CONCLUSION

Citizenship in an Unequal World

MELISSA LANE CAPTURES well the conundrum of citizenship in a connected world:

To think about citizenship is, therefore, to think about who is ideally and actually “inside” a given constitution as a citizen, who is “outside,” and why. This makes it a Janus-faced ideal. It seems to articulate a universal potential, and to close it down, defining a community that is smaller than humanity and directing its members to serve each other and themselves preferentially over others.1

Lane is a political theorist who focuses on classical times, but her point has as much to do with the twenty-first century as the time of Aristotle. We can espouse the values attached to citizenship but take no responsibility for their violation within a state other than our own. Yet the “others” who are not being protected by their own states are now knocking on our door, challenging our humanitarian sensibilities and the closures of citizenship regimes. Such are the limits of citizenship as a normative construct.

As Léopold Sédar Senghor realized 70 years ago, there is an uneasy relationship between aspirations to independence and the actuality of interdependence. We seek to transcend this tension, but some have more means to do so than others. There are too many differences in values and interests around the world to think, beyond the most utopian imagination, of a single global citizenship enforced by a single set of institutions, and there are too many connections across borders to think of a future in enclosed blocks of citizens. The question is whether we can debate and work through these two perspectives, acknowledge particularity and commonality, and reconfigure state and international institutions that cut across such lines.2

Citizenship is a claim-making concept. It is therefore defined by how people act. The civil rights movement in the United States provides a good example of rights that were obtained only because people actively demanded them.3 Citizenship is a relationship of people with each other as well as with the institutions of governance. This double relationship is why citizenship, as opposed to some other way of articulating affinity or another connection to a ruler, is such an important construct.4

Because citizenship, even in its most general and weakest form, entails membership in a political unit, the need of rulers for the loyalty or acquiescence of members enables citizens’ claim-making, and hence political action and the potential for a more expansive version of citizenship. But the reverse process is also possible, and we should be wary of it. The claims of citizens to a range of social benefits for the collectivity might be thinned out, leaving citizenship as a minimum of legal protections for the self-contained individual and his or her property, eroding the very notions of social well-being and of collective action to maintain it. Arguably that is happening, in many parts of the world, before our eyes.

The units and institutions that define belonging and its benefits are themselves the object of claim-making. The history that tied citizenship to a specifically national form is a short one, experienced by most of the world only in the last half of the twentieth century and compromised even then by multinational federations and confederations, superposed nationalities, and group-differentiated citizenship. That rights can be articulated and defended at different levels opens the possibility of claiming them in different jurisdictions, perhaps escaping the tyranny of a majority or the conformism of a minority group.5 That people in some historical situations successfully claim rights can encourage others to do so and foster mutual recognition of rights-bearing communities. Or claims can be narrowly focused on a putative community that seeks to prevent others from diluting its advantages. At the highest level of inclusiveness, enjoying civil, political, and social rights becomes a value that, one can argue, should apply to everyone, and such a postulate, however ambiguous and unenforceable, may be as close to global citizenship as we can get.

At the very least, economic and social rights have become discussable issues across borders. The UN, certain nongovernmental organizations, and humanitarian lobbies, as well as governments, approach issues of poverty and deprivation in the belief—widely held although not universal—that belonging to humanity should convey a chance to live a decent life. Such perceptions provide a basis for the world’s poor, in whatever political context they find themselves, to make claims, and for the rich to examine their consciences. The choice is not between addressing such issues within national containers or at a global level. There is no obvious reason why the national borders of each state should contain adequate resources to produce or import sufficient water, housing, sanitation facilities, and education for its citizens. But between a focus on the claims of national citizens and an all-inclusive humanity there are many spaces and many possibilities.

Citizenship is today facing a double challenge. On the one hand, the allocation of citizens into national containers and the fiction that each is self-determining has not produced a stable pattern of international relations. Creating the semblance of such a world depended on the massive unmixing of peoples—ethnic cleansing in today’s terminology—to make nation correspond to state. The violence of creating separate “Turkish” and “Greek” citizenries in the 1920s, forced population movements and self-imposed exiles after World War II, the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 are cases in point, and the continued turmoil in Iraq, Syria, Israel-Palestine, Turkey, Libya, and elsewhere reveal the unresolved difficulty of assigning diverse people to bounded spaces. The Islamic State repudiated the very notion of a territorial state in favor of a reimagined caliphate and a vision of people united by Islam. But Islam is not united, and the alternative the Islamic State offered is proving ephemeral, although for a time it attracted young men from countries with some of the most sophisticated versions of social citizenship in Europe. Whether the European citizenship regime can meet the challenges coming from within or the influx of refugees from without is not certain.

On the other hand, the great achievement that makes citizenship in much of the world worth defending—recognition of social rights—is under threat from the mobile forces of global capitalism. Social protections are challenged in the name of market discipline and austerity. Some commentators insist that the nation-state is the only bulwark for defending social benefits. National citizenship, with its conceit that citizens are equivalent to each other, remains part of that bulwark, but it is questionable that national units are themselves up to the task in the present conjuncture.6 States are not mobile; people are mobile at considerable cost to themselves and their relationships; capital is the most mobile of all. The risk today is a race to the bottom, as capital moves where its social costs—notably those imposed on it by taxation and regulation—are lowest.

Advocates of market liberalization appropriate the language of citizenship for themselves, claiming that individual freedom is at stake. But such arguments entail a “redefinition of citizenship to a strictly individualistic understanding of it.”7 So far, the advocates of a transnational economic citizenship are prevailing over defenders of international norms of social citizenship. Corporations and financial institutions have developed institutional mechanisms—the World Trade Organization, arbitration panels—that enforce the “right” of capital to cross borders. Even the European Union, some argue, has proven more protective of the flow of capital and commodities than of social welfare.8 That tendency puts pressure on states to provide less social insurance, education, environmental protection, and other benefits to citizens, and that in turn devalues the concept of citizenship itself. That retired people in Greece see their pensions devastated in the name of financial probity does not enhance faith in European, or Greek, citizenship. Xenophobic movements—blaming the increasing precarity of labor conditions on immigrants—is a response to this situation, but not a solution.9 Citizenship is and will remain crucial to the defense of human welfare and dignity, but the question remains of whether citizenship will be narrowly focused on the individual, on his or her property, and on the bounded community of which the citizen is a “member,” or whether the perceptions and institutions governing citizenship will be adaptive to the ways in which people actually move geographically and reconfigure themselves socially.

There is another side to international capital’s institutional self-protection: it shows that some kinds of rights can be protected beyond the framework of national citizenship. Can we turn this situation upside down? Can we build on fledgling mechanisms that exist—international courts of justice, human rights and fair trade networks capable of publicly shaming abusive corporations—to give more substance, more “thickness,” to the rights of people as they actually exist, as they move, as they lay down roots somewhere, as they remain attached to places in which they see themselves belonging? Citizenship has never meant mere affinity, but institutionalized and protected belonging. If we are to give meaning to “multilevel citizenship” or “flexible citizenship,” we need to think about them in institutional terms.10 The situation we face is not a choice between states and no states or between an all-inclusive cosmopolitanism and a narrowly bounded parochialism. The challenge is to think and act in the uneven and unequal structures in which we live.

We are not starting from zero. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 enshrined social and economic rights, and the controversies attached to those articles at the time suggest that the issue was not window-dressing. The UN subsequently passed resolutions specifying the right of people to use and exploit their own natural resources (1952) and a Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1976). The International Court of Justice and the special tribunals for Rwanda and ex-Yugoslavia have brought to justice some of the most flagrant perpetrators of crimes against humanity. There exists something on which to build. Whether transnational institutions will protect the worker in a textile factory in Bangladesh as well as a banker in Geneva is not determined by the inherent nature of those institutions; it is a political question.11 I make no claim that such mechanisms are likely to be developed in the immediate future and would not entail problems of their own. My point is that we should not be so stuck in our categories and assumptions that we assume that the national framework is the only one available.

“Refugee” is a category in which to place the person who falls outside of a citizenship regime without disturbing the notion that each individual should be slotted into a national citizenship. Agencies like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and numerous NGOs have created an institutional apparatus for helping—or channeling—refugees much more elaborate than what was available when Hannah Arendt wrote about the anomalous and dangerous position of the apatride. Such organizations manage camps in countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East, where the numbers of refugees vastly exceed those that have caused such consternation in Europe, and many of those families have little immediate prospect of resuming their old citizenship or assuming a new one. For them, notes Simon Turner, the ration card becomes the equivalent of the passport, and the camp managers determine the rules under which the refugees live. In effect, he writes, “The apatride refugee finds himself to be a citizen of the ‘international community’ ”—but it is a peculiar kind of citizenship, not conveying political rights, not recognized outside of the refugee system.12 As states debate how exclusionary or inclusionary they should be in regard to people with refugee status—or those who are artificially classified as “economic” rather than “political” refugees—the international order has yet to move beyond improvised solutions to a tragic situation.

Citizenship both enables and limits the possibilities people have for claiming social and economic justice within the currently constituted structure of states, and leaves those who fall outside of that structure in a perilous limbo. We have seen that from the early Roman Empire onward the commonality of citizens within a polity coexisted with social hierarchy and political oligarchy. They coexisted uneasily, for citizenship provided a framework for contestation, for some to push for greater equality and for others to use their resources to maintain and enhance their privileges. When Senghor saw politics as the conjugation of two sorts of solidarity, horizontal and vertical, he was seizing upon an oft-forgotten but essential aspect of political life. We live in a world of unequal relationships, but they are relationships nonetheless. The notion that as citizens we are all equivalent is an important mechanism for making claims; the unity of the citizenry can be a useful fiction. We belong to a political unit of some sort—or to multiple political units—and we belong to networks that may exist within or across such entities. Citizenship is a legal category; it provides a platform for insisting that a government meets certain expectations its citizens have of their state; it is built on and extends a subjective attachment to a political community. If citizenship becomes too impersonal, too legalistic, citizens may lose the sense of commonality and cooperation, but if citizens focus only on personal ties and cultural homogeneity, they entrap themselves in a closed-in world.

Sharing a common citizenship confronts us with the fact that we live with some people who are like us and some who are not. Citizenship does not in itself convey equality and it does not necessarily lead people to overcome the differences among themselves, but as in republican Rome, it provides a framework for discussion and debate about the kind of polity and society in which we wish to live. We exist as social beings, among our fellow citizens and among citizens of other polities, and we face the complexities of living in a world that is fragmented, unequal, and connected.