Citizenship between Past and Future

Engin F. Isin, Peter Nyers, Bryan S. Turner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415454414
• eBook ISBN: 9781317991403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Citizenship between Past and Future brings together some of the most prominent scholars in the field of citizenship studies to assess, critically and contextually, the ongoing significance of citizenship as an object of study.

The authors reflect on the major issues and debates that have emerged in the field of citizenship studies over the last decade as well as to point out some of the new challenges ahead. The book recasts traditional thinking about citizenship beyond issues of legal status and investigates it rather as a strategic concept that is central in the analysis of identity, participation, human rights, and emerging forms of political life.

Seeking to broaden the debate on the meaning, significance, and practices of citizenship, the authors engage with an impressive and challenging array of theoretical and substantive issues. Citizenship is investigated in terms of debates over inclusion and exclusion, statism and cosmopolitanism, status and rights, gender and race, and multiculturalism and global inequality. The book revitalizes the debate over a key political concept and offers new ways of thinking about citizenship that take into account contemporary challenges.

Investigating Citizenship: An Agenda for Citizenship Studies

ENGIN F. ISIN & BRYAN S. TURNER

Introduction

Modern citizenship is constructed historically from a set of contributory rights and duties that are related to work, public service (for example, military or jury service) and parenthood or family formation. It defines belonging to a society through the entitlements associated with service, and is perhaps most clearly evident in a national system of taxation. This model of citizenship as social rights has been closely associated with the legacy of the English sociologist Thomas H. Marshall (1893–1982). Marshallian citizenship has been subject to extensive criticism over the last two decades and the social model of citizenship has been expanded and deepened by approaches that emphasize the flexibility of social membership, the limitations of citizenship merely as rights, and by perspectives that emphasize identity and difference. Also, concern to defend human rights has often outmatched the defence of citizenship as entitlement, status and social membership. While we recognize the limitations of Marshall, we nevertheless build upon his approach. In particular we stress crucial compatibility of citizenship and human rights, emphasizing the importance of citizenship in effective democratic societies. Citizenship is essential for cultivating civic virtues and democratic values. The notion of duty should not be separated too sharply from rights and we attempt to develop a notion of rights (such as “rights of mobility and transaction”) that is relevant to globalization. Although globalization is often assumed to create a world in which citizenship loses its importance, we demonstrate its vital importance to contemporary political institutions.

Although the origins of the western institution of citizenship can be sought in the political cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, citizenship rights became significant as an aspect of modern politics only when certain key revolutionary events had appropriated the political norms of ancient Greece and Rome as their own: the English civil war, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. These revolutions had much in common; for example, the evolution of citizenship, involving a set of exclusionary rights that established claims to collective resources, and contributing to the formation of the state and then the nation. There was a shared emphasis on the contributions of the “common man” in services to the state through taxation and military service. Each revolution, however, appropriated and interpreted citizenship quite differently. The republican French tradition assumed the suppression of differences between citizens, who were to share a common loyalty to the republic in which religious identities were excluded from the public domain. French notions about citizenship were the results of the rational Enlightenment and were expressed radically in the writings of aristocrats like the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who among other things championed the rights of women as citizens in his essay of 1790 “On giving women the right of citizenship” (McLean & Hewitt, 1994). In the United States, citizenship emerged with the characteristics that were described classically by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) in his two volumes on Democracy in America (2003) in 1835 and 1840. The citizen was seen to participate in the state through civil society, which was composed of a multitude of voluntary associations such as chapels, denominations, and towns. Citizens shared a radical doctrine of egalitarianism, and there was a profound suspicion of central institutions of government. In the British case, citizenship was constituted within the framework of the common law, which safeguarded the privileges of property owners, and was a barrier against the power of the state over the individual. Parliament and the rule of law established a system of checks against the rise of an absolutist state. The rights of the citizen were essentially negative freedoms from interference rather than positive rights to enjoy certain privileges. Again, these forms of citizenship were very different from social citizenship in Otto von Bismarck's Germany where rights to social security were more important than civil liberties.

Perhaps the first thing to say therefore about investigating citizenship is that it inevitably involves the comparative study of the rights and duties of citizens across diverse states. Those rights that depend on obligations to the state have played an important part in the emergence of two modern movements: nationalism and capitalism. We have observed that much of the research undertaken into modern citizenship has been, implicitly or explicitly, concerned with the tensions and contradictions between citizenship and the state (exclusion versus inclusion, rights versus obligations), and between nationalism and capitalism (inward versus outward movements, social cohesion versus accumulation).

While investigating citizenship had been an inherent concern of political thought for centuries (wrapped, as it were, within more illustrious terms such as authority, freedom, state, law, right, and obligation), it is in the early modern era, at the onset of the three revolutions mentioned earlier, that we see the separation of subjects from citizens. While Thomas Hobbes was having difficulties recognizing the citizen, we find Baruch Spinoza bravely declaring in the Tractatus Politicus (published posthumously in 1677) that “I call men citizens in so far as they enjoy all the advantages of the commonwealth by civil right; and subjects in so far as they are bound to obey the ordinances or laws of the commonwealth” (Spinoza, 1958, p. 285). Early modern political thought had, therefore, already implicitly concentrated on the rights and obligations of citizens in relation to the state. By contrast, modern social thought initially concentrated on the social structures that have distorted and limited the formal rights of citizens, and these structures are typically social class, gender and race. The debate about citizenship in the United States has concentrated heavily on the issues of slavery, race and immigration, whereas the debate in British social science has been conducted in terms of the tensions between citizenship, capitalism and class structure. Marshall developed the principal theory of citizenship within the context of post-war welfare institutions, drawing from a deeper tradition of struggling for redistribution. We shall now turn our attention to those two forms of struggle—redistribution and recognition—that structure claims to and demands of citizenship. Then we shall question the dominant conception of human rights and proceed to develop a conception of cosmopolitan citizenship that undergirds a broader but pragmatic conception of human rights.

Struggles for Redistribution and Citizenship

We need to understand Marshall's contribution to investigating citizenship from the perspective of post-war reconstruction and the dominance of John Maynard Keynes's ( 1883–1946) economic and social policies on redistribution. Marshall saw citizenship as an institution that would guarantee the workers a “modicum” of civilized life by protecting them from the unpredictable vagaries of accident, sickness and unemployment. Keynesian economic strategies of redistribution were intended to increase employment through state investment in utilities when the business cycle was in a downturn. Marshall's view of social rights was as much about offering the minimum of civilized existence to a depressed, urban working class as it was about giving them protection from unemployment. Perhaps this uncivilized urban squalor in British post-war life was nowhere better described than by George Orwell in his The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Orwell painted a bleak picture of the squalor, grime and drudgery of everyday life in the northern cities of industrial Britain. “Wigan Pier” was as outlandish to the English middle classes of southern England as Timbuktu or Khartoum. The book that had been commissioned by Victor Gollancz in January 1936 to provide an analysis of the “condition of England” joined the tradition of William Cobbett (1763–1845), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) as an indictment of grinding poverty. It was against such conditions that Marshallian citizenship offered some hope of social reform, drawing from a deeper tradition that extended back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

We can also see that in some ways Marshallian citizenship theory provides the sociological underpinning to Keynes's theory of money. Working-class politics was an important aspect of pressure on the state to protect workers from unemployment and insecurity. The welfare state often appears as an aspect of social reconstruction because reformers like William Beveridge (1879–1963) thought idealistically that the welfare state would remove the five giant evils of post-war Britain, namely, want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Richard Titmuss (1958) saw more clearly that social citizenship was the unintended consequence of wartime mobilization and strategies to rebuild post-war Britain in the context of imperial failure.

The Marshallian understanding of citizenship, which came to dominate sociological approaches to social rights in the second half of the twentieth century, hardly needs any elaboration (Barbalet, 1988). His argument that citizenship was composed of three sets of rights is well known. Civil rights developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were institutionalized in common law, habeas corpus and the jury system. In English common law, its great spokesman was Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) whose legal philosophy was expressed in the Petition of Right (1628) against arbitrary taxation and arbitrary imprisonment. In the second stage, political rights were institutionalized in parliament and an extension of the franchise, and social rights in the twentieth century were built into the welfare state.

Marshall's ideas articulated the basic principles of social policy in Britain, but his ideas have come under increasing criticism. There is the obvious criticism that he neglected gender, assuming a conventional sexual division of labour that was increasingly irrelevant as women entered the formal labour market and the traditional family disappeared. He was less concerned with race and ethnicity (though see Marshall, 1981), despite Britain's dependence on Commonwealth labour to feed its post-war recovery. These problems can be summarized by saying that Marshall took the definition of citizen for granted, whereas contemporary theories of citizenship have been primarily concerned with rapidly changing identities: who is the citizen? If contributory rights and duties, relating to work, taxation, military service and parenthood, defined Marshallian citizenship, what is the status of the unemployed, the disabled, the elderly or the migrant worker? As identity has become a dominant issue of modern social movements, the relevance of Marshall's world appears to have been eclipsed, and with it, his approach to social rights. But we have argued that identity and citizenship are deeply connected (Isin & Wood, 1999; Isin & Turner, 2002).

Social Keynesianism was of course resisted in the United States, which retained a stronger notion of individual responsibility for welfare and relied upon local community initiatives to address social questions. The social dimension of rights claims has not sat easily with the American emphasis on community action and individual autonomy. Alexis de Tocqueville's theory of associational democracy rather than Marshall's welfare assumptions dominated American social science. De Tocqueville claimed to demonstrate that the absence of centralized, bureaucratic administration had encouraged individual initiative, and voluntary associations and community groups rather than state agencies had emerged to solve social and political problems. It is commonly argued that Americans are characteristically alienated from formal politics, big government and centralized authority, and hence their political commitments are channelled through local and informal associations (Bellah et al., 1985). Many argue that this active citizenship—participation in churches, voluntary associations and clubs—has, however, declined throughout the post-war period resulting in an erosion of trust, political participation and interest in politics (Putnam, 2000). There is, as we have noted, a powerful ideology of individualism that has been deeply suspicious of state involvement in welfare and therefore often antagonistic to the development of social rights. Individual rights such as freedom of conscience are championed, but social rights have been seen as aspects of socialism. The American Bar Association's House of Delegates opposed the Declaration of Human Rights because it contained social and economic rights in 1948, the Eisenhower Administration attempted to downplay the importance of the two Covenants on rights and, following action by Secretary of State Dulles, the United States did not ratify the Convention on Genocide (Galey, 1998). The American political class opposed the Declaration on the grounds that its social provisions smacked of communism and with the fall of communism American conservatives have been able to celebrate neo-liberal economic policies as the only viable global strategy.

Citizenship and welfare have consequently been profoundly altered by the Anglo-American neo-conservative revolution of the late 1970s, which created a political framework in which governments were no longer committed to the universalistic principles of social rights, a comprehensive welfare state, and full employment. Its tenets were either emulated by or, more frequently, imposed on other governments throughout the 1980s and 1990s, becoming global. These global redistribution strategies that promoted welfare for work saw a reduction of state intervention, deregulation of the labour and financial markets, implementation of free trade, reduction in personal taxation, and fiscal regulation of state expenditure. These strategies harnessed the doctrines of F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), Karl Popper (1902–1994), and Milton Friedman (1912–2006) to the purposes of policy formation. New Right theorists argued that judgements about human needs should be left to the operation of the market, not to governments. The historical period of Keynesian redistribution was replaced by more aggressive neo-conservative regimes in which the enterprising and self-regarding consumer became the driving force of the economy and the free market was a necessary condition of freedom. Although these doctrines are called either neo-liberal or neo-conservative, they may well be thought as a return to Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees in 1705 in which he set out to prove that private vices such as personal greed produce public goods such as wealth.

Struggles for Recognition and Citizenship

Traditional welfare forms of Marshallian citizenship were based on social rights, resulting from the contributions of individuals to the state in the form of work, military service (or similar public duty) and parenting. Contributory and redistributive entitlements presuppose a necessary relationship between right and duty. The entitlements of full-time employment in which the worker has paid taxes and pension contributions include unemployment benefit, health care, pensions, and education. Taxation and pensions are the two economic institutions that defined Marshallian, post-war citizenship, and the other was wartime service. The hallmark of a democratic modern state composed of citizens is a universal taxation system with few loopholes for the majority of the population. Tax evasion and corruption are correspondingly the hallmarks of failing states. Where an adequate taxation system is not functioning effectively, governments turn to the use of such instruments as a national lottery as in Thailand to generate funding for cash-strapped public utilities. This pattern of Keynesian welfare economics and Marshallian citizenship has been eroded by broad changes in the labour market, the transformation of modern warfare, the decline of the traditional family, the erosion of pension funds, the changing sexual division of labour, and changes in reproduction associated with new reproductive technologies (Turner, 2001).

The post-war model of social citizenship and state involvement is under additional strain because the ageing of the populations of the developed world and the decline in fertility is placing increased financial burdens on state pensions, health care and welfare services. As the active workforce declines in relation to the retired population, there is a reduction in the tax base and an erosion of private income flowing to the state through personal taxation. Because the majority of the population has inadequate savings to support themselves in sickness, retirement and old age, there are few easy solutions to this problem, or at least few solutions that an electorate will happily accept. Middle-class voters have typically welcomed cuts in personal income tax, accepting the argument that left-wing governments are high spending governments, producing inflation, inefficiency and indebtedness. In recent years in the United States and the United Kingdom, major companies have reneged on final salary pension schemes, leaving even more people without adequate pension coverage for old age.

The economic relationship between house prices, savings, investment and pensions in both countries is indicative of the recent transformation of citizenship by western governments that have embraced neo-conservative policies. Individuals and their families in the developed world seek to fund retirement by selling their homes on the basis of extraordinary increases in the property values of their houses. Personal savings remain low, and young people cannot enter the property ladder even where interest rates and mortgage repayments are at historically low levels. Homelessness has become a stigmatizing feature in a society dominated by home ownership, not only as an economic asset, but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Why Citizenship Studies?
• 1 Investigating Citizenship: An Agenda for Citizenship Studies
• 2 Twilight of Sovereignty or the Emergence of Cosmopolitan Norms? Rethinking Citizenship in Volatile Times
• 3 Transformation of Citizenship: Status, Rights, Identity
• 4 Inclusive Citizenship: Realizing the Potential
• 5 European Citizenship: A Critical Assessment
• 6 From Bounded to Flexible Citizenship: Lessons from Africa
• 7 Please Stay: Pied-a-Terre Subjects in the Megacity
• 8 Towards a Post-Citizenship Society? A Report from the Front
• 9 The Subject of Citizenship
• 10 Multiculturalism, Citizenship and National Identity
• 11 Being Here: Ethical Territoriality and the Rights of Immigrants
• 12 Citizenship and Global Distribution of Opportunity
• 13 The Right to Territory and the Contemporary Transformation of European Citizenship
• Index