Citizenship and Collective Identity in Europe

Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135211769
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book is the first monograph to systematically explore the relationship between citizenship and collective identity in the European Union, integrating two fields of research – citizenship and collective identity.

Karolewski argues that various types of citizenship correlate with differing collective identities and demonstrates the link between citizenship and collective identity. He constructs three generic models of citizenship including the republican, the liberal and the caesarean citizenship to which he ascribes types of collective identity. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the book integrates concepts, theories and empirical findings from sociology (in the field of citizenship research), social psychology (in the field of collective identity), legal studies (in the chapter on the European Charter of Fundamental Rights), security studies (in the chapter on the politics of insecurity) and philosophy (in the chapter on pathologies of deliberation) to examine the current trends of European citizenship and European identity politics.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of European politics, political theory, political philosophy, sociology and social psychology.

1
The conceptual dimension of citizenship

Depending on the epistemological access to the notion of citizenship, scholars in general subscribe either to a normative account of citizenship or to the functionalist one.

Therefore, some scholars might be interested in an ideal of citizenship. Sometimes, this assumes a standard of citizenship referring to a lost ideal of Ancient Greece or the Roman Empire, where citizens were higher beings in ethical, ontological (Greek Polis) and legal terms (Roman Empire). Not only were they believed to make intelligent and purposive judgments, but also expected to pursue common goods. This view idealizes a specific historical form of citizenship by canonizing it into a universal standard of citizenship. It is usually accompanied by a critical stance towards contemporary types of citizenship bemoaning their liberal, thin or underdeveloped shape.¹ Further normative approaches to citizenship attempt to abstract from specific historical accounts of citizenship and anchor it in a system of liberty and equality. The realization of liberty and equality is therefore regarded as a prerequisite for citizenship in a democratic regime. Probably the most prominent thinker in this field was John Rawls, who viewed modern citizenship through a magnifying glass of societal justice. Against the background of the hypothetical veil of ignorance, a universal form of citizenship (attached to the principles of liberty and difference) is to be established. It is believed to reconcile conflicting interests and ideologies in a diverse society.²

In contrast, functional approaches to citizenship deal with the explanations of specific citizenship forms and their development as associated with functional requirements of societies such as military aspects of social life or the mode of economic activity. For instance, Max Weber explains the development of mass-based citizenship in medieval cities of the Western world as a result of the cities being organized as defence groups. Municipal communities had to rely on the participation of as many individuals as possible in the military activities of the city, thus having access to military training and being allowed to bear arms. In contrast, no participatory citizenship developed in the Eastern world of China, Egypt and India, since the survival of the local communities was dependent less on defence matters and more on the effectiveness of the irrigation system and water supply, which led to the rise of bureaucracy rather than citizenship. While in the Western world the ruler became dependent on the military capability of the individuals, in the Eastern world the individuals were dependent on the ruler in matters of water supply.³

In a similar functionalist vein, T. H. Marshall argues that the development of modern citizenship occurred in a three-tier process of expanding civil, political and social rights to large parts of modern society. However, the order of their expansion was not accidental. Civil rights were an epiphenomenon of industrialization and capitalism, since rights of free contracting are essential for a proper functioning of the capitalist economy. Consequently, social change is the reason why the original amalgamate of civil, political and social rights for a small group of citizens in ancient and medieval times became functionally dissolved and civil rights expanded territorially to encompass larger strata of the society.⁴ Political rights have been introduced primarily as a functional requirement for participation of the masses in the warfare of the twentieth century.

Beyond the normative and functionalist accounts of citizenship we are confronted with a plethora of conceptions of citizenship such as civic citizenship, cosmopolitan citizenship, transnational citizenship, technological citizenship, sexual citizenship etc.⁵ These conceptions attach different meanings to citizenship and espouse frequently diverging implications for the social practice. My aim is, however, to find a way of examining citizenship despite all the conceptual variety and despite the discursive wave of citizenships with adjectives that sometimes blur the distinction between citizenship and other social phenomena. Therefore, I will discuss the semantic core of the concept of citizenship, which could be applicable in different institutional settings and cultural contexts.

The semantic core of citizenship

Three clarifications are necessary before we turn to the exploration of the semantic core of citizenship. The first clarification is conceptual in nature. Since we need a working definition of citizenship, a minimal definition would delineate citizenship as a shared membership in a political community.⁶ This definition is insensitive regarding the type of territoriality, since citizenship may be based in smaller territories of the cities or larger territories of nation-states or even federations.⁷ In addition, this parsimonious definition does not tell us anything about the substance of citizenship, but relates it to the political authority and the relationship among citizens by stressing the political nature of the membership. Consequently, it leaves the question of who belongs to a polity unanswered by treating it as a variable.⁸

The second clarification is methodological in nature. We need to distinguish between the concept of citizenship (semantic core) and the practice of citizenship (social practice), as already noted in the introduction. By practice of citizenship I mean everyday social and political experience, developed by social and political actors, as distinguished from the analytical categories used by social analysts.⁹ This reflects the approach of this book to first explore the semantic dimension of citizenship as well as the theoretical nexus between citizenship and collective identity. Only then will I analyze the social practice of citizenship and collective identity in the context of the European Union. Nonetheless, we should be aware that there is a close reciprocal connection and mutual influence between the concept of citizenship and the practice of citizenship. The ideal types stem from specific historical and social contexts, and they in turn are applied as instruments of the state-induced socialization upon individuals. The practice theory describes ‘practice’ as a patterned and repeated type of behaviour for the analysis of social reality and its feedback on the ideational constructs.¹⁰ The anchoring of citizenship in specific historical, social and cultural practices indicates that we deal with a ‘momentum concept’ that unfolds under the influence of social actors. This leads to a dynamic understanding of citizenship with a high potential for change.¹¹ Sometimes, the distinction between the concept of citizenship and the practice of citizenship is shifted entirely into the empirical realm of analysis and denotes the difference between formal citizenship as stipulated legally and the so-called lived citizenship. In this case, we would move from the methodological distinction between the concept and the practice and are confronted with a rather activist understanding of citizenship as a lived experience, which not only cannot be divorced from its context, but also becomes a proxy for the everyday political activity of people who understand and negotiate rights, responsibilities and participation.¹²

The third clarification is theoretical in nature. Since citizenship relates the individual to a political collectivity, it is associated with collective identity of individuals. The type of collective identity strongly depends, however, on the form of citizenship at hand. To learn more about collective identity of individuals as members of a political community, we should ask about the type of citizenship. In this sense, citizenship is a regulative notion, which links an individual to the political community by both enabling and constraining him. As with every other institution, citizenship enables individuals by ascribing rights to them, and constrains them by requiring duties and compliance vis-à-vis the collectivity.¹³ Based on rights, obligations and compliance we can identify different types of citizenship and their corresponding collective identity.

Citizenship as a relational setting

The relational perspective on citizenship disaggregates it into categories and reconfigures these categories into relational clusters in which individuals, organizations, political authority and power are positioned and examined. In this sense, citizenship can be analyzed as a relational setting.¹⁴ A relational setting is a patterned matrix of relationships among citizenship components, among citizens and between citizens and political authority. Departing from a minimal definition of citizenship as a shared membership in a political community, we cannot explain the institutional specifics of citizenship, nor can we conclude on normatively proper courses of action. Consequently, in addition to citizenship as a reciprocal and horizontal relationship among citizens, it remains a relational phenomenon that is also determined through the relationship between the citizen and the political authority. This relational aspect does not explain much about the range of rights ascribed to citizens, nor does it say who is included into citizenship. It also ignores the allocation of territory vis-à-vis the citizens.¹⁵ Charles Tilly describes the relational nature of citizenship primarily with regard to political authority:

Citizenship designates a set of mutually enforceable claims relating categories of persons to agents of governments. Like relations between spouses, between co-authors, between workers and employers, citizenship has the character of a contract: variable in range, never completely specifiable, always depending on unstated assumptions about context, modified by practice, constrained by collective memory, yet ineluctably involving rights and obligations sufficiently defined that either party is likely to express indignation and take corrective action when the other fails to meet expectations built into the relationship.¹⁶

In sum, the relational perspective on citizenship is threefold. First, it delineates a relationship between citizens themselves, since they constitute a community as formally equal political actors. As mentioned above, this relationship links citizenship to collective identity. Second, it describes the relationship between each individual citizen and the political authority.¹⁷ Third, the relational perspective pays attention to the relationship between the components of citizenship.

Citizenship components

We can map citizenship along the three criteria of rights, obligations and compliance. We identify these three criteria as components of citizenship. These components can assume different forms, different scope, different range as well as different degrees. In this sense, they are variables that can assume different values and should be viewed neither as constants nor as teleological categories that need to be fulfilled in order to claim the ‘genuine’ citizenship. The advantage of such a disaggregative and synthetic conception of citizenship is that by using rights, obligations and compliance we can examine any type of citizenship irrespective of its territorial range or its cultural background. Therefore, this approach is on the one hand synthetic, combining different aspects of citizenship as its components, and disaggregative on the other as we can examine the components of citizenship separately, thus disaggregating it along different analytical lines. Moreover, we can analyze the relation between the components as being, for instance, in tension with each other or strengthening one other. As the next step I will discuss the components of citizenship in more detail.

The rights component

Rights are an essential component of almost every conception of citizenship. Historically derived from the Roman concept of citizenship, in which citizenship was a legal status, rights are regarded as entitlements or privileges. In the legal sense, rights empower citizens to resolve their conflicts before courts. Therefore, citizenship protects from arbitrary political decisions and renders the citizens free. Citizens can sue in courts and involve a law that grants them rights. In the social sense, rights bestow a status or an honour, which associates citizenship with social esteem as a member of upper class vis-à-vis non-citizens.¹⁸ This view reflects the paradigm of ‘possessive individualism’, according to which rights are possessions of individuals and therefore can be extended or reduced.¹⁹

In the modern version of citizenship, T. H. Marshall presents an apogee of the rights-accentuated citizenship. He argues that citizenship is a unified pool of various types of citizenship rights including civil, political and social rights.²⁰ These rights are sustained in an interactive relationship, in which the exercise of one type of citizenship rights requires other citizenship rights. Once the principle is grounded in one area, such as the civil sphere, it spills over into the political and social spheres. The rights-orientated conception of citizenship is underpinned by two principles. It is the principle of legality that allows for judiciability of rights in the case of their violation by political or social actors. The other underlying principle of citizenship is the equality of status, which means that citizens cannot be excluded from entitlements enjoyed by other citizens. Moreover, the equality principle of citizenship makes citizenship attractive and desirable. While many social inequalities and differences between individuals are impossible to annihilate, it is citizenship that equalizes individuals by bestowing the same entitlements upon them. Marshall’s account of the development of citizenship in Britain entails the power of citizenship rights to mitigate class divisions.

Evidently, Marshall’s conception of citizenship espouses a telos of citizenship, according to which a fully fledged citizenship requires all three elements of civil, political and social rights. The equality of status in citizenship means that all types of citizenship rights are connected or unified. However, it is not the equality of outcome, but rather the equality with regard to the rights of citizenship as entitlements. This amounts to legal equality and is closely linked to liberty.

However, the rights-accentuated approach to citizenship can take an alternative turn to Marshall’s equality of status. The special group rights approach points in the opposite direction. They all argue in favour of recognition of differences in status for minority groups in diverse societies in order to achieve the equality of the outcome.²¹ Since in their account equal treatment of individuals (in the sense of equal status) is ‘difference-blind’, it tends to perpetuate oppression or disadvantages.²² In this perspective, the procedural equality of status does not result in the substantive equality of the outcome. This position holds that a more substantive equality cannot be achieved without recognizing and valuing differences alongside individual rights. Consequently, the pursuit of equality should involve according differential rights on the basis of group membership to reduce potential vulnerability and disadvantage from majorities.²³ Irrespective of the aim of the citizenship rights (equality of status or equality of outcome), rights are believed to be the central regulative instrument in achieving citizenship.

Traditionally, rights reflect the ontological priority of the individual, and link the individual to a political community. At the same time, righ...