Disputing Citizenship

Clarke, John, Coll, Kathleen, John Clarke, Kathleen Coll, Evelina Dagnino, Catherine Neveu

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781447312529
• eBook ISBN: 9781447312550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Citizenship is always in dispute – in practice as well as in theory – but conventional perspectives do not address why the concept of citizenship is so contentious. This unique book presents a new perspective on citizenship by treating it as a continuing focus of dispute.The authors dispute the way citizenship is normally conceived and analysed within the social sciences, developing a view of citizenship as always emerging from struggle. This view is advanced through an exploration of the entanglements of politics, culture and power that are both embodied and contested in forms and practices of citizenship.

This compelling view of citizenship emerges from the international and interdisciplinary collaboration of the four authors, drawing on the diverse disputes over citizenship in their countries of origin (Brazil, France, the UK and the US). The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the field of citizenship, no matter what their geographical, political or academic location.

THREE

Imagining the ‘communities’ of citizenship

In this chapter, we explore the ‘imagined communities’ of citizenship. One of the potent qualities of the idea of citizenship is its capacity to serve as a term through which different sorts of collectivities of people and connections between people may be imagined, mobilised and brought into being. Such imagined communities are constructed and elaborated in many different sites and settings, although this diversity is overshadowed by the persistent articulation of citizenship as a national question (both in academic theory and governmental practice). We begin, then, with questions about these national articulations, launching ourselves from Benedict Anderson’s (1983) famous understanding of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. This conception of imagined communities guides us in three directions during the chapter. First, we examine the implications of treating the nation as an imagined community for reflections on citizenship. This leads us to recent debates about the fate of the national character of citizenship in what has been described as a ‘post-national’ world.

Second, we consider the ways in which the nation is equated with the ‘national level’ as a privileged site of citizenship. Here, we encounter arguments that citizenship is both identification with the political community of the nation and practised in relation to national-level institutions, processes and issues. In contrast, we consider such nationalising logics to be part of a form of ‘scalar thinking’ that naturalises a specific ordering of social and political arrangements and, in the process, diminishes the salience of other sites and scales of social organisation (seeing them as encompassed by the national and the global). In such views, the local is always ‘merely local’. We explore alternative approaches to the politics of scale: asking how scales are imagined and institutionalised, and how they are contested by alternative political projects.

Third, and most importantly, we turn to the diverse imagined communities that citizenship can articulate. We stress the importance of citizenship as an idea – a keyword – through which collectivities can be imagined and brought into being. Drawing on earlier arguments, we insist that the diversity of communities: are imagined and enacted in heterogeneous sites and settings; not only take place at different scales, but also bring with them new sets of connections between scales; and, of course, are mobilised around diverse identities and issues. Such different concerns and claims have kept citizenship at the heart of political projects across time and space.

Benedict Anderson (1983) famously described nations as ‘imagined communities’. At the core of his path-breaking work is the claim that the nation ‘is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’ (1983: 6). He goes on to argue that ‘It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (1983: 6). Here, we wish to borrow his idea and take it a little further in two particular directions. First, by asserting that nations are not the only communities to which people, as citizens, imagine themselves as belonging. Anderson also knew this, noting that the idea of an ‘imagined community’ should not be located in a binary distinction between true and false, rather ‘all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (1983: 6). Two decades later, the concepts of imagined and imaginary have come to play a rather larger role in the social sciences, but Anderson’s view of the nation (and the difficult terms associated with it – ‘nationality’ and ‘nation-ness’, for instance) remains a critical point of departure for us. Indeed, much contemporary scholarship of affiliation, attachment and identification stresses the multiple connections through which people see themselves as articulated: multiplicity and heterogeneity seems to mark the terrain of these imagined relationships, and this also applies to the field of citizenship.

Second, we will enlarge Anderson’s conception of how communities are imagined, insisting that all aspects of social life combine imaginaries with relations and practices, and that such imaginaries are also mobilised in and by political projects that may offer contested and opposed conceptions of conflict and connection, division and solidarity. Citizenship is recurrently attached to questions of nation (the citizen is imagined – and inscribed – as a legitimate member of the imagined national community), particularly as nations are enacted and institutionalised by states. Nevertheless, it is important to insist on the multiplicity of identifications and imagined connections that might be in play in struggles over citizenship. It is thus worth directing particular attention to the contested ways of connecting state and nation, since the ‘national community’ is one of the most frequent ways to conceive of the ‘community of citizens’. Many writers on citizenship have drawn attention to the increasingly unsettled and contested relationship between nation, state and citizenship (eg Bauböck, 1999; Kofman et al, 2000; Morrisens and Sainsbury, 2005; Bosniak, 2007; Castles and Miller, 2009). Indeed, other collectivities can be addressed, summoned or built, including by the state(s), when such a community is envisioned or enacted (Newman and Clarke, 2009). The question of collectivities that do not have the state at the centre of their political vision, or even do not have it at all, is also significant.

Indeed, communities can also be defined and lived as ‘forms of collective experience in which individuals with plural identities find ways to agree and end up, maybe, forging something like a common identity, without this aspect being a principal and priority goal’ (Bourdeaux and Flipo, 2011: 87; emphasis added). Such a ‘communalist’ conception of community is the opposite of the communitarian one, according to which a community can only exist under the condition of previously sharing cultural traits. It allows for the possibility of envisioning communities not from the point of view of identities, but starting from (material) common objects, ‘from which we can build a community that is never given, never inherited’ (Bourdeaux and Flipo, 2011: 87). Such an approach to communities as based on sharing commons seems particularly important when one considers citizenship processes, especially since it allows for a reflexive and critical discussion on the links between citizenship and ‘culture’; Rosaldo’s notion of cultural citizenship in a sense connects to it by stressing the possibility of sharing such commons without building a ‘communitarian’ community.

As Balibar rightly underlines:

The question of the community of citizens ... thus has no once and for all defined or definable solution, neither in the form of an empirical community (such society, such culture, such State) nor in the form of an ideal community (for instance ‘the republican nation’, but also the ‘post-national’ federation). It neither has an univocal ‘logical site’, contrary to what Habermas seems to think, but rather a moving historical site, both sociological and symbolic: a meeting point between processes of work division’s transformation, populations’ movements, revolution of customs, and emancipation or solidarity dynamics. (Balibar, 2001: 125–6; emphasis in original)

We concur with Balibar’s analytical position, seeing citizenship as marking the site of constant struggles – in both theory and practice – to unlock the naturalised and naturalising connections between citizenship, nation and state, and as constituting the support for inventing other (communal) types of communities, based on both commons (des communs) and dissensus, as argued by Rancière (1998, 2000).

Nationalising and naturalising citizenship

Our experience of working collaboratively on citizenship processes and practices has shed a stark light on the troubled and troubling relationships between states, nations and citizenships. One specific aspect of these issues has to be restated here, since it does have an impact on this work and how it might be read. This book has been written in a language that is not the first language of two of the authors. This is also a language in which ‘citizenship’ can be read with at least three meanings, and it is not always easy, or even possible, to decide which one is meant by its users. In English-written literature, ‘citizenship’ can be read as ‘nationality’: the legal dimension of an individual’s state membership in the context of an interstate system (see, inter alia, Sassen, 2006; Fahrmeir, 2007; Bosniak, 2008). It can also be read as referring to sets of rights and connected obligations, and to the rules and procedures through which they can be accessed. For example, Bosniak’s (2008) The citizen and the alien examines the question of citizenship, nationality and alienage; while Somers’ Genealogies of citizenship, published in the same year, explicitly focuses on what she calls the ‘inside/interior’ dynamics of citizenship’s dynamics of inclusion and exclusion (2008: 20).

In such cases, the difference between nationality and citizenship can be very blurred. Alternatively, citizenship can refer to participation in the public sphere, to the process of becoming political subjects (Isin, 2002). These different usages articulate different meanings of the idea of ‘membership in a political community’. The first two take membership as being a legal matter, a question of status, and are both state-centric and nation-centric. The third takes participation in a political community as the fundamental relation of citizenship. Bosniak observes the effect of these elisions when she points to the problem of:

the analytical and normative nationalism that characterizes discussions of citizenship in mainstream constitutional and political theory. Most such discussions presume that citizenship is enacted within bounded national societies. Ordinarily, these presumptions are unspoken and unacknowledged: theorists tend to treat both a national setting and a state of boundedness as already satisfied conditions for the practices and institutions and experiences of citizenship. Making these assumptions permits them to focus their attention on what citizenship requires and entails in substantive terms within these pre-given boundaries.

More often than not, in fact, this literature appears to presume not merely that citizenship is national as a matter of current fact, but also that it is national as a matter of necessity or nature. One of the arguments I make ... is that the automatic correspondence commonly presumed between citizenship and nation-state is unfounded. Citizenship’s intimate relationship to the nation-state is not intrinsic but contingent and historical, and the forms and locations of citizenship, as we conventionally understand the term, are more varied than ordinarily acknowledged. Citizenship has been, can be, and arguably should sometimes be enacted not merely within national borders but beyond and across them, as well. (Bosniak, 2008: 5)

We continue to find this ‘nationalisation’ of citizenship in the English-language academic literature troubling – analytically and politically. It is not just a question of translation. It is that each term carries with it an accreted weight of meanings, and attachment to particular social, political and theoretical imaginaries, that differ both within the same language used in different contexts, and between different languages. Thus, Sassen considers that:

Today the terms citizenship and nationality both refer to the national state. In a technical legal sense, while essentially the same concept, each term reflects a different legal framework. Both identify the legal status of an individual in terms of state membership. But citizenship is largely confined to the national dimension, while nationality refers to the international legal dimension in the context of an interstate system. (2005: 81)

But are citizenship and nationality really ‘essentially the same concept’ even in a technical legal sense, ‘generally’ speaking? Is ‘citizenship’ really confined to the national dimension? Thus, for instance, Canadian immigration documents ask ‘What is your “citizenship/citoyenneté”?’, meaning by that your legal international state membership, where equivalent French documents will ask for your ‘nationalité’. Alternatively, the Mexican Constitution defines all Mexican men and women as possessing nationality but not ciudadania/citizenship until they reach 18 years of age and live honestly (‘tener un modo honesto de vivir’). Mexican nationality by birth adheres to the person; citizenship is revocable. The conditions of full inclusion in the definition of nationality and citizenship have changed along with the Mexican Republic and Constitutions (Ortíz Leroux, 2007). We have spent a lot of time in this book contesting the view that citizenship is (only) a legal status vis-à-vis the state – and this applies equally to the tendency to equate or elide it with nationality, or claim any stability in either category.

Sassen claims that both terms – ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’ – refer to the ‘national’ level, where national seems to mean the ‘state’; this is a further example of the ambiguously naturalised connection between states and nations when ‘national’ becomes a way to designate a level, as opposed to ‘local’, for instance. But what is to be learnt from their confusion and conflation, or from the apparently not only commonsensical, but also academic and governmental, facility with which these terms are used interchangeably? It seems to us that attention to the fluctuation in uses and meanings, in different contexts, is a central issue when discussing the decentring of states and nations in relation to citizenship processes. Exploring such fluctuations – and particularly unsettled moments – is one of the ways through which to unlock relationships that are often taken for granted as conventional, natural or normal. Our emphasis here is on the need to problematise and decentre the often-assumed connection between nationality, nation-ness and citizenship(s), and to question the practice of treating the ‘national community’ as the only or the natural way to imagine the ‘community of citizens’.

The resulting elisions between ‘the nation of citizens’ and ‘the nation of compatriots’ (Habermas, 1992), and the troubled connections between nation-ness (feeling of belonging to a shared identity), nationality (as a legal status linking an individual to the state) and citizenship (as political subjectification and membership), are commonly found, as stated earlier, in the multiple uses of the term ‘citizenship’ in the English-language literature; also, as evoked in Chapter One, similar ‘slips’ in meanings can be observed in French, as well as in German. We discussed earlier the need to include theories of citizenship themselves in the ‘thick contextualisation’ of citizenship, and the same goes for the ways through which contingent crystallisations of the connections between nation-ness, nationality and citizenship achieved the status of ‘abstract models’. Thus, for instance, the classic and naturalised dichotomy between ‘the French’ conception of the civic, political and contractual nation (nation of citizens) and ‘the German’ one of the ethnic and cultural nation (nation of compatriots) was produced in specific historical circumstances in the 1870s, when the aim was for each country’s philosophers and politicians to prove their legitimate right on Alsace-Lorraine. As Balibar rightly suggests:

It is time to get out of perspectives limited by stereotyped antithesis between ‘citoyenneté à la française’ and the fairly caricatural figures of ‘anglo-saxon communitarianism’ and of ‘ethnic nation’ of besides the Rhine or further East, to reject binary oppositions ... and look for more complex formulations. (2001: 207)

The process of working transnationally has been productive for making these issues more visible, since looking at other contexts and the different ‘bundlings’ that they produce enables some critical distance from the recurrent, if rarely examined, English-language conflation of nationality and citizenship. Relationships between citizenship, nationality and national identity are indeed historically and politically variable and always ‘under construction’ (or reconstruction) as political projects to govern the ‘nation’ shift. In Brazil, the emphasis on the state’s definition of citizenship through the category of ‘worker’ is intimately connected with efforts directed at developing national identity from the 1930 Revolution onwards, where the Brazilian focal concerns were expressed in the terms unidade nacional (national unity) and construção da Nação (nation-building). Concerns with the centrality of culture in that process made the construção da cultura nacional a focus of the Brazilian ‘state ideological production’, which played a powerful role in establishing a common ground between state intellectuals and others, including those not aligned with the authoritarian bias that presided over the state’s projects and who, in fact, opposed them strongly. One strong reason for the recognition of workers as citizens was the need to include them in the nation, whose very existence was seen as fragmented by different cleavages, among which the non-citizenship of popular sectors and poor people was culturally and politically significant. This nation-building work is often primarily associated with ‘new nations’ – marking a particular phase of forming and establishing the nation (which is then transcended when nations become ‘mature’). We would prefer to see it as a recurrent issue for nations – and their states.

What Anderson (1983: 13) calls ‘nation-ness’ (to distinguish it from the more formal/legal sense of nationality) is one of the forms through which states try to organise – and naturalise – the relationships between people, place and politics. The nation is imagined simultaneously as: a bounded space (the territory claimed by the nation-state); a people (the inhabitants of that space); and a polity (in which people, government and state form a symbolic unity). As analysed by Neveu and Filippova (2011), in the Russian case, the two terms načional’nost’ (usually translated as nationality/nationalité) and grazhdanstvo (citizenship) have very different meanings. The first means ‘ethnic belonging’ (very close to Anderson’s notion of nation-ness), while the second refers to membership in a political/state-based community. Until 1997, Soviet internal passports (officially named ‘Soviet Citizen’s passport’) had a načional’nost’ entry that provided information on a person’s ethnicity (eg Russian, Tatar, Yakut, etc, but also ‘Jewish’, which had been considered a national [in the sense of people] rather than religious identification). Nowadays, in Russia and in some of the New Independent States, the načional’nost’ entry is excluded from passport and personal data files; a change that manifests, to some extent, a ‘privatisation of ethnicity’, although individuals are still questioned about their ‘nationality’ during population censuses. So the blurring here is rather different: between ‘nationality’ and ‘ethnicity’, rather than between ‘nationality’ and ‘citizenship’. According to this logic, the nation is not a political entity, but rather just one of many possible forms of ethnic community; during the Soviet era, the ‘Soviet Nation’ was never an issue, there was a ‘Soviet People’, officially defined as ‘a new historical community’, composed of many ‘nations’ (načii), ‘peoples’ (narody) and ‘nationalities’ (narodnosty).

Relations between nation-ness, nationality and citizenship are thus not ‘natural’ ones; they are built in the face of specific stakes and aims, and need significant cultural and political work to be deployed to make them come true. One example of such work is the extent to which, in a period that has seen the development of analysis underlining the potential emergence of ‘post-national’ forms of citizenship (see later), the relationship between citizenship and the ‘national question’ has been re-dramatised in st...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• One: Recentering citizenship
• Two: Decentering citizenship
• Three: Imagining the ‘communities’ of citizenship
• Conclusion: Disputing citizenship
• References