The Two Republicae of the Roman Stoics: Can a Cosmopolite be a Patriot?

This paper is a response to recent attempts by liberal theorists to reconcile universalist sentiments with forms of particularism. It seeks to explore a number of ethical issues related to nationalism, patriotism and loyalty. As the first systematic expositors of cosmopolitanism, the Stoics are called on to address the question: can patriotism be defended ethically by moral universalists? The Roman Stoic attitude to war and imperial conquest is examined because war and its attendant conflicts of interest expose the tension between particular and universal loyalties and pose the greatest challenge to cosmopolitan principles. It is concluded that the task which 'liberal nationalists' have set themselves is a daunting one because, unlike the Stoics, they cannot rely legitimately upon imperialism and the belief in a universal God in order to smooth over differences and conflicting loyalties. In effect, then, this illumination of the origins of Enlightenment universalism problematises further, rather than resolves, issues of conflicting loyalties.     

Citizenship as a weapon

The focus of this article is on citizenship in its juridical sense. Other theorists, especially communitarians and civic republicans, have attempted to expand the idea of citizenship to include a social/political sense; they advocate expanding citizenship beyond its juridical confines to include civic participation as one of the hallmarks of citizenship. A new stage of expansion has begun; it is represented by those who want to make citizenship more multiple and flexible, to see citizenship in a more ethical/normative sense. These expansionist approaches do not jettison the juridical sense of citizenship. In fact, they build upon it. Therefore, these conceptions of citizenship become problematic to the extent that the juridical building block becomes problematic. Thus, the first task is to problematize this juridical sense of citizenship. This article explores a different critical path than the ones typically taken. It pushes the envelope by thinking about citizenship as a weapon. While more exposés of administrative and political abuses involving citizenship claims and issues are needed, this analysis unearths deeper, more fundamental problems with the concept of citizenship. Minimally, it pushes the debate beyond how inclusive or expansive citizenship should be made. It calls for a radical reappraisal of citizenship by recognizing citizenship as a weapon.     

George Orwell and ecological citizenship: moral agency and modern estrangement

Theories of ecological citizenship seek to conceptualize political agency while taking into account humanity’s embeddedness in nature. This essay intervenes with contributions from an author distant from discourses about environmental politics, but with insights to offer them. George Orwell’s writings respond to a problem continuously articulated in the history of ecological thought: the estrangement from the conditions of one’s existence. In doing so, he provides a literary case study of ecological moral reasoning, a practice whereby the virtues of ecological citizenship are cultivated. Such virtues are cultivated by confronting the conditions of one’s existence in embodied terms, incorporating that experiential knowledge, and contributing to practices of self-government using it. This essay presents Orwell’s case, explains its relevance to the contemporary discourse on ecological citizenship, and concludes by suggesting that it also provides resources for empirical social scientists seeking to operationalize ecological citizenship theory by way of a moral sociology of the environment.     

Not life but the world is at stake: Hannah Arendt on citizenship in the age of the social

This article evaluates Hannah Arendt's contribution to ‘thinking citizenship’ in light of her controversial account of the modern rise of ‘the social’. It argues that Arendt's writing on the social is best understood not primarily as analytical and normative but as an historical argument about the effect of capitalism and modern state administration on meaningful citizenship. This short piece analyses one important element of Arendt's story about the historical rise of the social: that it is a peculiar hybrid of polis and oikos, a scaled-up form of housekeeping, and its threat to the public, political world.     

Introduction: the body as a site for politics: citizenship and practices of contemporary slavery

This special issue of Citizenship Studies brings the meaning of citizenship into dialogue with recent work on the body and with practices of contemporary slavery. In bringing the concepts of citizenship, bodies and slavery into collision, we highlight the need to couple slavery with possibilities of citizenship as an alternative to the way in which, as Paddy McQueen below puts it, ‘citizenship and slavery are mutually exclusive: one can be either a citizen or a slave, not both’. Recent ideas about the body as a site for politics, where the body is understood in terms of embodied relationality in a situation – a necessarily social category – are a means for bringing about a richer encounter between the concepts of citizenship understood as political subjectivity (as developed in the work of Engin Isin), bodies and slavery. Practices of slavery deny relationality, based instead on a binary master/slave logic of power relations. This introduction connects citizenship with slavery, by identifying citizenship as embodied political subjectivity and slavery as one of the conditions in which the very possibility of this is denied. Taking embodied relationality into account, recognising the necessarily social embodiment of concepts and abjuring an abstract, disembodied sphere of concepts, thus disrupts the standard understanding of slavery as rights violations.     

The blind spots of liberal citizenship and integration policy

Governments across Europe have stepped up their efforts to manage social diversity politically, often specifically targeting Muslim populations. Lewicki interrogates the policy tools that the British and German governments deploy to ‘integrate’ an increasingly stigmatized and racialized population, zooming in on whether and how they problematize patterns of inequality. Complicating the ‘one country, one citizenship’ rationale of the citizenship regime literature that assumes a one-dimensional interpretation of history, cultural identity, political institutions or legal norms, she points to four salient liberal citizenship discourses that currently frame policies of diversity management. These are civic republicanism, multiculturalism, civic universalism and cosmopolitanism. Her analysis demonstrates that all four liberal citizenship discourses have blind spots when it comes to problematizing structural hierarchies and the logics of racism. Over the last two decades, liberal citizenship and integration policy frameworks have thus contributed to the retention of binary distinctions between superior citizens and inferior Others, distinctions that can now easily be exacerbated and used for mobilization by right-wing populist movements.     

Romantic guilt and identity

Abstract

There is a kind of guilt that looks archaic, but which arises at the moment of Romanticism. One way of understanding it is as a response to a plight bequeathed by Kant. Kant's account of the subject secures the subject as such, but not the particular individual. The particular individual for Kant presents a risk, the risk of turning away from the good will defined by the categorical imperative to embrace one's own, particular good. Ultimately for Kant this entails the risk of radical evil. The peculiarity of Romantic guilt is that it seems to grant one ontological assurance for one's particular individuality. This paper explores and seeks to define the phenomenon of Romantic guilt as a possible aspect of tensions in lived experience, in particular between the universalism and moral autonomy associated with the rationalist, Enlightenment strain in liberalism, and the particularism and rootedness of cultural belonging associated with Romanticism. Romantic guilt emerges as having a constitutive function in relation to the self. The paper concludes with suggestions about ways in which further research might trace Romantic guilt in a collective form in nationalism and modernity.     

‘But this is a park’! The paradox of public space in a Buenos Aires ‘no man's land’

Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork, this paper analyzes the occupation of an abandoned park in the south of Buenos Aires by the city's urban poor, delineating the implications of this incident for notions of citizenship in the context of deeply fragmented social rights. While public space has historically been understood as an expression of the universality of rights bearing membership in a political community, I show how this universalism became the object of struggle during a conflict over the park between the local middle class and squatters, many of which were of immigrant origin. The discourses mobilized by various social groups blurred the distinction between citizenship as a set of legal–formal rights versus a project of normative inclusion. While public space is juridically constructed as universal, particularistic claims to these spaces are imbued with increased legitimacy in a context in which social rights – conceived as a set of provisions guaranteed by the state under a regime of liberal citizenship – are unrealizable. By claiming this space for particularistic uses, squatters drew attention to the contradictions embedded in public space's democratic pretensions in a setting in which putatively universal rights are ignored by the state.     

The 'Advance Without Authority': Post-modernism, Libertarian Socialism, and Intellectuals

The eclipse of socialist statism and the advent of post-modernism have generated important questions about the role and future of left intellectuals, political organisation and theory. Socialist statism's vanguardism, elitism, scientism and substitutionism have been thoroughly discredited. The advent of post-modernism is one signal of this. The post-modern rejection of universalism, its critique of representation and its emphasis on situatedness provide a challenge to emancipatory thought. However, post-modernism's suspension of judgement, relativism and—most importantly—rejection of universalism is not a coherent emancipatory alternative. A more fruitful way of answering questions about intellectuals and political organisation is to examine the broad libertarian socialist tradition. At various times, thinkers within this political field have managed to steer a path between vanguardism and revolutionary waiting, between scientism and theoretical randomisation, advancing without authority to organise and theorise towards a radically democratic social order beyond state and capital.     

Thinking citizenship and its constitutive subject: interrogating the 2004 Irish citizenship referendum debate

This article considers a referendum which was held in the Republic of Ireland in 2004 involving a proposal to qualify the existing universal constitutional entitlement to birthright citizenship. Existing analysis of this referendum reflects dominant trends in citizenship scholarship. It does so by framing the issue in terms of two opposing perspectives – one particularistic (exclusive) and one universalistic (inclusive) – and positing the question of the ‘politics’ of citizenship as a trade-off between these diverging models. This article argues, however, that Rob (R.B.J.) Walker's notion of the constituent subject of (sovereign) politics challenges this dualistic framework as the necessary starting point for discussions about citizenship. It does so by problematizing the premise upon which it is based which is the taken-for-granted autonomous existence of persons (individuals) who are understood to be connected to, but ultimately separate from, ‘the state.’ This article concludes with reflections on what an alternative framework for exploring citizenship (based specifically on a historicization of subjectivity in relation to sovereignty) might look like. It suggests that this provides us with a different starting point to the prevalent form of a timeless dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, particularism and universalism, polis and cosmopolis currently determined by the boundaries of the Irish state.     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

Reforming the French welfare state: Solidarity,social exclusion and the three crises of citizenship

The article explores recent debates about citizenship and social provision in France. It examines the essential concepts comparable to ‘social citizenship’, as understood in British debates, and the role that they have played in the development of the French welfare state. Its conclusions are threefold. First, social provision in France is founded on the principle of solidarité, which holds that all citizens face a series of social risks (unemployment and illness) that make them dependent on one another. Second, as the traditional insurance principle (the core of the French welfare state) is founded on socio‐economic conditions (concerning the nature of social interdependence and social risk) that no longer exist, the emergence of these social ills has led to not one but three crises of citizenship: a crisis of coverage, of legitimacy and of participation. Third, while it is too early to draw definitive conclusions, recent policy reforms suggest that the difficulties faced by French welfare are encouraging moves towards the British model of tax‐based (rather than insurance‐based) financing of social provision.     

The dispositions of ‘Good’ citizenship: Character,symbolic power and disinterest

Abstract

The problems of determining citizenly competence and finding an appropriate balance between public and private life have increasingly organized intellectual debate in civil society. Although civic republicans and liberals give different answers to these problems, they both claim that ‘character’ should be a necessary foundation for good citizenship. This article identifies a tension between character's analytical status as a category of explanation and its normative status as a moral category. Although most civic republicans and liberals recognize that the concept of character is socially constructed, the concept typically appears as a pre-political good whose social origins are hypostatized or forgotten. This article uses the sociological insights of Pierre Bourdieu in order to explain how character simultaneously appears as a social construct and as a moral good by exploring how the concept is mobilized by civic republicans and liberals as a solution to the problem of ‘good’ citizenship. The goal of the article is three-fold: first, to use Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field and symbolic power to clarify the analytical and normative aspects of the concept of character and its relation to citizenship and civil society; second, to demonstrate how power shapes and conditions character formation in civil society; and third, to offer an account of the practical means by which character is promoted by civic republicans and liberals as a solution to the challenges facing civil society.     

On the durability and the decomposition of citizenship: the social logics of forced return migration in Cape Verde

This article explores the impact of deportation, a state practice increasingly applied by European and North American governments, on notions of sociality in transnational social fields. In particular, it concentrates on the dynamics between formal citizenship on the one hand and the moral economies of belonging and membership on the other. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in Cape Verde, where deportation is producing a new social minority, this article examines the confluence of social and formal legal practices of exercising membership in transnational fields. After summarising the constitutive features of Cape Verdean transnational social formation, the trajectories and perspectives of deportees are highlighted in relation to their family networks, as well as in their encounters with the wider society and state structures. It is argued that understandings of social inclusion and perceptions of membership are embedded in moral discourses on ‘law’ and ‘justice’ as they circulate within transnational social fields. In the context of forced return migration, citizenship emerges as an arena for claiming legitimacy and integration and likewise becomes a key mode of the formulation of conditionalities for integration and social exclusion.     

Women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion in Mexico City: citizenship,experience and clientelism

In April 2007, after a period of intense social debate, the Mexico City Legal Assembly legalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, which was an unprecedented development in women's rights in Mexico. Within the context of a proliferation of public discourses about women's citizenship rights changes in women's social status in Mexico, this article explores the extent to which the newly legalized character of abortion is interpreted by women as a right. Drawing on 24 interviews with women who had a legal termination of pregnancy between 2008 and 2009, this research shows that legalization opens up new and complex relationships between women as subjects of rights and the state. Such relationships are expressed as three discursive figures: legal abortion (1) as a concession from the government, (2) as ‘excessive’ tolerance by the state, and (3) as a right to be protected and guaranteed. The analysis shows that women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion are mediated by profound transformations, which Mexican society is currently undergoing. These include changes related to a shift from a clientist political culture to one more framed in terms of citizenship, the subjective effects of family planning policies, and their ambivalent relationships with Catholic notions of women and motherhood, and the effects of feminist discourses of women's citizenship, abortion, and reproductive rights.     

Tracing the roots of social citizenship: Jane Addams’ thought between formal rights and moral obligation

The modern social citizen is a dual figure: at one and the same time a legal-universal abstraction and a particular living being with specific capacities, proclivities and attitudes. The Settlement movement from the late nineteenth century articulated and shaped both universal and particular dimensions of social citizenship. It contained the imperative of guidance of individual conscience and the modern discourse of universal social rights. The article demonstrates that it is impossible to maintain a division between, on one side, the subject of individualizing pastoral care originating in religious poor relief and philanthropy, and, on the other side, formal rights based on universalism and the modern state. The Settlement movement lies at the pathway of belief, subjective interpretation and respect for the particular person and at the pathway of factual knowledge of social patterns and large-scale policy reforms. The focus on the particular person as subject was the legacy of Christian piety, whereas the concept of universal citizen was associated with the rise of social science at the University of Chicago. We explore this paradox of the particular and the universal through the work of Jane Addams as both sociologist and founder of Hull House.     

Liberal Nationalism and Responsible Citizenship in South Korea

This essay explores how South Koreans have creatively acculturated the meaning of citizenship using Confucianism-originated familial affectionate sentiments (ch?ng), while resisting a liberal individualistic conception of citizenship, by investigating contemporary nationalist politics in South Korea. Its central claim is that the ch?ng-induced politico-cultural practice of collective moral responsibility (uri-responsibility), which transcends the binary of individualism and collectivism and of liberalism and nationalism, represents the essence of Korean national citizenship. In other words, this essay attempts to make a Korean case of “liberal nationalism” in its post-Confucian context.     

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.     

Why Solidarity Matters: The Political Strategy of Welfare Design

Reporting on our recent book, The Solidarity Society, this article explores the way in which the design of welfare programmes interacts with and shapes the underlying quality of social relations between members of society—and, through this, public attitudes to welfare. Given that sustaining generous welfare over long timescales requires the support of electorates, this ‘relational’ dimension of welfare policy is crucial for the long‐term strategy of tackling poverty and inequality. The article looks in particular at the ‘welfare dilemmas’ that can arise from tensions between targeting and universalism and between need and entitlement, where the distributional and relational elements of welfare policy work against one another. We conclude that entrenching a generous welfare settlement will require strong elements of both universalism and reciprocity in the design of welfare.