Towards cultural citizenship? Cultural rights and cultural policy in Taiwan

This article reviews existing literature on the construction of cultural citizenship, and argues that cultural citizenship expands the concept of ‘citizenship’, promotes citizens' consciousness and ensures the protection of minority rights. Since the 1990s, three cultural policies have arisen related to cultural citizenship in Taiwan: ‘Community Renaissance’, ‘Multicultural Policy’ and the ‘Announcement of Cultural Citizenship’. ‘Cultural citizenship’ has expanded the concept of citizenship in two ways. First, it has led to the consideration of the minority rights of Taiwanese indigenous peoples, the Hakkas, foreign brides and migrant workers in ‘citizenship’; and second, it has placed emphasis on ‘cultural rights’ in addition to civil rights, political rights and social rights. This article begins by exploring what approach to cultural citizenship is used in cultural policy, and what approach is suitable for practising cultural citizenship in Taiwan. I argue that minority groups practise their cultural rights with the public participation of Community Renaissance. Taiwan's case bears out Stevenson's view: a society of actively engaged citizens requires both the protection offered by rights and opportunities to participate. Finally, this article shows the challenges and contradictions of cultural citizenship in Taiwan: the loss of autonomy and the continuation of cultural inequality.     

Citizenship in the Netherlands: locally produced,nationally contested

The Netherlands is often considered an extreme example of individualism and multiculturalism, two factors that many politicians and social scientists consider to be the main causes for the alleged decline in citizenship. In this paper, we examine Dutch citizens' conceptions of citizenship to test these negative expectations. We found the fear that a modern, individualistic, and diverse citizenry only care for their own rights to be misplaced; citizens were willing to exert effort to uphold the society they live in. Their efforts, however, were conditional upon returns in terms of a responsive government and in improvements to their individual lives. Communitarian, local, and rather submissive notions of citizenship were deeply shared – with a liberal twist among many migrants. We also found that ‘nationalist’ republican notions of citizenship awaken latent uncertainties and divisions among citizens rather than creating ‘new’ unity. This imagination of citizenship leaves Dutch society wanting for the deliberative, political elements of citizenship.     

Contesting belonging and social citizenship: the case of refugee housing in Armenia

Using the example of the right to housing, this article addresses the ways in which the practice of social citizenship, including popular claims and expectations and actual state provisions, has changed in post-Soviet Armenia. It examines the claims of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan to state-provided permanent housing, which they consider the key condition for becoming ‘citizens’ and ‘locals’ in Armenia, and the Armenian state's solutions to the housing issue following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It demonstrates how the Soviet-era housing policy has left its mark on current notions and practices of social citizenship in Armenia. Even though social rights in general have decreased, notions of social citizenship are still present not only in the expectations and claims of needy refugees and citizens without housing but also in the state's acknowledgement of responsibility for its citizens' welfare (though currently providing only for those in extreme need), and in the equalising effect, the state housing programme has had for the majority of refugees who participated in it.     

Citizenship,minorities and the struggle for a right to the city in Istanbul

Globalization is generating new forms of citizenship that often go beyond the institutional perception of social identity. These new forms of citizenship are developed in a scalable way to a greater extent than rights and obligations, and are entirely managed by the citizens themselves. To demonstrate empirical support for this issue, the case of minority communities in Turkey constitutes one of the most relevant examples, since citizenship in this country has long been associated with an idea of political loyalty and total allegiance to the nation-state. The main purpose of this article is to show how urban space and urban protest allow minorities to find alternative forms of expression for their collective identity, and to create a new understanding of citizenship beyond the classical definition, being based instead on institutional representation. The aim of this research is to examine the process of urban transformation in Istanbul, how this phenomenon shapes the structure of cities and how it gives rise to social resistance and protest, especially in neighborhoods housing minority communities. In this context, the article focuses on planning movements in Turkey through a comparative study of two urban planning projects and the citizens' protests against them.     

Cultivating self-health subjects: Yangsheng and biocitizenship in urban China

China's transformation from state-run socialism to market economy has resulted in the progressive privatization of a number of key areas, including public health. At the same time, research suggests that the privatization of public service has given accelerated the formation of self-governing subjects who will enrich and strengthen Chinese authoritarian rule. This is most vividly demonstrated in the tendency of Chinese consumers to engage in the practice of self-health, an integral dimension of the wide-spread yangsheng (life-nurturing) practice at the grassroots level. Engaging with the concept of biocitizenship, and combining critical analysis of media with ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines a nationwide process of health literacy education through popular media and the ways in which this process shapes yangsheng as both discourse and practice. It also identifies a range of ethical positions adopted by individual citizens in response to yangsheng as a discourse, practice and industry. The discussion reveals that biological citizenship has indeed become a new and integral dimension of China's citizenship project in the twenty-first century. We learn that while there is indeed an unambiguously top-down process of making biocitizens, a certain level of biological citizenship ‘from below’ is also present, albeit with distinct Chinese characteristics.     

‘I have so many successful stories’: framing social citizenship for refugees

The current US refugee resettlement system reflects the US government's agenda of having refugees acquire quick employment with low state welfare dependence and minimal fiscal and cultural disruption to the receiving communities. The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) assisting refugees hold broader goals for refugees, including feeling a sense of belonging in the USA. These goals represent a framing of social citizenship rights for refugees, and how NGOs frame social citizenship varies depending upon the NGOs contractual relationship with the US welfare state. Using data from 57 in-depth interviews, I describe how resettlement and assistance NGOs currently frame social citizenship for refugees in relation to market citizenship, and how their relationship with the federal government shapes this framing. Findings illustrate the role of NGOs in creating a discursive space for expanding the social citizenship rights of refugees and the ways such framing is highly constrained by the definitions of belonging that emerge from market citizenship.     

Internet access as citizen's right? Citizenship in the digital age

Discourses about Internet and rights generate ideological, economic, and policy debates that bring to prominence the question of citizenship in today's digital age. But what does Internet access as a citizen's right imply? What are the pragmatic meanings of the intersection of citizenship, rights, and technology access? Specifically, what does citizens' right to technology mean for African states? This paper examines citizenship, rights, and Internet in South Africa, and attempts to move the discourse beyond philosophical rhetoric to practical policy interpretations. To do this, the study examines interpretations and reactions of policy-makers to the idea of Internet access as a citizen's right, and through a survey explores the views of many youth on this subject. Findings reveal strong opinions about rights and technology access in South Africa. For policy-makers, the reality of the socioeconomic challenges of Africa humbles an egalitarian aspiration of rights and Internet access.     

Debating the ghost of Marshall: a critique of citizenship

Significant changes to societies and the jettisoning of social rights are limiting access to conventional citizenship and fueling a new criterion by which a substantive ‘citizenship’ may now be claimed. Specifically, fame, fortune and a kind of martyrdom are, de facto, the new ways in which an individualistic approach is used to access citizenship, initiating a two-tiered system of inclusion. This article uses a Canadian context to examine the relevance of Marshall's concept of citizenship. The argument will follow in four parts. First, I review Marshall's construct of social rights and take up some of the ‘internal’ critiques of its limits. Second, I examine the gendered limits of social citizenship claims. Third, I explore what amounts to an ‘external’ critique of Marshall, i.e. thinkers like Beck who argue that the debate has moved on from how to do ‘social rights’ to an attack on the very notion of (social) rights. Finally, I propose what a citizenship without social rights concretely amounts to in the modern world.     

Social reproduction and the limits of a neoliberal approach: the case of Singapore

Should citizenship status confer social rights independent of an individual's economic contribution? This study approaches this question through looking at social settings in which answers are contested. Specifically, it documents and analyzes qualitative semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews with 221 Singaporean citizens. As such, it complements existing critical policy studies on shifting conceptualizations of social citizenship and the rise of neoliberal governance. Data analysis illustrates interviewees' perceptions and lived experience of neoliberal, or ‘market citizenship’, bias in state population policy. Interviewees, moreover, find existing pronatalist incentives helpful but insufficient, largely because they see a decision to have more children as a long-term commitment requiring continual investment. They call for more generous, sustained, and universal state provisions for education and health, as well as homemaker allowances, which would be closer to feminist and classical formulations of citizenship-as-social rights.     

Protest,citizenship and democratic renewal: the student movement in Chile

What is the significance of upsurge of protest and claims-making for how we understand citizenship in relatively new democracies? In Chile, some 20 years after a paradigmatically successful democratisation, student protests for a more equitable education system have re-politicised and transformed debates about what democracy and citizenship should mean. Claims are being staked not only for educational reform but also for a new model of citizenship based on rights and welfare, in contrast to neoliberal models of citizenship as individualisation and consumption. In raising consciousness as regards the costs of neoliberal democracy, the student protests are reviving the country's radical traditions and past practices of an engaged, political active youth movement.     

No space for citizens? Conceptualisations of citizenship in a functional region

This article aims to discuss whether there is such a thing as citizenship performed at the level of the sub-state region and, if so, how this can be studied. It is suggested that aspects of citizenship should be studied not only in the context of sub-state administrative units, but also in the context of more loosely interconnected functional economic regions. The main argument for this is that, although there is no ‘contract’ between the polity and the citizen in these functional regions, they are often highly politicized spaces, governed by coalitions of public and private actors whose actions can be of considerable importance for those inhabiting them. It is also suggested that, in the absence of formal rights and institutionalized relations between citizens and polity, we need to explore how ‘citizens’ and ‘citizenship’ are conceptualized by the polity in these regions more broadly. The article focuses (a) on the conditions for citizenship in the functional region and (b) on those discourses of citizenship that emerge under the conditions identified. A tentative conclusion is that, in the absence of formal citizenship rights connected to the functional space, a discourse about citizens and citizenship has emerged, which is focuses solely on citizens' capacity to contribute to economic growth.     

Citizenship and Democracy: A Journey to Europe's Past

The relationship between citizenship and democracy is poorly understood, and the two notions are often used synonymously. Governing is obviously the central issue, but whereas citizenship seems to require self-limitation by calling on civic virtues, democracy is actually enlarging citizens' power. The Polish and Dutch Republics from the seventeenth and eighteenth century present an interesting mirror image of how citizenship and democracy relate to each other in political practice.     

Everyday Understandings of Citizenship in Germany

Most scholarship on citizenship focuses on institutional and structural analyses and extrapolates these to individual citizens' experiences. This renders citizenship a static and uniform concept that is divorced from individuals' understandings. Data gathered during qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, Germany, in 2000–01 show how ordinary Germans' understandings of citizenship challenge an oversimplified narrative about “Germanness” which has assigned a static notion of German citizenship as based on “blood”, or principles of jus sanguinis. By analyzing interviews with 60 working-class youth, this article demonstrates that these young people construct understandings of citizenship based primarily on cultural criteria. These findings redefine prevailing assumptions about Germans' understandings of citizenship and demonstrate that citizenship and naturalization policies cannot be used as a measure of the meaning of citizenship for ordinary citizens. Citizenship is not a static or uniform concept, but is rather imagined and re-imagined by ordinary citizens in a variety of ways.     

Reproducing the ‘national home’: gendering domopolitics

Walters developed the concept of domopolitics to refer to the ways in which the securitisation of migration contributes to the construction of the UK as a ‘national home’. Domopolitical policies and discourses produce the UK as the ‘national home’ of ‘neoliberal citizens’; they thus serve as tools of neoliberal governmentality, disciplining both citizens and migrants into displaying qualities associated with neoliberal citizenship, especially economic productivity. However, the concept of ‘home’ has a particular genealogy within liberal discourses of citizenship. As Pateman contends, the political ‘public’ sphere of liberal citizenship is constructed in opposition to an apolitical ‘private’ sphere. The public sphere has been coded as the domain of men, while women have been relegated to the private ‘home’. Consequently, women have been deemed responsible for the reproduction of both the private, and the ‘national’ home, a construction which has persisted under neoliberalism. While often superficially gender-neutral, domopolitics actually relies upon, and reinforces, these gendered understandings of neoliberal citizenship. Domopolitical policies and discourses construct migrant women’s reproductive practices as a legitimate and necessary site of state intervention, disciplining migrant women to ensure they ‘correctly’ reproduce the neoliberal ‘national home.’     

Hard times for citizenship: Women's movements in Chile and Mexico

This article comparatively analyses the cases of Mexico and Chile to understand how women's movements contest the meaning of citizenship in various national contexts. We also assess the consequences that different movement strategies, such as ‘autonomy’ versus ‘double militancy’, have for movements' citizenship goals. To explain the different outcomes in the two cases, we focus on the nature of the democratic transition, the internal coherence of women's movements, the nature of alliances with other civil society actors, the ideological orientation of the newly democratized state, the form of women's agency within the state, and the nature of the neoliberal economic reforms. We argue that a serious problem for women in both Chile and Mexico is the fact that governments themselves are deploying the concept of citizenship as a way to legitimate their social and economic policies. While women's movements seek to broaden the meaning of citizenship to include social rights, neoliberal governments employ the rhetoric of citizen activism to encourage society to provide its own solutions to economic hardship and poverty. While this trend is occurring in both Chile and Mexico, there are some features of the political opportunity structure in Chile that enable organized women to contest the state's more narrow vision of democratic citizenship. In Mexico, on the other hand, the neoliberal economic discourse of the current government is matched by a profoundly conservative ideological rhetoric, thereby reducing the political opportunities for women to forward a gender equality agenda.     

Emile Durkheim revisited: Les corps intermediaires

The article discusses the relevance of Emile Durkheim for contemporary debates about citizenship and democracy. If the concepts of social bonds and solidarity which have existed from the classical period of the welfare state until today are under revision the question is whether the thoughts of Durkheim have lost relevance too? Parsons's interpretation of Durkheim as a theorist of social order is criticized. He did not look for a functional order of the Parsonian type. More likely Durkheim was preoccupied with the paradoxes and problems of the liberal state, that is the search for a type of authority compatible with modern individual rights. Durkheim's focal interest in intermediary institutions is analysed and related to the neoliberal view of the welfare state as having too much influence over the individual. It tends to forget les corps intermédiaires as important preconditions for the construction of citizenship and modern democracies. The communitarian vision of modern intermediary bodies in the 1990s is criticized for being too local in its perspective.     

Biometric citizenship

The article considers the issue of citizenship in light of the recent developments in biometric identification techniques. It aims to answer the question as to what kind of citizenship is the ‘biometric citizenship’. Drawing on several empirical examples including the Iris Recognition Immigration System scheme, identity cards and current citizenship reform plans in the UK, I argue that biometric citizenship is at once a ‘neoliberal citizenship’ and a ‘biological citizenship’. The neoliberal aspect of biometric citizenship is demonstrated through the rearrangement of the experience of border crossing in terms of the neoliberal ethos of choice, freedom, active entrepreneurialism and transnational expedited mobility. At the same time, these are enacted alongside the exclusionary and violent measures directed at those who are considered as risky categories illustrating the constitutive relationship between the ‘biometric citizen’ and its ‘other’. As regards its biological aspect, biometric citizenship is embedded within rationalities and practices that deploy the body not only as a means of identification but also as a way of sorting through different forms of life according to their degree of utility and legitimacy in relation to market economy. This aspect also carries a racial and national dimension exemplified in both the national identity card scheme and the very technical infrastructure of biometric technology. Overall, what these two features have in common is the reduction of the principle of citizenship to processes of identity management and technical procedures without, however, purging it altogether from its all too familiar national and race-based components.     

On the creation of indigenous subjects in the Russian Federation

For many of Russia's poorest people, and especially for the officially recognized ‘indigenous small-numbered peoples’, neoliberal reforms following the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a major retrenchment in ‘social citizenship’ as defined by T.H. Marshall. However, some reforms also promised increased civil, political and cultural citizenship rights, which Russia's indigenous peoples have sought to realize through new legislation and appeals to international agreements regarding the rights of indigenous peoples. But with Russia's current economic and political course geared towards maximizing revenues from the extraction and sale of natural resources, Russia's indigenous peoples have been frustrated in their efforts to realize these citizenship rights, particularly in their attempts to assert rights to land and resources through legal means. This paper draws on case studies from southern Siberia to discuss first how Russia's identity politics and an international focus on indigenous peoples have combined to create indigenous subjects in the Russian Federation, and second how the anticipated transition from indigenous subjects to indigenous citizens has for the most part failed to materialize.     

Degrees of freedom in Canada's culture of redress

This article examines some recent Canadian projects of historical narrative revision in light of Canada's broader redress culture: the recurring norms and assumptions that govern its apportionment of causal and reparative responsibility for historic wrongs. To this end, it studies several grassroots commemorative projects funded under the Community Historical Recognition Program. It asks whether these projects contribute to forging a broader culture of redress capable of contributing to a goal that this article identifies as a central underlying justification for enterprises of historical justice in general: democratizing citizenship. Thus, the article aims to fulfil two main objectives. First, it offers an empirical analysis of some important Canadian historical justice initiatives, thus contributing to our understanding of a case often seen as a leader in redress politics. Second, by developing and then applying its own account of how historical justice projects can contribute to goals of democratic citizenship, the article offers what I hope is a suggestive model for analysing and evaluating particular acts or policies of historical redress more generally. A key conclusion from this analysis is that the Canadian example is much less inspiring than often assumed.     

Concepts of citizenship underlying EU gender equality policies

This article assesses the framing of gender equality in the EU political discourse from 1995 to 2005 and the conceptualisations of citizenship that emerge from it. To assess the extent to which EU gender equality policies meet the aspirations of the concept of a gender equal citizenship, it develops an analysis of how different feminist approaches to citizenship are related to concepts of rights and responsibilities in EU gender equality policies. The frame analysis of a selection of EU policy documents in the areas of family policies, domestic violence, and gender inequality in politics reflects different configurations of the relation between feminist conceptualisations of citizenship and citizens' distribution of rights and responsibilities. Findings show that both gender-neutral and gender-differentiated conceptualisations of citizenship are present in EU policy documents, while a gender-pluralist approach tends to be absent. They also reveal that, while both men and women are formally treated as right-holders, women are framed as mainly responsible for eradicating the barriers to an equal enjoyment of citizenship rights. Moreover, men and women are constructed as different citizens. The article concludes that EU formal definitions of citizenship based on the concept of equality, while promoting legal gender equality and acknowledging the existence of gender obstacles to the enjoyment of an equal citizenship for women, are not by definition translated into policy initiatives transformative of traditional gender roles. In this respect they could hamper the achievement of a gender equal citizenship in the European Union.