Globalisation and Citizenship

The Transnational Challenge

Wayne Hudson, Steven Slaughter

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134206117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This wide-ranging volume explores the impact of globalization upon citizenship, with a special focus on the transnational challenges that globalization poses.

While there is much debate over the concept, globalization implies at least two distinct phenomena. First, it suggests that political, economic and social activities are becoming increasingly inter-regional or intercontinental in scope. Secondly, it suggests that there has been an intensification of levels of interaction and interconnectedness between states and societies. Citizenship, as one of the foundational concepts of the modern liberal democratic states, provides the normative framework within which globalization debates may be understood and evaluated. It also examines how different concepts, theories and practices of citizenship are evolving in response to globalization. Central questions explored in this text are:

• How does globalization challenge traditional conceptions of citizenship in specific respects?
• How is globalization creating new citizenships or new civil society spaces?
• How is transnational citizenship developing and what problems are associated with it in specific areas?

Discussing the theoretical and practical prospects for new forms of liberal, republican and cosmopolitan citizenship, Globalisation and Citizenship will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of international relations, globalization, sociology and political science.

Part I
Globalisation

Challenges to traditional conceptions of citizenship

1
Theorising citizenship in a global age

Gerard Delanty

Introduction

Citizenship is a highly contested term, due in part to at least two different histories and the fact that today, in the allegedly global age, entirely new concerns are forcing us to rethink it. The origins of citizenship were twofold: in liberalism and in republicanism. From the liberal tradition arose the idea of citizenship as consisting of rights. In this tradition, citizenship was a legal status based on rights. This view of citizenship was, in the whole, compatible with the conservative ideology of the duties and responsibilities of citizens and was a strongly state-centred conception of political community. From the republican tradition – especially in America – an active concept of citizenship was reflected in an emphasis on participation. In this largely ‘civic’ tradition, an active conception of citizenship served as a contrast to the passive and anti-democratic view of citizenship in the liberal theory of citizenship. Virtually, the entire debate on citizenship has been a dialogue with these two heritages and their respective emphasis on rights and participation. What they shared was a view of citizenship as a condition based on equality. While liberals stressed the citizen as the bearer of rights and the republican tradition stressed the citizen as a member of civil society, neither questioned the principle of equality that lay behind citizenship.

It is in this respect that citizenship is very much changed today as a result of two major developments. The first is the communitarian challenge, which has brought identity into the debate on rights and has replaced the individual with the group. The republican tradition has been mostly reinvented by communitarianism and by various contingents of radical politics, the result of which has been that equality has been modified by the politics of difference. The second challenge is the cosmopolitan one: citizenship is now being taken out of the nation-state, which is no longer the exclusive political unit for citizenship. These challenges are connected. What connects them is the confluence of culture and citizenship. Culture has become one of the main battlegrounds for citizenship today, and this battle is being fought out in contexts that are not nationally specific.

The older conceptions of citizenship have been challenged by the rise of cultural citizenship in recent years. Culture, once seen as particularistic, and citizenship as universalistic, have become detached from these extremes. Culture is no longer able to withstand the universalism, critique and reflexivity of modernity and, on the other hand, citizenship can no longer marginalise or exclude large members of society from participation in the polity. It would thus appear that cultural citizenship has displaced the earlier emphasis on multiculturalism. In recent years, a wide spectrum of publications on culture and citizenship have moved the focus beyond multiculturalism to what is increasingly being called cultural citizenship (Isin and Wood 1999; Delanty 2000; Turner and Isin 2002; Lurry 1993; see also the journal Citizenship Studies).

This chapter concentrates on this challenge, which is closely associated with globalisation. In order to appreciate the full significance of the cosmopolitan challenge, I begin by defining citizenship and discussing the new challenges. In the second and third sections, I discuss some of the main debates. In the final section, I discuss ideas of cosmopolitan citizenship, arguing that citizenship must be seen as multi-levelled, consisting of local, national and global levels. Cosmopolitan citizenship exists in each of these levels and is not a separate kind of citizenship, but one that expresses new transformative cultural discourses.

New challenges for citizenship: culture and rights

In the most general sense, citizenship is an integral part of democracy, referring to that part of democracy that concerns participation in political community. Democracy can be defined in terms of constitutionalism, representation and citizenship. This integral connection with democracy must not be neglected in discussing citizenship.

But what is citizenship? Citizenship can be defined in terms of four components, namely rights, duties, participation and identity. In general, rights and duties refer to the formal dimensions of citizenship and participation and identity the substantive, or informal dimensions. Taking each of the these four components, we can break them down further.

• Rights can be divided into four categories: civic, political, social and cultural rights. The first three are the classic rights mentioned by Marshall in his famous essay on citizenship (Marshall 1992 [1950]). The fourth is a recent category and will be discussed below.
• Of the duties of citizenship, the following can be mentioned as the main ones: taxation, conscription and mandatory education as formal duties. As informal duties, there is the general duty to be a responsible and law abiding citizen, the duty to vote, etc.
• Citizenship as participation refers to participation in civil society, such as in voluntary associations or in social movements. Civil disobedience is also an expression of an active citizenship of participation. The participatory dimension of citizenship is often held to generate social capital.
• Citizenship also entails a degree of identity in the sense of it resting on values. This can vary from commitment to a particular cause, to patriotism, to loyalty to the normative ideas of the polity.

In recent times, there have been many new challenges to citizenship. In the 1980s, there was a shift towards participation, with radical democracy and communitarianism on the rise; in the 1990s, there was a shift towards identity, as a consequence both of radical communitarianism and cosmopolitanism. In these two shifts, questions of rights and duties inevitably became reformulated. The decisive issue was culture. The introduction of a cultural dimension into the debate on citizenship was reflected in some of the following:

• the taken-for-granted equation between citizenship and nationality became questioned;
• a blurring of the distinction between the rights of citizenship and human rights;
• the rise of group rights and a resulting tension between the rights of the individual and the group;
• the challenge of cultural rights replaced the previous concern with social citizenship;
• a shift from birth to residence as a criterion of citizenship;
• the rise of global (or transnational) forms of citizenship;
• the challenge of new kinds of rights, such a rights arising from the domain of technology, science and ecology;
• the emergence of ‘corporate’ citizenship;
• a growing recognition that the principle of equality will have to be reconciled with the pursuit of group difference.

One of the striking developments in recent political discourse has been the increasing confluence of culture and citizenship. Until recently, the concerns of most practices of citizenship have been quite different from cultural issues and conflicts over identity. As is well known, citizenship has been historically formed around civic, political and social rights. Even if T. H. Marshall’s account of the formation of modern citizenship reflected a very one-sided view of what was, at best, the British experience, it is certainly true that his omission of the sphere of culture was characteristic of most conceptions of citizenship.

Citizenship had been held to be based on formal rights and had relatively little to do with substantive issues of cultural belonging. It was a fairly static concept that reflected the durability of the existing national state. Although Marshall acknowledged a relation between rights on the one side and on the other duties and loyalties, the substantive dimension of citizenship was never central to his conception of citizenship. In the civic republican tradition, which emphasised more strongly participation and an active as opposed to a passive view of the citizen, the cultural dimension of citizenship did not receive much more attention (Pettit 1997; Putnam 1999; Etzioni 1995).

Moreover, citizenship in these older accounts, especially those like Marshall’s which are influenced by liberal thinking, have mostly had a very tenuous connection with democracy, presupposing a passive conception of the individual as the recipient of certain rights, or in the case of the republican tradition a conservative view of the individual as virtuous and committed to the public good. Citizenship in so far as it embodies political rights provides an essential basis of liberal democracy but does not extend into other dimensions of democracy, such as participation. Perhaps, it is for this reason that proponents of radical democracy have been sceptical of citizenship, which, as in Marshall’s model, has been seen as an antidote for the inequalities created by capitalism. For this reason, citizenship was not seen as having a transformative role and, moreover, as predominantly relevant to ‘social class’, it was not applicable to other social groups, such as ethnic or migrant groups. In this, the politics of citizenship reflected the concerns of an older social science, with the stability of the social order and the need for the state to bear responsibility for redistributive justice. Today, in the age of ethnopolitics and the postnational state, it is a different question.

Given the separation of citizenship from culture and its restrictive relation to democracy, it is not surprising, therefore, to see citizenship and multiculturalism as opposites.

Until about the late 1980s, multiculturalism and citizenship performed quite different functions. Citizenship, on the whole, pertained to the national citizenship of an established polity and was generally defined by birth, or in some cases by descent, while multicultural policies served to manage in-coming migrant groups. Today, this distinction has virtually collapsed. Migrant groups have become more and more a part of the mainstream population and cannot be so easily contained by multicultural policies and, on the other side, the ‘native’ population itself has become more and more culturally plural, due in part to the impact of some four decades of ethnic mixing, but also due to the general pluralisation brought about by postindustrial and postmodern culture. In Britain, for example, there is a greater awareness of the constituent nations of the Union as well as of regionalisation. The focus on production and social class, which informed Marshall’s account of citizenship, has given way to greater interest in subcultures based around leisure pursuits and consumption. In addition, new and more radical ideas of democracy have arisen as a result of the rise of new social movements. The social is now becoming more cultural, and with this come new kinds of participation.

There are two broad responses to this general pluralisation. The first response expresses anxiety about increasing cultural pluralisation. The American ‘culture wars’ debate is the exemplar of this response. Widespread anxiety about militant nationalisms and religious extremism, especially in aftermath of the September 11 terror attack have added to fears of a new age of culture wars (the ‘clash of civilisations’) fought out on a global level leading to a return of a Hobbesian order. In this view, pluralisation is closely associated with conflict. The second response, cultural pluralism, is viewed as something which enriches rather than threatens the fabric of society. This second approach is based on a notion of cultural citizenship.

The cultural turn in citizenship suggests a view of culture as less divisive than previously thought. While multiculturalism was based on the assumption of basic cultural differences between groups (especially between the dominant and incoming groups, which had to be ‘managed’), the new ideas of cultural citizenship point to a view of culture as a possible basis of integration. The decisive issue is citizenship as a form of democracy. Whereas the older ideas of multiculturalism excluded multiculturalism from citizenship, the new approaches bring culture into citizenship. Cultural citizenship also suggests an alternative to the more recent post-multicultural debates around the ‘culture wars’ which have led to a view of culture as a zone of anarchy. Notions of the ‘clash of civilisations’, widespread anxiety about militant nationalisms and religious extremism, especially in aftermath of the September 11 terror attack have added to fears of a new age of culture wars fought out on a global level. There is currently an increasing concern with securitisation at both national and EU levels. I believe that these perceptions of cultural conflict, whether on a global or national level, exaggerate cultural divisions. Recent American debates suggest that there is more ‘common ground’ than is often thought in American society (Smelser and Alexander 1999). In the case of Europe, this is certainly true and it is surely necessary to address more directly such commonalities. The idea of cultural citizenship as the contemporary paradigm of citizenship suggests such an approach.

On closer inspection, it becomes evident that there is less consensus than might be apparent from a first glance of the literature on cultural citizenship. Roughly speaking, this body of writing can be divided into two groups of thinking. On the one side, we have an approach that is influenced by sociology (e.g. Turner 1993; Somers 1995; Stevenson 2001; Cowan et al. 2001; Urry 2000), and on the other we have an approach heavily influenced by political theory (e.g. Kymlicka and Norman 2000). The result is, in fact, a certain uncertainty as to exactly how culture, which is mostly understood in terms of diversity, is to be brought into the sphere of citizenship in so far as this concerns equality.

For the sociological approach, the real challenge, it would appear, is to bring about inclusion in the sphere of identity and belonging; whereas the culture debate in political theory is about extending a more or less already established framework, the national polity, to include excluded or margin-alised groups. It is, in essence, a question as to whether cultural citizenship addresses the new ‘cultural’ needs of the individual/group or the inclusion of excluded groups/individuals. While departing in many respects from the assumptions of multiculturalism, the second approach has mostly remained within the confines of the liberal communitarian debate and is closer to the concerns of multiculturalism, with its concerns around issues of the limits of tolerance, the accommodation of difference, problems of group representation, etc.

In my view, the new sociological approach to culture and citizenship offers a potentially more far-reaching model for democratic citizenship, and one which might be useful in addressing, for instance, the urgent need for anti-racism and citizenship policies that might stem the rising tide of xenophobia. However, this approach is very poorly developed and often does not go beyond vague notions of inclusion. In order to distinguish the two approaches, I term the sociological idea of cultural citizenship ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’. This is because it concerns issues that extend beyond the accommodation of minorities and problems of cultural diversity within national societies to new cultural concerns. In this view, culture is creative and transformative. In general, as already argued, the concerns of cultural citizenship as expressed in political theory are confined to the established state, which is generally taken to be Canada or the United States. The version of cultural citizenship I call ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ refers to a different dimension of culture than that of political theory, namely the wider cognitive dimension of culture in the sense of the creative, constructivist dimension of culture.

Cultural citizenship and diversity

There is now a growing body of literature on bringing culture into the sphere of citizenship. Authors such as Will Kymlicka (1995) and others seek to conne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: globalisation and citizenship
• Part I Globalisation Challenges to traditional conceptions of citizenship
• Part II Prospects for the development of global citizenship and democracy
• Part III New transnational citizenships and new civil society spaces
• Index