PREFACE
would therefore be an impossible task to review all of these often insightful contributions. Instead, I adopt a particular line of argument in each chapter and offer my own perspectives on citizenship. My approach is largely conceptual, rather than historical or comparative, and the examples I use to illustrate the discussion are drawn from those societies I know best. However, it will become obvious, particularly to those who make it as far as chapter 6, that I consider citizenship crucial to solving global as well as local problems. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the concept and outlines the books structure and arguments -readers are therefore advised to begin there.
While writing this book, I have been lucky enough to receive support from a number of friends and colleagues. Particular thanks are due to Stevie Hallows, John Hoffman, Joe Ravetz, Alex Thomson and Robert Gibb who during the last few years have willingly listened to and criticised my thoughts on citizenship. I am also grateful to Susan Gray who collected mountains of material for me to read for this project and who served as a very able proofreader. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to all at Routledge and especially to Mari Shullaw who has been very supportive.
I dedicate this book to my parents, with thanks for all they have done for me over the years.
1
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
Citizenship has an almost universal appeal. Radicals and conservatives alike feel able to utilise the language of citizenship in support of their policy prescriptions. This is because citizenship contains both individualistic and collectivist elements. Liberals value citizenship because the rights it bestows give space to the individual to pursue their interests free from interference. Rights, in their political form, also enable the individual to have a hand in shaping common governmental institutions. Citizenship therefore also has great appeal as an inherently relational idea that entails cooperation between individuals in the running of their lives. Indeed, the concept of the 'private citizen' is an oxymoron (Oldfield 1990: 159). This means that in addition to rights, citizenship entails duties and obligations. Even a state like the USA, which is often said to place too little significance upon responsibilities, has an oath of allegiance that includes such duties as supporting the constitution, undertaking military service, and even to 'perform work of national importance when required by law'. All political communities, of whatever political
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
persuasion, must make demands upon their citizens. Citizenship therefore appeals to conservatives, communitarians and ecolo-gists, all of whom stress the responsibilities we all have to sustain our political communities and the natural environment. For only in this communal context are sustainable human relationships, and therefore rights, feasible.
Since the late 1980s, thinkers on the left have also embraced citizenship as a potentially radical ideal. There have always been socialists who have seen the democratic potential of citizenship. However, in the past, the general attitude of those on the left was one of suspicion. Citizenship was seen as part of the problem rather than a solution to the injustices of capitalism. Indeed, the rights of citizenship seemed to be imbued with a capitalist logic. They helped legitimise private property and hid the inequalities of class society behind an abstract rhetoric of equality. The failure of communism, the decline of class organisation, and the realisation that in increasingly heterogeneous societies not all inequalities can be reduced to questions of economics, have led many socialists to reconsider their rejection of citizenship. Feminists, too, have found citizenship useful in conceptualising the roots of women's oppression. Feminist analysis of the gendered nature of citizenship has helped draw our attention away from questions concerned purely with rights and duties, towards the question of the nature of the community in which citizenship is exercised. Poverty, discrimination and exclusion can all undermine the benefits of citizenship. Thus, a consideration of citizenship must also involve an examination of the conditions that make it meaningful.
While there is a consensus that citizenship is a desirable thing, there is much less agreement about what the status should entail, what kind of community best promotes citizenship, and whether the status is inherently exclusive. This book explores such questions and suggests answers to some of them. I will be concerned primarily with the nature and limits of liberal citizenship. This
is because it is through a debate with liberalism that the majority of contemporary accounts of citizenship have developed. Consequently, from this point on, I will desist from adding the term liberal or modern when discussing citizenship, unless drawing comparison with an earlier form of the idea. In this opening chapter, I provide a conceptual and historical overview. This will set the scene for the analysis of the dilemmas of liberal citizenship contained in chapters 2 to 7.
A CONCEPTUAL OVERVIEW
Modern citizenship is inherently egalitarian. This has not always been the case. It is only with the development of liberal tradition, which I take to be synonymous with modernity, that citizenship has developed such universality. In its liberal form, citizenship has lent great weight to arguments by minorities who can point to unequal treatment as an infringement of their basic rights, upon which their human dignity rests. Campaigns for the extension of citizenship have ranged from the anti-slavery movement in Britain in the eighteenth century, women's movements demanding the vote in the early twentieth century, African Americans in the 1960s campaigning for basic civil rights, to gay activists in the 1990s protesting that the age of consent be equalised with heterosexuals. Such campaigns have all drawn upon citizenship's capacity to act as what John Hoffman (1997) calls a 'momentum concept'. Citizenship contains an internal logic that demands that its benefits necessarily become ever more universal and egalitarian. Since citizenship gained currency in modern politics, its force has proved difficult for elites to resist. For this reason, Turner (1986: xii, 135) has contended that the modern history of citizenship,
can be conceived as a series of expanding circles which are pushed forward by the momentum of conflict and struggle
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
. . . The movement of citizenship is from the particular to the universal, since particular definitions of persons for the purpose of exclusion appear increasingly irrational and incongruent with the basis of the modern polity.
Unlike slaves, vassals or subjects, whose statuses imply hierarchy and domination, citizens formally enjoy legitimate and equal membership of a society. If it is to have substance, therefore, citizenship cannot allow arbitrary treatment: citizens must be judged by objective and transparent criteria. Citizenship also acknowledges individuals' ability to make judgements about their own lives, which is not predetermined by their 'race', religion, class, gender or any other single part of their identity. As such, citizenship, more than any othet identity, is able to satisfy the basic political impulse of humans, which Hegel has termed the need for recognition (see Williams 1997: 59-64). The status of citizen implies a sense of inclusion into the wider community. It recognises the contribution a particular individual makes to that community, while at the same time granting him or her individual autonomy. This autonomy is reflected in a set of rights which, though varying in content enormously over time and space, always imply recognition of political agency on the part of the bearer of those rights. Thus, a key defining characteristic of citizenship, and what differentiates it most from mere subjecthood, is an ethic of participation. Citizenship is an active rather than passive status. In short, citizenship is incompatible with domination, whether the source of that domination be the state, the family, the husband, the church, the ethnic group, or any other force that seeks to deny us recognition as an autonomous individua], capable of self-governance.
The appeal of citizenship, however, is not just the benefits it gives to the individual. Citizenship is always a reciprocal and, therefore, social idea. It can never be purely a set of rights that free the individual from obligations to others. Rights always
require a framework for their recognition and mechanisms through which they can be fulfilled. Such a social framework, which includes courts, schools, hospitals and parliaments, requires that citizens all play their part to maintain it. This means that citizenship implies duties and obligations, as well as rights. Indeed, it is conceivable that society could function justly without a formal expression of rights. It is, however, difficult to imagine a stable human community without some sense of obligation between its members. Citizenship is therefore an excellent basis for human governance.
Governance refers to the inherent human need to create and maintain social order and to distribute material and cultural resources. Politics, to which citizenship is closely related, is a set of methods and techniques, such as deliberation, compromise, diplomacy, and power sharing, through which the problem of governance can be resolved non-violently. The use of violence in human relationships, whether these relationships take place in the private or public sphere, represents the failure of politics rather than an intrinsic element of political life. Politics is concerned therefore with achieving and sustaining consensual governance. Citizenship is pivotal to the achievement of this goal precisely because it provides a strong legitimising identity. By demanding that we treat individuals equally, citizenship can negate sources of social tension that may threaten social order. Through its package of rights, duties and obligations, citizenship provides a way of distributing and managing resources justly, by sharing the benefits and burdens of social life.
Citizenship then is a powerful idea. It recognises the dignity of the individual but at the same time reaffirms the social context in which the individual acts, Citizenship is therefore an excellent example of what Anthony Giddens (1984: 25) has called the 'duality of structure'. For Giddens, the individual and the community cannot accurately be understood as opposed and antagonistic ideas. Instead, individual agency and social practices are mutually
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
dependent. Through exercising rights and obligations, individuals reproduce the necessary conditions for citizenship.
Citizenship is therefore a dynamic identity. As creative agents, citizens will always find new ways to express their citizenship, and new rights, duties and institutions will need to be constructed to give form to the changing needs and aspirations of the citizen and community. As citizenship is about human relationships, it defies a simple, static definition that can be applied to all societies at all times. Instead, the idea of citizenship is inherently contested and contingent, always reflecting the particular set of relationships and types of governance found within any given society. This means that one of the essential questions we must ask when trying to understand citizenship is what social and political arrangements form the context in which it is practised. Indeed, one of my major criticisms of much of the existing literature on citizenship is that it fails to pay enough attention to this question of context.
Many thinkers from the liberal tradition have advanced normative theories explaining what the citizen can expect in the way of rights and duties, without considering in enough depth the constraints that class, gender and ethnic differences (amongst many other social divisions) place upon individual citizens. Since all citizenship rights involve the distribution of resources, and because obligations are exercised within a societal context, any discussion of citizenship is also a consideration of power. If society fails to provide the necessary resources to sustain rights, as socialists have often feared, rights become a sham. Similarly, if the institutions in which obligations are exercised are designed to favour one group over another then again citizenship is diminished. In their obsession with defending abstract individual rights, liberals have often overlooked the power structures that can either facilitate or constrain citizens in the exercise of their rights and in the performance of their responsibilities.
Citizenship is portrayed by liberals as part of an evolutionary
process towards a more rational, just and well-governed society (Marshall 1992). This ignores why citizenship changes over time and the interests that are served by such shifts in its meaning. In practice, citizenship can be diluted as well as enhanced. The processes that determine how citizenship is denned are bound up with questions of self-interest, power and conflict. For example, citizens' rights are intimately linked to the priorities and irrationalities of the market and the states system. Economic crises may well lead to a reduction in rights, as social entitlements are rolled back in the name of industrial competitiveness. Warfare between states, or internal social conflict within a state, may also radically change the meaning of citizenship: participants in warfare being rewarded with more extensive rights, for example, or a particular social movement effectively mobilising in such a way as to promote an extension of its members' entitlements.
This brings us to three further questions, in addition to that of context, that we must address in exploring the idea of citizenship. First, social struggles have often been concerned with the extent of citizenship: who should be regarded as a citizen and what criteria, if any, are legitimate in excluding some from the benefits of citizenship? Second, what should the content of citizenship be in terms of rights, duties and obligations? Third, how deep or thick should our conception of citizenship be? By this, I mean how demanding or extensive should our identity as citizens be and to what extent should it take precedence over other sources of social identity and competing claims we have upon our time, such as family commitments or making a living?
Regarding the extent of citizenship, to ask who is to be included as a citizen is also to ask who is to be excluded from the status. All states, however liberal their immigration laws, impose controls upon who can become resident within their territory, and under what conditions they can remain. Thus, citizenship is closely associated with nationality, with the two terms often being used interchangeably in international law. Historically, the
8
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
9
extent of citizenship has consequently always been limited. For the individual then, and in particular the refugee or immigrant, the primary question of citizenship is often that of social membership. In the contemporary world, this means membership of a state. To be deprived of citizenship of a state, when the state is the key distributor of social resources, is to be deprived of the basis of other rights. This is why the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 15.1) includes the right to citizenship as a fundamental human right upon which the protection of other entitlements is premised.
Because of its importance to the idea of citizenship, chapter 2 is devoted to an exploration of the nation-state. It is no coincidence that the idea of citizenship has become more prominent in political discourse whenever the nature of political community has been transformed. The formation of the polis in ancient Greece or the expansion of the Roman Empire, for example, both required a rethinking of the meaning of citizenship amongst politicians and theorists alike. In terms of modern citizenship, the key event was the French Revolution, which fused citizenship with the nation-state. Chapter 2 first discusses the implications of this fusion. I will then address the question of whether citizenship requires nationality to give it meaning. Finally, some examples of current debates in Europe will be used to illustrate some of the controversies and contradictions of a citizenship that is defined as membership of the nation-state. I will argue that in order to unlock the inclusive potential of citizenship, the concept must be freed from its association with the nation-state.
The extent of citizenship is a question as much about groups within the state, who may be formally or informally excluded from citizenship, as it is about questions of immigration and asylum. The campaigns to extend citizenship mentioned above are good examples of how marginalised groups within the state have had to apply pressure to privileged elites in order to remove unjustifiable restrictions upon the practice of citizenship. Thus,
the extent and content of citizenship is intimately bound up with the context of this status. It may be that women, for instance, are formally viewed as equal citizens with men. If, however, women exercise their citizenship within the constraints of a patriarchal system, in substantive terms their citizenship is worth less than that of men.
I analyse some of the controversies surrounding the appropriate content of citizenship in chapter 3- In particular, the apparent tensions between different kinds of rights and between rights and responsibilities are analysed. The contemporary debate concerning these issues has taken the form of a dialogue between the dominant liberal approach and critical perspectives such as Marxism, communitarianism and feminism. My argument will draw upon these critiques. I will contend that liberalism, largely because of its assumptions about the state and the market, embraces an abstract and thin conception of citizenship. However, we cannot simply reverse liberalism s emphasis upon rights and assert in its place an ethic of responsibility as many conservatives and communitarians have advocated. Instead, for citizenship to have meaning we must see rights and responsibilities as mutually supportive.
Chapter 4 tackles the problem of difference. I ask whether the universal citizenship associated with liberalism is compatible with the pluralist reality of modern society. Should the content of citizenship vary from group to group and should minorities be protected from the majority through the provision of special rights? In critically assessing the answers to this question provided by such pluralists as Young (1990) and Kymlicka (1995), my conclusion is that so-called group rights create more problems than they solve. The point is not to give up on liberal citizenship; it is to fulfil the promise of liberal citizenship by transforming the context in which it is practised. The key to rendering citizenship more inclusive is to recognise the inherently racialised, patriarchal and class-based nature of the state and
i
10    THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
the corrosive effects of the free market upon rights and responsibilities.
The final dimension of citizenship I shall discuss is that of 'depth' or 'thickness'. Clarke (1996: 4) defines 'deep' citizenship as
the activity of the citizen self acting in a variety of places and spaces. That activity shifts the centre of politics away from the state and so recovers the possibility of politics as an individual participation in a shared and communal activity.
Tilly (1995: 8) contrasts thin and thick conceptions of citizenship as follows: citizenship can be
thin where it entails few transactions, rights and obligations; thick where it occupies a significant share of all transactions, rights and obligations sustained by state agents and people living under their jurisdiction.
Tilly's definition is more conventional in its identification of citizenship with the state, while Clarke argues that citizenship must extend beyond state borders. Both however raise such questions as: is citizenship purely of public significance, or can it pervade private lives as well? What is the significance of citizenship relative to other demands upon our time and enthusiasm? Bubeck (1995) has provided a useful typology that contrasts thick conceptions of citizenship with thin or procedural notions, which I have adapted in Table 1.1.
I believe, along with other critics of liberalism, that the citizenship liberals advocate has been too thin and has been subordinate to market principles and the interests of political and economic elites. Chapter 5 explores how the emancipatory potential of citizenship can be fulfilled through policies aimed at transforming the balance between rights and responsibilities and between the market and democracy.
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP 11
Table t,i Ideal types of thin and thick conceptions of citizenship
Thin citizenship Thick citizenship
Rights privileged	Rights and responsibilities
	as mutually supportive
Passive	Active
State as a necessary evil	Political community (not
	necessarily the state) as the
	foundation of the good life
Purely public status	Pervades public and private
Independence	Interdependence
Freedom through choice	Freedom through civic virtue
Legal	Moral
In chapter 6,1 explore how globalisation is transforming the context of citizenship and therefore requires that we rethink citizenship's content, extent and depth. Could it be that contemporary social change has rendered citizenship outmoded? Certainly some theories of postnational citizenship imply that citizenship will be increasingly replaced by the more inclusive idea of human rights that extend to ail people regardless of their nationality (Soysal 1994). Globalisation has also impacted upon the debate over content and depth. Ecologists, for instance, have pointed to the need to balance human rights with greater obligations to nature and to future generations. I agree that in order to fulfil its universalistk potential citizenship must look beyond the state. This should, as ecologists suggest, involve international obligations as well as human rights. However, citizenship also requires a political community to have meaning. I therefore consider the extent to which developments such as the European Union are providing a new context for what Heater (1990: 314) refers to as multiple citizenship.
12     THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP 13
In chapters 2 to 6, I implicitly develop what I shall call a postmodern theory of citizenship. The main elements of this theory are summarised, in chapter 7, which brings the book's arguments together in the form of a conclusion. Very briefly, this perspective attempts to combine the insights of several traditions of citizenship theory to construct a rich and rounded theory of citizenship, which I would describe as post-, rather than anti-, liberal. Thus, my theory departs from many exponents of postmodernism who offer powerful critiques of modernist ideologies, but then fail to develop alternative conceptual tools that can be used to reconstruct the nature of governance.
The socialist critique of liberal citizenship retains much of its power in that it highlights the relative neglect of issues of power inequality by liberals, which in practice negate the positive effects of citizenship. Ironically, however, many socialists commit the same error as liberals in their emphasis upon the economic at the expense of the political. Too often socialism has failed to appreciate the need for citizenship as a necessary element of governance, preferring instead to pin its hopes on revolution or upon social engineering by the state: strategies which both undermine the attributes of good citizenship (Selbourne 1994). Republicanism, by itself, cannot generate a convincing theory of citizenship because it shares with liberalism a rather abstract approach to politics. It has the virtue, however, of placing citizenship at the heart of its philosophy, where politics, not economics, is seen as primary. Republicanism is also more willing than liberalism to demand duties and obligations from the citizen (Pettit 1997). It will become apparent that the insights of ecological and feminist thought are also important to my theory of citizenship. As the risk of global ecological disaster intensifies, citizenship must be sensitive to the needs of the environment, and indeed these are indivisible from the needs of citizens. Feminism shares with socialism a desire for human emancipation that recognises and removes the discriminatory barriers, of
whatever kind, to the exercise of citizenship. The ethic of care advanced by some feminists has a part to play in a reformulated theory of citizenship. Care implies the recognition of the social nature and interdependence of all citizens and helps challenge the abstract liberal notion of independent citizens.
I would stress, however, that my theory seeks to build upon the strengths of liberalism, which are considerable. These strengths will become clear in the course of this volume. Unlike conservatism or some forms of republicanism, liberalism is at heart a perfectionist theory, which stresses our ability as humans to create and improve our systems of governance. It seems to me that such a view of human nature is the only one compatible with democratic citizenship. To assert that 'natural inequalities' are insurmountable barriers to people's ability, in cooperation with others, to shape their destinies through the exercise of citizenship, is to allow theoretical space for advocates of subjecthood, domination, elite rule, or some other such hierarchical system of governance.
To summarise the discussion so far: citizenship is a membership status, which contains a package of rights, duties and obligations, and which implies equality, justice and autonomy. Its development and nature at any given time can be understood through a consideration of the interconnected dimensions of context, extent, content and depth. A rich sense of citizenship can only be achieved when the contextual barriers to its performance are recognised and removed. The theory of postmodern citizenship, developed in this book, provides a perspective on how this might be achieved. In the rest of this chapter, a historical overview will provide necessary background for our understanding of the context in which the controversies of modern citizenship have emerged.
THE ÍDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The idea of citizenship, like so many important concepts of social science, has its origins in ancient Greece. The work of Aristotle (1992) represents the first systematic attempt to develop a theory of citizenship, while the practice of citizenship found its first institutional expression in the Greek polis, notably in Athens from the fifth century until the fourth century bc. The citizenship of the Greeks, however, was very different in its form and function from citizenship in the modern period. It is therefore common among historians of citizenship to divide the development of citizenship into distinct stages, to highlight the shirting meaning of the concept, from its origins in the ancient world to modernity and beyond (Heater 1990; Riesenberg 1992). Riesenberg, for example, identifies the first stage of citizenship as beginning with the Greeks and ending with the onset of modernity, marked above all by the French Revolution of 1789-Riesenberg s two-stage approach is too general and conflates the diverse ideas of citizenship that existed in ancient Greece, Rome and the medieval city. The instrumentalism of Machiavelli's republican citizenship for instance, which was aimed primarily at securing order in medieval Florence, was very different from citizenship as the political expression of human nature that can be found in Aristotle. Held (1996: 36-69) makes a useful distinction in this regard between the protective republicanism of Machiavelli and the developmental republicanism associated with Aristotle. Machiavelli viewed citizenship as a method for asserting citizens' interests, whereas Aristotle felt the performance of citizenship was of far more profound significance, as a core element of what it means to be human. Such diversity should caution us against talking of a single pre-modern conception of citizenship. It is also a mistake to assume that modernist understandings of citizenship were created in a vacuum. In reality, modern citizenship has built upon ancient and pre-modern ideas
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
and therefore continuities as well as contrasts can be found in the history of citizenship. The values of universality and equality, so important to modern citizenship, had their theoretical roots partly in the works of the Greek Stoic philosophers, who asserted the moral equality of human beings. In addition, the liberal discourse of natural rights drew inspiration from the universalistic tradition of Roman natural law.
It is perhaps more fruitful to draw contrasts between modern citizenship and its historical predecessors in terms of the four dimensions of citizenship outlined above. When discussed in terms of context, extent, content and depth, clear differences do emerge between the citizenship of modernity and its historical predecessors. These contrasts are discussed below, and a comparison is drawn in Table 1.2 between citizenship in the modern state, and its polar opposite, the ancient Athenian polis.
Recent scholarship confirms the dangers of imposing modernist assumptions when analysing the nature of citizenship in ancient Greece. Manville (1994), in advancing what he terms the new
Table 1.2 Citizenship in the ancient Greek polis and the modern state
Polis
Type of community Scale
Depth of citizenship Extent of citizenship
Organic Small Thick
Exclusive and inequality naturalised Content of citizenship Extensive
obligations Context of citizenship Slave society, agricultural production
Modem state
Legal/Differentiated association
Large
Thin
Progressively inclusive and theoretically egalitarian, but limited by statist context
Rights and limited duties
Patriarchal, racialised and capitalist states system, industrial production
16     THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP 17
paradigm of Athenian citizenship, argues that the dualisms that shape modern politics, such as a divide between state and society, between public and private, or between law and morality, simply did not apply in Athens. Instead, the context of Greek citizenship was that of the small-scale, organic community of the polls. Citizens ran their own affairs, acting as both legislators and executors, and defended themselves through a highly developed sense of military obligation. Such was the importance of warfare to citizenship that Weber (1958: 220) refers to the polls as a 'warriors' guild'. Other scholars have noted how the changing nature of military tactics in the polis influenced the practice of citizenship. Riesenberg (1992: 9) highlights the importance of the military formation known as the phalanx from the eighth century bc onwards. This tactic relied upon close cooperation between each soldier and, Riesenberg argues, was an important step towards a relational conception of citizenship, for men at least. Thus in Greece, a connection between war, citizenship and masculinity was established that would reappear repeatedly in the subsequent history of citizenship.
Owing to the organic nature of the polis, there was no sense in which citizenship could be seen as a purely public matter, divorced from the private life of the individual. The obligations of citizenship permeated all aspects of life in the polis: 'citizenship and the polis [were] one and the same' (Manville 1994: 24). A civic ideology dominated politics and society in ancient Greece. This ideology underpinned all educational, leisure and governmental institutions, each of which was concerned with the exercise and promotion of active citizenship: 'every civic institution taught a pattern of values that was viewed as ancient, immutable, and of divine origin' (Riesenberg 1992: 35). This meant that from birth, citizens internalised the values of active citizenship, greatly influencing the content and depth of its practice.
The polls was considered as prior to, and constitutive of, the individual. Aristotle (1992) famously expressed this idea in his
argument that to take no part in the running of the community's affairs is to be either a beast or a God! To be truly human one had to be a citizen, and an active citizen at that (Clarke 1994: 3-7). Thus citizenship was obligations-based rather than rights-based, since the close identification individuals felt between their own destinies and that of their community rendered the notion of asserting one's rights against the interests of the wider community inconceivable. Obligations generally did not take the form of statutory duties. They were perceived by citizens as opportunities to be virtuous and to serve the community. The institutions of government provided many opportunities for the exercise of this civic virtue and were modelled on the maxim that all citizens should be both ruler and ruled. In Athens, in particular, important political and judicial offices were rotated through a system of lot and all citizens had the right to speak and vote in the political assembly. It is true that in 594/3 bc, when Solon reclassified the various categories of Athenian citizens in response to growing social unrest and demands for inclusion by previously excluded classes, some groups were still afforded more political influence than others. Manville (1994) makes the point, however, that citizenship was not, as is commonly argued, determined by wealth. Instead, the level of participation afforded to each group was ultimately for the community to decide politically.
Moreover, following the revision of the Athenian constitution in 400 bc, the importance of political participation was recognised through publicly funded payments for citizens who attended the assembly. Crucially then, despite resistance from some elites within the polis, the Athenians recognised the importance of the material foundation of citizenship. Poverty was seen as a barrier to citizenship and thus payments for the exercise of citizenship can be seen as an important symbol of the dominance of politics over economics in the collective priorities of the polls.
18     THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP 1 THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP 19
Citizenship had then a holistic nature that is perhaps hard }
to appreciate in our own time, where politics is viewed with ■ suspicion, and obligation is seen as at best a necessary evil, at worst an infringement of our freedom. To the citizen of the polis, civic virtue was freedom, and the primary source of honour and respect. Because civic virtue was so central to the individual's
sense of self-worth and purpose, citizenship was both deep and \ thick in the sense that 'life and identity were offered and defined
by the polis almost exclusively: even the family was hardly [
competitive in the totality of its demands and gifts' (Riesenberg j 1992: 25). Even the Greeks' concepts of morality and the good
were very different from our own. As Jordan (1989: 67) argues, \ 'there was no clash between citizenship obligations and the duties
of private morality because there was no such thing as private ■ morality'. Similarly, the idea of the 'good' was not understood as being expressed via a private code of ethics. Instead, the good
was to be found through service to the community in the form y
of military obligation and political participation. In short, I morality and the good life were both expressed publicly through the performance of civic virtue.
The status of citizenship in the polis was, however, highly [
exclusive. In fact, the primary difference between pre-modern \.
and modern citizenship is that in ancient Greece and Rome, :
as well as in those cities that practised citizenship in the middle ;■
ages, inequality of status was accepted without question. Indeed, ]
citizenship was valued in part because of its exclusive nature h
and as a mark of superiority over non-citizens, whether they be p
women, slaves or 'barbarians'. The Greeks, for instance, saw the §
institutions of slavery and empire as entirely compatible with |
citizenship. Some scholars have asserted that an extensive citizen- I
ship for the privileged, and particularly the benefits paid to |
citizens through taxation, were made possible by the community's |
dependence upon these unjust institutions. This interpretation j
is simplistic, however. In fact, the democratic elements of |
citizenship, as well as payment for participation in civic affairs, continued well after the loss of the Athenian Empire (Arblaster 1994: 23). It is nonetheless true to say that hierarchy and exclusion were seen as axiomatic in ancient Greece. Slaves were not the only ones excluded from citizenship. Women were seen as lacking the necessary rationality required for political participation. Additionally, at certain times, the Athenian polis applied strict criteria to the question of which residents qualified for citizenship status. In 451^450 bc, under the leadership of Pericles, citizenship was restricted to only those residents whose parents were both born in the polis.
Roman conceptions of citizenship, in contrast to Greek exclusivity, became increasingly inclusive in their reach as its empire expanded. At the time of the republic, citizenship, as in Greece, was a privileged status, tied closely to political participation. However, in Rome's imperial age, citizenship gradually lost its association with participation and instead became a tool of social control and pacification. The Romans found that by granting citizenship to the peoples of the empire, something finally achieved through an edict in AD 212 by the emperor Caracalla, Roman rule could, to some extent, be legitimised in the eyes of the conquered. This meant that taxes were more easily collected and the need for expensive and uncertain military power reduced. As arguably is the case with some modernist examples of citizenship, such as that associated with the European Union, the status of citizenship became detached from an ethic of participation and was increasingly a thin and legalistic concept, with the largely instrumental motive of undermining sources of social discontent. As Nicolet (1980: 19) contends, in the Roman Empire citizenship meant 'above all, and almost exclusively, the enjoyment of what might be called a right of habeas corpus'. For the vast majority of Roman citizens, citizenship was reduced to a judicial safeguard, rather than a status that denoted political agency. In fact, the concept was stretched to breaking point and
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
citizenship became little more than an expression of the rule of law. In terms of the definition outlined above, Roman imperial citizenship was citizenship in name only. As Derek Heater (1990: 16) observes, the 'Romans {developed} a form of citizenship which was both pragmatic and extensible in application. Yet that very elasticity was the cause ultimately of the perishing of the ideal in its noble form'.
The Roman experience of citizenship retains its interest for at least two reasons. First, it stands as an early example of what Michael Mann (1996) has called in a different context a ruling class strategy to the problem of social order: the idea of citizenship as an expression of common interests, political agency and the fulfilment of human potential is replaced by a somewhat more cynical view of citizenship as an instrument of social control. Second, citizenship in the Roman Empire raises the question of whether a deep sense of citizenship is only possible in a relatively small-scale, homogenous community such as existed in the Greek polis.
After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West the importance of citizenship diminished even further. In the middle ages, the pursuit of honour through the exercise of citizenship became replaced by the search for personal salvation. In a denning text of the times, Saint Augustine asserted in the City of God that individuals should not concern themselves with temporal life and should instead turn inwards to self-contemplation and prayer (Clarke 1994: 62-5). Consequently, the church replaced the political community as the focus for loyalty and moral guidance.
The practice of citizenship did find expression during the medieval period in the context of several European Italian city-republics such as Florence and Venice. Such cities drew inspiration from the republican models of Greece, and particularly Rome. Importantly, they included an ethic of participation, which was lacking in other forms of political community during this period. According to Max Weber (1958: 72), these cities
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
played a crucial role in laying the foundations for the eventual emergence of modern citizenship. Certainly the label Weber applies to these cities - he defines them as a fusion of 'fortress and market' — bears similarities to the context in which modern citizenship emerged. As in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, citizenship in the medieval city from the twelfth century onwards was made possible by the development of a money economy and industrial activity that provided the tax base upon which a citizenship community could be constructed. The militia of these cities, like those in America's War of Independence or the citizen army of the French Revolution centuries later, also provided an important sense of obligation and identity for citizens. Moreover, defenders of the autonomy of such political communities, such as Marsilius of Padua, asserted the political, as opposed to sacred, nature of their authority, and thus underlined the essentially secular nature of citizenship (Clarke 1994: 70-3; Heater 1990: 23-4).
However, these cities were exceptions in the context of a feudal system that was 'overwhelmingly princely and hierarchical' (Riesenberg 1992: 187). They also enshrined a citizenship that was non-universal and hierarchical. Most individuals were excluded as a matter of course. Even citizens' rights varied according to property ownership. It is only with the development of liberalism that citizenship was furnished with an egalitarian logic.
CITIZENSHIP AND MODERNITY
Modern notions of citizenship are intimately tied to the development of the liberal state, the foundations of which had been laid by the end of the sixteenth century (Skinner 1978). One of the earliest political theorists to consider the relationship between the individual and political community in this new context was Thomas Hobbes. In perhaps the first work of modern political
22     THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
theory, Hobbes defined the task of his subject as the 'curious search into the rights of states and duties of subjects' (cit. in Skinner 1978a: 349). It is clear from such statements that Hobbes's concern was primarily with issues of security and order, his focus being the rights of the sovereign, not the individual. Hobbes was highly sceptical of participatory theories of citizenship. Indeed, the logic of his theory, which defended the sovereign's right to absolutist power, left little conceptual space for any sense of citizenship. Instead, the obligation to the common interest of the community, associated with citizenship, is replaced by total obedience to the state. The sovereign alone can ensure that anarchy does not destroy the basis for peaceful human interaction. The only 'right' for individuals that Hobbes speaks of is that of self-preservation, which turns out not to be a right in any meaningful sense, since Hobbes accepted that the sovereign shall have power of life and death. Clarke (1996: 53) therefore argues that in Hobbes's theory 'politics and citizenship are terminated' while Weiler (1997: 52) labels Hobbes as the 'father of modern antipolitics'. Hobbes's model for the relationship between the individual and state might, at best, be termed subject-citizenship because it had as its aim the securing of order rather than the performance of civic virtue, or the protection of individual rights.
Yet Hobbes was an important transitionary figure in the history of citizenship, with many of his ideas leading directly to the more developed sense of citizenship found in classical liberals such as Locke. First, unlike in the middle ages, where 'rights and liberties are extended to groups, corporations, estates rather than individual subjects', the individual in Hobbes enjoys a direct relationship with the state which, in practice, increasingly required a more developed sense of citizenship through which this relationship could be mediated (Bendix 1996: 66). Second, Hobbes believed that in terms of their abilities, as well as in their powers to upset the basis of social order, individuals were essentially equal:
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP 23
Nature hath made men so equal!, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he.
(Hobbes 1973: 63)
Crucially, this insight enabled liberal thinkers to make the conceptual link between equality and citizenship. Third, and despite Hobbes's personal preference for a monarchical system of government, his theory breaks with the assumption that the ruler and state are indivisible. This meant that in the modern period the state itself, rather than the monarch, became 'the sole appropriate object of its citizens' allegiances' (Skinner 1978: x). Fourth, by arguing that the sovereign should enjoy absolutist power, Hobbes was advocating the concentration of the means of violence. This was important for citizenship since it marked a break with the feudal notion of divided sites of power where violence was exercised by a number of actors. By limiting the exercise of violence to the state in this way, the opportunity was created for more consensual methods of governance to emerge. At the same time, Hobbes's theory of state sovereignty highlights the contradictory relationship between citizenship as consent and the state as the enforcer of order, which, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, had great significance for the context and extent of citizenship.
The liberal tradition founded by Hobbes was developed by Locke, who built upon the idea of the egalitarian individual's direct relationship with the state to construct a rights-based theory of citizenship. Locke's (1924) theory aimed to balance a Hobbesian concern with security with the protection of the rights of life, liberty and property, which for most liberals are the basis
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
for the fulfilment of self-interest. Chapter 3 will explore the limits of these liberal conceptions. However, a philosophical redefinition of citizenship by liberals cannot by itself explain the emergence of modern citizenship. Concrete social changes associated mainly with the transformation of the form of political community meant the status of citizenship began to matter more to those subject to the ever-expanding power of the state. Giddens (1985: 210) expresses this as follows:
the expansion of state sovereignty means that those subject to it are in some sense - initially vague, but growing more and more definite and precise - aware of their membership in a political community and of the rights and obligations such membership confers.
As the boundaries between states grew more precise, particularly from the eighteenth century onwards, the people within those boundaries became ever more concerned with the conditions of their membership, Mann has called this process 'social caging'. Before the eighteenth century,
the nature of state elites or of state institutions had mattered little for society. Now they mattered a great deal. The rise of citizenship is conventionally narrated as the rise of modern classes to political power. But classes are not 'naturally political'. Through most of history subordinate classes had been largely indifferent to or had sought to evade states. They were now caged into national organization, into politics, by two principal zookeepers: tax gatherers and recruiting officers.
(Mann 1993: 25)
The political status of citizenship was rendered even more imporranr as the military power and increasingly sophisticated bureaucracy of the state helped undermine competing sites of power. The key to this was the separation of church and state. The bloodshed and subsequent instability caused by the
Reformation led political theorists such as Bodin and Hobbes to look to divorce politics from religion. Political elites shared this view, and the subsequent secularisation of the state following the end of the Wars of Religion in Europe created important space for a secular citizenship to emerge. The Reformation had one further impact upon citizenship. The importance Protestantism placed upon the direct relationship between God and the individual was effectively secularised by Locke into a relationship between the citizen and the state. It is perhaps no coincidence that Hobbes, Marx and Hegel, amongst other modernist thinkers, have therefore drawn comparisons between God and the state, where the state replaces the divine being as the focus of people s aspirations.
One consequence of this much greater power for the state was that the state increasingly became the focal point for demands for the extension of rights. Giddens (1985: 201) terms rhis process the dialectic of control. By this, Giddens means that although the state's surveillance capabilities over its citizens grew enormously through the development of public education, the courts system, and parliaments, this process of control worked both ways. Greater state power meant that social movements could use the channels of communication created by the state to campaign for rights. For Giddens, the state consequently came to rely more upon consensual means of governance and less on force. Citizenship became an important part of this new system of consensual government, as its extension sought in part to incorporate potentially disruptive groups into the polity. Thus the history of modern citizenship can in part be understood as a series of bargains and trade offs, whereby elites seek to maintain their power through managing the effects of social change and containing the demands of social movements through concessions in the form of rights. This would culminate in the development of social rights, in the form of the welfare state, in many European countries by the middle of the twentieth century.
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP j
I
Some authors such as Mann (1996) and Barbalet (1988) | maintain that rights are largely the product of decisions by elites, | while others such as Turner (1986) and Giddens (1985) stress j the role of social struggle. It seems to me, however, that it is a j mistake to try to privilege either struggle or political expediency | in the history of citizenship. There are simply too many variables | to provide a general theory that can be applied in all places and j at all times. What is clear, though, is that the balance of social | forces shifted in the modern state compared to those in its J absolutist predecessor, which had dominated political life from | the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The absolutist states J successfully contained demands for rights and maintained sub- | jecthood rather than citizenship as the defining status of their populations. However, the egalitarian logic, which liberalism had injected into citizenship, coupled with the growing importance of the state for people's sense of identity and material needs, was to lead to the creation of what Riesenberg (1992: 1) calls the second citizenship. The coming of modern citizenship cannot then simply be explained in terms of class conflict. Giddens (1985: 208) is right to say that 'class conflict has been a medium of the extension of citizenship rights', but this is only part of the story. The development of citizenship since the eighteenth century has involved conflicts within and between states. Four factors seem to be particularly crucial to explaining the direction \ of citizenship. The relative significance of these factors has of course varied according to historical circumstances.
First, the struggles of social movements have undoubtedly * played an important role in extending citizenship. These have included women, ethnic minorities, and the disabled and sexual [ minorities, in addition to classes. Second, ideology matters. The universalism of liberalism provided citizenship with an egalitarian potential that excluded groups could draw upon creatively. As Turner (1986: 133) puts it, as the waves of citizenship move h outwards as a consequence of social movement to achieve real \
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
rights, the particularistic criteria which define the person become increasingly irrelevant in the public sphere'. Socialism, which I see as an ideology concerned above all with fulfilling liberalism's promise, is crucial in this regard. In states where socialism has been influential, such as Germany, Sweden and even Britain, social rights, in the form of publicly funded services, have been more extensive than in countries such as the USA, where socialism has been of minimal influence. Nationalism too played a huge role in galvanising support for the extension of rights, being at once a positive and yet limiting force in the history of citizenship. The ambiguous influence of nationalism on citizenship will be discussed in chapter 2.
Third, economic factors, and particularly the triumph of capitalism, are crucial to understanding citizenship. It is not necessary to adopt a Marxist analysis to accept that political elites rely largely upon the performance of the economy. Such elites therefore have a huge personal stake in maintaining the conditions whereby capitalists can prosper. Thus, the needs of the market economy have played a huge part in the form citizenship has taken. A key question, therefore, in the citizenship literature is whether citizenship is opposed to or supportive of capitalism. Marshall (1992), in his influential consideration of this problem, identifies a tension between the egalitarian values of citizenship and the economic inequality that is inherent to capitalism. As a social liberal, who is to some extent aware of the impact such inequalities might have upon social order, and therefore the practice of citizenship, Marshall advocates the use of tax-funded social rights to offset the worst aspects of inequality. The main problem in Marshall's account, however, is that he does not give sufficient consideration to the conditions and interests that sustained social rights in the period he was writing. Marshall's essay was published in 1950, in the infancy of the welfare state in Britain, when social rights appeared irreversible. I consider the problem of social rights in both chapters 3 and 5. Briefly,
THE IDEA OF CITIZENSHIP
however, the stage of development that capitalism had reached
in the early post-war period was one of mass, Fordist production. ^
This facilitated both high profits and working class organisation. |
In a classic example of citizenship as social bargain, social rights |
were largely a concession granted to workers in recognition |
of workers' ability to exercise trade union power in the workplace |
(Faulks 1998: 103-7). In the 1980s, the balance of power |
between labour and capital shifted in favour of the latter. Political J
elites since then have sought ways to minimise expensive welfare J
rights in response to calls from capital to cut back on red tape |
and taxation. The fundamental lesson that can be drawn from |
the restriction of rights by neo-liberal governments is that while |
markets can play an important part in promoting individual j
freedom, economic imperatives cannot take precedence over the |
political decisions of the community. We cannot allow citizen- |
ship to be shaped by the short term, ever-changing imperatives |
of market forces. This is why in chapter 5 I make the argument fj
for a citizens' income. Like the Greeks, we must recognise the |
link between material resources and the exercise of citizenship. |
■:|?
Finally, the nature of the liberal state itself is essential to I
understanding citizenship in modernity. In Table 1.2,1 prefaced |
the term state with the words patriarchal, racialised and J|
capitalist. I have already argued that political elites have more jl
often than not privileged the interests of capital over citizenship. |
The state, I wish to argue, is also inherently racialised and ig
gendered. This is because the modern state is not, as liberals J
would have us believe, an essentially neutral political institution. I
Instead, the state has been fused with a cultural concept of the |
nation that has been defined in both ethnic and gendered terms. J
A watershed in the creation of modern citizenship therefore was J
the French Revolution of 1789 because this event fused state and ||
nation together. Chapter 2 will explore the legacy this revolution |
has had for citizenship in the form of an analysis of the nation- p
state. J
CITIZENSHIP AND THE NATION-STATE
Citizenship in modernity is ambiguous. On the one hand, liberalism, as the dominant ideology of citizenship, has stressed the essentially egalitarian and universal nature of the status. On the other hand, from the eighteenth century onwards, citizenship has been bound closely to the institution of the nation-state and therefore in practice has acted as 'a powerful instrument of social closure' (Brubaker 1992: 23). The extent of citizenship, then, has been determined by boundaries between states, which are both physical and cultural in form. Consequently, citizenship has been about exclusion from, as well as inclusion into the polity. Immigration controls and residency requirements are seen by states as an important part of their sovereignty and represent the material aspects of exclusion. Cultural exclusion has also played its part, in the form of the concept of the nation. This means that individuals within state boundaries, legal residents, guest workers or refugees, as well as foreigners outside state boundaries, can be perceived as 'outsiders' or second-class citizens by the dominant
6
CITIZENSHIP IN A
GLOBAL AGE
Globalisation has, like citizenship, become a buzzword of late modernity. The popularity of the concept is reflected in the proliferation of articles, books and political speeches exploring the notion that a combination of advanced communications systems, the growth of world markets, and the pervasive reach of multinational corporations (MNCs) are steadily eroding the boundaries that have hitherto defined social membership. Could it be that the concept of citizenship is becoming redundant, since its close association historically with closed political communities is inappropriate to the porous boundaries of a new global age? We have seen how defenders of nationality such as Miller (1995) contend that without the psychological barriers between citizen and stranger that a distinct national culture provides, citizenship can be no more than a superficial concept, which is unlikely to engender the values of civic virtue necessary to good governance. In sum, globalisation appears to challenge the contemporary
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relevance of citizenship because it blurs the boundaries, both material and psychological, which have made citizenship significant in modernity.
In the first section of this chapter, I analyse the impact globalisation is having upon citizenship. While the economic and cultural effects of globalisation are often exaggerated or misinterpreted, globalisation, particularly in the form of planetary risks, has indeed hung a question mark over traditional assumptions about social membership. In particular, the tension between universal rights and sovereignty (which has set the limits of citizenship within modernity), is being highlighted by these processes. Traditional international relations theory is unable to conceptualise the nature of contemporary social changes that are creating a more interdependent world. We must therefore move beyond traditional conceptions of security if we are to remodel citizenship in a way that is relevant to the requirements of a global age.
Some authors, such as Yasemin Soysal (1994), have suggested that in the context of globalisation, citizenship is being replaced by human rights; the protection of these universal rights is now the key to securing individual autonomy. The second part of the chapter addresses the question of whether human rights are indeed superseding citizenship in the way that Soysal suggests. I argue that human rights cannot replace citizenship, because governance requires the exercise of political participation and responsibilities as well as the preservation of rights. Finally, I explore the relationship between governance and citizenship and consider whether citizenship has a future in a global age. I argue that pressure to enhance citizenship within states, though by itself important, must be accompanied by efforts to build multiple sites of governance that seek to fulfil the egalitarian logic of liberal citizenship in ways which reach beyond the limits of the state.
134  CITIZENSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE
GLOBALISATION AND CITIZENSHIP
Globalisation is generally said to involve processes of social change which are cultural, economic and political in form. Waters (1995: 3) provides a succinct definition of globalisation : 'a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and political arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware they are receding'.
Innovations in information and communications technology, including satellites, computers, jet travel and digital television, have made access to other cultures easier and more instantaneous than in previous eras. A consequence of this, argues Ohmae (1995), is the development of a global culture that is moving people beyond narrow national self-interests. As consumers of cultural symbols and signs, as well as material products, individuals are now looking beyond the boundaries of the state and making choices according to personal taste rather than national identity. The world of the global consumer is facilitated by the growth in world trade and the constitution of a global market place. The principal vehicle of these market forces is the multinational company, which is increasingly breaking its links with the state and is instead seeking new opportunities across the globe, regardless of the dictates of national interest. The significance of the rise of multinationals is, however, disputed by those who consider globalisation as a concept to be ill defined and overstated. Hirst and Thompson (1996), for example, have presented a critique of the idea of economic globalisation. They argue persuasively that world trade and investment patterns are still heavily concentrated within Europe, Japan and the USA, and that multinational companies are very much reliant upon the framework of laws, training, education, research, and general infrastructure provided by the state.
Additionally, polarisation, rather than globalisation, may best describe aspects of world trade, since whole regions are more or
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less excluded from the benefits of capital accumulation. Countries in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe for instance have in recent years seen their share of world markets decline. Such evidence contradicts the optimistic account of globalisation presented by Ohmae, who considers the triumph of capitalism on a planetary scale to bring benefits for all. The reality is that it is Western states that are benefiting from the liberalisation of trade in many areas. Moreover, in areas of commerce such as the control of technological innovations and copyright, where the West has a vested interest in maintaining control, tight regulations remain. Korten (1995: 180—1) highlights how, for example, international patent rights have been extended to genetic materials such as seeds and natural medicinals which means that 'a few companies have effectively obtained monopoly rights over genetic research on an entire species and on any useful products of that research'. For these reasons, then, there is a lot of truth in the argument that globalisation, rather than marking the end of the state, in fact represents a particular state strategy that aims at securing the interests of political and economic elites of liberal states.
There is also good reason to doubt the thesis that Ohmae presents concerning global culture. In effect, Ohmae s idea of global culture represents the spread of liberal values of individualism, market forces and Western consumer tastes. Many cultures have in fact responded negatively to the apparent triumph of liberalism following the ending of the cold war. Often these reactions take the form of fundamentalist reactions to what is perceived as the superficial and unsatisfying values of consumer capitalism. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in parts of Africa and Asia, the huge range of ethnic conflict in the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the continued dominance of the communist party in China are all evidence that contradicts any simple global culture thesis (Faulks 1999: 53-70).
Fukuyama is another commentator who sees in globalisation the triumph of liberal values. In Fukuyama's case, however, it is
136  CITIZENSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE
processes of democratisation in such regions as Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, as well as the spread of market principles, which are cited as evidence that the alternatives to liberal democracy-are collapsing:
Libera! democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe. In addition, liberal principles in economics - the 'free market' -have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented ievels of material prosperity.
(Fulotyama 1992: xiii)
A consideration of Ohmae's and Fukuyama's arguments helps throw light upon the nature of the processes associated with globalisation in ways that take us back to the internal tensions within liberalism we have identified throughout this book. These tensions have helped shape the form and development of citizenship. Ohmae sees little place for democratic citizenship in his vision of a global age. Like many neo-liberals, Ohmae is highly sceptical of the values of democracy and instead sees the market as the surest way to govern society and to distribute resources. Fukuyama sees a much closer relationship between the values of the market and democracy and believes that the two institutions of capitalism and citizenship in combination create the most favourable conditions for individual freedom and stable government. I have already demonstrated, however, that there are in fact strong contradictions between the values of capitalism and citizenship: where the values of the market are dominant, citizenship acquires a thin and vulnerable status. Globalisation is making this contradiction more acute in several ways.
First, while the world economy cannot actually be described as global in an inclusive sense of the term, it has become more internationalised (Hirst and Thompson 1996). States compete for market shares in an international system that is only
CITIZENSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE 137
minimally governed. Institutions such as the World Bank, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) attempt to give some structure to the world economy, but overwhelmingly these institutions are dominated by advocates of neo-liberalism. Moreover, some of the most important actors within the economy are subject to weak regulation. The activities of MNCs for example are governed by no international charter and companies have resisted attempts by bodies such as the United Nations (UN) to curtail their activities. For example, the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations, which was once a focus for criticism and scrutiny of the activities of MNCs, has been reduced, under pressure from powerful companies, to a 'collecting house for information' (Horsman and Marshall 1995: 97) This lack of regulation of their activities means that powerful MNCs are in a strong position to exploit the need poorer countries have for jobs and foreign investment. Attracting an MNC to one's territory may thereby involve the limitation of democratic scrutiny over the company's activities and a reduction in basic social and civil freedoms, such as rights to welfare and trade union membership. So, as competition between states grows stronger, the tension between state interest and universal rights and between capitalism and democracy becomes more intense.
Second, the dominance of the market over citizenship is an important element in the development of global risks. These risks are the most important aspect of global change. Unlike the advantages of the 'global' market or the values of abstract individualism, risk can truly be said to be planetary in its impact. The idea of global risk refers to problems that cannot be managed successfully by any single state. They include migration, infectious diseases, international crime, nuclear power and ecological damage: none of these problems respect the boundaries that states defend. Modern communications technology has exacerbated these problems and made states and individuals more aware
CITIZENSHIP IN A GLOBAL ACE
CITIZENSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE
that these problems exist. Migration and crime, for example, are facilitated by improvements in ttansport systems, while evermore sophisticated television networks beam pictures of the latest refugee crisis or act of terrorism into the homes of ordinary citizens. The development of global risk has huge implications for the role of the state and its ability to guarantee citizenship. In classical international relations theory, the state, which concentrates force in the form of sovereignty, is seen as the only plausible method by which order can be maintained. The primary justification the state has to rule is its promise to provide security to its citizens. It is this Hobbesian logic that is being challenged by contemporary social changes associated with globalisation.
Realists have argued that since states are the only viable institution of governance, the claims of individuals outside of the jurisdiction of any individual state must be balanced by the state's primary duty to its own citizens. In effect, realists postulate an inherent opposition in the international sphere between order and demands for justice. However, with the intensification of planetary risk, this opposition can no longer be sustained. Many of the problems associated with risk are closely related to the high levels of global inequality that exist between states. The processes associated with economic globalisation, as championed by neo-liberals such as Ohmae, have increased this inequality. The deregulated, and therefore unstable, nature of financial markets, for example, impacts negatively upon the maintenance of citizenship rights, particularly in poorer countries. In turn, this leads to greater poverty, which increases the possibility of instability and war. Given the increase in the destructive capability of modern weaponry, warfare is much harder to contain within a single state or even a geographical region. Environmental damage, which is inherently of global importance, is also linked to poverty, as developing states struggle desperately to increase industrial productivity rather than seeking sustainable methods of development that may be less profitable in the short term.
The effects of these inequalities of basic rights and liberties are increasingly impacting directly upon rich as well as poor countries. Migration and international crime are linked to this inequality, for example. The phenomenon of economic refugees, who seek to leave the poor regions of the world and search for a place at the high table, is alarming liberal states. This problem is set to become one of the key political issues of the twenty-first century (Bali 1997). Those who stay in the poorer regions of the world are more likely to be tempted to trade in illegal substances such as drugs because the base price for most legal commodities is kept low by the Western-controlled currency markets. These problems mean that a simple dichotomy between domestic matters and international politics, which realists have argued must be sustained, is increasingly untenable. Booth, in a telling critique of traditional international relations theory, has argued that security interests have tended to be defined in terms of state interests. This approach has in fact masked the real problems of risk that threaten world order. In relation to nuclear deterrence, for example, Booth (1995: 335) writes that much international relations theory has 'employed the euphemistic jargon of nuclear strategy, and [we] have utterly distanced ourselves from the subject matter — the possible extinction of civilisation'.
In the context of globalisation, however, where risks are both more dangerous and more transparent, states cannot convincingly claim to guarantee their own citizens' rights if they do not also consider the rights of individuals in other communities. It is for this reason that some writers are arguing that human rights are replacing citizenship as the primary guarantee of individual
HUMAN RIGHTS AND CITIZENSHIP
Yasemin Soysal is one of those who detects an enhanced role for human rights in late modernity. In her book, the Limits of
CITIZENSHIP IN A GLOBAL ACE
Citizenship, she sets out a compelling argument which has at its centre the assertion that a new and more universal concept of citizenship has unfolded in the post-war era, one whose organising and legitimating principles are based on universalpersonhood rather than national belonging (Soysal 1994: 1, emphasis added). The context of this shift is the development of a global system that encompasses international law, the United Nations network, global civil society, and regional governance, as found in institutions such as the European Union.
Consequently, the language of human rights is becoming increasingly central to the government of world affairs, as respect for the person challenges the idea that states are sovereign in relation to their citizens and that other states or international bodies have no right to interfere in this primary relationship. Soysals evidence for this transformation is focused upon the experience of so-called guest workers in Europe. These are individuals who live and work in a foreign country, often for years, without ever acquiring citizenship status. The growing importance of human rights, however, means that the benefits of citizenship are becoming less important. Organisations representing guest workers have been able to mobilise support for the extension of basic social and civil rights. Thus the significance of citizenship has been reduced to the point where 'noncitizens' rights do not differ significantly from those of citizens' (ibid.: 119). As such, social membership is increasingly postnational and based upon personhood rather than citizenship (ibid.: 44). Even groups such as Muslims, who have historically lived in tension with liberal values, are utilising discourses of human rights in ways which 'speak to "modern individuals' needs'" such as rights to worship and to cultural recognition (ibid.: 116).
Importantly, Soysal rejects arguments that seek to understand the experience of guest workers as beneficiaries of the extension of the territorial reach of citizenship, which now includes denizens as well as citizens by augmenting the criteria for rights
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based upon nationality with the additional criteria of residency. Such perspectives, contends Soysal (1994: 139), remain within the confines of the nation-state model' (see Brubaker 1992). Instead, what is happening to guest workers reflects a more 'profound transformation in the institution of citizenship, both in its institutional logic and in the way it is legitimised. To locate the changes, we need to go beyond the nation-state' (Soysal 1994: 139).
I am in full agreement with Soysal upon the urgent need to reconceptualise citizenship in ways which break the link with the state. It is only in this way that the rights of citizenship can be extended in a manner consistent with liberal notions of the equal worth of individuals. Soysal is also right to identify the growing importance of human rights in world politics. Since the Second World War, international law governing human rights has been expanding rapidly. The UN Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted unopposed by the UN General Assembly in 1948, is the centrepiece of human rights law. Since then, other conventions covering such matters as the outlawing of torture, discrimination against women and children, and the promotion of the rights of migrants have gained widespread international support (Bretherton 1996: 251). In 1993, 171 governments at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna supported a statement to the effect that economic, social and cultural rights are universal, indivisible, and interdependent and interrelated* (Broadbent 1997: 6). Moreover, within Europe in particular, cases of injustice within states are increasingly likely to be decided at a level beyond the individual state. An excellent example of this occurred on 27 September 1999, when the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled in favour of four gays (three men, one woman) who had objected to the fact that Britain's armed forces exercised a ban on homosexual and lesbian recruits. The Court ruled that the British Government was contravening the basic human right
142  CITIZENSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE
to enjoy a private life, the nature of which should have no bearing upon eligibility for employment.
There is evidence, then, to suggest that states are becoming aware of the problems of global risk and how abuses of human rights by states are likely to impact beyond state boundaries. As Turner (1993) has observed, risk has helped to create common interests and an awareness of the frailty of human existence. Risk has thereby created the basis for a high degree of agreement on the need for human rights. As Turner (1993: 184) puts it, 'frailty is a universal feature of human existence'. For Turner (ibid.: 187), globalisation means that 'the debate about [human} rights might begin to replace the debate about citizenship in both academic and political life'. Does an enhanced role for human rights effectively mark the end of citizenship as a useful concept as both Turner and Soysal imply? An analysis of some of the weaknesses of Soysal's arguments will illustrate that human rights cannot supersede citizenship in the way that she and Turner suggest.
The first problem with Soysal's thesis is that while many guest workers might increasingly enjoy social and civil rights, they do not possess political rights. This is a major problem if, as I have argued, we place great importance upon participation as a defining characteristic of citizenship. While it may be true that immigrant groups have been able to organise themselves politically in the context of civil society, without formal rights to vote or stand for office immigrants can take little part in the formulation and implementation of policies that may impact negatively upon their social entitlements and civil liberties. Non-citizens are therefore objects of state policy rather than active participants.
Human rights by themselves do not ensure the development of the participatory networks that are necessary to sustain common institutions of governance. Such networks are also crucial in building bridges between immigrant groups and the
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dominant culture within the polity. It is right to seek to detach citizenship from nationality. A postnational model of citizenship, as expressed in Habermas's (1994) notion of constitutional patriotism, nonetheless requires that all members of a community participate in and display loyalty to their governmental institutions. It is hardly healthy for any democracy to have large groups of individuals working and living in a community, but without the opportunity to make decisions about that community's future: membership of a polity involves responsibilities as well as rights. It can only fuel hostility towards minorities if some groups are seen to benefit from the social aspects of citizenship without playing their part in the community. Human rights, then, do not address the question of reciprocity of obligation. Crucially, it is because citizenship involves participation and responsibilities that human rights cannot simply supersede citizenship in the way Soysal suggests. For these reasons, 'non-citizenship is tolerable in the interim, but not in principle' (Joppke 1998: 29).
In any case, Soysal is over-optimistic about the extent to which immigrants do in fact enjoy social and civil rights. Immigrants' standing within the community may well be challenged and undermined by shifts towards more draconian immigration or asylum policies. Hostility to further immigration can undermine the security and rights of a minority already living within the state. Furthermore, as Bhabha has commented,
Racial harassment and violence persist across EU member states. Discriminatory police behaviour and visible ghettoisation characterise European metropolitan cities. Widespread racism in employment and in the provision of public services remains a matter of acute public concern across the EU. Despite formal legal entitlements to an extensive range of state benefits, in practice, Europe's third country nationals do not enjoy the full civil rights to which the 'native' population has access .. . Such
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evidence rebuts SoysaS's optimism that the promotion of human rights in Europe is a panacea, resolving the divisiveness that has accompanied the delineation of Europe.
{Bhabha 1998: 602-3)
Countries outside Europe conform even less to the postnational model of citizenship that Soysal outlines. In the USA, for example, changes in welfare legislation in 1996 limited eligibility of immigrants to virtually all cash benefits. As Schuck (1998: 192) remarks, this legalisation has increased 'sharply the value of American citizenship while reducing the value of permanent legal resident status'. Schuck also makes the point that there are around 5 million illegal immigrants in the USA who play a crucial role in the economy as low-paid factory and domestic workers. These persons feel little benefit from the postnational order described by Soysal.
The guest worker's experience in Europe cannot be easily generalised into a widespread shift to a postnational citizenship. Joppke (1998: 25) argues that by focusing upon the experience of these workers, Soysal is in danger of elevating 'the fringe into the core experience'. Also, in those countries such as Germany where guest workers are numerous, there is an ongoing debate over the desirability of denying citizenship to long-standing residents. In 1999 Chancellor Schroder's Social Democratic Government passed a new citizenship law which cut the link between German blood and nationality and thereby paved the way for guest workers to seek citizenship. The new Act gives automatic citizenship to children born to foreign residents. This shows that there is a strong strain of opinion in states like Germany, with a high number of guest workers, that does consider it a problem to have millions of non-citizens residing on a long-term basis in the state. Moreover, Joppke observes that the vast majority of people do not choose to migrate and rely upon their own state to protect their rights. However, human
rights are abused by states in many parts of the globe and a stable postnational order will need to address the institutions of governance that guarantee rights globally. This will require a more critical engagement with the powers of the state, if human rights are not to remain secondary to sovereignty. As Joppke (ibid.: 29) contends, 'unless it solves the problem of order, post-national membership must remain either Utopian or an anomaly within a world of states'.
The question of human rights cannot then be detached from the wider political question of governance. The central paradox that is shaping world politics in late modernity, and which Soysal (1994: 157) identifies, is 'a deterritorialized expansion of rights despite the territorialized closure of polities'. The point is, however, that human rights rest upon shaky foundations unless mechanisms can be found to move beyond state-orientated definitions of politics. In her eagerness to proclaim a postnational order, Soysal in effect defends a highly abstract view of rights which distances these rights from the social and political structures that sustain them. A sustainable postnational model of citizenship must in fact be more than an abstract defence of human rights, because, as I have argued, governance requires participation and responsibilities as well as rights. In this sense, Soysal can identify the limits of citizenship' only because she defines the concept in a very narrow and passive way.
CITIZENSHIP AND GOVERNANCE BEYOND THE STATE
Despite the importance of human rights doctrines, citizenship retains a salience when considering the problem of governance. This is for two main reasons. First is that, although globalisation has altered the context in which states govern, it is the state that remains the institution most able to concentrate economic, military and communicative power (Faulks 1999)- The state
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therefore forms the primary context for the individual citizen. Rights and responsibilities are still exercised mainly at the level of the state. International actors such as MNCs and bodies like the World Bank and the IMF are not rootless actors but rely upon a frameworks of rules determined by states. This means that diverse strategies towards citizenship are likely to continue, and this means pressure to enhance citizenship will need to be aimed at further democratising states in ways in which the values of citizenship - such as equality — are extended within state boundaries. Examples of the kind of reforms I have in mind have been set out in chapter 5. Second, citizenship expresses a relationship between rights, responsibilities and participation which is crucial to any form of governance. The problem with human rights is that they are not tied to the idea of political community and lack effective mechanisms through which they can be fulfilled. Rights, of themselves, are unlikely to create the appropriate context for social order. The arguments of Soysal and Turner, then, who advocate the replacement of citizenship by human rights, based upon the recognition of personhood in the case of Soysal, or human frailty in Turner's account, would leave us with a very passive model of rights and do not address the need for reciprocal responsibilities.
Moreover, not all analysts of international politics accept the arguments advanced by Soysal and Turner that universal rights are sustainable or even desirable. Recently, Samuel Huntington (1998) has breathed new life into a state-centred model of world order by arguing that the pursuit of universal standards of justice, in the form of human rights, is counterproductive. Huntington's neo-realism represents a second possible strategy to the question of how we understand the relationship between citizenship and globalisation that contrasts starkly with the human rights model. Huntington maintains that since the world is divided into distinct civilisations, which are mutually and inevitably suspicious of one another, it would be impossible to ground global
governance on the foundation of universal human rights. Instead, 'the security of the world requires acceptance of global muiti-culturality' (Huntington 1998: 318). The chief protectors of these civilisations are states. Therefore, attempts to undermine sovereignty through the promotion of human rights are likely to lead only to further conflict. For Huntington, the communications technology of the global age has accentuated rather than diminished the differences between cultures.
Huntington is motivated by a fear of the rise of aggressive alternatives to liberalism in the form of fundamentalism, and in particular militant Islam. What Huntington fails to fully acknowledge, however, is the far more dangerous impact of Western fundamentalism in the form of neo-liberaiism. It is an obsession with liberalisation in world trade that has fuelled radical alternatives to liberalism in the form of religious or ethnic fundamentalism. Of course, Huntington is right to argue that human rights cannot simply be imposed upon states suspicious of Western calls for democratic reform. However, Huntington's alternative to human rights, a rejection by Western states of multiculturalism domestically and an assertion of their identity internationally, is hardly likely to build common interests. There is a good chance that Huntington's approach, if adopted by states, would be a self-fulfilling prophecy and would only hasten the zero sum conflict between competing civilisations that he fears.
Huntington fails to see that it is the state that is the problem, not diverse cultures. This is illustrated by the fact that many of the conflicts in world politics since 1945 have been between states who Huntington says share the same culture; for example the Korean war or the two Gulf wars of the 1980s and 1990s. The reality is that conflict is inherent in the states system. This is built upon mutual suspicion between states, even where states may share a common culture or ethnic origin. Huntington also ignores how advocates of human rights have attempted to uphold universal rights, even in states which have very different rnlmf«-
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In 1999, for example, a US-led NATO intervened militarily to stop human rights abuses by Serbia against the people of Kosovo, who are predominately Muslim. Again, it is difficult to understand such actions within the logic of Huntington's clash of civilisations thesis. The central problem with Huntington's theory is that it is culturally deterministic. A world of multiple cultures is of course both inevitable and desirable, but if these differences are to be reconciled peacefully it is the nature of political and economic links through which states interact that are crucial. This is also true of relationships within the state between different cultural groups. Given Huntington's rejection of multicultural institutions as a way forward for liberal states, it is difficult to see how, for example, the 20 million or so Muslims who reside in Western states can be considered as equal citizens. In this regard, Huntington underestimates the culpability of liberal states in their hypocritical advocacy of human rights while at the same time promoting the further deregulation of world trade which undermines basic rights. The West has also given considerable support to authoritarian regimes, such as Saddam Hussein's Iraq during the 1980s. Such hypocrisy, and the subsequent inequalities that derive from such actions, will only drive already alienated minorities towards fundamentalist reactions against liberal values. In the words of Wallerstein (1995: 161), 'the self-contradiction of liberal ideology is total. If all humans have equal rights ... we cannot maintain the kind of inegalitarian system that the capitalist world economy has always been and always will be.'
A third and more potentially fruitful alternative to Soysals passive view of citizenship and Huntington's rejection of universal human rights theories does exist. I would argue that the roots of citizenship lie within individual communities, and rights and responsibilities will be expressed largely within this local context. However, globalisation demands that the roots of citizenship grow outwards to encompass obligations to other
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communities and the exercise of rights within a variety of contexts. As Lister (1997: 196) has argued, an inclusive notion of citizenship, which attempts to live up to liberal aspirations to equality of all persons, must necessarily be both internationalist and multi-layered. Citizenship is best thought of, suggests Lister, in terms of a 'spectrum that extends from the local through to the global'. This is what Heater has called multiple citizenship. A conception of multiple citizenship underscores the need to separate citizenship from limiting cultural identities such as nationality. The flexibility of mind required by a multi-textured view of citizenship also makes multiple citizenship incompatible with a citizenship based upon group identity such as advocated by Kymlicka and Young. As Heater (1990: 320) argues, 'it is necessary to accept as perfectly feasible the notion that an individual can have multiple civic identities and feel multiple loyalties'.
This third approach to citizenship is central to theories of cosmopolitan democracy advanced by such writers as David Held (1995). Cosmopolitan democracy seeks to theorise a citizenship that is global in its orientation and involves not just the protection of rights but also the extension of responsibilities beyond the state and the development of global institutions of governance. It is only by extending the responsibilities that diverse cultures have to respect each other's rights, together with the construction of more participatory institutions of global governance, that rights will be sustainable. This is because human governance is concerned with the problem of order and the distribution of material and cultural resources. As threats to social order increasingly occur at the level beyond the state, new political institutions are therefore required to meet these challenges. Similarly, globalisation has intensified levels of inequality across the globe and made the inequity in the distribution of resources more apparent. As Held (1995: viii) observes, the key challenge in political theory today is how institutions and concepts previously associated with the
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state can be adapted to the management of such global problems. Ways will need to be found to apply the constituent parts of citizenship, namely rights, responsibilities and participation, to both regional and global bodies of governance.
Rights remain crucial to any reconceptualised model of cosmopolitan democracy. Rights are the best mechanisms we have for signifying human dignity and autonomy. The problem, however, with the liberal tradition is that the rights it has defended have been highly abstract and disembodied. Given that in practice liberals have also embraced the state as the basic unit of politics, rights have been disconnected from an interdependent view of human relations and have tended to be enjoyed only by privileged individuals within privileged states. If we do not recognise the essentially relational nature of rights, and the way in which all rights depend upon recognition of others to be meaningful, then rights will have a limited impact on global problems.
However, processes of globalisation are beginning to change our perception of the nature of rights. First, as I have argued, the new security dilemmas associated with cross-border threats such as nuclear annihilation or ecological disaster are making states more sensitive to the rights of others. Injustices and rights violations within states can no longer be so easily contained, and state sovereignty is undoubtedly being challenged by the extension of arguments for human rights and by a more vigorous UN. The UN charter makes no mention of humanitarian intervention and yet the UN is increasingly intervening in the internal affairs of states to protect basic human rights. Although UN operations in Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia in the 1990s have had mixed results, the important principle of intervention on humanitarian grounds is being established. In 1994 the International War Crimes Tribunal was set up by the UN to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of crimes against humanity carried out in the war in Bosnia that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. This
body followed a precedent established after the Second World War at the Nuremberg trials, where Nazis responsible for appalling acts of genocide found that a defence based upon following the orders of one's government was not acceptable.
Regional bodies that are attempting to manage the problems associated with globalisation, such as the European Union (EU), are also extending citizenship rights beyond the boundaries of individual states. In fact the EU is unique amongst regional economic bodies because unlike, say, the North American Free Trade Agreement or Association of Southeast Asian Nations, it has looked to create political and not just economic institutions of cooperation. In the 1990s in particular the EU has made significant strides towards political union. At the centre of the project has been the creation of European Union citizenship, established formally through the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. This innovative development extended civil, and some political rights to all individuals who were members of EU countries. Citizens of member states can also vote to send representatives to the European Parliament, a body that has seen its powers of scrutiny and policy-making grow in the 1990s. Although the extension of citizenship in the EU has been problematic, as shall be discussed below, it has been significant in enhancing the autonomy and resources of women, part-time workers and working parents in particular (Meehan 1993).
The second way that globalisation is challenging an abstract view of rights is by enhancing awareness of threats to the eco-structure and therefore humanity's vulnerability to harm caused by ecological damage. This is why Turner's (1993) argument that an ontology for rights at the global level could be provided by the acceptance of human frailty is so useful. This idea captures the relational nature of citizenship in a way that the atomistic logic of liberals such Hobbes and Locke fails to grasp. A relational view of rights demands not only that we find ways to extend the benefits of rights to all peoples, regardless of national boundaries,
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it also means recognising that rights are only sustainable if we display a much greater sense of responsibility to other communities and to our natural environment. Global citizenship must involve responsibilities as well as rights. The rapid growth of ecological political thought in recent years has helped sensitise us to this issue in relation to the conservation of natural resources and a shift towards sustainable development which does not contribute to such phenomena as global warming or acid rain. An ecological dimension to citizenship involves extending the ethic of care, central to many feminist accounts of citizenship, which I discussed in chapter 5.
First, the ecological citizen is increasingly 'aware of his or her organic process of birth and growth out of the earth as a living organism' (Van Steenbergen 1994: 150). Such a conception of citizenship challenges the male-dominated, disembodied perspective on citizenship which has been central to liberalism and which has encouraged an atomistic approach to the question of rights and responsibilities. Second, ecological citizenship means extending our understanding of citizenship beyond material concerns with welfare rights and rights to property and market exchange (Steward 1991: 68). A consideration of ecological citizenship helps us to see the conceptual links between intimate citizenship and global problems. By taking care to be responsible in our own relationships, consumer patterns, and in the way we treat our environment generally, individuals can begin to make the shift away from purely quantitative measures of human success towards deeper and more qualitative assessments — such as the quality of the air we breathe, natural beauty and the enjoyment of freshly produced food (Steward 1991: 67). Understood in this way, citizenship makes an important challenge to the semiotic dominance of market-orientated language that has stressed narrow economic criteria as the primary measurement of human achievements. As Newby (1996: 210) has remarked, environmentalism has led to a much sharper recognition of the
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fact that 'economic wellbeing in itself does not promote civility, social cohesion or even a sense of enlightened self-interest'.
Third, the idea of limitless progress associated with liberalism, scientific innovation and economic growth is clearly being challenged by globalisation, which is revealing the limits of modernity. Ecological citizenship requires that we treat issues of conservation as at least as important as issues of 'progress' in science and economics. Thus the responsibilities we have as citizens extend not only to those with whom we currently share our community or planet, they also extend towards other species,
' the environment, and future generations of citizens. Smith (1998:
91) contends that citizenship needs to be underpinned by eco-centric as opposed to anthropocentric values. Even if we do not wish to accept that animals or natural forms have rights as such,
! we do need to acknowledge and exercise our responsibilities
towards them.
Rethinking citizenship in response to worries about the environment is a good example of how global risks are demand-l ing that we detach citizenship from its association with limiting
concepts such as the nation-state or the public-private divide. As implied by the idea of intimate citizenship, ecological citizenship will also involve taking the notions of rights and f responsibilities more seriously in non-conventional settings, such
as in the family, in the supermarket (by the consumer choices we make) and in the context of the workplace. Ecological citizenship represents a deeper conception of citizenship than that offered t by classical liberalism. Many of the responsibilities associated
with this form of post-liberal citizenship will be voluntary ; obligations rather than enforceable duties. However, individual
! actions in terms of recycling, responsible consumer patterns and
t so on can only form part of the response to the challenges
I presented by globalisation. As well as establishing the framework
of educational and political institutions through which this new citizenship can develop, governments must also display a greater
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willingness to exercise responsibilities beyond their boundaries. The current world order is structured firmly around the interests of states, and international law is still concerned with the activities of states rather than individuals. An important step towards a more global citizenship must therefore be a greater willingness for states to exercise global obligations and build stronger links with other countries.
Western states in particular must recognise the ways in which the world's political and economic systems are organised in ways that favour their interests over those of the rest of the globe. Appalling levels of poverty, debt and political instability in Africa, for example, are largely the legacy of the slave trade, colonialism and the unethical practices of Western companies. This is not, of course, to excuse political and economic elites generally from failing to honour their obligations to their own citizens as well as to the global community. To take the example of Africa again, dictators such as Mobuto Sese Seko, who ran a corrupt regime between 1965 and 1997 in the former Zaire, have contributed much to the suffering of Africans. However, it is Western states that possess the economic and political clout necessary to restructure the global order in ways that extend the responsibilities of citizenship to embrace obligations towards non-nationals.
There are many ways in which states can recognise their obligations. Western states could write off the debts that developing countries owe to them. As of 1999, for every £1 given by rich countries in the form of aid, poor countries return £4 in debt repayments (Jubilee 2000, 1999: 2). Many of these debts are the result of the legacy of imperialism and the low prices that the raw materials — the production of which many developing countries rely upon - fetch on the world markets. These prices themselves reflect the inequality of power between buyer and seller. Agriculture in the developing world is also jeopardised by such policies as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in
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Europe, which pays huge subsidies to farmers and thus creates unfair competition to Third World farmers. By writing off debt, aid to developing countries would become meaningful and could help to encourage sustainable development. By the end of 1999, there were some positive signs in this regard; President Clinton announced his intention to cut debts to zero providing more money was directed towards health and education programmes by Third World governments. Debt cancellation must also be accompanied by much more generous aid provision, which not only will help to stimulate economic activity in developing countries, but will also help to maintain political stability. A fairer and more tightly regulated trade regime is also necessary. This means ensuring that unjust policies, such as the EU's CAP, are rethought and monopolies that exist in industries like agriculture, which ensure the suppression of prices for raw materials, are broken up. A tax on money made through currency speculation would also help stabilise financial markets and therefore prices. This money could be used to fund global institutions of governance such as the UN.
As Dauenhauer (1996) has argued, rich states can also help development in poorer countries by avoiding adding to the 'brain drain' whereby skilled workers are poached by Western states. States must be more open and consistent in immigration policy and should shift towards criteria based upon the needs of immigrants rather than purely assessing applicants in terms of their financial viability. The record of liberal states here, however, is still poor in most cases. A good example of cynical immigration policies occurred when the British government, following the ending of Hong Kong's status as a British colony, chose to bestow citizenship only upon a few thousand of the most skilled and wealthy members of Hong Kong in the 1990 Nationality Act (O'Leary 1998). Instead of seeking only to import more expertise into wealthy countries through selective immigration policy, technologically advanced states should
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instead be more ready to share their innovations with others. This is one of the few areas of world trade that requires further liberalisation. Currently, the technology used by many MNCs is shrouded in secrecy and host states are prevented from sharing in such expertise, even though their citizens are employed by MNCs. Poorer countries cannot hope to compete in an increasingly technological and knowledge-driven market if they are denied access to inventions by strict copyright and patenting laws.
I have outlined briefly just a few examples of how states can exercise global citizenship by respecting the rights of other peoples, honouring existing responsibilities and looking to extend obligations that build trust between diverse communities. Unless rights and responsibilities of global citizenship are linked to the democratisation of decision-making bodies that govern world affairs, however, their existence will remain precarious. If we take human rights as an example, it is clear that the selective use of these doctrines does much to increase suspicions among non-Western states that human rights are little more than the assertion of Western interests by other means. Noam Chomsky (1997) gives many examples of how human rights have been used by the West as a propaganda tool against perceived opponents of liberalism while a blind eye has been turned to abuses in countries that are seen as important political or economic partners. Thus the USA, for instance, has been prepared to commit large resources in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, but has failed to put sufficient pressure on Israel to abide by several UN declarations to withdraw from the West Bank and other territories that Israel holds illegally. As long as institutions of global governance such as the UN, the World Bank and the IMF are dominated by a small group of states, it is unlikely that the reciprocal trust that must underpin the rights and responsibilities of citizenship can extend to meet the challenges of globalisation identified in this chapter. Threats that conservatives
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like Huntington identify to world order, and particularly all forms of fundamentalism, are largely an understandable reaction by the non-Western world to the exclusionary practices, double standards and the hostility of Western policies in the international arena, rather than the result of fixed and conflicting cultures as Huntington suggests. Yet, democracy and human rights are powerful and emancipatory ideas, and authoritarian governments have found it hard to suppress popular demonstrations in favour of these principles in countries like East Timor, China and Iran. In each of these three examples, there have been mass demonstrations during the 1980s and 1990s in favour of democratic reform and the protection of basic rights. What this suggests is that a policy of constructive engagement by the West rather than the hostility implied by the clash of civilisations thesis is the most likely to extend the values of citizenship to the international level.
In seeking to build systems of global governance, however, it would be unwise to aim at the creation of a world state. As Arendt has remarked, 'the establishment of one sovereign world state . . . would be the end of all citizenship' (cit. in Baubock 1994: 15). Advocates of cosmopolitan democracy appear to recognise the problem that the states system raises for global governance and the security of rights. Held (1995: 268) writes,
the Westphalian model, with its core commitment to the principle of effective power - that is, the principle that might eventually makes right in the international world - is at loggerheads with any requirement of sustained democratic negotiation among members of the international community.
Merely recreating the state form at a higher level of organisation would not tackle the problem that violence, concentrated primarily in the state, raises for democratic citizenship.
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Crucially, multiple citizenship does not entail the destruction of separate political communities but rather seeks to transform the nature of the relationship between these communities. Held (1995: 267-86) uses the term overlapping networks of power' in contrast to the concentration of power in the state that has set the limits of citizenship in modernity. According to the principles of cosmopolitan citizenship, the individual will increasingly become used to exercising rights and responsibilities in a number of contexts and political communities. This suggests the need to transcend the concept of sovereignty, which a deep sense of citizenship must be opposed to, rather than seek to divide sovereignty as Held suggests we should (ibid.: 138). Hoffman has shown how Held's position is in fact inconsistent. As Hoffman (1998a: 62) notes, while Held's theory has an underlying post-statist logic, Held 'is unwilling to detach sovereignty from the state. He insists that the modern state is not defunct but rather that "its idea" must be adapted to "stretch across borders".' The danger of reforming, but retaining the concept of the state can be illustrated by the EU's attempt to construct political union through the extension of citizenship to the supranational level. The ambiguity of the EU project in general, and its associated form of citizenship in particular, symbolises the wider tensions that are increasingly shaping global politics.
As has been noted, the EU appears to represent a unique attempt in modernity to extend the rights of citizenship beyond the state. This, it seems to me, is a step in the right direction towards a multiple citizenship model suggested by cosmopolitan democracy. Through the growing powers of the European Parliament in particular, European citizenship is being linked to new forms of polirical participation that are encouraging closer cooperation between political parties, pressure groups and social movements across national boundaries. However, such positive developments must be balanced by an acknowledgement that for
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many policy makers in the EU, the citizenship project of the Union retains a distinctly statist and exclusive character. This can be demonstrated by the EU's approach to questions of third country nationals.
Unfortunately, the creation of EU citizenship at Maastricht failed to take an excellent opportunity to sever the link between nationality and citizenship. According to EU law, member states can still assert their right to determine citizenship of their communities and, in turn, EU citizenship is limited to those individuals who are legitimate citizens of member states. As O'Leary (1998: 91) insightfully comments, 'surely the whole point of Union citizenship was that it was a status which was to recognise an individual's rights (and duties) outside the traditional context of nation and state'.
It is this exclusive aspect of the EU that helps to highlight the weakness in the arguments of Soysal (1994: 148), who sees in the EU 'postnational membership in its most elaborate legal form' and that illustrates the contradictions inherent in the idea of divided sovereignty as advanced by Held. O'Leary (1998: 100) argues that far from being a postnational organisation, the EU is in fact attempting to encourage an exclusive (and mythical) European identity that sets cultural as well as legal limits on the expansion of citizenship. The Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 has further highlighted the negative implications of an EU superstate for asylum seekers and immigrants, by firming up common border controls. The Maastricht Treaty asserted the EU's support for human rights. However, at Amsterdam, it was agreed that the European Court of Justice would have no jurisdiction in the area of law and order and safeguarding of internal security' (Statewatch 1998: 13). Moreover, the 1997 treaty asserted that EU citizenship was to complement and not supersede national citizenship.
If the EU is to develop as an authentically democratic union that seeks to extend the freedoms associated with citizenship, it
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needs to address these contradictions by complementing the rights of EU citizenship with a Charter of Responsibilities that the EU has to poorer regions of the world and to the environment. This would need to include more extensive aid programmes, a reform of protectionism as found in the CAP, and a citizenship policy that breaks the link between nationality and citizenship and thereby creates a much greater liberalisation of immigration policy. As Bhabha (1998: 612) observes,
Europe is creating a paradox while defining its territorial and social boundaries; failure to adhere to human rights norms excludes states from membership of the EU, but individuals excluded from access or membership frequently are denied those core constitutive protections in the process.
The future of citizenship turns upon the ways in which the problems raised by innovative but contradictory institutions of governance such as the EU are tackled. Falk (1995: 140) is surely right to state that in considering the future of citizenship, we cannot be overly constrained by what appears to be 'realistic5 in the short term: 'global citizenship of a positive variety implies a Utopian confidence in the human capacity to exceed realistic horizons, but it is also rooted in the highly pragmatic conviction that what is currently taken to be realistic is not sustainable'. Falk puts his finger on the challenges globalisation raises for citizenship. Advocates of global citizenship are not abstract Utopians. They seek to build upon actual social changes that are making a modernist approach to citizenship untenable.
We should not give way to false optimism, however. Globalisation without doubt presents us with opportunities to extend the egalitarian thrust of liberal citizenship to its logical end, but globalisation also brings with it considerable dangers. In considering four possible scenarios for the future, ranging from an inclusive world citizenship, a disintegrative scenario of trade
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wars and ethnic violence, a globe dominated by a large political bloc involving the West and former Communist states, and the development of an exclusive Western regional fortress, Rapoport (1997: 113) considers the latter the most plausible. Privileged citizens of the West may well have rights that extend beyond their immediate locality, but these will come at the expense of the poor regions of the world. The essence of the argument presented in this chapter, and indeed throughout this book, has been that such a scenario could not hope to secure the rights of individuals and stable governance in the medium to long term given the rapid social changes that are transforming human relationships in late modernity.
Implicitly I have argued that a conception of citizenship in a global age must be postmodern In character. In terms of guaranteeing rights and ensuring the fulfilment of the responsibilities that any form of stable governance requires, it is no longer possible to retain the link between citizenship and the closed and exclusive form of political community that is the state, whether that state be national or regional in character.