Citizenship in a Globalised World

Christine Hobden

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429602863
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Sous-sujet: Política

What does it mean to be a citizen of a democracy today? This book challenges us to re- evaluate and ultimately reorient our state- based conception of democratic citizenship in order to meaningfully account for the context in which it is lived: a globalised, deeply interconnected, and deeply unjust world.

Hobden argues for a new conception of citizenship that is state- based, but globally oriented. The book presents a new account of collective responsibility that includes responsibility for a wider range of collective outcomes.

Drawing upon this account, Hobden argues that citizens can be held collectively morally responsible for the acts of their state, both domestically and internationally.

The book explores how this conception of citizenship, with its attendant collective responsibility, can speak to citizens of today: those experiencing the costs of inequality and oppression; those living under semi- and newly democratic regimes; and those living as non- citizen residents. It encourages

an active citizenship and presents innovative channels of participation, with discussions on civic education in the media and political consumerism.

Offering a new lens on citizenship in a global context, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of political theory, global justice, citizenship, democratic theory, and collective responsibility.

Part I

The concepts: states, citizens, and global injustice

1Introduction

What does it mean to be a citizen today? For some it is a stable foundation upon which to build, the irrevocable right to remain, the fulfilment of their human rights, a space for their political voice. For others, it remains an empty promise or harsh gatekeeper. For some it is a sense of identity and belonging. For others a symbol of exclusion. The pervasive and unequal impact of a world divided into different citizenships cannot be denied. This book is an opportunity to re-evaluate and ultimately reorient our state-based conception of citizenship. If, as it seems, we are committed to a world system of states, we need to re-explore what that commitment entails, morally speaking, in our globalised, interconnected world.

Contemporary citizens appear to use citizenship as a framework to turn inward and to shore up the borders at their backs. We live in an era where it is possible for the super wealthy to buy citizenship and for thousands to die in pursuit of it. In a deeply unequal world, the apparent value of citizenship varies drastically between states. While this reality is contested by many, on the whole, it tends to lead to a widespread effort to protect one’s ‘more valuable’ citizenship from would-be citizens who are deemed unworthy and unable to contribute: a Trump-led United States is waging a long-term campaign to curb immigration, including a controversial suspension of existing worker visa programmes.¹ A post-Brexit United Kingdom will introduce a points-based system that aims to prohibit low-skilled immigration.² In recent years South Africa has shown signs of rolling back access to citizenship and building a ‘paper wall’ to keep asylum seekers out (Hobden 2020c, 2020b). States, such as Italy and Australia, actively work to prevent asylum seekers making it to their shores, pre-emptively deeming them unqualified for refugee status. Italy’s deal with Libya to intercept boats and return asylum seekers to detention centres in Libya has recently been renewed despite widespread reports that asylum seekers face extreme abuse at these centres, including rape and torture.³ State-based citizenship is treated as a commodity over which to compete. Even those seeking asylum are viewed as claiming something to which they are not entitled, an attitude that has been deadly for many: the Missing Migrants Project recorded 2,496 migrant deaths in 2019. This being the lowest number in five years (the highest being 4,489 in 2016) and an extremely low estimate given the difficulty in accurate recording.⁴

My aim is not to condemn citizens for this attitude; we would do well to understand that citizens in deeply unequal societies face their own relative challenges and deprivation beyond which it can be difficult to see. For many, the state appears to be an agent that is out of reach, acting in ways that appear to have little to do with their daily needs. Money appears to have more power than a democratic voice, leaving citizens feeling disconnected from, and often marginalised by, the state that is intended to serve their interests. Consider that in the United States, 63.2% of respondents to the recent 2017–2020 World Values Survey answered ‘very often’ or ‘fairly often’ to a question about how often ‘rich people buy elections’ in their country (Haerpfer et al. 2020).

Contemporary democracies, across variations, struggle to motivate citizens to vote en masse, even in national elections. Globally, a third of parliamentary elections have a turnout below 60% as of 2015, and data shows a global trend of decreasing turnout since 1990 (Solijonov 2016, 30). The United States 2016 election had a significant impact on the lives of American citizens and residents, and many beyond their borders. Yet four in ten citizens who were eligible to vote did not do so in 2016 (Pew Research Centre 2018). Pew Research Centre (2018) found that ‘nonvoters were more likely to be younger, less educated, less affluent and non-white’. Not only is there a missing voice among the electorate, but it belongs to those who are most likely to feel the impact of government policy given their marginalised and often oppressed status within society. At just over two-thirds, the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in India were a record turnout.⁵ In a country as populous as India the missing one third constitutes roughly 300 million eligible citizens who did not cast a ballot – and this on a record-breaking high turnout. South Africa, on the other hand, still a new democracy, faced a record-low turnout in its 2019 election, dropping from 73.47% in 2014, to 66% in 2019.⁶ This figure does not reflect the further worry that 9.8 million eligible voters did not register to vote, 6 million of whom are under the age of thirty.⁷ With these citizens included, using a measure of ‘voting eligible population’, the turnout falls just below 50%.⁸ To be sure, lower voter turnout does not necessarily indicate a decrease in overall citizen engagement (Solijonov 2016, 9). Whether it be for reasons of disillusionment or the less pernicious opening up of more convenient forms of political engagement, this shift in how and to what extent citizens engage is reason to carefully examine the nature of our citizenship and the democracies in which we live it.

This book will argue that citizens have a much more central role in their democracies, and in the global realm, than they currently take up. The aim is not however to ignore the sense in which citizens experience both perceived and actual arbitrary power from a state that is intended to protect their rights and interests. Rather, this reorientation of our citizenship is an act of hope: it is a call to realise that while one might feel like the state is outside of one’s control, to the extent that it is, it is unjustified, and with collective power this can be rectified. Citizen responsibility should be understood not as a burden but an opportunity to collectively work towards a more just world, for oneself and others. The cost of taking up this opportunity will vary significantly but this account of citizenship can accommodate this variation, and leverage it towards a more just citizenship.

This conception of citizenship relies on a sense of moral accountability; a belief that justice is an important pursuit and that we need to have good moral reasons to justify our actions when they impose on others. The arguments presented here do not focus on establishing a unique account of what precisely justice is, or that it is worth pursuing; the arguments here motivate that citizenship is a realm and a role in which justice, considered globally, plays a pivotal role. Former UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, claimed that if you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.⁹ This book will argue against this claim. To be sure we should take seriously that citizenship in reality, and in citizens’ own self-understanding, is state-based. Yet a state-based citizenship is fundamentally placed within a global context and cannot be justified unless the normative implications of this global context are taken into account. You are always then, a citizen of somewhere, of the world.

The value of a theoretical account of citizenship

Richard Turner, political theorist and anti-apartheid activist, argued that idealised political theorising is an essential part of political resistance (Turner 1972). Political theory is not a luxury for the armchair activist but a tool to enable us to evaluate and compare and create. It does not in itself change anything, but provides us with the analysis to better grasp what can be changed within our society, and in what direction we wish to initiate this change. His work invites us to notice that we all too often fail to distinguish between absolute impossibility and other-things-being-equal impossibility. It is absolutely impossible for a lion to become a vegetarian, but, he argues in 1972, it is not absolutely impossible for a black person to become the Prime Minister of South Africa; it is other-things-being-equal impossible (Turner 1972). But do other things have to remain equal? We often treat our social and political institutions as if they are naturally occurring mountains that we have to manoeuvre around rather than a set of behavioural patterns that we (at least potentially) have the power to change. Turner argues that while institutions might have some material features like written down rules or a building that houses it, ultimately, our institutions are formed and maintained in the way we collectively behave towards one another (1972). The value of utopian (or ideal philosophy) thinking then, is that it provides space to explore what about our society is truly unchangeable and what is, upon closer examination, possible to change. It allows us to examine our institutions in comparison to other possible versions and so begin to truly evaluate our social and political arrangements. While we may not be able to reach the ideal now, or even ever, having it in mind enables us to better understand and evaluate our current situation, and more strategically plan for the future.

In its time, Turner’s argument was a call, especially to white liberals, to allow space to conceptualise a truly equal South Africa and to fight for this, rather than only focusing on small shifts that felt more immediately possible within the seemingly unchangeable political system of the Apartheid State. In our time, Turner’s work continues to challenge us to be bold in our use of theory to shape the ways we wish to change the world. It is, of course, unlikely we will agree upon, or fully realise our ideal accounts. But that is not, in the end, theorising’s point or main value; political philosophy can help to orient us, to highlight the values we want to keep before us in each complex and compromised policy decision we have to make, and to bear the standard against which we can evaluate our progress and pin our hopes.¹⁰

The theory of citizenship presented here is thus both boldly ambitious and not very ambitious at all. It is ambitious in its envisaging of a just citizenship and in how much it believes we can ask of the typical citizen to achieve this end. It does not however harbour ambition to be a definitive account of citizenship or justice; it is one voice among many as we attempt to morally orient ourselves in the extremely difficult task of living together justly. This collective, outward-looking citizenship may never be fully established as a norm; philosophy invites us nevertheless to allow these accounts to shape our views and guide the small steps in which politics moves. As Swift and White put it, political theory helps us to stand firm against ‘value creep: allowing one’s sense of what is of ultimate value to be dictated by one’s perceptions of what is politically feasible in the near term’ (2008, 67). The political theorists’ task is thus to prevent the truth from slipping out of sight altogether (Swift and White 2008, 67). In order to guide us as citizens of today, the book proceeds with a method that takes citizens’ existing norms and contexts into account. It is to this method that we now turn.

Method

Miller and Siedentop describe political theory ‘as a goad – inducing people to reconsider beliefs previously taken for granted, to notice the fuller implications of their value-commitments, or perhaps to recognize the incompatibility between different goals that they espouse’ (1985, 1). While debates on method in political theory have evolved significantly since this 1980s claim, the spirit of their claim resonates with the aims of this project. I am interested here in exploring the underlying commitments of the status quo and setting out the full extent of the normative implications of those commitments. We live as citizens of particular states in a world system of sovereign states; this book will explore to what extent we can plausibly justify this system and live justly within it as citizens of a particular state.

I begin then from the status quo of state-based citizenship but develop a plausible justification for this position, and then explore what our commitments are if we use the normative resources within this justification. That does not mean, however, that the status quo is automatically accepted. Normative work requires that we engage with the plausibility of views we encounter and make decisions about which aspects of the status quo to accept and which to challenge. Engaging with the status quo here is not just taking the state as a constraint on how we can imagine the political landscape; the method aims to make use of the normative resources within existing beliefs or norms (drawn out in developing plausible justifications) as resources to motivate further responsibilities that are contained within our existing commitments. This method can be understood as something like the ‘cantilever strategy’ that takes an accepted principle (p) as the basis for a claim that another principle is incoherent if held alongside it (-q) or that it is incoherent not to hold further principle q if one adheres to p (Carens 2013; Miller 2016). The added contribution to the cantilever strategy is the aim here to first develop a plausible justification for (p) before exploring its potential implications in the second half of the conditional. This justificatory work can at times obscure the conditional nature of the overall argument. We ...