Citizenship and its Others

Bridget Anderson, Vanessa Hughes, Bridget Anderson, Vanessa Hughes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349556229, 9781137435071
• eBook ISBN: 9781137435088
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume analyzes citizenship through attention to its Others, revealing the partiality of citizenship's inclusion and claims to equality by defining it as legal status, political belonging and membership rights. Established and emerging scholars explore the exclusion of migrants, welfare claimants, women, children and others.

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Introduction

Bridget Anderson and Vanessa Hughes

In recent years we have had a proliferation of citizenships. They have sprung up like weeds: ecological citizenship, sexual citizenship, active citizenship, global citizenship and so on. Citizenship talk also infuses popular debates and political practices, where its internal contradictions are often exposed: Is citizenship a privilege or a right? Is naturalisation a means of facilitating integration or a reward for integration? There have been claims that the combination of overuse and confusion has meant that the concept of citizenship risks losing its meaning, and in recent years migration scholars have contributed significantly to the literature on citizenship by emphasising that citizenship is a legal status. As Bauböck puts it, citizenship ‘marks a distinction between members and outsiders based on their different relations to particular states’ (Bauböck 2006: 15). While legal citizenship has been opened to many (but not all) groups who in the past were not considered ‘citizens’, such as Black people, women, those who do not own property, people with physical disabilities and so on, this expansion stops at the national border. Importantly, the border is not simply at the edge of territory but reaches into the heart of political space. Non-citizens are not simply excluded from the territory but are differentially included when residing on the territory. For example, in the United Kingdom it is illegal to refuse employment to a citizen qualified for a job solely on the grounds that they were born in a different country. This is considered discriminatory. However, immigration law requires employers to reject legally resident Third Country National candidates in favour of suitable UK/EU applicants, effectively requiring discrimination. Thus the position of migrants challenges liberal citizenship’s claims to inclusion and equality and draws attention to the ways in which Non-citizens are formally excluded.

The tension between citizenship rights and human rights, or between citizenship and equality, has been the focus of considerable interest in political theory, and looks to be moving centre stage in political debate as detention, deportation and hostility to ‘migrants’ increase. The relation of equality held to characterise citizenship in liberal democracies was for too long imagined as unproblematically enacted in national spaces. Migration scholars have contributed to unmasking this assumption and foregrounding its implications. Some have drawn attention to the position of those who are not formal citizens with a view to exploring re-making citizenship. Taking the position that citizenship is built ‘from below’, not just gifted from above, following Rancière they argue that claiming citizenship can effectively be forging it. Others are more sceptical, and the question of whether citizenship is irredeemable and necessarily a tool of global inequality or can be adapted to accommodate global mobility continues to be subject to robust debate.

One challenge for both these positions is the risk of reinforcing the citizen/Non-citizen binary. This overlooks the situations of long-term residents and the complexities of citizenship, including those raised by EU citizenship. However, more importantly for the purposes of this volume, it reinforces the fantasy of ‘full citizenship’. Full citizenship is, as Cohen puts it, a ‘myth’: ‘In the final analysis, citizenship does not make a citizenry equal. In fact, it appears to institutionalize both difference and inequalities, albeit in sometimes unexpected ways’ (Cohen 2009: 12). The myth of full citizenship, the claim that all citizens are fully and equally included, is impossible to maintain if one’s focus is on the legal citizenry alone. However, once citizenship is turned into a binary, an either or, it promises full and equal rights. That is, legal status and its strong association with enforcement help to stabilise ‘full citizenship’ and turn attention well away from the gendered, classed and racialised borders within formal citizenship. Immigration enforcement practices reify citizenship’s privileges by attention to migrants’ abjection. Emphasising the inclusions/exclusions of citizenship encourages an assumption not only that immigration controls have no direct adverse consequences for citizens but also that all formal citizens are fully and equally included.

Citizenship does not guarantee inclusion. While formal membership is critical, modern states portray themselves not as arbitrary collections of people hung together by a common legal status but as communities of value, comprised of people who share common ideals and (exemplary) patterns of behaviour expressed through ethnicity, religion, culture or language (Anderson 2013). As citizenship is a Good, so the community of value is populated by Good Citizens. When US President Obama addressed the nation on immigration in November 2014, he clearly stated what kinds of immigrants were not welcome in the US community: ‘Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids’.¹ Yet the problem is of course that plenty of US-born citizens are felons, criminals, gang members and people not working hard for their kids. Not all formal citizens are Good Citizens. Scholars such as Bonnie Honig (2001) have explored how the nation is defined from the outside by the Non-Citizen, but what has passed unremarked is that the community of value is also defined from the inside. Individuals and groups who are imagined as incapable of, or failing to live up to, liberal ideals may be designated as ‘Failed Citizens’. The Failed Citizen, like the Non-Citizen, can be fixed through the category of the criminal, though this by no means exhausts the category. It includes a wide range of people, such as welfare dependents, sex workers and so on. Taken together, the Failed Citizen and the Non-Citizen are citizenship’s Others (Anderson 2013).

Non-Citizens and Failed Citizens are typically sharply differentiated and indeed are used to discipline each other: the hardworking immigrant offers a fine example to the lazy welfare dependent, and their family values are an example to gays, single mothers and irresponsible fathers; the benefit dependent has their job stolen from them by the illegal immigrant; the gay decries the homophobia of the immigrant and so on. The fragility of the hold of the nearly-good-enough-citizen, the contingently accepted, permeates the politics of citizenship. Hierarchies of belonging and of exclusion are not stable and need to be constantly performed and reiterated. In practice these are not simple binaries, and each Other has complexity and ambiguity, with zones of toleration (the hardworking immigrant, the reformed criminal, the deserving benefit claimant, the non-promiscuous gay). The Tolerated Citizen must work hard to remain in this zone of toleration and not slip into failure, and their assertions of deservingness can play an important role in upholding the virtues of Good Citizenship. This is very recognisable for those who have worked with migrant communities – those with legal status or long-term residents often complain about new arrivals or irregular compatriots for bringing them into disrepute.

Many Non-Citizens and their supporters are keen to distance themselves from Failed Citizens. However, claims such as ‘Illegal immigrants are not criminals’, ‘Migrants do not claim benefits’ ‘9/11 bombers were not illegals’ overlook what Non-Citizens share with marginalised citizens. In the United States, for example, a felony conviction by anyone in a household may be grounds for the household’s eviction from public housing, and in many states convicted drug felons lose the right to vote, to Medicaid, to food aid, public housing and to any form of government education grant for life. For these people, the promise of formal citizenship is largely reduced to the bare toleration of their presence on state territory. Effectively citizenship is reduced to a minimal right to be present. Put like this, and purged of its moral claims, the distinction between the Non- and the Failed Citizen begins to look more hazy. The community of value is defined from outside by exclusion, and from inside by failure, but the excluded also fail, and the failed are also excluded.

Acknowledgement of the Failed Citizen’s minimal right to be present may be through gritted teeth. Consider the press coverage of cases where citizens are forcibly returned after serving criminal sentences, for example. The popular response towards returning child sex offenders who have served sentences abroad is not unlike the response to those seeking to return to European Union states having been fighting in Syria – Don’t let them in! They might be citizens but they are not ‘one of us’. As Goldberg (1993) has put it, the Good Citizen has rights because he has values, and has values because he has rights. The Failed Citizen does not have rights because he does not have values, and he does not have values because he does not have rights.

This volume aims to engage with debates on citizenship through paying attention to the Others of the Good Citizen, and asking what attention to citizenship’s Others reveals about the nature of good citizenship. There are many Others who are not included in this volume: the drug addict, the sex worker and the physically/mentally ‘unfit’, but we hope to give an indication of the potential of such an approach. It is in this spirit, and to reflect the dynamism and multi-layered nature of these relations, that most chapters are followed by one or two shorter pieces that develop or engage with the ideas put forward by the author.

Chapter 2 by Laura Brace reflects on the Good Citizen, examining the meanings of ‘good citizenship’ in relation to ideas about property, self-ownership, equality and labour, and how these inform prevailing notions of freedom, belonging and otherness. In her chapter, she reveals the connections between the liberal sovereign self and the meanings of citizenship, and considers the crucial intersections between labour, freedom and belonging to understand what it means to be a citizen. She argues that questions of belonging must be considered in terms of individuals’ construction as market actors, workers and migrants, as well as citizens, and thus reveals how the Good Citizen is constructed as particularly gendered, classed and racialised. Starting from a model of citizenship as imagined through Rousseau’s social contract, and using Hegel’s theory of civil society and Mill’s critique of the social contract, Brace argues that self-government and self-ownership are essential for understanding how the Good Citizen is constituted in relation to his or her Others and how hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion are established.

Taking an historical approach, David Feldman argues for the value of citizenship in making claims to social justice, despite its exclusionary nature. He claims citizenship can serve as a weapon ‘that the weak, and those who would fight with and for them, possess’. Considered from an historical perspective, he argues, citizenship has an emancipatory potential, and its exclusions are not essential to it but rather reflect a particular context that changes over time.

In her response, Hughes examines the values underpinning contemporary citizenship in the United Kingdom using the lens of recent changes to family migration policy. These illustrate the ways in which the Good Citizen continues to be gendered and the underpinning assumptions of the ‘good family’ as nuclear and heteronormative. They reveal not only who can become a member of the community but also, following Brace, how many people are likely to find themselves not excluded but only partially included, thus creating hierarchies of citizens.

In Chapter 3, Bridget Anderson argues for the importance of examining immigration controls as constitutive of citizenship as much as they constitute non-citizenship, and suggest that this can help us demythologise formal citizenship and move beyond an approach that takes migrants and marginalised citizens as competitors for privileges of membership. She argues that the myth of ‘full citizenship’ is linked to the moral value of labour, and is consequently a feature of debates on both migration and welfare benefits. Taking the EU citizen as the paradigm of the worker citizen, she emphasises the importance of an analysis that does not assume the differentiation between migrants and citizens.

In her response, Isabel Shutes develops the ways in which immigration controls determine access to social provisions and shape the relationship between work and welfare. She extends Anderson’s discussions by looking at its gendered dimensions and implications for care and care-providers. Shutes argues that the gendered division of paid/unpaid work continues to shape unequal relationship to the market and rights of citizenship for women and men. Considering how work underpins citizenship rights and policies towards citizens and Non-citizens in an EU context, she argues that this has significant gendered implications for low-paid and unpaid carers and more generally for the status of care itself.

Adding a global perspective, Daley in her response to Anderson’s chapter examines how interconnections and intersections across space and time are involved in the constitution of the national. Using a post-colonial and relational approach, she links the migrant/immigrant and the citizen, examines how these relations are practised through politics and problematises the assumed coupling of labour to a territory. Such an approach, she argues, will help to ‘decolonize it [citizenship] from its modernist presumptions’.

In Chapter 4, Melanie Griffiths draws on qualitative research with detainees, refused asylum seekers and precarious migrants to analyse the convergence of the criminal and the foreigner in the modern-day UK bogeyman of the ‘Foreign Criminal’. She analyses how the figure combines the two Others of the citizen – the migrant and the criminal and defines the citizen from both the inside and the outside. Thus the Foreign Criminal is the Other, not only of the Good Citizen but also of the Citizen Criminal and the Good Migrant. Tracing the increasing use of criminal justice rhetoric and technologies in migration management and the growing number of immigration consequences for criminal offences, she excavates the Foreign Criminal category’s tensions, contradictions and heterogeneity and demonstrates how it is racialised, gendered and classed. Through the examination of three case studies, she demonstrates the real political and social consequences that this categorisation brings to men’s lives.

Adding to Griffiths’ analysis, Andrijasevic argues for the relevance of privatisation and the expansion of capital into detention and removal as a factor in the broadening of the category of the Foreign Criminal and increased detentions and deportations. As an integral part of the migration industry, she argues, immigration control, detention and deportation are ‘driven by the logic of the market and the transnational financial flows’.

In his response to Griffiths, Michael Keith suggests that we ‘only connect’. He places the folk devil of the Foreign Criminal within the broader context of anti-migrant populism, and suggests that the tools we can use to analyse migration and its relation to ‘race relations’, fashioned in response to the Windrush generations, are in need of reworking. He argues in particular that as European governance has transformed national sovereignty through free movement of European Economic Area (EEA) workers, the politics of welfare systems are ‘up for grabs’ and that the metropolis is critical in the generation of collective subjects.

In Chapter 5, Nandita Sharma examines the role of racism and the connected idea of nationhood in the construction of the Others of citizenship. By deconstructing the ‘sovereignty story’ by de-coupling identity, territory and authority, or the nation and its citizens, she argues that racism ‘is one of the key vectors determining the validity of anyone’s claim to national belonging’. Crucially Sharma argues that ‘it is important that we understand the national form of state power as one that inherently organizes human “society” as a racialized community, one in which citizenship operates to create a positively racialized “nation” and a negatively racialized other’. She argues that we must reject racist and nationalist basis of organising human societies and citizenship if we are to ‘open up the possibility of reclaiming our planet from capitalists and states and taking it back as our collective source of life’.

David T. Goldberg elaborates on Sharma’s chapter by considering the implications of globalising neoliberalisation and neoliberalising globalisations on the traditional model of capital accumulation. He argues that neoliberalising globalisation has shifted the boundaries of the nation-state borders towards an emphasis on global flows and has thus ‘fractured the traditional approach to “citizenship and its others”’. Simultaneously, globalising neoliberalism, in his analysis, emphasises state securitisation where citizenship becomes more of an instrumentalisation than an ontological category.

In Chapter 6, Eithne Luibhéid analyses how nationalist gender and sexual regimes uphold the citizen/migrant distinction as relational, multiscalar and unequal. By looking at Ireland’s 2004 citizenship referendum, which altered citizenship laws in response to a perceived ‘crisis’ over migrant women giving birth to children who were legally citizens, Luibhéid brings the gendered and (hetero) sexual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Reflections on the Good Citizen
• 3 Immigration and the Worker Citizen
• 4 The Convergence of the Criminal and the Foreigner in the Production of Citizenship
• 5 Racism
• 6 Sexualities, Intimacies, and the Citizen/Migrant Distinction
• 7 Class, Spatial Justice and the Production of Not-Quite Citizens
• 8 Denizens All: The Otherness of Citizenship
• Index