transnational citizenship and human-trafficking - european
TRANSCRIPT
Mojca Pajnik
Aporias of Citizenship and Prospects for an Active Citizenship Approach
Mojca Pajnik is a scientific counselor at the Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social
and Political Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, an assistant professor at the University of
Ljubljana, and, currently, a visiting fellow at the University of Florence.
E-mail: [email protected]
Constraints in Citizenship Traditions: Towards the Recovery of Political Engagement
The paradoxes and conflicts within the contemporary phenomenon of citizenship arise, on the
one hand, from contrasts between two predominant citizenship traditions, liberal and
republican, and, on the other, from their dominant interpretations. These mainly depart from
T. H. Marshall’s triadic conceptualization of rights (civil, political and social rights) from the
1950s. The majority of interpretations, not to mention the level of institutional understanding
and policy formation, still view citizenship in terms of duties and obligations that citizens
need to fulfill as social beings. However, this is a legitimate position for understanding
citizenship only if considered from the standpoint of citizenship interpreted as social
membership out of a need, i.e. a need to perform specific social functions. This paper argues
that such an understanding, which encompasses elements of the utilitarian tradition, follows
from the waning of the memory of “political citizenship” or of what is developed in this paper
as “active citizenship”. The minimizing of political citizenship goes together with claims of
the decline or the end of citizenship that are adopted in the name of the reinforcement of
institutional management, or, to put it differently, for the pursuance of a more technocratic
application of citizenship.
Elements that enable us to theorize citizenship politically, beyond the prevailing
instrumentality of the concept, can be found in the classical Greek tradition, in the notion of
Aristotelian polis as a space and practice of citizens’ political engagement. Citizenship of the
polis was related to the notion of a public sphere, and of public engagement of citizens who
deliberate on res publica, common issues of a public character. Citizenship was
preconditioned by bios politikos, political living, Öffentliche Leben, as Habermas (1962/1989)
put it decades ago, or vita activa in terms of Arendt’s (1967) theorizing of the political
conditions for living in the world.
Certainly the positioning of Greek polis as a practice of citizenship did not go by unnoticed
for its exclusionary mechanisms. Critiques from feminist standpoints of the polis version of
citizenship that started to emerge in the late 1970s argued that political activity of the polis
was only possible because of the naturalization of oikos as a private sphere of necessity to
which large parts of the population were confined. Several feminist authors (Okin 1979,
Elshtain 1981) argued against Aristotelian citizenship since it excluded women, older people,
children, the disabled, and “foreigners” (metoikoi) from the political life of the polis.
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According to these interpretations, it is not correct to treat the polis solely as a variation of
political citizenship, since it can only be properly understood by a parallel characterization of
oikos as a sphere that necessitated the life of many. Still, even those critical of the privileged
notion of citizenship in Athenian democracy recognize that, despite the exclusionary elements
of polis, the zoon politikon activity embraced the notion of “political citizenship”, of active
citizenry, oriented towards the “care for the world” principle.
The medieval period, as Weber (1921/1968) has shown in his study on the European city, saw
citizens as inhabitants of towns, as subjects defined by specific urban relationships (with the
privileged legal position of male citizens who were obliged to enter military service). The
political elements of town-related-citizenship can be found in some specific practices of
citizens’ engagement in towns (the example of political and economic life in towns in Italy,
i.e. Genoa or Florence). To the contrary, elements of political citizenship cannot be found in
the representational performances of medieval authorities. Rather then having to do with
citizenship, these appear as apolitical practices of representation. As Habermas has shown in
his widely cited study on the structural transformation of the public sphere, medieval
authorities did not act to enable and stimulate citizens’ activity; rather, they understood public
engagement in terms of their own public performances, displaying themselves as the
embodiment of some higher power. These authorities practiced representation not so much of
citizens, which was a desirable practice after the introduction of the liberal tradition, but in
front of them. They introduced citizenship as exhibits of self-promotion of those in power
(Habermas 1962/2001: 7-8). Habermas has shown how the processes of societalization or, as
he has put it, depoliticization that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries (with the exception
of coffee-shop culture as a political domain in Western Europe) has led to the formation of the
liberal theory of citizenship. Liberalism introduced citizenship in the tradition of
argumentation of social contract theorists, i.e. the Hobbesian politike techné principle that
treated politics, and consequently the notion of citizenship, as a necessity, as a formal status
or an expression of privileged membership. From the 18th century onwards, citizenship was,
in various sociological and legal traditions, mostly interpreted as an instrumental concept that
exists in the service of the representational elite and the reproduction and development of the
social system.
The introduction and the pursuance of a formalist understanding of citizenship diminished the
attempts to view citizenship as a political concept with emancipatory potential. Early 20th
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century sociology, in the spirit of the functionalist tradition, reduced citizenship to a
privatistic and a prepolitical status. Sociological empiricism together with the mercantilist
ideals, according to which the marketplace, if regulated, can assure equal opportunities to
access the market for all, accelerated the a-political or anti-political understanding of
citizenship. This was not only confined to the exclusivity of the national state model (contrary
to the previous town-related-citizenship), but was also – through the promotion of
egalitarianism and the principle of access to the market for all – subjected to the logic of profit
and capitalist development. The subjection of citizenship to sociological inquiry, which
treated it as social membership, as a need for the reproduction of the system based on statuses,
together with the economic paradigm of development and prosperity, produced a situation
where the “common interest” (interest of the public or of the citizenry) was established as a
condition sine qua non of the liberal state. This appears as an “enterpreneurial state”
(Habermas 2000:53) that uses common interest ideology to sustain a kind of collective,
obligatory interest, which does not preclude citizens’ engagement but promotes citizenship as
a principle of inclusion in or exclusion from privileged membership.
The limits of liberal conceptions of citizenship have been critically addressed by several
authors, by theorists of postnational (Soysal 1994, Habermas 2001), or transnational (Balibar
2004) citizenship, as well as by theorists who point to gender deficits in the liberal tradition
(Yuval Davis and Werbner 1999, Lister 1997). These critiques point out, to put it bluntly, that
citizenship as membership of the national state functions as an apparatus that gives legitimacy
to public administration, and support to the system of market economy that consists of
“citizens” as private persons and their social work. Here the aspirations of citizenship are
reduced to the connections between the socio-private interests of citizenry and the interests of
the state apparatus. This is the relation that produced a Western type of liberal capitalism,
where citizenship has become a type of consumer good. In addition, the understanding of
citizenship as membership out of need promotes the national state as an ethnically solid
society, which is an attitude that produces the exclusion of those who are defined as non-
citizens, “illegals”, and in other ways demarcated “others”. Along these lines citizenship has
appeared as a marker between the insiders (the “nationals”) and the “outsiders” (migrants as
“non-nationals”) (Bauböck 2006: 19) or between “national legitimate citizens” and “migrants
as subjects, residents and the precarious” (Balibar 1993: 56).
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The liberal version of citizenship has been criticized for being limited in its reach, since it did
not associate democracy with citizen deliberation, but with the manufacture of a thin legal
framework to enable maximal effectiveness of an economically oriented society. As such, the
liberal model of citizenship, legitimized by the thin theory of rights, introduced the “drying
out of the public” (Habermas 1962/2001), and the triumph of particularistic and
individualized interests. These are put forward by bodies of institutional politics as ready-
made decisions with the purpose of gaining citizen’s recognition, and thus legitimization, but
not their involvement. Citizens were introduced as recipients of policies, and as bearers of
rights, which presupposes a passive conceptualization of both citizenship and the notion of
human rights. The classical liberal theory, as Delanty (2000: 10) has noted, with the
introduction of the formalist, state-centered project, managed to reproduce the detachment of
citizens from political activity. The mere fact of citizens’ recognition was now required to
gain legitimacy for policy-making, and not active engagement that would embrace the idea
developed by Arendt, of “world-care”.
The conceptualization of citizenship as exclusive membership of national states, or of
citizenship as a necessity did not remain unchallenged. After the civil society movements in
the 1980s in Central and Eastern Europe, the opportunity arose to develop a new kind of
citizenship-state-based model, which would build upon the bitter experiences of
totalitarianism and would evade the traps of Western liberal capitalism with its pervasive
consumerism. However, recent analysis of citizenship in the new states (Jalušič 2003) that
emerged as new sovereign political units in Central and Eastern Europe (i.e. Slovenia,
Croatia, and the Baltic states) has shown the obliteration of hopes for the emergence of
citizenship as a new political project.
These countries have witnessed the erosion of the concept of collective rights in social terms,
when social rights are neglected, and when the individual is reintroduced as the bearer of
rights, and the state legitimized in its role as protector of the rights against infringement. As a
consequence of globalization and the market-based economy, as well as of the new national
state contexts, this region has also been overwhelmed by new totalitarian temptations – even
if they differ from those confronted in the former times of communism, they are no less
problematic and dangerous. They have been connected with the issues of migration, refugees
and diverse identities, and with the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion for various
population groups that are not nationally defined or otherwise assimilated. They might be
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even more dangerous, since these new examples rarely exhibit the case of a “vampiric state”
that wants to control everything in the leviathan manner. Rather, it is the case of a different,
much more dispersed, “social totalitarianism of true mass society” and its compulsive
homogenization, which develops in line with a relatively weak state ruled by law, weak
protection of rights and, consequently, overall normalization of the practices of exclusion and
discrimination. These temptations proceed against a background of strong neo-liberal
discourse, which stimulates policies of discrimination that take place under the aegis of social,
political and ethnic diversification (Ibid.).
Theorizing the constraints of citizenship traditions nowadays requires that one unpack not
only the fallacies of the liberal tradition of treating citizenship as an exclusive form of social
membership, and of consumerist neoliberal applications in “older” or “newer” states, but also
the critical treatment of the republican model. The fallacy of the republican understanding of
citizenship is that, as with the liberal model, it did not recognize the need for intersubjective
communication between private and public autonomy. The simultaneous treatment of citizens
as private and public beings is a precondition for the pursuance of a political understanding of
citizenship. Lacking political dimensions, republican citizenship advocated an overly
idealistic connection between democracy and citizens’ virtues: it viewed individuals as
virtuous and committed to the noble cause of assuring the “public good”. An additional
fallacy is that, in its understanding of deliberation, republican views derive from a culturally
determined background, rooted in tradition, and a predetermined set of customs, all of which
eventually links citizenship to actual policies of exclusion (Pajnik 2005).
Citizenship, Nationality and Conceptualizations of Rights
The predominant modern conception of citizenship that has been concentrated on a dialogue
between the liberal and the republican tradition, evolved in a context of possessive
individualism driving ideas of social development. This was applied to the national state as
the body of implementation. Such a conception that introduced citizenship as membership
was based on the idea that membership in society must rest on a principle of formal equality.
Human rights were naturalized as a premise of citizenship equality, and Marshall’s theory of
citizenship, resting on a principle of ensuring formal equality, provided the legitimate
theoretical basis for such an understanding of citizenship.
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In his Citizenship and Social Class from 1950, Marshall’s tendency was to shift citizenship
from an overly heavy reliance on a market-based model of society to a state-welfare based
model. He extended the dualistic, rights-based model of citizenship that rested on civil and
political rights, to include social rights. The civil rights that include equality before the law,
freedom of speech, religious liberty and the right to property, and the political rights that
evolve around formal rights of participation, i.e. the right to vote and to get elected, or to form
political associations were supplemented by his introduction of social rights; these concentrate
on the welfare of citizens, whereby the state is to guarantee a minimum of social and
economic “rights”, such as housing, education, social and health security, unemployment
benefit, pensions etc.
Theorizing the renewal of citizenship as a political project requires that one address
Marshall’s theory by pointing out what appears as its salient problem, that is its lack of the
concept of political action, and its predominant view of the citizenry as a recipient body.
Marshall’s concept of citizenship takes “statuses bestowed on those who are full members of
a community” (Marshall 1950: 28) as a citizenship precondition. This said, his model can also
be viewed as a contribution to and not as a disruption of the predominant receiver-giver
structure of society – despite the fact that he introduced the triadic conceptualization for
completely opposite reasons.
Marshall sensed that the problem with the mercantilist development of citizenship was that it
deprived citizens of social welfare, which is why he introduced the notion of social rights.
Despite its corrective potential, his theoretical endeavor eventually supported a society of
divisions. It appears that the triadic model was not sufficiently innovative to change the
existing relations that support the passive citizenship approach. As Delanty (2000: 21) has put
it, rather than enhancing the power of citizens, citizenship as a nation-state-based-on-rights
project that naturalizes the nation-state as the exclusive citizenship unit eventually served the
structures of capitalist inequality. The problem in Marshall’s conceptualization is that he left
the social structure intact, i.e. he theorized equality by the introduction of rights, but he put
aside his rightful remark that “capitalism is a system not of equality, but of inequality”
(Marshall 1950: 92). Some authors (Barcellona 1988, Zolo 1994) have theorized the
impossibilities of marshallian social rights along the lines of their division from political and
civic rights: while the latter are defined once and for all and (at least in a normative
framework above the national-state interests), social rights are dependent on the autonomy of
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the market and of the national (and international) economic sphere. As such “social rights” are
by the very definition “conditionalized” and “imperfect” rights that serve to cover up the
inequalities and social differences (Barcellona 1988: 20, 24) – if they are rights at all – Zolo
(1994: 11, 32-33) for example, speaks of them as “social services” or of “simple consumer
rights”. In addition, along with political and civil rights social rights and their projection in
social citizenship “correlates” with the process of “nationalization of citizenship” (Balibar
1993: 69).
The welfare state model that departed from the utopian idea of peaceful coexistence between
democratic citizenship and capitalism, and nourished an ideal of the production of a better
way of life, has failed to embrace the potential for “active citizenship” in the sense of
engaging citizens in formulating public policies. Migration, for example, has shown the
shortcomings of the understanding of welfare regimes. The fallacy of such social organizing
is that it treats citizens solely as clients of welfare, and not as partners in communication. In
addition, it promotes the ideal of self-achievement through hardship and exclusion of indigent
“outsiders”. This is an indicator that points to exclusionary policies with predictable
consequences: the selective inclusion or the total exclusion of migrant populations from the
thin concept of rights, as well as their exclusion from the dominant signifiers, among which
national identity appears as the most sustained and difficult to negotiate.
Habermas has argued that such social organization produced a revival of Smith’s hard
economy principle of supposedly “helping people to help themselves”, where – for those
included – the failure to meet the demands of the welfare regime falls on individuals
themselves. The welfare state consequently reinforced client relationships, but, as Iris Marion
Young has claimed, the welfare distributive paradigm of justice also reinforced
depoliticization by reducing public debate to distribution, reducing it thus on the market
analogy. Young speaks about the “insurgency” of a welfare capitalist society and develops the
claim that a distributive paradigm “functions ideologically to reinforce depoliticization of
citizenship” (Young 1990: 66). To add to this, the welfare ideals left out the “non-nationals”
who, as “migrants for life”, find themselves doubly burdened: not only are they themselves
responsible for any possible failure to integrate into the dominant society; the bigger problem
is that the majority are not even recognized as those who can integrate. They are instead
trapped between the borders of the welfare regime and remain there to sustain the limits of
rights.
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It has become evident that modern apolitical conceptualizations of citizenship lack the
potential to adequately address contemporary relations and communications of dispersed
populations. Predominant conceptions are not able to think anew the theories and practices of
dispersed citizens’ activity. Concomitant with the ideas of multicultural citizenship and its
critique of the shortcomings of the liberal conception, it should be added that peoples’
relations nowadays also pose a question of cultural rights. These provide a supplement to
Marshall’s triadic model – with the idea of encompassing the notion of diverse and changing
cultural practices. In addition, complex relations that transgress national borders and cultural
boundaries point to the need for a redefinition of political rights as well. These should be
rethought to enable the transgression of current celebrations of procedural citizenship practice
embedded in the system of voting rights. The renewed political rights would bring the
recognition that citizens use other channels to act politically, i.e. public manifestations, civic
activities or community engagement.
In Marshall’s model, citizens have no place in the formulation of rights that in principle
should not be posed aside from the question of citizen participation. This makes such a model
a detached one, since, eventually, it has little to do with the agency involved; the agency is not
treated as a partner in communication, but as a recipient of policies. This becomes apparent in
contemporary migratory policies that are reproduced in detachment from migrants. The
approach of political citizenship practice would, in contrast, make the biographical plans of
migrating women and men a starting point for policy development, and not a marginal note to
it.
Marshall’s conceptualization would also require the decoupling of citizenship and nationality.
The predominant modern model of citizenship took as its precondition the following
parameters: nation-state sovereignty, territorially defined borders, and homogenous, or, in
Balibarian terms, fictively homogenous ethnicity. With the introduction of the modern nation-
state, nationality became the precondition for membership in the nation-state as the exclusive
polity that is, however, not a polity in political terms (Bellamy and Mason 2003). Modern
citizenship, established on the nationality principle, solidified the notion of ethnicity, and it
also introduced, through compulsory education, the notion of culturally unified identities.
Around these, if we refer to parameters defining the Westphalian nation-state model
contextualized by Fraser (2005), boundaries supported by national media, national languages,
national politics, and national economy were built.
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Over the course of the 20th century the articulation of the national, the “national substance”
and of related claims for territorial sovereignty have been consolidated as the “natural” human
condition. Territorial belongings and identities confined within the national state borders
constituted citizenship along the lines of national affiliations and ethnic homogeneity.
Consequently, the predominant model of citizenship evolved as a “weak” citizenship concept
that had developed along side the production of exclusionary practices of nationalism, racism
and xenophobia.
Although the actual patterns of living and practicing citizenship develop beyond national
borders and beyond the concept of ethnicity, many recent theoretical endeavors still
presuppose the national state as the guarantor of citizens’ rights. Contemporary migrations
show that migrants even when granted citizenship in terms of formal membership in a
nationally defined society, are excluded from participation in society. What appears as a
“paradox of human rights” (Pajnik 2007: 857) can actually be ideally viewed in migration
policies. These adopt the discrepancy between the attitude of granting rights to citizens and
“protecting” national sovereignty. To add to this, migrants are addressed as non-national
receives of rights and are prevented from being incorporated into the national body. And if
and when they are incorporated, meaning, to use Soysal’s explanation, “well adjusted”,
adapting to the life patterns of the nation-state, they tend to remain at a disadvantage, as
incomplete nationals, destined to remain less than complete. Thus a situation emerges where
individual rights as a heritage of the liberal tradition appear coercive, because their
implementation, having been left to the nation-state, is practiced as a mechanism primarily
aimed at protecting the majority culture.
A counterpart to the paradoxical situation related to human rights was elaborated by
Habermas (2001: 65), who opted for a change in the law at large in a direction enabling
citizens to be not only the bearers or subjects of rights, but also their authors. Habermas’s
discourse theory of law and his reinterpretation of the system of rights require the effort of
opting for public deliberation to enable a situation where citizens communicatively engage
with one another in a public sphere. This reformulation includes “some kind of collective
rights” that shatter the modern state tailored to non-negotiable individual rights. Still, the very
disparity between these rights and the sovereignty principle seem to leave the Habermasian
model at the level of descriptive aspiration.
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Discursive changes would only be possible within a transformed notion of citizenship that
would deal actively with this discrepancy and that would overcome the exclusive models of
citizenship anchored in national sovereignty and primordial membership. Nowadays, several
challenges have emerged to address the different global and transnational forms of
citizenship. These observations do not mean that the concept of state has become meaningless
when addressing transnational citizenship practices, but it does point to certain fallacies of
citizenship reduced to the national contexts and national policies of the (non)fulfillment of
rights. To add to this, new kinds of rights are emerging, related, for example, to ecology, or,
to the domain of technology – rights that await debate along the lines of “a new kind” of
transnational citizenship practice.
New Challenges for Citizenship
In her book Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe
published in 1994, Soysal challenged the prevailing citizenship model based on the principle
of national sovereignty. The book articulated a plea for the disruption of the assumptions,
both popular, political, and maybe to a lesser extent also scholarly, that national origin is the
imperative of citizenship and the condition enabling participation in a polity. Several attempts
have been made since to thematize larger and more flexible understandings of citizenship.
These are anchored in deterritorialized notions of personhood, and take into account life
practices, belongings and individual aspirations, even when they thematize policies.
Communitarian theories have emerged to challenge the dominant sociological perspectives of
the 1960s that worked to legitimize different variations of Marshall’s citizenship model.
These theories tried to extend the understanding of citizenship by including notions of culture
and identity: the example of Taylor’s (1999) concept of recognition, Kymlicka’s (1995)
modification of liberalism with the argument of embracing cultural difference, and Parekh’s
(2000) multiculturalism, to name a few.
Despite their revisionist attempts, these theories were criticized for ignoring the interrelations
between citizenship and democracy, and as in Marshall’s case, for putting aside the notion of
citizens’ public engagement. They were reproached by some for not providing argumentation
radical enough to disrupt the exclusionary certainties of the narrow framework of national
citizenship. Protagonists of multiculturalism were criticized for promoting the apolitical
aspects of culture, among them the folklorization of migrants, an approach which promotes
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the tasting of their food and the airing of their songs, where, however, migrants are not
envisioned as political beings (Pajnik and Zavratnik Zimic 2003: 175). Similarly, Taylor’s
notion of recognition was criticized for praising individuality, promoting individuals as naked
addressees of laws, for introducing fixed and frozen identities, and for reducing the
importance of actions oriented towards responsibility for world care, that is, for promoting the
current worldless model of citizenship. Responses to such critiques were also formed, and
these defended the notion of “cultural citizenship” as a redefinition of a formalistic
conception, claiming a broader understanding of culture (Ong 1999). Along these lines,
cultural citizenship would not equal folklorization, but would be about articulating belonging
and aspiration, as well as about practicing intercultural responsibility.
Attempts to address citizenship that take political engagement as its precondition have also
been developed, for example with radical theories of direct democracy, and theoretical
attempts to grasp the activities of new social movements. The political dimensions of a
feminist citizenship approach can be found in attempts to problematize the processes of
marginalization in prevailing understandings of citizenship. Gendering citizenship means
focusing on the position of women and disadvantaged groups, while claiming citizenship as a
process of creating conditions for the responsible and active existence of individuals of both
sexes. In addition, the rethinking of the public-private divide, introducing interplay between
rationality and emotional speech, theorizing a public space that encompasses diversity and
plurality, are all important to be mentioned as some among the significant feminist
contributions to en-gendering citizenship.
Feminists have also articulated the altered tensions that define citizenship: if the issue of
equality was once central to citizenship and defined as its precondition, nowadays the tensions
emerge between equality and difference. Citizenship must go beyond purely formal, jural
analyses and must take into account differing positions of citizens, and discrepancies in these
positions that arise from categorical definitions by gender, nationality, ethnicity, class etc. The
challenges of multiple identities, dual citizenships and diasporic realities also point to the fact
that there is no simple trajectory along which a logical model of a three concept of rights can
be projected, because citizenship only emerges as a reality of multiple existences.
Additionally, in the last decade several attempts have been made to thematize postnational
(Soysal 1994, Habermas 2001), or, more recently, transnational notions of citizenship (Balibar
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2004), including the ideas of cosmopolitan citizenship (Delanty 2000, 2007, Habermas 2001)
which thematize post- or trans-national changes in structural conditions, and also take into
account individual biographies. One of the circumstances of postnational constellations is that
they confer human rights upon every person who participates in polity formation (this goes
beyond the nation-state model of citizenship acquisition), regardless of their historical or
cultural ties belonging to a specific national community. In his Postnational Constellations
Habermas (2001) developed a discursive notion of rights to explicate the need to reformulate
human rights in a dialogical manner – to include citizens’ communicative engagement and
prevent the functioning of rights according to the deus ex machina principle.
If postnational conceptualizations of citizenship adopt the human rights principle of granting
citizenship, and transnational theories are more critical of how the principle of human rights is
advocated, both are oriented towards seeking new, multilayered notions of citizenship.
What can be viewed, despite their differences, as an aspiration common to both postnational
and transnational conceptualizations is the facilitation of new understandings of citizenship,
which encompass or at least try to encompass the multiplicity and flexibility of discourses and
action.
Parallel to these two understandings, let us here introduce the notion of “active citizenship,”
defined by the embodiment of a new kind of deterritorialized politics that has the potential to
generate new modalities of political membership. Active citizenship evolves beyond the
ideals of privileged membership of a nation-state, since it addresses shifting identities, and it
legitimizes transnational modalities of living, even forms of non-national citizenship. The idea
of “active citizenship” is related to the “role citizenship plays in the very constitution of a
polity through citizens formulating, deliberating upon, and disputing different views …” that
Bellamy envisioned as an “alternative view of citizenship, as ‘the right to have rights’ rather
than as a given set of rights” (Bellamy 2001: 41).
Theorizing the Possibilities for Active Citizenship
The multiplicity of particularisms that defines the process of placing oneself in the world, as
well as personal aspirations and the subsequent social fragmentation that appears most
evidently in transnational migration practices, all disrupt the presumed contiguities of
nationality and undermine the territorial sanctity of contemporary nation-states. The divided
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and unbound conditions of citizenship that pertains to minorities and migrants, and the
growing autonomization of life projects disrupt the imperative of sovereign statehood and
demand new modes for thinking and living the multiple realities of membership. In addition,
new discourses that emerge in the field of ecology, plus the activities of transnational social
movements also point to the dissolution of organized modernity and contribute to the
articulation of the need for a new kind of citizenship. Various transnational processes evolve
across the different levels of social and political life, across the national, transnational, and the
local levels, and such reality becomes a subsequent reason why worldly relations need to be
rethought at the intersection of the local, the national and the global. Still, the stubbornness in
predominant sociological practice that designates the nation-state as the imperative actor,
even when conversing about transnational processes such as migration, obscures the
multiplicity of living realities and attempts to change them.
Future research in citizenship should engage to grasp not only the structural dilemmas, but
also the individual migrant practices of being and acting in the world. By doing so, it would
be possible to lay the groundwork for the legitimization of practices, memberships and ways
of belonging that are multiple, not only in terms of interests, but also in the sense of spanning
local, regional and transnational livelihoods. Intersecting memberships of, for example,
migrating women that go beyond the prescribed national fixities allow for the practice of
shifting and fluid identities. Migrants traverse borders in search of a better life, of work; they
practice diasporic lives, keep up transnational family ties etc. The potential in the notion of
transnational citizenship lies in the concept’s capacity to grasp the multiple displaced subjects
who are always on the move, both physically and imaginary. Transnational citizenship thus
suggests new relations, new modalities of interconnectedness and mobility across space, and
tries to embrace transnational practices and imaginings of nomadic subjects.
Still, when thematizing transnational citizenship as a possible aspiration for the introduction
of an engaged and a political model of “active citizenship”, one should be careful to
distinguish this idea from some transnational or, more accurately, international trends and
activities. Some of the globalizing trends take place most obviously in the field of market
economy. These address the erosion of state sovereignty not as an opportunity for active
citizenship, but as the opportunity for the extension of capitalist market economy from a
national to a global level. Many such projects do not interfere with the existing structural
relations at all. On the contrary, they take these as given by employing the notion of passive
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citizenship, and the treatment of citizens as dutiful and obedient individuals who eventually
grant support to the acceleration of capitalist consumption.
Zolo has critically pointed out another apolitical dimension of emergent global or
international citizenship, which is the establishment of “legal globalism” or “juridical
globalism”. One might argue that legal globalism might be a desirable answer to the questions
evolving around the type of citizenship that would transgress national borders and encompass
transborder modalities of living. While, on the one hand, it seems that there is nothing
basically wrong with supporting such ideas and institutional practices, it is contestable, on the
other hand, that these unreflectively adopt Western legal language as a universal medium. The
unbiased and unreflected transnational institutional approaches applied to citizenship are
those trends that Zolo has lately addressed by using Hardt’s and Negri’s labeling of existing
international policies as a form of “imperial citizenship” (Zolo 2007a: 82).
The contemporary capitalist and consumerist conditions of life in Western democracies that
acquire global dimensions seem to obstruct “active citizenship”, or, to use another political
term (in contrast to the apolitical capitalist or neoliberalist notions of consumerist and
imperialist citizenship) “public-generated citizenship”. Our plea here would be not to dismiss
the notion of the public and the public sphere as another fallacy of liberalism (which some
authors have done), but instead to rehabilitate the political dimensions of the public and relate
these to the thematization of the new challenges of citizenship.
Capitalist economy has made the notion of individuality, agency and autonomy a precondition
for citizenship. Individual autonomy perceived as atomism and productive individualism has,
since its introduction in the 19th century, become the official policy promoted by
governments. The problem with such “autonomy” is that it is characterized by the
unknowability of the world and of worldly relations. Along these lines, Dean (2003: 41) has
argued that contemporary capitalism works “against citizenship” and produces split subjects,
through privatizing and individualizing practices that are related to the demand for constant
steering of subjects towards self-realization and self-maintenance. Such requirements are
seen, for example, in migration when migrants are embedded in integration policies, and if
they fail to meet their requirements, their subjectivity is held to blame and made the only
responsible agent (Pajnik 2007).
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Structural policies develop, to use Arend’t terminology, from worldless relations; they embed
individuals as atomized personalities into such relations, and blame them if they don’t cope
with self-maintenance. The personal integration plan as an integrational mechanism in
migration pursued around the world is proof of this case. The public-generated citizenship
that aspires to the recovery of worldliness has difficulty coping with the atomistic individual
as a product of capitalist relations, since this kind of groundedness of subjects produces
worldless, rather than worldly relations.
Of course, leaving the arguments mired in mere ideology will not suffice. Neither does this
paper want to reproduce some fallacies of bourgeois conceptualizations of citizenship that,
along with the Greek polis, implicitly suggest that public-generated citizenship is reserved for
the able elite, and for active citizens only, i.e. those full members who commit fully to
engagement. Women, children, the old and the foreigners were not admitted to the political
activity of the polis, nor to the rational debates of the 19th century coffee shops. In a similar
way, migrant engagements or projects of new social movements and of ecological groups are
dismissed today as not really relevant by policy makers. Although, to adopt Holloway’s
(2002) discourse, it is precisely such engagements that do not necessarily address the whole
citizenry directly, although they do perhaps indirectly address citizens in general – through
claims of a worldly character – which have the potential to rethink existing relations and
recover the political dimensions of citizenship.
From an active citizenship viewpoint alternatives need to be sought to a sustained framework
of choices for possessive and entrepreneurial subjects. What is needed is a form of subject-as-
citizen autonomy that is more meaningful than that maintained by contemporary policies.
Examples could include migration, or today’s ecological problems; these are topics where the
possibilities of making “good” choices that would enhance the well-being of individual
choosers are curtailed. Only the intelligibility of the world would permit choices that go
beyond altruistic and consumerist individuality. It would require an environment of
nurturance for politics, citizen engagement and significantly, for adopting an attitude of
responsibility for world care.
Public-generated citizenship would adopt Arendt’s (1967) dialogical thinking and acting,
which does not depend on preconceived frameworks of patterns imposed on the world.
Rather, it engages a kind of activity that is resistant to the profit-oriented necessities promoted
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by the capitalist system. Arendt spoke about acting in concert to enable “natality”, to use
imagination in relation to others – i.e. to practice care for the world, and to actualize the
solidarity principle. This, however, cannot emerge or reinitiate a political reality in
circumstances of overwhelming technocracy and apolitical thinking, such as are typical of
today’s democracy.
The current version of autonomy that individuals are to adopt serves to support the atomistic
logic of capitalism that ignores the matter of interdependence and promotes an isolated
individuality. These cannot possibly act in a worldly manner, practicing what Arendt would
describe as “reflective judgment”, since interdependence is a precondition for worldly activity
or active, public-generated citizenship. The rationality of public-generated citizenship that
would require a kind of worldly education for the emergence of a post-capitalist sensus
communis, would need to be attached to rather then detached from the world and the plurality
of people in the world.
To use Arendtian terms, active citizenship requires the practicing of an “enlarged mentality”,
projecting individual identities onto others, exercising earnest mental visiting, and creating
commitments constituted by speech and action. Active citizenship as it is conceptualized here
requires more than correction to the legal system or the improvement of social policies, since
what merely appears as corrections does not suffice for the emergence of an engaged type of
citizenship. Therefore, more radical interventions in existing structural relations are necessary
for the adoption of a worldly kind of active citizenship.
Here it is useful to draw upon the concept of enlarged mentality in Arendt’s terms or the
communicative action described by Habermas, which refers to engagement with the activity
of putting ourselves in the place of others – to be able to think and act in a worldly manner, in
the direction of world care. Practicing such an enlarged mentality does not mean submerging
our own identity to a unity (as in the example of integration policies as the practicing of the
giver-receiver principle), but making a judgment about the world shared with others from an
enlarged point of view. Acting in the public, for Arendt, is about people in plural terms: her
principle of “plurality” (1961/1985: 73) relates this term to the Latin inter homines esse,
standing for “living” or “to be in the company of people”. Related to worldly reality, the
public or active citizenship principle can emerge when “things are seen by many in different
perspectives” (Ibid.: 59). By speaking and acting, an individual expresses her/his individuality
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in the public space, and her/his act is a public act when people are together with one another
and willing to expose themselves. The public-related citizenship thus appears when people
enter into a public space; it appears by an action in relation to exposure, and also to the
thinking process that happens not in isolation but in “communication with others” (Arendt
1961/1985: 220). The enlarged mentality is inclusive in the sense that it refers not only to
those who speak, but to those who listen, as well. Her words, “wherever you are you are
polis”, refer to the public space that is not tied to one’s home country (contrary to the notion
of citizenship as national membership) but can appear wherever there are people (Ibid.: 209).
Similarly, Habermas’s idea is that worldviews should not be seen in terms of closed or open
mentality (e.g. Popper); he calls for broader thinking that does not solely embody attitudes
towards the objective world. He affirms at the same time that worldviews are shared within
communicative action. They are not just constitutive for reaching understanding, but vital for
the formation and appearances of identities, as well. Worldviews do not happen in a linear
way; nor are they formed as the consequences of causality (Habermas 1981: 44, 45, 61-63),
but rather refer to communicative action that grasps the world as a whole, but at the same time
not in the sense of negating the particular. Being intersubjective, communicative action is a
reflexive action. It is plural, as it cannot happen in isolation but only together with others – it
is intersubjective in its orientation to truth and interactive in the sense that it enables
innovation. Communicative action does not alienate the mindful from the mindless, but
includes understanding and active recognition. Interaction comes from the “inside” and makes
individuals aware of others. Not serving as the goal of action, interaction, in terms of
intersubjectivity and plurality, is seen as something that emerges among inclusively and
communicatively acting individuals. It points to the public sphere as an “intersubjectively
shared space”, where actors do not just observe each other but take a “second-person-
attitude”, that results in reciprocal attribution of communicative freedom. Communicatively
acting subjects co-ordinate their actions in terms of intersubjective recognition. From this it
follows that only those reasons count that subjects jointly find valid, and these have a
rationally motivating imperative for those involved. Habermas goes for the transsubjective
validity claim (Habermas 1981: 9), which reflects the inclusive nature of communicative
action when the claim has meaning for observers, nonparticipants, as well as for the acting
subject.
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Active citizenship also refers to what Zolo (2007b: 11) has recently proposed, i.e. that citizens
need not only to have rights, but they need to practice “cognitive autonomy” (autonomia
cognitiva). Along these lines active citizenship is not so much realized in a new form of
“world government” since this is usually imagined as another kind of an international regime
that does not function in a much differentiated manner from the existing ones. Instead,
“cognitive autonomy” is envisioned as a political concept that avoids the “use of coercive
instruments of legal penalization and above-national police forces”. It refers to a kind of
“cooperative anarchy” (anarchia cooperativa) that, albeit nowadays limited to questions of
meteorology and whether changes, alternative forms of human activity for example in the
Antartics etc. – by not applying legal penalties to organize human activity (Ibid.) has an
imaginary potential of a new kind of citizenship.
This paper has proposed the notion of “active citizenship” to capture the sense of global
responsibility for human plurality in the world. The recovery of political dimensions of this
concept goes beyond worldless contemporary cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, although
there have been several attempts to reconstruct this notion, for example Delanty’s (2007)
recent idea of “civic cosmopolitanism”, still supports the existing power relations, against
which Zolo has conceptualized “cognitive autonomy”. Related to this, it does not take as its
precondition a more radical aspiration towards change in the current structural relations,
which is why it seems that it is content with and confident of its promotion of an idealistic
universalism. It still supports the idea of the welfare system that eventually introduced
citizenship as clientilism – clientelism between the individual and the state that later evolved
into citizenship as consumerism. Active citizenship, as theorized in this paper, on the
contrary, takes as its precondition the responsible activity that reconstitutes worldly affairs for
future generations, not just for the present cosmopolitan elite. Active citizenship has the
potential to encompass the cognitive and the productive needs of the world and ensure that
these needs would be addressed in a worldly manner rather then economically and
instrumentally.
19
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