Citizenship and Solidarity: Reflections on the Canadian Way

Numerous accounts of contemporary liberal democratic citizenship focus on the introduction and subsequent erosion of social citizenship rights through neo-liberal governing practices. These studies demonstrate that the progressive erosion of social entitlements and social policies has aggravated poverty, economic insecurity, and social exclusion, especially among already marginalized groups and those with tenuous links to the wage economy. Less attention, however, has been directed to the implications of withering social citizenship rights and associated social policies for the ongoing generation of social solidarities and collective identities. This article draws upon the Speeches from the Throne of the Federal Parliament to demonstrate the recent and complex interrelationships among social citizenship, national identity, and social solidarity in Canada. It argues that, in the immediate post-World War Two years, the idea of social citizenship was conflated with federally inspired discourses of pan-Canadian nationalism. The decline in social programs during the past two decades in Canada thus has represented more than simply a shift in governing philosophies and practices. Rather, neo-liberal governance has challenged Canadians', especially English Canadians', sense of shared identity and national community. The article concludes by examining the most recent and unsuccessful attempts by the federal government to rebuild and reaffirm a sense of shared identity and community.     

Counter-Hegemonic Citizenship: LGBT Communities and the Politics of Hate Crimes in Canada

Relying on a case study in which violence targeted at lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered (LGBT) individuals and strategies used to counter this violence is examined, this paper argues that public policies and laws that aim to protect groups cannot guarantee access to substantive citizenship. They can, however, be used as a resource by oppressed groups to force a shift in the boundaries of the citizenship regime. Considering that violence targeting LGBT people (hate crimes, discrimination, etcetera) is an indicator that they are denied access to substantive citizenship, this paper examines how the citizenship of LGBT people can be extended in ways that allow this group to enjoy substantive citizenship. Citizenship is a useful lens to assess power relations, understand situations of oppression and develop strategies to challenge this oppression. Relying on the concept of citizenship regime and informed by work on radical democracy, the author introduces the Gramscian notion of hegemony. In doing so, she proposes a new way of thinking about citizenship. Her model, counter-hegemonic citizenship, brings us to consider citizenship as a process, rather than a status or a set of rights, and to focus on meaningful struggles that can lead to the redrawing of the boundaries of the citizenship regime for all oppressed groups. This paper inscribes itself in a body of literature concerned with struggles for equality and the role of laws and public policies for achieving this end.     

Digital Restructuring: Gender,Class and Citizenship in the Information Society in Canada

‘Digital restructuring’ denotes a phenomenon integral to but also distinct within economic and political restructuring broadly conceived. The concept of restructuring can be modified with ‘digital’ to forefront the important technological dimension of global restructuring, as well as to indicate developments associated with the new ‘information economy’. Digital technology and digitization have been integral to the scope and speed of the global economic and political restructuring of recent decades. They have constituted the technological conditions for some of the more characteristic aspects of this process; from the flexiblization or outright shedding of labour, to the mobility of production and capital and the globalization of trade and financial markets. This paper seeks to debunk much of the corporate and state mythology of digital restructuring currently in circulation by drawing upon the analyses of digital technology and restructuring advanced by critical scholars and progressive social movements, and to highlight the dangers to progressive political movements and discourses posed by the very nature of these representations.     

The Politics of Multiscalar Citizenship: The Case of Lesbian and Gay Organizing in Canada

Citizenship is increasingly viewed as a multiscalar social practice, constituted and contested at local, urban, national and transnational scales. This paper attempts to bring this insight to bear on the study of queer social movement politics. A multiscalar perspective, we argue, enriches our understanding of contemporary LGBT citizenship struggles. Using qualitative case studies of lesbian and gay organizing at the pan-Canadian and urban levels in Canada, the paper demonstrates the relationships that exist between and among citizenship struggles and practices across scales. Queer political struggles at the urban level diverge widely from those at the pan-Canadian level. By using a multiscalar approach, we are able to demonstrate these critically important political differences. The paper contributes to an understanding of multiscalar citizenship by showing the different forms of politics that are produced at different scales of social movement organizing.     

Paradise Paved? Reflections on the Fate of Social Citizenship in Canada

The aim of this paper is to assess the potential of the concept of social citizenship for articulating progressive policy development in Canada. I argue that the revisioning of social citizenship is hampered by a recent notion that it is part of the superseded welfare policy paradigm of the past. Many analysts characterize a shift in the objectives of Canadian social policy as a move away from a 'golden age' policy paradigm, which emphasized the social rights of citizenship, to a neo-liberal paradigm promoting market citizenship. I suggest that there is an overstatement in the current literature of the extent to which social citizenship rights were ever realized, or even pursued, in Canada. There are two tendencies toward over-generalization in the literature that obscure a more complex picture of social policy development in Canada. The first concerns the relationship between social policy and the social rights of citizenship. The blurring of these two concepts underlies some of the overstatement in the literature about the past implementation of social citizenship rights. The second tendency to over-generalization relates to the observation of a paradigm change in social policy orientation. While things may be shifting, there are grounds to believe that this is largely a within-paradigm intensification--from mean and lean, to meaner and leaner. Finally, I suggest that the conceptual foundations of the social rights of citizenship must be re-worked in a way that acknowledges contestation over the terrain and quality of the 'social' and that challenges the distinctness and priority of the 'market'. There is a continuing need to strengthen and promote the social rights of citizenship as a discursive and practical challenge to neo-liberal interpretations of the 'good' society as a 'market' society. This would involve contesting the claim that the market is the arbiter of the quality of life, and claiming the market itself as a social arena.     

Canada: Canadian legislative proposal for the prosecution of war criminals 1

A proposed amendment of the criminal code is designed to overcome the problem of retroactive legislation in the prosecution of suspected Nazi war criminals living in Canada.     

Interweaving Aboriginal/Indigenous Rights with Urban Citizenship: A View from the Winnipeg Low-Cost Housing Sector,Canada

State-society relations around low-cost housing in Canada changed from a period of strong federal leadership centred on social rights to a period of state retrenchment. A coalition of housing stakeholders from the public, private, and voluntary sectors self-organized in Winnipeg to create new low-cost housing following the 1993 discontinuation of federal social housing programs. This move toward urban citizenship was not received in the same way by Aboriginal peoples pursuing a distinctive set of rights centred on self-determination alongside common social (housing) goals. While Aboriginal rights are given regard at the federal level, they were not embedded in localized citizenship processes. Expanding the theorization of urban citizenship, the empirical results in this article reveal that discourses of democratic racism and cultural neutrality permeate mainstream views, running counter to Aboriginal citizenship pursuits.     

重塑公民:当代中国农民公民身份的考察与反思

无论从何种角度考察,公民首先表现为一种资格,权利与义务的内在规定是其本质的要义所在,只有二者统一,才能外化为公民身份.当代中国农民的公民身份在新中国成立后表现出单向度的特点,税费改革后这个特点发生了逆转,但也使农民的公民身份陷入了困惑.当前,农村社会发生了重大变迁,融入许多新的时代因素,新农险以其法理性契约关系的模式给重塑农民的公民身份以启迪,让我们反思过去,审视当下,积极创造条件以塑造新时代理性的农民公民.     

Citizenship in Palestine: a fractured geography

This article deals with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict through an approach based on citizenship. The article considers the whole historical Palestine (Israel and the so-called Occupied Territories) as a unique unit of analysis, and suggests that the dynamics of citizenship in this area should be analysed through the exam of two fundamental dimensions, relating to membership and territory. In general, the example of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict offers the chance to address the conventional meaning of concepts such as ‘state’, ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’, underlying the complex dynamics of inclusion/exclusion of individuals and groups within a collective decision-making process. As far as Palestine is concerned, the centre of gravity and the horizons of the conflict are described through the notion of ‘ruptured demos’, suggesting new directions for comparative research and drawing the attention to the progressive demise of the so-called ‘two-state’ solution.     

Social Citizenship in China: Continuity and Change

A fundamental feature of Chinese social citizenship is the demarcation between the rural population and the urban population. Entitlement to income security and welfare provision has been exclusively a right of city dwellers. However, as economic reform progresses, the socialist welfare system has become unable to provide adequate protection. Welfare reform intends to widen the social security net, yet it has inadvertently exacerbated social inequality. In the meantime, the inferior social position of the peasantry has worsened as an effect of continued state bias, heightened tax and fee burdens, and the expropriation of farmland for development. In light of the intrusion on their rights and interests, more and more Chinese citizens have taken to protesting to voice their discontent.     

Immigration and Citizenship in Germany: Contemporary Dilemmas

The paper starts from a paradox of contemporary German politics: after the unification of the two Germanies the ethnocultural grounding of German citizenship has lost its historical meaning; at the same time violent conflicts and heated debate over the rights to full membership for immigrants in the German state have developed. After a theoretical discussion of the notions of nation state, citizenship, and immigration, the development of the contemporary paradox of citizenship is sketched historically using two pairs of distinctions: nationhood v. statehood and political v. social (state-mediated) inclusion. The paradox of 'ethnicized' conflicts over Germans v. foreigners is interpreted as a discrepancy between membership in the state on the one hand and membership in the welfare state system on the other—a discrepancy which currently is 'overdetermined' by the socio-economic consequences of unification.     

Citizenship studies: A general theory

Societies face two contradictory principles. They are organised around issues of scarcity, which result in exclusionary structures such as gender divisions, social classes and status groups, but they must also secure social solidarity. In social science, these contradictory principles are characteristically referred to as the allocative and integrative requirements. In a secular society, especially where social inequality is intensified by economic rationalism, citizenship functions as a major foundation of social solidarity. The article also explores the scope of citizenship studies through an examination of identity, civic virtue and community. It concludes with an extensive critique of the legacy of T. H. Marshall, pointing to the future of citizenship studies around the theme of globalisation and human rights.     

Neo-liberal Citizenship

The government of populations within states and the government of states themselves within the international arena are intimately connected. Thus, in order to understand the character of citizenship in the modern world, it is necessary to locate it as part of a supra-national governmental regime in which the system of states, international agencies and multinational corporations play a fundamental role. A brief history of the modern system of states is followed first by an account of liberalism as a project of government emerging within that system, and secondly by an examination of how twentieth-century changes in the system of states have impacted on that liberal project. Where the liberal government of non-Western populations was once predicated on a denial of citizenship it is now channelled through the promotion of citizenship in states that are themselves increasingly subject to the rigours of the market.     

The Effects of the Canadian Supreme Court's Charter Interpretation on Regional and Intergovernmental Tensions in Canada

Canada's adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982had a number of unexpected consequences. Many Canadians hopedthat the Charter's adoption would help unify the country bycreating a shared set of civil liberties; yet, it was also fearedthat the Charter would tip the balance federal power in favorof the federal government because it allowed the national SupremeCourt to oversee provincial policymaking. Neither of these predictionshas come to pass. In its Charter cases, theSupreme Court hasneither made the national government its constitutional favoritenor helped to unify Canadians.The Court's language-rights caseshelped catalyze Quebecois resentment toward the rest of Canada.preferentialtreatment of laws and court decisions from Ontario has the potentialto increase Canada's regional antagonisms as well. These findingsdemonstrate that judicial power can have significant politicaleffects that are not anticipated by constitutional reformersor the constitutions they adopt.