IDENTITY VERSUS CITIZENSHIP:
TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE
DISCOURSES AND PRACTICES OF
CITIZENSHIP
TREVOR PURVIS AND ALAN HUNT
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
ABSTRACT
The recent surge of theoretical interest in citizenship has been shaped in important ways
by a growing sensitivity to the politics of identity. Citizenship, conceived as a matrix
of rights and obligations governing the members of a political community, exists in
tension with the heterogeneity of social life and the multiple identities that arise therefrom.
This tension expresses itself in the clash between the ‘universal’ citizen and
numerous dispersed identities of which citizenship is but one. Citizens share the rights
and obligations arising from that status, and the concept of ‘equality’ arising from this
shared status has very real implications for the politics of identity, since citizenship has
traditionally claimed priority over other identities. In practice this has often resulted in
the relegation of alternative identities to an extra-political or even pre-political status.
Today these alternative identities have become overtly politicized and as a result the
stability of the identity of ‘citizen’ has itself been destabilized and contested. The ‘rise’
of identity politics has thus ushered in a number of challenges to, and transformations
in, the discourses of citizenship. In this article we bring the resource of governmentality
theory to bear upon the changing conditions of a modern complex citizenship that
is not confined to the political arena, and a conception of politics not confined to the
state. To this is added a neo-Gramscian consideration of counter-hegemony. This yields
an agonistic vision of citizenship in which universal elements are not imposed from
above, but are the outcome of projects in which social forces change themselves in constituting
alliances with other political identities.
INTRODUCTION: THE TENSIONS AT THE CORE OF CITIZENSHIP
O
VER THE PAST DECADE there has been an upsurge of interest in
the topic of citizenship. After a prolonged post-war hiatus the subject
is once again a matter of pressing concern across the political
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spectrum. Who can legitimately lay claim to the rights and benefits arising
from citizenship status, and who is subject to the obligations which that
status entails? These questions have acquired a new salience in a world dominated
by the profound inequities engendered by late-capitalism. Finding
adequate responses has, however, been rendered all the more difficult by the
apparent rise in recent years of ‘the politics of identity’. The latter has
brought to the fore an age-old tension at the heart of the concept of citizenship:
the tension arises from the actuality of a plurality of social identities and
the singular identity implied by citizenship, that is, between the particularism
of the former and the universalistic aspirations of the latter.
The apparent proliferation of identities and the rise of identity politics has
raised the thorny issue of how the singular identification of social subjects as
‘citizens’ competes with the other identities thrown up by the profound
structural and institutional changes typically characterized in terms of the
‘late-’ or ‘post-modern’ condition. The fragmented political identities and
conflicting political loyalties and obligations associated with this condition
pose important challenges to the pretensions of universality associated with
citizenship. In turn, the rising intensity of identity politics presents formidable
challenges to any efforts to theorize citizenship.
This article examines both the roots of, and the practical and theoretical
implications arising from, the emergent tension between citizenship and
identity. At the centre of our concerns is the question ‘How does (indeed,
can) a concept which has at its core the principles of universality and of equality
of status accommodate the politics of particularity and difference associated
with the new wave of identity politics?’ We arrive at two conclusions.
First, the tension between citizenship and identity politics is not as new as
the recent ‘rise’ of identity politics might suggest. Second, while citizenship
and the politics of identity might stand in tension with one another, this
tension cannot be avoided by a simple rejection of either concept. Neither
can it be resolved by reasserting some necessary transcendent priority of one
over the other. Rather, we argue that this tension is a uniquely productive
one, marking a crucial condition of possibility for sustaining democratic politics.
Citizenship, we suggest, is best conceived as a project through which
alternative identities vie for instantiation in the political institutions and discourses
of society. This is a project which is never complete but remains open
to contestation and supplementation, and the theoretical elaboration of
which is crucial to the development of democratic responses to the problem
of the constitution of political community.
Our exploration of these themes is located at the intersection of three
broad sets of debates in contemporary social and political theory. The first of
these is a still-nascent literature advocating an agonistic conception of
democracy as central to the future vitality of democratic practice.1 Second,
we draw upon the insights of neo-Gramscian theories of hegemony, counterhegemony,
and political strategy.2 But it is in the relation of these to a third
literature that the novelty of the present article resides. In our effort to shed
light upon the tensions between identity and citizenship we draw upon the
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resource of governmentality theory in order to flesh out the implications of
the ‘new-ethics of the self’ ushered in by the hegemony of the New Right.3
The addition of theories of governmentality into this fray offers insights into
the broader techniques of rule at play in the transformations currently under
way in the liberal democracies of the West, as well as a means whereby new
light might be shed upon both the ethical limitations attending their present
operations and their potential as touchstones for democratic transformation.
THE SHIFTING FOUNDATIONS OF THE POLITICS OF CITIZENSHIP
The transformations in the discourses and practices of citizenship to which our
title alludes are closely related to pertinent features of contemporary life.
Theoretical debate on citizenship has had to respond to a shift in the terrain
upon which the practices of citizenship are played out, and this has shaken
whatever complacency might, until recently, have dominated thinking on the
subject. The unprecedented economic growth of the liberal democracies of the
West in the post-war era had been regarded by many as holding out the possibility
of not only taming the worst excesses of capitalism, but of progressively
expanding participation in public life to include the great majority of the population
as well. Yet the persistence of relations of domination and disadvantage
in those societies has undermined the optimism of post-war discussions of
citizenship. The rhetoric of universality and equality has strained against the
persistent actuality of marginalized groups subordinated on the basis of their
race, class, gender, ethnicity, language, nationality, sexuality, etc. This stubborn
persistence of unequal social relations has been heightened with the subsequent
retreat of the welfare state in virtually all of the advanced capitalist countries.
This retreat, in turn, is closely related to the globalization of capital, the concomitant
restructuring of the economies of the advanced capitalist countries
along so-called ‘post-industrial’ or ‘post-fordist’ lines, and the ideological
ascendancy of the New Right. Each of these features has combined to call into
question the discourses of citizenship which dominated the post-war era.
The roots of change lay not only within the individual nation-states of the
West. The subject of citizenship has also been tackled with renewed vigor in
the wake of the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ in Eastern Europe.
The demise of the Soviet regimes and the push for political restructuring in
their successor states has forced into stark relief the relationship between
those states and their populations, with a pressing emphasis on the future of
civil, political and social rights in those countries, and, more generally, on the
relationship between the heterogeneity of civil society and the potentially
oppressive unity of the state. The effects of events in the East have not,
however, remained confined to its component states. Uneven economic
development and social and political instability in the region have ushered in
the prospect of mounting economic migration from these areas to the West,
adding further fuel to debates on the subject of citizenship on both sides of
the East/West divide.
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The flight from economic and political insecurity is in no way limited to
the countries of Eastern Europe. The increasing polarity which has manifested
itself inside the countries of the West has been mirrored in important
ways by the growing gap between the First and Third Worlds. The prospect
of mounting migration from the latter once again poses the problem of
citizenship in its starkest terms. The presumed convergence of nation, state,
and population has been, if not shattered, certainly destabilized. Hence the
question has become sharply posed as to who is entitled to partake of available
economic and social resources. This question is all the more pressing
because of the possibilities it opens up for the politics of xenophobia and
racism. Finally, that citizenship has acquired new trans-national and international
implications is poignantly highlighted by the nature and scope of
contemporary environmental crises. A politics of citizenship which conceives
of political communities whose lines of solidarity run only to the borders of
nation-states seems increasingly ill-equipped to tackle the truly transnational
scope of so many contemporary environmental crises, and seems
unlikely to assuage environmental insecurity.
If the changes sketched above have posed the problem of citizenship afresh,
it is in good measure because they simultaneously throw up the problem of
identity, and most particularly of political identity. And, identity is, in
important respects, implicated in each of these transformations. The national,
racial, ethnic, sexual, linguistic, and other minorities internal to the advanced
liberal democracies all seek to secure recognition of their specificity. In some
cases this quest for identity is manifest in minority struggles for integration
in the political life of the communities in which they live, struggles epitomized
by the civil rights movement in the United States. Such recognition has
only been partially (if, in some cases, at all) forthcoming, constrained by the
particular hegemonic ideal of universal citizenship prevailing in these
societies. As a consequence other expressions of the struggle for identity have
been either cautious or even explicitly hostile to projects of incorporation and
assimilation.
An important dimension of the struggles around the welfare state and its
apparent retreat has been the nature of the identities that compete for state services
and resources. Are individuals to be clients or individual consumers of a
minimal state and the services it provides (as the Right frequently insists)? Or
are they to be active democratic participants in the production of services in
ways that simultaneously secure the conditions for both individual autonomy
and social solidarity (as voices on the Left argue)? Thus, the ascendancy of
neo-liberalism, with its radical individualism and focus on the unencumbered
consumer, raises the problem of identity.4 So too does the globalization of
capital, challenging as it does the old loyalties invested in nation-states. The
growing recognition of the heterogeneity of civil society has ushered in a
reconsideration of that concept and its implications for social and political
thought, calling into question the nature of political identity itself. And the
growing Eastern European and Third World diaspora has been met on the Left
by calls for a radical reconsideration of political identity along post-national
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cosmopolitan lines (Habermas, 1996: 491–515; Held, 1996), and on the Right
by the virulent anti-immigrant chauvinism of the likes of Le Pen in France.
Finally, the new ‘environmental consciousness’ has been met with calls for a
new environmental citizenship, one capable of transcending conceptions of
citizenship locked within the confines of the nation-state (Falk, 1994).
Much conventional post-war theoretical reflection on citizenship in the
West operated on the implicit assumption that sovereign states could provide
the framework within which progress would proceed, and given the right
footings – a combination of liberal democracy, capitalism, and the logic of the
welfare state – the successes of the West would percolate to the developing
countries. From theories of the ‘end of ideology’ to those of ‘the end of
history’ there has been a sense that the model of liberal democratic nationstates
revealed to the rest of the world the vision of their inexorable future.
We in the West who supposedly lived that future, could attest that it was
indeed a good one, and one that held the promise of ever-greater things to
come. The changes which we have sketched have, however, conspired to leave
that vision rather more blurred than some of its proponents would have us
believe. The bloom, it seems, is off the rose.
The new reality ushered in by these changes serves to highlight tensions
inherent in the theoretical approaches to and practices of citizenship which
dominated the post-war era. This new reality is one that is frequently
described in terms of a ‘late-modern’ or ‘post-modern’ condition, a confluence
of social transformations which have given rise to the proliferation and
fragmentation of identities – the notion that as social and political agents our
daily existence is mediated by numerous, often conflicting, spheres of action
and interest. One of the hallmarks of analyses which stress this fragmentation
has been the celebration of the heterogeneity of the social, the plurality of
identities and interests, while maintaining a (sometimes radically) sceptical
stance toward those discourses of identity and concepts of the social which
would mask that plurality or sublimate its radical political potential. On one
reading of the discourses of citizenship – one we wish to challenge – citizenship
might be read as necessarily performing just such a masking or sublimation.
Citizenship can indeed perform such a task, but a critical theory of
citizenship quickly reveals that citizenship has always operated in tandem
with assumptions about who are valid political actors and what are the appropriate
boundaries of community.
The politics of citizenship have required us to place our universal identity
as citizens ahead of those particular interests which arise from our daily lives.
There is, thus, a distinct friction between citizenship and the identities that
arise from other aspects of our lives. To citizenship has been allotted the job
of transcending those complex differences that arise in the everyday world.
But a concept of citizenship which occludes these identities and, in turn, the
social relations through which they are constituted, reproduced, and potentially
transformed, threatens to serve as a legitimating discourse for the maintenance
of the oppressions premised upon those identities. If all are equal in
the realm of the political, that is as citizens, does this not relegate these other
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inequalities and differences to the realm of the extra- or pre-political? The
discourses of citizenship have frequently seemed singularly ill-equipped to
contend with this challenge (Young, 1995). The problem here is not, we
suggest, rooted so much in the concept of citizenship itself, but rather in a
series of unduly restrictive conceptions of the political, particularly those
which fail to take (adequate) account of the cultural dimensions of the political.
It is a failure to understand the place of citizenship in hegemonic projects,
and relatedly its complex articulation with other social and political
concepts, an articulation too often assumed and too seldom problematized.
The implication that citizenship somehow stands in opposition to, or is
juxtaposed with, identity requires some clarification, for citizenship itself
implies an identity, but not, however, just any identity. Citizenship connotes
a distinctly political identity, one which stipulates the conditions of membership
in and exclusion from a political community. And it is much more than
a mere nominal category. In a world in which the term ‘citizen’ is frequently
deployed in everyday language to designate little more than the fact that a
person carries a birth certificate and a passport issued by one state or another,
it is easy to overlook the significant benefits attached to membership in some
political communities and the deficits attending membership in others. In
addition to stipulating membership, citizenship also implies a matrix of rights
and duties to which citizens are, respectively, entitled and bound. It is this
association with the rights and duties of membership that ensures that in
struggles around citizenship the stakes are particularly high. However, it is
in its relationship to other identities, its capacity or incapacity to recognize
or accommodate other sources of identity, that citizenship comes into conflict
with the broader politics of identity which has achieved such currency
in recent years.
UNIVERSAL CITIZENSHIP: FROM POLIS TO NATION
If, as we have suggested, features of the current political and economic conjuncture
have been the catalyst for a renewed interest in the subject of citizenship,
it must nevertheless be stressed that the tensions between citizenship
and identity are not reducible to these characteristics. Citizenship’s conceptual
lineage flows from the roots of Western political thought, and so too do
the tensions between citizenship and identity. The status of citizenship has
always strained between universality and particularity, manifest in relations
of inclusion and exclusion, identity and difference.
The discourses of citizenship have frequently prioritized ‘citizen’ as the
pre-eminent political identity, with the practical effect of displacing, occluding
or supplanting alternative identities, banishing them to the realm of the
extra- or pre-political. This, however, is hardly a new feature of the discourses
and practices of citizenship. Our purpose here is not to offer a general overview
of the concept of citizenship, its origins and development,5 but to
provide a brief look at the concepts of citizenship which prevailed in Western
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antiquity to demonstrate that the universal pretensions of citizenship have
always strained against the particularities of the social. The point we wish to
stress is that from its earliest roots in the canons of Western political thought
the concept of citizenship contained the seeds of many of the contradictions
with which we still grapple today.
The classical Greek conception held citizenship to be the only political
identity that members of the polis had. Citizens were presumed to enter the
public sphere unencumbered by the affairs of mundane life, those particular
interests arising from the sphere of the oikonomia. It was through participation
in the dialog of the polis and by taking public office that true virtue
and the actualization of the good life were to be realized. The burdens and
prerogatives of citizenship fell equally upon the shoulders of all to whom that
status applied. Citizens equally ruled and were ruled, and citizenship heralded
the victory of universality over particularity, the priority of polis over
oikos, and the realization of man’s true nature as a zoon politikon. At the
centre of this theory of political community was the principle of equality of
citizens, but given that wage earners, women, children, slaves, and aliens were
deemed unfit for this exercise, it is an account of human equality which, as
Pocock points out, ‘exclude[d] the greater part of the human species from
access to it’ (1995: 31). The prerogatives and duties of citizenship may have
applied universally to all citizens, but its scope of application implied a very
truncated universe indeed. Political life was reserved for citizens, and identities
other than that of the virtuous citizen were deemed to have no place in
political life.
This, however, was not the only concept of citizenship bequeathed by
antiquity. Roman jurisprudence yielded a variant. The citizen of Imperial
Rome was quite unlike the virtuous citizen of Athens, with Roman citizenship
being a significantly more passive status than the Athenians had contemplated.
Citizenship entailed the ability to lay claim to a set of rights and
protections to which all citizens were equally entitled. Here there was much
less emphasis on the virtues of civic life or on the obligation to participate.
Roman citizens, like their Athenian predecessors, were ruled, but unlike the
virtuous citizens of Athens they did not rule themselves. As Walzer has
pointed out, the dramatic increase in social scale from the Athenian city-state
to Imperial Rome led to this more passive concept of citizenship. In short, as
social scale increased, the affectual bonds that underpinned the virtuous community
of active citizens were weakened. Social solidarity was more likely to
be secured though the extension of a matrix of rights and protections equally
to all citizens (Walzer, 1989: 214). But there was no space for alternative identities.
Political identity and solidarity were secured through, and exhausted
by, the extension of equal citizenship rights to all members at the expense of
any recognition of difference.
In an important respect, much of the subsequent development of the
concept of citizenship can be viewed in the light of the tension inherent in
these two classical approaches to the issue: one emphasizing civic responsibility,
the obligation individuals owe to the community of which they are a
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member; the other, the prerogatives and protections to which citizens are
entitled. The imperial conception would find resonances in the absolutist
monarchies of early modern Europe, with ‘subjects’ the passive recipients of
the rights and protections bestowed by a more or less beneficent Leviathan.
Liberals, from Locke onward, would strive to return sovereignty to ‘the
people’ by limiting the state’s role to that of guarantor of the relations of civil
society along with a focus on freedom from unwarranted interventions by
the state. The liberal concept of citizenship also sustained an overwhelming
focus on the rights and privileges attaching to citizenship. The state was a
necessary evil, and true virtue was to be found not in membership in political
society but rather in industry and commerce. Citizenship was rooted in
that collection of rights which would secure the conditions for the latter. This
conception stood in stark contrast to the active citizen contemplated in the
republican theories that emerged on the continent. The ideal of the virtuous
citizen of Athens, actively and equally engaged in political life, was resuscitated
and pressed into service as the cornerstone of the civic republican vision
of citizenship. Citizenship has strained between these two poles ever since.
Citizenship has provided the identity which marks our common membership
in a political community, but has performed this task in part by obscuring
the persistence of other social relations and thereby undermining
recognition of the alternative identities arising therefrom. It has done so in
conjunction with other assumptions about what constitutes a ‘competent’
political actor and/or the ‘naturalness’ of the social community that the state
is presumed to administer. This aporia of citizenship obtains not only in the
liberal version of ‘passive’ citizenship, but in the republican tradition as well.6
Each version tends to rely heavily upon the assumption of a pre-political
constitution of a natural community of social actors.
In their rejuvenation of the classical concept of citizenship, the bourgeois
revolutions of Europe in the 18th and 19th century introduced a relatively
new feature into the field of political discourse. The states that emerged from
this period of revolutionary transformation laid claims to a rootedness in the
nation, constructing themselves as nation-states, with each state actively
engaged in the consolidation and institutionalization of its own national
characteristics: language, territory, symbols, rituals, etc.7 The emerging liberal
democratic state appealed to this primordial national community as the basis
of social solidarity. In this discursive space was inscribed a new hegemonic
project: the consolidation and integration of the nation. Citizenship would
figure centrally in this project. In this era the concept of citizen became
articulated with both the idea of the nation, and with the institutions of the
modern state. This conceptual association has helped to lend to citizenship
some of its ambiguity, not to mention some of its more unappealing practical
manifestations.8
The primacy of the nation-state was linked to the doctrine that every
nation should form its own state, and every state its own nation. The selfdetermining
nation became the social embodiment of the Athenian citizen:
one who rules and is ruled. Interpretations of just what that implied for
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political practice would vary from case to case: from the liberalism of Locke,
Smith and Hume, through the civic republicanism of Rousseau, to the romanticism
of Herder, Schelling, and Fichte, the latter finding resonances in Kant
and Hegel. But the common thread running through them all was the notion
that a nation – a nation of citizens – should govern itself. The root of the
problem lay in the ambiguity surrounding the nation. The projects of nation
building which were central to the process of state formation and the establishment
of the legitimate capacity of states to regulate and govern their
respective populations were founded upon a particularly ambiguous category
of social organization, for as pervasive as the new discourse of nation was, its
substantive content was anything but self-evident. The project of the nation
would see the articulation of various features of sociality – history, language,
culture, territory, memory, etc. – brought together in strategic combination,
and, in turn, inscribed in institutional apparatuses and practices as states con-
solidated.
In an important respect the modern project of citizenship can be seen as an
effort to bring the nation and the population into line with one another by
extending the rights and obligations of citizenship to all members of the
nation.9 The ambiguity surrounding the nation has meant that the substance
of citizenship has varied from national case to national case. Two models of
nationality are generally held up as constituting the poles within which actual
nation formation has proceeded. One entails what is primarily a political
concept of nation, the other an ethno-cultural concept. The former is conceived
as a population combined in its shared dedication to a common political
project and ‘open’ to new members. All who wish to become members of
the nation are to be welcomed as fellow citizens, with citizenship entailing a
dedication to a common civic-national political project, the locus classicus of
this model being the cosmopolitan nationalism of the American Revolution.10
The ethno-cultural conception limits the granting of citizenship to a narrowly
defined nation, with citizenship entitlements generally restricted to those who
meet stringent criteria of some combination of language and blood. The
German and Japanese cases exemplify this model. In both models, however,
membership in the nation slipped easily into the discourse of citizenship, with
the definition of national belonging operating to identify who was entitled to
the benefits and obliged to fulfill the duties of citizenship.
In practice the discourses of citizenship and national identity have converged
in different ways, with the span between these poles occupied by a
variety of citizenship practices as numerous as the nation-states which give
them institutional embodiment. The ethno-cultural model is perhaps the
most explicit in its homogenizing imperatives, with eligibility for membership
constrained from the outset, reserving citizenship status (and, in turn, its
accompanying rights and obligations) to those who meet strict ethno-cultural
criteria. In practice, however, the civic-national model, for all its talk of openness,
is also generally shot through with assumptions about national culture
and language. The problem is not so much with the expectation that immigrants
assimilate to an extent that renders them capable of functioning with
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some measure of political, cultural, and linguistic fluency. Rather, just what
they are being assimilated to is problematic, with the homogeneity of the
nation too frequently assumed and too seldom subjected to critical scrutiny.
The fact is that today our citizenship is generally associated with our
‘nationality’, with citizens frequently referred to as ‘nationals’ in everyday
parlance, a more than innocuous semantic slippage. As Brubaker suggests:
Citizenship in a nation-state is inevitably bound up with nationhood and
national identity, membership of the state with membership of the nation. . . .
The politics of citizenship today is first and foremost a politics of nationhood.
As such, it is a politics of identity, not a politics of interest (in the strict, materialist
sense). It pivots more on self-understanding than on self-interest. The ‘interests’
informing the politics of citizenship are ‘ideal’ rather than material. The
central question is not ‘who gets what?’ but rather ‘who is what?’. (Brubaker,
1992: 182, emphasis in original)
This is not to suggest that real material interests are not at stake in the politics
of citizenship. On the contrary, as a politics of identity it is important to
stress that citizenship entails both identification and recognition.11
An identity may be an active expression of group experience, and it may
seek to secure recognition of that identity from others. For example, the ‘gay
community’ existed as an identificatory referent long before the emergence
of campaigns for political recognition (‘gay pride’, ‘gay rights’, etc.). It is only
when some constituency is accorded ‘recognition’ and the form of that recognition
is linked to citizenship that this becomes translated into a premise for
determining the distribution of social benefits, entitlements, and protection,
as when same sex couples are accorded mutual pension rights. But the conjoining
of citizenship and nation has meant that the criteria of recognition
have varied, sometimes dramatically, from case to case and across time. Too
frequently nations have been:
conceived of as categories of like individuals rather than as webs of social
relations. This places the emphasis on sameness, and often leads nationalism to
be the enemy of diversity. It also provides the basis for arguments that national
identity should take precedence over other competing identities – regional,
familial, gender, interest-group, occupational and so on. Nationalism is particularly
potent and problematic where diverse institutions of civil society are
lacking or fail to provide for a diversity of public discourses and collective identities.
(Calhoun, 1993: 387)
Unfortunately, the fluidity of the concept of nation has manifested a disturbing
tendency to closure and constriction in times of crisis, with legitimate
access to citizenship rights being preserved for those who meet new standards
of stringency on the criteria of recognition. At its most chauvinistic, this logic
clears the space for both xenophobic policing of the boundaries of the nation
(protecting the nation from external others such as ‘illegal immigrants’) and
governing the moral fabric of the citizenry (either normalizing or marginalizing
the internal other). This potential for the very language of nation to slide
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into more chauvinistic interpretations in times of conflict or crisis renders the
coupling of citizenship and nation inherently problematic. While we cannot
simply avoid ‘the nation’, this ever-present potential for semantic slippage
makes it a less than obvious foundation upon which to attempt to build social
solidarity and a politics of citizenship.12 There are, of course, innumerable
other identities which compete for our loyalties, many of which have implications
for our political lives, often competing for recognition in political discourses
and practices. Insofar as they do, they are not somehow pre-political,
but stand rather in a constitutive relation with political discourses and practices.
National homogeneity no longer seems an adequate foundation upon
which to construct a politics of citizenship that is sensitive to the plural identities
arising from a heterogeneous civil society (Mouffe, 1992: 8). For, as
Calhoun has argued, ‘There is no single, definite and fixed “peoplehood”
which can be assumed in advance of political discussion’ (1993: 407). We turn
now to propose a historically contextualized framework in which to locate
an argument about the future of citizenship.
CRISIS OF WELFARISM AND THE DECLINE OF UNIVERSAL
CITIZENSHIP
In the return of the problem of citizenship to the contemporary agenda, the
principle touchstone against which discussion has proceeded has been provided
by T. H. Marshall’s 1949 lecture ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ (Marshall,
1992). His formulations remain a powerful source of insight from
which a normative critique of the current conjuncture might proceed. But for
all its insight his account serves to highlight the limits of much post-war
thinking on the subject.
We need not dwell on the specifics of Marshall’s argument; that ground has
been well covered by others.13 However, a brief reflection upon Marshall’s
lecture provides a point of departure for the present discussion, not least
because of the optimistic chord it strikes with respect to the politics of citizenship.
While clearly cognizant of the antagonistic relationship prevailing
between the expansion of citizenship rights and the class structure of capitalism,
Marshall (and many of those who followed him) viewed the post-war era
as promising a potential enrichment of the substantive content of citizenship,
a promise whose fulfilment might simultaneously provide a bulwark against
the worst excesses of capitalism while securing the basis for social integration.14
For Marshall, the expansion and deepening of citizenship rights would provide
the foundations for a new equality which would counter (but not necessarily
eradicate) the inequalities inherent in the class structure of capitalist societies.
Expanding the substantive content of citizenship was seen as the basis upon
which might be built ‘a direct sense of community membership based on
loyalty to a civilization which is a common possession’ (Marshall, 1992: 24).
Today, while vestiges of such an incremental view of rights are still present, we
are generally more more cautious about the effectivity of rights.15
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For Marshall, the citizen who had acquired civil, political, and now social
rights had to accept the ethical obligations that accompanied them. But there
is an underside to Marshall’s argument which remains, at best, implicit in his
formulation. His vision implied not only a citizen who was the bearer of both
rights and duties, but one who was to be guided to his/her fulfilment through
the intermediation of the array of professional expertise mobilized by the
post-war welfare state. The 19th century had seen the rise of processes of
individualization rooted in the discourses and practices of a nascent web of
professions and techniques of social governance. As the 20th century
unfolded, this complex of discourses and practices burgeoned, constructing
the individual as citizen with social obligations quite different from the
‘obedience’ expected of the subject of the sovereign. A set of experts set about
constructing the ‘normal citizen’, ‘normal mother’, ‘normal child’, ‘normal
worker’ through education, counselling, and allied techniques that were
monitored by doctors, social workers, and other experts.16 An expertise of
normalization embraced the citizenry. The Marshallian ‘citizen’ was the
embodiment of the period of the welfare state and thus of ‘the social’; a new
social contract framed with a ‘balance’ of rights and duties administered by
a powerful but benevolent state and supervised by an array of experts (social
workers, psychologists, etc.).
The world has, of course, changed dramatically in the five decades since
the publication of Marshall’s lecture. Today, just what that ‘civilization
which is a common possession’ is has become less clear than it seemed in the
optimistic post-war era. ‘Common’ for whom? ‘Civilized’ by whose standards?
And ‘possessed’ by whom? Marshall’s vision of the gradual expansion
and deepening of civil, political, and social rights mitigating the harsher
face of capitalism now seems in serious jeopardy, challenged by shifting
political and economic circumstances and tempered by a recognition of the
ethical dilemmas inherent in the technologies of governance implicit in that
model. Moreover, the project of deepening the substantive content of
citizenship through the expansion of social rights often took a form which
served to entrench social divisions of gender, race, sexuality, and culture,
obscuring their persistence behind a rhetoric of universality.17 The
diminishing scope and differential application of the rights of citizenship
suggest that the development of the post-war vision has at least halted and
is probably in retreat.18
These changes invite a normative assessment of the condition of citizenship.
The erosion of social rights presents a worrisome feature of late-modern
life, not least because it bears directly upon the substantive content of civil
and political rights. The capacity to be full and equal members of civil society,
and to be active, knowledgeable political agents has come to require measures
guaranteeing social security through social rights. As these become attenuated
it no longer seems as clear as it once did precisely what equality entails.
Equal to whom? What constitutes equality for people occupying different
identities? Moreover, the history of social rights is, as we have suggested, not
without its own ambiguities.19
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NEO-LIBERAL GOVERNANCE AND CITIZENSHIP
There is wide agreement that the weakening of citizenship is associated with
the decline of the welfare state and that universalist citizenship has been
undermined by the rise of identity politics. We want to insist that this association
between the decline of the welfare state and the weakening of citizenship
needs to be specified in more detail. We suggest that this process can be
understood as a general shift in the mode of governance and we draw on the
governmentality tradition to demonstrate the longer term processes at work.
The focus of this work on identifying shifts in the techniques of rule is significant
for our purposes. In the liberal democratic regimes of the West the
dominant mode of governance throughout most of the 20th century has been
a welfarist liberalism which constructed its object of governance as ‘the
social’.20 The social found expression in the project of the expansion of the
universal attributes of citizenship. The critical mechanism of the government
of the social was through an advancing governance by experts orchestrated
under the umbrella provided by the agencies of the welfare state.
In recent decades ‘the social’ has increasingly been contested, expertise has
diversified, and its links to state apparatuses have been disaggregated. Clients
of experts, narrativizing their dissatisfactions in the potent language of rights,
engage in self-organization and contest the powers of expertise, and become
consolidated in ‘identity politics’. A new formula for the relation between
government, expertise, and subjectivity gradually formed via strategies of
pluralization, autonomization, and responsibilization. Significantly these
developments occurred under the political hegemony of the Right whose
great success was that they managed to render this regime technical, that is
they found ways to govern through the new ethics of the subject. In other
words they succeeded in creating a distinct mode of governance whose key
feature was a new regime operating through autonomy and choice ‘embodied
in technologies that enable people to be governed, and to govern themselves,
in terms of their of their identity’ (Rose, 1994: 385, emphasis in
original).
The central question that these developments pose is: can such a system
work through something other than ‘neo-liberalism’? Can a regime of autonomy
and choice be made effective in a form that is compatible with the retention
of the universalizing attractions of ‘citizenship’ and with democratic
politics? What is significant is that there now exists a neo-liberal mode of
governance which decenters the state. While a critical recognition of this turn
of events has been misinterpreted by some as implying that the state is no
longer important, that recognition has arisen from a polemical concern to distance
the governmentality position from state-centered approaches.21 In
keeping with the former, we see it as better to understand the role of the state
within neo-liberalism as no longer being the conductor of the orchestra, but
rather as providing the conditions for the exercise of rule by many other institutions
and agents that operate by inciting and stimulating the active choices
of enterprising individuals. The key technique is the linking of self-identity
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to ‘lifestyle’ through techniques that involve governing through the selfgovernance
of identities. It should be stressed that the objectives of neoliberal
projects of rule continue to have many of the features established
under welfare liberalism such as the production of effective workers, healthy
bodies, functional families, and hygienic homes. These remain political objectives,
but they are no longer the direct responsibility of the state bureaucratic
agencies operating through inspection, instruction, and surveillance. Neoliberal
rule is better conceived as a new alliance between the state, autonomous
experts, and self-governing individuals.22 ‘[I]t has become possible to
govern without governing society – to govern through the “responsibilized”
and “educated” anxieties and aspirations of individuals and their families’
(Rose, 1994: 389, emphasis in original).
Lest it be thought we are rushing to embrace neo-liberalism, we should
note that it is vulnerable to a general moral criticism. The preoccupation with
self-identity and the burdens of responsibilized self-enterprise may encourage
a defensive contraction of the self and a consequent lack of capacity to
sustain social relations with others (Lasch, 1984). Alongside the pacific image
of individuals as ‘free to choose’ their own identities and lifestyles, the neoliberal
mode of governance is confronted by a profound contradiction. It has
left an intractable remainder, the marginalized under-classes. One of its
central modes of operation is by means of policing the dividing practices that
have hardened the gap between the ‘responsible’ and the ‘irresponsible’, the
former committed to self-governance, the latter subject to intensified coercive
governance. No longer embraced within a politics of solidarity, the
marginalized are, rather, in an important sense excluded from citizenship.
Instead they are exposed to the expanding network of public and private
policing, or are left in the care of a range of new para-governmental agencies
– charities, advice bureaus, drop-in centres and other voluntary organizations
(Rose, 1994: 389).23
Can neo-liberalism sustain the contradiction between the self-motivated
world of enterprising individuals and the coercion of the marginalized? The
least optimistic scenario (which Christopher Lasch bequeathed to us) is that
the contented majority is, in the developed world, sufficiently large that it
can exercise its political power so as to remain deaf to the fate of the marginalized
(Lasch, 1995). The complacency of the comfortable may be rocked
now and again by rioting in the inner cities that they deserted long ago; they
may strengthen the increasingly fortified suburbs in which they now reside.
However, this cynical scenario is undermined by the recent series of electoral
defeats which neo-liberalism has suffered at the hands of the deeply
paradoxical, and undoubtedly unstable, mix of economic liberalism and
social democratic welfarism in the USA, UK, Italy, and France.24 It is not
our intent to pursue futurology. It is sufficient to insist that the neo-liberal
model of a truncated citizenship of self-governing individuals is likely to
prove unstable and offers no satisfactory solution to the dilemmas of
modern citizenship.
If the Left is to fruitfully address this strategic void its response must stand
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in direct contradistinction to the resigned acceptance that neo-liberalism displays
toward the deepening marginalization of a sizeable and growing underclass.
This must entail a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand there must
be an unwavering commitment to the deepening of democratic institutions
and practices. Any adequate conception of citizenship under the complex
conditions prevailing in contemporary liberal democracies must recognize
that democratic citizenship is constituted in multiple sites in which citizensas-actors
‘without intending it, [renew] the political by contesting the forms
of unequal power which democratic liberty and equality have made possible
and which democracy can eliminate only by betraying its own values’ (Wolin,
1996: 43–4). On the other hand, the very substance of citizenship must be
reconceived as a negotiated compromise over the boundaries of the political.
The citizenship identity must be reconceived as a terrain of active contestation
which seeks to instantiate the boundaries of ethico-political life in the
institutions of both state and civil society. As such it must also reflexively
attend to the inter-relation between the public and the private, and the ways
in which full citizenship must be pursued within a context that provides
meaningful supports for the actualization of independence and autonomy for
those marginalized by both the post-war and neo-liberal breeds of welfare
security (Phillips, 1993; Young, 1997). A critical theory of citizenship must
recognize the contingency of that identity, and the fact that any given resolution
of the contests over the substance of citizenship represents an unstable
equilibrium of compromise which is most open to transformative pressures
at those moments when the ethical foundations of prevailing social relations
are no longer adequate to secure social solidarity.
HEGEMONY AND CITIZENSHIP: REARTICULATING THE
UNIVERSAL AND THE PARTICULAR
There can be no return to the idea that citizenship identity can or should take
priority over all other identities; but neither can the recognition of identities
through rights by itself provide grounds for constructing a new and vibrant
social solidarity. The more optimistic variants of identity politics look to the
formation of coalitions and alliances between different identities to provide
the basis for collective action (e.g. ‘rainbow coalitions’) and the potential for
generating enduring solidarity. This optimism tends to neglect the instability
inherent in such ensembles of alliances. Without any stable core such alliances
are always vulnerable to natural tensions, competition, and conflict between
plural interests. For this reason we should not succumb to the post-modern
variant of identity politics that celebrates all asserted identities equally; for to
do so negates the possibility of achieving a form of shared identity capable
of grounding social solidarity. As Anne Phillips has suggested with respect
to feminist concerns with the limitations of citizenship politics, ‘Without
careful attention to the ways in which particular identities end up masquerading
as universal concerns, “the citizen” threatens to shut down the
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awakening recognition of group identity and difference. So while there may
be no necessary incompatibility between feminism and the language of citizens,
a lot of hard work will have to go into assuring that this is so’ (Phillips,
1993: 87).
We suggest that the hard work Phillips proposes is vital to the future vitality
of democratic practice, and that citizenship continues to offer a potentially
valuable resource. Its great merit is precisely its capacity to shift our
political discourse beyond the scope of what Gramsci termed ‘corporate’
interests. Gramsci argued that finding common ground between different
groups and identities required specific changes in the forms of consciousness
of those involved. This idea makes it possible to avoid the tendency to naivety
in those approaches which focus only on communication and dialog between
different identities. Gramsci directs us toward a more agonistic process in
which participants have to change, rather than merely make tactical compromises.
It is central to our argument to stress that projects directed toward
handling clashing identities require deliberate strategies to overcome sectional
interests. Any project which seeks to develop the capacity to integrate
plural identities must cultivate a capacity to forego immediate interests in
order to bind more closely to other social forces. Such hegemonic practices
are illustrated by the need not only to challenge, but to overcome long-established
practices that exclude or marginalize some identities, for example,
female employees or an ethnic group. Gramsci used the concept of ‘nationalpopular’
to describe such projects (Gramsci, 1957). This term remains appropriate
as a way of thinking through the relation between citizenship and
plural identities; it refers both to a universal element and at the same time to
the complex of popular elements that are at play. Since we are interested in
decentring the nation and the state we take the liberty of renaming Gramsci’s
concept ‘popular citizenship’.
A democratic theory of popular citizenship needs to be capable of engaging
with disparate identities and to be open to negotiation and contestation
with all identity claims. This implies that democratic citizenship cannot be
committed to the recognition of all identity claims or to the same form of
recognition for every identity. Here we encounter complex questions. For
example, in what contexts is it appropriate to grant representative status to
ethnic identities? In South Africa, where the struggle against racial categories
was at the heart of the struggle against apartheid, it would seem
inherently problematic to grant racial or ethnic representation, whereas in
contexts where historically significant but small ethnic minorities exist,
their direct political representation may be not only expedient, but essential,
as for instance in the case of the Maori of New Zealand. Similar problems
beset the question of the recognition of problematic identities. Where
ethnic identities press for recognition, what should the response be to
supremacist claims for the recognition of an Aryan identity? The solution
to such a problem would vary with context, but needs to combine struggle
against such a claim with caution about what forms of coercion or exclusion
are exercised.
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Additionally, we propose to make use of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony.
However, it is first necessary to perform a somewhat violent act on the
original form of the concept which, in Gramsci’s usage, always presumed a
ruling class or class-led dominant bloc as the active subject that exercised
hegemony and secured its benefits. There is some space in Gramsci’s treatment
for an alternative that is implied in his idea of counter-hegemony; this
he used to provide the possibility of the emergence of a social movement with
the capacity to challenge the existing hegemonic bloc. There seems no reason
in principle to accept Gramsci’s assumption that a counter-hegemonic movement
should be formed around a social class. In principle, any constellation
of social actors can potentially constitute a hegemonic alliance. The most
basic requirement for a hegemonic project to become dominant is that it must
address and incorporate, if only partially, some aspects of the aspirations,
interests, and projects of not only its own constituents but also other groups
whose alliance is possible. This variant of hegemony can usefully be referred
to as an ‘incorporative hegemony’ in that it helps to focus attention on the
constructive project that is at the core of hegemony, but it retains an emphasis
on the agonistic nature of the project.25
A number of quite distinct mechanisms are involved in the processes
whereby incorporative hegemony can install the presence of subordinate
interests within the hegemonic project. First, a successful hegemony needs to
incorporate values and norms which contribute to securing the minimum
standards of social life. Second, it involves the means by which, as a result of
actual struggle or the apprehension of it, a dominant bloc engages in a more
or less self-conscious project of ‘compromise’ so as to incorporate some
element of the interests of other groups. A third and more complex process
is the requirement that a hegemonic project articulate values and norms in
such a way that they acquire significant trans-cultural appeal. For example,
it is important in asserting a freedom of religion, that this is shorn of the
implication of providing advantages for some privileged religion. Yet it must
at the same time remain capable of contesting doctrines and practices of those
religions which are incompatible with other components of the value content
of the hegemonic project.
It is now necessary to demonstrate the pertinence of the above discussion
of hegemony to citizenship. Its potential is to make it possible to avoid the
problem within those treatments of citizenship which imply the existence of
some generalized consent to the ‘rules of the citizenship game’ such as underlie,
for example, the positions developed recently by Habermas (1996) and
Kymlicka (1995, 1996). The fact of contemporary pluralism is that minorities
not only frequently do not share the assumptions about the legitimacy of
existing norms and institutions but also in many cases these are seen as the
problem rather than the cure.26 Thus while Habermas, for instance, seeks to
ground legitimacy in the legislative process, it should be noted that it is often
precisely the legislative apparatus which is viewed with suspicion and hostility
by many minorities. In contrast to such positions we need an account
of how citizenship can be reconstructed without assuming that all must first
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accept the consensual liberal values on which it has previously been legitimated.
This is not to suggest that the securing of consent to the ‘rules of the
game’ is not a component of the project of reconstructed citizenship. For
example, many minorities are deeply suspicious of free speech norms. How
might those Muslims who would deny rights to Salman Rushdie come to
recognize that conceding rights to Rushdie is a concomitant of their claim for
self-governing Muslim schools or the strengthening of blasphemy laws? And,
in turn, how might those who view Muslim schools and the return of
blasphemy as antithetical to democratic citizenship come to accept that these
projects may be necessary consequences of their abstract commitment to
minority rights?
Invoking a near-Gramscian theory of counter-hegemony provides a more
agonistic approach to the relationship between citizenship and identity.
Political and ideological struggles frequently revolve around attempts to give
priority to some subject positions and to marginalize others. To the extent
that this process succeeds, achieving some measure of stable (albeit ultimately
contingent) equilibrium in the institutions, discourses, and practices of a
society, constituting a new ‘common sense’ of the day, hegemony has been
achieved. Projects which seek to rearticulate the elements of hegemony, supplanting
some, supplementing others, are in this sense counter-hegemonic. If
some level of realism is be to achieved it is necessary to reject any suggestion
that these battles can be resolved by purely consensual means. Not only the
content of identities, but which identities are capable of securing recognition
are the outcomes of social and cultural contestation. As Stuart Hall argues,
Far from coming from the still small point of truth inside us, identities actually
come from outside, they are the way in which we are recognized and then come
to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the
others there is no self, there is no self-recognition. (Hall, 1995: 8)
Thus we are concerned to stress the contested nature of identities, both
internally and externally. It follows that projects concerned to prescribe a
normative framework to resolve the contested claims of a plethora of radically
dissimilar identities runs the risk of presuming that some neutral standpoint
outside the contest can be found. Kymlicka’s distinction between
national and ethno-cultural communities, categories he views as qualitatively
different and which, in turn, imply differential normative foundations in a
politics of rights, represents precisely such an external criterion. However,
we seek to avoid the simple alternative that the content of citizenship is
nothing more than the resultant of naked power struggles between competing
identities.
We suggest that the theme of incorporative hegemony allows us to argue
that citizenship rights provide a framework – a framework that is stable, but
never fixed – that establishes grounds for both the legitimation of some claims
and, conversely, the exclusion of others. General citizenship rights provide criteria
for the granting of differential rights, namely, that such differential rights
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are only legitimate insofar as they serve to fulfil citizenship rights available to
all. Thus to grant a linguistic community the right to court proceedings being
conducted in their primary language serves to fulfil the access to justice that is
available to all. These normative criteria provide periodic opportunities to
secure greater stability by means of securing their constitutional embodiment,
for example, in charters of rights and other rights creating legislation.
Thus citizenship provides criteria for the legitimation of differential treatment
of different identities, but does not itself provide operative rules for
application to concrete cases. Take, for example, the question of which communities
are to be granted limited self-governance over the provision of education
supported by public funds. One criterion might be the requirement
that curricula incorporate minimum standards. Another might be that any
self-governing curriculum must, consistent with constitutional equality,
provide equal treatment for males and females such that a community which
proposed to deny females instruction in science or physical recreation would
be refused public funding. While this and many other controversies can only
be determined in the context of struggles, citizenship is significant in providing
a framework within which the discursive engagement can take place;
it does so by providing grounds for asserting and disputing claims to differential
treatment of social and cultural identities.
Central to these struggles is that each and every identity, in order to secure
its group interests, must engage in political communication in order to
expand the legitimacy of the particular claims they seek to assert. It follows
that this must also involve the implication that if they fail in this communicative
project, they may have to be prepared to alter or amend aspects of their
norms and practices. The enemy is the illusion that any identity is fixed and
its distinguishing marks etched in stone. The great enemy of any constructive
engagement with the contested arena of welfare and citizenship is essentialist
conceptions of identities. However, this does not resolve the issue of
what changes in the content of particular identities the wider community is
entitled to press or which demands so undermined the distinctiveness and
vitality of a community that they are, objectively, challenges to the very existence
of that identity.
CONCLUSION
As the 20th century unfolded, the gradual extension of citizenship status to
all ‘nationals’ inhabiting the political communities of Western democracies
proceeded.27 And this status was much more than a mere nominal one, for
that same era also raised the promise of a deepening of citizenship’s substantive
content, with citizenship status becoming closely associated with not
only community membership but the provision of the means whereby citizens
might be assured opportunity to participate actively in the social, political,
and economic lives of their communities. That project, incomplete as it
was, seems to have stalled, and in some cases, to have shifted into reverse.
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The inequities and contradictions of late-modern life have provided fertile
soil for the growth of identity politics, often articulated in problematically
essentialist terms. The category of ‘citizen’, long considered to apply equally
to all members of a political society, now strains under the burden of difference.
As the status of citizenship expanded to include most of the inhabitants
of a modern state’s territory it tended, simultaneously, to occlude substantive
differences between members, differences articulated in terms of nation, class,
race, gender, ethnicity, language, culture, sexuality, etc. This, of course, was
no accident. It is precisely in its capacity to rise above these identificatory distinctions
that the appeal of citizenship lies. The unity of political society is
secured by placing the principle of citizenship above the fray of these alternative
identities.
The universal pretensions of citizenship are forever destined to clash with
the particular aspirations arising from the complex heterogeneity of civil
society. This is a paradox to which there is no permanent solution. Nor
should we seek such permanence, for it is precisely through the contest
between these two that the boundaries of the political are contested and
resolved. In this paradox – in the struggle to achieve an always contestable
equilibrium of compromise between universality and particularity – resides
the very precondition of democracy. If a solution to this paradox were to be
found this would render democracy, indeed politics, redundant. ‘If democracy
is possible, it is because the universal has no necessary body and no
necessary content; different groups, instead, compete between themselves to
temporarily give to their particularisms a function of universal representation’
(Laclau, 1995: 107). Democratic negotiations of the substantive
content of citizenship are played out precisely upon this terrain.
Thus the state, and particularly the form, degree, and extent of its welfare
provisions will continue to figure centrally in both the politics of citizenship
and, more broadly, identity:
Citizenship is special because admission to its prerogatives, within the very
wide bounds set by international law, is entirely at the discretion of the state.
The regulation of membership is an essential attribute of sovereignty; the principle
of the liberty of the state in the attribution of citizenship is firmly established
in international law . . . In the European setting citizenship is a last
bastion of sovereignty; states continue to enjoy a freedom of action in this
domain that they increasingly lack in others. (Brubaker, 1992: 180)
But as we have suggested, both our theories and practices of citizenship must
move beyond the narrow strictures implied by much state-centric theorizing.
And just as importantly we must endeavor to decenter the nation in our
efforts to grasp the radical potential inherent in a revitalized democratic
citizenship.
These are difficult issues that afford no ready resolutions, at least none
that can avoid contestation. For it is precisely in the effort to work toward
their contested and always contingent resolution that the virtue of democracy
resides, but so too its ambiguity. The great myth of the political is the
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perpetual quest for the negation of politics. Politics always seeks to resolve
contradiction, but can never complete the project.
NOTES
1. The literature related to an agonistic vision of democracy is growing slowly, but
of particular interest are contributions by Connolly (1991), Honig (1992, 1993),
Mouffe (1993), and Wolin (1996).
2. This, of course, is a large and growing literature. Of particular importance to its
development has been the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (Laclau,
1977, 1990, 1995; Mouffe, 1979, 1992, 1993; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), and that
of Stuart Hall (1988a, 1988b). It is not our intention to offer a survey of the
specific contributions each of these authors has made to these debates, or to
engage these contributions in a sustained critical dialog here (a dialog we have
commenced on other fronts; see Purvis and Hunt, 1993). But while we would
stress that the postition we are developing here is irreducible to those espoused
by Laclau, Mouffe, and Hall, we nevertheless find ourselves sympathetic with
the broad contours of their respective positions. See also Hunt (1990).
3. The governmentality literature is exemplified by Dean (1991), Miller and Rose
(1990), and Rose (1989, 1994, 1996).
4. The individualism of neo-liberalism exists in tension with a universalism
embodied in its nationalist rhetorics.
5. For important discussions of that history see Pocock (1995), Ignatieff (1995),
Flathman in Beiner (1995), and Walzer (1989).
6. The revival of the civic-republican conception of the political has posed the
question of the relationship between rights and obligations. See the earlier interventions
by Arendt (1958) and Wolin (1961) and the growing communitarian
literature which has fueled a vibrant set of debates (see Sandel, 1982; Walzer,
1983; Taylor, 1990; Mouffe, 1993; Habermas, 1996).
7. The foundations for much of this process were, of course, laid prior to the revolutions
of the 18th and 19th centuries. For one of the most influential accounts
of the role played by print capitalism and the administrative apparatuses of
emergent modern states in paving the foundations for the modern nation, see
Anderson (1991).
8. One significant manifestation of this interpenetration of state, nation, and
citizenship was the conflation of ‘citizen’ and ‘subject’ which survived the
democratizing thrust of the modern period.
9. This version has been read in much theorizing on citizenship to imply a Whiggish
view of history, with full citizenship being the end result of a teleological
unfolding of necessary historical development. But the crucial point is that
citizenship is always a project, one which is never completed, and whose substance
is always open to contestation and revision.
10. In important respects the French Revolution provided a paradigm case of the
political conception of the nation, but it never fully separated itself from an
ethno-cultural vision of ‘Frenchness’ based on blood which has left the legacy
that even common language has not been enough to ensure the smooth integration
of incomers into French citizenship.
11. Indeed one of the most sustained sociological attempts to grapple with the shifting
forms of modern sociality has displaced the notion of ‘identity’ as too narrowly
hermeneutic in favor of ‘recognition’ as stipulating an appropriate
relational context (Honneth, 1995).
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12. This point has been made forcefully by Habermas (1996: 491–514). Not everyone
would agree, however. Some conservatives have suggested just the opposite,
arguing that what is needed is a much more forceful defence of the nation
as the essential foundation of social solidarity (Scruton, 1990: 229–337).
13. Indeed, the literature spawned by Marshall’s article has become a growth industry
in recent years, although many of the treatments of his contribution have
been quite (and sometimes unfairly) narrow in their reading. For useful recent
treatments of Marshall’s thinking on the subject, see Barbalet (1988), Bottomore
(1992), Pateman (1988), and Turner (1992).
14. Marshall associated ‘complete’ citizenship with the development of the welfare
state. Social rights were to afford citizens a modicum of economic security adequate
to ensure their affective participation in the political system (1992: 8, 24).
15. The problematization of rights was articulated most sharply in ‘critical legal
studies’ (Tushnet, 1984) and in feminist debates on law (Kingdom, 1991; Smart,
1989). But within both these traditions other voices pressed the continuing significance
of rights discourses (Bartholomew and Hunt, 1990; Cornell, 1993;
Minow, 1990; Schneider, 1986). Similar debates have also reverberated within
race theory.
16. This concern with the social citizen generated a parallel concern to understand
and to reform the anti-social citizen (juvenile delinquents, dysfunctional
families, etc.).
17. A growing feminist literature has exposed the assumptions underpinning dominant
conceptions of citizenship and the ways these have acted to relegate
women to a marginal citizenship status. See, for instance, Gordon (1990),
Pateman (1988), Phillips (1993), and Young (1997). Mink (1990) and Nelson
(1990) extend these analyses to the articulation of race, gender, and citizenship
in the American welfare state.
18. The suggestion that citizenship is in retreat should be distinguished from the
claim that citizenship is less ‘full’ or ‘complete’ than it once was, or once seemed
capable of becoming. Citizenship, as a project, is never complete. The subject
of ‘full citizenship’ should be reserved for empirical analyses of the substantive
content of particular citizenship regimes. To posit an ideal conception of
citizenship as a normative standard against which to measure the moral and
ethical implications of various regimes is undoubtedly a powerful political tool.
But the practical content of citizenship (criteria of entitlement and the rights
and duties that flow therefrom) will always be subject to contestation and
subject to revision. Any suggestion of an end-point in the development of
citizenship should, accordingly, be resisted.
19. An ambiguity poignantly captured by Cooper (1993) who traces the Major
government’s Citizen’s Charter foray into the traditionally ‘socialist’ terrain of
rights to welfare provision and public services. Cooper’s article helps to illustrate
the indeterminacy of rights discourse and its ambiguous articulation with
the politics of citizenship.
20. The ‘social’ is that aggregate of activities and persons that are the proper object
of government (Pasquino, 1991: 105).
21. See the exchange between Curtis (1995) and Miller and Rose (1995). We should,
however, be careful to distinguish this acknowledgement of the actuality of the
‘decentering’ of the state and its analytical implications from another literature
which seems more intent on ‘decentering’ the state precisely because it is of
waning importance (Magnusson and Walker 1988; Magnusson 1996). We
believe that the latter sorely underestimates the shifting yet continued importance
of the state as a crucial site organizing modes of social regulation.
22. For example, the goal of healthy bodies is promoted by an alliance of state,
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medicine, producers that act on the consumption choices of individuals, but
nevertheless state regulation provides the product labeling and pharmaceutical
testing so that the consumer can make ‘informed’ decisions.
23. One of the ironies of the ascendancy of the New Right has been its invocation
of the ‘‘‘active citizen” as a necessary ingredient in social cohesion, and [its
appeal] to a self-help tradition of voluntary service as an alternative to dependence
on the state’ (Phillips, 1993: 75). This new focus on the ‘obligations’
attending full social citizenship implies the simultaneous hardening of existing
marginalizations, leaving those incapable of such active involvement seemingly
further still from the status of ‘full’ citizenship.
24. The French case is much closer to a return to a post-war welfarism than the
others.
25. On the idea of ‘incorporative hegemony’ with reference to counter-hegemonic
rights strategies, see Hunt (1990).
26. This objection is elaborated on with respect to Kymlicka’s defence of differential
rights for minorities by Parekh (1997).
27. It should be remembered that this process was slow to reach completion.
Therborn has argued that it is not until the 1960s with the civil rights legislation
in the USA that the enfranchisement of ‘nationals’ was completed (Therborn,
1977). It should also be borne in mind that some states held to narrow rules of
entitlement that refused to grant citizenships to significant number of longterm
residents as with the case of ‘guest workers’ in Germany and ex-colonials
in France. Even today ominous rumbles in the USA portend the refusal of social
benefits to non-citizens.
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