The fate of citizenship

From its inception, the modern state- in particular, the modern liberal state- has been involved in projects of colonisation abroad and of domestic repression of minorities at home. However, the idea of citizenship has, at least at the beginning of its democratic history, acted as a vehicle of inclusion insofar as the ideal of enfranchisement – of recognition of rights and obligations – is what has motivated popular movements, both within the states and abroad, to seek recognition from these institutions. If we think about the moments of affirmation of the idea of citizenship, we think about the French Revolution, for example. We think about the ideals that animated the French Revolution: freedom, equality and fraternity, or solidarity. Take 1848, another moment of affirmation of the idea of citizenship as a struggle against authority, and of recognition of the right to self-determination by people who try to become independent and republican – critical of the legitimacy of the empire or of institutions like the authority of the Church or kings.

The question is, has citizenship ever been like this, or is this another myth, another story that we tell ourselves? Another question is, is citizenship still like that? I think the answer to these two questions is slightly complicated. On the one hand, when we think about the emergence of citizenship, historically, we know that there were famous critics of the French Revolution or a republican account of citizenship as being universal and emancipatory. Most famously, Karl Marx in On the Jewish Question wrote that the republican-liberal conception of citizenship was based on another kind of exclusion that, on the surface, as a matter of abstract rights, recognised and granted universal citizenship but it did so on the basis of a separation between public persona – public character, the recognition of the citizen, the citoyen – and the exclusion of the private lives of those citizens as bourgeois, which, as Karl Marx wrote, was in tension with that inclusionary dynamic that characterised citizenship.

When we think about contemporary trends, about the transformation of citizenship in the contemporary era, what’s important to signal is the shift from citizenship as a process to citizenship as a kind of commodity that either one is entitled to or not, and that gets bought, sold or exchanged if one shows that one deserves it. What’s really important, and in some ways helps us link back to what I started with the Marxist critique of liberal citizenship, is to see the selective way in which citizenship is deployed in contemporary politics; to both exclude those who are seen as not belonging, not deserving of access to the liberal state and, on the other hand, to sell citizenship to those who have money and power and can show that they have access to this claim. So, citizenship becomes a little bit like an inherited status during the pre-modern era- it’s no longer the process through which subjects get enfranchised, and becomes a claim that either one inherits or one doesn’t. If one doesn’t inherit it, one can then purchase it.

It’s easier to think about what should define citizenship in a positive way by thinking first about what kind of trend we’re trying to resist, and the trend we’re trying to resist is the flattening of citizenship on national and ethnic belonging. When the French revolutionaries began to discuss the idea of citizenship, understood as political membership in a republic – which was then considered as progressive because it stood in opposition to traditional ways of conceiving political authority (e.g. the monarchy, the right of kings or the authority of the Church) – it was inclusive, because it was not tied to nationality, to birthright or being born in a particular context. Famously, the republican constitution granted citizenship to anyone who came and wanted to be a citizen of the French Republic; to anyone who pledged loyalty to the ideals that motivated the French Republic. I believe this is what we have lost and what would be important to recover: this understanding of citizenship as participation in the political process, in decisions that affect you and the right to have a say in these political decisions, regardless of whether you were born there or deserve it because you earn enough money, and regardless of property qualifications. Thus, to return to this emancipatory route of citizenship.

The other aspect that’s also really important is to realise that if citizenship, in its contemporary trends, has consolidated this exclusion based on social class, it has returned from being a vehicle of emancipation, of, for example, political enfranchisement, of those who didn’t have property, to being used now to deny access to this political process, to those who don’t have any properties or any money. So, it’s almost a return to where we started historically. The important implication is to understand that, again, migration is not a problem as such. It’s bound up with class belonging. Not every migrant is necessarily unwelcome or considered problematic, but it depends very much on the positioning of those migrants in the class divisions in society. That should push us to try and reform migration rules and our reflection on border management in a way that accommodates this concern for injustices based on social class, rather than injustices triggered by the mere movement of people.