Ambiguous Citizenship in an Age of Global Migration :

Aoileann Ní Mhurchú

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780748692781
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many people see citizenship in a globalised world in terms of binaries: inclusion/exclusion, past/present, particularism/universalism. Aoileann Ní Mhurchú points out the limitations of these positions and argues that we need to be able to take into account the people who get caught between these traditional categories. Using critical resources found in poststructural, psychoanalytic and postcolonial thought, Ní Mhurchú thinks in new ways about citizenship, drawing on a range of thinkers including Kristeva, Bhabha and Foucault. Taking a distinctive theoretical approach, she shows how citizenship is being reconfigured beyond these categories.

1	Exploring the Citizenship Debate: The Sovereign Citizen-Subject

Citizenship will continue to name a political practice that is plausibly monopolized by the modern state … [Yet it] also names a site at which our constitutive account of what we are supposed to be will become less plausible, and where the highly problematic character of what we think politics is and where it occurs will become increasingly pronounced … There is no point in pushing at these limits … without also pushing at the account of modern subjectivity which has been produced by, and is productive of, those limits.

R. B. J. Walker¹

Being political means being implicated in strategies and technologies of citizenship as otherness.

Engin Isin²

The ‘people’ cannot be taken as an already established notion: rather it consists of an act of permanent creation and recreation.

Étienne Balibar³

At present, dominant trends in citizenship scholarship frame the question of citizenship in terms of two opposing perspectives: one particularistic (exclusive), one universalistic (inclusive). The politics of citizenship is posited here as a trade-off between these diverging models. This first chapter argues that a new growing body of citizenship literature – explored here through the work of Étienne Balibar, Engin Isin and R. B. J. Walker – provides an alternative focus. It does so by challenging this dualistic framework as the necessary basis for discussions about citizenship. As the above quotations indicate, in their work Balibar, Isin and Walker emphasise the link between politics and subjectivity; in particular, how the latter takes its meaning from the former. It does not take for granted that subjects engage in statist politics, as sovereign autonomous beings.

This chapter argues that existing citizenship scholarship needs to be seen as one overarching debate which presents a spectrum of possible, yet limited, interpretive choices which are defined by a particular reality of what it means to ‘be’ a citizen (a political subject) in terms of sovereignty and autonomy, rather than a series of competing debates. The first part of the chapter explores the dominant intellectual and theoretical explanations for the two main theoretical models which have dominated citizenship scholarship. The second section considers how this dominant dualistic framework is challenged by the work of Balibar, Isin and Walker. I argue that their work destabilises the inevitability of the Citizenship Debate. I explore how the work of Balibar, Isin and Walker urges us to think about conceptions of subjectivity outside sovereignty and autonomy; I subsequently consider what the implications are of this alternative starting point for approaching the politics of citizenship.

The Citizenship Debate: Two Theoretical Models

This section outlines the two main theoretical models in citizenship scholarship which together form the understanding of the basis of current jurisprudence. The point in outlining these models is not to engage in yet another discussion regarding whether an exclusive (bounded) model or an inclusive (universal) model of citizenship is better, more desirable or more realistic and what their minute intricacies are. Rather, as will become clear, the two main models are outlined in this chapter to provide a basis for exploring (and unpacking) in subsequent chapters, the manner in which both, as articulated, leave unquestioned a modern concept of subjectivity which sits at the heart of the Citizenship Debate.

The Particular Exclusivist Model

The particular exclusivist model of citizenship relies on the understanding that citizenship and the questions of morality and politics which it entails can only be realised within clearly defined boundaries; it presumes that citizenship loses its meaning when detached from territoriality, shared nationality and sovereignty. David Miller is a champion of the exclusivist citizenship model. He points out that ‘all our experience of citizenship … has so far been of bounded citizenship: initially citizenship within the walls of the city state, later citizenship within the cultural limits of the nation-state’.⁴ Tracing the idea back to Rousseau and his ‘small-is-necessary perspective on citizenship’, David Miller equates the bounded citizenship model at its best with the republican understanding of citizenship as an active ideal. Here a specific political community is constructed around a bounded unit, understood as a finite single entity which is defined on the basis of shared characteristics and active participation in the community.⁵

The notion of citizenship as an active ideal is something which has gained favour and been promoted as a way of dealing with the question of community cohesion in recent decades. For example, according to FORUM, a Dutch institute for multicultural affairs, ‘an open, democratic society is a dynamic society created by and for active citizens that do not close themselves off from the rest of society or lock themselves up in closed communities’.⁶ Echoed elsewhere, what is stressed is the need to understand ‘active citizenship’ in terms of the ‘values of solidarity and participation, rather than isolation and withdrawal’;⁷ it links belonging to ‘direct democratic participation and responsibility’.⁸ Such an emphasis on the notion of citizenship as an active ideal can be seen as a response to growing fears about the lack of connection which certain people have to their country of birth. It is commonly understood that changes in citizenship policy have been linked to such concerns – within Europe, most notably in the UK in 1981 and in France in 1993.⁹

It is often argued in existing citizenship scholarship, for example, that in 1981 the British government successfully amended legislation surrounding the allocation of citizenship by appealing to such bounded active citizenship arguments. Previously citizenship had been allocated unconditionally at birth (unconditional jus soli) in the UK. However, in 1981 a new provision was introduced which stipulated that only those children whose parents were already British citizens or who had the right to remain in Britain without restriction (a legal condition referred to as ‘settled’) could become citizens at birth.¹⁰ This measure was justified as needing to ensure that those who became citizens at birth did so by design – because their parents had connections to the country – rather than by an accident of birth. According to the Home Secretary at the time,

the present arrangements lead to significant numbers of people acquiring the right of abode here although they have no real ties with this country … Some people would like to have our citizenship only or mainly because of the advantages that it confers if they go to live and work abroad.¹¹

Those in favour of the proposal argued that not everyone who happened to be born in the UK wanted to become a British citizen and they should not be forced to do so. They maintained that the proposal was necessary to create ‘a more meaningful citizenship for those who have close links with the United Kingdom’.¹²

A decade later in 1993 the French government amended the existing automatic entitlement to French citizenship at the age of majority (simple jus soli) by appealing similarly to the particularistic exclusive model of citizenship. Simple jus soli had previously been allocated in France automatically at the age of majority or at any time from birth if a declaration was taken by the parents of the child in question. Both options were abolished in 1993 and replaced with the need for such children to express their willingness (manifester leur volonté) between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one to be French.¹³ This amendment was introduced amid fears that citizenship was being accorded to people who were neither aware of it nor (necessarily) wanted it, given that it was being automatically granted to the children of migrants, and such people only had the right of refusal for one year.

What was argued was that certain people were becoming French without knowing or wanting to (français sans le savoir et sans le vouloir).¹⁴ Such people were ‘increasingly seen as a problematic “unassimilated” population’.¹⁵ As Randall Hansen and Jobst Koehler explain, it was believed that easy access to citizenship engendered immigration problems. It provided a way to circumvent the existing immigration controls: certain individuals could enter France illegally and, if they had children, who became citizens, could no longer be expelled, although they remained unable to work due to their illegal status.¹⁶ It was argued that many people were only becoming French for strategic reasons, to avoid expulsion for themselves and their families. The 1993 proposal was justified by the French government on the basis that it would help put in place ‘the proper foundations for nationality, and the rights and obligations associated with it’.¹⁷

Miller argues that it is the combination of the demanding and rewarding natures of republican citizenship that necessitates its exclusive focus in this manner: ‘to give citizenship rights freely to all-comers is to risk undermining the conditions of mutual trust and assurance that make responsible citizenship possible’.^18...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Translations
• Introduction
• 1. Exploring the Citizenship Debate: The Sovereign Citizen-Subject
• 2. A Lens: The 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum
• 3. Trapped in the Citizenship Debate: Sovereign Time and Space
• 4. Interrogating Sovereign Politics: An Alternative Citizen-Subject
• 5. Challenging the Citizenship Debate: Beyond State Sovereign Time and Space
• 6. Traces Rather than Spaces of Citizenship: Retheorising the Politics of Citizenship
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index