Citizenship

Emerging global contexts have affected the concept of citizenship. They have shifted, altered, and created new forms of individual political membership and activity that call into question the traditional link among citizenship, national polity, and individual freedom in democratic theory.

Whereas in the late 1970s scholarly interest in the concept of citizenship had all but died, by the 1990s, it had come back in fashion among political thinkers, and in the first decade of the new millennium, interest in citizenship has grown across the spectrum of disciplines as scholars of democracy, international relations, new institutions, public law and policy, constitutionalism, justice, identity, race, and ethnicity seek to understand empirical shifts, provide normative analysis, and offer new theories of the transformation of citizenship.

Several empirical observations today throw traditional understandings of citizenship into question. One set of observations concerns the large-scale transnational flows of migrants. International migration patterns have the foundational conception of citizenship as a single loyalty of political and social membership in that migrants maintain cross-border ties that link sending and receiving countries through remittances, social networks, and increasingly, political decision making. These social, economic, and political memberships that transcend state boundaries give rise to multiple legal statuses that diffuse and expand the notion of citizenship as a bundle of rights and [Page 187]duties. What have come to be known as “diasporic” or “nomadic” citizenships unhinge the connection between community and space.

A second set of observations concerns the shifting nature of sovereign authority. The regulation of transnational flows of goods and capital have spawned a dense web of legal rights and judicial administration through the proliferation of quasi-national or transnational courts that have given individuals access to assert rights within, beyond, and through national states. The rise of supranational bodies such as the European Union, the secession or devolution of federated states into smaller ethnic communal localities, and the connections between regions or global cities as economic and political centers call into question the secular national state as a sovereign authority. In addition, networks of global political, economic, and social actors now form a global civil society that exerts authority over the national state, calling into question the connection between citizenship and republican governance as popular sovereignty.

A third set of observations concerns the division between global entrepreneurs who operate through privately owned security, education and social services, and legal networks that bypass the state bureaucratic institutions and, at the other extreme, global workers who are increasingly denied such public services and are, thereby, excluded from the state and public sphere. These dialectical global forces have dislocated traditional understandings of citizenship concerning place and belonging, equality, and right. Disenfranchised and socially excluded immigrant communities experience a disconnect between the grant of citizenship, as a formal status, and the full status of membership that comes through substantive equality and community belonging. All these various observations regarding the globalized world necessitate an examination of the historical progression of citizenship and the normative discussions regarding its transformation.

The core claim is that globalization dislocated the traditional understandings of exclusive or quasi-exclusive political membership and that there has been an expansion of institutions and legal structures to facilitate and legitimize new forms and multiple memberships such that national citizenship may be obsolete. Yet, at the same time, national citizenship seems to have gained currency as a valuable political and social commodity in the globalized world of limited resources and heightened security, which have increased the costs of nonmembership. Behind both these claims is the normative understanding of citizenship in democratic theory as a transformation of the individual into a political actor possessing the power to make communal decisions and, thereby, actualize individual freedom. The question, then, is how the observations mentioned concerning the globalized world have either altered this understanding or shifted its attainment to new centers and modes of political belonging. In other words, how do we understand the transformation of citizenship that has taken place, and what does this say about the nature of political relations and democratic institutions that have traditionally been understood in terms of freedom actualized through unitary membership and rights in a polity? After a discussion of the transformation of citizenship within the historical context of the evolution of the modern national state, this entry examines the scholarly debates regarding ways in which new global trends and events have altered the traditional normative understandings of citizenship as either a “good” or as a “right.” A concluding section discusses new theories of global citizenship.

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