The Contemporary Debate on Citizenship

New York: Routledge, Series Concepts in Comparative Politics

Citizenship is a core concept for the social sciences and for conceptualising democracy. It is also a contested and political concept, as it has been subject to manifold disputes and transformations during the centuries, both in political theory, and in political and social practice. The various aspects of the concept of citizenship are frequently debated, interpreted and challenged in different political arenas, and they are also a matter of vivid academic interest. The book focuses on these debates, interpretations, challenges and contestations of the concept of citizenship: With regard to the geographical context of Europe, it discusses how citizenship is and has been theorised, debated and practised. The approach is based on central ideas of conceptual history or Begriffsgeschichte: Political key concepts like citizenship, democracy or state are always controversial and an object of politics. Changes of key concepts, moreover, relate to changes in the real world: they are objects and indicators of political changes, conflicts or debates.

Princeton University Press, 2019

2021

The concept of citizenship and it's correlation to nationality is certainly sui generis. The very essence of this concept of citizenship circumvents the possibility of membership in the intangible legal community of the nation which oftenly needs the intervention of theories of citizenship attached thereon. In this regard, the bond between a state and a citizen cannot be ignored, as it brings about the inherency and entitlement between a state and its persons. In any jurisdiction, the legal nature of citizenship tells of an antidote of the relationship between rights and duties and the corresponding obligations by states by virtue of the sovereignty of a people. In the end, this doesn't befit any other description other than the right to own rights in that jurisdiction obligatory upon the state to fulfill them. That in essence is the concept of citizenship that this paper will interrogate.

"Concepts of citizenship have been formulated and thought about for centuries, from Plato and Aristotle to more recent accounts by the likes of Jürgen Habermas and Michael Ignatieff. All of them rely on a particular and divisive view of human nature. The division generalises between those who think that people can lead themselves and those who think that people need to be led by others. But such a division relies on both a misreading of human nature and the classical literature of citizenship and democratic theory. I intend to chart the development of the definition of citizenship and how the theory of citizenship differs from the actuality of citizenship. Part of this process will involve examining and clarifying the various misreadings of citizenship, which continue to this day. Once this is accomplished, it is then possible to look at how the theory of citizenship acts as a “conceptual cover” for the practice of citizenship. States use this “conceptual cover” to discriminate against some of their citizenry. That is, they undermine or completely negate the citizenship rights of some of their citizens, whilst at the same time claiming to respect equally the rights of all citizens under their jurisdiction. How they utilise this cover will be examined in detail within the context of a new theory of citizenship."

Visnik Nacional’nogo universitetu «Lvivska politehnika». Seria: Uridicni nauki, 2017

The present paper is offering a short account of citizenship, its history, its constitution and its main theoretical approaches. It is divided in four principal sections. The first, examines the two main theories of citizenship in their historical and normative context, thus the republican and liberal approach of citizenship as they were formed in the ancient Greek and Roman tradition, as well as in their current feminist critic. The second part focuses in the analyses of what seems up until now to be the most influential work on citizenship, the essay of the British sociologist, Thomas Humphrey Marshall "Citizenship and Social class", which was published in 1950 and since then it is considered to be the stepping stone of the international literature on citizenship. The third part presents the "constitution" of citizenship, the elements of which the notion of citizen is crafted, thus membership in a certain political community, rights and the ability of democratic participation. Finally, the last part examines the modern apprehension of citizenship, its supranational dynamic, its ability to act as a means of integration and coercion in the modern liberal democracies, while theories of pluralism, cosmopolitanism and post-nationalism are taken into account. Instead of conclusions, the paper is closing with a short postscript concerning the fallacies and prospects of a European citizenship.

CIRS Special Issue of The Middle East Journal, 2019

Citizenship is a central feature of the modern nation-state. Neither scholars nor policymakers can provide us with a unified and agreed upon idea of what citizenship means in all places, at all times, and for all people. But, pared down to its most basic construct, citizenship is recognized as being that which establishes the fundamental rules of membership, participation, and belonging for the people who inhabit a particular territory. Citizenship creates the legal instruments and political boundaries that shape the relationship between individuals and the state to which they belong. In the absence of a universal definition of citizenship as a category, there are certainly still universally understood ideas, norms, and notions of what citizenship should be as an aspiration and an ideal. In sum, although citizenship exists and develops within its own local context, as a result of a particular historical trajectory, and based on local social and cultural practices, it is still often bound, even if just in the imagination, to the universal, lofty, and idealized form of itself.

“Citizenship is the right to have rights” was famously claimed by Hannah Arendt. Te case of the ‘erased’ of Slovenia sheds new light on this assumption that was supposedly put to rest afer World War II. We lack a comprehensive paradigm for grasping what citizenship means today in and to our societies. My thesis is that there are currently three ways to understand the notion. These different views tend to merge and overlap in the today’s debate, furthering misunderstandings. I will account for different conceptions of the citizenship by looking at the opposite of citizenry. Te political model holds the subject (sujet) in opposition to the citizen (citoyen), entailing problems related to the democratic quality of institutions. Law and jurisprudence look at the citizenship by trying to limit the numerous hard cases arising in the world of migration where the opposite of the citizen is the alien and the stateless. While in social sciences the citizenship is the opposite of the exclusion and represents social membership. Therefore, my aim is to distinguish and clear out these three different semantic areas. This essay is presented in four sections: First, I briefly recall the case of the ‘erased’ of Slovenia, which presents us with one of the more poignant examples of statelessness in the today’s world, so their status can be easily related to the problems that the aforementioned theoretical shortcomings entail. The ‘erased’ had their residency permits and by extension, civil rights as well, revoked by the Slovene government in the aftermath of the break-up of Yugoslavia. This erasure was ruled to be unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia but so far it has by and large remained only at that ruling, with little additional legal action, which has prompted complaints from the Ombudsman’s Office and Amnesty International. Tis issue is tied to some of the findings of Hannah Arendt, who claimed that human rights often proved to be ineffective when faced with significant numbers of people who were not citizens of any specific country. Although in the aftermath of WW2 measures to end this situation of statelessness were progressively taken by the international community, there are still cases of a legal vacuum where people could be deprived of their fundamental rights. And as long as human rights remain largely declarative and as long as there is a glaring lack of international agencies of judicial enforcement, we can claim that Arendt’s paradox of human rights has not been yet fully overcome. The second section focuses on discourse analysis of the citizenship. There is no doubt that the citizenship nowadays represents a much broader subject than it did only a couple of decades ago, however, if anything, this has only caused its meaning to become more vague. Since the late 1990’s scholars have increasingly directed attention towards interdisciplinary perspectives covering the fields of politics, sociology, history and cultural studies that move beyond conventional notions of the citizenship, but the understanding of the citizenship itself often lingers on traditional assessments, characterised by clear-cut disciplinary divides. This disciplinary entrenchment has led to the effect of deepening misunderstandings, and attempts to bridge the divide between various perspectives facing increasing difficulties. So it becomes clear that we lack a comprehensive model for understanding the notion of the ‘citizenship’, and to remedy that, rather than simply asking “what is citizenship?” as that would give no clear answer, we shall ask what is opposed to the citizenship. I will provide the answer to that question in the third section, where attention is directed to the composition of the three separate semantic areas that are connected to the term “citizenship.” These areas correspond to three separate figures of opposition: Te subject, the alien and the excluded, which form the foundation of three basic dichotomies (citizenship/subjecthood; citizenship/being a foreigner; citizenship/exclusion). And from this we can extract various meanings of the citizenship: in the realm of political science, ’citizenship’ means the ‘non-subject’; in legal science, ‘citizenship’ means the ‘non-alien’; and in social science, ‘citizenship’ means ‘non-exclusion’ from participation in the social network of a group. I shall focus on the structure, content and origin of these dichotomies, and also on the kind of problems they are trying to resolve. Finally, I will point to an array of questions that the citizenship raises in the today’s complex society. Some of them deal with political rights of the Poles living in the UK, citizenship issues of the Russians in Estonia and the status of the Hungarian ethnic minorities in Romania, Slovakia and Serbia. Furthermore, we may notice an alarming surge of perverse effects that the customary legal perspective has on citizenship such as the increase of cases of statelessness and multiple nationalities, besides new phenomena such as the so-called “legal tourism.” On top of that, Europe is facing an increasing wave of nationalism and social integration issues, which come in wake of the general economic downturn, activism against the Bolkenstein directive and recent jurisprudence of the ECJ in the cases Rüfert, Viking Line and Laval. In light of all this we can conclude that citizenship studies require less ambiguous tools than those prevailing in literature. Te first step towards achieving this is to give up hoping for any understanding of “citizenship” that encompasses all the different meanings mentioned above. Te only way to take them all in is to use a very vague idea of “citizenship” that promotes unsuitable policies and no real solutions. So I suggest that we should rather focus on the tripartition scheme and discourse analysis discussed above, as they can be useful tools for decision makers so as to design as consistent policies as possible, and also for our shedding new light on transnational citizenship building and cross-state handling of status-related issues. KEYWORDS: political, legal and sociological concept of citizenship, human rights, the erased of Slovenia, stateless people (statelessness), right to have rights, legal status

Stokke, K. (2017). Politics of Citizenship: Towards an Analytical Framework. In E. Hiariej and K. Stokke (Eds.), Politics of Citizenship in Indonesia. Jakarta: Yayasan Pustaka Obor Indonesia.

2002