The Transformation of Citizenship, Volume 2

Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion

Jürgen Mackert, Bryan Turner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367877668
• eBook ISBN: 9781317203827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion examines the many different and newly emerging ways in which citizenship refers to spatial, symbolic and social boundaries. Today, in the context of citizenship we face processes of inclusion and exclusion on national and supranational level but no less on the level of groups and individuals. The book addresses these different levels and discusses processes of inclusion and exclusion with regard to spatial, social and symbolic boundaries referring to such different problems as political participation, migration, or identity with regard to religion or the EU. This book will appeal to academics working in the field of political theory, political sociology and European studies.

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1 Introduction

Citizenship and its boundaries

Jürgen Mackert and Bryan S. Turner

Among the many far-reaching transformations that both societies and citizens have faced in recent years, the European migration crisis of 2015/2016 has most urgently brought back to mind the fact that modern citizenship has always been about boundaries and about processes of inclusion and exclusion. Boundaries that once seemed to be fixed and solid can change rapidly – and vice versa, as we could see in the case of militarily fixed border crossings on the Balkan route after only a few weeks of the ‘politics of open borders’. It is obvious that already the proclamation of the ‘Rights of Man and the Citizen’ in the French Revolution drew clear territorial boundaries not only between France and adjacent sovereign territories but no less between Frenchmen turned peasants (Weber, 1976) who were included in the rights of the citizen and other persons who remained excluded from them. Thus, from the very beginning citizenship was one of the core institutions of modern societies that shaped people’s access to rights and membership, their belonging to a community and their conception of themselves, namely their identity. In times of ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie, 1982), when the nation-state was conceived to be the only recognised sovereign actor in world politics, the economy being state-led and strictly regulated and the citizenry being conceptualised as a homogenous community, processes of demarcation appeared to be unproblematic, decisive and a matter of quite simple regulations.

However, a closer examination reveals that this idea is misleading. From the beginning, modern citizenship did not conform to its own claims of being a universalistic institution and it did not match any expectations for comprehensive inclusion. In fact, national societies operate as ‘exclusive clubs’ that deny access to both their territories and their institutions. This means that, although citizenship operates inclusively for a clearly defined group of individuals, it is not only a means of inclusion but also a powerful instrument of social closure that triggers processes of exclusion (Brubaker, 1992; Mackert, 1999). While the boundaries that citizenship draws between citizens and non-citizens come to mind at once, this differentiation is just one aspect among many others.

In this volume we conceptualise boundaries in terms of a number of dimensions. These can be bureaucratic in terms of the ownership of passports, residential visas (such as the famous Green Card in the United States, and other indicators of membership such as driving licences, tax records and indeed criminal records). However, boundaries and borders can be spatial, symbolic, cultural and religious. Because of their complexity and significance, boundaries are inevitably sites of struggle and contestation. Struggles for inclusion by outsiders or struggles for exclusion on the part of insiders play a crucial role not only for migrants but for domestic politics and obviously for the evolution of citizenship as a legal status defining membership and entitlement.

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Despite these spatial, cultural and legal struggles over the boundaries defining citizenship, for a long time sociology has conceived of citizenship as primarily an instrument of social integration. Thus, we first briefly consider this idea of citizenship as inclusion in the classical sociology of citizenship.

Citizenship as inclusion: the classical sociological idea

In developing the sociological model of modern citizenship, T.H. Marshall (1950) developed his argument in a context where nation-states were effectively separated outwardly from one another by strictly monitored and policed geographic frontiers. Inwardly these societies were organised by a state-led economy, political democracy and a welfare state that had to serve the needs of the members of a political community, which was assumed not only to be culturally homogeneous but also united by a shared sentiment of national belonging. Further, Marshall was convinced that citizenship rights could tame the disruptive class struggles of competitive capitalism by turning the worker into a citizen. The theory of citizenship was a response to the Marxist idea that class struggle could not be contained and that in the long run it would undermine capitalism and usher in a new mode of production and a new type of society. Marshall was convinced both that citizenship would include ever more social groups and that the citizenship status itself would be enriched with more and more rights. Following this interpretation of British history in terms of the evolution of citizenship, Talcott Parsons (1977a) further developed this model of citizenship as an instrument of integration and inclusion within national societies by citizenship rights. In both an evolutionist and a functionalist perspective, this complex and complicated process of societal integration would be ensured by simultaneously institutionalising status equality and the legitimation of social inequalities. Following the functional differentiation of the social system, enhanced adaptation to the environment, cultural upgrading and value generalisation, Parsons was convinced that the ‘societal community’ had an enormous capacity for social inclusion (see Münch, 1984). This inclusion is accomplished on the basis of citizenship rights: ‘The concept of citizenship . . . refers to full membership in what I shall call the societal community’ (Parsons, 1966: 709). For that reason, there is a necessary and inevitable process of including previously excluded groups into the societal community: ‘The long-run trend, however, is successful inclusion’ (Parsons, 1977b: 185).

Of course, in the United States racial segregation continued to be a major barrier to successful integration into citizenship. No doubt, the Marshall–Parsons perspective set the stage for understanding citizenship as inclusion, and it was subsequently supported by a number of sociological analyses. They also argued in favour of citizenship as an instrument of inclusion by either integrating the working class into capitalist society (Lipset, 1960; Dahrendorf, 1959; Bendix, 1964), overcoming voters’ apathy in democratic societies (Rokkan, 1960) or including ever more social groups into citizenship status through the social right of education (Dahrendorf, 1965).

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Although citizenship was well established in the sociological canon by Marshall, Parsons and Dahrendorf in the 1950s and 1960s, sociological interest in citizenship waned in the 1970s. After this period of scholarly neglect, it enjoyed something of a revival as an important instrument of sociological analysis in the 1980s and beyond. However, this rediscovery of citizenship as a critical institution of modern societies was not going to be restricted to the old debates. Rather, it challenged taken-for-granted assumptions associated with ‘citizenship as inclusion’ and opened the door for broad debates on the status of both the sociological concept itself and its functioning in modern societies. For example, debates started by looking at the relevance of citizenship for coming to terms with the nature of capitalism, class society and class struggle (Giddens, 1982). Turner discussed the character of citizenship both as a modern status (Turner, 1986) and in the context of capitalism (Turner, 1988), while Mann (1987) pointed to the fact that citizenship was not only a revolutionary instrument but also, under certain conditions, a means of taming conflicts and thus a strategy of ruling classes. Against this background, Turner (1990) argued that the idea of struggles for citizenship had long been restricted to working-class struggles, thereby neglecting the critical role of ‘new’ social movements in struggles for rights. Further, he also made a strong plea to take into consideration the struggles for women’s rights, the role of religion, civil society and the public sphere, and processes of globalisation that obviously challenged the national conception of modern citizenship.

The different strands of this broad debate show that the rediscovery of citizenship involved a sociological reorientation because these new directions did not treat citizenship merely as a mechanism for an expanding inclusion of more and more social groups into ‘full citizenship’. Quite the contrary, new approaches pointed to the importance of a number of aspects that so far had been left out of consideration – among them and highly critical was the significance of boundaries and processes of inclusion and exclusion. Further, citizenship was put into a contextual relationship with important debates about the social, economic and political processes that historically had transformed pre-modern into modern society, that characterised its state of development with regard to citizens’ rights, and that pointed to perspectives beyond the nation-state.

Tensions within the modern concept of citizenship

Starting with the Declaration of the ‘Rights of Man and the Citizen’ in the French Revolution that first codified the modern idea of citizenship, this core institution of modern societies established clear boundaries, thereby necessarily setting off processes of inclusion as well as exclusion:

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As a bourgeois revolution, it created a general membership status based on equality before the law. As a democratic revolution, it revived the classical conception of active political citizenship but transformed it from a special into what was, in principle if not yet in practice, a general status. As a national revolution, it sharpened boundaries – and antagonisms – between the members of different nation-states. As a state-strengthening revolution, it ‘immediatized’ and codified state-membership. National citizenship as we know it bears the stamp of all these developments. (Brubaker, 1992: 49)

Brubaker’s differentiation of the ways in which citizenship operates nicely shows that citizenship is not just a ‘unitary’ institution that develops and transforms with regard to changing political, economic and social conditions that are external to citizenship as such. Rather, it is obvious that the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion lie within modern citizenship itself. From an analytical point of view, citizenship is characterised by at least three critical tensions. First, there have always been various approaches to understanding citizenship as status or praxis. Second, modern citizenship has been viewed as a mechanism for establishing a formal equality among citizens while at the same time allowing for social inequality within the citizenry. Third, there is the unresolvable tension of citizenship as a universal category in contrast to its particularistic realisation (Mackert, 2006). We find these contradictory conceptualisations – be it one of them or in their mutual interaction – in all processes in which citizenship operates. We take a brief look at the constitutive basis of each of them.

Status versus praxis: Thinking about citizenship as being a general status and/or political praxis at once refers to the philosophical underpinning but artificial distinction of the individual being an economic or a political subject. On the one side, liberalism argued in favour of the bourgeois as the model of modern man as a ‘possessive individual’ (MacPherson, 1962). One of the most important catalogues of individual civil rights can thus be found in John Stuart Mill’s ([1859] 2000) famous essay On Liberty. Against this conception of citizenship being a passive (economic) status, the tradition of republicanism made a strong plea for conceptualising the modern citizen as a political subject, the citoyen. Most prominently in Rousseau ([1762] 1997) it is not the passive status but the active citizen’s political praxis in the res publica that is decisive for an adequate conception of the modern citizen.

Formal equality versus social inequality: Institutionalising a general status of citizenship by declaring all members of a society to be formally equal while accepting social inequalities between them is the critical moment in citizenship, especially for coming to terms with the tension in democratic capitalism. From its foundation, the formal commitment to equality in modern citizenship does not aim at ‘absolute equality’ (Marshall, 1950: 77). Rather, as Marshall argued, citizenship operates as a common status that is bestowed upon every person in order to counterbalance the market-driven inequality among citizens by political democracy.

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Universalism versus particularism: In historical perspective, modern citizenship is the first model of membership that argued in favour of turning all members of society into citizens. Not a single member of society was supposed to remain excluded from the single and general status of the citizen. However, by simultaneously declaring the ‘Rights of the Citizen’ and the ‘Rights of Man’ the French Revolution institutionalised a clear difference between those who were accepted as citizens and those who did not count as Frenchmen. This differentiation resonates today in the tension between citizenship rights and human rights. Thus, the claim to ‘full’ inclusion was realised but in particularistic terms within the borders of the nation-state, thereby only referring to the members of a nation that was supposed exist as a homogeneous community.

Constituting the internal tensions of the modern concept of citizenship status versus praxis, formal equality versus social inequality and universalism versus particularism establishes certain boundaries. Conceiving of citizenship as a passive status proposes to define the citizen in terms of economic behaviour within a liberal economy while at once taking the market as the very model of society. On the grounds of guaranteed rights to possession, citizens in this liberal society exchange goods, thereby necessarily increasing both their personal wealth and that of the nation, as Adam Smith ([1776] 2008) argued. In contrast, conceiving citizenship as praxis in the republican tradition following Rousseau points to political activity and to political processes, in that the status of citizenship may be enriched or broadened, thus pointing to social change and struggles for citizenship rights. Both conceptions include those who behave in the way which they prescribe – be it as market individuals or as politically active citizens – while excluding those who do not.

In a similar way, thinking about citizenship as a formal legal status that institutionalises equality of all citizens before the law bestows a unitary legal identity upon them; while doubtlessly this legal status is an enormous historical achievement in establishing equality of all citizens before the law, it does not say much about the actual living conditions of citizens. However, the ability to make a living presupposes access to resources and goods in a capitalist society that is characterised by their extremely unequal distribution. Thus, the tension that emerges from extreme differences in class society points to social conflicts of redistribution and political strategies that help to avoid the dynamics of social disintegration.

Taking citizenship to be a universal status immediately evokes questions about this claim. This refers not only to the boundary that separates citizens from non-citizens but also to problems within societies, for example with regard to social, religious, linguistic and other minorities, the pluralisation of sex and the family, or processes of migration. In contrast to the assumption of societies being political communities that are supposed to be culturally homogeneous nations, we observe that the universal claim necessarily has to be implemented particularistically; thus, in many regards to both internal and external processes of pluralisation and heter...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Transformation of Citizenship, Volume 2
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Citizenship and Its Boundaries
• 2 Citizenship as Political Membership: A Fundamental Strand of Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century European History
• 3 Secular Law and Sharia: Accommodation and Friction
• 4 The Consumer–Citizen Nexus: Surveillance and Concerns for an Emerging Citizenship
• 5 Contentious Citizenship: Denizens and the Negotiation of Deportation Measures in Switzerland
• 6 ‘In Its Majestic Inequality’: Migration Control and Differentiated Citizenship
• 7 National Origins of Frontex Risk Analysis: The French Border Police’s Fight Against FilièRes
• 8 Is There a European Refugee Citizenship in the Making? the Still-Weak Institutional Basis of a Common European Asylum System
• 9 Antinomies of European Citizenship: On the Conflictual Passage of a Transnational Membership Regime
• 10 European Citizenship and Identity Politics in Europe: Is the Citizenship Narrative a Good Plot for Constructing the Collective Identity of the People Living in Europe?
• 11 European Citizenship Between Cosmopolitan Outlook and National Solidarities
• Index