Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City

Engin F. Isin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135123758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City focuses on the controversial, neglected theme of citizenship. It examines the changing role of citizens; their rights, obligations and responsibilities as members of nation-states and the issue of accountability in a global society. Using this interdisciplinary approach, the book offers an innovative collection of work from Robert A. Beauregard, Anna Bounds, Janine Brodie, Richard Dagger, Gerard Delanty, Judith A. Garber, Robert J. Holton, Warren Magnusson, Raymond Rocco, Nikolas Rose, Evelyn S. Ruppert, Saskia Sassen, Bryan S. Turner, John Urry, Gerda R. Wekerle and Nira Yuval-Davis.

Part I
Citizenship, sovereignty,
politics

1 Metropolis, memory and citizenship¹

Richard Dagger

What is the proper breeding ground for citizenship? Many students of politics, ancients and moderns alike, have thought that it is the city. Other forms of political association, such as province, nation-state and empire, are too large and too remote from the everyday lives of their inhabitants to inspire the kind of interest and effort that citizenship demands. The city, in comparison, is more accessible to its residents, more closely tied to their interests, and more likely to promote the sense of community that is usually associated with citizenship. Yet it is also large enough and diverse enough to offer more scope and substance for political engagement than the village or hamlet. Hence the city is the true home of citizenship.

Cities differ from one another in a remarkable variety of ways, however, and it is unreasonable to think that they all have provided equally hospitable settings for citizenship. In this respect, as in others, what may have been true of Periclean Athens may not be true of modern Los Angeles. I do not mean to deny that cities and citizenship are intimately related, for I believe that, for better or worse, they are. What I want to suggest is that the relationship is nowadays most often for the worse. Far from encouraging citizenship, many cities in one way or another effectively discourage it. The size, the fragmentation, the fluidity of the population of these swollen metropolises all contribute to the loss of civic memory - the memory that, by tying its residents to the past of a city, enables them to play a part in its present and help shape its future. As they contribute to the loss of civic memory, so these factors also contribute to the failure of citizenship.

My purpose here is to demonstrate how and why this happens. But if we are to understand why our cities do not provide an environment conducive to citizenship, we must first understand what citizenship involves. I begin, then, with an explication of that concept.

Citizenship

We have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, and painters in plenty; but we have no longer a citizen among us ...

(Rousseau, 1750, p. 160)

Citizen' and its cognates derive from the Latin civis, and the concept itself can be traced even further to the Greek politēs. In both classical Latin and Greek there is a clear connection between the word for citizen and the word we now translate as city-state: between civis and civitas, politēs and polis. To be a citizen, then, was to be part of a political community, and a part of it, moreover, in a way that others were not. Others were subjects, as the citizen was, but they were merely subjects. The citizen was a partner in his community, which meant that he enjoyed certain rights - and was subject to certain duties - that were not extended to women, children, resident aliens, slaves and those who could not meet the property qualifications that were sometimes imposed.

In the ancient world the rights and duties of the citizen were always exclusive in nature, designed to distinguish the citizen as somehow superior to others. In the Roman Republic, for example, citizens were legally immune from crucifixion, which was considered a particularly humiliating form of punishment (Sibley, 1970, p. 140). The essential feature of citizenship, however, was that the citizen, and only the citizen, was entitled by law to take a part in the government of his community. As Aristotle saw it, this was at the heart of citizenship: 'as soon as a man becomes entitled to participate in authority, deliberative or judicial, we deem him to be a citizen' (Politics, 1275b18-20 [1981, p, 171]).²

Legal status was thus the basis of citizenship, but it was hardly the whole of the matter. Not only was the citizen entitled to engage in civic affairs, he was expected to do so. Because the life of the citizen involved considerably more than casting an occasional vote, this often meant that he would have to devote the better part of his time and energy to public concerns (Fustel de Coulanges, n.d., pp. 334-6). Such devotion was necessary, however, if the individual was to achieve the ideal of citizenship: to be a self-governing member of a self-governed community. Those who preferred a more private existence, even if it proved less arduous than that of the citizen, were regarded, in Pericles' words, 'not as unambitious but as useless' (Thucydides, 1951, p. 105). For the Greeks, such a person was idios anthropos: the man who lives for himself (Myres, 1927, p. 341; Jaeger, 1945, p. 111 and p. 444, n. 45).

Here we may have the most telling sign of the distance between the ancient and modern attitudes towards citizenship. For the Greeks, idiotes was the apposite of policēs. But we have no word to oppose to our 'citizen'; certainly we do not ordinarily contrast citizens with idiots. Nor will 'private' work, for we sometimes describe a person as a 'private citizen'. What this indicates is that citizenship, a prized status in the ancient world, is now largely taken for granted. It has retained its legal basis while losing much of its ethical import. When we nowadays say that someone is a citizen, we normally mean nothing more than that he or she is legally entitled to vote or otherwise participate in public affairs. Whether one puts that title to use (whether one actually does participate) is not usually thought to be a test of one's citizenship. Our view of citizenship tends to be passive and legalistic, and we find nothing remarkable in such statements as, 'A little over a fifth of the citizenry takes almost no part in political life' (Verba and Nie, 1972, p. 79).

This legalistic conception of citizenship is inadequate, in my view, but it is not simply wrong. To be a citizen is, at the least, to be a member of a body politic who enjoys certain rights, and is subject to certain duties, by virtue of one's legal status as a citizen. Holding this status does not require one to exercise the rights of citizenship, such as the right to participate in public affairs. It does make it possible to exercise those rights if one chooses, however, and it provides protection against those who would infringe upon one's rights. Citizenship as legal standing is also something that can be invoked when a person thinks that others are treating him or her as a 'second-class citizen'. In these respects, legal status is surely necessary to an adequate conception of citizenship.

But that is not to say that it is sufficient. If citizenship is nothing more than a matter of legal status, we face the kind of difficulties identified by those who complain of the excessive individualism and civic irresponsibility of too many 'citizens' today (e.g. Etzioni, 1996; Selbourne, 1994). We also neglect the conviction, still widespread (as indicated by Conover et al., 1991), that real or true citizenship entails a duty to work with others to promote the public good. Some who hold this conviction even argue that mere voting is not enough to satisfy the requirements of citizenship. According to the authors of a recent study of political participation in American cities, for example,

[r]ebuilding citizenship in America means that reform must move beyond getting more people into private voting booths to getting more people to public forums where they can work with their neighbors to solve the problems of their community. Once America has real citizens, increased voting will be sure to follow. And once we have real citizens, campaigns will be held to higher standards and elections will be more concrete manifestations of the people's will.

(Berry et al., 1993, p. 2)

As this appeal to 'real citizenship' demonstrates, it is still possible to discover traces of the ancient conception of citizenship in contemporary discourse. We may be obliged to attach such adjectives as good, ethical, responsible or real to 'citizen' when we want to distinguish a citizen from those who are citizens only in the legal sense of the word, but the point can be made nonetheless. And when the distinction is drawn today it rests, as it did in Periclean Athens, on the understanding that citizenship is a public vocation.

To say that citizenship is a public vocation is to say, first, that the (true) citizen plays a full and active part in the affairs of the community. What counts as a full and active part is difficult to say, for it will vary with the exigencies of the time. As with Oscar Wilde's complaint about socialism, civic life may sometimes seem to take too many evenings. The (good) citizen may share Wilde's abhorrence of too many evenings consumed by meetings, but he or she will not think that any meetings at all are too many. Keeping informed about public affairs and making more than an occasional trip to the polls will surely count towards a full and active part in civic life. It would serve no purpose to try to catalogue the activities of the (responsible) citizen here, however. What matters is that these activities set him or her apart from those who regard politics as a nuisance to be avoided or a spectacle to be witnessed - from those who are willing to leave the government of their communities, and their lives, to others.

To say that citizenship is a public vocation is also to say that the mere fact of participation is not enough to establish one as a citizen. The character of one's participation also counts. If citizenship is a public vocation, then it carries with it a responsibility to act with the interests of the community in mind. This point is put nicely by those who remind us that 'every citizen holds office' (Kennedy, 1961; Zwiebach, 1975, p. 87; Van Gunsteren, 1998, p. 25). Every citizen is in a position of public responsibility, and we must judge his or her, and our, actions according to standards similar to those we apply to persons elected or appointed to public office. This means, most significantly, that the citizen is expected to use his or her office not to accomplish his or her own ends but to further those of the public.

Some may regard this as an old-fashioned, outdated conception of citizenship. For those who regard politics as merely another form of economic activity, the citizen is simply a taxpayer who wants efficient services or a consumer who invests time and energy in politics only when doing so is necessary to protect or promote personal interests. Some even argue that the metropolitan complex consisting of a central city surrounded by a profusion of suburbs is a desirable arrangement because it responds to the preferences of 'citizen-consumers'. According to Charles Tiebout,

the consumer-voter moves to the community whose local government best satisfies his set of preferences. The greater the number of communities and the greater the variety among them, the closer the community will come to fully realizing his preference position.

(Tiebout, 1956, p. 418)³

In residential choice as in other areas of life, on this view, the citizen is simply shopping for the best bargain in the political marketplace.

Someone who rejects the view of the citizen as consumer or taxpayer may also doubt that citizenship is a public vocation. Dennis Thompson (1970, p. 2), for example, holds that 'modern citizenship suggests that citizens are in their political activities to express not only public but also personal interests of individuals and groups'. Whether Thompson is right or wrong here depends on how one distinguishes matters of personal from matters of public interest. In a good many cases the individuals pressing a personal claim are making a public case as well, as happens when a group of parents band together to petition for the installation of a traffic signal. In such cases we commonly acknowledge that the parents are acting as citizens. When someone petitions for a licence to operate a business establishment, however, we are likely to say that the petitioner may be acting within his or her rights as a citizen but is not acting as a citizen. The parents are required to appeal to the public welfare to make their case, which is to say that their concern is both personal and public. But when it is purely personal, as it seems to be in the second case, it stands outside the bounds of citizenship.⁴

It will not always be easy to separate concerns that are both personal and public from those that are merely personal, for this is often a matter of some controversy. But the fact that it involves us in controversy may be the best indication of the importance we attach to this distinction. Those organizations that seek to distinguish themselves from special interest groups by calling themselves 'citizens' lobbies' testify to its continuing power. Whether these 'citizens' groups' actually do represent the public interest is, of course, open to question. But the important point is that they use 'citizen' as a sign of their professed concern for the public welfare, then contrast this with the 'special' or 'private' nature of other groups. They can do this only because we have not completely lost the notion that citizenship is a public vocation.

If we conceive of citizenship in this way - as ethical citizenship, as a public vocation - then it is easy enough to understand why some political analysts are worried about the failure or eclipse of citizenship. Citizenship demands effort, and it is clear that a large portion of the citizenry (in the legal sense) is not meeting even the minimum demands of citizenship. In the presidential election of 1960 about 63 per cent of the voting age population of America actually voted - the highest turnout in this country since 1912. Since then the percentage o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: democracy, citizenship and the city
• PART I Citizenship, sovereignty, politics
• PART II Government, virtue, power
• PART III Difference, identity, city
• PART IV Globalism, politics, city
• Index