PS139: States, Nations, and the Politics of Citizenship Rules. (original) (raw)
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Abstract
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Dimitry Kochenov Citizenship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019, 337 pp
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / Revue Canadienne Droit et Société, 2020
Among the public rituals of liberal democracy, what can match the grace and prowess of a citizenship ceremony? Behold the invocation of the nation's founding narrative, its pledge of equality and the rule of law, and the keen partaking by a diverse slice of the population… that is, subject to the odd attempt to exclude women with religious face-coverings (secular masks being kosher, if not de rigueur). 1 That citizenship is so valued by newcomers who actually consent to the proffered social contract-as opposed to the homegrown masses whose consent is implied-surely speaks to its potency. Not so, argues the constitutional scholar Dimitry Kochenov, for whom its symbolism elides "an abstract status" that is utterly "totalitarian in nature" (38). Indeed, he regards most citizenships outside his privileged European zone, coupled with the United States and Canada, as outright liabilities. Human rights and personhood are the true prizes in Kochenov's provocative account-distinct from citizenship, which is everywhere a "glorified" idea whose only purpose is to make states "better governable by promoting servility and complacency" (239). How has it come to this, when from Aristotle down to the liberal age we have been told otherwise, most famously in T. H. Marshall's critique of "social citizenship?" Are the raging civic struggles for what racialized minorities and Indigenous people deem to be claims to full citizenship missing the point? Is the global movement for ethically responsible citizenship on climate change, including radical legal reform, simply naïve? Kochenov's case for the prosecution of citizenship, past and present, is pitched under four rubrics: Status, Rights, Duties, and Politics. These add up ultimately to a "legal fiction devoid of moral and ethical contenu," he avers at the outset, poised to punish "critics of the inequitable in the world it has evolved to perpetuate" (3). Kochenov is surely on solid ground when he stresses the dominance of a statist ascription of one's legal status as overriding other aspects of where or how one belongs to a national territory. The coherence that citizens bring to what Benedict Anderson called the "imagined community" of modern nationhood is subject to the state allowing for such a construct, among people who happen to be in a specific place. This top-down, arbitrary reality is reflected in the lottery of wealth and quality of citizenship within and between states, notes Kochenov. Being a citizen of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) puts you at an exponential advantage over the rest in terms of what your passport is worth-yet offers no assurance that you will actually enjoy equality in relation to your fellow nationals, especially if you happen to be a woman, a visible minority, 1 Alex Boutilier, "Zunera Ishaq Granted Citizenship in Time to Vote Oct 19," Toronto Star, 9 October 2015, www.thestar.com. A Federal Court of Appeal decision allowed Ms. Ishaq to bypass a government "requirement" that she doff her niqab (Muslim face covering) to attend her citizenship ceremony.
Citizenship and State Transition.
The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, 2017
This chapter analyzes the national citizenship regimes adopted by newly independent states— that is, states first appearing on the world political map during the era of popular sovereignty— and factors that influence the content of these regimes. The chapter examines how the goal of attaining state sovereignty, different visions of and debates over the boundaries of the national community in whose name the new state is constituted, perceived implications of citizenship rules for political and economic power of different groups, and external actors, including other states in the region and international organizations, inform the content of citizenship regimes in new states. The chapter will highlight challenges, issues, and dynamics characteristic of new transition states more broadly, though most of the empirical illustration will come from the context of the fifteen successor states of the former Soviet Union. It contends that the politics of citizenship policymaking (meaning, a set of issues that impact the formation of citizenship rules, and groups whose status is at the center of domestic debates over citizenship rules) differ in the new states in important and systematic ways from the politics of citizenship policymaking in established ‘older’ states. Three particularly important differences will be highlighted and analyzed in the three sub- sections of this chapter.
Symposium on citizenship: Foreword
International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2010
This symposium explores the extent and constitutional significance of the changes that are taking place in the conception and practice of citizenship in countries throughout the world. The six papers reveal a preoccupation with broadly similar issues in the regions on which they primarily focus: Europe, North America, and southern Africa. At the same time, however, the papers show how sometimes deep contextual differences between states also ground differences in the way questions of citizenship are approached, leading to differences in outcome. In this respect, the symposium also offers useful insight into the challenges of comparative constitutional law.
Introduction: Beyond Citizenship and the Nation-State
New Political Science, 2020
The Call for Papers for this Special Issue of New Political Science "Beyond Citizenship and the Nation-State" was written in what now seems an utterly different time: Fall 2019. This Special Issue acts as a bookend to "Intersectionality for the Global Age," the December 2015 Special Issue co-edited by Jocelyn M. Boryczka and Jennifer Leigh Disney. "Intersectionality in the Twenty-first Century," Boryczka and Disney wrote in their Introduction to that issue, "seems to provide an analytic method and epistemological perspective that resonates with our attempts, as scholars and everyday people, to understand the rapidly changing and increasingly complex contemporary world." 1 That Special Issue reflected their focus as co-editors from 2014-2017 on bringing intersectional scholarship from across the globe more centrally into the journal's scope. Building a stronger international presence for the
Citizenship: flexible, fungible, fragile
Citizenship Studies
Since the 1980s, rising Asia has opened up our understanding of liberal citizenship to the forces of a globalizing world economy. Previously, scholars have treated citizenship as an ideal typea construct of politico-legal and spiritual elements-determined by the nation-state. My approach situates the unstable character of citizenship within the vicissitudes of global capitalism and competitive nations. By investigating citizenship not as a fixed construct, but as a contingent category subject to transnational forces, I emphasize the interaction of newcomers and nation-states in shaping the mutations of citizenship.
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States of Citizenship Working Paper
2013
Bettina von Lieres teaches at the University of Toronto where she works on global governance, new forms of citizen participation, democracy and the dynamics of global change. Recent publications include Mobilizing for Democracy: Citizen Action and the Politics of Participation (co-edited with Vera Schattan Coelho, Zed Books, 2010), 'Democracy and Citizenship' (co-written with Steven Robins) in New South African Keywords, 2008, and 'Rethinking Citizenship in the Postcolony' (co-written with Andrea Cornwall and Steven Robins) Third World Quarterly, 2008.
CIRS Special Issue of The Middle East Journal, 2019
Citizenship is a central feature of the modern nation-state. Neither scholars nor policymakers can provide us with a unified and agreed upon idea of what citizenship means in all places, at all times, and for all people. But, pared down to its most basic construct, citizenship is recognized as being that which establishes the fundamental rules of membership, participation, and belonging for the people who inhabit a particular territory. Citizenship creates the legal instruments and political boundaries that shape the relationship between individuals and the state to which they belong. In the absence of a universal definition of citizenship as a category, there are certainly still universally understood ideas, norms, and notions of what citizenship should be as an aspiration and an ideal. In sum, although citizenship exists and develops within its own local context, as a result of a particular historical trajectory, and based on local social and cultural practices, it is still often bound, even if just in the imagination, to the universal, lofty, and idealized form of itself.
Philosophy Compass, 2009
This study surveys debates on citizenship, the state, and the bases of political stability. The survey begins by presenting the primary sense of 'citizenship' as a legal status and the question of the sorts of political communities people can belong to as citizens. (Multi)nation-states are suggested as the main site of citizenship in the contemporary world, without ignoring the existence of alternative possibilities. Turning to discussions of citizen identity, the study shows that some of the discussion is motivated by a perceived need for citizens to have a sense of political belonging, on the assumption that such a sense promotes political activity and has other personal and social benefits. But there are serious problems with the strategy of understanding the relevant sense of belonging in terms of identification with the nation-state. The study explores a more promising way to generate this sense of belonging. First, societies should function, to a sufficiently high degree, in accord with political principles of justice and democratic decision making. Second, there should be a general consensus on political principles among citizens, as well as high levels of engagement in democratic deliberation.
This thesis proposes to shed new light on the debates in international relations theory between the communitarians and cosmopolitans by focusing on three concepts of rights: citizenship, human rights and state sovereignty. It argues that the current boundary between citizenship and human rights is drawn by the concept of state sovereignty, and to that extent, while it is constantly challenged, radically transcending it is difficult. The task is approached through analysis of texts in three different areas, namely, political theory, history of international law, and development of European Community/ Union citizenship. Part One re-examines political theory debates concerning membership and treatment of outsiders. Chapter I looks at three concepts of citizenship and their justifications for excluding non-citizens and assesses whether the arguments would be still valid if the political community assumed in the theories had not also been a sovereign state. Chapter II will analyse the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship, emphasising the difficulty of radically transcending the current boundary between insiders and outsiders. Part Two will look at the history of international law, in an attempt to show the way the boundary between citizenship and human rights has shifted as the concept of state sovereignty and interests associated with it changed. Chapter III will analyse the international human rights law, focusing on the rights whose interpretation is restricted so as not to challenge the boundary between citizenship and human rights. Part Three takes a close look at the process of European integration. This section focuses on horizontal expansion of the boundary between citizenship and human rights, which has taken place within a regional boundary. This unique example is anomalous to the norm of the nation-state system, which justifies a clear boundary between citizens and aliens on the basis of the assumption that a nation state constitutes a special community.
Philosophical and legal sources of citizenship
Visnik Nacional’nogo universitetu «Lvivska politehnika». Seria: Uridicni nauki, 2017
The present paper is offering a short account of citizenship, its history, its constitution and its main theoretical approaches. It is divided in four principal sections. The first, examines the two main theories of citizenship in their historical and normative context, thus the republican and liberal approach of citizenship as they were formed in the ancient Greek and Roman tradition, as well as in their current feminist critic. The second part focuses in the analyses of what seems up until now to be the most influential work on citizenship, the essay of the British sociologist, Thomas Humphrey Marshall "Citizenship and Social class", which was published in 1950 and since then it is considered to be the stepping stone of the international literature on citizenship. The third part presents the "constitution" of citizenship, the elements of which the notion of citizen is crafted, thus membership in a certain political community, rights and the ability of democratic participation. Finally, the last part examines the modern apprehension of citizenship, its supranational dynamic, its ability to act as a means of integration and coercion in the modern liberal democracies, while theories of pluralism, cosmopolitanism and post-nationalism are taken into account. Instead of conclusions, the paper is closing with a short postscript concerning the fallacies and prospects of a European citizenship.