Two hypotheses about the emergence of a post-national European model of citizenship

Citizenship is not just a status (defined by a set of rights and obligations), it is also an identity that expresses membership in a political community. It also has a substantive political dimension of active participation in the public sphere. Traditionally, collective identity and the membership dimensions of citizenship have been seen as intrinsic to the nation-state. The processes of globalization that have undermined the sovereignty of the nation-state make it necessary to reconceptualize citizenship in light of a ‘post-national’ framework. At the same time, however, the ‘culturalization’ of the social and the ‘multiculturalization’ of societies are putting into question the homogeneity of a collective identity. According to a recent hypothesis, a new post-national model of citizenship is emerging, one of European construction. In seeking to explore this position, the paper advances two additional hypotheses: (i) EU policy-making and governance are likely to foster a post-national European civil society with multi-level citizenship participation; and (ii) European anti-discrimination regulations are likely to accelerate the emergence of an alternative model to multiculturalism that can address differences within a universal framework of rights.     

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.     

Ethnicity,citizenship and reproduction: Taiwanese wives making citizenship claims in Malaysia

This paper focuses on the experience of one specific group of Taiwanese women married to Chinese Malaysian men to examine the contestational process of bidding for citizenship status in an ethnicized polity. Positioned within a trajectory of transnational linkages between origin and host countries, they achieve success through making use of networking links with co-ethnic Chinese Malaysian women who are well-positioned within government bureaucracy, while forwarding an argument based on familial ideology and the (reproductive) citizenship rights of their Malaysian husbands. As noncitizens, they nevertheless engage in socially contributive ‘acts of citizenship’ that signify their suitability as citizens, nonthreatening to social cohesion. Furthermore, they enhance their strategy by ethnic boundary-making efforts aimed at distancing themselves from People's Republic of China wives who constitute a stereotyped and stigmatized ‘other.’ The discussion makes a contribution to the literature on ethnicity, citizenship, and gender.     

Citizenship on paper or at heart? a closer look into the dual citizenship debate in Europe

This article seeks to promote an integrated approach to the study of citizenship policies, which pays due attention to their potential impact on migrants whose self-recognition are formally delimited by legal definitions. Through a novel approach that makes use of naturalisation processes as an empirical entry point into the narratives of citizenship embraced by Turkish migrants, this article investigates the role of dual citizenship policies in three European countries: Spain, the Netherlands and the UK. The evidence from the sample group displays a process of ‘self-bargaining’ prior to the naturalisation decision, which calls into question the link established between legal and emotional bonds of citizenship. The Dutch example demonstrates how Turkish migrants cope with the ban on dual citizenship by downplaying the identity-conferring role of citizenship status. This leads to a decoupling of legal and emotional aspects of citizenship and thereby to the adoption of a thin sense of citizenship. While Spain represents an in-between case that has a tolerant implementation despite a de jure ban, the British example shows how the process of ‘self-bargaining’ can result in the widening of emotional landscape, when dual citizenship is allowed. A thick sense of citizenship is therefore not only preserved but it can also be extended to the citizenship of the country of residence.     

Ethnicizing citizenship,questioning membership. Explaining the decreasing family migration rights of citizens in Europe

Citizenship does not equal belonging. In this paper, we investigate how the disjunction between the ‘imagined community’ and the formal citizenry impacts on citizens’ rights. In particular, we analyse decision-making on the family migration rights of citizens in France, Germany and the Netherlands. Our analysis shows that in these three countries, notwithstanding their different migration and citizenship regimes, the reduction of citizens’ family migration rights is based on the same discursive mechanism: the ‘membership’ of citizens of migrant origin who marry a partner from abroad is called into question. As they are excluded from membership of the imagined community, their entitlement to family migration rights is decreased. Ethnic conceptions of national community, intersecting with gender and class, play a crucial role in shaping the rights attached to citizenship in Europe today.     

Making citizenship public: identities,practices, and rights at Woodsquat

The common conception of citizenship is that of belonging to a political community, with the ensuing rights and responsibilities of membership. This community tends to be naturalized as the nation-state. However, this location of citizenship needs to be decentred in order to investigate current modes of democratic participation. This paper investigates current sites and practices of citizenship through reflection on a tactical housing squat of an empty department store staged by an urban social movement in Vancouver in 2002, known as ‘Woodsquat’. It uses a social movement perspective to look at citizenship, emphasizing the identities, practices, and locations of democratic engagement over the collective question of how we will live together in these places. From this point of view Woodsquat shows current limits of national citizenship, conceptually and practically, and suggests alternative possibilities for future citizenship practices located in multiple identifications with (political) communities. Moving from this analysis of political participation at Woodsquat attention is brought to the importance of spaces of democratic communication for possibilities of citizenship, where there seems to be a reinforcing relationship between public spheres, social movements, and democracy. Ultimately, then, actions at Woodsquat are argued to be a form of citizenship that emerged within a democratic public.     

Caught between two worlds: mainland Chinese return migration,hukou considerations and the citizenship dilemma

Issues about migrant rights and protection are raised in cases of return migration when the country that migrants return to prohibits dual citizenship although the migrant has naturalised elsewhere. This article explores the politics of membership and rights faced by former citizens returning to reside in the society they had left. Returning Mainland Chinese migrants with Canadian citizenship status have to navigate China's dual citizenship restriction and the impacts on their Chinese hukou status that confers residency, employment and social rights. This analysis also keeps in view their relationship with the country in which they have naturalised and left, namely Canada. Migrants shuttling between the two countries face a citizenship dilemma as they have limited rights in China whereas their status as Canadian citizens living abroad simultaneously removes them from some rights provided by the Canadian state. This paper thus introduces new and pressing questions about citizenship in the light of return migration trends.     

From privileged to thwarted stakeholders – Polish migrants’ perceptions of the Scottish Independence Referendum 2014 and the UK General Election in 2015

Scotland in 2014 and 2015 provides an ideal context for examining EU citizenship political rights as established in the Maastricht Treaty of 1993 from the perspective of Polish migrants resident in Scotland. We argue that the contrast between Polish migrants’ full enfranchisement in the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014 to then being disenfranchised from the UK General Election in 2015 is a significant site for observing how EU laws interact with state-centric and also ‘post-national’ notions of citizenship. Our participants’ experiences of voting in the Referendum and subsequently not being able to vote in the General Election were articulated in the following terms: (a) the justification of their political rights in terms of their stake and contribution in the UK; (b) their frustrations with regards to anti-migration rhetoric and the limitations of European citizenship; and for some, (c) their plans of apply for British citizenship in the context of EU membership uncertainty.     

The national dimension of citizenship in T.H. Marshall

In the revival of the political theory of citizenship, T.H. Marshall is a seminal influence. A major attraction is clearly his apparent reversal of the usual relation between membership and rights. Whereas rights are commonly regarded as deriving from membership, Marshall raises the possibility that appropriate combinations of rights may be constitutive of membership in the form of citizenship, a form not determined by any prior identity. This is of immediate relevance for analysis of possible postnational reformulations of citizenship. Yet theoretical discussion must take seriously the derivation of membership from rights, which requires attention to the concrete sociological process by which rights become endowed with meaning. Although it has received comparatively little comment, this theme is central to Marshall's discussion, which provides some suggestive pointers to the main theoretical issues. In particular, Marshall reproduces the standard British ambivalence about the ‘national’, which is variously and sometimes confusingly distinguished from the ‘local’, the ‘private’ and the ‘foreign’. The ‘civilisation’ of which Marshall suggests that it should be a ‘common heritage’ is historically situated—in fact it is precisely because it is in one sense already common that social pressure gradually causes it to be recognized as such. In other words, it is possible to show that Marshall's analysis specifically addresses the issues of citizenship within the nation‐state. Its potential relevance beyond the nation‐state requires, therefore, explicit discussion of the social basis of belonging that Marshall, for his own purposes, was able to take for granted.     

Making claims for migrant workers: human rights and citizenship

Migrant workers claims for greater protection in a globalized world are typically expressed either in the idiom of international human rights or citizenship. Instead of contrasting these two normative frames, the paper explores the extent to which human rights and citizenship discourses intersect when it comes to claims by migrant workers. An analysis of the international human and labour rights instruments that are specifically designed for migrant workers reveals how neither discourse questions the assumption of territorial state sovereignty. Drawing upon sociological and political approaches to human rights claims, I evaluate the Arendtian-inspired critique of international human rights, which is that they ignore the very basis ‘right to have rights’. In doing so, I discuss the different dimensions of citizenship and conclude that international rights can be used by migrant workers to assert right claims that reinforce a conception of citizenship that, although different from national citizenship, has the potential to address their distinctive social location.     

Transgendering Mother's Day: blogging as citizens' media,reproductive rights and intimate citizenship

Citizenship is fast emerging as a central concern for transgender politics. This article approaches the topic of transgender citizenship by investigating empirically how the practice of blogging has served as a way of claiming, or practicing, intimate citizenship for transgendered people. Theorization of intimate citizenship helps us to further our understanding of the ways in which our most private decisions and practices are inextricably linked with public institutions, law and state policies. Significantly, this development is also tied up with other characteristically late modern technological advancements, ranging from new reproductive technologies to new Information and Communication Technologies. In the case of transgender politics, such interlacings become particularly perspicacious, not only due to modern discourses concerning diagnosis and treatment, but also because the presence of social media resources affords new possibilities for the sharing of personal and political narratives about ‘being transgendered’. In this article, I investigate an event in the Swedish blogosphere, namely the way in which the national celebration of Swedish Mother's Day became a site for the contestation of the current limitations of the reproductive legal rights for transgendered people, providing an opening for a more general debate on transgender reproductive rights.     

Post‐national citizenship,social exclusion and migrants rights: Mexican seasonal workers in Canada

In the past few decades, migrants residing in many European and North American countries have benefited from nation‐states' extension of legal rights to non‐citizens. This development has prompted many scholars to reflect on the shift from a state‐based to a more individual‐based universal conception of rights and to suggest that national citizenship has been replaced by post‐national citizenship. However, in practice migrants are often deprived of some rights. The article suggests that the ability to claim rights denied to some groups of people depends on their knowledge of the legal framework, communications skills, and support from others. Some groups of migrants are deprived of the knowledge, skills, and support required to negotiate their rights effectively because of their social exclusion from local communities of citizens. The article draws attention to the contradiction in two citizenship principles—one linked to legal rights prescribed by international conventions and inscribed through international agreements and national laws and policies, and the other to membership in a community. Commitment to the second set of principles may negate any achievements made with respect to the first. The article uses Mexican migrants working in Canada as an illustration, arguing that even though certain legal rights have been granted to them, until recently they had been unable to claim them because they were denied social membership in local and national communities. Recent initiatives among local residents and union and human rights activists to include Mexican workers in their communities of citizens in Leamington, Ontario, Canada, are likely to enhance the Mexican workers' ability to claim their rights.     

Immigrant sexual citizenship: intersectional templates among Mexican gay immigrants to the USA

Existing literature on sexual citizenship has emphasized the sexuality-related claims of de jure citizens of nation-states, generally ignoring immigrants. Conversely, the literature on immigration rarely attends to the salience of sexual issues in understanding the social incorporation of migrants. This article seeks to fill the gap by theorizing and analyzing immigrant sexual citizenship. While some scholars of sexual citizenship have focused on the rights and recognition granted formally by the nation-state and others have stressed more diffuse, cultural perceptions of community and local belonging, we argue that the lived experiences of immigrant sexual citizenship call for multiscalar scrutiny of templates and practices of citizenship that bridge national policies with local connections. Analysis of ethnographic data from a study of 76 Mexican gay and bisexual male immigrants to San Diego, California, reveals the specific citizenship templates that these men encounter as they negotiate their intersecting social statuses as gay/bisexual and as immigrants (legal or undocumented); these include an ‘asylum’ template, a ‘rights’ template, and a ‘local attachments’ template. However, the complications of their intersecting identities constrain their capacity to claim immigrant sexual citizenship. The study underscores the importance of both intersectional and multiscalar approaches in research on citizenship as social practice.     

Bordering through domicide: spatializing citizenship in Calais

ABSTRACT

This paper examines domicidal practices against illegalized border crossers in Calais, France as a technology of citizenship and migration governance. It addresses recent calls to include actions and interventions which restrict citizenship in the context of illegalized migration within critical citizenship studies literature. Studying the state violence upholding and spatializing normative citizenship allows for a deeper understanding of citizenship’s implication in the European border regime, and raises questions on the concept’s continued application to theorizations of migrants’ political movements and spatial manifestations. The paper proposes anti-citizen politics as an alternative before arguing that the presence of this politics within the city’s squats and jungles, more than the physical occupations as such, is what the French state seeks to eradicate through acts of domicide. Working from empirical examples, the article describes a ‘carrot-and-stick’ domicide currently at work in Calais where the eviction and destruction of autonomous forms of migrant inhabitance is combined with a simultaneous offer of state managed accommodation. These tactics operate together to drive migrants out of the city of Calais, away from the UK border, and ultimately into a determination of their detain/deport-ability via citizenship’s scrutiny.     

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.     

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.’     

The grey area between nationality and citizenship: an analysis of external citizenship policies in Latin America and the Caribbean

Literature on diaspora engagement policies, transnational and extra-territorial citizenship has painted the increasing recognition of dual nationality and the extension of state policies to the diaspora as a signal of states leaving behind the paradigms of exclusive nationality and residence as conditions to exercise citizenship. In doing this, this literature tends to treat citizenship and nationality as synonyms. By analysing the citizenship policies of 22 Latin American and Caribbean states towards their nationals who reside abroad and/or acquire another nationality, we add key nuances to such consideration: nationality and citizenship may relate to different legal statuses – with important consequences for migrants – and there might be differences also between the citizen rights of nationals by origin and of nationals by naturalization. In particular, we show that citizenship and nationality interact in different ways when it comes to the preservation of rights for emigrants: the distinctions allow restricting the portability of citizenship rights for nationals by birth, and other groups of nationals, depending on the exclusivity, and origin, of their national belonging. These distinctions tell a potentially different story of how citizenship is conceived of by states as they approach the challenges of membership and participation posed by emigration, and paint a less rosy picture with regard to the demise of exclusive nationality.     

Constructing citizenship: framing unauthorized immigrants in market terms

We show how conceptions of ‘market citizenship’ hold a central place in three distinct arenas: political theory; mainstream cultural narratives, and the views expressed by middle class Latino immigrants. Our analyses of both print media coverage and interviews with middle class Latino immigrants demonstrate that the narrative of market citizenship has heavily influenced the collective US understanding of state membership. This project not only finds a clear market framing in news coverage of the immigration issue, but finds that members of the Latino community have directly engaged with this frame and use it to refute the largely negative contentions of the popular press.     

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.     

Social citizenship and ethnicity around a public sector steel plant in Orissa,India

This article is about a modern public sector steel plant in the state of Orissa and its promise to set standards for post-colonial India's citizenry at large. These steel plants were to provide their workforces with superior social and economic citizenship rights, which in turn were to serve as exemplary industrial relations for the industrialising nation. The steel plants were also intended to forge multi-ethnic workforces into exemplary Indian citizens by transcending their manifold ethnic differences. The trajectory of the public sector steel plant in the town of Rourkela confirms that enhanced social and economic citizenship rights detached public sector steel workforces from labour at large and produced a ‘labour aristocracy’. The trajectory, furthermore, reveals how in Rourkela policies designed to accommodate ethnic differences constantly recreated these differences and hampered the access of large sections of the local population to these enhanced social and economic citizenship rights.