Reconfiguring Citizenship

Social Exclusion and Diversity within Inclusive Citizenship Practices

Mehmoona Moosa-Mitha, Lena Dominelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317070443
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Citizenship as a status assumes that all those encompassed by the term 'citizen' are included, albeit within the boundaries of the nation-state. Yet citizenship practices can be both inclusionary and exclusionary, with far-reaching ramifications for both nationals and non-nationals. This volume explores the concept of citizenship and its practices within particular contexts and nation-states to identify whether its claims to inclusivity are justified. This will show whether the exclusionary dimensions experienced by some citizens and non-citizens are linked to deficiencies in the concept, country-specific policies or how it is practised in different contexts. The interrogation of citizenship is important in a globalising world where crossing borders raises issues of diversity and how citizenship status is framed. This raises the issue of human rights and their protection within the nation-state for people whose lifestyles differ from the prevailing ones. Besides highlighting the importance of human rights and social justice as integral to citizenship, it affirms the role of the nation-state in safeguarding these matters. It does so by building on Indigenous peoples' insights about linking citizenship to connections to other people and the environment and arguing for the inalienability and portability of citizenship rights guaranteed collectively through international level agreements. These issues are of particular concern to social workers given that they must act in accordance with the principles of democracy, equality and empowerment. However, citizenship issues are often inadequately articulated in social work theory and practice. This book redresses this by providing social workers with insights, knowledge, values and skills about citizenship practices to enable them to work more effectively with those excluded from enjoying the full rights of citizenship in the nation-states in which they reside.

PART I

(Re)Conceptualising Citizenship

Chapter 1

Problematising Concepts of Citizenship and Citizenship Practices

Lena Dominelli

Introduction

Citizenship, an ancient concept of Grecian origins, depicted a status held by male patricians enjoying a public political life within the polis (particular territory) and superior to the private realm of the household (Shafik and Brysk, 2006). Marshall (1950) linked political and civic rights including voting and decision-making for the nation through representative liberal democracy with social rights associated with welfare entitlements to food, clothing, shelter, education and health services. Despite its exclusionary beginnings, citizenship as status assumes that all those deemed ‘citizens’ enjoy similar rights within national boundaries. However, citizenship practices can be inclusionary or exclusionary. The capacity to include or exclude is embedded in state-enacted social policies that define those belonging to a particular nation-state and the benefits that accrue to citizens while denying these to those unable so to qualify (Roche, 1992). Such exclusionary practices produce varied citizenship experiences according to social divisions like gender, ethnicity including the specific variant of Indigeneity, ability, age, class and sexual orientation. A wealth of writings has exposed exclusion among both nationals and non-nationals (Dominelli, 1991, 2010; Lewis, 2004; Lister, 1997; Williams, 1989). Citizenship as a concept, a status and a practice linked to nation-states is contested by global migration, diasporas and transnationalities. Resistance to citizenship’s exclusions through restrictive links between place, space and territory, acceptance, belonging and solidarity, is common.

Human rights, linked to an individual’s humanity, are innate (Basok et al., 2006), defined through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and agreed by member states of the United Nations (UN). These assert individual claims to entitlements covering social, political and (minimal) economic rights. The realisation of human rights is dependent on the nation-state’s willingness to guarantee these by discharging its ‘duty to care’ for its citizens. This duty of care links citizenship, national sovereignty and human rights inextricably together, a situation rarely challenged. This dependency makes human rights precarious and ‘the right to have rights’ is unrealisable without collective support within the nation-state and more widely (Arendt, 1956). Furthermore, a state’s commitment to the UDHR opens the door for claims by those residing within its borders but lacking citizenship rights associated with nationality.

Citizenship rights, limited to people with legal citizenship status, are created, granted and upheld by courts within the framework of state sovereignty (Isin and Turner, 2006: 8). These acquire nationalist orientations that evoke diverse notions of nationhood, for example, Spanish Catalonians’ demand for statehood; Indigenous communities within settler nation-states affirming traditional rights to land and ways of life; transnationality; and diasporas. These diverse and contentious claims challenge unitary hegemonic citizenship, embroiling it in struggles for social justice, social inclusion and human rights. Citizenship as a concept facilitates social workers’ commitment to social justice, social inclusion and human rights by enabling practitioners to advocate for social inclusion and social justice claims, regardless of citizenship status. Thus, social workers both work within contemporary citizenship practices and challenge their exclusivity as indicated throughout this book.

Citizenship practices that marginalise or assimilate diverse populations within national borders are complicated, whether applied to: marginalised groups who have been settled for millennia, for example, the First Nations peoples of Canada and Maori peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand; newly arrived immigrants like Iranian refugees seeking asylum in the West; or overseas social workers recruited to staff vacant posts in specific social services regimes like social workers from India recruited to work in Britain. The provision of citizenship entitlements exclusively to those holding a nationally-bounded citizenship status configures how citizenship practices are expressed, controlled and operationalised in and through social work practice, but contradicts working across diverse social groups, settings and territories.

Supra-national developments have transcended the implications of citizenship rights rooted in the nation-state by initiating agreements to accord these to a range of people living within a region composed of diverse nation-states rather than one specific country. For example, the European Union (EU) grants citizenship rights that include social, political, welfare and civic rights and freedom to cross ‘national’ borders to all citizens living within it. Some argue that this arrangement constitutes the ‘European citizen’, reflected in everyone having the same colour passport. Others challenge this depiction, suggesting that the European is a citizenship identity in the making. This regional citizenship is becoming increasingly discredited and challenged through its failure to deal with non-nationals living in its midst, especially those of Muslim origins (Wagner, 2004); the fiscal crisis in Euroland (Von Hagen, 2002); demands of nationalistic groups like UKIP in Britain for repatriation of sovereign state powers from an unaccountable and undemocratic EU (Farage, 2013); and unwanted immigration. Other theorists raise the possibility of a ‘global citizenship’ (Carter, 2001).

These developments generate evidence that citizenship is being undermined and reconfigured while failing to address exclusionary citizenship practices within a given nation-state, for example, conditional rights to social security benefits and welfare rights for married/cohabiting women and pensions accorded to women in the UK until the late 1980s (Dominelli, 1991; Phillips, 1991). Its contemporary variant under neoliberal austerity regimes erodes welfare rights and imposes welfare benefit cuts upon large sections of the citizenry, including unemployed people, lone mothers and disabled people by compelling them to work for benefits (Lara, 2011), thereby reversing hard-won rights. Ironically, employment rights, excluded from the UDHR, are needed more than ever, given worker mobility across the globe and in-country resistance to overseas workers seeking employment in fiscally challenged countries. Retrenchment in social security undermines struggles for guaranteed incomes, social protection and other expressions of institutional solidarity expressed through the welfare state. Prevailing discourses further sub-divide citizens into those allegedly abusing a ‘generous’ welfare state and those working hard to pay taxes to support it.

Additionally, attitudes towards non-citizens have hardened. In the UK, the right of asylum seekers to receive the same benefits as settled citizens has been removed and replaced with reduced benefits, thereby denying those without formal citizenship access to crucial assistance. Attacks on solidarity through the welfare state ignore citizenship status as the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt, 1956) and disregard the incapacity of marginalised people without the wherewithal to be players in the marketplace to access market-based provisions. What are the implications of such exclusions for social work practice, and society more widely? How long will citizens of a particular territory condone attacks on welfare rights when they lack legally accessible alternatives? When will they secure interesting jobs that pay living wages instead of short-term, boring, low-paid work? Will their future be one of remaining unemployed wage workers or potential students unable to access tertiary level education because fees and associated living costs are high? Harsh neoliberal regimes can produce social disorder when citizens feel trapped and see governments undermining their rights as has occurred recently in Greece or England during the riots of August 2011.

This chapter considers theories that underpin the concept of citizenship and examines its practices including the knowledge, values and skills that social workers require to work across exclusionary nation-state boundaries. I re-conceptualise citizenship and advocate for new citizenship practices that transcend the nation-state by being collectively guaranteed, inalienable, globally portable and attached to the person. Achieving this requires the re-negotiation of existing relationships between individuals and the nation-state representing society; and between nation-states to create a humanitarian, environmentally friendly, inclusive international social order.

I describe the exclusionary nature of citizenship and reformulate the concept in accordance with the UDHR (signed and ratified by most countries) and social workers’ commitment to social justice including environmental justice and sustainable development (Dominelli, 2012). I demonstrate that citizenship rights currently residing in the nation-state are violated regularly for vast numbers. Internally, this occurs because citizenship is fractured along ‘race’, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, ability, class and age and experienced differentially by individuals and groups. Although citizenship rights including human rights are applied to individuals, their realisation is not portable outside the borders of a particular nation-state that define specific citizens its nationals. Consequently, those enjoying citizenship rights within their own borders lose these rights when crossing country lines. Rooting citizenship in the nation-state legitimates the loss of individual rights, when they should be individually inalienable and portable as suggested by the UDHR, and collectively guaranteed.

I problematise and rework the exclusionary bases of citizenship to reformulate citizenship rights as inalienable and portable, going with individuals wherever they go. This gives the nation-state from which people originate the obligation to recognise individual/group citizenship rights internally for its own and other nationals, and assist in their realisation externally in another territory alongside maintaining environmental sustainability in an interdependent world. Achieving this re-conceptualisation of citizenship rights can be difficult because the international community within the UN would have to enable all nation-states to implement UDHR rights to food, clothing, shelter, education, health and social services covered by Articles 22 to 27, and add employment rights alongside sustainable environmental rights. Ensuring portability and comprehensive coverage alongside a holistic, inclusive citizenship that cares about and for people and the environment could pose financial challenges for nation-states and international bodies to resolve.

Defining Citizenship

Citizenship has been defined as a universal status that accords individuals human, civic, political social and welfare rights (Marshal, 1950). Citizenship is rooted in birth or legitimate residence within a particular nation-state and excludes by definition those not ‘belonging’ to it, making citizenship contingent on territory. This conceptualisation is problematic. Even within dominant social groups, some citizens have been excluded historically for having the ‘wrong’ identity, being dispossessed, lacking property, not holding waged employment or living in environmentally degraded neighbourhoods. In the UK, Dominelli (1991) and Lister (1997) have instanced and critiqued the state’s inability to provide equal citizenship for women from both dominant and minority ethnic groups.

T.H. Marshall’s (1950: 33) seminal work on citizenship argued that civil rights ‘gave each man [sic], as part of his individual status, the power to engage as an independent unit in the economic struggle’ without appreciating its exclusion of women. He anticipated that social citizenship would create a universal right to a state-guaranteed income not linked to the market. Wagner (2004: 280) contends that while this allows individuals ‘to compete in the labour market and participate in economic wellbeing’, civil and social rights ‘conflict with each other’ because the principle of protecting oneself contradicts that of the state protecting all citizens equally. Marshall embeds citizenship in the principle of solidarity institutionally enshrined within the welfare state, while simultaneously undermining it by rooting solidarity in ‘class abatement’ or the belief that the welfare state protects only those pursuing waged labour and contributing directly to funding its provisions. This excludes and devalues caring activities and their economic infrastructures.

Omitting caring as an important social activity excludes those who do the caring – mainly women, and those being cared for – dependent children, husbands and older relatives, as highlighted by feminists (Knijn and Ungerson, 1997; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Noddings, 2003, 2004). Recently, privatisation has destabilised the idea of caring as a social right to reduce demands on state provisions. Recognising care as both an obligation and a right that affects day-to-day relationships between men and women is crucial to gender equality (Roche, 1992). Gendered care is problematic because identifying caring as women’s prime responsibility disadvantages women who feature strongly as carers and care-recipients (Knijn and Ungerson, 1997; Noddings, 2002a, 2002b). Unlike remunerated employment, exclusionary practices that de-value unpaid caring labour undermine its potential for citizenship claims. Paid work remains the gateway to welfare benefits as the age of austerity bites into people’s entitlements and claimants are required to engage in paid employment for fewer benefits as instanced by unemployment insurance in Canada, workfare in the United States, and reduced benefits for single parent mothers refusing paid work in the UK (Lara, 2011).

Wagner (2004) suggests that valuing caring increases a population’s tax burden, an argument adopted by neoliberal ideologues utilising contemporary austerity regimes to enforce swingeing public expenditure cuts that encourage self-help and market-based services. This contentious approach disregards: the workload that unfunded caring imposes on women; wealthy individuals’ capacities to pay higher taxes; and demonstrations of solidarity for disadvantaged individuals/groups. Wealthy citizens’ unwillingness to pay their share of taxes to fund services adequately aggravates the social damage caused by an economic system that privileges the few; exacerbates environmental degradation; and breaks the social contract whereby one section of society supports another because they are better-off. Political adherence to social democratic principles for welfare states has declined in Europe since the 1980s, even in Nordic countries with higher levels of taxation and commitment to publicly funded, citizenship-based welfare. The UK has shifted from the social democratic welfare regime of the 1970s to today’s neoliberal one. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Cameron proclaimed the ‘Big Society’ policy of kin-care, voluntary work and community-based provisions organised through under-funded civil society organisations (CSOs) to cover gaps left by reductions in state-resourced social care, education and health services (Dominelli, 2012). Such policies are destructive because in ignoring gender relations, women’s work remains invisible and socially de-valued. Women are often excluded from decision-making bodies that formulate these policies, thereby hindering their citizenship rights of political participation. Encouraging CSOs as welfare providers can also reduce accountability because CSO governance structures are democratically insufficient, and their employees are unaccountable to local populations.

Politicians’ reluctance to fund social and environmental rights is a tension in both industrialised Western countries and industrialising societies in the Global South. Although UN member states have signed the UDHR, the Security Council has not affirmed and enforced these rights everywhere, allowing, instead, the principle of national sovereignty to usurp the state’s duty to protect its citizens from economic exigencies and environmental disasters.

Differentiated Experiences and Citizenship Practices

Conceptually, citizenship has a past rooted in universalism – the idea that rights and obligations apply to all individuals equally. Citizenship practices reveal that this important principle is context-specific and differentially experienced. Its meaning varies across historical space and socio-economic and political regimes, while being questioned across a range of domains including political participation and enjoying citizenship rights individually and collectively. For half the world’s population, gendered and ethnicised inequalities underpin citizenship practices, whatever the legal aspirations and obligations of the nation-state (Bussemaker and Voet, 1998).

Discounting unpaid caring work as socially valuable and contributing directly to the economy is only one basis of women’s lesser citizenship status. Poor representation at the highest levels in political and economic decision-making structures reflects the exclusion of women and black and minority ethnic groups (BMEs) from decisions affecting them. Lister (1998: 322) agrees with Hall and Held (1989) that persistent gender inequalities for majority and minority ethnic groups are attributable to ‘irreconcilable tensions between the thrust to equality and universality entailed in the very idea of the citizen and … modern political subject’. Social divisions are masked by universalism, thereby enhancing the danger of the universalised subject excluding more women and BMEs than white men. Ignoring other social divisions exacerbates gendered and racialised exclusions. Unpacking these is critical to understanding differentiated citizenship experiences of individuals/groups who may (not) be encompassed by the category of citizen within nation-states. Additionally, neoliberal privatisation ideologies requiring individuals to care for themselves and their families deny welfare benefits to asylum seekers and (im)migrants, many of whom are women and BMEs, as public discourses shift away from social justice and institutionalised (wel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I (RE)CONCEPTUALISING CITIZENSHIP
• PART II CITIZENSHIP PRACTICES IN DIVERSE SETTINGS
• PART III MARGINALISED IDENTITIES: CITIZENSHIP PRACTICES IN DIVERSE SETTINGS
• PART IV LESSONS FROM CITIZENSHIP DISCOURSES: PRACTICE AND EDUCATIONAL CURRICULA
• PART V INCLUSIONARY CITIZENSHIP PRACTICES: LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index