Citizenship and Ethnic Conflict

Haldun Gülalp, Haldun Gülalp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134203802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Making a new case for separating citizenship from nationality, this book comparatively examines a key selection of nation-states in terms of their definitions of nationality and citizenship, and the ways in which the association of some with the European Union has transformed these definitions.

In a combination of case studies from Europe and the Middle East, this book's comparative framework addresses the question of citizenship and ethnic conflict from the foundation of the nation-state, to the current challenges raised by globalization. This edited volume examines six different countries and looks at the way that ethnic or religious identity lies at the core of the national community, ultimately determining the state's definition and treatment of its citizens. The selected contributors to this new volume investigate this common ambiguity in the construction of nations, and look at the contrasting ways in which the issues of citizenship and identity are handled by different nation-states.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars studying in the areas of citizenship and the nation-state, ethnic conflict, globalization and Middle Eastern and European Politics.

1 Introduction

Citizenship vs. nationality?

Haldun Gülalp

The modern nation-state is (ideally) a territorially circumscribed entity, exercising legitimate power within its boundaries. Citizenship in the modern state is (ideally) linked to territorial sovereignty, so that individual members of that community are accepted as equals regardless of their primary communal affiliations. But historical reality is much more complex than these normative principles. The nation-state is a specific and historically contingent model of political organization whose origins may be found in the Westphalian Treaty of 1648, signed at the end of the “Thirty Years” religious wars, which in effect started the era of mutual recognition of territorial sovereignties. As territorial powers began to acquire “national” legitimation, the “nation-state” form came into existence. The universality of this political form in the twentieth century has been the outcome of the imposition of the European model of territorial state on a global scale, both through colonization and other less direct modes of imposition (Poggi 1978, 1990; King 1986; Breuilly 1982; Hobsbawm 1992; Giddens 1995). Yet this outer shell of a common form of political organization, the nation-state, contains a bewildering variety of local experiences. Moreover, the variety in the patterns of citizenship is never solely limited to formal legislation and almost always has a popular cultural dimension. The formal principle by which the state defines citizenship is not necessarily the same as its actual practice. In many concrete cases, the formal structures of citizenship diverge from both the ideological claims of the nation-states and their actual policy-making practices. The study of the similarities and differences between the countries examined in this book reveals the universal dimensions of these issues.

Nation-states define their national communities in diverse ways, but the core elements of nationality usually include a combination of such historically rooted identities as religion, race, or ethnicity. Typically, an implicit or explicit ethnic or religious identity lies at the core of this definition and influences the state’s treatment of its citizens. Thus, the modern state’s building of the national community and its ongoing relationship with it necessarily involves a tension: the nation-state aims to tear individuals from their “traditional” (or “primordial”) communal ties, and yet the conception of the nation still makes reference to a “traditional” identity. This essential tension, present from the inception of the nation-state, has been further deepened in recent years due to trends toward “globalization,” which has weakened national boundaries and made them more porous. Both the re-emergence of already existing but heretofore suppressed minority identities and mass transnational migration have led to the creation of multiple subcommunities with distinct cultural identities within what presumably used to be coherent national communities.

The nation-state between ethnicity and globalization

The notion of citizenship is closely tied to the modern state’s project of monopolizing the loyalties of individuals at the expense of their local, pre-national communities. In so far as citizenship implies the unification of a people around a state and the leveling of ranks by the creation of universal rights, it is identical to the building of a “nation” (Carr 1945; Marshall 1964). Citizenship therefore entails the creation of a new (national) community and a new (nationalist) ideology of political sovereignty. The concept of citizenship has two distinct aspects. First and foremost, it defines a new and politically constructed identity. As a system of closure, citizenship specifically identifies who is in, as a member of the national community, and who is out. Secondly, citizenship formally endows and burdens the members of the community with a set of rights and obligations. This is generally true regardless of the political regime of the nation-state. For example, in the same way that a liberal democratic nation-state grants the right of political participation only (or primarily) to its citizens, an illiberal and paternalistic nation-state that grants no or limited political rights but generous welfare benefits does so only (or primarily) to its own citizens. In both cases, state sovereignty is exercised in the name of the national community and is predicated upon nationalist ideology.

The greatest declared goal of nationalism, the dominant political ideology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is the coincidence of nation and state; and the greatest myth of nation-states is that such coincidence is not only feasible but even nearly exists. Where there is an admitted divergence, “minorities” are created. This unavoidable situation raises a set of questions about sovereignty and to whom it really belongs. How will these divergent elements be made to fit into a supposedly homogeneous population that exercises sovereignty? Will the minorities be considered full members of that sovereign community? What will be their rights? How will those rights differ from, or converge with, the rights of the majority population, to which, it is assumed, real sovereignty belongs?

But even before the question of identifying what those differential rights or obligations may be, there is the question of how actually to define the minorities. There is no uniform concept that identifies minorities in all historical contexts. Minorities are not defined by a universally given set of criteria, but by a variety of them: linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, sectarian, and so on. There is, in other words, a significant cultural dimension to the creation of minorities. One of the interesting dimensions of the history of nation-states is the “cultural construction” of the notion of citizenship, that is not only the official definitions provided by the state, but the popular-cultural concepts about who qualify and who do not qualify to become members of the community in the eyes of those who consider themselves to be the majority or the hegemonic (if not necessarily numerically dominant) element of that community.

In some cases, minorities are recognized as such from the inception of the nation-state, with the rest of the diverse elements of the population somehow brought into the (mythical) mold of a homogeneous nationality, while in others minorities are recent arrivals due to massive migration (whether drawn by job opportunities or propelled as refugees facing discrimination or annihilation). In yet some other cases, minorities have come into existence as a result of a group of citizens’ assertion of their “cultural” difference and consequent demand for political recognition as such. These cases have proliferated in recent decades during which differential rights for minorities have begun to be perceived as a matter of universal human rights. Thus, while the pursuit of homogeneity through assimilation and the suppression of distinct identities was the norm in an earlier period of nationalism, today, in the age of globalization and culturalism, assertions of difference have become one of the primary vehicles of political struggle. In recent decades, the demand for “multiculturalism” has become a crucial concept in the popular contestation of the dominant definitions of citizenship.¹

The language of culturalism and demand for “recognition” conceals the divergent sources of both the status and concerns of minorities. For instance, the Kurds in Turkey and the Turks in Germany may be treated as equivalent or at least comparable situations, although the former is a product of an old history of border drawing and nation building and the latter is a product of recent immigration. Attesting to the fluidity and variability of identities depending on the context, Kurdish-speaking immigrants from Turkey will still be called Turks in Germany. Nonetheless, the seeming similarity between these divergent cases reveals the myth of homogeneity; and the political language common to both has the cumulative effect of driving a wedge between political membership and cultural identity. Currently, the nation-state form of political sovereignty is under assault both from above and outside and from below and within. While globalization weakens and transforms the policy-making power of individual nation-states, the rising significance and urgency of cultural claims challenge the previously established forms of identity such as nation and class. This situation forces individual states to reassess and revise the established notions of citizenship, which have been formally defined by reference to a national community and granted by the nation-state as a set of social and political rights. Both globalization and culturalist movements complicate the imaginary coherence of national communities, question the existing terms of citizenship, and propose new foundations for political entitlement. Citizenship, as a system of closure that is based on nationality and contained within the boundaries of the nation-state, has begun to be revised and relaxed in the context of globalization, although not yet universally, as we shall see in the chapters below.

One alternative that has been emerging in recent years is the increase in multiple citizenships while another finds expression in the growth of the language of “human rights” and points at the need for institutions of supranational political community and democracy. In both cases, there is the increasingly pressing need to decouple rights from nationality (Soysal, Y. N. 1994; Faist 2004). Globalization seems to have opened up a postnational age of citizenship. While in the modern age of nationalism the normative expectation, however unrealistic, was for every nationality to aim to have its own independent state (Gellner 1983), in the postmodern age of globalization this is no longer the case. Nationality and political membership are now being separated. This is in stark contrast to an earlier era when the conflation between nationality and citizenship could be observed in both the interchangeable use of these two terms (which still continues to a certain extent) and the international legal norms that restricted multiple citizenships, such as the “Hague Convention” (1930), which stated that persons are entitled to only one nationality, and the “European Convention on Reduction of Cases of Multiple Nationality and Military Obligations in Cases of Multiple Nationality” (1963), which has now been replaced by the much more liberal “European Convention on Nationality” (1997).²

As the rise of self-consciously “multicultural” societies ruptures the link between nationality and citizenship, territory and governance are likewise separated through the creation of supranational institutions that limit the sovereignty of individual nation-states, such as, most prominently, the European Union (EU), which arguably has gone well beyond earlier forms of supranational political communities. In fact, as soon as the formally independent nation-state became the universal norm in the second half of the twentieth century, supranational institutions began to emerge that to a certain extent appropriated the sovereignty of individual nation-states. These institutions currently include, in addition to the regulatory agencies of the global economy, such as the IMF and the World Bank, the whole gamut of multinational political and legal organizations from the UN to NATO, and multinational treaties from the European Covenant of Human Rights to the Kyoto Protocol (Held 1991, 2000; Slaughter 2003). But, as far as political representation at the global level is concerned, nation-states are still the relevant units for the negotiation of transnational issues. Despite the growing multiplicity and complexity of the institutions of global governance, the political actors that engage in these treaties and organizations are still the formally sovereign nation-states. While, for example, legitimation of political power is more and more based on the transnational concept of human rights, these rights are still granted and regulated by individual nation-states. Thus, individual citizens may have begun to seek their human rights in the global arena, often in the form of demanding protection from their own sovereign states, but they can do so only in so far as their nation-states have signed on to the requisite covenants.

The EU, however, is a novel political organization that aims to transcend the nation-state form. While on the one hand it has put into practice a regime of human rights on a supranational level, thereby separating citizenship rights from nationality, on the other hand it is an experiment in cosmopolitan democracy that was originally envisaged by some enlightenment philosophers. Both are trends anticipated and advocated by recent scholarship on citizenship (see, for example, Turner 1993, Archibugi and Held 1995, Bohman and Lutz- Bachman 1997, Linklater 1998, Vandenburg 2000, Ignatieff 2001, Falk and Strauss 2001). Still based on the assumptions of the Westphalian order, the UN, for example, takes the nation-states that comprise it as the relevant units of representation and does not discriminate between them for membership, which only requires formally independent state sovereignty and is not contingent on the character of the political regime. Dictatorships and liberal democracies sit side by side to negotiate global affairs as formally equal members in the UN. The Security Council rests on an entirely different power structure within the UN, but it too ignores the political regime of a member country. The EU, by contrast, is an association of liberal democracies. Moreover, as far as nation-state sovereignty is concerned, the EU and the UN appear to be based on opposing principles. While in order to qualify for UN membership a nation-state has to be recognized as fully sovereign, to qualify for EU membership a nation-state has to agree to surrender a significant measure of its sovereignty.

Comparative perspectives

The comparison of the countries studied in this book hinges on the way in which the state defines citizenship and determines who is or is not its citizen; it also addresses the impact of association with the EU on the transformation of these definitions. Each of these cases faces the perennial problem of building a nation-state: how to define the relationship between the nation-state and the ethnicity, religion, or any other communal identity of the population, and how to make that definition acceptable to the people who are in an actual or potential relationship of citizenship with that nation-state. The cases covered in this book represent a range of different modes of citizenship, and yet they all face similar problems. Despite their differences, as detailed below, in each of these countries some implicit or explicit ethnic or religious identity lies at the core of the national community and determines the state’s definition and treatment of its citizens. In some cases, the existing notions of citizenship are being challenged by groups of people who feel that their political, economic, and social participation is hindered due to their religious or ethnic identities and hence express themselves through culturalist political mobilization with the aim to gain differential rights. In others, there is an effort to remove that ethnic or religious core from the definition of citizenship, with varying degrees of success. A comparison of these disparate cases shows that this common ambiguity in the construction of the nation (universalism vs. exclusionary communitarianism) is handled in different ways with differing outcomes, ranging from civil war to the peaceful redefinition of citizenship rights.

The six nation-states examined in this book have intertwined histories as well as revealing features of both convergence and divergence, as we see below. There are interesting links between them, both historical and ongoing. The most obvious is that many of these countries are descendants of the Ottoman Empire and products of the redrawing of the Middle Eastern map in the wake of wars. This is an important point to remember as, at the time of writing, the Middle East seems to be at yet another war-related crossroads in which borders are likely to be redrawn with serious consequences for citizenship and ethnic conflict.

The two, out of six, that do not descend from the Ottoman Empire are Germany and Israel; and they too have histories that are inextricably linked with each other, particularly through the horrors of the Nazi era, as well as with the other four, either as their neighbor (Israel) or as a receiver of Turkish immigrants and prominent actor in Turkey’s prospective membership in the EU (Germany). There is also something in common between Germany and Israel, which is not exactly shared by the others, at least not in the same formal way: the claim to an exclusive ethnic identity as the basis of the nation-state, based on a line of descent through blood ties in the case of Germany and on religion in the case of Israel.

For the four states that do descend from the Ottoman Empire, however, the empire’s millet system has been a powerful influence. Religion, rather than ethnicity or language, was the main basis of identification for the diverse subject populations of the Ottoman Empire; and the empire granted the various religious communities under its rule some form of autonomy in their internal affairs. A millet, then, was a religious community, which could include members of different ethnic and linguistic groups and residents of different regions of the empire, and which had some political power and significance. Each millet had its own semi-autonomous legal, judicial, as well as cultural and educational, functions, and was represented by a leader whose position was incorporated into the central administration of the empire. In the course of the nineteenth-century modernization of the Ottoman Empire, the term millet began to acquire its current meaning in the Turkish language, which is equivalent to the word “nation.”³

But the Ottoman legacy has not been the only influence contributing to these four countries’ nation-state formation experiences. Two of these four, Lebanon and Iraq, have also been colonized by “modern” colonial powers, France and Britain respectively, while the other two, Turkey and Greece, have never been colonized. The core remnant of the empire, that is Turkey, self-consciously rejected the Ottoman past and aimed to borrow from the French model of citizenship. The outcome was ambiguous, as we see below. Greece, on the other hand, whose nationalism was in many ways built, and to this day reproduced, in a dialectical relationship with Turkish nationalism, also claims, internally contradictorily, both Hellenic and Orthodox Christian sources of identity.

Finally, the state structures in both Iraq and Lebanon are powerfully shaped by their respective colonial experiences, most evidently in the fact that when Iraq gained independence from Britain it had the form of a monarchy, whereas France bequeathed its republicanism to independent Lebanon. Both, however, as colonies carved out of the Ottoman Empire, had borders drawn at negotiation tables between superpowers; and both have been, in effect, patchworks and seemingly interminable nation-building projects in progress.

Or, at least, that is how they are currently perceived. It is tempting, in other words, to think of these two examples as broadly representative of Middle Eastern (or, more generally, postcolonial) states, where nation-building has failed. The comparative framework of this book, however, suggests that the problem is more general and therefore its source lies elsewhere. If ethnic diversity challenges even those nationstates of the European core, where the myth of homogeneity has had a longer time to establish itself, and even if it does so for no other reason than the massive immigration of recent decades, then the problem perhaps lies in the assumptions of the nation-state form itself. Discarding the myth (and thus the presumed requirement) of homogeneity and liberating citizenship from nationality may be the only meaningful ways forward.

Diversity within unity

Germany is often presented as the archetype of the citizenship model that is based on the principle of ethnic descent (jus sanguinis), contrasted to the territorial principle (jus soli) epitomized by France (Brubaker 1992). In a piece that sets the tone for the general theoretical argument of the book, Riva Kastoryano (Chapter 2) examines the recent relaxation of the ethnicity-based, exclusionary citizenship law in Germany, where the sizable number of Turkish immigrants feel discriminated against. Kastoryano argues that the country’s new citizenship law (2000), however revolutionary it may be for ending the “right of blood” principle (jus sanguinis), is not likely to integrate the Turks into German society, for government policy still constructs Turks as a homogeneous ethnic minority, despite their multiple internal divisions. Turks, in response, have demanded the right to “dual citizenship,” which the new law does not recognize (although, admittedly, the restrictions of the law are not uniformly enforced throughout the country). The German government’s denial of dual citizenship does not necessarily contribute to its presumed aim, that is the cultural assimilation of the Turks. On the contrary, focusing on the question of dual nationality perpetuates the distinction between true and false citizens. But this chapter also argues that, although demanded by the Turkish denizens of Germany as a democratic right, dual citizenship would still mark the bearer as less than a full citizen. Moreover, there is really nothing that is inherently democratic in the logic of dual citizenship, since citizenship can o...