in particular two traditions of citizenship, which have been handed down to present-day democratic societies from ancient sources. Thus, as J. G. A. Pocock explains in a much-cited standard article, the specific figure of the citizen first came to be “defined as a member of the Athenian polis or Roman res publica, a form of human association allegedly unique to these ancient Mediterranean peoples and by them transmitted to ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’” (29). Accordingly, the earliest manifestations of civic assembly and participatory self-rule emerged in the city-states of ancient Greece. For in contrast to the extensive empires of Egypt or Mesopotamia that existed further east, the territorially bounded city-states were small enough to offer qualified individuals a public gathering forum, where matters of communal concern were discussed and determined collectively, so that an original version of direct democracy would develop. In Aristotle’s prominent phrase, it was based on the principle of “ruling and being ruled in turn” (see Pocock; Burchell). While the effective exclusion of women, children, slaves, and immigrants from this early model of political will formation is striking, since only male household patriarchs aged 20 and over were deemed eligible (Bellamy), it has remained influential due to its focus on consensual public debate. In political philosophy, it has come to be known as the “republican” tradition, which “derives from the Latin res publica, the public thing […]. Publicity – the condition of being open and public rather than private or personal – and self-government thus seem to be the essential elements of republicanism” (Dagger 146).
Imperial Rome is typically seen as providing the conceptual counterpart. In this line of reasoning, the Roman Republic originally still bore hallmarks of the Greek model, yet over the centuries grew into a vast empire, stretching geographical parts of Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. As a result, the direct and participatory model of citizenship proved no longer practicable, so that a version of citizenship dubbed civitas sine suffragio became forged, i.e., “citizenship without the vote” (Bellamy 644). In the historical context of great expansive conquest, this model served an imperial stabilization purpose (Balot 17-23). For while full citizenship continued to exist within the Roman Empire itself, residents in newly colonized lands, although not allowed to vote, were granted some of the most important rights of the day (Balot 23-25). Notably, these included the right to own and trade in property, and to have related interests protected by Roman law (Eckstein 251-53). Given its focus on economic self-interest and personal thriving, this model has come to be termed “liberal,” with “[l]iberal theory, whether of citizenship or of anything else, begin[ning] with the individual” (Schuck 132).

Throughout centuries of contestation and redefinition, and traversing the work and thought of key intellectuals like Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Hannah Arendt (see Zander 157-60), republican and liberal definitions have passed into the contemporary world to “offer more or less systematic alternative accounts of the problem that politics addresses, the values that are significant, and the ways in which these can be realized” (Honohan 84). The “forum model” of republicanism favors the collective over the individual, which translates into ideas of thick participatory rights of the democratic citizenry and a redistributive, egalitarian tax and welfare system; it stresses especially the “substantive” element of citizenship, mentioned in the introduction. The “market model” of liberalism – or in its economic variant: neoliberalism –, by contrast, which has become the dominant paradigm in the capitalist economies of Western nation-states as well as the EU, favors relative freedom from state interference, strong private rights protection, and hence a rather thin yet legal membership status for the citizen-as-individual; it emphasizes citizenship’s “formal” element (See Elster; Honohan).

Citizenship and the European Union
In the wake of globalization, many approaches have emerged that seek to position the concept beyond nation-state confines, approaches variously termed “transnational citizenship” (Bauböck), “cosmopolitan citizenship” (Linklater), “diasporic citizenship” (Collyer), or “post-territorial citizenship” (Ragazzi), among numerous further designations. The gradual establishment of the European Union has been monitored carefully in this context, especially with regard to proclaimed European core values rooted in universal human rights. According to an influential study published by sociologist T. H. Marshall in the 1950s, the societies of European nation-states since the eighteenth century have been marked by a progressive implementation of, at first, civil rights (such as the right to freedom of speech, thought, and faith), then political rights (the right to vote and be eligible in parliamentary elections), and finally social rights (like access to education, health care, and social insurance), which are deemed to be available to ever growing population rates (8-17). Against that backdrop, and as a “‘unique experiment’ […] of creating a supranational political community on a continental scale,” the development of EU citizenship has hence been viewed as “an exciting case of common citizenship superseding old division” (Maas 409).
The path there has been long and intricate, with decisive impetus coming from international peace building measures after World War II (see Maas). It was formally concluded in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which states that “every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union” (art. 8; see Pullano 437). Meanwhile, normative interpretations of EU citizenship vary. This concerns above all the so-called “market bias” which has surrounded the debate especially at transition phases, and which stems from the fact that present-day EU citizenship has grown out of capitalist structures like the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community (Kostakopoulou 428). The latter had already provided free movement opportunities to workers, and when the Maastricht Treaty finally went into force, not only had the definition of “worker” become substantially enlarged, to include, e.g., apprentices, students, and in certain cases their family members (Tonkiss 447-48). But there now also exists a differentiated system of sets of rights beyond the narrowly economic realm, such as specific voters’ rights and, most crucial of all, the people’s right to freedom of movement and residence across the complete array of member states (see Guild 419). Liberal thinkers see in this the evidence that civil, political, and social rights have indeed been expanded progressively even at the supranational scale, “thus helping to promote and entrench the shift from market rights to individual rights and common citizenship” (Maas 414).
Some republican thinkers, however, counter that this is not enough (see Olsen 161-66). One of the most consistent critical commentators, Jürgen Habermas, for example, argues that, as it is, the EU citizenship regime lacks a distinct space for the very consensual public debate that defines the core of democracy from his standpoint (“Citizenship”). To Habermas, the “formal” institutionalization of a legal rights administration, which he perceives as moving toward the technocratic (Rees), has to be complemented by an infrastructure that allows for the revitalization of the “public sphere” in the “substantive” sense (“Three Normative Models”). Given that the direct participatory model of the Athenian forum is not feasible within a national, much less supranational framework, Habermas ascribes a special function to the cultural as well as mass-media institutions (“Citizenship”). According to his rationalist concept of a consensual discourse ethics, these institutions bear in principle the power to help inform and cultivate a common European political culture, ideally culminating in a shared constitution of the EU (Rees). The project remains unfinished, however, and in his latest work Habermas has appeared skeptical of the EU-wide state of the public sphere, where he sees large-scale shifts and erosion due to the pervasive reach of the new digital media (New Structural Transformation).

And yet, Habermas’ insistence on civic agency – i.e., “the actual use made of active citizenship” (“Citizenship” 268) – invites recognition. As we have seen, only by the acting out of citizenship in the dialectical struggle with formal governance can meaningful, structural change occur in the democratic polity. Pressingly, change is needed in view of those externally excluded by the European system of membership, the migrants and asylum-seekers without EU citizen status in particular, who are lingering in forced displacement, refugee camps, and increasingly in hotspot zones off the continent’s externalized borders (Shachar). Already in a 1990s update of T. H. Marshall’s abovementioned influential study, caution was raised against the emergence of a “Fortress Europe,” where the “freedom of movement […] for those who are formally citizens” of the EU went hand in hand “with more severe restrictions on entry […] for non-citizens” (Bottomore 84). That situation has only become aggravated ever since (Carr). Leading EU politicians and institutions lose credibility and risk self-contradiction if they continue “assign[ing] and freez[ing] in place inequality of position and opportunity in the world political system,” unable or unwilling to transcend the Eurocentric paradigm (Gutmann 287). This is all the more the case for a globally operating (neo)liberal polity like the EU, which has gradually expanded its internal mobility rights in the name of social integration, but whose external mobility regime remains one-sided and economically limited to goods, capital, and labor – emphatically not to include people, and effectively barring non-citizens’ life prospects (Shachar). Conversely, bottom-up civic engagement has the potential to call into question and re-work such a nominal status quo, even if admittedly at the micro-scale level. Engin Isin has coined the term “activist citizens” (368) for individuals and collectives whose participatory political claims make a concrete difference on location, suggesting the revived Sanctuary and Solidarity initiatives as an example from the given context (see Scholz). Contemporary ecological, digital, or queer-feminist political questions and struggles range among further obvious areas where citizens’ creative appropriations can challenge more legally informed regulations (Curtin; Isin and Ruppert; Volpp). At such junctures, citizenship comes ultimately to its full unfolding, in productive interplay between the formal body politic and the substance of the actual citizenry.

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