Citizenship and Immigration

Christian Joppke

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745658391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Immigration Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This incisive book provides a succinct overview of the new academic field of citizenship and immigration, as well as presenting a fresh and original argument about changing citizenship in our contemporary human rights era. Instead of being nationally resilient or in "postnational" decline, citizenship in Western states has continued to evolve, converging on a liberal model of inclusive citizenship with diminished rights implications and increasingly universalistic identities. This convergence is demonstrated through a sustained comparison of developments in North America, Western Europe and Australia. Topics covered in the book include: recent trends in nationality laws; what ethnic diversity does to the welfare state; the decline of multiculturalism accompanied by the continuing rise of antidiscrimination policies; and the new state campaigns to "upgrade" citizenship in the post-2001 period. Sophisticated and informative, and written in a lively and accessible style, this book will appeal to upper-level students and scholars in sociology, political science, and immigration and citizenship studies.

1

The Concept of Citizenship

Citizenship is a notoriously polyvalent concept, with many meanings and applications. A recent Handbook of Citizenship Studies (Isin and Turner 2002) includes entries on sexual, cultural, and ecological citizenship, to name just a few of the many kinds of citizenship on offer today. However, most definitions of citizenship still conceive of it as “ineradicably political” (Smith 2001: 1857). As Rogers Smith further explicates, citizenship’s “oldest, most basic, and most prevalent meaning is a certain sort of membership in a political community” (ibid.). If there is hardly a definition of citizenship that does not conceive of it as pertaining to the political,¹ the question arises: What is “political”?

There are at least two answers: a normative and a factual.² The normative answer goes back to the Greek polis, which invented the idea of the “human production of social order” (Popitz 1992: 12). Here the political is about the Machbarkeit of order, the possibility to generate order and not just to let it happen. Implicit in this is the notion of something “better,” because otherwise there would be no point in change: “To the idea of the political belongs the belief in the possibility to produce a good order” (ibid., emphasis added). From here began the search for the best constitution, and the articulation of the principles to evaluate it: justice, rule of law, equality under the law (isonomia). This has been the stuff of political thinking from Plato to Montesquieu. However, as the modern experience would show, such normative politics, driven by the search for a better, could eventually not be limited to one sphere. In the age of modern mass democracy, where state and society are not separate but mutually implicated, there is an endemic tendency for normative politics to become ubiquitous, thus dodging our exit proposition of citizenship as “membership in a political community.” A normative definition of the political leads to the idea of “citizenships,” in the plural, and thus to the hyphenated citizenships of today.

Conversely, only a factual definition of the political allows one to conceive of “citizenship” in the singular, which today means state membership. Key to the non-normative tradition of the political is the idea of order as containment of violence. This tradition’s most lucid and penetrating, if controversial, document is Carl Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen, written on the eve of the twentieth century’s darkest moment ([1932] 1963). At the most general level, Schmitt conceives of the political as one of the many spheres of society, much as there are, in addition, religious, cultural, economic, legal, and scientific spheres, to name just a few. Each sphere orders the world from a specific vantage point: “true” versus “false” in science, “good” versus “evil” in religion and morality, “efficient” versus “inefficient” in the economy, etc. The specifically political distinction, this is Schmitt’s controversial proposition, is that between “friend” and “enemy.” His radical proposal is to separate politics from morality. This has often been misperceived through the lens of Schmitt’s dubious sympathy for Hitler and Nazism. However, there is profound insight here into the frail and precarious nature of human existence and sociability, which in modern political thinking had been prominently made by Thomas Hobbes: insight into the physical dangers that human beings represent to one another, and which drives them into the creation of an “artificial body” (Hobbes [1651] 1998), the state, that protects them from the ubiquitous possibility of violence.³ In this respect, the political is not just one of the many spheres and forms of human association, but the one that is “paramount” because related to the Ernstfall of violence and physical annihilation (Schmitt 1963: 39). The political is the terminal human association, the one that cancels out and subsumes all others. In fact, as Heinrich Popitz argues in the Hobbes–Schmittian tradition, the political is tantamount to the “idea of order” itself, which is born out of the “fear of violence” and the “counter-motif of security” (Popitz 1992: 61).

At the same time, more than constituting an own sphere, the political denotes the “degree of intensity” of a human association or disassociation; more precisely, the political is the “most intensive and extreme” (Schmitt 1963: 30) of associations that trumps the others, and which can be “reached from the economy as from any other sphere of society” (ibid.: 72). In this sense, the political is transversal to the other spheres of society, as it can be reached from any point in it. However, short of civil war, in modern society the political becomes identical with the state, as this is the only association that has “power over the physical life of human beings” (ibid.: 48). This involves, internally, what Max Weber called the “monopolization of the legitimate use of violence” (Weber [1919] 1977: 8), whereby domestic society becomes a zone of “peace, security, and order” (which is the definition of Polizei, notes Schmitt 1963: 10); and, externally, the jus belli, the right of states to declare war. Always the reference of the political is violence and protection from violence. This is no Schmittian prank but the end point of the secular and unsentimental reflection on the political from Machiavelli to Max Weber. As Max Weber summed it up in his Politics as a Vocation, “For politics the decisive means is always: violence” (Weber 1977: 58).

If citizenship is “membership in a political community,” to reiterate Rogers Smith (2001: 1857), it is membership in that human association that trumps all others through providing elementary security and protection. As in modern society this “paramount” association is the state, citizenship denotes, and should exclusively denote, membership in a state.⁴ With Schmittian means one arrives at a parsimonious understanding of citizenship as state membership. Certainly, one may find fault with Schmitt’s existentialist, non-normative understanding of the political that is drenched in blood and leaves no space for the routine “politics” in the liberal-democratic state. But one must still acknowledge the fact that state citizenship is the only “citizenship” that is not just rhetorical and metaphorical but formal and institutional, a hard fact in terms of the passport and a state’s nationality laws and, by implication, immigration laws from which only citizens are exempt. Furthermore, from a Schmittian angle, one gets a sense of the enormity of the challenge that is posed to citizenship by immigration, because the immigrant is “the other, the stranger,” the protection from whom is the whole purpose of the political association (Schmitt 1963: 27). Conversely, one begins to appreciate the enormous civilizing achievement of facilitating, routinizing, and putting on a legal basis this boundary-crossing in today’s citizenship and nationality laws.

If reference to (a certain view of) the political allows for a parsimonious understanding of citizenship as state membership, we are still dealing with “citizenship,” which is a profoundly liberal institution that centers on the individual, not the group. In Schmitt’s well-known scenario, liberalism is the despised “negation of the political,” as liberalism celebrates “individualism” (for the various meanings of individualism, see Lukes 1973). By contrast, “political unity” subsumes the individual and asks for his or her “sacrifice of life” (Schmitt 1963: 69f.). As Schmitt rightly sees, liberalism is about “domestic struggle against state power” (ibid.), constraining the latter for the sake of individual freedom and private property. Liberalism thus opens up the black box of domestic politics that was sealed by the sovereign state’s internal pacification of society. And here is the point of entry for the hyphenated citizenships that had earlier been locked out by tying citizenship exclusively to the political sphere. Schmitt even realized this, in terms of his diagnosis that the classic state, in which the state had overlapped with the political, was giving way to the “blurring of the lines between state and society” in the age of modern mass democracy (ibid.: 25). However, what he misleadingly described as the “total state” that undid the “depoliticizations” of nineteenth-century society was really the arrival of total society, in which the status of political association was leveled to that of any other: economic, religious, or cultural association. In a way, the pluralist state theories of G.D. H. Cole or Harold Laski, which were ridiculed by Schmitt for enmeshing the individual in a plurality of simultaneous groups and associations, of which the political was only one, have come true,thus crossing out the Schmittian “truth” that “there is no political ‘society’ or ‘association’, but only a political unity, a political community” (ibid.: 45). In the age of globalization, this fact is registered, if greatly overstated, in terms of the death or demise of the nation-state.

Some three decades before so-called citizenship studies put the hyphenated citizenships of repoliticized society on a pedestal, Ralf Dahrendorf anticipated the latter in terms of “sectoral citizenships,” which he profoundly disliked for making modern societies “ungovernable” (1974: 697). Defining citizenship as “the generalized right to participate on equal terms,” Dahrendorf argues that there is an inherent tendency of such citizenship to move from its original site, the political sphere of the nation-state, to other sectors of society: “Once the seed of citizenship has been planted in a society, it will grow like ivy, not to say like weeds, until its outgrowth has covered as many members of a community in as large a segment of their social lives as is at all possible” (ibid.: 680). As social structure comes to invade the public sphere, we see the rise of “the economic citizen, the citizen in uniform, the church of citizens” (ibid.: 695), plus – one should add today – the hyphenated citizenships of contemporary identity politics. Citizenship, one could argue, is the medium for the “generalization of suspecting the presence of power” (Generalisierung des Machtverdachts) that Heinrich Popitz (1992: 60) found endemic to modern democratic society, in which power is no longer concentrated in the state but has become “societalized” (vergesellschaftet).

Of course, these sectoral or hyphenated citizenships cannot be understood in Schmittian terms. They thrive on a normative, infra-national rather than inter-national understanding of politics as resisting coercive power wherever it raises its head, invoking the principles of equality and freedom that are also institutionalized in modern citizenship. Citizenship connotes the “rule of law” that is directly opposed to the “political” as the sovereign’s nonnormative decision about the “exception” (Ausnahmezustand).⁵ The idea of citizenship is “isonomy” (Hayek 1960: 164), equal laws for all persons, in which the asymmetric power of people over other people is exactly abolished by the symmetric, and thus freedom-enhancing power of the law. While citizenship is notionally tied to the sphere of the political, and at heart is membership in a state as “protection racket,”⁶ it also plants the virus of individualism that eventually dissolves this limitation and reduces the import of political association to that of any other association (or, rather, that politicizes the previously non-political spheres of society in a profoundly un-Schmittian sense).

Certainly, what appears here as result of a conceptual analysis is in reality the result of a historical process, the post-World War II transformation of the Western world from a Hobbesian zone of war into a Lockean zone of trade, which makes a Schmittian understanding of politics as group-level “friend–enemy” relationship increasingly implausible.

It is this historical process that forms the backdrop to the story of citizenship and immigration that will be unfolded in this book. At heart, it is a story of the mellowing of citizenship’s exclusive edges, which were once marked by nationalism and racism, and of the reverse strengthening of its inclusive thrust, which Linda Bosniak (2006: 2–4) has captured in the oxymoron of “alien citizenship.” But, at the onset, one must state the fundamental ambiguity of modern citizenship that is unlikely ever to go away: Rogers Brubaker (1992: ch. 1) characterized it as citizenship’s being “externally exclusive” and “internally inclusive.” We arrived at this distinction through situating citizenship in the political sphere, as which it is “externally exclusive,” but then tracing the reverse dynamics of the individualistic and egalitarian idea of citizenship, as which it is “internally inclusive” and subversive of its exclusive and boundary-setting dimension.

Citizenship in History

To better calibrate the distinct features and dynamics of modern citizenship, it may be helpful to review briefly what citizenship has historically been (a short overview is Gosewinkel 2001). Its birthplace is usually taken to be ancient Athens, in which a citizen was “one who both rules and is ruled,” to quote Aristotle’s famous definition. Ever since, there has been an intrinsic connection between citizenship and democracy. But, as is well known, classic citizenship was highly exclusive and based on formal inequality, as only the male chiefs of an oikos (family household), and thus not women and slaves, could be equal members of the polis (city). In the polis, citizens were to abstract themselves from the trivia of economic life and pursue non-instrumental, public goals that lifted human above animal life. Hannah Arendt ([1958] 1981) eulogized this as “acting” and “speaking,” pursuing the “good life” that is possible only in collectivity. But in reality, life in the polis was mostly about warfare.⁷ What since the eighteenth century has been called society, “this strange intermediate space in which private interests acquire public significance” (ibid.: 36), was locked out of the affairs of Athenian citizenship. The latter was emphatically political, devoted to the affairs of the paramount community, without any interference from the merely private.

However, Athens also invented a more fundamental, lasting aspect of citizenship that is easily forgotten in the focus on the political and democracy: citizens are strangers, rising above the primordial ties of family and tribe. Citizenship is civic. In Ulrich Preuss’s (1995: 275) evocative formula, citizenship allows “a kind of community in which aliens can become associates.” Or, as J. G. A. Pocock explicated the same condition, a “community of citizens is one in which speech takes the place of blood, and acts of decision take the place of acts of vengeance” (1995: 30). From the start, citizenship is a civilizing instrument that works against the boundaries that are also set by it.

If classical Athenian citizenship stressed the importance of political participation and public-oriented virtues, imperial Rome pioneered a more mundane understanding of citizenship as a “legal status, carrying with it rights to certain things” (Pocock 1995: 36). This is much closer to our contemporary, liberal understanding of citizenship (see also Walzer 1970: 205) because of its focus on individuals and their rights, the latter constituting an inner sanctuary, a private sphere into which no one is allowed to intrude. The underlying image of the individual is not one of zoon politikon, as group-forming creature, freely and directly associating with other individuals; rather, the image is one of the individual as a “possessor of things” (Pocock 1995: 35) whose relations with other individuals need to be regulated by law, because of the intrinsic competitiveness and zero-sum relationship that property entails. Roman citizenship, in being generously conferred on conquered peoples in return for their expected loyalty, was also the first that foreshadowed a modern understanding of citizenship as legal state membership.

In the medieval age, the classic, polity-or state-centered tradition of citizenship collapsed, as Augustinian Christianity came to relocate the membership that mattered from the corrupted “city of man” to the spiritual “city of God.” In the disparaged city of man, feudalism came to constitute a system of particularistic master–servant relationships that is directly opposed to the universalism and equality of citizenship (a concise account is Poggi 1978: ch. 2).

However, close to its etymological roots, citizenship survived as, and now became exclusively equated with, the status of free city-dweller in the Occidental city. As Max Weber famously argued, the Occidental city, with its focus on political autonomy, independent jurisdiction, non-primordial association, and the positive revaluation of economy and trade over the non-productive life of the chevalier and rural nobleman, was a virus that dissolved feudalism and prepared the coming of modern capitalism and state – “city air liberates” (Stadtluft macht frei) (Weber [1921] 1976: 742).

Modern citizenship still required an extension of scope from the city-state to the territorial state. A unitary state membership, replacing the multiple and non-territorial master–servant relationships of feudalism, was first established by the absolutist state. Internally, the absolutist state flattened the autonomy and privileges of the old estates and erected a uniform rule of law instead; externally, it created a formal state membership that was based on birth and thus more exacting than mere residency to mitigate the problem of the migrant poor (see Brubaker’s discussion of Prussia, 1992: ch. 3). Such unitary state membership became democratically and nationally revalued in the French Revolution,which transformed equal subjectship into equal citizenship, thus producing the modern citizenship that we know today.

Citizenship in Social and Political Theory

Given its rich and variable history, and its centrality for understanding the human infrastructure of the modern state, it is astonishing that citizenship has been touched on only peripherally in classic social theory. Weber was interested mainly in bureaucracy and political leadership in the modern state, glossing over its citizen dimension. Durkheim relegated citizenship to pedagogy and moral education, however important this may be for cohesion in modern society. Only Marx ([1843] 1978) produced a memorable entry on citizenship, if only in terms of a sarcastic denunciation. For him, individuals led a “double existence – celestial and terrestrial” in capitalist democracies, as heavenly “citizen” in the state and as earthly, self-regarding “bourgeois” in civil society. In Marx’s view, the formal equality of citizenship served only to mask the substantive inequalities of capitalist class societies. Much against what was ever held possible by Marx, for whom citizenship could never be more than a passive instrument of class rule, his analysis has since become key ammunition for the “complete citizen’s” march through the institutions (Dahrendorf 1974), sniffing up coercive power wherever it rears its ugly head, and heralding the many hyphenated citizenships of today.

Social citizenship

The most influential work on citizenship ever written was a direct answer to Marx (without mentioning his name). In T. H. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class ([1950] 1992), originally presented in 1949 as a series of lectures at Cambridge University, citizenship is nothing less than the peace formula that reconciled workers to capitalism. If the social question generated by capitalism was the twentieth century’s central fault-line, citizenship was the answer to it. By the same token, if Marshall was ...