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Multilevel Citizenship (Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism) - Hardcover

Buch 8 von 17: Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism
 
9780812245158: Multilevel Citizenship (Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812245156 ISBN 13: 9780812245158
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Citizenship has come to mean legal and political equality within a sovereign nation-state; in international law, only states may determine who is and who is not a citizen. But such unitary status is the historical exception: before sovereign nation-states became the prevailing form of political organization, citizenship had a range of definitions and applications. Today, nonstate communities and jurisdictions both below and above the state level are once again becoming important sources of rights, allegiance, and status, thereby constituting renewed forms of multilevel citizenship. For example, while the European Union protects the nation-state's right to determine its own members, the project to construct a democratic polity beyond national borders challenges the sovereignty of member governments.

Multilevel Citizenship disputes the dominant narrative of citizenship as a homogeneous status that can be bestowed only by nation-states. The contributors examine past and present case studies that complicate the meaning and function of citizenship, including residual allegiance to empires, constitutional rights that are accessible to noncitizens, and the nonstate allegiance of nomadic nations. Their analyses consider the inconsistencies and exceptions of national citizenship as a political concept, such as overlapping jurisdictions and shared governance, as well as the emergent forms of sub- or supranational citizenships. Multilevel Citizenship captures the complexity of citizenship in practice, both at different levels and in different places and times.

Contributors: Elizabeth F. Cohen, Elizabeth Dale, Will Hanley, Marc Helbling, Türküler Isiksel, Jenn Kinney, Sheryl Lightfoot, Willem Maas, Catherine Neveu, Luicy Pedroza, Eldar Sarajlić, Rogers M. Smith.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Willem Maas is Jean Monnet Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at Glendon College, York University, and author of Creating European Citizens.

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Chapter 1
Varieties of Multilevel Citizenship
Willem Maas

Citizenship in contemporary societies has come to be defined as a homogeneous legal and political status within the context of a nation-state: in the now-dominant meaning, the only form of membership that may be termed citizenship is membership in a sovereign state. Although undeniably important, this narrow and exclusionary definition of citizenship obscures important developments at both sub- and suprastate levels. For example, the rise of citizenship of the European Union (discussed further below) has raised expectations that other regional integration efforts may also result in meaningful supranational rights. At the same time, many states, particularly federal or multinational ones, face demands for special regional or group-based statuses that directly contradict the ideal of equality before the law. Similarly, some cities are starting to reassert the most common meaning of citizenship, until current forms of statehood crowded out alternatives: a citizen meant a member of a city (citizen descends from the French cité and before that, the Latin cīvitas, the community of citizens) entitled to the privileges and rights of that city. The comparative history of citizenship provides rich examples of multilevel citizenship in theory and practice, although such examples are today often forgotten or obscured by the dominant narrative of a single and homogeneous, territorial, state-based citizenship.

This book aims to upset the now-dominant conception of citizenship by providing a series of examples of alternative concepts of citizenship as they operated or operate in practice or as they are (re-)emerging. The focus is on levels of citizenship, particularly nested and overlapping geographical levels: citizenship not only of the state but also of substate, suprastate, or nonstate political communities. The motivation is the urgent need to reflect on citizenship as a construction of political and legal practices and of territorial affiliations that are not limited by physical borders. Rather than advance a single alternative theoretical model of citizenship—an exercise that in any case might be doomed to fail, given the nuances and complexity that the chapters in this book uncover—the intention is to question taken-for-granted assumptions currently embedded in the concept. Although citizenship as an analytical category has come to be narrowly defined as legal and political equality within the context of a sovereign state, such equality has never existed in pure form. Indeed, unitary citizenship is the historical exception; more common are varieties of multilevel citizenship.

The claim that varieties of multilevel citizenship are historically dominant and that the main contemporary definition of citizenship is a recent aberration in no way challenges the close relationship between this version of citizenship and statehood or the widely shared belief that citizenship in today's dominant definition would be meaningless without states. The idea that "without a state, there can be no citizenship" is prevalent. This poses an existential problem for multilevel citizenship: if only states can confer citizenship, then alternative sources of citizenship such as cities, provinces, nations (to the extent that they do not coincide with a state that they control), or supranational entities such as the European Union cannot bestow citizenship, or at the very least cannot be the primary locus of citizenship. By demonstrating that alternative, nonstate communities or jurisdictions do in fact constitute important sources of rights and status, the artificiality and arbitrariness of the sovereign state's monopoly on conferring citizenship becomes clear.

The emergence of the modern institution of citizenship cannot be understood apart from the formation of the modern state and the international state system, but the reverse is equally true. States collude to limit competition to their power and authority. One way in which this collusion manifests itself is through the institutionalization of citizenship as the foundational status that individuals must possess under international law—a status epitomized in the form of passports (states choose to recognize only the passports of other states). International agreements specifying that each individual have precisely one nationality and that this nationality be conferred only by recognized states, rather than alternative forms of citizenship such as those explored in this book, underscore this collusion.

Much of social science has been infected with the view that, because the world is divided into sovereign nation-states, social scientists should study and understand the world according to that division rather than questioning the category by examining the construction of and limits to the geopolitical structures themselves. In addition to the empirical claim that nation-states are the prime way to study what is "social" in social science, there is sometimes the normative claim that "the community of citizens is the ideal political order" or the related claim that attempts to create transnational forms of citizenship are misguided because only a shared national identity can motivate citizens to work together. This repeats one of the central tenets of nationalism: every nation should have sovereignty over a national territory, and sovereignty is pure and indivisible. (The institutionalization of sovereignty reflects the growth of the international system: the reference in the Covenant of the League of Nations to "the dealings of organized peoples with one another"—specifically leaving out unorganized peoples such as those subject to imperialism and colonialism—was rephrased in the Charter of the United Nations as the "principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples." Both statements make clear that each "people" is entitled to membership in the international community, as long as it is organized into statehood.) In the nationalist concept, the notion that because citizenship in its dominant definition signifies membership in a "national society" such societies should be privileged to the detriment of other forms of collective membership is bolstered by claims regarding the perceived moral superiority of communities of citizens over other forms of community.

Citizenship is thus a political construction. Unquestioningly accepting the dominant definition of citizenship obscures much of the messiness of politics by substituting an anodyne status quo. By contrast, the chapters in this book consider political projects that are not necessarily tied to particular states but rather exist over, under, around, and through them. It is not particularly novel to observe that state sovereignty, nation-based citizenship, and other institutions both public and private are being destabilized and even transformed as a result of globalization, new technologies, and increased mobility. This book is not the first to observe that notions of national allegiance are weakening while subnational (for example, municipal, regional) and supranational (for example, EU) allegiances and identities gain. However, the implications of these developments are not often pursued. Indeed, many scholars remain in denial, asserting that state-based sovereignty and citizenship are not being transformed or, if they concede the pressures that traditional concepts face, asserting that there is no alternative to a world divided into states that all have the same legal status and similar organizational structure. The dominant narrative of statecentric citizenship still has ardent defenders, and breaking down established analytical categories can be frustrating if there is no easily available substitute model.

Other models of citizenship do exist,...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812245156
ISBN 13 
9780812245158
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Herausgeber
Maas Willem
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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