“High” citizenship vs

Changing Citizenship Theory and Practice—Comparative Perspectives in a Democratic Framework

[Lead article of symposium on citizenship in PS: Political Science and Politics, Oct. 2005; Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 667-670]

Martin O. Heisler, University of Maryland

Citizenship is an increasingly important focus in political and social theory, as well as in philosophy, legal studies and some of the humanities. It is also a vital concern in the lives of many “real people.” It figures in the assurance or denial of rights, economic benefits and social services, education, due process of law, and opportunities to affect political decisions; but it does not guarantee equality, fairness, justice, economic well-being, dignity or the respect of public officials or fellow citizens. We need to engage theoretical and normative aspects of citizenship when considering such topics as democracy and democratization, civil liberties; political participation, migration and asylum, nationality, culture, persistent inequalities, discrimination, identity and belonging, gender equity, race and ethnic relations, human rights and globalization.

Not surprisingly, the concept’s meaning has become less clear as its relevance and prominence have increased. This is due in part to conceptual stretching brought by the proliferation of its use and the multiplication of the perspectives of its users;[1] but it also reflects structural and normative changes in politics, the economy, and some fundamental values in parts of the world—including what is generally termed globalization. Perhaps the most important of these is migration across state borders. All of this makes Morris Janowitz’s observation of a quarter century ago, that “the notion of citizenship requires continual conceptual, philosophical, and value clarification” (Janowitz, 1980:1), more pertinent than ever.

Although such clarification would undoubtedly be useful, that is not our primary aim here. Instead, our essays illustrate and analyze changes in the world that compel—or should compel—rethinking the idea of citizenship and its uses, the ways the concept is changing, and the reasons for, and ramifications of, those changes. We raise more questions than we attempt to answer. And while much serious discussion of citizenship has tended to shy away from its crucial normative elements, we do not. Instead, we seek to chart a direction, though not a single path, toward a new problematic by calling attention to the salient novel or newly significant issues in political and social life that revolve around citizenship.

Migration—transnational and international, voluntary and forced, legal or not—is at the center of the new problematic. It educes the increasing interconnectedness of polities, economies and societies; many of the ways in which the traditional exclusivity of states’ jurisdictions is changing; the “portability” of individual human rights; the status of resident and transient aliens; relations between citizens and non-citizens; and myriad related issues.[2] It also helps to concretize both traditional state-centered assumptions regarding citizenship as loyalty, identity, and belonging and newly significant questions about membership in the polity and society and, in the broadest terms, the human and institutional boundaries of obligation and expectations.

Discourses around citizenship have shifted in most of the industrialized world, and certainly in countries with democratic regimes, from the inclusion of native populations to three overlapping subjects: cultural or communal versus individual rights; the rights, treatment and status of non-citizens; and the meanings and forms of belonging, identity and political membership. Much of our symposium concentrates on these concerns; and, while the essays that follow do not converge on a single point of view, they reinforce the sense that these are and will continue to be crucial issues in intellectual and policy considerations of citizenship.

The title of this essay and theme of the symposium reflect a symbiotic connection between changes in citizenship and challenges to the way we think about it. There are changes in citizenship theory and practice, and we need to consider changing theory and practice. This essay suggests one way of framing those connections.

From the traditional through the modern to the post-modern

Until a hundred or so years ago, few people were full, equal citizens anywhere, even in a formal, legal, sense. Women; minors; those without property; ethnic, racial or religious minorities; indigenous peoples and others were relegated to second-, third- or non-citizenship status. Underlying such hierarchical citizenship were normative arguments intended to justify inequality in a manner analogous to the noble lie in The Republic. Those who enjoyed full citizenship were entitled to their status for specified reasons; others were either rightly excluded (often, it was claimed, for their own good, as in the case of women and children) or needed to earn inclusion by acquiring property, literacy or—as in the case of descendants of slaves in the United States—grandparents or great-grandparents who had been fully enfranchised citizens (see Schkar, 1991).

Such hierarchies existed among citizens and between them and members of the society, not only between citizens and foreigners.[3] Clear hierarchies of citizenship, generally accompanied by pronounced inequalities, are also noticeable at the international level, as Stephen Castles and others note. (International or extra-national aspects of citizenship are important considerations for the authors of most of our essays, and I shall return to them below.)

In states that later became developed democracies, ever-larger portions of populations were incorporated into the citizenry, at least nominally. With few exceptions—the French Revolution was a notable, if partial exception—such expansion was driven by elites’ needs for soldiers and revenue, or their desire to avoid of unpleasant consequences from the expression of grievances by those outside the circle of citizens who wanted to be let in (Manicas, 1989; Hanagan and Tilly, 1999.) As national states matured, the stratification that had characterized traditional citizenship was eroded, usually through contestation and sometimes by violent conflict.

Even in the traditional mode, it mattered less what or whom the boundaries of privilege encompassed or how they were constituted than that they demarcated inside from outside. As Karl Deutsch showed fifty years ago, over the course of two and a half millennia changes in the size and form of the state were accompanied by changes in the forms and practices of membership in it (Deutsch, 1954: chap. 1). That, in turn, led to adaptations in ways of thinking about what made a given form of the state “natural” and in the normative justifications for buttressing those views. The city-state, multi-state civilization, empire, feudal fiefdom, absolutist state and modern national state each seemed not only the natural, but the only sensible—if not the only imaginable—setting for citizenship. Each form of the state produced a set of normatively appropriate identitive, social, cultural and legal statuses and roles.

Most people in independent countries had gained at least nominal citizenship by the middle of the last century; and by the mid-1970s virtually everyone virtually everywhere had become citizens of a state.[4] This spread of legal, nominal citizenship—akin to what the British sociologist, T. H. Marshall, came to term civic citizenship (Marshall, [1950] 1964)—within and across countries was the culmination of centuries of social and political change (cf. Manicas, 1989). It followed from both endogenous, independent, efforts within countries and, especially in the non-western world, from cross-border diffusion. And it became the point of departure for the construction of modern citizenship.

Modern citizenship, and modern citizenship studies, date from the end of World War II.[5] Marshall ([1950] 1964) argued that the prevalent view of citizenship at mid-20^th century as a set of civil rights and obligations was excessively narrow and formalistic. He viewed the gulf between social classes in Britain as an impediment to the effective practice of such civic citizenship. The normative thrust of modern citizenship brought the creation and extension of social programs; the effective enfranchisement of virtually all holders of nominal citizenship;[6] efforts to expand the reach of education, social security and health care. In Northern and Eastern Europe, real or pretend programs were undertaken to reduce inequalities in income and wealth under the banner of economic democracy.

The turn to social and economic aspects of citizenship in the post-World War II period was only partly the consequence of the generalization of traditional citizenship. An important, commonly overlooked, factor for most democracies and the countries in Eastern Europe aligned with the Soviet Union was the turn from military security to economic and social security as the raison-d’être of the state.[7] The creation of the Cold War blocs, each anchored by a nuclear superpower and balanced by mutual assured destruction, vitiated the classic, conventional, view that the provision of military security was a—perhaps the—defining function of the state (King, 1973; Rose, 1976) and the bond that cemented citizens’ relationships with it and with each other. Reliance for security on nuclear deterrence controlled by others called for new justifications for the state and its claims on its citizens; and most European states, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and a small number of other countries (Costa Rica comes to mind most readily) turned to the provision of social programs for such justification.

“Les 30 glorieux,” the rapid and sustained economic growth in the post-war decades, ushered in the post-modern stage of citizenship. It generated a sense of material well-being in much of the industrialized world, leading some to project a “culture shift” toward a post-materialist era in which psychological, cultural and quality-of-life values would rise to the fore (see, most notably, Inglehart, 1977; 1990). It was probably not a coincidence that a value shift occurred toward multiculturalism near the end of that period of economic optimism, ushering in what I term here the post-modern stage of citizenship.[8] The recognition of group-based claims to end discrimination and for genuine, not just nominal, equality; the continuing shift toward rights rhetoric and away from obligations in citizenship practice and theory (Janowitz, 1980); the rethinking of long-held notions about assimilation (B. S. Heisler, 1992); and the increasing significance of transnational migration as distinguished from traditional immigration (Heisler, 1998/99; 2001; Heisler and Heisler, 1986) contributed to a growing emphasis on questions of authenticity, cultural integrity and collective or group rights—and, most important, in my view, the legitimacy of multiple identities without a superordinate identity anchored in the state. These notions have become the focus of debates in industrialized democracies about “who we are” and who we ought to strive to be.[9]

Then and now, here and there

It is easy to see why scholarly attention has increasingly focused on this “evolving” story. It is readily researchable, both in the historical record and through empirical, quantifiable, data relevant for the study of the behavioral (e.g., voting, participation, attitudinal) and distributional (i.e., equality/inequality) aspects of modern citizenship. From the vantage point of theory, discussions of rights and obligations, active versus passive citizenship, the roles of the state and civil society, and most important, the markers of liberal, republican or democratic norms permit coherence and scholarly dialogue. This is one explanation for limiting this symposium almost entirely to the world of substantially developed, relatively stable, law-based countries—and often to the democratic, liberal (usually republican) West.

Citizenship here and now—or, viewed in the developmental perspective, here in the past, as well as now—is not citizenship in the entire world or in general, however. To be sure, it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to investigate the distance between the legal foundations of citizenship and citizenship practice; opportunities for meaningful political participation; the leveling of the functioning of civil society; access to education; or economic distribution in the parts of the world outside the frames of reference of most studies of citizenship. But ignoring what is likely a large majority of the world’s countries and probably a majority of its population has profound theoretical, policy, and especially normative or ethical implications.

The essays in this symposium exemplify the recognition of the growing importance of developments beyond state boundaries for the theoretical understanding of citizenship today and in the foreseeable future. The rise of transnational communities; the proliferation of multiple citizenship; supranational and local government-sited rights regimes; the progressive incorporation of international laws and human rights norms into national jurisprudence, and other elements of globalization are directing our gaze across state borders.

It is not surprising that these challenges stand out in the concerns of leading students of citizenship. The principles of universal citizenship have been established in mature democracies. While civil liberties and opportunities for participation cannot be taken for granted anywhere, the institutionalization of the legal and philosophical foundations for full citizenship make it tempting to treat shortfalls as mere shortfalls in implementation. The main task, according to most of us working on the subject, is the extension of at least large portions, if not all, rights enjoyed by citizens to those who enter the domain of the democratic state. These are immigrants, transnational migrants, asylum seekers and refugees.[10]

By concentrating on the unfolding of citizenship and related rights regimes in liberal democracies, are we saying that the circumstances of people in other—in most—parts of the world are irrelevant or less relevant for citizenship theory? To be sure, human rights movements and theory, foreign relations and inter- and non-governmental organizations do concern themselves with their civil, economic and social rights. But should we compartmentalize citizenship concerns and humanitarian concerns? Even if that is a useful division of labor in the realm of action, is it appropriate in the realm of theory? A clear answer eludes me.

Liberal conundrums

And what is the normative or intellectual ethical stance of theory that assumes, often a priori, the exportability—the universal validity—of the practices and supporting justifications of the trajectory of citizenship in the West? Is the hope that people in non-democratic regimes, in greatly stressed or failing states, and cultures that do not place high (or any) priority on particular individual or human or group rights, and others will eventually “become more like us?” We run at least three risks: the pitfalls of historicism; the arrogance of value imperialism; and looking through or past the state but not below it.

It is important to avoid historicism when speaking of stages of citizenship. Citizenship in the West did not follow an inexorable path. The sort of developmental trajectory suggested by the classic historical narrative of progressive expansion of the body of citizens (e.g., Manicas, 1989) should elicit skepticism in the light of massive reversals of citizenship status in the Third Reich, the treatment of native-born and naturalized American citizens of Japanese descent in the 1940s, and the more recent classification of some citizens as “enemy combatants.” Nonetheless, changes that are politically, legally and normatively embedded do matter. While, in light of the examples just noted, it would be foolhardy to speak of path dependence, embedding expectations and entitlements about rights and obligations has political as well as legal consequences, most clearly in democracies. They affect societies’ self-concepts and, in time, become parts of what Rogers Smith (Smith, 2003) has called “stories of peoplehood.” Reconciling violations of such expectations and entitlements with those self-concepts or stories of “who we are” is politically difficult—though clearly more so in mature democracies than in Orwellian totalitarian regimes (Heisler, 2005).

Although there is no logically or empirically compelling reason to cast either of these perspectives into normative terms, they almost invariably are. It seems difficult to resist the notion that countries that have moved away from such traditional concerns as the assertion of the fundamental equality of citizens in law and political personhood and have become concerned with the material and social conditions of their populations, making the cultural integrity and dignity of minorities of various sorts public business are “more evolved” than those where large parts of the population are denied political and cultural rights and decent economic treatment.

I am not entirely successful in avoiding such a perspective. Nonetheless, it seems worthwhile to leave open for now the question of whether western liberal, largely democratic, highly legalistic notions of citizenship must—or even can—serve as templates for citizenship everywhere. Such doubts are reinforced by a recollection of the horrors perpetrated on the road to the ideas and ideals of citizenship that might be offered for export. A non-exhaustive list includes slavery, genocide, cultural repression, and the systematic exclusion of women, minorities and the poor. Were any of these factors in the development of our current notions of citizenship?

Finally, can the norms associated with liberal rights regimes be put in place democratically? How, if at all, should dominant cultural majorities be consulted regarding the hosting of immigrants, resident but perhaps transient foreigners, asylum seekers or refugees? Public education and effective political leadership are likely to help, but will they suffice to achieve a welcome democratically? And, even if we do not focus on the ongoing constitution design efforts in Iraq, it is likely that the assurance of citizenship rights and opportunities for effective political participation will be difficult in an age when democracy is increasingly operationalized as an election or referendum. These final paragraphs are suggestions for possible work in the future. The essays presented here provide useful insights for such work.

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