citizenship

1. citizenship Political Sociology Lecture 4 Dr Alice Mah

3. Outline • What is citizenship? • Citizenship perspectives and debates • Questions for discussion

4. What is citizenship? • Dictionary definition: • the position or status of being a citizen of a particular country, with legal rights and responsibilities • Political sociology of citizenship: critique of citizenship as a concept, status and practice • Sociologists are interested in how formal citizenship rights are related to non-formal criteria of inclusion in the ‘civil sphere’ (Alexander, 2006), the space of citizenship between the state and the market • Civil sphere: construction of shared understandings about citizenship; inherently normative; inclusion depends on recognition by others

5. Political Sociology of Citizenship • citizenship and citizens are historically, politically and socially constructed: • linked to history of modernity, liberalism, Enlightenment rationality, imperialist nationalism, and universalism • exclusionary; white male breadwinner as ‘normal’ citizen (in Western nation-states, e.g. Britain) • a ‘bounded’ concept, tied to the nation-state and the normal citizen • tension between active and passive conceptions (Drake 2010: 95): • Citizenship as the subjection to authority (state citizenship), or • Citizenship as the constitution of authority (democratic citizenship) • Since the rise of New Social Movements (1968-), pressure to expand the limits and boundaries of citizenship

6. Citizenship perspectives and debates

7. T.H. Marshall: Citizenship, social class, and the nation-state • ‘Classic’ UK starting point for discussion of citizenship: T.H. Marshall’s historical sociological analysis (1950 Citizenship and Social Class) • Context: post-WWII welfare state in Britain • Linked historical development of citizenship rights to the development of capitalism: citizenship rights as a parallel system of equality, with capitalism as a system of inequality

8. T.H. Marshall’s three types of citizenship rights • Civil rights developed in 18th century, associated with modern institutions of civil and criminal courts of justice: ‘liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought, and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice’ • Political rights became citizenship rights only in the 20th century with universal suffrage for adults: ‘right to participate in the exercise of political power as a member of a body invested with political authority or as an elector of the members of such a body’ • Social rights: developing in the 20th century with the institutions of the modern welfare state, including education, health, social services, et al

9. Criticisms of Marshall’s account of citizenship (Nash 2010) • Evolutionist and ‘progressivist’: idea of a natural progression from civil to political to social rights with capitalist modern development (Giddens 1982) • Assumption that development of citizenship takes the same forms in all countries • Assumption that citizenship rights are genuinely universal and confer equality upon citizens • Assumption concerning the normal citizen and universalism of citizenship rights collapses cultural into social rights (especially re: notions of cultural difference and the politics of recognition) • Assumption that tensions between citizenship and capitalism would be resolved in favour of citizenship: too optimistic/idealistic, especially in the context of neo-liberalism and the related ‘crisis of citizenship’ with the roll-back of the welfare state

10. Citizenship and the women’s movement • Three contradictory ways in which women are excluded from full citizenship rights: • Excluded when they should have the same rights as men (campaigns for equal rights: e.g. maternity) • Treated the same as men when only differential treatment would make genuine equality possible (e.g. equal pay) • Some social rights are accorded differently to women and men, whereby women are treated as inferior citizens

11. Different social rights for women and men • women disproportionately represented, both as beneficiaries and as workers in health, social and education services • higher risk of poverty: poorer wages, more time caring, more part-time work, linked to ‘feminization of poverty’ • Less political power in society (participation in ‘high politics’) • Idea that the ‘personal is political’: politicizing of subjectivity and personal relations

12. Intimate citizenship • ‘Intimate citizenship’ (Plummer 1995: 7): ‘a cluster of emerging concerns over the rights to choose what we do with our bodies, our feelings, our identities, our relationships, our genders, our eroticism, and our representations’: overlap between private and public, care work as a form of participatory citizenship • dilemma of ‘essentialism’: the idea that different genders and sexualities are intrinsically different can reify and regulate gender and sexuality relations within discourse (Butler’s idea of performing gendered identities, importance of disrupting ‘heteronormative matrix’)

13. Citizenship and the LGTB movement • Common cause with feminism re: challenge to heteronormativity, yet also tensions between lifestyles and sexual practices • Gay movement since 1960s: focus on equalizing civil rights (end to sodomy laws, equal legal protection, equal age of consent to sexual activity, inclusion of facts about homosexuality within school curriculum, equal opportunity and inclusion in employment and military, legal homosexual marriage and divorce) • Debates re: compatibility between citizenship rights and more radical aims (problem of reifying sexual difference, the essential view of homosexuality as an innate disposition)

14. Citizenship and queer politics • Queer politics: younger generation of ‘queer activists’, anti-essentialist, challenge to naturalized links between reproductive capacities, gender identity, and sexual desire • Critique of queer politics: too blurred? Difficult to campaign for rights on the basis of unclear identities

15. Citizenship, race, and ethnicity • Citizenship re: race and ethnicity: shift from assimilationist policies to differentiated citizenship rights • West: dominant historical model of the mono-cultural, homogenizing nation-state • Citizenship granted on the basis of two ideal-types: • jus soli- to those born within the state’s territory (pre-1962 Britain, France, US, Canada) • Jus sanguinis- to the citizenship of the baby’s parents (blood; e.g. Germany)

16. Citizenship and multiculturalism • In recent decades, European countries are converging around citizenship criteria, to allow some inclusion but also control immigration • Multiculturalism: a challenge to ‘universalism’ through recognizing cultural difference or group-differentiated rights (criticisms from both right and left re: undermining solidarity and redistributive policies) • ‘Civic multiculturalism’ (Modood, 2007): a suggested balance between solidarity, cultural difference, and individual difference that is necessary in Western liberal democracies

17. Citizenship and borders: UK ‘Go Home Van’ controversy, summer 2013

18. Universalism and difference • Theoretical challenge to combine or reconcile ‘an ethos of pluralization’ with the universalist emancipatory promise of citizenship • Counter-arguments to privileging of ‘difference’ and ‘cultural recognition’: poverty activists- appeal of universalist vs. difference claims; importance of recognition, respect, dignity, and equal rights (Lister 2007: 23)

19. Citizenship and governmentality • Governmentality perspectives (Miller and Rose 2008, drawing on Foucault) argue that social citizenship is limited; government strategies are more important in terms of understanding rule and subjugation of citizens • Government shapes political subjectivity through a wide range of sources and political strategies (e.g. investment in consumption or community) vs. only through the state • Government operations changes citizenship from a relatively passive identification with the rights and obligations to a nation-state to an active pursuit of individual fulfilment through identification with culture and consumption (Miller and Rose 2008)

20. Post-national citizenship • Growing proliferation of citizenship statuses (super-citizens, quasi-citizens, un-citizens) • Citizenship struggles play out at multiple, interrelated spatial scales’ (Lister 2007) global, urban, regional, local, intimate and domestic (feminist ethics of care) • European citizenship: towards a supranational state? • Ecological/sustainable citizenship: questions of who is included (non-humans as well as humans?), emphasis on obligations more than rights • Global citizenship; towardsIsin’s ‘citizens without frontiers’…?

21. Conclusion: Beyond the limits and boundaries of citizenship… • Social movements concerned with identity and equality have been transforming citizenship debates • Attempts to expand the concept of ‘citizenship’ as a ‘momentum concept’ (Lister 2007): paradoxical, contradictory… • Tensions between: • universalism and difference/plurality • exclusion and inclusion • essentialism and anti-essentialism • rights and obligations • legal rights and cultural recognition • active vs. passive (participatory vs. subjected) • nation-state and other scales (post-national, global, regional, urban, intimate/domestic, ecological)

22. Seminar Questions • Compare and contrast ideas of: 1) citizenship as a ‘momentum concept’ , and 2) ‘citizens without frontiers’. • Is expanding citizenship paradoxical? How? • Discuss the tensions between universalism and difference within citizenship debates. What does ‘citizenship’ add (or detract) from analyses of cultural recognition and the politics of difference?