Overcoming Global Inequalities

Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Christian Suter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317254874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the changing nature of global inequalities and efforts that are being made to move toward a more egalitarian world society. The contributors are world historical sociologists and geographers who place the contemporary issues of unequal power, wealth and income in a global historical perspective. The geographers examine the roles of geopolitics and patterns of warfare in the historical development of the modern world-system, and the sociologists examine endeavours to improve the situations of poor peoples and nations and to engage the challenges of sustainability that are linked with global inequalities. Overcoming Global Inequalities contains cutting-edge research from engaged social scientists intended to help humanity deal with the challenges of global inequality in the 21st century.

PART I

Historical Development of Inequalities

1

COMMODIFICATION OF CITIZENSHIP

GLOBAL INEQUALITIES AND THE MODERN TRANSMISSION OF PROPERTY¹

Manuela Boatcă

Abstract

Conventional sociological understandings conceive of modern social arrangements as being defined by achieved characteristics. By contrast, recent legal and sociological scholarship on global inequalities has shown how citizenship—an ascribed characteristic—is a central mechanism ensuring the maintenance of high between-country inequality in the modern world-system. In line with this newer literature, this chapter argues that the widening of the worldwide inequality gap is paralleled by an increase in the commodification of citizenship. To this end, it looks at the emergence of official economic citizenship (or “citizenship by investment”) programs as well as at the illegal trade in EU passports (“buy an EU citizenship” schemes) in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean as similar strategies of eluding the ascription of citizenship through recourse to the market. Citizenship is thus shown to be a core mechanism not only for the maintenance of global inequalities, but also for ensuring their reproduction in the postcolonial present.

Introduction

Time and again, canonical sociology has presented and analyzed citizenship as a counterbalance of social inequalities. From Max Weber through Talcott Parsons and up to Bryan Turner, the institutionalization of citizenship was seen as part of a sequence of social change characteristic of the West, which entailed progress from bondage to freedom and from ascribed to achieved positions in the inequality structure, ultimately defining the alleged transition from tradition to modernity. In stark contrast to the former view, recent legal and sociological scholarship on global inequalities has, on one hand, advanced a conceptualization of national citizenship as a form of inherited property (Shachar 2009). On the other hand, it has provided empirical data for the claim that citizenship remains the main determinant of a person’s position within the world inequality structure today (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009). While conventional sociological understandings conceive of modern social arrangements as being defined by achieved characteristics, such approaches conclude the very opposite: it is precisely due to its ascribed character that citizenship has functioned as a central mechanism ensuring the maintenance of high between-country inequality in the modern world-system in the past and can do so today. Thus, membership in the political community of citizens has made for the relative social and political inclusion of the populations of Western European nation-states under both jus soli and jus sanguinis arrangements. At the same time, however, it has accounted for the selective exclusion of the colonized and non-European populations from the same social and political rights throughout recent history (Boatcă 2011).

In line with the newer literature on global inequality, I will therefore argue that the widening of the worldwide inequality gap is paralleled by an increase in the commodification of citizenship. I will illustrate this by zooming in on two similar strategies of eluding the ascription of citizenship through recourse to the market: first, the emergence of official economic citizenship programs (“citizenship by investment”) in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean and, second, the trade in EU passports (“buy an EU citizenship” schemes).

“City Air Makes One Free”

Especially in his section on the city in Economy and Society, but also at various points in his sociology of religion, Max Weber clearly traced the rise of citizenship as an institutionalized association of an autonomous status group (Stand in German) of individual burghers subject to the same law back to the ancient Greek polis and the medieval Occidental city (Weber 1978, 1240). According to him, the revolutionary innovation differentiating the Central and Northern European cities from all others had been the principle that “city air makes man free,” according to which slaves or serfs employed for wages in the city soon became free from obligations to their master as well as legally free. Consequently, in time, status differences between free and unfree city dwellers gave way to equality of individual citizens before the law. Although this was characteristic of medieval Occidental cities, antecedents could be found in ancient Greece and Rome, but also in the Near East and in Russia, where town-dwelling slaves or serfs could purchase their freedom. According to Weber, this possibility not only intensified the economic effort of unfree petty burghers, thus spurring capital accumulation through rational operation in trade or industry, but also constituted a preliminary stage in the achievement of political equality (Isin 2002; Weber 1978, 1238).

As the revolutionary innovation differentiating the Occidental city from the Oriental Rest, the principle that “city air makes man free” carried the additional meaning of a sequence of social change that, as it progressed from bondage to freedom, gradually abandoned ascribed criteria of social stratification in favor of achieved characteristics, ultimately describing an ideal-typical transition from tradition to modernity.

According to Weber, the intended meaning and purpose (Sinn in German) of the institutionalization of citizenship in the modern (Occidental) state—“the first to have the concept of the ‘citizen of the state’ (Staatsbürger)”—is that of providing “a certain counterbalance to the social inequalities which are neither rooted in natural differences nor created by natural qualities but are produced, rather, by social conditions.” Taking into account the fact that “the inequality of the outward circumstances of life, particularly of property,… can never be eliminated altogether,” Weber therefore suggests allotting parliamentary suffrage equivalent weight, “so as to counterbalance these other factors by making the ruled in society … the equals of the privileged strata” (Weber 1994, 103–104).

The different religious logics to which he had traced social inequalities in the West and the Rest, respectively, turn out to be the structuring principles of the political organization in the (allegedly) secularized European city:

Equal voting rights means in the first instance this: at this point of social life the individual, for once, is not, as he is everywhere else, considered in terms of the particular professional and family position he occupies, nor in relation to differences of material and social situation, but purely and simply as a citizen. This expresses the political unity of the nation (Staatsvolk) rather than the dividing lines separating the various spheres of life. (Weber 1994, 103; emphases in the original)

This idea would be central to the sociology of T. H. Marshall, who proposed the extension of citizenship as the principal political means for resolving, or at least containing, the contradictions between formal political equality and the persistence of social and economic inequality. Talcott Parsons later elaborated on the development of citizenship as a transition from societies based on ascriptive criteria to societies based on achievement criteria to include a shift from particularistic to universalistic values, such that the modern citizen emerges as a political subject no longer formally confined by the particularities of birth, ethnicity, or gender. Despite criticizing Weber for his Orientalist conception of citizenship, Bryan Turner further drew on Weber’s analysis, arguing that citizenship is an essentially modern institution that “evolves through the establishment of autonomous cities, develops through the emergence of the nation-state in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and finds its full blossoming in the welfare states of the twentieth century” (Turner 1994).

Global Inequalities and the Issue of Citizenship

However, both Weberian and neo-Weberian analyses have concentrated on the way the allotment of citizenship levels ethnic differences and appeases social conflict within nation-states, or on what Bryan Turner has referred to as “internalist accounts” of the emergence of citizenship (Turner 1990). While ethnic and racial allegiance are treated as traditional ascriptive criteria for social cohesion in national contexts, there is no awareness of the importance of race and ethnicity in the development of citizenship at the global level. Recent analyses of global inequalities, however, have focused on how birthright citizenship, whether under the jus soli or the jus sanguinis principle, functions as a kind of inherited property that restricts membership in well-off polities to a small part of the world population. Thus, according to legal scholar Ayelet Shachar, citizenship in both its gatekeeping (exclusionary) and opportunity-enhancing (inclusionary) functions bears striking similarities to the feudal entail, a legal means of restricting future succession of property to the descendants of a designated estate owner. In medieval England, the entail offered a tool to preserve land in the possession of dynastic families by entrenching birthright succession while tying the hands of future generations from altering the estates they inherited from their predecessors (Shachar 2009, 38). At the same time, studies of global income distribution have revealed national identity and citizenship to be the most important criteria shaping between-country inequalities (Korzeniewicz 2011; Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009), thus paradoxically making an ascribed characteristic of the type usually associated with the stratification order of feudal societies the main principle of global stratification of modernity. Citizenship is thus what Max Weber—had he taken the world-system as a unit of analysis—would have considered a clear instance of social closure. Switching back and forth between the nation-state perspective and the world as a whole, Korzeniewicz and Moran show how the institutionalization of birthright citizenship as pioneered in the Occidental city ensured the relative social and political inclusion of the populations of Western European nation-states, yet in doing so selectively excluded the colonized and non-European populations from the same rights throughout history. Although the low levels of income inequality in the West gradually came to be perceived as structured around achieved characteristics such as one’s level of education or professional position, this is only half the story. The long-term stability of low-inequality contexts had in fact been safeguarded by restricting physical access to these regions on the basis of ascribed categories, especially national identity and citizenship, through the control of immigration flows. What appears as a pattern of relative inclusion of the population through redistributive state policies, democratic participation, and widespread access to education in low-inequality contexts when taking the nation-state as a unit of analysis is thus revealed to entail the selective exclusion from the same rights of large sectors of the population located outside national borders once the analytical frame shifts to the world-economy (Korzeniewicz and Moran 2009, 78).

Against this background, the ascribed characteristics of nationhood and citizenship become as important for global stratification as class, usually considered to depend on levels of achievement. Yet, while class membership has regulated the differential access to resources at the level of national populations, citizenship—i.e., nation-state membership—has restricted both the mobility and the access to resources of the poorest segments of the world population—especially the colonized, nonwhite, or non-European groups (Boatcă 2011, 21).

The double function of inclusion in the political community and exclusion of constructed aliens is easily illustrated by looking at the ambiguities and contradictions the granting of citizenship generated in continental France and the then-French colony of Saint-Domingue in the wake of the French revolution, or in Germany and its African colonies up to the first decades of the twentieth century. Tellingly, both arrangements resulted in defining the nonwhite population out of the political community of the nation.

In the wake of the French revolution, the granting of citizenship as the basis for the universal equality of political and social rights in a modern social order was understood not only as an expression of liberty (i.e., the opposite of slavery), but also as the mark of civilization. As such, citizenship was to be acquired as the result of a civilizing process—that is, gradually. Citizenship rights were therefore granted only to male property owners, whose ability to pay taxes and military tribute and thus contribute to the maintenance of social order qualified them as “active citizens.” Women, foreigners, and children were in turn defined as “passive citizens” and denied political rights. The French constitution of 1793 extended active citizenship to all adult males, thus leaving women to derive their membership in the social community from their relationship to men. The institutionalization of the division between private and public spheres, habitually considered a characteristic of the specifically modern form of social organization, was therefore closely associated with the gendering of economic roles upon which the state-propagated, bourgeois family model was based. In turn, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where the revolution of the enslaved resulted in the abolition of slavery in 1794, skin color took precedence over property as a criterion for the granting of citizenship. Since not all whites were property owners, but relatively many free mulattos were, the colonial assembly gave all male whites the right to vote even before this was accomplished in continental France, but excluded both slaves and mulattos from franchise after a series of heated debates. By relegating women, children, former slaves, and foreigners to the part of the “civilizing process” that white men had supposedly completed, the implementation of universal principles was already creating its own particularisms.

Thus, if the gradual extension of citizenship rights from propertied white males to all white males and to white women accounted for the development of a relatively low income-inequality pattern within France as of the eighteenth century, the categorical exclusion of Saint-Domingue’s black and mulatto population from French citizenship, irrespective of their property status, ensured the maintenance of a high inequality between France and Saint-Domingue/Haiti.

At the same time as citizenship rights were gradually extended to ever more groups within Europe, they were systematically used as a means for the selective exclusion of the colonized and nonwhite populations from the European political communities of citizens. Although France declared slavery illegal on its territory in 1716, leading to the freeing of slaves upon arrival, black Africans were increasingly singled out as ...