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Lineages of European Citizenship Rights, Belonging and Participation in Eleven Nation-States
Edited by
Richard Bellamy, Dario Castiglione and Emilio Santoro
Lineages of European Citizenship
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Lineages of European Citizenship Rights, Belonging and Participation in Eleven Nation-States Edited by
Richard Bellamy Professor of Government, University of Essex, UK
Dario Castiglione Senior Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Exeter, UK
and
Emilio Santoro Associate Professor in Sociology and Philosophy of Law, University of Florence, Italy
Selection and editorial matter © Richard Bellamy, Dario Castiglione, and Emilio Santoro 2004 Chapters 1–10 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–98683–0 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lineages of European citizenship : rights, belonging, and participation in eleven nation-states / edited by Richard Bellamy, Dario Castiglione, and Emilio Santoro. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–98683–0 (cloth) 1. Citizenship—European Union countries. 2. Political participation— European Union countries. 3. Citizenship—United States. 4. Political participation—United States. I. Bellamy, Richard. II. Castiglione, Dario. III. Santoro, Emilio, 1963– JN40.L56 2004 323.6′094—dc22 10 13
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Contents
Preface
vii
Notes on Contributors
viii
Introduction: The Making of Modern Citizenship Richard Bellamy 1 Citizenship and the German Nation Ulrich K. Preuß
1 22
2 Republican Citizenship and the Crisis of Integration in France Cécile Laborde
46
3 Nationality, Rights and Virtue: Some Approaches to Citizenship in Great Britain Jose Harris
73
4 Portuguese, but not Citizens: Restricted Citizenship in Contemporary Portugal Rui Ramos
92
5 Italian Citizenship and the Republican Tradition Luca Baccelli
113
6 Spanish Citizenship: Democracy-building and Plural Nationhood in the European Context Carlos Closa
130
7 The Scandinavian Model of Citizenship and Feminist Debates Birte Siim and Hege Skjeie
148
8 Citizenship and Cultural Difference in France and the Netherlands Siep Stuurman
167
9 American Citizenship: Between Past and Present Brunella Casalini v
186
vi Contents
10 From National to European Citizenship: A Historical Comparison Pietro Costa
207
Index
227
Preface
This volume results from research undertaken as part of a European Commission Thematic Socio-Economic Research Network on ‘European Citizenship and the Social and Political Integration of the European Union’ (SOE2-CT97-3056), co-ordinated by Richard Bellamy. Additional funds were provided to support the work of each of the editors by the Leverhulme Trust (Grant F/239/AA, for Richard Bellamy), the ESRC (Grant L213252022 on ‘Strategies of Civic Inclusion in Pan-European Civil Society’, for Dario Castiglione) and a MURST grant (on ‘Citizenship, Inclusion and Exclusion: Theoretical Issues and Practical Implications’, for Emilio Santoro). Early versions of the chapters were discussed at workshops at the Universities of Reading and Florence, while the final editing and pulling together of the typescript was mainly undertaken at the University of Exeter. For assistance in organizing the workshops and preparing the final typescript, the editors are grateful to Alex Warleigh, Ciarán O’Kelly, Francesco Vertova, Rob Lamb, and in particular to Gail Prosser, who also helped bring the project to completion. Except where otherwise indicated, translations into English are by the authors.
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Notes on Contributors Luca Baccelli is Associate Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Pisa. His publications include Praxis e poiesis nella filosofia politica moderna (Angeli, 1991), Il particolarismo dei diritti: Poteri degli individui e paradossi dell’universalismo (Carocci, 1999) and Critica del repubblicanesimo (Laterza, 2003). Richard Bellamy is Professor of Government at the University of Essex and Academic Director of the European Consortium for Political Research. His recent publications include Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise (Routledge, 1999); Rethinking Liberalism (Continuum, 2000); and, as co-editor, Citizenship and Governance in the European Union (Continuum, 2001) and The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Brunella Casalini is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Florence, where she teaches history of political thought. Her main research interests are in American political and philosophical thought, on which she has published extensively. Her publications include Antropologia, filosofia e politica in John Dewey (Morano, 1995) and Nei Limiti del Compasso (Mimesis, 2002). Dario Castiglione is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Exeter. His main research interests are in the history and theory of political thought. He has been involved in several ESRC and EC-funded research projects on European constitutionalism and citizenship and acted as Chair for the 2001 EURESCO Conference on ‘Social Capital’. His publications include the co-edited volumes The Constitution in Transformation (Blackwell, 1996), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies (Manchester University Press, 2003). Carlos Closa is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the Universidad de Zaragoza. He has been a Jean Monnet Fellow at the EUI (Florence) and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. His publications on citizenship include ‘The Concept of Citizenship in the TEU’, CMLRv (1992) and ‘Citizenship of the Union and Nationality of Member States’ CMLRv (1995). A book on Spain and the EU (with Paul Heywood) is forthcoming from Palgrave. viii
Notes on Contributors
ix
Pietro Costa is Professor of the History of Law at the University of Florence. His publications include Lo Stato immaginario: Modelli e paradigmi nella cultura giuridica italiana fra Ottocento e Novecento (Giuffrè, 1986) and numerous articles on the history of legal and political thought. He has recently completed a four-volume study of citizenship, Civitas: Storia della cittadinanza in Europa (Laterza, 1999–2001). Jose Harris is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Her main research interests are in the history of Victorian Britain and modern political thought. Her publications include Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914 (Penguin, 1994) and William Beveridge: A Biography (Clarendon, rev. ed. 1998), and she is editor of the new Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition of Ferdinand Tönnies’ Community and Civil Society (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Her most recent book is Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2003). Cécile Laborde is Lecturer in Political Theory at University College London. She is the author of Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France, 1900–1925 (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) and of a monograph in French on Muslim brotherhoods in Senegal. She edited a Special Issue of the European Journal of Political Theory on the reception of John Rawls in Europe. She has published a number of articles on contemporary theories of patriotism, multiculturalism, toleration and citizenship. She is currently working on a book on republican political philosophy. Ulrich K. Preuß is Professor of Law and Politics at the Free University of Berlin and Judge at the Bremen Constitutional Court. His main research interests are constitutionalism, constitutional transition in the postcommunist states, and the development of European citizenship. His publications in English include Constitutional Revolution: The Link between Constitutionalism and Progress (Humanities Press, 1995), a co-authored volume on Institutional Design in Post-communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and a co-edited collection on European Citizenship, Multiculturalism and the State (Nomos, 1998). Rui Ramos is Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, and Professor of Constitutional History in the Faculty of Law at the New University of Lisbon. His current research interests include the history of intellectuals, particularly their role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century nation-building in Europe; the republican tradition in nineteenth-century southern Europe; and the
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history of literacy in Portugal. He is the author of A Segunda Fundação (1890–1926) (Editorial Estampa, 2001). Emilio Santoro is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Sociology of Law in the Law Faculty at the University of Florence. His publications include Carcere e società liberale (Giappichelli, 1997), Autonomia individuale, libertà e diritti (ETS, 1999), Common law e Costituzione nell’Inghilterra moderna (Giappichelli, 1999) and a co-edited volume on L’altro diritto (Nis, 1997). Birte Siim is Associate Professor in the Institute for History, International and Social Studies, Aalborg University. She has contributed to the Danish Commission on Democracy and Power (1997–2003) with a project on ‘Gender, Power and Democracy’. She has co-ordinated a research project on ‘Gender, Empowerment and Politics (GEP)’ for the Danish National Research Council for the Social Sciences (1997–2002), and a European Commission TSER Network on ‘Gender and Citizenship: Social Integretion and Social Inclusion in the European Welfare States’ (1996–1999). Her most recent publications include: Politics of Inclusion and Empowerment. Gender, Class and Citizenship (with John Andersen, Palgrave 2004) and Gender and Citizenship: Politics and Agency in France, Britain and Denmark (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hege Skjeie is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. She has been a member of the Norwegian Government’s research committee on ‘Power and Democracy’ (1998–2003), which delivered its concluding report in the autumn of 2003. Her recent publications include Vanens makt: Styringstradisjoner i Arbeiderpartiet (Ad Notam, 1999); Norske makteliter (Gyldendal Akademisk, 2002); and Menn i mellom: Mannsdominans og likestillingspolitikk (Gyldendal Akademisk, 2003). Siep Stuurman is Jean Monnet chair of European History at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He has published widely on the history of ideas, state formation, nineteenth-century liberalism, political thought and the early French Enlightenment. His publications include a co-edited volume on Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Routledge, 1998), and François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Harvard University Press, 2003).
Introduction: The Making of Modern Citizenship Richard Bellamy
The establishment of European Union citizenship by the Maastricht Treaty has prompted scholars, politicians and sections of the general public to reconsider the role and attributes of the citizen in contemporary societies (Shaw, 1997, 1998). Two sets of questions have figured particularly prominently in their discussions. The first set centres on the relationship of citizenship to nationality (e.g. Rosas and Antola, 1995; Cesarani and Fulbrook, 1996; Jenkins and Sofos, 1996; Modood and Werbner, 1997; Miller, 2000; Eder and Giesen, 2001). Is a shared national identity necessary to bind people to each other and to the state? If so, what are the sources of such national feelings? Can their less-appealing aspects, such as xenophobia and racism, be avoided? How far should immigrants and the existing population be educated into a shared civic culture? And what does that culture consist of—mere familiarity with and acceptance of the political system, or a common set of cultural attitudes as well? The second set concerns the possibility of citizenship in circumstances that challenge the nation-state (e.g. Soysal, 1994; Lehning and Weale, 1997; Hutchings and Dannreuther, 1999; Bellamy, 2000; Bellamy and Warleigh, 2001a,b; Kostakopoulou, 2001). What rights and institutions are needed to realize citizenship in a context that, depending on the view of the commentator, is either inter-, trans-, supra- or post-national? Can a civic culture be developed that does not rely on some analogue of nationalism—such as a feeling of global community? Or does a genuine cosmopolitanism transcend such particularist attachments? The first set of questions has arisen because access to Union citizenship depends on being a national of a member state (following the Maastricht Treaty, Article 8, establishing the European Community, subsequently amended by the Treaty of Amsterdam to become Article 17). 1
2 Introduction: Modern Citizenship
Yet definitions of nationality vary between states, prompting worries that this formula may produce inequities. As a result, interest has grown in exploring the nature of these national differences and in criticizing or defending their supposed rationale. The Amsterdam Treaty later specified that ‘Citizenship of the Union shall complement and not replace national citizenship’ (Article 17). However, the nature of this complementarity remains both vague and contested. Some believe any form of dual citizenship to be impossible and see the creation of Union citizenship as necessarily pointing towards the establishment of a European nation (Aron, 1974). They regard citizenship as intimately linked to forms of nationhood that the EU both undermines and attempts to supplant, for good or ill, and, depending on the commentator, with greater or lesser prospects of success (Miller, 1998). Others maintain that Union citizenship simply offers a set of predominantly market- and labour-oriented entitlements additional to those that citizens hold at the national level (Everson, 1995). Meanwhile, a further group believe Union citizenship rightly interacts with, and legitimately constrains, the rights of nationstates (Weiler, 1999, Ch. 10; Bellamy and Warleigh, 2001b). This view leads to the second set of questions. The new Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union places the EU’s citizenship provisions within a broader context as a key component of an individual’s basic rights. Certain commentators argue that this grounding in fundamental rights points towards a new, post-national conception of citizenship based on justice rather than on nationality or even statehood (Habermas, 1992, 1996). Yet many fear that it undermines the collective and political aspects of citizenship, replacing it with a set of individual legal entitlements (Bellamy, 2001; Bellamy and Castiglione, 2002). The central issue here is the character and very possibility of citizenship in global market societies. Some believe these new circumstances open up novel possibilities for extending citizenship to new groups of people and spheres of social and political life beyond the state in ways that will lead to a fairer world (Soysal, 1994; Linklater, 1998). Others worry that these developments have rendered citizenship impossible, weakening the capacity of ordinary people to claim or defend their rights (Miller, 2000, Chs 5, 10). The chapters of this book primarily address the first set of questions, though their findings have implications for the second set (which are examined directly in a companion volume—Bellamy, Castiglione and Shaw, forthcoming—see too Bellamy and Warleigh, 2001a). They explore the history of citizenship in Europe and the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. Their common thread concerns the ways in which the development of citizenship reflects the relations and
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occasional struggles among different groups of citizens, on the one hand, and between citizens and the state, on the other. Several factors influenced the form these relationships and their attendant conflicts took within each country: the structure of the state and the nature of its political regime, the character of class relations, the existence and the source of any tensions between centre and periphery, the types of ideological and cultural divisions, contingent events such as war, and the available legal and political languages through which the demands of different groups could be expressed. The contributors have attempted to highlight how different national traditions of citizenship emerge from the interactions between these various factors: particularly the way the dominant forms of legal and political discourse both reflected and helped configure the relations between state and society and amongst citizens themselves.
Theoretical models and the history of citizenship Studies of citizenship often distinguish various ideal types or models of the citizen of a normative, ideological or analytical kind (e.g. Oliver and Heater, 1994, Ch. 2; Beiner, 1995b, pp. 13–14; Janoski, 1998, pp. 33–8). This volume suggests a modification of these sorts of approach and explores how the three aspects of citizenship highlighted by these models mutually interact within specific historical contexts and traditions. Each model focuses on an important aspect of citizenship that relates to the others: namely, its basic conceptual and normative components, the ways these are configured within different ideological conceptions, and the manner in which these ideological configurations are partly conditioned in their turn by the particular socio-political setting in which citizens are situated—in the case of modern citizenship, the nation-states and industrial societies that emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To be recognizable as accounts of citizenship, ideological conceptions must share certain common normative and conceptual features. They must also address particular social, political and intellectual contexts, justifying themselves as legitimate responses to a certain set of problems. Even calls for a new form of post-national citizenship must show that it can rightfully claim in certain relevant respects to be a conception of citizenship rather than, say, a theory of what persons are entitled to by virtue of their status as human beings, while indicating why the new social and political context justifies such a move and in the process indicating the conceptual and empirical weaknesses of alternative views.
4 Introduction: Modern Citizenship
Three consequences follow from this more historical approach. First, the different languages of citizenship defy neat categorization according to the standard, and rather abstract, ideal, typical philosophical, ideological or analytical models. The philosophical core concept of citizenship constrains but does not dictate the various ideological conceptions that might be advocated, while these derive their given colouring from the particular political, social and intellectual contexts within which they are fashioned and deployed. Second, as a result, there is no definitive ‘liberal’, ‘republican’ or other view, as some claim (e.g. Heater, 1998), but rather the various liberalisms, republicanisms and so on that emerged from different sets of historical circumstances. What counts as liberalism or republicanism will vary. Such terms can refer to a word, a political party or movement, a set of policies or programme, and an ideal or range of ideas. These four aspects do not always coincide. Liberal ideas can be adopted by self-styled Republicans, just as republican policies may be taken up by Liberals— especially if the word has fallen into disuse, the party declined, or the ideal and programme been dropped by those that bear their name. There are Liberal–Republicans and Republican–Liberals, and those who contend that the two are inherently incompatible. Likewise, there are socialists and conservatives who adopt liberal and/or republican notions, but link them to distinctive values and campaigns of their own. Some adopt liberal policies for republican reasons or vice versa, others simply exploit the historical resonance associated with a term or avoid it because of unfortunate associations, and so on. The complementarities and contrasts that appear vary according to the dynamics of the struggles in which a given set of political actors is engaged and the connotations of the languages available to them. For example, in certain contexts, such as nineteenth-century Britain, the language of liberalism may be regarded as a progressive force involving the removal of privileges and barriers to individual initiative. As such, dominated groups seeking recognition of their claims will naturally seek to exploit it and extend it to new areas of concern to them, as working-class radicals and early feminists did. In different contexts, however, liberalism may be associated with the forces of law and order and be used to legitimate oppression of these same groups. Such was the case in Italy following unification, for instance. Finally, the variety and contingency of different conceptions of citizenship that follows from this more historical analysis also go against attempts to chart an ideal and progressive trajectory of the nature of citizenship. Such accounts usually adopt Marshall’s three phases of
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civil, political and social rights (Marshall, 1950), occasionally adding environmental and various kinds of cosmopolitan rights as ‘natural’ or ‘logical’ extensions within globalizing societies (Heater, 1990). In fact, as the chapters that follow document, none of the countries surveyed has followed this neat Marshallian schema, least of all Britain. Nor can any be classified as representing a particular model of citizenship. Instead, each is sui generis, reflecting a variation on certain common components of citizenship that resulted from the process of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury state-building (although the variations often reflect social and political factors that date even further back). As Jose Harris shows, Marshall’s account has to be understood as an intervention within a particular historical debate. Therefore, this volume looks at how the normative components of citizenship were interpreted within various ideological languages of citizenship by political actors seeking to address the issues thrown up by the interactions between state and society within a given national political community. It is through this dynamic process that the different national traditions of citizenship were formed, and a European citizenship is emerging. In the remainder of this introduction, I first discuss the core conceptual components of the modern theory of citizenship, indicating the socio-political factors that have shaped it and its different ideological variations. I then illustrate these points through a brief account of the national traditions explored in this book.
Modern citizenship: context, concept and ideology The term ‘citizen’ has had different meanings in different historical periods and languages (Ignatieff, 1995; Pocock, 1995). It can signify the member of a city and/or a given class, as in the Greek polities or the original usage of the German Staatsbürger, or be equated with subjecthood of a monarchy, as in Britain, or membership of a state, as in France, or be associated primarily with belonging to a people or nation, as was the case in Germany. It can be a legal status with or without political rights, entail quite different obligations such as voting, military service or only some or none of these and so on. So varied are the terms, bearing and contexts of citizenship, that it is not clear that a history of the concept from ancient Greece to the present could be plausibly written. Of course, classical Greek and Roman notions of the citizen figure in later thought, yet as often as not as myths that idealized the historical reality and were in any case hopelessly anachronistic. In different ways, later thinkers had to grapple with the distance separating the polis or the res
6 Introduction: Modern Citizenship
publica and the city-states, principalities, empires, monarchies and popular democracies that followed. This volume deals only with the form of citizenship that emerged in the wake of the political and socio-economic transformations resulting from the American and French Revolutions, on the one side, and the Industrial Revolution, on the other. This dual revolution provided the basis for a distinctively modern conception of citizenship. First, it gave rise to the new political context of the nation-state. Rather than being the fiefdoms of monarchs, these new political units found legitimacy through being the territorial expression of a given culture and people. The political apparatus no longer referred simply to the administration of the monarch’s domain and subjects, but likewise had a popular justification. Second, this development was linked in its turn to the emergence of commercial and increasingly industrial market economies. These required regular forms of government and justice that in various ways facilitated the free movement and exchange of goods, capital, labour and services. Thus, states had to uphold the rule of law, particularly freedom of contract and the protection of property rights. Nation-building and a state education system that promoted a common language and guaranteed standards of numeracy and literacy helped create a mobile workforce capable of acquiring the generic skills needed for industry. Nation-states could also provide the infrastructural public goods required by market economies, such as a unified transport system, a single currency and a standardized system of weights and measures. Third, markets broke down traditional social hierarchies and systems of ascribed status, thereby fostering equality of opportunity. This feature was also associated with demands for equal political as well as legal rights by hitherto politically excluded sections of the nation. The national people gradually transformed into a demos, who sought to ensure that the state governed in their interest. These three interrelated developments associated with the rise of national industrial states promoted the three key components of modern citizenship. First, they fostered an emphasis on individual rights. Lack of ascribed status led individuals to being treated as equals possessing certain rights simply by virtue of their humanity—including the right to be treated equally before the law. Their involvement as actors in markets also gave them equal rights to pursue their interests by buying and selling goods, services and labour (Ignatieff, 1995; Pocock, 1995). Meanwhile, they looked to the state to provide social and economic rights as part of its regulatory function and demanded political rights to secure equal access and recognition within its policies,
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decision-making and organizational structures. Second, citizenship became closely associated with belonging to the national community (Preuß, 1995). National identity shaped a common civic consciousness and allegiance to the state and one’s fellow citizens. It encouraged reciprocity and solidarity in both politics and economics. National systems of education created a public political language and inducted citizens into a certain civic culture and set of values. Third, a mark of citizenship was the capacity and right to participate as a full and equal member within the economy and the polity (Barbalet, 1988). The right to vote was often obligatory and in any case tied to the payment of taxes, military service, and the undertaking of such public duties as sitting on juries. Similarly, social and economic rights were linked to the duty and ability to work and to contribute to national schemes of social insurance. Those deemed socially irresponsible, a label that at various times and places has been applied to lunatics, children, criminals, women, the propertyless and the indigent, either forfeited or ineligible for most citizenship rights. Though these three components of rights, belonging and participation constitute the basic building blocks of the modern concept of citizenship, different conceptions deploy them in diverse ways. Practitioners of the sort of ideal-typical approach discussed earlier often separate these three components as offering distinct models of the citizen: namely, citizenship as rights, as belonging and as participation. Standardly, the first is identified as liberal, the second as communitarian and the third as republican (Beiner, 1995b). However, such accounts are doubly misleading. First, even if these models give precedence to one of these components, each of them includes aspects of all three. Indeed, all three are needed if we are to end up with a theory of citizenship rather than mere subjecthood. As we shall see, social and civil rights were often granted to people on the basis of membership or simply as human beings, while explicitly denying them the right to decide what their rights were through participation within the political sphere. In fact, social rights were frequently offered in the hope of dampening calls for political rights. However, it is only when the participatory element becomes conjoined to the others that we have a conception of citizenship in the full sense, for individuals become citizens through possessing the right to decide what rights they should have and being able to influence the character of the community to which they belong. Second, even when these models are reinterpreted as involving all three components, they are not mutually exclusive. As such, they are inaccurate as descriptions of the available logical combinations and hence of either the various ideological conceptions or the
8 Introduction: Modern Citizenship
numerous national practices of citizenship. Liberal views of civil and social rights were often combined with, for example, communitarian notions of belonging and republican conceptions of participation, different groups of people being included in each category. Yet, this combination proved a coherent response within the political and social circumstances of the time. Therefore, different versions of the main ideological positions necessarily draw on elements of all three of these models, often modifying them in the process, while the practice of citizenship has been similarly mixed— not least because it has been constrained and legitimized through quite complex ideological judgements and in response to numerous, often somewhat contradictory, political and social circumstances. Thus, any ideological conception or national discourse of citizenship is likely to draw on one or more of the nine possible combinations summarized in Table 1. Which combinations are likely to be employed depends on the character of the available argumentative space. Two related factors proved particularly crucial in defining this space: the cultural and social divisions generated by nation-building and industrialization, respectively (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967), along with their mutual interactions, and the way politics was structured within the state, which was both shaped by and shaped these divisions. Nation-building involved a move towards the development of standardized and centralized regulations and administration linked to a shared political culture. This policy encountered cleavages deriving from ethnic, religious or linguistic differences. These divisions usually, if not always, were mobilized around territorially concentrated minorities, setting up tensions between centre and periphery. The way they were played out was partly influenced by a second set of cleavages resulting from the social and economic transformations produced by the Industrial Revolution. These changes were accompanied by two cross-cutting sets of conflicts: the rural and landed interest versus the rising industrial and predominantly urban classes, and owners and employers versus tenants, labourers and workers. These two sets of divisions were linked in their turn to the ways in which politics was organized. Any state possesses a ‘polity’ dimension, specifying the territorial and functional ‘spheres’ within which it operates, and designating who are its ‘subjects’ in either a passive or an active sense (that is either as merely subject to its authority or as also having certain rights against or over it). States also have a ‘regime’ dimension, consisting of the political arrangements and the ‘styles’ of governance it employs, the type of electoral system, the respective powers of judiciary,
Table 1
The components and dimensions of modern citizenship Basic components of modern citizenship
Ideal types or models of citizenship
Citizenship as Rights
Rights
Belonging
Basic human interests of individuals as autonomous beings Apply equally to all persons
Legal status held by all who voluntarily Access to legal redress Political involvement voluntary join, are born into, or are affected by and both instrumental to and political or other agency constrained by the realization of individual rights
Participation
Political and social participation vital for individual self-realization within the community Political: to express the will of the people Social: to contribute to a scheme of co-operation from which all draw benefits
Citizenship as Participation
Civic duty—instrumentally valuable to ensure government policy restricted to the public interest and provides those collective goods on which individual self-realization depends; intrinsically valuable as a means of creating civic bonds and mutual understanding
Product of positive law resulting from political decision-making Coordinate social interaction in the public interest and protect against domination
Access through capacity and willingness to fulfil civic and socio-economic responsibilities
9
Citizenship as Belonging Derive from, and provide access Possession of a shared culture— whether based on ethnicity or other ties to, common goods Entitlement stems from membership and contribution, and so varies
10 Introduction: Modern Citizenship
executive and legislature and so on, and the ‘scope’ of its intervention in social life—how the public is distinguished from the private, for example, and the balance between regulative and redistributive policies. Though analytically distinct, these four dimensions are closely interrelated. Change in one almost always has implications for the others. By and large, citizenship provisions have arisen from social groups struggling to determine the way the political is defined in one or more of the polity and/or the regime dimensions in order to better promote its interests (Bellamy, 2001, pp. 43–50). The presence and interaction of the two types of social division greatly influenced the sorts of claims groups made and the alliances they could form (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). However, though these demands were reflected in the political system, they were themselves also constrained by the opportunities the prevailing structures allowed and the sort of ideological appeal it (and the population at large) recognized. Cultural and religious, territorial, and rural–urban cleavages have tended to produce more differentiated polities and regimes, involving a federal organization of the state’s sphere, for example, and greater diversity in the styles of its regime, such as an electoral system based on proportional representation and forms of power-sharing. By contrast, cleavages based on conflicts between owner and worker tend to promote calls for uniformity and more majoritarian decision-making. To a degree, the main difference between the continent of Europe and Britain (at least until recently) has been the predominance of this last cleavage over the others, apart from in Northern Ireland, resulting in a more unitary polity and regime dominated by two political parties. Various features of the political system have affected in their turn the nature of citizenship demands and the ways they can be expressed. These features include its openness to protests and opposition, what types of criticism, if any, were regarded as legitimate; the willingness of established movements to incorporate new groups, not least by extending political rights to them, and the capacity for new movements to secure political representation of their own; and the possibilities and pay-offs of securing majority rule, the threshold required and the checks on political power once attained. Majoritarian systems may be less acceptable in culturally or religiously divided communities, but their absence also reinforces the incentives against joint action and the capacity for established parties to incorporate new entrants. As a result, both diversity and unity within a political system prove to be self-reinforcing. Thus, the languages of modern citizenship can be seen as arising within a context defined by three interrelated factors and the dynamics between them: namely, the basic components of citizenship emerging
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from the processes of nation-state-building and the Industrial Revolution, the two types of social conflict produced by these developments, and the political opportunity structure of the given polity and its regime. However, these languages also constitute a fourth and partly autonomous factor in themselves. Obviously, the character of the social groups will partly determine the sorts of ideological argument that are likely to arise. Christian Democracy, for example, is unlikely to emerge as a force of any power where no cleavage exists between church and state, which is sufficient to cut across a division between socialists and conservatives. Yet, ideological traditions have their own internal logic and can fashion the political culture in their turn (Skinner, 2002, Chs 9, 10). Political claims and the ideological legitimation that accompany them can take a number of forms. For a start, they can be continuous or discontinuous with the prevailing social and political system. In being continuous with it, they may seek either to extend prevailing assumptions and entitlements to cover new areas, or to contest their current application as inconsistent. They can operate within the established political channels or outside them, or seek support within civil society or through the formal institutional channels of the state. Finally, they can be aimed at introducing or changing a policy or government, or endeavour to alter some aspect of the constitutional framework. By contrast, a discontinuous form of politics rejects the current system and political languages. This tactic might arise because the existing forms refer to, or only seem comprehensible within, a social and political context that has largely passed away. Something like this process has occurred in the way even monarchies, such as the United Kingdom, have gradually dropped the language of subjecthood for that of citizenship. Alternatively, the aim may be the revolutionary one of revealing the established system and ways of thinking as anachronistic and no longer in the interests of the population. However, no politics can be totally discontinuous, a completely new construction. It would be incomprehensible to any but its creator if so. Even revolutionary action is usually preceded by a period of continuous politics aimed at incremental changes and the building of what Gramsci called a counter-hegemony. Moreover, attempts to re-evaluate or re-describe a given concept, such as citizenship, must share some common ground with the readings they seek to challenge. Otherwise, the exchange would be a dialogue of the deaf rather than an argument. Even in shifting attention from subjects to citizens, there must be some shared sense of what the difference entails, although the various advocates of this change may hold differing conceptions of citizenship. Obviously, many campaigns involve a mixture of all of these strategies. Civic action
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is often backed by the mobilization of sections of civil society, extending an accepted principle usually entails contesting its current application, while many policies have constitutional implications, and so on. As an example of the ways in which these four factors interact, take the reorientation of liberal thinking on citizenship undertaken by T. H. Green in Britain during the 1870s. In terms of the three ideal types outlined above, Green’s theory could be classified as a communitarian account of citizenship as belonging. His more positive account of freedom linked individual autonomy to membership of a national community. However, it was clothed in the language of liberal rights and placed considerable weight on republican notions of civic virtue and participation too. Indeed, his achievement was precisely to import these communitarian and republican notions into the language of liberalism. This strategy arose out of his more general aim to shift the basis of liberal ideology and so bring the concerns of the labouring classes within the liberal fold and show that their interests were naturally allied to those of the manufacturing and professional middle classes. Several factors influenced his adoption of a strategy of incorporation. The passing of the parliamentary reform acts had (for men at least) switched the focus of political debate from the franchise to the social question as the prime dividing line. Meanwhile, the majoritarian system encouraged electoral alliances with the new, working-class, entrants. The conflict between industrial and landed wealth continued, though it was lessening due to the willingness of the old agricultural ruling class to merge with the business elites. Though many of Green’s works were published posthumously in the 1880s, they largely prefigure the resulting change within British Conservatism. Conflicts between church and state and the various cultural groupings had been partially resolved by the end of the eighteenth century, although differences over Irish Home Rule and between nonconformists and the Church of England still divided the main parties. Therefore, the space existed for using a broader conception of liberal citizenship to recruit, or at least collaborate with, a working class that had yet to adopt a distinct socialist doctrine. Green aspired to show how the state’s role could still be restricted to the standard liberal ideal of hindering hindrances to individual freedom, yet allow for collectivist policies and extensive regulation because the obstacles and forms of illegitimate interference were more extensive than liberals had hitherto acknowledged. As a result, he argued that the association of liberalism with possessive and egoistic forms of individualism was mistaken. He exploited Victorian assumptions concerning self-help and character, partially secularizing the nonconformist Christian
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morality within which they were often expressed. By placing these ideals within a communitarian context, he was able to justify such social reforms as the Factory and Employers’ Liability acts as consistent with the earlier advocacy of freedom of contract. He thereby provided a liberal basis for social citizenship. However, whilst this new doctrine sought to satisfy certain working-class demands, it also endeavoured to refocus them. As Jose Harris notes in her chapter, the emphasis of much of the post-Green literature on citizenship was concerned with the attributes of the ‘good’ citizen. These were distinctly liberal qualities, which implicitly or explicitly delegitimized certain socialist demands such as collective ownership of the means of production. In terms of the argumentative strategies outlined above, Green’s reworking of freedom was largely a continuous approach aimed at extending Victorian liberal assumptions to new areas. He was able to relate both the form and the language of his theory to earlier campaigns for parliamentary reform, repeal of the Corn Laws and so on. Indeed, the legitimacy he sought for his new reforms lay precisely in assimilating them to these earlier successful struggles. However, he also wanted to contest their current application as inconsistent, particularly in relationship to the disenfranchisement of women. He worked within the Liberal Party and was for a while even an Oxford town councillor, but perhaps his greatest influence resulted from his involvement in various movements within civil society, such as the ethical societies and temperance leagues, and above all his appeal to a whole generation of the British political class through his Oxford lectures and tutorials. He concentrated on both particular policies, from working hours to educational reform, and major constitutional changes, like Irish Home Rule. Finally, he wished to stress a discontinuity between liberal and feudal values. He endeavoured to show that liberal strictures against the landed property rights of many aristocratic landowners did not apply to the very differently acquired wealth and property of capitalists. He sought to delegitimize unearned privileges and Tory paternalism as anachronistic and unjust, while legitimizing the rewards of labour and the entitlement of workers to state support as claims consistent with liberal capitalist morality. As I noted, in the process, if less directly, he was also arguing for the radical discontinuity (and hence impracticality and incoherence) of attempts to articulate workers’ demands within a socialist framework. Nevertheless, his achievement should not be underrated, for he managed not only to redefine the scope of state action to encompass the regulation of factory conditions, but also extended its subjects, to include workers, its styles, by partly legitimizing
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political action by workers to defend their rights, and its sphere, by making the economy an area of state activity. Thus, Green took the concept of modern citizenship and reinterpreted it in ways that related to both the cultural and (more especially) social divisions and the political system of Britain, and were continuous with much of the prevailing liberal ideology. While parallel operations occurred elsewhere in Europe, notably among the solidaristes in France, they had very different inflections that reflected profound differences in political structures and the pattern of social cleavages. Indeed, in certain cases these differences were so great as to produce an altogether different development of citizenship—for example, divorcing social and nationality rights from political citizenship completely. Here, the elite nature of nation-state-building, often linked to nation-making preceding the social changes associated with the Industrial Revolution and even the creation of the state, meant that rights and belonging were attributes of subjecthood rather than citizenship. Indeed, the ideology of citizenship was exploited to exclude rather than include the mass of the population from decision-making without denying their membership of the legal and national communities. Thus, much depends on the different phasing of the socio-economic and political transformations underlying the components of modern citizenship, their relationship to class and other struggles and their various ideological justifications.
National traditions of citizenship As this book shows, there has been no single trajectory for the development of citizenship. It has been played out very differently in different states. In each case, the four factors described in the last section are configured in diverse ways, rendering their interactions similarly distinctive. Many of these differences pre-date the era of mass politics and even the nation-state, reflecting the ways state–church relations were resolved in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whether industrialization came early or late, and the stamp placed on the political system by the earlier struggles occasioned by the growth of monarchical power. The contributors have been necessarily selective as to which aspect of citizenship they look at, but each concentrates on an assumed or real characteristic feature of the national tradition they discuss. The book opens with a discussion of the three best-known European traditions—the German, the French and the British. Ulrich Preuß explores what is often taken to be the distinctive element of the German case: the ethno-cultural definition of nationality. He introduces several caveats
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to the standard accounts. In particular, he observes how nationality and citizenship were differentiated—while the one was particularistic, the other was not. In large part, this results from German nationhood’s having been largely defined before, and in certain respects as an alternative to, German statehood. Meanwhile, the structure of the imperial state when it was formed was such that citizenship in the sense of civil and social rights was divorced from effective political citizenship. Participation largely took place within corporations and other semi-public bodies within civil society—a situation that was in many respects a modern version of the representation by estates that had obtained in Germany prior to unification. France is standardly contrasted with the German case as offering the archetype of a republican civic nationality premised on political participation in the formation of the popular will. However, Cécile Laborde notes that the dominant French model defies such simple categorization. It also encompassed both a liberal concern with individual rights and a communitarian emphasis on a clearly bounded, homogeneous citizenry. Laborde explores the ways these three different elements came to be brought together, reflecting as they did the role of the French state as both the agency responsible for freeing individuals from particularist feudal attachments and the carrier of a set of universal revolutionary values associated with the sovereign will of the French nation. Individual rights became associated in this way with involvement in the framing of the national general will through the organs of the state. As a result, she argues, the place of ius solis within the French republican schema has been misunderstood. Mere birth on French soil was never a sufficient condition for becoming a French citizen. What mattered was socialization, particularly via the national system of education, into a way of life— that of the liberal civic patriot. She argues that this model was most fully described and defended in the work of Durkheim, who linked it to both an organic view of industrial social relations as naturally complementary, like Green, thereby delegitimizing opposition by the landed and the working classes, and a strongly secular, non-ethnic and largely political view of culture that was centred on the state. Though progressive in its time, this emphasis on assimilation and acculturation to a statist ethic risks becoming deeply conservative in a period of growing social pluralism and ethnic diversity. These can no longer be treated as pre-modern forms of particularism, forcing a rethinking of the French republican tradition. Britain, as was noted above, has often been identified with Marshall’s scheme of the successive stages of civil, political and social rights. Jose
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Harris modifies this picture somewhat. She identifies the peculiarity of the British case in the evolutionary and unbroken character of British (principally English) institutions, the English common law and the extent and diversity of the British Empire. Consequently, many so-called citizenship rights were actually the entitlements of subjects or persons, with habeas corpus, for example, applying to anyone on English soil. Even social rights predated any link to citizenship, being in certain respects more solidly grounded in the absolute right to poor relief than they were to be in social insurance schemes that tied them to participation in the labour market. Consequently, talk of citizenship made only rare appearances in British history until comparatively recently. Moreover, when it did emerge towards the end of the century, the focus was not on who was a citizen, an issue that was largely taken for granted, but rather on what were the attributes of the ‘good’ citizen. As we saw, this concern was at the centre of Green’s reworking of liberalism, and itself reflected an earlier discourse on the duties and virtues of public life that viewed political involvement more as a privilege than a citizenship right that was grounded in basic human equality. This curiously elitist conception of citizenship was even more in evidence in Portugal. As Rui Ramos observes, though access to nationality was extremely open, being based on residence, political citizenship was relatively restricted—indeed, by contrast with the rest of Europe, the suffrage was actually narrowed rather than expanded in the 1890s and in 1913, with universal adult suffrage being adopted only in 1974. If the first characteristic can be attributed to the need to keep the populations of Portugal’s far-flung Empire under Portuguese jurisdiction, the second emerges from the fact that nation-building was largely carried out by an urban liberal elite in opposition to the Catholic Church, the monarchy and, in a late industrializing country, the landed interest—including the peasantry. Liberal notions of civil rights went hand in hand with a strongly republican conception of political rights, which were to be restricted to those with the virtue and capacity to use them well. Education and property became qualifications for the franchise, since both were necessary to avoid a dependency on others that might lead to private interests being prioritized above the public good. Women were excluded for the standard republican reasons of being ‘naturally’ frail, irrational and dependent on men. The influence of this discourse on citizenship was such that it legitimized authoritarian measures by left and right up to the 1970s, though the advent of a more egalitarian conception of citizenship ironically was accompanied by the introduction of a more restricted ethnic definition of nationality.
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Luca Baccelli’s account of the relationship of Italian citizenship to the republican tradition not only reveals a number of parallels but also contrasts with the Portuguese case. Here too, nation-building was an elite process, promoted in this case by the northern landed classes grouped around the Piedmontese monarchy. Yet, there were also attempts to galvanize popular involvement, all of which drew on republican discourses of citizenship as a source of legitimation. Indeed, the fact that in Italy republicanism was, from the sixteenth century to the formation of Resistance, an oppositional force against foreign domination and monarchical regimes helped give it a more popular and less authoritarian character than it had in either Portugal or, in certain ways, France. Baccelli also highlights the advantages within the Italian context of the political as opposed to ethnic-cultural conception of patriotism that resulted from this tradition. Whereas nationalism has had largely authoritarian and right-wing associations of an exclusionary nature, republicans have seen citizenship as the highest form of patriotism. Spain offers yet another variation on this theme. As Carlos Closa explains, here too nationality was divorced from citizenship. The former was inclusive in certain respects, once more reflecting an imperial past, yet also deeply reactionary. Moreover, it ultimately had the exclusionary purpose of denying the claims of minority national groups. Here too social rights were initially granted, albeit somewhat selectively, as paternalistic offerings that aimed to undercut demands for political citizenship or more effective civil rights. Closa shows how the post-Franco conception of citizenship was largely defined in opposition to the earlier account. With notions of Spanish nationality tainted by their association with the Franco era, the most inclusive categories of rights were now portrayed simply as human rights. Citizenship as political participation became more important. However, it was linked to regional and minority national allegiances, thereby creating a differentiated form of citizenship. In between citizenship and human rights was a third category of rights based on legal residency. Finally, different levels of social rights became linked to each of these three groups. Thus, the reaction against an authoritarian notion of citizenship as national belonging has produced both a more universal and a more particularist dimension to the Spanish conception of citizenship. In other words, the political system has attempted to respond to the contrasting pressures of the social and cultural divisions that were suppressed under Franco’s dictatorship. Republicanism has traditionally been wary of what Rousseau called the ‘disorder of women’, a concern liberalism long echoed. However, although Scandinavian countries have a participatory tradition that has
18 Introduction: Modern Citizenship
many republican characteristics, since the 1960s they have become distinguished by high levels of female representation in politics, between 35 and 50 per cent. Yet, as Birte Siim and Hege Skjeie remark in their analysis of this development, the link between feminist demands and citizenship was made only in the late 1980s. They trace the strengths and weaknesses of the engendering of Scandinavian democracy to the interplay between two channels of political influence and power within social democratic systems: the corporatist–pluralist channel, concerned with the representation of interests, and the numerical–democratic channel, focused on the formation and pushing of interests. Social rights had become institutionalized within the first channel, and initially issues of gender were largely conceived as an extension of these. As such, they operated mainly within the social sphere and involved the recruitment of women within established party and labour organizations. It was only as a result of more participatory movements employing the second channel that gender issues moved from being conceived as aspects of welfare policy to becoming a matter of citizenship. Only then did the implications of feminist demands for the restructuring of the political sphere come to the fore. Corporatist arrangements have also characterized Dutch politics, most especially in the cultural sphere. Siep Stuurman associates the Dutch consociational system with the existence of cultural cleavages and political mechanisms to deal with them that long pre-dated mass democracy and the nation-state. In large part an outgrowth of the Dutch republican tradition of mixed government, the consociational system contrasts profoundly with French republicanism. Whereas the first emerged from a political history shaped by struggles against monarchical claims to sovereignty and the defence of religious pluralism, the latter took over the absolutist claims of the French monarchy and its links to religious homogeneity and transferred them to the people and the civic religion of the state. Consequently, the Dutch polity and regime are far more federal than the one and indivisible French republic. The result is that the relations between individual and communal rights are interpreted very differently in the two states, producing divergent policies for incorporating immigrant groups. The issue of immigration, and the interplay between republican and liberal approaches to citizenship in tackling it, also forms the focus of Brunella Casalini (in Chapter 9). The United States has often been viewed as the archetypal immigrant society, and as such a model of multicultural citizenship. Casalini suggests that this picture needs to be qualified in a number of ways. The Federalist founding fathers sought
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to balance the liberal concern with individual rights against a more republican preoccupation with the public interest. However, their synthesis of these two elements was contested from the beginning by the more communitarian-minded republicans of the Anti-Federalists. Indeed, until the 1960s it was in fact a largely republican model of citizenship of this latter kind that prevailed. This view proved considerably exclusionary, and sought to engineer a highly moralistic, Protestant conception of the good citizen that often had scant regard for either cultural difference or individual rights. The civil rights movement heralded something of a liberal backlash. While positive in many respects, this change has also had its downside. In some respects, a purely rights-based conception of citizenship misses certain key features of what it means to be a citizen: namely, the civic obligations and virtues that lead citizens to contribute to those public goods on which their rights ultimately depend. The recent republican revival can in this respect be viewed as an attempt to restore the balance between liberalism and republicanism advocated by the founders. Pietro Costa uncovers a similar dilemma when comparing the development of citizenship within nation-states to its emergence within the European Union. He argues that the EU’s intellectual origins lie in the anti-fascist struggles of the 1940s. Early European federalists, such as Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, conceived the European legal order as a means for overcoming the twin flaws of nationhood and state sovereignty that they believed had characterized totalitarian regimes. In other words, European political integration was seen as a means for modifying the excesses of, and even going beyond, the nation-state, not for recreating it at the European level. As a result, European citizenship was conceptualized largely in terms of constitutional rights. However, he notes two difficulties with this approach. First, European Union has been largely driven less by the ideals of these thinkers than by the instrumental and functional concerns of national economies. Rights policies have arisen largely as an afterthought in order to legitimize the resulting institutional structures and agreements. Second, these rights have resembled more the entitlements of subjects than that of citizens. In this regard, the EU reflects the earlier elitist projects of nation- and state-building, for it is only when rights become linked to the shaping of the political community by the population at large that they can generate allegiance and reflect a more general culture of equal concern and respect. Here too the mix of rights, belonging and participation will be shaped by the prevailing social and cultural divisions and their relation to the available political structures and ideological discourses. Yet, without
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an opening for participation, definitions of both rights and belonging are likely to be weak and exclusionary since they are devoid of any corresponding sense of civic obligation (Bellamy and Castiglione, 2002).
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Ciarán O’Kelly, Emilio Santoro and especially Dario Castiglione for comments on this introduction and numerous conversations regarding its content.
Bibliography Aron, R. (1974), ‘Is Multinational Citizenship Possible?’, Social Research, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 638–56. Barbalet, J. M. (1988), Citizenship: Rights, Struggle and Class Equality (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Beiner, R. (ed.) (1995a), Theorizing Citizenship (New York: SUNY Press). Beiner, R. (1995b), ‘Introduction: Why Citizenship Constitutes a Theoretical Problem in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century’, in Beiner (1995a), pp. 1–28. Bellamy, R. (2000), ‘Citizenship Beyond the Nation State: The Case of Europe’, in N. O’Sullivan (ed.), Political Theory in Transition (London: Routledge), pp. 91–112. Bellamy, R. (2001), ‘The “Right to Have Rights”: Citizenship Practice and the Political Constitution of the EU’, in Bellamy and Warleigh (2001a), pp. 41–70. Bellamy, R. and D. Castiglione (2002), ‘Beyond Community and Rights: European Citizenship and the Virtues of Participation’, Quaderni Fiorentini, 31, Vol. 1, pp. 349–80. Bellamy, R. and A. Warleigh (2001a), Citizenship and Governance in the European Union (London: Continuum). Bellamy, R. and A. Warleigh (2001b), ‘Cementing the Union: The Role of European Citizenship’, in F. Cerutti and E. Rudolph (eds), A Soul for Europe (Leuven: Peeters), pp. 55–72. Bellamy, R., D. Castiglione and J. Shaw (forthcoming), Making European Citizens (London: Palgrave). Cesarani, D. and M. Fulbrook (1996), Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe (London: Routledge). Eder, K. and B. Giesen (2001), European Citizenship: National Legacies and Transnational Projects (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Everson, M. (1995), ‘The Legacy of the Market Citizen’, in J. Shaw and G. Moore (eds), New Legal Dynamics of the European Union (Oxford: Clarendon), pp. 73–90. Habermas, J. (1992), ‘Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe’, Praxis International, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 1–9. Habermas, J. (1996), ‘The European Nation State’, Ratio Juris, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 125–37. Heater, D. (1990), Citizenship: The Civic Ideal in World History, Politics and Education (London: Longman). Heater, D. (1998), What is Citizenship? (Cambridge: Polity).
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Hutchings, K. and R. Dannreuther (1999), Cosmopolitan Citizenship (London: Macmillan). Ignatieff, M. (1995), ‘The Myth of Citizenship’, in Beiner (1995a), pp. 53–78. Janoski, T. (1998), Citizenship and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Jenkins, B. and S. A. Sofos (1996), Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (London: Routledge). Kostakopoulou, T. (2001), Citizenship, Identity and Immigration in the European Union: Between Past and Future (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Lehning, P. and A. Weale (1997), Citizenship, Democracy and Justice in the New Europe (London: Routledge). Linklater, A. (1998), ‘Citizenship and Sovereignty in the Post-Westphalian European State’, in D. Archibugi, D. Held and M. Köhler (eds), Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity), pp. 113–37. Lipset, S. M. and S. Rokkan (1967), ‘Introduction’, in S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press), pp. 1–64. Marshall, T. H. (1950), Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Miller, D. (1998), ‘The Left, the Nation-State, and European Citizenship’, Dissent, Summer, pp. 47–51. Miller, D. (2000), Citizenship and National Identity (Cambridge: Polity). Modood, T. and P. Werbner (1997), The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community (London: Zed Books). Oliver, D. and D. Heater (1994), The Foundations of Citizenship (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf). Pocock, J. G. A. (1995), ‘The Ideal of Citizenship Since Classical Times’, in Beiner (1995a), pp. 29–52. Preuß, U. (1995), ‘Citizenship and Identity: Aspects of a Political Theory of Citizenship’, in R. Bellamy, V. Bufacchi and D. Castiglione (eds), Democracy and Constitutional Culture in the Union of Europe (London: Lothian Foundation Press), pp. 107–20. Rosas, A. and E. Antola (1995), A Citizens’ Europe: In Search of a New Order (London: Sage). Shaw, J. (1997), ‘The Many Pasts and Futures of European Citizenship’, European Law Review, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 554–72. Shaw, J. (1998), ‘The Interpretation of European Citizenship’, Modern Law Review, Vol. 61, No. 3, pp. 293–317. Skinner, Q. (2002), Visions of Politics, Volume 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Soysal, Y. N. (1994), The Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Weiler, J. (1999), The Constitution of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
1 Citizenship and the German Nation Ulrich K. Preuß
Introduction As scholars often note when studying the German concept of citizenship, the German language lacks a term that, etymologically, reveals its basic conceptual roots in the word ‘city’. The German term analogous to citizen, citoyen, cittadino and ciudades is Staatsbürger. Kant, for instance, made it clear that when he spoke of the Bürger, he meant the ‘citoyen, d.i. Staatsbürger, nicht Stadtbürger, bourgeois’ (Kant, 1977, p. 151). Similarly, Wieland, to whom the first usage of the German term Staatsbürger is frequently attributed, juxtaposed the novel term Staatsbürger with the French term citoyen to explain its meaning. In fact, at the end of the eighteenth century, Staatsbürger appeared to many contemporary observers as a—not etymologically, but philosophically—French word, or, amounting to much the same thing, a Jacobin word (Weinacht, 1969, p. 55). Indeed, modern studies of the German concept of citizenship feel obliged to explain to their non-German readers that the analysis requires the use of at least three different expressions: Staatsbürgerschaft, Staatsangehörigkeit and Volksangehörigkeit. These three terms express different elements of an idea that, at least in the Anglo-American tradition, is covered by the single word ‘citizenship’ (Brubaker, 1992, p. 50). If political and juridical languages use certain distinctions, it is safe to assume that they reflect significant material differences. The German triad Staatsbürgerschaft, Staatsangehörigkeit and Volksangehörigkeit invokes the concepts of the ‘state’ and the ‘people’ (Staat and Volk) and combines them with the term ‘belonging’ (Zugehörigkeit, Angehörigkeit), thus suggesting a passive inclusion, rather than an active participation, of the individual in society. Hence, when the German concept of citizenship is under scrutiny one should keep in mind that certain aspects of 22
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citizenship which are incorporated in a single concept in other countries may here be disjoined and associated with separate terms and perhaps even different conceptions. However, despite this variety of terms, the central term for what is called citizenship, citoyenneté, cittadinanza, and so on, in other languages is Staatsbürgerschaft in German. Before Kant, who linked the Staatsbürger to the citoyen and the French Revolution, this term did not play a significant role in German political and juridical reasoning.
The concept of nation in citizenship The French Revolution made the idea of citizenship considerably more significant. Its affiliation with the concept of the état-nation made the citizen the key actor in the political sphere. The citizen has become the constituent element of the modern nation-state. Citizenship now means membership of the nation; the members constitute the nation. But who qualifies for membership? Two criteria of belonging must be distinguished, the social and the cultural. The former is the socio-economic, vertical, dimension of top and bottom, that is, of class cleavages; the latter is the cultural, horizontal boundary between insiders and outsiders, that is, between members and non-members of the nation understood as a community. The social criterion, for instance, made it a common practice at the end of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century to grant only male property-owners the status of citizenship. They alone, obviously a small minority, were the relevant group; hence they constituted the nation. In Sieyès’ famous pre-revolutionary pamphlet, the French nation was the third estate, that is, the bourgeois class. The rest were ‘the people’, the masses and the underclass—in other words, inferior elements of society who were below the standard of both citizenship and nation. They were simply subjects of the French state. Obviously, this socio-economic criterion has disappeared in the twentieth century, though not the cultural criterion. Originally a formal legal standard by which the modern state distinguished its subjects from foreigners, the criterion of nationality developed into a rule according to which the quality of belonging to and constituting the political community was more actively defined. As part of the evolution of modern statehood, nationals changed from being mere passive subjects of the nation-state in which they lived to become active citizens who constituted the state-as-nation. The quality of belonging to this state attained a socio-cultural, identity-generating dimension, with subjects requiring additional qualifications to be constituent components of the nation-state. The characteristic boundary of the nation-state is that drawn against
24 Citizenship and the German Nation
foreigners. Foreigners are often defined in terms of physical appearance, geographical distance, religious difference, ethnic otherness, political values, and so on (cf. Münkler and Ladwig, 1997). What all these categories of foreigner share is their failure to be part of the nation; they cannot be citizens of the nation-state. In other words, the concept of citizenship is inherently connected to the idea of the nation-state and nationhood. The tendency for social exclusion inherent in the first criterion of nationhood was much easier to overcome than the symbolic boundary between inside and outside deriving from the second. 1 The main reason for this is the fact that the cultural notion of nationhood defines not only the legal boundaries between foreigners and belongers, that is, nationals/citizens, but also symbolic boundaries which are viewed as indispensable for the sense of commonality among the members of a society that defines itself as a nation. Thus, the concept of citizenship as determined through the idea of cultural nationhood touches on much more than the legal and political status of individuals—it is at the core of the collective identity of a nation.
A brief account of German nationhood The designation ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ suggests that the Empire, which dissolved in 1806, was considered the political incarnation of the German nation. However, the term ‘German Nation’, which was added in the fifteenth century, did not refer to the modern concept of nation, which is inherently connected with statehood and peoplehood. This modern concept emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century (Möller, 1989, p. 54). It defines the nation as the collectivity of the dwellers in a delineated territory, united by common attributes such as descent, institutions, language, history or mere political will. The old Empire was represented in the Imperial Diet by the Imperial Estates among which the high nobility, in particular the seven electors who elected the Emperor, formed the most influential part, while the imperial cities were of lesser significance. To the Imperial Estates, the German nation was an ‘estatist’ entity. The very idea of the nation was embodied by the Imperial Estates, who claimed not only to rule the Empire but also to represent its Christian character. While in other European countries, such as France, England and Spain, a long process beginning in the thirteenth century led the idea of nation to become associated with the monarchy and its emerging ius territoriale (which in France in the seventeenth century came to be called the droit de souveraineté), this did not happen in the old Empire. Its territory was too
Ulrich K. Preuß 25
extensive and the capacity of its medieval networks of communication and transportation was insufficient to permit the transformation of the estatist authority of the emperor into modern territorial rule (Brunner, 1965, p. 165 ff.). Though the Westphalian Treaty of 1648 recognized the ius territorii et superioritatis and paved the way to the new world of enclosed sovereign states, the Holy Empire persisted in its estatist structure, stagnated, and became what Pufendorf in his famous legal analysis De statu imperii Germanici of 1667 would call an ‘irregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile’. It is this isolation of the German Empire from the process of state formation that pushed the German concept of nation in a particular direction. In the writings of many eighteenth-century French and German authors, the concept of nation acquired an anti-estatist meaning. They envisioned the emerging ‘third estate’ as the new relevant social category that could legitimately claim the right to embody the nation and to rule (Möller, 1989, p. 50 ff.; Vierhaus, 1991, p. 55 ff.): the emerging class of state and church employees, tradesmen, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, artists and similar segments of the population that through their work generated the—still quite modest—welfare of the country. In France the anti-estatist thrust of the concept entailed the claim of the new class to political power and the right to shape the political organization of the country. The French lived in a bounded territory under a single monarch. The Germans lived in a plurality of territories and were ruled by a plurality of princes, while the single king who existed, the Emperor, had no immediate power over them. Moreover, none of the sovereign princes, including the hegemonic Prussian king, wished to establish a German nation-state. Thus, in eighteenth-century Germany the idea of a German nation emigrated into the sphere of culture. In the absence of a unified and homogeneous German state, the educated classes that had arisen during the evolution of the 40 odd German territorial states and their state and church bureaucracies, their residential courts and towns, not least their newly founded universities, academies and theatres, developed a ‘national spirit’ on the basis of the German language. Latin had been the language of the Church, and French the language of the princely courts. Even Frederick II, who was not only a king but also a muchadmired homme de lettres and who was celebrated by many Germans (including Goethe) after his many military successes, wrote his essays in French. Thus the growing, mostly state-nurtured, middle class developed their national feeling through the German language, an institution that overstepped the political boundaries of the states and was not compromised by the representatives of the obsolete order represented
26 Citizenship and the German Nation
by the Empire. Incidentally, the particular role that the German language played in the national consciousness is apparent also in the origin of the term ‘deutsch’, which was used for the first time in the eighth century and meant ‘those who did not use Latin’. Thus ‘deutsch’ and ‘Deutschland’ are terms that originally designated a linguistic community. Their political import emerged in the sixteenth century and acquired a polemical thrust against the ruling princes through the claim to embody one single collectivity, as opposed to the particularistic fragmentation and disunion of the Empire. Consequently, the term ‘deutsches Volk’ has always meant more than just the neutral designation of a particular collectivity in a delineated territory. Its symbolic importance amounts to what the concept of nation signifies for the French. It embodies the Germans’ search for political unity and identity (Lutz, 1985; Koselleck, 1992, p. 149 ff.). 2 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was the most influential among the philosophers, poets and intellectuals who fought for the development of a German nation and a German national spirit through the advancement of German culture, especially through German language and literature (Schönemann, 1992, pp. 307 ff., 316 ff.). Herder, Klopstock, Lessing, Schiller and others pursued the objective of a German national literature and a German national theatre. In a way, they regarded these as substitutes for the German political nation. Schiller in particular was very much aware of this substitution of culture for politics: ‘Germany? Where is it located? I do not know where to find the country. Where the learned country begins, the political ends.’ Also: ‘The language is the mirror of a nation, if we look into this mirror, then a great and excellent image of ourselves advances’ (quoted in Möller, 1989, p. 56). This does not mean that they were cultural nationalists. On the contrary, their belief in the spiritual character of the nation was inspired by humanitarian ideals, which regarded each nation as an equally valuable and dignified collective entity that merited equal respect and recognition. One distinctive feature of German nationhood is the lack of an inherent connection of the idea of the German nation with a demarcated territory, and, as a consequence, of the lack of an original alignment between statehood and nationhood. In Spain, England and France state formation was simultaneously the process of national closure: those living permanently outside the boundaries of the state did not belong to the nation. The state defined the nation, although the state was not the nation itself. The state is an organization of domination: it is the institutionalization of sovereign power over a demarcated territory and the individuals who stay within it. Statehood gives rise to the quest for limiting state power
Ulrich K. Preuß 27
and for participating in it. It is the starting point for the pursuit of a constitution and for a political understanding of nationhood (cf. Poggi, 1990, pp. 26–7; Preuß, 1996). It is not by accident that the separation of nationhood from statehood in the German experience gave rise to the weakness of the idea of constitutionalism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the people who lived within the confines of what geographically was Germany were subjects of some 40 independent states that were ruled by late-absolutist monarchs and princes. 3 At the very least, the members of the educated middle class wanted to become German citizens: that is, citizens of a state in which they could participate in government, through an assembly elected on the basis of civic equality and representing the German people. But this concept of German citizenship—to live under the representative government of a single polity that incorporated all Germans—was burdened by the fact that political freedom and national unity did not easily go together. In two consecutive and protracted steps, and with great difficulties, suffering and violent struggles, France had achieved, first, political unification in a state through the French monarchy and, second, the establishment of a constitutional political system as the result of the revolution of 1789. This would have to be accomplished in one step in Germany. Hence, the German liberation movement emerging at the beginning of the nineteenth century regarded the two goals as mutually reinforcing: they were convinced that Germans could achieve political freedom in a constitutional state only through being united in one single nation-state. As we know, this belief proved to be overoptimistic. Yet, the opposite assumption that the Germans could enjoy either political freedom without national unity, or national unity without political freedom, was even more unrealistic. If the subjects of the fragmented system of German petty states wanted to be Germans in the first place, they could identify themselves as members of a German nation only in the pre-political sense of a cultural nation. Their Germanness linked them to a cultural community that could easily ignore the great number of political boundaries on the geographical territory of Germany, but this was a far cry from the goal of national unity, because it was hardly more than what Benedict Anderson called an ‘imagined community’. As mere Germans, they could not be political animals, and that is what the idea of national unity is ultimately all about. Yet, if they preferred to be free members of a polity, they had to take into account exactly these political boundaries, that is, the existence of a patchwork of mostly petty states under the hegemonic shadow of the two rival major powers, Austria and Prussia.
28 Citizenship and the German Nation
In 1871, Bismarck finally established the German nation-state on the basis of the dynastic principle and Prussia’s hegemony. He sidelined the German liberal and democratic movement and excluded Austria. This founding suffered from serious congenital defects that foreshadowed the national catastrophes of the twentieth century. We may distinguish two mutually exclusive conceptions, which were to determine the fate of the German nation-state: a universalist notion, which its proponents regarded as the realization of the ideals of the French Revolution, and a particularistic notion, which made a völkisch turn in the interpretation of German nationhood and anticipated important elements of the right-totalitarian movements of the twentieth century. Proponents of the universalist notion included the socialist and left-liberal political forces who struggled for the democratic republic that they regarded, in line with the ideals of the revolution of 1848, as the true embodiment of the nation-state. For them, the establishment of the German nationstate represented both an overcoming of the parochialism that prevailed in the German petty states, and the achievement of political freedom and civic equality. Proponents of the particularistic notion—the nationalist forces—sought an ethnically homogeneous German nation-state (Brubaker, 1992, p. 114 ff.; Dann, 1994, pp. 177 ff., 185 ff.). For this group, the German nation-state had to be the political organization of ‘Germandom’ (Deutschtum), the definition of which oscillated between the ethno-cultural and the biological racist. Their basic convictions were xenophobic and anti-Semitic. The former group did not reach its goal until 1919, after losing the war and undergoing another revolution. As we know, this German nation-state lasted only until 1933, when the Nazis established the ‘Greater German Empire’ (Großdeutsches Reich) and realized the goals of the nationalist movement, namely the racist definition of Germanness. After the Second World War—to be precise, after 1949—the Germans found themselves in a situation similar to the one their forefathers had experienced before 1871. There were two German states—the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic—both of which claimed to embody the better elements of German nationhood, and neither of which considered itself the complete German nationstate. Again, as during most of the nineteenth century, ‘Germany as a whole’ was the object of international concern and regulation. This time it existed only in the international treaties in which the war’s victorious allies reserved their right to determine the political fate of Germany and to supervise the exercise of its sovereignty. Again, there was a difference between the status of a ‘German’ and that of the citizen
Ulrich K. Preuß 29
of a German state. Things were complicated further by the refusal of the Federal Republic of Germany to recognize the newly created international borders between Germany and Poland, which re-established those of 1937. This refusal could be misunderstood as a desire to re-establish the borders of the German Empire at the expense of Poland. These irregularities and uncertainties were finally overcome in 1990 when the two German states united following the accession of the German Democratic Republic to the Federal Republic, so that constitutionally the ‘new’ Germany was identical with the Federal Republic, which in turn regarded itself as identical with the German Empire as demarcated by its borders of 1937. The resulting state avowed in international treaties that it had become a complete nation-state with respect to both its territorial extension and its population. In 1990 the ‘German question’, which had troubled Europe since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, seemed to have found its ‘natural’ solution. The German nationstate now includes all Germans who can legitimately claim to live in one polity. This situation amounts to the achievement of a German civic nation (Staatsbürgernation) in the sense of the French tradition: the nation-state is the political organization of citizens who live in a delineated territory and whose claims to self-determination are defined through these state boundaries. In other words, the fact that there are Germanspeaking people in other parts of the world is no reason to consider the German nation-state incomplete. Consequently, the fact that ethnic non-Germans live permanently and legally within the territorial boundaries of the German nation-state must not be an obstacle to their inclusion in the citizenry of that state. This inference, however, has not yet been fully and wholeheartedly accepted, since a considerable number of permanent legal residents of non-German origin are denied German citizenship.
The rules concerning German nationality and their political relevance Given the century-old uncertainty surrounding German nationhood, it is no surprise this was also reflected in the rules defining the boundary between insiders and outsiders. Here, too, the separation of nationhood from statehood raises the question of whether it is the state or the nation that provides the defining criterion. The answer is supplied by the rules according to which a person becomes the member of a particular state, a status that in the Anglo-American context is called ‘nationality’ 4 and in the German legal system is termed Staatsangehörigkeit.5
30 Citizenship and the German Nation
The concept of nationality operates in two different contexts, legal and social. The first is the sphere of international relations and international law. Within this framework the status of ‘nationality’ forms the link between the individual and international law in that the conjoining of an individual to a particular state entails the exclusive jurisdiction of that state over the individual. Consequently, all other states are under a legal obligation to respect the home state’s jurisdiction over the individual as an expression of its sovereignty. Here, nationality primarily functions as the instrument employed by states to mark their respective spheres of sovereign competency over their populations. The rights and benefits that flow from this status for the nationals themselves are by and large limited to their rights to diplomatic and consular protection, and to residence within the home state’s territory (Wiessner, 1989; Lang, 1990, p. 21 ff.). Historically, the legal definition of Staatsangehörigkeit in Germany is a consequence of its territorial and constitutional disunion and division into a multitude of particularistic states. From the end of the eighteenth and throughout the entire nineteenth-century Germany experienced an unprecedented increase in poverty and mass migration, which was to a great extent the consequence of trans-border mobility. The need to address the problem of mass pauperism entailed the state’s recognition of its responsibility in this regard and ultimately required a device that allowed states to assign the migrating paupers to the particular state responsible for them. Such a system mattered all the more because the tradition by which local communities took responsibility for the destitute, the homeless and vagabonds no longer worked in an era of growing social and geographical mobility (Grawert, 1973, p. 133 ff.). This functional belonging to a particular state, in a world characterized by a plurality of states with demarcated territories, gradually became the basis for a more political perception that the multitude of a state’s members were indeed ‘the people’ constituting that state (Staatsvolk). They were no longer perceived as atomized elements—a mere multitude of individuals—but rather as components of a collectivity. Members of this collectivity must share some basic characteristics so that political unity can be generated amongst the disparate crowd. If this happens, Staatsangehörigkeit becomes a constitutive element of statehood. This process leads to the second of the two contexts of nationality, the social context. In fact, the domestic role of nationality (Staatsangehörigkeit) has been more important than its function of delimiting spheres of sovereignty in interstate relations. Nationality was an essential part of the internal consolidation of the state. As I noted earlier, the consolidation of statehood was primarily directed against estatist intermediary forces,
Ulrich K. Preuß 31
such as patrimonial estates, vassalships, corporations, towns, guilds and the like, all of which claimed special liberties, privileges, exemptions and immunities and thus were major obstacles to the formation of a unitary, homogeneous and centrally controlled dominion. In this estatist order the individual was typically subject to several lords who frequently made competing claims on his obedience (Finer, 1975, pp. 86–7). This situation was one of the consequences of the individual’s being a mere appurtenance of the soil. His social and legal status was determined by his physical adhesion to a particular place. The defeat of the estatist orders by the state required the emancipation of the individual from several obligations to feudal lords, and the establishment of a single and exclusive duty to obey the unifying ruler. When in Germany the monarchs and princes struggled to achieve a unitary status of subjecthood and gradually developed the concept of Landesangehörigkeit, the predecessor of Staatsangehörigkeit, the reason was not to establish external boundaries against other states, but internal responsibilities giving them exclusive jurisdiction over the inhabitants of their territories. When we speak of German Staatsangehörigkeit in the nineteenth century until the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, we must bear in mind that each of the 40 German states established its own rules about its members. Only a few of them—in particular, Prussia and Austria—did this with the intention of creating a homogeneous body of subjects, the ‘passive nation’ as the embryonic version of the nation destined to become the vitalizing force of mere statehood. Thus, the numerous rules of the individual states are of no interest for this study.6 However, this particularism of rules prevented the German Confederation from developing both confederal nationality as a status (Bundesangehörigkeit) and a direct constitutional relationship between state subjects and the Confederation as a whole. Indeed, in order to achieve just this result, which had been anticipated in particular by Austria and some southern German states, a ‘German’ nationality was not established. They were strictly opposed to the idea of a general German status of nationality (allgemeines deutsches Bürgerrecht), because it somehow presupposed a concept of Germany as a whole, a concept that they rejected.7 It is interesting to learn that despite an unequivocal rejection of any kind of association of the status of being a national (Staatsangehöriger) with the concept of a universal German nation, the principle of descent (ius sanguinis) prevailed as a criterion for acquiring nationality in individual states. This criterion was often reinforced by other criteria such as naturalization, marriage, tacit toleration of having had residence or a self-employed business for at least 10 years, and territory (ius soli) for
32 Citizenship and the German Nation
those born within the territory to stateless and homeless parents (Grawert, 1973, pp. 136–7; Lang, 1990, p. 37 ff.). The priority of the principle of descent was actually a modern achievement, since it displaced the estatist principle that the status of the individual is determined by the status of the land on which he or she is born. According to ius sanguinis, the individual is no longer a mere appendage to the land; rather, the relationship to the ruler is one of personal loyalty and obedience that has as its corollary the ruler’s duty of protection. The individual’s bonds with his ‘fatherland’ are conceived as created through an immediate social relationship, while accidental birth in the territory of a state is not considered to have involved such a social bond. This means that nationality is no longer a status of mere passive subjecthood, but the legal embodiment of a relationship in which belonging to a particular state is constitutive of a particular, hence exclusive, community. In many of the German states some limited rights to vote and the duty to perform military service already existed. Therefore, when the choice was forced between those who were merely physical members of the state and those who had a more intense relationship to their ‘homeland’ or ‘fatherland’, people opted for a concept of nationhood based on the tribal community (Stammesgemeinschaft). The members of this basic community were supposed to be trustworthy per se. Some states, like Prussia, consisted of several separate territories more or less accidentally accumulated in the course of dynastic politics, located in distant regions and characterized by diverse cultural traditions and religious faiths. As a result, the unity of the state could hardly be secured by the unity of the territory and its individual characteristics. The unity of the state had to be generated through bonds between the subjects of the state, and here common descent—dubious as this always is (Weber, 1978, p. 923)— appeared to be the most obvious principle. The Empire of 1871 rendered national membership of the Empire (the central unit in the federal state) dependent on the possession of nationality in one of its member states. The ‘national’ dimension of what the Constitution called the common indigenousness (gemeinsames Indigenat) consisted in the stipulation that the subjects of the member states of the Empire were no longer foreigners in the states of which they were not a subject—all subjects/inhabitants/nationals of the member states were now compatriots. Still, there was a tendency towards a distinct imperial status of nationality, in that the duty to perform military service was a federal duty, which was imposed only on members. As a result, the central government was directly interested in the rules that determined who qualified for this duty, and thus a gradual process of centralization
Ulrich K. Preuß 33
of the definition of nationality (Reichsangehörigkeit) occurred (Grawert, 1973, p. 199 ff.), culminating in the Nationality Act of 1870 (Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz) which by and large standardized the particularistic rules of the member states. In particular, the law confirmed the principle of ius sanguinis as the primary source of acquisition of federal nationality (Grawert, 1973, pp. 203–4; Lang, 1990, pp. 43 ff., 87 ff.). The principle of ius sanguinis, which prevailed in the nationality law of 1870 and which was continued in the nationality law of 1913 (Reichs-und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz), did not necessarily entail an ethnic definition of belonging. But it could be used as an instrument of ethnification of belonging, and that is what happened in the first German nation-state. Yet, as Brubaker (1992, p. 137) claims, the incongruity of nationhood and state territory as such did not require the ethnification of the concept of the German nation and the German nation-state. Other states in Europe that experienced this discrepancy, such as Switzerland, Belgium and Austria, did not define their nationhood in ethnic terms. Though Germany, as a geographically extended country in the heart of Europe, may have had a conception of its national identity different to those of small European states, this feature does not explain the adoption of an ethnic definition of nationhood. Since the end of the eighteenth century, Prussia had been a dominant European power with a sense of national identity at least among its elites. Yet Prussia resisted most persistently the separation of state and nationhood that became more and more popular in other German states after the failure of the 1848 revolution. The main reason for the ethnification of German nationhood and consequently of German citizenship is probably the congenital defect of the Empire, namely its establishment from above, that is, without the participation of significant parts of the population. The Empire recognized only certain elements of society, those who had prominence and power. It was sociologically exclusivist and minoritarian, while claiming to include the whole nation. Whenever a part claims to be, or at least to represent, the whole, it develops an ideology bridging this gap between the particularism of the reality and its universalist aspiration. The unease about the existence of this gap entails a latent tendency towards aggressiveness, scapegoating and the need for identified enemies. In Bismarck’s Reich, the enemies were the followers of the socialist labour movement and the Catholics. Of course, they were not denied the formal status of German nationals and citizens of the nation-state—this was also true for the Poles who lived within the boundaries of the Empire, the so-called imperial Poles (Reichspolen)—but they were second-class citizens. The gap between the German Empire’s claim to be the embodiment of the
34 Citizenship and the German Nation
German nation, and the exclusionary reality was bridged by a particularist meaning of the concept of nation. According to this interpretation, the German nation was a community embodied in the ethnic Germans. If, on that account, Germanness was the essential quality of the German nation-state, the exclusion of non-Germans from membership or, if this was not possible, from full citizenship was not sensed as a violation of the moral and legal requirements of the German nation-state. This turn to a definition of nationhood in terms of a pre-political identity—as an ethnic community—had serious consequences. Once the concept of nation has acquired a particularist content, those groups that succeed in identifying themselves with the nation are the true holders of power in the country. They have the power to define authoritatively what must be recognized as ‘national’ and what must be excluded from national solidarity (and the nation-state’s protection) on the ground of its ‘non-’ or ‘anti-national’ character. This changes the structure of the political process: before entering the business of normal politics, groups and interests have to prove their ‘national reliability’. Thus, the political process is biased in favour of those groups, classes and elites who can credibly claim to embody the nation, or at least to be closer to its spiritual essence than are other social groups whose membership depends on different kinds of links, such as those based on labour (for instance trade unions) or spiritual bonds (for instance Catholics). If the idea of the nation is no longer universalist and no longer implies the project of social co-operation between diverse social, religious and ethnic groups, any group that lays claim to the loyalty of its members appears as a competitor, or even as a serious threat to the existence of the nation-state. The distortion of the concept of nation in the development of the German Empire and the quest for ethno-cultural homogenization is surprising, as, ever since the Middle Ages, geographical, religious and socio-economic fragmentation has been a constant in German society. Moreover, since Prussia was the hegemonic power in the Empire and had a record of having a universalist state ethos, it is even more difficult to understand this development. I do not intend to analyse that striking contrast in this chapter. Obviously, the trauma of territorial, religious and political splintering created a more or less conscious longing for social homogenization among large segments of the German population. This desire in turn entailed the suppression of the tradition of diversity, heterogeneity, fragmentation and sociological openness in German society and hence gave way to the high degree of authoritarian rule characteristic of both the Wilhelmine Empire and the so-called Third Reich.
Ulrich K. Preuß 35
Conclusion When we examine the concept of citizenship, we should be aware that we are dealing with a plurality of dimensions, each of which has a different significance in different contexts. It seems appropriate to distinguish between: 1. citizenship as a legal status; 2. citizenship as a passive status in the polity, that is, as subjecthood; this is a constituent status in the process of consolidation of statehood against the ‘estatist’ order; 3. citizenship as nationality; 4. citizenship as an active status in the polity, that is, as a participant in the formation of the political will of the polity; 5. citizenship as an identity-engendering status; 6. citizenship as a socio-economic and industrial status; 7. citizenship as a cultural status. With the exception of (1), all of these dimensions are closely related to the evolution of statehood in Germany and to the particular connection between statehood and nationhood. This is why we are justified in speaking of the German concept of citizenship. However, this is not a reference to the familiar hypothesis of a special German path to liberal democracy (the so-called Sonderwegthese). This theory is exposed to serious criticisms because it presupposes a fixed and universally valid developmental pattern that serves as a standard against which deviations are measured. Even a cursory consideration of the processes of state formation and nationbuilding in Europe reveals that there have been as many paths to liberal democracy as there are countries. Each of them has developed in a particular manner and through particular stages. Hence, there is also a particular German path to a modern polity; this path has evoked a particular concept of citizenship, which is characterized by the following properties: 1. the conceptual differentiation between nationality and citizenship (Staatsangehörigkeit und Bürgerstatus); 2. the differentiation between Staatsangehörigkeit and Volksangehörigkeit (‘belonging to the state’ vs ‘belonging to the folk’ = a person of German ethnic origin, cf. Article 116, Basic Law); 3. as a consequence, there is only a loose connection between the concept of the nation-state and German citizenship (‘Germany’ is not a [German] nation-state);
36 Citizenship and the German Nation
4. an oscillation between an extremely particularistic, ethno-cultural, and an extremely universalist, cosmopolitan, understanding of citizenship (German of ethnic origin, that is völkisch definition vs constitutional patriotism [Verfassungspatriotismus]); 5. the dissociation of the idea of freedom from the claim to free participation in the exercise of popular sovereignty (the separation of Rechtsstaat and democracy); 6. a more corporate—rather than individualistic—understanding of freedom. The basic historical legacy of the German concept of citizenship is undoubtedly the potential duality of relationships of belonging. The ‘German citizen’ can be defined either as ‘belonging’ to—in the sense of being a constituent part of—the German ethno-cultural community distributed across a plurality of German states, or as being a subject and an active political member of a, not the, German state. Obviously these dual attachments may entail emotional dissonances and even conflicts of loyalty, as in fact occurred in the post-Second World War Germanies again and again; each of the two German states demanded a monopoly on their respective subject’s/citizen’s loyalty, and at times even the loyalty of the subjects/citizens of the other state. Individuals who, acting out of a sense of German patriotism, tried to maintain the idea of one German nation divided into two separate and hostile states were prone to being treated as traitors in one, or sometimes even both, of them. But there is not only the incongruity of the German ethnic nation and the German state nation (Volksnation and Staatsnation). The evolution of German statehood in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation also had important effects on the substantive conception of membership. The princes of the territorial states in the Empire were attached simultaneously to imperial estates. While they established their sovereign authority over the society within their territories, they claimed at the same time rights within the constitutional structure of the Empire, that is, vis-à-vis the Emperor. This dual role was conceptualized in the notion of Libertät (Krieger, 1957, p. 6 ff.), a kind of aristocratic liberty that included the right of the feudal lord to represent the incorporated society as a whole and that became the legal entitlement for the princes’ establishment of their sovereign power over society. According to Krieger, this ‘internal connection . . . between the governing rights of the princes and the representative rights of the people was the first link in the development which was to associate freedom with the very authority of the state in Germany’ (ibid., p. 6).
Ulrich K. Preuß 37
The consolidation of internal sovereignty in the German territorial states was not paralleled by the development of a distinct social sphere comprising individualized subjects who can guarantee a truly autonomous social sphere. The corporatist character of German society prevailed, and it was represented by the sovereign prince in his capacity as an estatist lord. Thus, at the turn of the nineteenth century the term Bürgertum became tantamount to bürgerliche Gesellschaft, and, contrary to Hegel’s and our (present) understanding, it became a synonym for the state (Riedel, 1972, pp. 713–14). The society was conceptualized as a union of state and estate. Although the estatist elements of the German society had been weakened after the Prussian reforms of the first decade of the nineteenth century, the idea of the Bürger was rarely understood as a political concept. The Bürger was predominantly defined as a social category. For instance, the Brockhaus encyclopaedia of 1827 defined the Bürgerstand (bourgeoisie) as ‘a class which encompasses all free persons who cannot be subsumed under either the nobility or the peasantry . . .’. Ludwig von Stein and Karl Marx, the most clear-sighted social analysts of the emerging German bourgeois society of the mid-nineteenth century, also understood the citizen as the dominant class of the emerging market society rather than as a universal category that embodied the essential political spirit of civil society. Even after 1850—when the revolution of 1848 had placed constitutional democracy, in which the citizen played the key role, on the historical agenda—the tension between the two dimensions continued. The notion of citizen shifted between the conception of citizenship as a particularist social class (which was distinct from the nobility, on the one hand, and the petty bourgeoisie and the peasant, on the other) and the universalist conception of the Staatsbürger (citizen, citoyen). The two meanings were connected with each other through the census suffrage. However, the understanding of citizenship as a social status clearly prevailed. Lassalle was a rare and prominent exception when he asserted: ‘We all are citizens, the petty bourgeois, the grand bourgeois, the workers . . .’ (quoted in Riedel, 1972, p. 722). The shifting of the political dimension of citizenship into the area of the social has remained a characteristic feature of the German concept of citizenship. Bismarck’s constitution of the Reich introduced universal male suffrage for the Imperial Diet (Reichstag) in Germany, but since the Reichstag possessed only limited political authority—in particular, the government did not depend upon the confidence and the support of the Reichstag—this innovation was not tantamount to democracy. Universal male suffrage in the Reichstag did not, as Lassalle had envisioned, turn
38 Citizenship and the German Nation
the proletariat into citizens. And yet, it is hardly an overstatement to maintain that the Bismarck Reich had a huge impact on the German concept of citizenship. It established an unprecedented system of social protection for the working classes against the hazards of the capitalist market. Protection of (blue-collar) workers8 against the economic consequences of old age, invalidity and illness was founded on the principle of social solidarity not only among the working class, but also between them and the employers who had to contribute to the costs of this scheme. This new system replaced the traditional forms of worker cooperatives, which had been developed in opposition to the bourgeois society and the authoritarian bourgeois state. It was administered through public corporations governed by boards on which employers and workers were represented in equal proportion. As public institutions, the boards were attached to the state and offered a kind of representation of the lifeworld and the existential interests of the workers as a social class. The boards could be regarded as a modern version of estatist representation and indeed many conservatives saw them as an adequate substitute for the incomplete political emancipation of the inferior classes. In any case, the Imperial social security system, founded in 1883 and steadily developed both quantitatively and qualitatively until today,9 has extended the field of citizenship into the sphere of the individual’s socio-economic status. Two aspects of this social citizenship should be noted. First, the beneficiaries of the various social insurance schemes are members of the relevant public corporations and form the electorate that selects the members of the boards. In other words, they are not conceived as mere passive recipients of welfare benefits, but as active ‘social citizens’ of a significant branch of public authority. However, we cannot overlook that this dimension of social citizenship has remained quite underdeveloped; the turnout amongst social security voters has always been very low, and the delegates of the unions dominate the boards. Social bureaucracy and social corporatism have become characteristic of what originally was devised as a system of social self-government. Second, and most important, this development reflects the shift of the idea of freedom from the political into the social sphere. To have a ‘normal’ status in society means to be incorporated into the social security system, which has become evermore inclusive since its establishment and which now also comprises considerable segments of the self-employed population. The indirect connection of the public social security corporations with the state linked the socio-economic status of their members
Ulrich K. Preuß 39
to the political sphere, while at the same time moving the idea of the citizens’ political status, in particular the idea of political freedom, into the domain of corporatist representation. Important public institutions such as the public television networks, the main Christian Churches and the large number of professional chambers are viewed as corporate embodiments of, respectively, the communicative, religious and vocational freedoms of their clients or members. Obviously, this scenario is a late echo of the old German Libertät mentioned above, which unites the idea of freedom with the concept of public authority. Not surprisingly, the idea that the citizen is not a constituent part of a unitary and homogeneous sovereign imposing its will upon society, but is represented by a particular corporation that shapes political decisions through negotiations with the other corporate actors, is a characteristic attribute of this closeness of the political and the social dimensions of citizenship. There is, moreover, a further German particularity of citizenship that has not yet been mentioned and which certainly merits a thorough inquiry. This is the role of the religious denominational cleavages in German society. Among all of the European states, Germany is the least homogeneous in its denominational composition. It is the only European nation-state in which the Christian population—amounting to about 90 per cent until the 1950s and about 80 per cent at present— is almost evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants. In the nineteenth century this division was an attribute of Prussia due to its heterogeneous territorial set-up, while the southern German states were almost completely Catholic, and the northern states Protestant. Given the close state–church relationship characteristic of the German states since the Augsburg Peace Treaty of 1555, the problem of the parity of Christian denominations (see Huber, 1967, p. 388 ff.) and of civic equality irrespective of an individual’s faith became an essential element of the German concept of citizenship. Hence, the constitutional guarantee that the enjoyment of civil and political rights and the eligibility for public office shall be independent of religious denomination 10 is a constant element of German constitutional history and of German citizenship in particular. The state’s denominational neutrality did not translate into religious neutrality and non-identification. Until 1919, the Constitution did not prevent the state from discriminating against non-Christians, especially Jews and atheists. Still, the principle of denominational parity and the necessity to recognize a certain degree of religious heterogeneity contributed to the overall fragmentation characteristic of the German polity. Federalism, denominational parity and corporatist representation are
40 Citizenship and the German Nation
institutional responses to the challenges of both territorial plurality and the incongruity between statehood and nationhood, to confessional heterogeneity and to socio-economic divisions. Together, they have shaped German citizenship as an institution that is deeply embedded in the non-political intermediary spheres of economy and society, of culture and religion, and which therefore can hardly be expressed in a single concept. Ironically, the Germans have achieved the congruity of statehood and nationhood, that is, the single German nation-state, for the first time in their history at a moment when the principle of nation-statehood has lost its pre-eminence for both the internal order of modern societies and the international order. Modern German history is a continuous process of constitutional, political, religious and social fragmentation, and this long-lasting and often painful experience has finally taught the Germans to achieve political maturity by accepting and productively coping with the non-existence of a consolidated German nation-state. It is no accident that the concept of constitutional patriotism originated in the German political thought of the second half of the eighteenth century, when intellectuals had to give up their hope for a ‘German fatherland’ as a political entity (Sternberger, 1982). Today, at the beginning of a post-national era, constitutional patriotism has again become a popular political philosophy in Germany (Habermas, 1992, p. 495 ff.). However, this time it is not the product of political despondency, but of an attitude of openness towards the multiplicity of political identities and the demand for multiple commitments and loyalties. A fresh look at the historical predicaments of Germany may well corroborate the similarities between the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation after 1648 and the contemporary European Union (Evers, 1994), providing the Germans with an exciting sensation of déjà vu.
Notes 1. The distinction between the top–bottom and inside–outside dimensions of the concept of nation is developed in Koselleck, 1992, p. 145 ff. For a more differentiated taxonomy of citizenship, see Everson and Preuß, 1995, p. 52 ff. 2. Interestingly, important German encyclopedias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lack the term ‘Nation’ and instead deal with this concept under the entry ‘Volk’. See, for example, Das Staatslexikon (1845 ff.) and Brunner, Conze and Koselleck (1972 ff.). 3. After the dissolution of the Empire in August 1806 a few former imperial cities (Augsburg, Bremen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Lübeck and Nürnberg) maintained their status as city republics, but not all urban residents had legal status as citizens.
Ulrich K. Preuß 41 4. The English term ‘nationality’ is misleading since it suggests the existence of a nation. The German term ‘Staatsangehörigkeit’ is different from the concept which in the Anglo-American theory is named citizenship and which refers to the political status of a person within the polity. Staatsangehörigkeit literally means ‘belonging to the state’; it refers to statehood, particularly to the last of its three elements, territory, supreme power and subjects. Hence, a ‘Staatsangehöriger’ is not necessarily the subject of a nation-state, but of any kind of state. There is no distinct English term for the German ‘Staatsangehörigkeit’, but it seems that ‘national’ and ‘nationality’ are more appropriate translations than ‘citizen’ and ‘citizenship’; cf. Lang, 1990, pp. 23–4; Gosewinkel, 1998, p. 124. 5. It is a matter of legal debate whether nationality is a status or a legal relationship; cf. Lang, 1990, p. 24 ff. (with further references); I leave this question aside because it is insignificant in the context of this chapter. 6. See the detailed enumeration in Grawert, 1973, pp. 172–3. 7. Grawert, 1973, p. 194 (with detailed references to the sources). 8. White-collar workers were included from 1913 onwards. Unemployment insurance for both groups was introduced in 1927. 9. The most recent step has been the introduction of a new type of old-age nursing insurance in 1995. 10. Article 146, Imperial Constitution of 1849 (not enacted); Article 12, Prussian Constitution of 1850; Article 136, paragraph 2, Weimar Constitution of 1919; Article 33, paragraph 3, Basic Law of 1949.
Bibliography Anderson, B. (1991), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso). Aretin, K. Otmar Frh. von (1967), Heiliges Römisches Reich 1776 bis 1806: Reichsverfassung und Staatssouveränität, Zwei Bände (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner). Aretin, K. Otmar Frh. von (1985), ‘Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation’, in O. Büsch and J. J. Sheehan (eds), Die Rolle der Nation in der deutschen Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag), pp. 73–83. Brubaker, W. R. (1992), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press). Brunner, O. (1965), Land und Herrschaft: Grundlagen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter, 5th edn (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft). Brunner, O., W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds) (1972 ff.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta). Coing, H. (1985), Europäisches Privatrecht, Vol. 1: Älteres Gemeines Recht (1500–1800) (München: C. H. Beck). Conrad, H. (1965), Das ALR von 1794 als Grundgesetz des friderizianischen Staate (Berlin: de Gruyter). Conrad, H. (1971), Staatsgedanke und Staatspraxis des aufgeklärten Absolutismus (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag).
42 Citizenship and the German Nation Conze, W. (1963), Die deutsche Nation: Ergebnis der Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Conze, W. (1985), ‘ “Deutschland” und “deutsche Nation” als historische Begriffe’, in O. Büsch and J. J. Sheehan (eds) Die Rolle der Nation in der deutschen Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag), pp. 21–38. Dann, O. (1994), Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland 1770–1990, 2nd edn (München: Beck). Duggan, L. G. (1974), ‘The Church as an Institution of the Reich’, in J. A. Vann and S. Rowan (eds), The Old Reich: Essays on German Political Institutions 1495–1806 (Brussels: Les Editions de la Librairie Encyclopédique), pp. 149–64. Ebel, W. (1958), Der Bürgereid als Geltungsgrund und Gestaltungsprinzip des deutschen mittelalterlichen Stadtrechts (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf). Evers, T. (1994), ‘Supranationale Staatlichkeit am Beispiel der Europäischen Union: Civitas civitatum oder Monstrum?’, Leviathan, Vol. XXII, No. 1, pp. 115–34. Everson, M. and U. K. Preuß (1995), ‘Concepts, Foundations, and Limits of European Citizenship’, Discussion Paper (Bremen: Zentrum für Europäische Rechtspolitik an der Universität Bremen). Finer, S. E. (1975), ‘State- and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military’, in C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 84–163. Finsen, F. C. (1983), Das Werden des deutschen Staatsbürgers: Studien zur bürgerlichen Ideologie unter dem Absolutismus in der zweiten des 18. und zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Kopenhagen-München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag). Friedrichs, C. R. (1986), ‘Urban Conflicts and the Imperial Constitution in Seventeenth-Century Germany’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 58, No. 4 (December, supplementary issue), pp. 98–123. Gosewinkel, D. (1998), ‘Citizenship and Nationhood: The Historical Development of the German Case’, in U. K. Preuß and F. Requejo (eds), European Citizenship, Multiculturalism, and the State (Baden-Baden: Nomos), pp. 123–33. Grawert, R. (1973), Staat und Staatsangehörigkeit: Verfassungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Entstehung der Staatsagehörigkeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot). Gross, H. (1973), Empire and Sovereignty: A History of the Public Law Literature in the Holy Roman Empire, 1599–1804 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Gross, H. (1974), ‘The Holy Roman Empire in Modern Times: Constitutional Reality and Legal Theory’, in J. A. Vann and S. Rowan (eds), The Old Reich: Essays on German Political Institutions 1495–1806 (Brussels: Les Editions de la Librairie Encyclopédique), pp. 1–29. Habermas, J. (1992), Faktizität und Geltung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Hauser, O. (1972), ‘Zum Problem der Nationalisierung Preußens’, in E.-W. Böckenförde (ed.), Modernd deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte (1815–1918) (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch), pp. 95–105. Hegel, G. W. F. (1971 [1800–1802]), ‘Die Verfassung Deutschlands’, in K. M. Michel (ed.), Werkausgabe, Vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), pp. 451–610. Henderson, W. O. (1981 [1968]), ‘Prussia and the Founding of the German Zollverein’, in O. Büsch and W. Neugebauer (eds), Moderne Preußische Geschichte 1648–1947 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), pp. 1088–99. Hobbes, T. (1991 [1658/1642]), Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive), ed. B. Girt (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company).
Ulrich K. Preuß 43 Hoffmann, L. (1986), ‘Die nichtdeutschen Minderheiten im deutschen Nationalstaat’, in H. Daheim (ed.), Heute Ausländer—morgen Deutsche? (Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld), pp. 69–85. Huber, E. R. (1967), Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789, Bd. I: Reform und Restauration 1789 bis 1830, 2nd edn (Aufl. Stuttgart/Berlin etc.: Kohlhammer). Huber, E. R. (1969), Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789, Bd. IV: Struktur und Krisen des Kaiserreichs (Stuttgart/Berlin etc.: Kohlhammer). Huber, E. R. (1970), Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789, Bd. III: Bismarck und das Reich, 2nd edn (Aufl. Stuttgart/Berlin etc.: Kohlhammer). Isenmann, E. (1979), ‘Reichsstadt und Reich an der Wende vom späten Mittelalter zur frühen Neuzeit’, in J. Engel (ed.), Mittel und Wege früher Verfassungspolitik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), pp. 9–223. Isenmann, E. (1986), ‘Reichsrecht und Reichsverfassung in Konsilien reichsstädtischer Juristen (15.-17. Jahrhundert)’, in R. Schnur (ed.), Die Rolle der Juristen bei der Entstehung des modernen Staates (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot), pp. 545–628. Kant, I. (1977 [1793]), ‘Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis’, in W. Weischedel (ed.), Werkausgabe, Bd. XI (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), pp. 125–72. Köbler, G. (1965), Civis und ius civile im deutschen Frühmmittelalter, Diss.jur, University of Göttingen, unpublished. Koselleck, R. (1967), Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution (Stuttgart: Klett). Koselleck, R. (1981), ‘Staat und Gesellschaft im preußischen Vormärz’, in O. Büsch and W. Neugebauer (eds), Moderne Preußische Geschichte 1648–1947 (Berlin/ New York: de Gruyter), pp. 378–415. Koselleck, R. (1992), ‘Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse’, entry in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Bd. VII (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), pp. 142–51, 380–431. Krieger, L. (1957), The German Idea of Freedom (Boston: Beacon Press). Kroeschell, K. A. (1971), ‘Bürger’, in A. Erler and E. Kaufmann (eds), Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte [HRG], Vol. I (Berlin: Schmidt), pp. 543–53. Krüger, H. (1964), Allgemeine Staatslehre (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). Lang, M. (1990), Grundkonzeption und Entwicklung des deutschen Staatsangehörigkeitsrechts (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Standesamtswesen). Leibholz, G. (1958), Volk, Nation und Staat im 20. Jahrhundert (Hannover: Landeszentrale für Heimatdienst in Niedersachsen). Lutz, H. (1985), Zwischen Habsburg und Preußen: Deutschland 1815–1866 (Berlin: Siedler). Marshall, T. H. (1964), Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (New York: Doubleday). Meier, U. (1994), Mensch und Bürger (München: Oldenbourg). Meinecke, F. (1908), Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates (München und Berlin: R. Oldenbourg). Meinecke, F. (1981 [1906]), ‘Preußen und Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert’, in O. Büsch and W. Neugebauer (eds), Moderne Preußische Geschichte 1648–1947 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter), pp. 1517–29. Moeller, B. (1972), Imperial Cities and the Reformation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press). Möller, H. (1989), Fürstenstaat oder Bürgernation: Deutschland 1763–1815 (Berlin: Siedler).
44 Citizenship and the German Nation Mommsen, W. J. (ed.) (1979), Stadtbürgertum und Adel in der Reformation (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta). Moraw, P. (1994), ‘Cities and Citizenry as Factors of State Formation in the Roman-German Empire of the Late Middle Ages’, in C. Tilly and W. P. Blocimans (eds), Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, AD 1000 to 1800 (Boulder, CO: Westview), pp. 100–27. Münkler, H. (1994), ‘Die Nation als Modell politischer Ordnung’, Staatswissenschaften und Staatspraxis, Vol. 5, pp. 367–92. Münkler, H. and B. Ladwig (1997), ‘Dimensionen der Fremdheit’, in H. Münkler and B. Ladwig (eds), Furcht und Faszination: Facetten der Fremdheit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag). Poggi, G. (1990), The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Preuß, U. K. (1996), ‘Two Challenges to European Citizenship’, Political Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 534–52. Pufendorf, S. (1991 [1673]), On the Duty of Man and Citizen, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Riedel, M. (1972), ‘Bürger, Staatsbürger, Bürgertum’, entry in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Bd. I (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), pp. 672–725. Riesenberg, P. (1992), Citizenship in the Western Tradition: Plato to Rousseau (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press). Schieder, T. (1992), Das Deutsche Kaiserreich von 1871 als Nationalstaat, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). Schieder, T. and E. Deuerlein (eds) (1970), Reichsgründung 1870/71: Tatsachen, Kontroversen, Interpretationen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta). Schiller, F. (1964), Sämtliche Werke, eds G. Fricke and H. G. Göpfert (München: Hanser). Schmidt, G. (1982), ‘Reichsstadt und Territorialstaat’, in Esslinger Studien, No. 21, pp. 71–104. Schmitt, C. (1976 [1927/1932]), The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Schönemann, B. (1992), ‘Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse’, entry in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Bd. VII (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), pp. 281–380. Sheehan, J. J. (1985), ‘The Problem of the Nation in German History’, in O. Büsch and J. J. Sheehan (eds), Die Rolle der Nation in der deutschen Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag), pp. 3–20. Staatslexikon, Das: Enzyklopädie der sämmtlichen Staatswissenschaften für alle Stände (1845 ff.), eds Carl v. Rotteck and C. Welcker (Altona: J. F. Hammerich). Sternberger, D. (1982), Verfassungspatriotismus (Hannover: Niedersächische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung). Stolleis, M. (1981), ‘Untertan—Bürger—Staatsbürger: Bemerkungen zur juristischen Terminologie im späten 18. Jahrhundert’, in R. Vierhaus (ed.), Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Heidelberg: Schneider), pp. 65–99. Vierhaus, R. (1991), Germany in the Age of Absolutism, trans. J. B. Knudsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Ulrich K. Preuß 45 Weber, M. (1978), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds G. Roth and C. Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press). Wehler, H.-U. (1979), ‘Polenpolitik im Deutschen Kaiserreich’, in H.-U. Wehler, Krisenherde des Kaiserreichs 1871–1918, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), pp. 184–202. Weinacht, P.-L. (1969), ‘ “Staatsbürger”: Zur Geschichte und Kritik eines politischen Begriffes’, Der Staat, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 41–63. Weis, E. (1986), ‘Enlightenment and Absolutism in the Holy Roman Empire: Thoughts on Enlightened Absolutism in Germany’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 58, No. 4 (December, supplementary issue), pp. 181–97. Wiessner, S. (1989), Die Funktion der Staatsangehörigkeit: Eine historischrechtsvergleichende Analyse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rechtsordnungen der USA, der UdSSR und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Tübingen: Attempto-Verlag).
2 Republican Citizenship and the Crisis of Integration in France Cécile Laborde
Introduction Even the most cursory survey of the literature on French citizenship presents the reader, accustomed to the categories of Anglo-American political philosophy, with a paradox. In some respects, the dominant understanding of citizenship in France seems to encapsulate the values of Enlightenment-influenced liberalism: a strong emphasis on individual autonomy at the expense of community attachments, the justification of political authority by reference to universalist principles, and an insistence on the separation between the public and the private spheres of human life. In other respects, however, the French approach to citizenship reflects distinctively communitarian concerns, emphasizing the importance of a clearly bounded, homogeneous citizenry, the need to foster civic virtues, and a particularist commitment to distinctive national traditions. While this paradox is testimony to the fact that neat philosophical categories are often ill-equipped to capture the complexity of actual understandings of citizenship in particular contexts, it also illustrates the theoretical impasse that the debate between liberals and communitarians has reached. In France, both popular and academic accounts of the nature and significance of citizenship are (more or less consciously) articulated as republican syntheses between ‘liberal’ and ‘civic’ insights. This ‘civic–liberal’ synthesis, which took shape under the Third Republic and was revived, in a modified form, in the 1980s, as a discourse of ‘national integration’, has in the last two decades come under growing strain. As a result, this chapter will argue that the normative force of republicanism, its capacity of holding together the ‘liberal’ and the ‘civic’ components of citizenship, has been somewhat lessened. The chapter’s organization is broadly chronological: the first section clarifies 46
Cécile Laborde 47
the meaning of the civic–liberal heritage of citizenship, as it has been formulated in the course of French history, and the second focuses on recent reformulations of the ideal of civic–liberal citizenship.
The civic–liberal heritage of citizenship A historically sedimented model Of the defining moments in the emergence of French civic–liberal citizenship, the revolution of 1789 is the most important. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen symbolized its individualistic, universalist ambition; the transfer of sovereignty from the monarch to the people established the principle of national, popular democracy; the commitment to formal equality between citizens broke with the ancien régime’s particularist, hierarchical and corporate social order; and the belief in the central role of reason in politics testified to an Enlightenment-influenced, progressive belief in state-promoted perfectionism (Baker, Lucas and Furet, 1987; Gauchet, 1989; Rosanvallon, 1992; Fitzsimmons, 1994; Fontana, 1994; Nicolet, 1994). While republican citizenship was explicitly articulated in stark opposition to the ancien régime it also, interestingly, inherited two features of the political culture shared by the absolute monarchy and the Catholic Church: a view of power as flowing downward from one central source, and a distrust of the centrifugal proclivities of social and moral pluralism—both of which often sat uneasily with the liberal spirit of the revolution ( Jaume, 1989). In the nineteenth century, the 1848 revolution and the experience of the Second Empire contributed to the modernization of republican ideology, reinforcing its anti-authoritarian, participatory and solidaristic commitments (Furet, 1986; Rosanvallon, 1992, pp. 253–305; Nord, 1995; Pilbeam, 1995; Hazareesingh, 1998, Ch. 4). It was under the Third Republic that republicanism reached its apogee. The regime engaged in an ambitious programme of nation-building that was designed to transform ‘peasants into Frenchmen’ through cultural uniformalization and the diffusion of the values of egalitarian, democratic, patriotic citizenship (Weber, 1976; Gellner, 1983). The secularization of education and the separation of church and state reflected republican hostility to the public role of Catholicism. The Dreyfus Affair graphically confirmed the republican commitment to entrenching the equal rights of political citizenship, rather than race or ethnicity, as the defining condition of membership in the national community. What are, then, the distinctive features of the French republican conception of citizenship, as it eventually crystallized at the turn of the
48 Republican Citizenship in France
twentieth century? Its central characteristic is that it privileges the nation-state and its direct relationship to citizens, founded on principles of equality and universality. In the public sphere, which takes precedence over the private realm of particularist interests and allegiances, individuals are treated as rational, free and equal citizens engaged in the collective definition of the general interest. Such features do not lend themselves to an easy categorization of the French conception as either liberal or communitarian. It shares with liberal conceptions of citizenship a concern for the separation of the public and private spheres and for universalist inclusiveness, but in its emphasis on the foundational nature of a bounded political order and on the importance of collective self-government, it articulates central civic–communitarian commitments. Only a more fine-tuned analysis will allow us to grasp the distinctive republican contribution to the theory of citizenship. The French ‘civic–liberal’ model of citizenship operates a complex synthesis between classical civic humanist and modern liberal concerns. This synthesis is predicated on three sets of conceptual connections: between liberty and the state, between citizenship and autonomy, and between nation and universalism. Liberty and the state The first and most distinctive feature of the republican model of citizenship is the tight connection it establishes between liberty and the state. Historically, the state played a central role in the transition from the feudal to the modern age. The absolutist state was famously credited by Tocqueville with having freed individuals from the grip of particularist, feudal attachments, and with having been an agent of equality against aristocratic privilege (Tocqueville, 1952). The 1789 revolution, which destroyed intermediary groups such as occupational guilds, completed this century-long process. The French state was established as the chief organizing force of the ‘atomised society’ (Rosanvallon, 1990). Aware as French republicans were of the threat that state authoritarianism posed to individual liberties, they did not consider it a paradox that, historically, liberal individualism had been nurtured by the state, to the point that, as Emile Durkheim put it, ‘the stronger the state, the more respected the individual’ (Durkheim, 1957, p. 52, cf. p. 72). It was misleading, therefore, to see rights as held exclusively ‘against’ the state. Rousseau’s gloss on social contract theory had suggested that the passage from the state of nature to the civil state produced a ‘very remarkable change in man’, substituting for ‘natural liberty’, motivated only by force and appetite, a more moral, other-regarding ‘civil liberty’ (Rousseau, 1987, p. 102).
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Although French republicans were broadly committed to the ‘sacred’ value of the individual rights entrenched in the Declaration of 1789, they generally opined that subjective rights could be objectively realized only within the legal order of the state, which was ‘the institutional form of the liberty of the citizen’ (Magnette, 1996, p. 671). This was the case, however, only if the state was the expression of the democratically expressed collective will of the citizenry. Popular sovereignty and individual liberty were tightly connected: participation rights—rights to contribute to the elaboration of the laws of the state—were essential as a guarantee of ‘negative’ rights and liberties (Ferry and Renaut, 1985; Mesure and Renaut, 1999). Education occupies a centrally important place in the process through which the republican state produces an alert citizenry, conscious of its rights, able to exercise them responsibly, and apt to defend them. Civic virtue, thus defined, is not a product of a wholesome process of moral regeneration (as dreamt, and partially attempted, by the Jacobins under the Terror) but, rather, is entrusted to the development of the powers of individual reason (Nicolet, 1994, p. 483). There is, therefore, no paradox of education in French republican doctrine: citizens are ‘forced to be free’ only to the extent that it is essential, for the sake of freedom itself, that they develop the means of their freedom. They become citizens not through moral indoctrination but through rational persuasion (Deloye, 1994). Citizenship and autonomy The second distinctive feature of the French republican model is its picture of the ideal citizen as a self-determining, rational and autonomous human being. Citizenship as it was understood from 1789 onwards was not a merely legal status but, rather, both an instrument and a symbol of moral ennobling. Citizenship consecrated the human capacity for freedom—its ability to overcome all obstacles to the expression of the autonomous will. The attribution of citizenship, therefore, was conceived as a process of individual emancipation from traditional, oppressive and obscurantist institutions. Of these, the Catholic Church was the most prominent, and republican citizenship was primarily understood as an instrument of emancipation from religious dogmatism. As the ability to use reason was a universal attribute, there should be no a priori limits to the scope of the citizenry. Republican citizenship captured the universalist intuition that all individuals were sources of equal moral worth, regardless of their contingent features and affiliations. Equality of all before the law was therefore substituted for the mosaic of differentiated statuses
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inherited from medieval society. Such an individualistic and egalitarian conception of citizenship appears clearly in Clermont-Tonnerre’s famous defence of the attribution of citizenship to Jews: ‘Jews . . . must be refused everything as a nation, and granted everything as individuals’ (quoted in Rosanvallon, 1992, p. 76). In a society where the rights and duties of individuals were defined by their social position, the concept of the abstract individual was no benign or mystifying abstraction: it had deeply subversive, or at any rate liberating, effects. The republican conception of citizenship opened up genuine opportunities for social promotion for members of disadvantaged groups through meritocratic, egalitarian institutions such as state schools. Closer analysis of the republican ideal of the autonomous and selfdetermining individual as the bearer of the rights of citizenship, however, reveals a number of fault lines and ambiguities. There were intrinsic limits both to the egalitarian and to the emancipatory potential of the discourse of citizenship. First, the emphasis on rational autonomy as the criterion of citizenship could be used to exclude those deemed to lack autonomy (often conflated with intellectual competence or financial independence). Such a capacitaire, elitist understanding of citizenship served to justify the exclusion of individuals judged to be dependent on the will of others, on the dictates of nature, or on the scriptures of tradition or religion. These, at various times, comprised the poor, domestic servants, members of religious orders and colonial subjects. Most glaring was the century-long gap between the radical proclamation of ‘universal’ suffrage in 1848, which discreetly omitted half of the electorate, and the belated granting of voting rights to women in 1944 (Rosanvallon, 1992, pp. 139–45, 393–412; Scott, 1996). Second, and connected to the first point, the emphasis on rational autonomy as the criterion of citizenship set intrinsic limits on the republican emancipatory project. By focusing exclusively on ignorance and bigotry as the chief obstacles to progress, and by equating emancipation with an intellectualist revolt against tradition and religion in the name of reason, republicans tended not to see the role of economic and social oppression in structurally hampering the development of full human capacities. Their conception of social reform too often amounted to a commitment to meritocratic education, social mobility, the provision of equal opportunities, and limited measures of wealth redistribution. The dissemination of popular education tended to be hailed as the exclusive instrument of social change. Such doubts over the truly emancipatory potential of the republican conception of citizenship echo Marx’s suspicion that abstract citizenship does little to challenge the
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inequalities of capitalist society and the institution of private property, and that the separation between public and private serves only to protect ‘bourgeois man’ from the revolutionary implications of the invocation of citizenship (Marx, 1975, pp. 221–41). Republican and liberal accounts of citizenship clearly converge on this concern to circumscribe and protect a sphere of ‘private’ liberties and rights. Yet there is a sense in which republican citizenship embodies a more perfectionist conception of the good life than that propounded by those liberals for whom citizenship has an essentially protective function—that of shielding individuals from interference by the state. Many republicans endorsed a Rousseau- (and Kant-) inspired conception of rational autonomy as the capacity to formulate the general will or universal law. A strong connection is thus made between individual self-government and collective self-government, which relies on citizens’ ability to abstract from their particular circumstances, to adopt a general perspective oriented towards the pursuit of the common good. While political participation is primarily instrumental in the protection of ‘negative’ rights and liberties, it also takes on a value of its own, as citizens come to be motivated by an ideal of individual self-realization through active involvement in a self-governing community of equals. In a republic, therefore, the civic identity of individuals becomes a relatively ‘thick’ public identity that, although compatible with the pursuit of purely private concerns in the non-public sphere, is constructed expansively and carries special moral weight. As a result, private beliefs, interests and practices are formally excluded from the public sphere—which, notably, includes state schools—and shrink to near-invisibility. The traditional republican anxiety that the republic might be corrupted by private interests, together with a long-standing worry about the disruptive social consequences of the individualisme unleashed by the revolution of 1789 and the Industrial Revolution, gave French republicans a heightened sense of the fragility of republican institutions. To ward off the dangers of excessive privatization identified by Tocqueville, citizens must feel a strong sense of membership in a political community. Nation and universalism The third distinctive feature of the French republican conception of citizenship is its centring on the nation as the relevant political community. This territorial anchoring of citizenship had its source in the simultaneous emergence of nationalism and modern democracy during the French Revolution, and it left a profound mark on republican doctrine. French civic–liberal citizenship is, paradoxically, rooted in a bounded
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universalism—whereby the nation and universal values are assumed to overlap unproblematically. Since the 1789 revolution, it has been a truism in France that the citizen is first and foremost a member of the nation. The coincidence between nationality and citizenship was formally recognized in law only in the late nineteenth century, but it could be inferred from the revolutionary definition of the nation as a self-governing political community. In the famous words of Sieyès, a nation is ‘a community of associates living under the same law and represented by the same legislature’ (Sieyès, 1995, p. 35). The transfer of sovereignty from the monarch to the nation symbolized a shift from a vertical to a horizontal principle of legitimacy. There were strong conceptual associations between the nation, popular sovereignty, the end of privilege and the rule of law. In revolutionary ideology, the nation figured as the site of practical universality. That citizenship was primarily conceived as an inclusive, universalistic political category is revealed by the rules governing the attribution of nationality. Frenchness, as the député Lamourette boldly declared in the early years of the revolution, required no other bond than ‘philosophical consanguinity’ (Rosanvallon, 1992, p. 74), and citizenship could therefore be generously granted to foreigners sympathetic to the revolution. A decade of war, however, convinced Napoleon and others that only biological consanguinity was a reliable indicator of political loyalty, and the Code Civil thus established descent as the foundation of nationality (ius sanguinis). However the revolutionary—and ancien régime—territorial conception of nationality (ius soli) did not fade, and reappeared in the laws of 1851 and 1889, which made it possible for individuals born of foreign parents in France to acquire French nationality. The place of ius soli in the republican theory of citizenship has often been misunderstood. Contrary to common interpretations, republicans rarely assumed that mere birth on the national soil, or a declaration of political allegiance, was sufficient (or, in the case of the latter, even necessary) to become a French national. What mattered above all was socialization into a shared culture and way of life (of which permanent residence was assumed to be a reliable indicator) (Weil, 1991, p. 472). Renan’s seminal distinction between the French ‘civic nation’ (founded on a voluntaristic ‘daily plebiscite’ from its citizens) and the German ‘ethnic nation’ (based on inherited characteristics) was essentially a polemical construct designed to justify French claims on Alsace–Lorraine. Renan himself conceded, in the same lecture, that the nation in France was also a ‘spiritual principle’ which connected past and present generations through shared historical memories (and amnesias) (Renan, 1992).
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He was right to point out that the French nation was founded on a form of political artificialism—it did not rely on objective characteristics such as race or language—but he was wrong to imply that it was entirely based on democratic voluntarism—the nation was in fact a collective, cultural heritage that transcended the will of any particular generation. As Brubaker neatly put it, in the French conception of the nation, political unity was constitutive, and cultural unity expressive (Brubaker, 1992, p. 10). The main difference from German conceptions was that French republicans believed in the universality of their values and in the irrelevance of ethnic difference, and therefore developed a robust belief in the virtue and efficiency of cultural assimilation. The symbolic efficiency of the capacious republican assimilatory machine—which transformed peasants into Frenchmen, and foreigners into citizens—was such that France, the biggest country of immigration in Europe, never saw itself as a country of immigration at all. Two central tenets of the republican worldview explain why republicans had few qualms about cultural assimilation, thus revealing the ultimately ‘bounded’ nature of their universalism. The first was the commitment to patriotism as a civic virtue. Republicans sought to substitute for traditional Catholic-inspired sociability a new civic identity, which would unite citizens in common love of the secular republic. The project of national integration implied the promotion of a sense of civic fraternity capable of transcending the diversity of individuals’ allegiances. Influenced partly by Rousseauian philosophy and by positivist sociology, republicans sought to establish a new ‘civic religion’, imbued with an ethically charged feeling of national belonging and a consensualist conception of democracy, complete with founding myths (Citron, 1987), rituals and festivals (Ihl, 1996), altars, martyrs, saints and priests (schoolteachers and intellectuals). State schools during the Third Republic were likened to secular churches dedicated to the diffusion of the religion of the patrie. A common language and cultural unity became central to the republican understanding of nationality (but, see Chanet, 1996; Thiesse, 1997). This stemmed from a dual awareness on the part of republicans: that a nation founded on abstract, disembodied principles of human rights would be quite unable to replicate the level of affective mobilization achieved by the hegemonic Catholic Zeitgeist (Deloye, 1994; Ihl, 1996), and that only the forcible promotion of patriotic unity could ward off the spectre of class war (Noiriel, 1986; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1988). Republican patriotism, in sum, was a powerful instrument of social cohesion. The second tenet that blinded republicans to the contradiction between democratic universalism and cultural assimilation was their belief in the
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superiority of French culture. Although this was apparent in the Third Republic’s dismissal of regional cultures as sites of obscurantism and popular religiosity, it was most spectacularly illustrated by republican colonial ideology. Since the late eighteenth century, French culture had been identified with civilization—a unitary concept that admitted no alternative referent. With the revolution emerged the idea that the Grande Nation had an obligation to bring civilization to the rest of the world. Yet French colonial practice and ideology did not exhibit the republican commitment to assimilation as much as it demonstrated its limits and ambiguities. It is in the colonies that the link between nationality and citizenship broke down most dramatically. The avowed objective of colonization was not to make citizens but, rather, to civilize subjects (who were nonetheless French nationals). Citizenship could be earned individually (for example, by those ‘deserving’, ‘acculturated’ individuals willing to renounce Muslim civil law) but was not granted en masse. There was no question of extending political rights and the full range of fundamental liberties to colonial subjects—a clear breach of republican universalism, and a no less striking limit to assimilationism (Conklin, 1997). The generous mission civilisatrice was in fact paradoxically underpinned by an implicit racialization of the categories of colonial policy, a racialization that also insidiously permeated twentieth-century immigration policy (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1988; Silverman, 1992; Colas, 2000). While there was exclusion from citizenship within the boundaries of the nation and empire, this took an even more brutal form for those outside those boundaries. The treatment of foreigners by the republic is symptomatic of the particular form of social closure constituted by citizenship. By inventing the citizen and the legally homogeneous national citizenry, the French Revolution simultaneously invented the foreigner (Brubaker, 1992). The first repressive measures against foreigners, implemented in 1793 amid a general atmosphere of paranoid xenophobia, marked the beginning of a process of political domination of and legal discrimination against foreigners, who were denied a number of basic civil rights (Lochak, 1985, 1988, 1999; Bruschi, 1987). Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, national citizenship became an increasingly regulated status, to which access was tightly controlled through the large-scale bureaucratization of identity that was characteristic of the ‘tyranny of the national’, to use Gérard Noiriel’s felicitous phrase (1991). While citizenship is undoubtedly defined by a tension between inclusion and exclusion, what characterizes the French conception is a paradoxical, almost schizophrenic, commitment to both a messianic,
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abstract universalism and a strong concept of the political community as a clearly bounded geographical and ethical space. Republican citizens are both situated and tied to a particular community and subject to universal standards of law and justice. Consequently, the discourse of citizenship can alternatively function as a discourse of boundary maintenance (when it serves to restrict citizenship status) or as a discourse of boundary subversion (when it serves to extend citizenship status). Disenfranchised groups can claim access to citizenship in the name of the universalism that originally inspired it. I have presented the republican model of citizenship as a complex, three-tier synthesis between liberal and civic–communitarian commitments. First, the republican doctrine combines a liberal concern for the primacy of rights and liberties with a civic–communitarian sensitivity to the role played by the state in nurturing the social and political environment conducive to their flourishing. Second, it articulates a liberalneutralist commitment to the non-interference of the state in individuals’ private lives with a more perfectionist emphasis on the intrinsic value of rational and democratic self-determination. Third, it attempts to combine the universalist ethics of liberalism with a civic concern for the delimitation of a space of fraternity. Furthermore, the French republican understanding of citizenship is more ‘political’ than ‘social’, and more centred on the state than on civil society. At the root of this conception lies an ambivalent attitude towards social pluralism—something to be transcended rather than accommodated. Republican thought since the revolution has tended to be permeated by a fear of pluralism, of particularism and of fragmentation (Nora, 1984, p. 653) as shown, notably, by the distrust of intermediary groups between individuals and the state, the transfer of absolute sovereignty from the monarch to the nation, a persistent conflation of diversity and inequality, a conception of the public sphere as the site of expression of a unitary general will rather than as a site of conflict between particular interests, and a sometimes exclusivist understanding of democracy (Rudelle, 1982; Jaume, 1989; Rosanvallon, 1992, pp. 168–71). The chronic weakness of the labour movement and of associational life generally, and the republican tendency to de-politicize, bureaucratize or moralize social problems (Donzelot, 1994) combined to give republican citizenship a limited social content. Moreover, paradoxically, the republican emphasis on the political dimension of citizenship was not necessarily translated into the provision of effective channels for citizen participation. Republican democracy uneasily alternated between, on the one hand, the Jacobin utopia of the identity of rulers and ruled and, on the other, an elitist parliamentary
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practice—both of which tended to discourage grassroots civic involvement ( Jaume, 1989). To be sure, the traditional picture of the French republic as unable to establish democratic mediations between an aloof state and uprooted, atomized individuals needs qualifying, in two respects at least. The rich culture of civic activism that was nurtured at local and associational level, mainly under the Second Empire, facilitated the entrenchment of the Third Republic (Nord, 1995; Hazareesingh, 1998), and it is mainly through their integration into the associational structures of ‘civil society’ (neighbourhoods, factories, trade unions, amicales and ligues) that individuals in effect became citizens. It remains, however, that Third Republic politicians and propagandists tended to concentrate on state education, socialization into literate urban culture and the exercise of voting rights as the main instruments of citizenship, and that this experience left a deep mark on later constructions of civic–liberal citizenship. Such a dominantly political and anti-pluralist construction of citizenship made French republicans particularly vulnerable to the ‘socialist objection’, which pointed out the centrality of class identity and class conflict to modern citizenship (Kriegel, 1998; Jallon and Mounier, 1999, pp. 105–10). It is only belatedly and with much ideological hesitancy that the republic gestured at the recognition of the political existence of ‘the world of labour’, in the form of collective social rights, certain types of occupational representation, and (limited) industrial democracy. The attempt to make republican citizenship compatible with social pluralism was frustrated and limited by the influence of universalist ideology, which decried the political recognition of social and economic identities. In the civic–liberal conception, citizenship was typically ‘imagined’ as a dialectical relationship between two poles, the state and the individual.
The revival and crisis of civic–liberal citizenship In the 1980s and 1990s, a broad consensus emerged in France about the virtues of ‘the French model of integration’ and ‘republican citizenship’. This was a surprising revival of fortune for an ideology—republicanism— that had, throughout the twentieth century, been either regarded as a venerable if unexciting relic of a bygone age, or stigmatized (in the 1960s) as an oppressive, anti-pluralist outgrowth of the ‘totalitarian’ Enlightenment. In the last two decades of the century, however, the concepts of citizenship, nationality, integration and multiculturalism became pivotal in a public discourse increasingly centred on issues of social cohesion and national identity. The ‘new politics of citizenship’
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(Feldblum, 1999) crystallized into a quasi-hegemonic public discourse. This took place in the context of the broader re-emergence of republican ideology as a central point of reference in political discourse. While the most spectacular symptom of this revival was the constitution of a ‘national–republican’ movement, both political and intellectual (Lorcerie, 1994; Leruth, 1998; Jallon and Mounier, 1999; Lacroix, 2000), a more discrete but no less significant sign of renewal was the increasing frequency with which themes such as citizenship, education, law and order, national identity and immigration were given an explicitly republican gloss by politicians, journalists and academics alike. Republicanism, two commentators recently observed, has become ‘the foundation of [the French] political epistemology’ (Jallon and Mounier, 1999, p. 64). The rest of this chapter concentrates on the official republican philosophy of citizenship, as articulated mainly by left-of-centre intellectuals. 1 It first sets out the doctrine of ‘integration’ and situates it within a ‘Durkhemian’ sociological paradigm of modernity, and then discusses the disintegration of the civic–liberal synthesis that underpinned it. Integration versus multiculturalism Debates about citizenship in the last two decades in France have centred mainly on the question of the ‘integration’ of immigrants and their children into French society. In the post-war years, immigration was the object of pragmatic socio-economic management by local and national authorities, and was not conceptually connected to national identity or citizenship. In the 1980s, however, the rising popularity of a rightist, racist party (the Front National) intent on politicizing immigration, a sense of acute economic and social malaise, heightened by mass unemployment, the perceived ‘ghettoization’ of urban suburbs, and the erosion of national sovereignty combined to place l’intégration des immigrés at the heart of public debate. Within a few years, what came to be called ‘the French republican model of citizenship’ had acquired cognitive and normative dominance. A cross-party, cross-institutional consensus took shape during the debates of the Commission de la Nationalité (a panel of ‘experts’ convened in 1987 to reform nationality laws; see Long, 1988), and was also articulated in the various reports by the Haut Conseil à l’Intégration (1991, 1995, 1997; also Brubaker, 1992, Ch. 7; Favell, 1998, Chs 3 and 5; Feldblum, 1999). It marginalized two alternative understandings of citizenship: the culturally exclusive discourse of the far right, and the multicultural and internationalist ideal of the radical left. The latter, inspired by the libertarian and anti-colonial philosophy of the 1960s, had sought to modernize republicanism by infusing it with
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a new sensitivity to cultural difference (expressed by the slogan ‘le droit à la différence’) and with a ‘post-national’ reading of citizenship (Giordan, 1982; Safran, 1984; Wieviorka, 1996; Touraine, 1997). A pluralist inflection of the civic–liberal heritage was, therefore, a genuine discursive possibility in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was the Front National appropriation of differentialist rhetoric—defending the authenticity and integrity of French ‘native’ culture against foreign influence—that radically delegitimized the philosophy and practice of multiculturalism. The republican model of integration was constructed in opposition to the unhealthy obsession with ‘race’ and ‘culture’ allegedly shared by the racist right and the anti-racist left. Both, on the republican view, were committed to a regressive ‘differentialism’ that lost sight of the ethics of universalism bequeathed by Enlightenment philosophy (Taguieff, 1987). The republican tradition of ‘national integration’ was therefore conjured up as a prophylactic against the dangers of Janus-faced ‘culturalism’. What was, then, the republican case against multiculturalism, understood as the public recognition of cultural difference (Jennings, 2000; Laborde, 2001)? Multiculturalism was presented as the latest version of the illiberal, communitarian, reactionary challenge of Romanticism against the universalist Enlightenment (Finkielkraut, 1987; Todorov, 1995). More precisely, multiculturalism undermines the four pillars of the French republican tradition: liberty, equality, fraternity and laïcité. By reducing individuals to their cultural origin, multiculturalism undermines their freedom—defined as rational self-determination through transcendence of particularist affiliations. Cultural attachments should be seen as contingent, rather than constitutive attributes of individual identity. Human dignity lies in the ever-possible emancipation of the human mind from its cultural limitations. By granting different rights to different communities, multiculturalism breaks with the central egalitarian principle proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789: namely, that individuals should be respected ‘sans distinction d’origine, de race ou de religion’. In the telling words used in an official report of the Haut Conseil à l’Intégration (1995, p. 19), ‘the French model is based on the lack of differentiation between individuals. Every human being has intrinsic worth, independently of the community to which [s]he belongs’. Multiculturalist policies would also unavoidably be divisive and undermine the civic sense of fraternity. The bond of citizenship would be eroded if society were fragmented into a multitude of identity groups seeking recognition of their difference instead of working towards the public interest. Last, multiculturalism threatens the principle of laïcité, which requires the state to be neutral towards ascribed identities as well
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as religions, lifestyles, conceptions of the good, and cultural preferences. Public neutrality, and the separation between public and private that it entails, is the precondition of both the universal access to the public sphere, and respect for differences, which must remain private. The contours were thus drawn of a ‘French model of integration’, based on ‘a logic of equality and not a logic of minorities’ (Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, 1991, p. 19). ‘Immigrants’ became ‘citizens’, to paraphrase the title of a typical work on the subject (Costa-Lascoux, 1989), through their individual ‘integration’ into the main structures of French society— state, schools, the workplace, trade unions, political parties, and so on. They were allowed to cultivate their particularism, but only on condition that this practice remained ‘private’ and did not benefit from public recognition. While this distinction between public and private was used to distinguish imperialist ‘assimilation’ from liberal ‘integration’, the importance of a public ‘common culture’ was also repeatedly emphasized. Immigrants were implicitly expected to endorse prevalent cultural norms in their ‘private’ lives: for example, sociological indicators such as falling birth rates or declining religious practice among families of immigrant origin were occasionally presented as evidence of ‘successful’ integration (Todd, 1994, p. 445 and passim). Further, in reaction against the ‘desacralization’ and instrumentalization of citizenship, high moral stakes were increasingly attached to the acquisition of French nationality. Hence the advocacy by the Commission de la Nationalité of a tightening of nationality laws. A 1993 law abolished the automatic application of ius soli and required second-generation immigrants to make a formal request for nationality upon reaching the age of 18.2 While this reform was presented as being in line with the French ‘voluntarist’ tradition (a ‘tradition’ which, as we have seen, applied in practice only to colonial subjects), it clearly set steep conditions of allegiance, and imposed heavy moral and political baggage upon would-be nationals or citizens (the two statuses were almost indistinguishable). Becoming French was a process of moral ennobling: ‘immigrants’ became ‘good citizens’ by living the life of fully autonomous actors who had broken with their ethnic origins (Favell, 1998, pp. 163–4). For its critics, such a highbrow conception of citizenship has the perverse effect of humiliating those deemed not capable of meeting its standards, and of hiding from view the real causes of the exclusion of the underclass (Khosrokhavar, 1996, p. 148). For its advocates, the republican model of integration encapsulates a progressive view of citizenship that genuinely facilitates social integration and promotion, irrespective of citizens’ ethnic
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or cultural origins. This well-entrenched belief is rooted as much in an Enlightenment-inspired moral philosophy (for which, as seen above, the categories of multiculturalism closely mirror those of the Romantic attack on abstract universalism) as in a sociological paradigm whose grip on French republican ideology is too often overlooked. A Durkheimian paradigm of integration This paradigm I call ‘Durkheimian’ both because it implicitly draws on the concepts and concerns of the late nineteenth-century sociologist Emile Durkheim, whose influence on republican ideology is unmistakable and because, in a broader sense, it reflects a number of assumptions—about universalism, ethnicity, modernity and social integration—that pertain to a distinctive Third Republic Zeitgeist. A late twentieth-century, modernized Durkheimian paradigm informs the republican approach to citizenship and integration in three different but connected ways. First, it reflects a particular understanding of progress and of modernity. Durkheim’s starting point was the declining relevance of ethnic identity in modern societies, characterized by new forms of ‘organic solidarity’ based on the division of labour. Of those highly institutionalized societies, regulated by abstract norms, the most evolved is the modern democratic nation. In the absence of an organized world society, nations, defined by the coincidence between political unity, a bounded territory and a shared culture, are best equipped to secure functional integration and rational efficiency (Schnapper, 1998, pp. 395–400). Nations, therefore, are intrinsically ‘modern’ and ‘rational’ communities, whereas ethnies are hierarchical, regressive, and tied to ‘mechanical’ forms of solidarity. This pronounced, value-laden and evolutionist contrast between nations and ethnies took a predictable Eurocentric turn when it mirrored the colonial distinction between civilized and primitive peoples. The decolonization struggles and the shift towards more critical approaches in the social sciences and philosophy hardly seem to have shaken the republican commitment to the French mission civilisatrice. The latter has been, in a sense, reinvented within the bounds of the post-colonial European nation-state (Favell, 1998, p. 60). Thus, in the French literature on integration, immigrants’ identity is invariably defined as ‘ethnic’, while ‘French’ identity is ‘national’, that is, modern and universal. Second, this is connected to a distinctive view of integration as a process of ‘acculturation to modernity’ (Schnapper, 1991, p. 171). Individuals learn to ‘privatize’ their particular cultural affiliations, acquiring the general skills that allow them to become functioning members in the public world of work, citizenship and national politics. Modern societies
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require autonomous individuals able to distance themselves from the particular bonds of ethnicity, locality and other particularist attachments. The story of integration on this view is one of autonomization, individualization and unavoidable cultural disenchantment (Lapeyronnie, 1996). It is not a two-way process, but a unilateral effort of adaptation by individuals to pre-existing social structures (‘society’ and ‘the nation’). The integration of society somehow precedes, but also in the longer term depends on, the integration of individuals to society. The pervasiveness of this paradigm has frustrated interest in alternative accounts of social integration. In the early twentieth century, for example, the Chicago School analysed ‘assimilation’ as a progressive, multi-level, transgenerational process, and described the contribution of ethnic affiliations to the emergence of modern ‘hyphenated’ identities (Cohen, 1999). More recently, post-colonial accounts of ethnicity point out that immigrants, despite being perfectly integrated into the rational system of modernity, still find themselves subjectively ‘colonized’ and ‘racialized’ by the host society. In such circumstances, the cultivation (or re-invention) of ethnic identities allows minority groups to initiate a ‘reversal of stigma’ and thereby secure the public recognition of their collective identity. On this view, ‘ethnicity’ does not denote pre-modern backwardness but is, rather, constitutive of post-modern identity. While there has undoubtedly been a growing interest in those approaches among French sociologists (Lapeyronnie, 1993; Gaspard and Khosrokhavar, 1995; Tribalat, 1995; Wieviorka, 1996; Schnapper, 1998; Cohen, 1999), they are unlikely to displace the dominant modernist paradigm, which interprets ‘integration’ as a process of individual conformity to a nationally defined system of modern values and norms. Third, this suspicion of ethnicity is heightened by another tenet of the Durkheimian worldview: its central preoccupation with the achievement of social and moral cohesion. Durkheim believed that even modern individualistic societies required a social ethos, a shared set of norms and values capable of warding off the dangers of anomie, to which they were particularly exposed. Individualism was both the sine qua non condition of modern citizenship and its ever-present pathology. The whole of Durkheim’s work can be interpreted as an attempt to identify forms of social cohesion appropriate to modern societies (Cladis, 1992). While he famously advocated strengthening intermediary groups such as occupational corporations, he also typically emphasized the role of the state in promoting social integration (Durkheim, 1957). In contemporary republican discourse the centrality of the state is evidenced in Dominique Schnapper’s (2000) definition of it as ‘the set of instruments of control
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and coercion through which the . . . integration of national society is established and sustained’. This appeal to the integrative, coercive and authoritative function of the state betrays a characteristic anxiety vis-à-vis the perceived risk of fragmentation and disintegration of contemporary French society. Contemporary republicans are in fact even more painfully aware of this risk than Durkheim was and, as a result, their gloss on the Durkheimian paradigm is distinctly more conservative than anything their inspirer would have identified himself with. Late twentieth-century republicanism is a disenchanted republicanism, which has lost faith in the Third Republic’s optimistic philosophy of progress and its sanguine belief in the project of emancipation. Consequently, there have been two major inflections to the Durkheimian paradigm. On the one hand, contemporary republicanism has toned down its universalist pretensions, and has accentuated the national dimension of citizenship in a distinctively communitarian way. On the other hand, contemporary republicanism focuses more on the pathological side of individualism than on its emancipatory dimension (contrary to Durkheim) and also worries about the resurgence of ethnic communitarianism within the nation (which Durkheim did not foresee). The following two sections account for the implosion of the civic– liberal model of citizenship that these two inflections symbolize. The nationalization of citizenship There are three chief symptoms of the increasing nationalization of citizenship in the last 20–30 years: the ‘patrimonization’ of the republican past, the valorization of the ‘national exception’ over foreign experiences, and the conflation of citizenship with the defence of national identity. Republicanism has always maintained an ambiguous relationship to history. While the 1789 revolutionaries claimed to set up an entirely new social order that took no cue from past experience (‘History is not our code’, they defiantly proclaimed), the active cultivation of national memory became a preferred way to entrench the legitimacy of the regime under the Third Republic (Ozouf, 1998). Reference to history has become omnipresent in contemporary republican discourse. The chief object of nostalgia is precisely the Third Republic, which now figures as the historical site of deployment of the ‘enabling myths’ of collective national destiny. Public debate is haunted by mythical references to the golden days of the separation between church and state, the Dreyfus affair, free and compulsory education, enlightened patriotism and the French melting pot (le creuset français). No doubt, this contributes to the consolidation of the mythe national, a state-centred, teleological, conflict-free
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historical narrative, dismissive of the alternative ‘memories’ of those who lost out in the process of secularization and Frenchification (Citron, 1987). Even more damagingly for its impact on the discourse of citizenship, this narrative is deployed at the very moment when republicanism is no longer a historical project capable of informing the present and the future. History no longer provides the keys of destiny, and has turned into memory. The only legitimate relation to the past is one of patrimonization, as in Pierre Nora’s monumental Les lieux de mémoire (1984), where the republic becomes, quite literally, a monument, halfway perhaps between a museum and a temple (Willaime, 1988; Jackson, 1999). The patrimonization of the republican past tends to anaesthetize public debate, and to foster a cult of continuity (Goldhammer, 1998, p. 38). When inscribed within a philosophy of history, the ‘republican moment’ does not underpin a tale of unending progress but, rather, is a fragile point of balance in a story of cyclical decadence. The republic refers to that precarious haven of civilization suspended between a barbaric past (ancien régime feudalism) and the threat of a no less barbaric future (prefigured by the ethnic revival in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and, above all, North America) (Jallon and Mounier, 1999, pp. 81–2). The United States, most symptomatically, represents the ‘other’ of the French model, both in time (the prospect of a frightening future) and in space (a daily physical invasion). Such valorization of the ‘national exception’ over foreign countermodels is the second facet of the nationalization of citizenship discourse in France. Foreign experiences of the management of immigration and cultural diversity are routinely presented as inverted reflections of the virtues of the French model (Todd, 1994). Thus, American multiculturalism— often interpreted through the most unappealing excesses of ‘political correctness’ (Granjon, 1994)—epitomizes the twin dangers of ‘individualism’ and ‘communitarianism’ that threaten to engulf the republican model of integration. ‘Do we want,’ prominent republicans asked in a collective letter to Le Monde in 1997, ‘a society founded on the primacy of the individual, increasingly dismissive of the state and of the nation, and attached to homogeneous groups, structured around gender, ethnicity or religion?’ (Debray et al., 1998). Other foreign counter-models are the German ‘ethnic’ conception of nationality (which denies that immigrants can ever assimilate into German culture) and non-Western religious ‘fundamentalisms’ (alleged Islamic illiberalism is routinely used as the a contrario confirmation of the universalism of the French conception of human rights). These insistent comparisons serve to emphasize and legitimize the ‘French model’ or (less confidently) the ‘French exception’
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(Bouretz, 2000). As a form of ‘naïve ethnology’ (Jallon and Mounier, 1999, p. 76) they are quite innocuous, but their repetition ad nauseam tends to infuse citizenship discourse with a narrow communitarian ethics (in the Anglo-American sense). If the just and the good are thus nationally bounded, might it not be thought that everything that is national is just and good? The third dimension of the nationalization of citizenship is precisely this tendency to adopt an expansive and ethically charged definition of French national identity. French republicans, departing from the confident universalism of democracy and human rights, have increasingly been drawn towards a defensive eulogy of the intrinsic virtues of French culture, history and ways of life (see the symptomatic evolution of Finkielkraut, 1987, 1999 and Debray, 1989a,b, 2000). French civilization is seen as besieged by an alternative universalism, epitomized by American-led economic and cultural globalization. The nation is defended as the only force able to stem the tide of global consumerism and cultural fragmentation. In this context, national citizenship becomes a ‘thick’ cultural identity, requiring, in the words of Schnapper (1998, p. 450), ‘a shared culture and singular historical memory’. The analytical distinction between the ‘nation’—a modern, universalist, democratic Gesellschaft—and the ethnie—a pre-modern, historical, cultural Gemeinschaft—loses its relevance, as integration into the nation is also integration into a specific culture—a fact recognized by Schnapper, who consistently argues that civic nations have an unavoidable ‘ethnic’ component (Schnapper, 1994). While, as we have seen, there always was a constitutive tension between universalism and particularism within the French republican theory of the nation, the balance seems recently to have tilted towards a defensive cultural nationalism. This is only one symptom of the move towards a less liberal, more conservative interpretation of the republican paradigm, which is itself a reflection of the disarticulation of the civic– liberal synthesis. The crisis of citizenship Earlier in this chapter it was suggested that the republican model of citizenship should be best understood as a complex, three-tier synthesis between liberal and civic–communitarian commitments. Today, this synthesis is disintegrating under a number of convergent pressures. First, the close interconnection between liberty and the state is put in question by the profound crisis of the state as the instituteur du social. The movement of constitutionalization and internationalization of rights has detached the latter from their traditional inscription into a
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state-promoted democratic process. The state’s capacity to give meaning and purpose to the ‘society of individuals’ has also been eroded, in no small part as a result of the growing opacity of society and the multifaceted crisis of political representation (Rosanvallon, 1998, pp. 322–34). The slow decline of the privileged loci of citizenship—parliament, schools, political parties and unions, and the military—signals a profound ‘crisis of the institutions which guaranteed the correspondence between national norms and individual motivations’ (Lapeyronnie, 1993, p. 51). More generally, Gauchet (1985, pp. 55–78) refers to the end of the convergence between ‘the exercise of personal rights and the production of collective unity through the state machine’. Second, this challenges the natural connection made by republicans between citizenship and autonomy. Individuals no longer acquire autonomy through citizenship. In lieu of the rational, autonomous, positive individualism hailed by republicans, whereby individuals realized themselves through participation in collective projects and institutions, what is emerging is an ‘individualism veering towards anomie’ (Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, 1997, p. 15). Autonomy has been achieved, not only vis-à-vis transcendental morality and archaic traditions (as republicans hoped) but also vis-à-vis national institutions and publicly defined norms. The political identity of citizenship is a marginal, sometimes even optional, identity for increasingly ‘privatized’ individuals. Further, in a context of widespread economic insecurity, the socio-economic content of citizenship has thinned out, and its attractiveness for the disenfranchised and the ‘disaffiliated’ (Paugam, 1996) considerably reduced. Third, the normative equivalence established by republicans between the nation, universalism and modernity has irremediably lost its plausibility. Of the many symptoms of the multifaceted ‘crisis of the national society’ (Lapeyronnie, 1993, Ch. 1) two stand out as profound challenges to republican citizenship: the hegemony of the new ‘universalist’ ideology of economic and cultural globalization; and the ‘ethnic revival’, the assertion of collective identities at sub-national level. The nation is no longer the vehicle for the implementation of progressive, universalist ideologies: in the aftermath of the aggiornamento of Marxism and the spectacular failure of Mitterrandian socialism, the left is bereft of grand narratives and left to mourn (or celebrate) ‘the end of the French exception’ (Furet, Julliard and Rosanvallon, 1988). Paradoxically, it is precisely at the time when the particular institutional and historical configuration which sustained republican citizenship has all but disappeared that the virtues of the latter are most vibrantly celebrated. As a result, contemporary republican discourse often takes
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the form of highly abstract and formal prescriptions, which entertain such a tenuous link with actual social practices and beliefs that they can be suspected of acting as a form of rhetorical compensation. However, although republicans recognize that republican ideals are profoundly at variance with a social reality they no longer explain or shape, republican discourse is not articulated as a normative ideal, a tool of social criticism. Rather, the norms of republican citizenship are presumed to be already embodied in the existing French law. The much-invoked ‘French model of integration’, for example, functions simultaneously as a descriptive and a normative category. The assumed convergence between abstract principles and actual law and the concomitant disregard for the impact of law on social reality (and its adequacy to it) has the effect of stifling the critical potential of the discourse of citizenship. Nor is this all. The recent endorsement of a normativist, institutionalist and legalistic approach by republican academics (Lorcerie, 1994) signals a deeper conservative turn of republican thought. Fundamentally, this is because the republican diagnosis of the current social malaise is that, of the twin ideals of civic liberalism—individual emancipation and social cohesion— the former has been achieved at the expense of the latter. State institutions need no longer strive to emancipate the individual, who is already emancipated. Rather, they should nurture feelings of community membership, and restore a social fabric badly damaged by the joint assaults of individualism (now exclusively pathological) and the rise of ethnic particularisms (Taguieff, 1996; Haut Conseil à l’Intégration, 1997). Hence the implosion of the civic–liberal synthesis. While the civic–liberal tradition, at its best, sought to place social cohesion at the service of progress, education at the service of individual emancipation, national identity at the service of social solidarity, and universalism in ethics at the service of social inclusion, now the two strands, civic and liberal, have, in a sense, diverged. This divergence is most forcefully expressed by Régis Debray’s influential, polemical and historically disingenuous contrast between (liberal) ‘democrats’ and (nationalist) ‘republicans’ (Debray, 1989b). A democrat, on his view, is committed to a bland mixture of rights-based internationalism, market economics, the self-sufficiency of civil society, European integration and multiculturalism. A republican, in turn, cultivates a nationalist interpretation of civic ideals: he (for he is the virile heir to the heroic patriotism of the soldiers of Liberty) keeps alive the ideals of the centralized state, strict egalitarianism, citizens’ devotion to the public good, respect for republican authorities and the cult of national memory. While this dichotomy broadly fits one interpretation of the
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liberal/civic republican divide as it is mapped out by Anglo-American philosophy, it is far from faithful to the complexity of the French republican heritage as I have defined it. Yet Debray’s dichotomy came to define the broad parameters of political debate in France in the 1990s. While few, in truth, would unconditionally associate themselves with the self-professed ‘national republicanism’ of Debray (2000), republican intellectuals have failed to articulate a new civic–liberal synthesis. In the meantime, they have been more inclined to side with a defensive republicanism than with a much-despised libéralisme (which, in French, stands for a combination of economic deregulation and identity politics). This inflection was very publicly demonstrated by a manifesto signed by prominent republicans, coming from both the (centrist) première gauche and the (liberal) deuxième gauche, printed in Le Monde (Debray et al., 1998). This emblematic text articulated the central concerns of the conservative politics of citizenship: a defence of the French model of integration against both asocial individualism and ethnic particularism; a repudiation of ‘foreign’ models and influences; an appeal for the restoration of the ‘republican order’ through the enforcement of basic norms of civility and co-operative behaviour, and the repressive apparatus of law; and the invocation of the ‘socializing’ role of traditional institutions such as schools. This defence of French republican values had to be complemented by the restoration of basic networks of sociability in civil society, as a prophylactic against social atomization and fragmentation. ‘“We must,” republican intellectuals wrote in nostalgic vein, “restore the long chain of citizenship whose links were, in the old days, the father, the teacher, the mayor, the lieutenant, the factory mate, the [local Communist Party] cell or trade union secretary.”’ The rhetorical inflation of the adjective citoyen (as in une action citoyenne, une entreprise citoyenne) is a sure sign of the desperation of the times. The discourse of citizenship, it seems, has become a moral placebo for the solution of intractable social problems, and republicanism a nostalgic substitute for socialism (Fitoussi and Rosanvallon, 1996, pp. 163–9).
Conclusion This chapter has argued that the French ‘civic–liberal’ synthesis—which combined individual rights and state unity, personal autonomy and civic virtue, nationalism and universalism within a distinctive republican paradigm—has undergone a process of accelerating disintegration. As long as nation-building and liberalization went hand in hand, as under the Third Republic, little tension was felt between the struggle for private
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freedom and equal rights, emancipation from traditional identities, and the embrace of a new public, national identity. The contemporary ‘crisis of integration’ partly reflects the dissolution of the social and political bases of the civic–liberal synthesis. The paradoxical response of contemporary republicans was to defiantly reassert the validity and coherence of the republican model of integration. Because they tended to blame the present crisis on the unchecked development of la société libérale—an individualistic order in which political citizenship dissolves under the combined weight of market economics and multicultural fragmentation— republicans resorted to a defensively nationalist, communitarian and conservative interpretation of the republican tradition. In the process, the liberal, universalist, progressive and critical potential of the civic–liberal synthesis was lost sight of. By suggesting that the only alternative to la société libérale is a nostalgic communitarian republicanism, French republicans, however, are making a historical mistake (they are unfaithful to their own heritage) as well as a tactical mistake. Only a modernized republicanism, capable of adapting the radical and egalitarian insights of the republican tradition to ‘post-modern’ conditions, can provide a plausible corrective to liberal citizenship—and an attractive one for the left.
Notes This research was funded by a British Academy Large Research Grant (LRG 33562) on ‘Republicanism and Multiculturalism in France’. 1. It leaves out alternative accounts of citizenship: right-wing republicanism, which endorses a less universalist and more openly ‘culturalist’ account of national identity (for example, Seguin, 1993), and a range of critical, multiculturalist, or post-national left-wing accounts (for example, Balibar, 1988; Bouamama, Cordeiro and Roux, 1992; Wieviorka, 1996; Touraine, 1997). The official account can also be profitably compared with ordinary perceptions of citizenship, as discussed in Duchesne, 1997. 2. This law was only partially overturned by the Socialist administration in 1997—a fact that reveals the extent of the cross-party consensus on these matters. Nationality is now automatically granted at the age of 18 to children born of foreign parents in France, and it can be requested by them when they reach 16.
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70 Republican Citizenship in France Fitzsimmons, M. P. (1994), The Remaking of France: The National Assembly and the Constitution of 1791 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Fontana, B. (ed.) (1994), The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Furet, F. (1986), La gauche et la révolution au milieu du XIXème siècle: Edgar Quinet et la question du Jacobinisme, 1865–1870 (Paris: Hachette). Furet, F., J. Julliard and P. Rosanvallon (1988), La République du centre: La fin de l’exception française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy). Gaspard, F. and F. Khosrokhavar (1995), Le foulard et la république (Paris: La Découverte). Gauchet, M. (1985), ‘L’école à l’école d’elle-même: Contraintes et contradictions de l’individualisme démocratique’, Le Débat, Vol. 36, pp. 55–78. Gauchet, M. (1989), La Révolution des droits de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard). Gellner, E. (1983), Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Giordan, H. (1982), Démocratie culturelle et droit à la difference (Paris: La Documentation Française). Goldhammer, A. (1998), ‘From Project to Memory: The Crisis of Republican Civic Consciousness’, French Politics and Society, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 37–45. Granjon, M. C. (1994), ‘Le regard en biais: Attitudes françaises et multiculturalisme américain’, Vingtième siècle, Vol. 43, pp. 18–29. Haut Conseil à l’Intégration (1991), Pour un modèle français d’intégration: Premier rapport annuel (Paris: Documentation Française). Haut Conseil à l’Intégration (1995), Liens culturels et intégration (Paris: Documentation Française). Haut Conseil à l’Intégration (1997), Affaiblissement du lien social, enfermement dans les particularismes et intégration dans la cité (Paris: Documentation Française). Hazareesingh, S. (1994), Political Traditions in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hazareesingh, S. (1998), From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Ihl, O. (1996), La fête républicaine (Paris: Gallimard). Jackson, J. (1999), ‘Historians and the Nation in Contemporary France’, in S. Berger, M. Donovan and K. Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London: Routledge), pp. 239–51. Jallon, H. and P. Mounier (1999), Les enragés de la République (Paris: La Découverte). Jaume, L. (1989), Le discours jacobin et la démocratie (Paris: Fayard). Jennings, J. (2000), ‘Citizenship, Republicanism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary France’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 30, pp. 575–98. Khosrokhavar, F. (1996), ‘L’universel abstrait, le politique et la construction de l’islamisme comme une forme d’altérité’, in M. Wieviorka (ed.), Une société fragmentée: Le multiculturalisme en débat (Paris: La Découverte), pp. 113–51. Kriegel, B. (1998), Philosophie de la République (Paris: Plon). Laborde, C. (2001), ‘The Culture(s) of the Republic: Nationalism and Multiculturalism in French Republican Thought’, Political Theory, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. 716–35. Laborde, C. (2002), ‘La Citoyenneté’, in C. Prochasson and V. Duclertz (eds), Dictionnaire critique de la République (Paris: Flammarion), pp. 116–23. Laborde, C. (2003), ‘Toleration and Laïcité’, in C. McKinnon and D. Castiglione (eds), The Culture of Toleration in Diverse Societies: Reasonable Tolerance (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 161–77.
Cécile Laborde 71 Lacroix, J. (2000), ‘Les “nationaux-républicains de gauche” et la construction européenne’, Le Banquet, Vol. 15, pp. 157–68. Lapeyronnie, D. (1993), L’individu et les minorités: La France et la Grande-Bretagne face à leurs immigrés (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Lapeyronnie, D. (1996), ‘Les deux figures de l’immigré’, in M. Wieviorka (ed.), Une société fragmentée: Le multiculturalisme en débat (Paris: La Découverte), pp. 251–65. Lochak, D. (1985), Etrangers, de quel droit? (Paris: PUF). Lochak, D. (1988), ‘Etrangers et citoyens au regard du droit’, in C. Wihtol de Wenden (ed.), La citoyenneté et les changements de structures sociale et nationale de la population française (Paris: Fondation Diderot), pp. 73–85. Lochak, D. (1999), ‘Les droits des étrangers, entre égalité et discrimination’, in P. Dewitte (ed.), Immigration et intégration: L’état des savoirs (Paris: La Découverte), pp. 310–19. Leruth, M. F. (1998), ‘The Neo-Republican Discourse on French National Identity’, French Politics and Society, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 46–61. Long, M. (1988), Etre français aujourd’hui et demain: Rapport de la Commission de la Nationalité présenté par M. Marceau Long au Premier Ministre, Volumes 1 and 2 (Paris: La Documentation Française). Lorcerie, F. (1994), ‘Les sciences sociales au service de l’identité nationale’, in D. C. Martin (ed.), Cartes d’identité: Comment dit-on ‘nous’ en politique? (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques). Magnette, P. (1996), ‘La citoyenneté dans la pensée politique européenne’, Res Publica, Vol. 38. Marx, K. (1975), ‘On The Jewish Question’, in Early Writings of Marx, with an introduction by Lucio Colletti (London: Penguin), pp. 211–41. Mesure, S. and A. Renaut (1999), ‘La discussion républicaine du libéralisme moderne’, in A. Renaut (ed.), Histoire de la philosophie politique, Vol. 4 : Les critiques de la modernité politique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy). Nicolet, C. (1994 [1982]), L’idée républicaine en France (1789–1924): Essai d’histoire critique (Paris: Gallimard). Noiriel, G. (1986), Les ouvriers dans la société française, XIXème-XXème siècle (Paris: Seuil). Noiriel, G. (1991), La tyrannie du national: Le droit d’asile en Europe (1793–1993) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy). Nora, P. (1984), Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. I: La République (Paris: Gallimard). Nora, P. (1986), Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. II: La Nation (Paris: Gallimard). Nora, P. (1992), Les lieux de mémoire, Vol. III: Les France (Paris: Gallimard). Nord, P. (1995), The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Ozouf, M. (1989), L’homme régénéré: Essais sur la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard). Ozouf, M. (1998), ‘L’idée républicaine et l’interprétation du passé national’, Annales, Vol. 53, No. 6, pp. 1075–86. Paugam, S. (ed.) (1996), L’exclusion, l’état des saviors (Paris: La Découverte). Pilbeam, P. (1995), Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Macmillan). Renan, E. (1992), Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (et autres textes choisis et présentés par Joël Roman) (Paris: Presses Pocket). Rosanvallon, P. (1990), L’Etat en France: De 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil).
72 Republican Citizenship in France Rosanvallon, P. (1992), Le Sacre du Citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard). Rosanvallan, P. (1998), Le people introuvable: Histoire de la representation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard). Rousseau, J.-J. (1987), Le Contrat social, ed. J.-L. Leclerc (Paris: Editions Sociales). Rudelle, O. (1982), La République absolue: Aux origines de l’instabilité constitutionnelle de la France républicaine, 1870–1889 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne). Safran, W. (1984), ‘The French Left and Ethnic Pluralism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 7, pp. 99–123. Schnapper, D. (1991), La France de l’intégration: Sociologie de la nation en 1990 (Paris: Gallimard). Schnapper, D. (1994), La communauté des citoyens: Sur l’idée moderne de nation (Paris: Gallimard). Schnapper, D. (1998), La relation à l’autre: Au coeur de la pensée sociologique (Paris: Gallimard). Schnapper, D. with C. Bachelier (2000), Qu’est-ce que la citoyenneté? (Paris: Gallimard). Scott, J. W. (1996), Only Paradoxes to Offer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Seguin, P. (1993), ‘La république et l’exception française’, Philosophie politique, Vol. 4, pp. 45–68. Sieyès, E. J. (1995), ‘What is the Third Estate?’, in O. Dahbour and R. Micheline (eds), The Nationalism Reader (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International), pp. 35–7. Silverman, M. (1992), Deconstructing the Nation: Immigration, Racism and Citizenship in Modern France (London: Routledge). Taguieff, P. A. (1987), La force du préjugé: Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles (Paris: La Découverte). Taguieff, P. A. (1996), La République menacée (Paris: Textuels). Thiesse, A. M. (1997), Ils apprenaient la France: L’exaltation des régions dans le discours patriotique (Paris: Editions de la MSH). Tocqueville, A. de (1952), ‘L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution’, in J.-P. Mayer (ed.), Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. II (Paris: Gallimard). Todd, E. (1994), Le destin des immigrés: Assimilation et ségrégation dans les démocraties occidentales (Paris: Seuil). Todorov, T. (1995), ‘Du culte de la différence à la sacralisation de la victime’, Esprit, June, pp. 145–60. Touraine, A. (1997), Pourrons-nous vivre ensemble?: Egaux et différents (Paris: Fayard). Tribalat, M. (1995), Faire France: Une enquête sur les immigrés et leurs enfants (Paris: La Découverte). Weber, E. (1976), Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Weil, P. (1991), La France et ses étrangers: L’aventure d’une politique d’immigration de 1938 à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard). Wieviorka, M. (ed.) (1996), Une société fragmentée: Le multiculturalisme en débat (Paris: La Découverte). Willaime, J. P. (1988), ‘De la sacralisation de la France: Lieux de mémoire et imaginaire national’, Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 125–45.
3 Nationality, Rights and Virtue: Some Approaches to Citizenship in Great Britain* Jose Harris
Introduction Over the course of several centuries, conceptions of citizenship in Great Britain have both resembled and differed from those common among its continental neighbours in a variety of ways. As on the continent of Europe, debates about citizenship in Britain have resonated with the echoes of a civic terminology inherited, consciously or unconsciously, from the history of Greece and Rome. As in much of Europe, a conception of personal citizenship derived from the feudal ius soli (based on birth in a given territory) has co-existed and interacted throughout the modern period with the more ancient conception of ius sanguinis (based on lineage and kinship) deriving from Roman law. As in France, Germany, Italy, Ireland and elsewhere, the salience of ‘citizenship’ as a central theme of public debate has ebbed and flowed at different moments of modern social and political history. And, as elsewhere, there has been not one strand of citizenship discourse but several, each drawing on a similar battery of words and ideas but applying them to very different contexts and problems, and often towards very different ends. Against these points of similarity must be set various countervailing factors that have tended to distinguish and set apart British traditions and understandings of citizenship from those prevalent in other European countries. Of these, perhaps the most important has been the sheer continuity of British (or English) history, together with the long-drawn-out ‘evolutionary’ character of Britain’s core political institutions. This quality of ‘unbrokenness’ has meant that only on very rare occasions has any formal public statement of the meaning of citizenship, or of the * This chapter draws upon the author’s Ford Lectures on ‘Ideas of Citizenship in British History’, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 73
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rights and obligations of ‘subjects’, been thought of as desirable or even possible. It is perhaps no coincidence that major exceptions to this rule coincided with the seventeenth-century civil wars (in the visions of civic republicans), and more recently with debates about Britain’s relationship to the European Union and to the European Court of Human Rights. Another conditioning factor has been the intellectual milieu of the English common law, the precedent-based and incremental character of which militated against the formulation of public rights and duties in terms of timeless and entrenched abstract principles. In contrast with Roman law and modern civil law, the common law’s underlying cultural assumption has always been that there are large areas of autonomous social activity not normally in need of ‘public’ or ‘civic’ definition and regulation. Certain fundamental freedoms, which current discourse sometimes confuses with the rights of citizenship, developed quite independently of whether or not a person happened to be a citizen— the most important example being the law of habeas corpus, which applied to anyone, irrespective of whether that person was a subject of the British crown. A further important influence was the peculiar character of the British empire, whose far-flung geographical extent and immense diversity of peoples, laws, religions and cultures posed questions about civic and national identity quite different from those that pertained in the land-based, centralized, and geographically contiguous empires of central and eastern Europe. Partly as a consequence of these historical particularities, another distinctive characteristic has been that, throughout the long history of political thought in Britain, citizenship both in language and in substance has nearly always been a theme in a minor key; it has been secondary to and largely overshadowed by more dominant themes such as liberty, property, sovereignty, utility, collectivism versus individualism, and markets versus the state. Moreover, on the relatively rare occasions when ‘citizenship’ issues have preoccupied British political theorists and public figures, their major concern has been not with the largely takenfor-granted question of who should possess citizenship, but with the characteristics of the good citizen. Thus throughout the first half of the twentieth century, there was widespread debate in Britain about the nature of ‘virtuous’ or ‘public-spirited’ citizenship, but until very recently there was surprisingly little debate about citizenship of the more formal kind, that is citizenship as the basic constituent and outward badge of an individual’s national, legal, civic and cultural identity. A consequence of all this is that the history of citizenship in Britain cannot be straightforwardly ‘read off’ from a series of authoritative
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constitutional and legal documents. It is very easy both to understate and to overstate what it meant historically to be a British citizen because many rights and duties that in other political cultures would have been explicitly proclaimed or embodied in a constitutional code were tacitly taken for granted, embodied in everyday social practice, or evolved through the common law. As in many other languages, the very term ‘citizen’ in English was ambiguous and fluid, being sometimes applied to occupants of a particular city or borough, sometimes to a select group of notables within such a borough, and sometimes to the inhabitants of the whole realm or Commonwealth. Many different layers and styles of language about citizenship co-existed and interleaved with each other, in ways that have frequently been misunderstood or drastically oversimplified by more recent interpreters. Over many centuries ‘subject’ rather than ‘citizen’ was the culturally preferred term, and on occasion ‘subjects’ were explicitly distinguished from and contrasted with ‘citizens’ (usually to the disadvantage of the latter). But far more commonly the two terms were treated as interchangeable, with none of the distinctively ‘republican’ and ‘monarchical’ connotations that are often read into them at the present day. Puritan critics of monarchy during the English Civil War, for example, specifically referred to ‘citizens and subjects’ as though the two were identical, while the term ‘subject’ was positively preferred to ‘citizen’ by the no less anti-monarchical Jeremy Bentham (Woodhouse, 1951, pp. 189–90; Parekh, 1973). Such peculiarities cannot be wholly unravelled in a short chapter, but an attempt will be made here to chart the historical evolution and current understanding of ‘citizenship’ in Britain on three different levels: first, the evolution of law and legislation relating to a person’s primary civic identity, or what came in the nineteenth century to be known as ‘nationality’; second, changing notions of the rights, duties, and privileges that were attached to the possession of citizenship; and, third, the rise, fall and partial re-emergence of that most central and characteristic figure in British citizenship debates, the so-called ‘good citizen’.
The evolution of civic identity ‘Citizenship’ in the form of a particular national or civic identity evolved from the personal fealty owed by the individual male ‘subject’ to a feudal monarch. Under ius soli (which prevailed not just in the islands of Britain but throughout much of late-medieval Europe) this duty was universally governed by place of birth: any man born within the territorial domains (or ‘soil’) of a particular ruler was deemed to be the subject
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of that ruler, even if he became a permanent resident in the domains of another. The ‘subjecthood’ of women was determined in the same way, except that where a woman was married to the subject of a foreign ruler her allegiance was normally transferred to her husband’s liege lord. 1 Only a subject could own real property within the kingdom; and only by a personal act of the sovereign could subjecthood be conferred upon an individual born outside the sovereign’s domains (Salmond, 1902, pp. 49–51). These rules governed the formal identity of the subject under English, Scottish and Irish law until the early seventeenth century. They continued to be major determinants of ‘citizenship’ for several centuries thereafter, and residues of them remain influential in British nationality laws down to the present day. Nevertheless, the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland, the arrival of Protestant refugees and economic migrants from the continent of Europe, the growth of international trade, and the expansion of Britain’s overseas colonies and possessions all led to a gradual, for a long time almost imperceptible, dilution of the strict principle of ius soli. Case law legitimized the ownership of English land by Scotsmen and vice versa (and by implication conferred equal civic status), nearly a century before a common political identity was created by the Act of Union of 1707 (Dummett and Nicol, 1990, pp. 60–1). Over the course of the eighteenth century a series of minor and largely piecemeal acts of parliament slowly extended certain rights to apply for ‘naturalization’ to foreign-born Protestants and eventually to immigrant Jews, and many more were naturalized by private bills. Similar legislation created exceptions to the ius soli rule by upholding the claims to British nationality of the children of British subjects born overseas (mostly the offspring of diplomats, merchants and traders) (Parry, 1957–60, Vol. I, pp. 60–71; Graf, 1999, Ch. 5). Some of the nascent British colonies began to make their own local rules about entitlement to citizenship (a status that could scarcely be grounded, in newly founded immigrant communities, purely upon ius soli), and these local rules were gradually recognized by and thus incorporated into the English common law. The American declaration of independence in 1777 was followed by the legal recognition as British subjects of former loyalists who owned property in Britain but had ceased to be domiciled in the territories of the British sovereign. And, conversely, the ius soli itself operated in certain cases to expand conceptions of who counted as a subject or citizen. It embraced as British subjects certain Dutch- and Hanoverian-born newcomers who had followed their sovereign rulers into Britain; and although the Act of Union with Ireland did not fundamentally alter the ius soli status of Irishmen,
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the union highlighted the anomaly of the widespread eighteenth-century assumption that loyal subjecthood was intrinsically Protestant. Moreover, in the fast-moving imperial rivalries of the later eighteenth century, whole populations might acquire, lose and regain their standing as British subjects by right of ius soli, through the fluctuating fortunes of war (Salmond, 1902, pp. 55–7; Dummett and Nicol, 1990, pp. 71–91). During the early 1800s, Britain’s resistance to Napoleonic invasion meant that English law avoided the wholesale conversion to Roman civil law, including transition to ius sanguinis, imposed or adopted at that time in many parts of western Europe (Salmond, 1902, pp. 51, 53). Nevertheless, piecemeal and pragmatic additions to the categories of persons deemed to be British subjects were to continue over the course of the nineteenth century. The possibility of naturalization was extended to foreign-born Catholics in 1825; and the rapid expansion of free trade, together with notions of ‘liberal internationalism’, led to further de-restrictive legislation in 1844 and 1870. The Alien Act of 1844 did away with age-old restrictions on the rights of foreigners to own and bequeath land in Britain; it granted automatic naturalization to the foreign wives of British subjects; and it opened the way to the naturalization, at the discretion of the Home Secretary, of any foreign-born person willing to swear allegiance to the British crown (Parry, 1957–60, Vol. I, pp. 69–71). The Naturalisation Act of 1870 likewise removed all remaining political restrictions on the rights of naturalized British subjects, by allowing persons of alien birth, for the first time, to become members of parliament and privy counsellors. Such formal measures were almost certainly accompanied by a growing, though largely unrecorded, volume of ‘informal naturalization’ of foreigners who settled in Britain and lived as British subjects without ever officially changing their legal nationality, a process made possible by the almost total absence of both immigration controls and the kind of police surveillance over day-to-day civil activities routinely practised in many parts of the continent (no adult Briton, for example, possessed a birth certificate before 1860, or a passport before 1914). The 1870 Act also moved some way towards permitting the adoption or repudiation of nationality simply at the will of the individual citizen, with ‘the personal idea . . . gradually giving place to the territorial’ (Salmond, 1901, p. 271; Parry, 1957–60, Vol. I, pp. 78–82). It thus came close to prefiguring the view canvassed by some ultra-liberal citizenship theorists at the start of the twenty-first century, who claim that ‘citizenship’ is just a personal flag of convenience, to be deployed by individuals in accordance with their private interests in an ever-changing global economy. British Home Office archives of the late Victorian era suggest
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that many public officials of that period were themselves committed to just such a liberalizing ethic, and largely indifferent to the fears of ‘alien invasion’ and ‘dilution of national identity’ expressed from time to time among the public at large (Home Office Papers, 1892–94). Such a liberalizing view, however, was in underlying conflict with certain powerful countervailing currents of the later nineteenth century, and the Act of 1870 proved to be something of an aberration in the long-term development of ideas about British nationality. Late nineteenthcentury Jewish migration from eastern Europe—coupled with rising unemployment, international depression and the ending of unrestricted entry into the United States—led in 1905 to the first official controls, not over immigration in general, but over admission into the United Kingdom of foreigners who were deemed ‘destitute, criminal or diseased’. Though limited in scope and largely ineffectual in practice, these controls signalled a marked shift away from the permissive and laissez-faire citizenship philosophy of the 1870s—a shift that was echoed in a number of related spheres. The late nineteenth to early twentieth century was an era of mass migration out of as well as into Britain, and legal opinion on disputed nationality questions began increasingly to invoke the civil-law doctrine of ius sanguinis to uphold the claim by descendants of British subjects to automatic British nationality, regardless of whether or not they had been born or were resident on British soil (Piggott, 1907, pp. i–iii, 45–9). And over the same period, the framing of a mass of new localized citizenship laws in Britain’s self-governing colonies and dominions left the notion of a common allegiance to the British crown, rooted in a uniform common law, in a state of incipient chaos. Legislation of 1914, further revised and extended after the First World War, aimed (over-ambitiously) to promote a single unifying ‘common code’ of nationality and naturalization for the whole of the British empire. Under these acts, a common British subjecthood deriving from ius soli was promulgated ‘throughout the length and breadth of the dominions of the Crown’, and at the same time was extended to all persons of British descent by virtue of ius sanguinis—thus conferring potential rights of access and settlement in Britain itself on perhaps a third of the population of the world. But the vision of ‘world-citizenship’ that lurked behind such legislation was largely confined at the time to statesmen and leaders in Britain; the dominions themselves remained fiercely insistent on their own territorial citizenship laws, which were almost invariably much more economically selective and racially exclusive than those of the ‘mother country’ (Salmond, 1902, p. 58; Dicey, 1915, p. lxxxxi; Parry, 1957–60, Vol. I, pp. 87–9).
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Such complex historical lineages left Britain’s nationality laws largely unprepared for the massive global shifts in power, nation-statehood, economic expansion and patterns of international migration that were to occur in the aftermath of the Second World War. Although members of the post-1945 British government were committed in principle to complete Dominion autonomy and rapid advance towards independence for Britain’s remaining colonies, there was almost no conception among them of what this might mean in terms of legal citizenship for the many hundreds of millions of British subjects dotted about the globe. Even the granting of Indian independence in 1947, which left an estimated several million people with no legal statehood except that of ‘British subject’, appears to have stirred little response in the minds of citizenship theorists at that time (Allen and Hudson, 1948). Post-war government policies on international resettlement and migration were by earlier standards unusually interventionist and proactive; nevertheless, the pattern of entry and exit into Britain envisaged in these policies was in many respects remarkably unchanged from that which had prevailed spontaneously, without state intervention, half a century before. That is to say, their prime concerns were with the absorption into Britain of displaced persons from eastern Europe, and with the fostering of emigration from Britain to the ‘old white dominions’ with the aim of strengthening a continuing British affinity in those far-flung parts (Paul, 1992). The ‘post-colonial’ and ‘new Commonwealth’ dimensions of such policies went largely unacknowledged, and were to remain so even with the passage of the British Nationality Act of 1948, which persevered with the earlier project of trying to arrive at a global definition of comprehensive British identity. The 1948 Act invented two new categories of citizen: ‘Commonwealth citizens’ (applicable to all who were citizens of a sovereign state within the Commonwealth), and ‘citizens of the United-Kingdom-and-Colonies’ (devised for inhabitants of the remaining ‘dependent territories’). Both types of citizenship were seen as an automatic qualification for, and substantially identical with, the older status of ‘British subjecthood’, though the newer terms were deemed more culturally acceptable to those, like the Boers and Québecois, who disliked direct allegiance to the British Crown. Together they tacitly confirmed the right of abode in Great Britain for more than 800 million Commonwealth residents—although this was done with no glimmer of an expectation that it might lead to large-scale inward migration—simply with the aim of maintaining Britain’s cultural, strategic and commercial ties within the former empire. The aura of grandiose confusion that surrounded this Act was epitomized by its treatment of the inhabitants
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of Eire who, just at the moment when their state was formally converting itself into a republic outside the British commonwealth, were given the option of declaring themselves simultaneously as Irish citizens and ‘British subjects’. Moreover, the Act singularly failed in its object of establishing a common citizenship status throughout the former empire, most commonwealth countries continuing as before to maintain their own local laws (Parry, 1957–60, Vol. I, pp. 92–9). For the rest of the twentieth century, debates about citizenship in the sense of legal nationality attempted to resolve the difficulties, ambiguities and unintended consequences generated by the Act of 1948, but were never wholly able to do so. From the late 1950s, the problem of defining British legal citizenship was to become enmeshed with the issue of regulating what was seen as excessive immigration from the Commonwealth, a concern that led to a long series of legislative and administrative measures, starting in 1962, that gradually prised apart the concept of a ‘citizen of the United Kingdom’ from the concepts of both ‘British subject’ and ‘Commonwealth citizen’. The culmination of this process came with the British Nationality Act of 1981, which largely abandoned the ancient principle of citizenship through ius soli, and also curtailed the rights of citizenship via ius sanguinis that had been granted indefinitely to descendants of persons of British origin earlier in the twentieth century. Henceforward, the core qualifications for automatic United Kingdom citizenship were envisaged as being either birth within Britain to a parent permanently settled in Britain, or birth elsewhere to a parent born in Britain—conditions both of which in theory excluded large numbers of ‘British subjects’ as defined not just by the Act of 1948 but by English common law over the previous 500 years. However, such attempts at simplification on one front were to be foiled by increasing complexity and innovation on many others. The common law itself, with its emphasis on natural justice and due process, was to uncover many routes of entry into settlement and permanent citizenship for people who felt themselves to have been arbitrarily excluded by misapplications of statute (Vicenzi, 1985). The successful feminist demand that there should be equal common-law rights for both men and women likewise gave access to UK citizenship to many husbands, fiancés and family dependents who would otherwise have been excluded by statutory restrictions on immigration. From a quite different angle, Britain’s entry into the European community in 1972 meant acceptance of clauses in the Treaty of Rome, relating to internal migration of labour and eventual movement towards a common European citizenship, that opened the door to new kinds of cross-national civic rights and pointed
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towards the likelihood of fundamental long-term readjustments in the localized citizenship laws of all member states. The explosion of the international market economy in the 1980s and 1990s likewise brought greatly accelerated movements of both capital and labour into and out of Britain. And, from the mid-1980s onwards, British rules on entry, residence and nationality were to be further challenged—as were those of many other developed countries—by the increasingly bold stance on migration, settlement and nationality issues adopted by the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights (Meehan, 1993).
Changing notions of citizenship The story so far has dwelt at length on persons who were deemed to have the status of British subjects or citizens by virtue of ‘nationality’, but has referred only in passing to other more substantive aspects of citizenship, such as the citizen’s duties and rights. This emphasis, reflecting concerns of the present-day, tends to distort and obscure ways in which citizenship was thought about in the past; since, throughout much of earlier British history, citizenship in the sense of a person’s national identity was very largely taken for granted. The main focus of both political thought and popular discourse was, rather, upon the benefits and duties of citizenship, and upon the moral and civic qualities that it was deemed to require. It was significant, for example, that the most influential and oft-cited work on citizenship published in Britain over the course of the twentieth century—T. H. Marshall’s Citizenship and Social Class (1950)—never once mentioned citizenship in the sense of ‘legal nationality’, even though the lectures on which it was based were delivered in Cambridge only a few months after the passage of the seminally important British Nationality Act of 1948.2 Like nearly all commentators of that period, Marshall assumed that citizenship was rooted in ‘a civilisation which is a common possession’, and that an individual’s civic identity was simply too self-evident to need any comment. What mattered was not the question of who was a British citizen, but what were the civic claims and entitlements enjoyed by citizens as a result of their membership of a particular commonwealth or state. Marshall’s overall approach to this question—that different types of citizenship rights had been acquired incrementally by the British people over the course of several centuries—had the merit of portraying citizenship as something that was historical, functional and ongoing rather than abstract and static. In this respect his account closely fitted
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the circumstances of the British case, and continues to do so half a century later. He also usefully defined the meaning of citizenship in its modern setting as ‘full membership of a community’ in all those spheres where at any given time ‘equality’ was deemed desirable. Nevertheless, the finer details of Marshall’s historical analysis include much that is open to question. His central argument was that citizenship in the sense of ‘civil rights’ had been attained by the British people during the eighteenth century, citizenship in the sense of ‘political rights’ during the nineteenth century, and citizenship in the sense of ‘social rights’ only with the displacement of the poor law by universalist social services in the earlier and mid-twentieth century. Yet it may be objected that many of what Marshall called ‘civil rights’ (habeas corpus, freedom of speech, freedom of religious belief, freedom of association, freedom of the press) were not citizen rights at all, but rights that had been gradually asserted for all individuals within the realm of Britain quite regardless of whether or not they happened to be subjects and citizens. These rights thus referred to what in modern parlance might be called ‘human’ rights, rather than to ‘citizenship’ per se. Likewise, Marshall’s identification of a ‘civil right to work’ (by which he meant not the ‘right to be employed’ but the ‘free choice of employment’) ignored the continued existence of closed industrial shops and professional corporations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and again it is by no means clear why free choice of employment, however desirable, should be classed as a ‘right of citizenship’. Rights to ‘political citizenship’, in the sense of possession of the franchise and access to the holding of public office, certainly expanded during the course of the nineteenth century, but certain groups (notably women and recipients of public relief) were explicitly written out of the Constitution just at the moment when others were brought in.3 At every point in franchise expansion, ideas about a person’s political capability remained at least as attached to the ‘ancient-constitution’ belief that public office was a duty and privilege requiring special virtue, as to the emerging concept of citizenship as ‘basic human equality’. That more ancient view of citizenship continued until well into the twentieth century to exclude many men, and all women, who were deemed not to possess that special capability and virtue; and, as A. V. Dicey noted in 1914 while writing the introduction to the 1915 edition of his book on the law of the Constitution, there were many millions of ‘subjects’ throughout the empire whose political rights under the British Constitution were considerably more extensive than those of many subjects resident in Britain (Dicey, 1915, p. xxxvii; Oldfield, 1990). Even Marshall’s account of citizenship as the
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advance of ‘social rights’ is open to question, since it may be argued that at least in formal terms the poor laws, both ‘old’ and ‘new’, were more deeply rooted in an absolute ‘right’ to public relief than were many aspects of the welfare state, the latter being dependent on contractual rights and participation in the labour market rather than on the fundamental status of ‘citizenship’.4 Moreover, Marshall made no reference whatsoever to the kind of personal rights—relating to marriage and divorce, parents and children, gender and sexuality, and so on—that had been spasmodically debated and contested in many quarters since the later nineteenth century, and were to come to the fore in discussions of citizen rights only shortly after his lectures were delivered. Marshall’s account of what constituted the rights and duties of citizens at various stages in British history was therefore of questionable accuracy and by no means exhaustive. There were many alternative constructions of the substantive rights of citizenship, some deeply intertwined with past constitutional and political history, others anticipating the eventual emergence of a multi-layered international polity of a kind far more extensive than anything envisaged by Marshall. A much older tradition linked full rights of political citizenship to ownership of property, a link not severed to any significant degree in mainland Britain until 1918, and still residually powerful in Northern Ireland until the civil-rights reforms of the later 1960s. Another ancient tradition equated political rights with capacity to bear arms and the duty to fight for one’s country, a theory of citizenship that had shaped both governing institutions and the franchise laws since the seventeenth century and was still substantially present in the suffrage reforms of the early twentieth century. Theorists in the ‘constitution of liberty’ tradition from Dicey to F. A. Hayek shared Marshall’s belief that citizenship implied a basic equality of political rights, but they dissented from his view that it entailed fundamental social claims upon the body politic, except where such claims were necessary to facilitate full political citizenship (as was arguably the case in public provision of education). Exponents of this school saw ‘civil’ and ‘social’ rights as stemming from the common law or from primordial personal freedom rather than from ‘citizenship’ properly so-called—and they were in many cases rights to be defended against rather than emanating from the civil power (Dicey, 1915, pp. 259–88; Hayek, 1993, pp. 216–17, 251–394). At the opposite end of the spectrum, there slowly emerged during the earlier twentieth century the view that rights of ‘citizenship’ were simultaneously both more personal and more universal than those envisaged in traditional accounts of the internal character of particular constitutions. This approach, first articulated by Salmond but
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more fully developed in the writings of Harold Laski, portrayed the citizenship of the future as attached to individuals rather than polities, and as applying to cross-national unions and federations rather than separate sovereign states (Salmond, 1901, pp. 271–2; Laski, 1925, 1929).
Good citizens Finally, there was the ethic of ‘virtuous citizenship’, promulgated at various times by a long series of reformist movements since the time of the English civil wars, and constantly re-invigorated by elite and scholarly interest in the history of Greece and Rome, but not mediated in more popular political culture until the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries (Pocock, 1975, pp. 332–505; Matthew, 1986, pp. 20–1, 32–48; Matthew, 1995, pp. 93–8, 181–3). Shortly before the Third Reform Act of 1884 the publishing firm of Macmillan & Co. launched what was to be a longlasting (13 volumes from 1881–88) and highly successful series of short books, The English Citizen: His Rights and Responsibilities. The purpose of this series was not just to inform readers of their personal duties and entitlements, but to spread knowledge and understanding of how British public institutions worked, and thereby to promote civic competence among the newly enfranchised masses. Despite its title, the spirit of the project was in no sense narrowly nationalistic, since the volumes were specifically designed to make cross-national comparisons and to suggest how ‘English’ or ‘British’ citizenship could be enhanced and improved by learning from foreign experience. This Macmillan series, soon to be emulated by several other major publishers, signified and set the tone for an approach to citizenship that was to be widely pervasive in British public life from the 1880s down to the end of the Second World War. It was based on the view—provoked by the shift towards popular democracy, and by alarm at revelations of the mass of pauperism and destitution in Britain’s great cities—that citizens were no longer simply ‘born’ but needed instruction and training in ‘the habits of good citizenship’. The target of such writings was not directly the poor themselves, but individuals and associations in the ‘middle’ ranks of life who might be persuaded both to practise good citizenship and to pass on its lessons to the untutored masses. It coincided with and was to some extent inspired by the idealist strand in late Victorian and Edwardian political thought, which laid stress not just on the material welfare of the lower classes (though there was some, and often much, concern over that), but on their moral and functional incorporation into the national body politic (Harris, 1992; Finlayson, 1994).
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This civic movement precipitated what was perhaps the most intense and prolonged debate on the nature of citizenship undertaken in any period of British history. For the next 50 years the language of ‘good’ citizenship was to be widely pervasive in all aspects of British public life, competing with but also penetrating and significantly shaping other core political languages of the time, including those of socialism and class conflict. Though it was primarily a middle-class concern, it was not exclusively so, and by no means confined to any one particular point on the ideological spectrum: on the contrary, it attracted support from Fabians and new liberals, from positivists and Christian socialists, from the pro-imperialist Duty and Discipline lobby and the anti-imperialist Independent Labour Party. It was common both to ‘equal-rights’ feminists fighting to gain access to public life and to ‘domestic’ feminists campaigning for the ‘endowment of motherhood’. Passionate Edwardian advocates of the teaching of ‘citizenship’ ranged from disciples of the Scottish evangelical reformer Dr Chalmers, whose ideal of the ‘civic economy of large towns’ had been based on voluntarism, face-to-face charity and self-help, through to the followers of John Ruskin, whose vision of a ‘citizens’ economy’, famously set out in Unto this Last, had involved large-scale provision of state employment, citizens’ pensions, ‘fair wages’ and unconditional public welfare. Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their early writings on industrial democracy (1898) portrayed the skilled trade unions as national ‘cradles of citizenship’, while Winston Churchill applied precisely the same imagery to the friendly society movement and the nonconformist chapels. All branches of Edwardian Christianity increasingly invoked the secular gospel of ‘civic’ or ‘civil’ religion, and the post-1918 movement for extending compulsory religious education within state schools likewise portrayed the teaching of religion and the teaching of good citizenship as one and the same. During the prelude to the First World War, appeals to good citizenship were deployed both by advocates of compulsory conscription and by those who favoured voluntary ‘citizen militias’; while during the war itself lectures on citizenship became a central theme of officers’ training schemes, often delivered to recruits by professors of social and political philosophy (Ruskin, 1862; Webbs, 1898; Marris et al., 1911; Anson et al., 1912; Hunter, 1912; Vaughan, 1915; Reiss, 1934; Holton, 1986). Such themes continued unabated in many quarters after the First World War and, despite (or perhaps in response to) the civil unrest of the period, seemed to reach a peak in the 1920s with the launching of the National Council for the Promotion of Social Service, an umbrella body that comprised the great mass of civic and voluntary welfare organizations
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that had sprung up all over Britain since the late Victorian era. A major goal of this body was the fostering of co-operation between the statutory and voluntary sectors, its ideal of the ‘good citizen’ being not the paid public official, nor even the democratically elected local councillor, but the active, altruistic private person who freely donated his or her services to the community as a charitable volunteer (Harris, 1992). This equation of good citizenship with ‘voluntary service’ rather than political action was to dominate the citizenship movement in Britain throughout the inter-war years and was to be a recurring theme later in the twentieth century (Finlayson, 1994, Chs 3, 4). Nevertheless, over the course of the inter-war era there began to appear many signs, often small in themselves but cumulatively important, that the moral appeal of ‘good citizenship’ as conceived by late-Victorians and Edwardians was beginning to wane. Depression and financial retrenchment contracted or put an end to many of the community projects cherished by Edwardian civic reformers, while to many people active in civic and social service movements ‘training the poor’ to be good citizens came to be seen as an increasingly inadequate response to such problems as mass unemployment. The Webbs, once full of enthusiasm for the civic role of trade unionism, local government and the ‘citizen-consumer’, gradually shifted towards the view that good citizenship of any kind was increasingly unattainable, because the culture of advanced capitalism was making personal ‘civic virtue’ both morally and psychologically impossible (Webbs, 1923). To many others in the British labour movement, ‘good citizenship’ began to seem like little more than a fig leaf for the ineffectual politics of consensus that they blamed for Labour’s defeat and eclipse in 1931. Intellectual fashion likewise turned, almost imperceptibly at first, against Edwardian-style citizenship, as the generation of philosophical idealists who had long been its academic mainstay began to recede before newer and much more critical ideological currents, in the form of Marxism, positivism, internationalism and a widely diffused ethos of popular materialism (Harris, 1992). The cult of the good citizen was nevertheless to be a long-time dying. In the early 1940s the circumstances of the Second World War gave it a powerful new lease of life, as tens of millions of British citizens were mobilized both compulsorily and voluntarily into many different modes of public service. The language of ‘good citizenship’ figured prominently in the wartime reconstruction movement, and in the long series of official and unofficial enquiries, reports and white papers that planned for a better way of life after the war. But the citizenship movement during the Second World War was noticeably different in both tone and aspiration from
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that of a quarter-century before. New social service organizations that came to the fore in the early 1940s, such as the Citizens Advice Bureaux and the Women’s Voluntary Service, were much more levelling, democratic and practical in method and outlook than their equivalents of the previous war, whilst army training schools and captive audiences of servicemen gave short shrift to discourses on ‘good citizenship’ in the style of 1914. After 1940, the average British citizen was deemed automatically ‘good’ and not in need of moral training by high-minded civic activists. By a strange paradox, a war that brought about the apogee of the ancient civic republican vision—of the citizenry as ‘a nation under arms’—also brought the triumph of the opposite view—of citizenship as unqualified universal entitlement to a bundle of material rights (Wootton, 1943; Jones, 1994, pp. 148–86).
Conclusion It was this ‘marked shift of emphasis from duties to rights’ that Marshall identified as the touchstone of the new ‘social citizenship’ that came to prominence after 1945. Despite this new perspective, however, discussion of citizenship of all kinds—be it in the form of entitlement to nationality, of rights and duties, or of public-spirited conduct—was to be conspicuous by its rarity in British political culture in the post-war world (Marshall’s lecture on the subject, first published in 1950, was not to be reprinted until 1992). As indicated above, there was virtually no public discussion of the problems of civic identity posed by Britain’s withdrawal from the empire. A study of 1958 suggested that the language of ‘good citizenship’ was fast fading from popular consciousness, while post-war British philosophy was deeply averse to the possibility of even talking about such concepts as civic duties and rights (Aberdare, 1958; Harris, 1996). The conflicts of the 1960s raised many fundamental political issues, including intense debates about ‘personal’ freedoms, but, except in the context of Northern Ireland, ‘citizenship’ and ‘civil rights’ were not among them. It was only with rising concern about levels of immigration that public debate about citizenship returned in some degree to the political agenda, and even then this was largely confined to citizenship in the sense of a right to British nationality. Only from the mid-1980s, in a context of rising cross-national concern about infringements of human rights in many countries, did local grievances about the ill-defined nature of citizens’ rights in Britain begin to coalesce into demands from some quarters for a British ‘bill of rights’, a written constitution, or a new Magna Carta (Andrews, 1991). From the early 1990s there were tentative
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expressions of the opposite concern—that widespread neglect of basic civic duties should be dealt with by Rousseauesque ‘Courts of Obligation’, empowered to sanction punishments such as ‘temporary loss of certain forms of public benefit, temporary imposition of community service or other special civic duty, temporary loss of other civic rights . . . and even temporary or permanent loss of citizenship itself’ (Selbourne, 1994, pp. 267–9). The last decade has seen the return of ‘citizenship’, in each of the three senses discussed above, to the forefront of political, legal and philosophical debate in Britain. This revival has been precipitated and thrown into sharp public relief by a multiplicity of factors. These have included: the changing and often chequered relations between the component countries and provinces of the United Kingdom; problems associated with absorbing and assimilating, and in some cases refusing and disappointing, a great diversity of migrants, immigrants, asylum-seekers and refugees; a growing culture of legalistic concern, not just with the substantive content of rights, but with natural and procedural justice (culminating in 2000 with incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into United Kingdom law); a widespread perception that British traditions of civility, public order and ‘good citizenship’ have declined or broken down since the ‘peaceable kingdom’ of earlier eras; and, perhaps most important, the difficulties currently encountered, or anticipated, of aligning and harmonizing Britain’s citizenship laws with those of its partners in the European Union. On all of these levels there has been much heated discussion and organized lobbying for reform, but a startling lack of consensus about how citizenship and its attendant problems should be approached at the present time. To some it seems that the whole idea of discrete national citizenships has had its day and needs to be replaced by a universal code of individual rights, applicable without regard to national frontiers, whereas to others such entrenched codes appear deeply unsuited to the fast-changing circumstances and immense plurality of values and personal identities that characterize the early twenty-first century. To some the difficulty of defining British citizenship is tightly bound up with monarchy, ‘subjecthood’ and similar residues of the ancien régime, whereas to others it seems that the British Crown is a powerful reified symbol that holds together many disparate cultures and is too complex a notion to be easily replaced or reinvented (Scruton, 1994, pp. 38–9, 168, 187–8; Wright, 1994; Hutton, 1996, pp. 287–8). In the eyes of some, the tradition of spontaneous and self-governing ‘good citizenship’ was subverted and eclipsed by the post-war welfare state (the very embodiment of
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those ‘social rights’ celebrated by T. H. Marshall), whereas for others civic decay set in with the public vacuum and psychic privatization induced by competition and global markets (Marshall and Bottomore, 1992; Selbourne, 1994; Dahrendorf, 1996). For some the ‘mechanical’ question of who is entitled to British citizenship appears wholly separate from the ‘moral’ question of how good citizens should behave towards each other, whereas for others the two are closely connected—witness recent Home Office proposals that applicants for British nationality should undergo language tests and receive instruction in their civic obligations. To some it seems that the present muddle constitutes a massive denial of basic rights, whereas to others it seems that the absence of a tightly drawn civic code leaves British institutions wide open to largescale abuse and criminal exploitation. Past British history suggests that these are not problems that will be easy to address, let alone resolve, and that both positive and negative inheritances in British public and private life stand in the way of any exact and simple definition of citizenship.
Notes 1. Usually, but not automatically; in the case of some major vassals, where a title was held by a woman, the allegiance owed by a subject took precedence over gender. 2. This omission is particularly surprising because Marshall was acutely conscious of the fact that he was speaking at a time when older ideas about citizenship were being radically redefined—hence his references to the expansion of social welfare rights, and the final abolition of special parliamentary suffrages, both of which had occurred only a few months before. 3. Thus women and paupers were for the first time explicitly excluded from the franchise in the Representation of the People Act in 1832. 4. Despite the fact that until 1918 asserting one’s poor law rights automatically meant loss of ‘political’ rights, it is worth recalling the view from nineteenthcentury Europe, which was that the English poor law was a unique source of social and civic entitlement, embodying welfare claims upon public resources to an extent unparalleled in any other country (Harris, 2002).
Bibliography Aberdare, L. (1958), The Youth Service in England and Wales (London: HMSO). Allen, A. B. and Hudson, O. R. S. (1948), Citizenship (London: Allman & Son). Andrews, G. (1991), Charter 88 (London: Lawrence and Wishart). Anson, W. et al. (1912), The Rights of Citizenship: A Survey of Safeguards for the People (London: Frederick Warne). Dahrendorf, R. (1996), ‘Property, Civility and Liberty: Can We Square the Circle?’, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 90, pp. 223–35.
90 Citizenship in Great Britain Dicey, A. V. (1914 [1905]), Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England (London: Macmillan). Dicey, A. V. (1915 [1885]), Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (London: Macmillan). Dummett, A. and Nicol, A. (1990), Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London: Weidenfeld). Finlayson, G. (1994), Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Gardner, J. P. (ed.) (1997), Citizenship: The White Paper (London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law). Gooch, G. P. (1936), Citizenship and History (London: Association for Education in Citizenship). Graf, S.-P. (1999), The Making of the Alien: An Analysis of the Law of Nationality in Nineteenth-Century Britain, M. Litt. thesis, University of Oxford. Hansen, R. (2000), Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Harris, J. (1992), ‘Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870–1940’, Past and Present, Vol. 135, pp. 114–41. Harris, J. (1996), ‘Political Thought and the State’, in S. J. D. Green and R. J. Whiting (eds), The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Harris, J. (2002), ‘Poor Law to Welfare State?: A European Perspective’, in D. Winch and P. K. O’Brien (eds), The Political Economy of British Economic Experience (Oxford: British Academy and Oxford University Press). Hayek, F. A. (1993), The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago University Press, 1960, reprinted London: Routledge, 1993) . Holton, S. S. (1986), Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Home Office Papers (1892–4), PRO, H.O.45/B13077C/1 and 2. Hunter, H. (1912), Problems of Poverty: Selections from the Economic and Social Writings of Thomas Chalmers, D. D. (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson). Hutton, W. (ed.) (1996), The State We’re In (London: Vintage Books). Janoski, T. (1998), Citizenship and Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Jones, H. (ed.) (1994), Duty and Citizenship: The Correspondence and Papers of Violet Markham, 1896–1953 (London: Historians’ Press). Laski, H. (ed.) (1925 and 1929), A Grammar of Politics (London: Allen and Unwin). Marris, I. et al. (1911), Essays on Duty and Discipline (London: Cassell). Marshall, T. H. (1950), Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Marshall, T. H. and Bottomore, T. (1992), Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto Press). Matthew, H. C. G. (1986), Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Matthew, H. C. G. (1995), Gladstone 1875–1898 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Meehan, E. (1993), Citizenship and the European Community (London: Sage). Miller, D. (2000), Citizenship and National Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press). Oldfield, A. (1990), Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modern World (London: Routledge).
Jose Harris 91 Parekh, B. (ed.) (1973), Bentham’s Political Thought (London: Croom Helm). Parry, C. (1957–60), Nationality and Citizenship Laws of the Commonwealth and of the Republic of Ireland, two volumes (London: Stevens). Paul, K. (1992), ‘The Politics of Citizenship in Post-War Britain’, Contemporary Record, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 452–73. Piggott, F. T. (1907), Nationality Including Naturalisation (London: William Clows). Plant, R. and Barry, N. (1990), Citizenship and Rights in Thatcher’s Britain: Two Views (London: Institute of Economic Affairs). Pocock, J. G. A. (1975), The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Reiss, E. (1934), Rights and Duties of Englishwomen: A Study in Law and Public Opinion (Manchester: Sherratt and Hughes). Ruskin, J. (1862), Unto this Last (London: Allen and Unwin). Salmond, J. W. (1901), ‘Citizenship and Allegiance’, Law Quarterly Review, Vol. XVII, pp. 270–82. Salmond, J. W. (1902), ‘Citizenship and Allegiance’, Law Quarterly Review, Vol. XVIII, pp. 49–63. Scruton, R. (1994), The Meaning of Conservatism (London: Macmillan). Selbourne, D. (1993), The Spirit of the Age (London: Sinclair-Stevenson). Selbourne, D. (1994), The Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundation of the Civic Order (London: Sinclair-Stevenson). Shaw, D. (1922), Citizenship (London: Hodder and Stoughton). Vaughan, C. E. (ed.) (1915), The Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge University Press). Vicenzi, C. (1985), ‘Aliens and the Judicial Review of Immigration Law’, Public Law, pp. 93–114. Webb, S. and B. (1898), Industrial Democracy (London: Longmans). Webb, S. and B. (1923), The Decay of Capitalist Civilization (London: Allen and Unwin). Woodhouse, A. S. P. (ed.) (1951 [1938]), Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents (London: Dent). Wootton, B. (1943), ‘Before and after Beveridge’, Political Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 357–63. Wright, T. (1994), Citizens and Subjects: An Essay on British Politics (London: Routledge).
4 Portuguese, but not Citizens: Restricted Citizenship in Contemporary Portugal Rui Ramos
Introduction Most commentators single out two national peculiarities of the Portuguese case that distinguish it from other traditions of modern citizenship in Europe. First, whereas the potentially ethnic principle of descent (ius sanguinis) prevailed in determining who was and who was not a citizen in many European countries, the predominant principle in Portugal up to 1981 was territorial (ius soli), just as it was in most republics in the Americas. Second, while universal male suffrage spread in western Europe, the right to vote in Portugal, after a relatively early expansion in the 1870s, was restricted, first in the 1890s and again in 1913. Universal adult suffrage, for men and women, was adopted only in 1974. Thus, one could sum up the Portuguese historical experience of citizenship by saying that while it was easy for residents and their descendants to become Portuguese nationals, it was difficult for Portuguese nationals to become full citizens. Explanations for these peculiarities have focused on the nature of the Portuguese state and its path to democracy. For most of its history, until 1975, the Portuguese state incorporated various overseas territories in South America, Africa and Asia. The need to keep their populations under exclusive Portuguese jurisdiction while increasing their numbers by immigration is usually invoked as the reason for Portugal’s American-style concept of nationality (Moura Ramos, 1984, pp. 47–8, 64). The reasons given for the restriction of civic rights, however, have been less satisfactory. It has often been assumed that the rural nature of Portuguese society, at least up to the 1950s, resulted in the domination of a traditional agrarian 92
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elite over the masses of labourers and peasants. However, this account does not explain why the principle of citizenship was adopted in the 1820s. Further, it ignores the fact that the tightest restrictions on the right to vote were decreed in 1913 by the leftist rulers of the First Republic (1910–26), an urban elite of liberal professionals whose relations with backward-looking landowners were rather unfriendly. This chapter argues that the restriction of civic rights in Portugal derived from the very project of citizenship adopted by the so-called ‘liberals’, and that it provides the key to understanding the Portuguese tradition of citizenship. Apart from two brief relapses into dynastic autocracy (1823–26 and 1828–34), liberals dominated the state from 1820 to 1910 and decisively shaped modern Portuguese political culture. The modern experience of citizenship in Portugal was determined more by the liberal project of political and cultural change than by any process of modern state-building. Liberals conceived of citizenship as a common identity organized around the rejection of the dynastic and Catholic tradition. This prevented them from ever accepting the notion of a citizenry made of individuals with conflicting opinions and interests or with different skills and capabilities. Thus, citizenship was used as a means to legitimize political and social exclusion. Not by chance, liberal citizenship provided the language with which the left and the right justified their experiments with authoritarianism in twentieth-century Portugal.
The liberal theory of free states In 1822, the first Portuguese Constitution declared that ‘all Portuguese are citizens’. This proclamation was meant to demonstrate the liberal desire to break with a recent past in which the Portuguese had been members of different corporate groups to whom the king granted different privileges and liberties in accordance with natural law and tradition. In the old monarchy, there were no universal rights, and nationality by itself did not confer any status. For those who did not belong to the nobility or the clergy, status was obtained through vizinhança (residence in a certain neighbourhood) which allowed the individual to enjoy the rights of that community (Moura-Ramos, 1984, pp. 8–12). Cidadão (‘citizen’) was simply the title given to those residents of a city or a commune who could be elected to municipal positions. However the modern concept of citizenship, both in its contractualist and in its republican forms, had not been ignored in the old monarchy. By the late eighteenth century, some jurists advising the royal government insisted
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that the king’s subjects were ‘citizens’ and that their rights were not mere privileges acquired through their services to the king but those derived from ‘the fundamental laws of the kingdom’ (Pereira, 1982, p. 300). Further, in the 1790s, members of the royal administration became fascinated by the methods of republican France, especially the idea of a national army based on the patriotism of the masses. This led to a renewed interest in classical models of citizenship and to a critical look at the royal state (Costa, 1995). However, all schemes for a constitutional revolution from above were compromised by the liberal revolution of 1820. Liberals proposed to restore the independence and greatness of the state by making citizens out of the Portuguese, but they did not believe that the old monarchy offered the right framework to achieve this civic transformation. In 1821, a group of university students writing in a periodical aptly titled O Cidadão (The Citizen) quoted the English republican author Algernon Sidney to the effect that citizens could not exist without ‘a free state’ (Vargues, 1997, pp. 244–5). It was this free state that liberals intended to set up by endowing the monarchy with a written constitution which vested the supreme power of the state in a legislative assembly elected by the ‘nation’. Although they had justified their revolution by invoking the supposed violation of the natural rights of the Portuguese under the old monarchy, liberals preferred, once they were in power, to emphasize the duties rather than the rights of the citizens. Thus, the Constituent Assembly decided that whoever refused to take a public oath of allegiance to the Constitution should be forced to leave the country, on the understanding that by his refusal he had renounced his membership of the nation. This move encouraged some conservatives to claim that those who had repudiated the Roman Catholic religion should also be excluded from citizenship since the Constituent Assembly, so as not to alienate traditionalist opinion, had recognized Roman Catholicism as ‘the religion of the Portuguese’ (but not as ‘the only religion of the Portuguese’, as the most devout Catholics had demanded). By refusing the catholic proposal the Assembly made clear that the Portuguese were citizens first and Christians second (Raposo Costa, 1976, pp. 37, 40, 121). They were obliged to respect Catholicism as the religion sponsored by the state, but not to profess it. For liberals, the ‘virtuous citizen’ was a pleonasm (Vargues, 1997, p. 108), but his virtue was purely civil. Adherence to the Constitution or, to be more precise, to the liberal principles enshrined in it became the primary prerequisite for Portuguese citizenship. The other condition of citizenship was summed up by the idea of personal ‘independence’. In fact, although the Constitution
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declared all Portuguese to be citizens, not all of them were endowed with the one right that liberals considered paramount in defining a citizen: the right to elect the members of the sovereign assembly (Garrett, 1985, p. 161). In 1820, members of religious orders, beggars and servants were explicitly banned from voting. In 1822, it was the turn of the illiterate, that is, of the vast majority of adult men (Santos, 1990, pp. 124, 134). This exclusion was justified by Montesquieu’s argument that it was formal education that generated a concern for the public good among individuals (Garrett, 1991, p. 128). Lacking formal education, the illiterates were not supposed to belong to the community of the civic-minded; they were considered highly susceptible to manipulation by others, and their choices could not be said to be the products of their own wills. Their condition was similar to that of friars and monks in being subject to their superiors, or that of servants bound to be obedient to their masters: they lacked the capacity for autonomy and self-reliance (Vieira, 1992, pp. 260, 277, 291). Access to formal education, however, came with property ownership, since it was property that allowed for leisure and instruction (Garrett, 1991, p. 139; Vargues, 1997, pp. 104, 106). In that sense, property ownership was chosen as the best indication of the individual’s capacity to become a citizen. The fact that ownership was at the root of citizenship became evident when freedom of expression was translated as the right to ‘own opinions’ (Dias, 1978, pp. 68, 72). Accordingly, some liberals held that those who had no property, and so lived in ‘continuous dependency’, could not be trusted to care for the public good (Raposo Costa, 1976, pp. 90–2). In 1826, the literacy test was replaced by an income test for granting the right to be ranked as an ‘active citizen’. For liberals, only those who had the means to ‘live independently from the will of others [could] use the rights of citizenship’ (Praça, 1997, Vol. II, p. 113). That was why, in 1852, all state employees classified as amovíveis (liable to be fired or transferred by the government) were also deprived of the right to vote (ibid., pp. 106–8). Libertos (freed slaves) suffered the same exclusion. It was understood that those who had been slaves had ‘gained the habit of obeying their masters, so that they could not have the instincts and the sentiment of freedom which are necessary in those who have to elect the representatives of the people’ (ibid., pp. 106–8, 110). Thus, it was clear that ‘independence’, which was the prerequisite of citizenship, was not just a condition defined by personal status, education or income. It was more than that: it was a state of mind. That was precisely what the liberal writer Alexandre Herculano (1810–77) made clear in the 1850s. The condition of a ‘free man’, according to Herculano, was a ‘noble pride’, a sense of his own ‘dignity’, a ‘profound conviction’
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in his own rights, everything that was summed up by the concept ‘character’ (Herculano, 1986, Vol. II, pp. 353, 356). That was why the right to public assistance, inscribed in the Constitution of 1826, was so fraught with problems for liberals, given the risk of fostering dependency among those who benefited from it (Praça, 1997, Vol. I, pp. 105–11). For the Portuguese liberals, a ‘free state’ was much more than a set of constitutional arrangements designed to safeguard the rights and liberties of every person and so allow the individual an autonomous existence. A free state was a community of free men, that is, of individuals who cherished that kind of autonomous existence to the point of turning it into a collective ideal. The age, gender, property and educational qualifications for voting and being elected, which excluded most of the male population and all women, were not derived from an oligarchic fear of the masses, but from the impossibility of justifying the rule of the ‘unfree’. The participation of the ‘populace’ was seen as a corruption of the polity. It would reintroduce into the system the will of the powerful, on whom the poor, the uneducated, the servants and the wage earners were dependent. As Herculano put it in 1837, it was not ‘poverty’ in itself that disqualified the proletariat, but the ‘abjection’, the habits of personal subservience, that went with it (Herculano, 1983, Vol. I, p. 51). As a consequence of these theories, ‘citizen’, far from being an abstract category, was a concrete social and moral type. It was a title that fitted the propertied and educated gentleman with liberal leanings, who was expected to vote in elections, to be active in the ‘patriotic clubs’, and to wear the blue and white ribbon, which singled out the ‘constitutional citizen’ (Vargues, 1997). The counterpart of the citizen was the pious woman, subject to her husband and her priest, and confined to a domestic role (Herculano, 1983, Vol. I, p. 513). Significantly, in 1821, women were excluded even from the public gallery in the parliament (Vargues, 1997, p. 208). If citizenship was not gender-blind, it was not ideologically neutral either. Citizens had to be liberals, insofar as the right to debate and to change was equated with the rejection of dynastic and Catholic traditionalism. Not by chance, in the 1820s, ‘citizen’ acquired a partisan ring similar to that of ‘comrade’ in the twentieth century. Liberals adopted it as a distinctive badge to replace the traditional vassalo (‘subject’) (Neves, 1987, pp. 93, 184; Garrett, 1991, pp. 184–5). Portuguese citizenship was so bound up with liberalism that, according to a law of 22 October 1836, any foreigner persecuted in his country for liberal ideas was entitled to immediate naturalization in Portugal (Rocha, 1848, p. 141).
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It was this concept of citizenship that eventually led liberal authors to contest the use of the word ‘citizen’ in the Constitutions of the 1820s to refer to all Portuguese. For Manuel António Coelho da Rocha (1793–1850), a professor of law at Coimbra, ‘any individual can be a Portuguese, without being a Portuguese citizen’; the title ‘citizen’ should be reserved for the ‘members of the political community’ alone, that is, for those qualified to have access to public positions. Coelho da Rocha made his point through a distinction between civil and civic rights. Civil rights, which derived from the natural right to dispose of one’s own person and belongings, were rights to which all men—including non-nationals who visited or resided in the country—were entitled as ‘human beings’. But civic, or political, rights expressed the individual’s position in relation to that of his fellow countrymen in terms of wealth and education, and it was this pre-eminence that defined the citizen (Rocha, 1848, Vol. I, pp. 139–40; Praça, 1997, Vol. I, 154–5). Essentially, Portuguese liberals subscribed to a political model that could be characterized as republican rather than merely contractualist or jurisprudential. Republicanism in this sense did not refer to a regime opposed to monarchy, but a regime in which political life, based on patriotism rather than dynastic loyalty, was a preserve of educated and propertied gentlemen who had freed themselves from the constraints of the Catholic and dynastic tradition. As such, citizenship introduced a hierarchy in public life between those who had a right to exercise political power and those who were confined to a transitory status of political passivity. The only serious problem that this theory faced was that of the right of non-citizens to enjoy liberdades colectivas (collective freedoms), such as the rights of petition, public meeting, association and freedom of expression (Coelho, 1908, p. 401). Some liberals thought that these liberties, the right to vote, should be reserved for proper citizens only, but had to admit that, like, such restrictions were not viable (Praça, 1997, Vol. I, p. 172).
The citizens and the people in the civic state Liberals were aware of the exclusion practised under the citizenship principle. In 1851, Herculano acknowledged that the liberal revolution had done nothing more than replace one group of elites with another, and that the electoral principle functioned as the fidalguia, the hereditary line, had done before: it defined a new privileged stratum, that of ‘citizens’ (Herculano, 1983, Vol. I, pp. 210–16). In fact, most liberal leaders were members of the provincial gentry, politicized by the patriotic rising and
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service in the army during the French wars (1807–14). Socially, the liberal revolution meant that these families of the gentry ascended to the high offices of the state, from which the court aristocracy had excluded them in the eighteenth century. Freemasonry, into which at least half of the members of parliament in the 1820s and 1830s were initiated, provided the ideology of the new ruling class. They never evolved into a landed aristocracy, but turned themselves into an urban elite of highly educated state employees, mostly based in Lisbon (Ramos, 2001b, pp. 31–63). The liberals decided that their right to rule derived not from lineage but from their achievements and patriotism. As Almeida Garrett (1799–1854), one of the principal liberal writers, explained in 1830: The mass of the people, the populace, the classes with less influence on the state, would not lose much by unification with Spain. It was rather probable that they would benefit. . . . But all those who, by birth, wealth or personal value, have risen above the general mass of the people and to some kind of social pre-eminence would lose everything with the unification, and would be forced back into a social and political limbo, from which they had escaped by their talent and valour or by acquired or inherited eminence. (Garrett, 1969, p. 203) The liberal elite recognized themselves as those who had ‘risen above the general mass of the people’, the only ones to have a vested interest in the independence of the nation. They assumed that the people were indifferent or hostile to their patriotic and progressive sentiments (Herculano, 1983, Vol. I, pp. 42–3; Praça, 1997, Vol. II, p. 179). Persistently high illiteracy levels, despite the fact that elementary state education had been free and obligatory since the 1830s, came to illustrate the reluctance or incapacity of the rural people—that is, most of the Portuguese—to join the liberal community. Thus, although Portugal had a relatively homogeneous population within stable borders, liberals did not see the state as the embodiment of a pre-existing nation, but as an instrument with which to create a community of civic-minded individuals out of a hostile mass of superstitious and unpatriotic peasants. In fact, liberals faced constant popular resistance in the rural north, an area of densely populated valleys and mountains, comprising 63 per cent of the population in the mid-nineteenth century. The most religious region of the country, with a thick network of church institutions, it remained a source of riots and uprisings, usually triggered by the prospect of new taxes or restrictions on local religious customs (Proença, 1989; Ferreira, 1995). The ruthlessness of the liberal response was clear in its
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instructions to the army to deal with rural unrest: soldiers should always shoot to kill, so as to ‘make clear the costs of disobedience’ (Ramos, 2001a, p. 84). For liberals, the need to rescue the fatherland from ignorance and backwardness strongly justified the use of state power, even the disregard of some of the rights enshrined in the Constitution. This policy affected the Court aristocracy and the Church, whose lands were expropriated and sold back to liberal supporters. But liberals showed no more regard for the customary privileges of the people. In 1854, over 500 of the 807 surviving communes were abolished, and the rest turned into administrative units controlled by a delegate of the government (Oliveira, 1996, pp. 208, 216). Collective tracts of land were appropriated by the state. Professional magistrates, appointed by the government, replaced elected justices of peace (Praça, 1997, Vol. II, pp. 330–1). In general, liberals treated the people as children under tutelage, to whom freedom had to be served in small doses. Passports were instituted to deter poor peasants from overseas emigration (Praça, 1997, Vol. I, p. 71). The introduction of trial by jury was postponed because of the people’s lack of education (Raposo Costa, 1976, pp. 62–8). All of this allowed those who were nostalgic for the old monarchy to argue that the pre-1820 royal administration had had more respect for the privileges and rights of its subjects. In fact, from a liberal point of view, this social and political scorchedearth policy was self-defeating. For instance, the prohibition on teaching imposed on the Church became one of the main causes of high illiteracy rates, since the state alone lacked the necessary financial and human resources to implement its programme of popular education (Ramos, 1998a). Further, a suspicion of the people led liberals, who otherwise did not share the traditional reverence for the religious and dynastic traditions of the country, to use the Catholic clergy and the monarchy as instruments of popular control. This was possible because the Roman church saw a bargain with the state as the best way to defend its interests and because part of the royal family opted for the liberal cause in 1828 (Neto, 1998). Thus, liberals felt they could afford both the union of church and state, and a monarchical constitution, which gave the king the power to control parliament (through veto and dissolution) and to appoint ministers. The royal prerogative finalized the break between high politics and the people. Changes in government were determined by the intrigues of the liberal leaders around the king, not by street demonstrations or electoral results (Ramos, 2001b, pp. 52–4). Some liberals were critical of this ersatz version of the old royal power structure, but they knew that Portugal was not yet a ‘free state’, that is,
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a state where free men were the majority (Praça, 1997, Vol. I, pp. 61–3). Accordingly, few defended the extension of full political rights to the population at large. For the ‘democrats’ among the political elite, democratization did not mean a simple extension of the franchise, which was hardly a topic of serious debate (Vieira, 1987, p. 132). Democracy meant a social revolution that would transform the masses into a political agent and thus accomplish their conversion into a free people. It was only insofar as universal suffrage could be seen as a surrogate revolution— ‘it would elevate by itself the intelligence of the people’—that some on the left defended its introduction (Praça, 1997, Vol. II, pp. 120, 157). Thus when, in the 1870s, some enlightened conservative liberals decided to bring the democratic left into government, the extension of the suffrage to all adult male householders was part of the bargain. It was assumed that to be able to keep a family was a sign of that independence otherwise tested by income and literacy (Mónica, 1996, p. 1052). But the illiterates, although electors, were not actually promoted to full citizenship: for instance, they could not be jurors (Praça, 1997, Vol. I, p. 171). Nevertheless, for the next 17 years, the Portuguese monarchy had one of the widest franchises in Europe, comprising 72 per cent of adult men (Almeida, 1991, p. 143). However, the enlargement of the suffrage did not have the revolutionary effects that the left had hoped for. One result was to weaken the voice of ‘independent’ citizens by drowning it amongst those of the ‘dependent’ masses. Despite the secrecy of the ballot, stories about votes being bought abounded (Mónica, 1996, pp. 1045–6, 1053–6). In 1895, the need to end this ‘source of electoral corruption’ led to the abolition of having responsibility for a family as a source of the right to vote. The percentage of adult men enfranchised fell to 50 (Ramos, 2001b, p. 51). Indeed, this withdrawal of political rights should warn historians against seeing the extension of rights as a straightforward process. Disappointment with the failed extension of the suffrage caused some on the liberal left to focus on the social conditions of democracy and the role of the state in creating those conditions through public education, social insurance and factory legislation (Ramos, 1998b). Others, however, opted for an anti-monarchical and anti-clerical revolution, whose prospect excited those in southern cities and towns, where the influence of the Catholic Church had always been weak. The leaders of the new Republican Party (PRP) preached an ideal of direct democracy based on universal suffrage and the reorganization of the state as a federation of communes. But once in power, by means of a military coup in October 1910, Republicans changed their tune. They agreed that, considering the backwardness
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and ignorance of the people, only the reactionary priests and landowners who dominated the rural masses would benefit from universal suffrage and the devolution of power to the provinces (Actas, 1986, pp. 139, 143, 459–62, 468). Federalism, therefore, was postponed and the illiterate were disenfranchised. In 1913, the electorate was reduced to 24 per cent of adult men, the lowest percentage since the 1850s (Lopes, 1994). The right to vote, as the leader of the PRP explained in 1913, depended on the ‘full development of reason’: the republic was the collective exercise of reason, and those unable to participate in it should be mercilessly excluded (Costa, 1976, p. 53). Republicans continued to subscribe to the liberal doctrine that a civil capacity did not imply a political capacity (Actas, 1986, p. 297). That is why, although they proposed to increase women’s civil rights, they had no qualms about rejecting female suffrage because ‘women in general are reactionary’ (Actas, 1986, p. 131). The paradox of a self-proclaimed ‘democratic republic’ without universal suffrage did not shock many Republicans. They assumed that the republic was democratic in the sense that they, although a minority in the country, were a majority among ‘the patriots’, that is, those entitled by their capacity and civic devotion to rule the country (Actas, 1986, p. 117). The ‘nation’ was not identical to the population who resided within the confines of the republic. Republicans trusted the state schools, ferociously laicized, and military service, now universal, to socialize the rest of the population. The 1911 Constitution’s bill of rights impressed an American commentator as ‘hardly paralleled in comprehensiveness among the constitutions of Europe’ (Ogg, 1913, p. 643). In fact, the need to defend the republic against the ‘bourgeois and clerical reaction’ led to a restrictive regulation of those rights (Actas, 1986, p. 224). A similarly restricted view applied to habeas corpus, which the Republicans feared could be abused by their enemies (ibid., pp. 236–7, 262–3). The independence of the judiciary was also limited so as to control the monarchists among the magistrates (ibid., pp. 440, 487). But, for Republicans, these restrictions were not a diminution of citizenship, since a citizen was defined by the conscious fulfilment of his civic duties, rather than by his rights (ibid., p. 117). We may gain further insight into the relations between the people and the elite citizens in liberal and republican Portugal by considering the condition of the natives in the Portuguese colonies overseas. In 1820, the first liberal governments declared that all the inhabitants of the empire were members of the same nation and subject to the same laws (Cunha, 1960, pp. 89, 192). Yet, in 1911, following France’s example,
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the Republican government divided the inhabitants of the colonies—now mainly African—into ‘citizens’ and indígenas (natives), ‘those born of native parents and who by education and habits were not distinct from the common of their race’. The ‘natives’ were denied political rights, but their customs were recognized as their own law (Portuguese law, however, prevailed in cases of conflict between natives and citizens [ibid., p. 225]). They had a ‘moral duty’, which the colonial authorities could enforce, to procure employment so as to improve their living standards (ibid., p. 74). This opened the door to the justification of forced labour. What is significant is that when required to justify such a discriminatory arrangement, the Portuguese authorities resorted to Coelho da Rocha’s classic distinction between nationality and citizenship. The natives were nationals, in the sense that their human rights as persons were guaranteed by the Portuguese state. But they were not citizens, because citizenship was determined by the individual’s integration into the political and moral community on which the state was founded (Coissoró, 1961, p. 80). In a way, this colonial utilization of the citizen/national dichotomy reveals the relation between the enlightened urban elite and the illiterate rural masses in Portugal itself as a case of internal colonialism. Obviously, the inhabitants of European Portugal were all subject to the same laws and called ‘citizens’, but most of them remained simple ‘nationals’, or citizens capitis diminutio, because of their poverty or lack of education. As in Africa, the citizens awarded themselves the right to rule and direct their ‘backward’ compatriots in the name of a natural superiority.
From republican to democratic citizenship While economic growth remained sluggish and public finances collapsed, the PRP, for most of its spell in power (1910–26), seemed to consider the ‘cultural war’ against the Catholic Church, disestablished in 1911, as the republic’s raison d’être. This anti-clerical obsession, which was reflected in the neglect of other options, such as the social policies that had been pursued by the last governments of the monarchy (Pereira, 1999), deeply divided the educated classes that had traditionally run the state. Some of its members wanted a compromise with the Catholics and organized themselves as a conservative opposition to the republic. But despite allowing other forces to be represented in parliament, the PRP never allowed any peaceful rotation of power, relying on its domination of a restricted and purged electorate, and harassment by its armed gangs in the larger cities, to contain and intimidate any opposition. To circumvent the PRP’s monopoly on power, right-wing conservatives
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appealed for a national plebiscite or devised new representative mechanisms, thus becoming the only defenders of universal suffrage (Lopes, 1994, pp. 83–4). Nevertheless, the conservative coalitions managed to wrench power from the PRP only through military coups in 1917 and 1926. In both cases, they rushed to broaden the franchise. In 1918, they briefly instituted universal suffrage, which the PRP abolished as soon as it managed to return to government in 1919 (Santos, 1990, pp. 256, 261). In 1926, the military regime appealed to the ‘majority of the Portuguese’ by reintroducing a wide electoral franchise, similar to that of 1878 (ibid., p. 277). However, the PRP’s resistance to any compromise forced the military to rely on Catholic and monarchist support, which resulted in the ascendancy of Oliveira Salazar (prime minister between 1932 and 1968) and the foundation of the New State, the longest lived noncommunist dictatorship in twentieth-century Europe (1933–74). Intent on being ‘positivist’ in politics, Salazar announced that the new regime would follow the ‘natural constitution of society’. He proposed to replace the abstract ‘citizen’ as the foundation of the state with ‘natural groups’ and ‘moral and economic associations’. Individuals should be empowered as they really were, that is, as members of families, neighbourhoods and occupational classes (Salazar, 1939, pp. 85–91). All of this was less original than Salazarists were to claim and never as far-reaching as they intended. Many liberals had already defended the creation of local administrative units and self-regulated bodies in which the people could be initiated into junior forms of citizenship. As Herculano put it, the municipality should be the fatherland of the people, as the nation-state was the fatherland of the ‘educated’ (Herculano, 1983, Vol. I, pp. 210–16, 395). Also, both the liberals and the republicans had discussed systems of political representation by professional classes (Ramos, 2001b, pp. 86–7). In fact, the experiment with a ‘corporative republic’ was never more than an occasion for corporativists to lament that there was no strong living corporative tradition in Portugal, a society corrupted by individualism (Caetano, 1941, pp. 33–4, 80, 95). The state was never really refashioned according to corporative principles (Lucena and Gaspar, 1991, pp. 848–9). The president of the republic (up to 1959) and the national assembly carried on being elected through direct individual suffrage. Corporative suffrage was adopted only for local elections. The Corporative Chamber was never more than a consultative body. Political sovereignty rested on the ‘nation’ as the liberals and the republicans had conceived it. The political elite of the New State were a new generation of the same class of professionals and high bureaucrats who had traditionally ruled
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the state (Schmitter, 1999, p. 30 ff.). However, they made a point of divorcing themselves from the political tradition of that class as represented by the liberal and republican generations. As members of parliament, they saw their duty as that of producing ‘useful work’, which amounted to assisting the government with technical advice instead of checking the proceedings and discussing the principles (Diário das Sessões da Assembleia Nacional, 1935, p. 32). But this self-restraint was adopted in patriotic terms, as a sign of devotion to the common good rather than the recognition of a natural hierarchy. Salazar, whose speeches were devoid of any religious references or content, never dispensed with the old language of civic patriotism. He was to describe the National Union, the non-partisan movement founded in 1930 to support the government (Cruz, 1988), as a ‘school for citizens’ (Salazar, 1939, p. 117). Despite the corporative tenets of the regime, Salazar repeatedly warned that the ‘elements of the nation’ (‘parties, groups, classes’) were prone to see things according to their own particular ‘interests’. The role of government was to look after the ‘national interest’, for which it counted on the support of all ‘men of goodwill’ (ibid., pp. 133, 154, 260). Thus, although the people were to be organized in corporative bodies, the state continued to rely on the individual’s devotion to the common good for which citizens were classically renowned. Salazarists understood the advantages of posing as patriotic citizens, which allowed them to exclude opponents as unpatriotic. The New State reflected the fact that the century-long liberal regime had turned liberalism into a national ideology of regeneration and modernization, impossible to erase but adaptable to other uses. The Constitution of 1933 indulged in a liberal-style proclamation of the ideals of equality, pacifism, progress, care for the less privileged and civic virtues (Article 43). It also included a most generous bill of rights, afterwards severely restricted by the government, which invoked the need to subject individual rights to collective interests (Magalhães, 1995, pp. 53–61). In fact, the leaders of the New State explored the potential of the liberal language of citizenship to justify authoritarian rule. This was particularly the case with Salazar’s successor as prime minister in 1968, Marcello Caetano. Caetano enjoyed confessing that his concept of freedom was ‘liberal’ (the capacity to obey general laws rather than men). He constantly referred to the liberal and republican idea that the realization of the civic utopia of full participation in Portugal, a society lacking ‘traditions of civic conscience’, required the strong use of state power to correct social and cultural ills. This, according to Caetano, required the priority of social over political rights (Caetano, 1971, pp. 61–3, 97, 178). The
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New State, which Caetano presented as a ‘third way between social democracy and liberalism’, felt ‘an obligation towards the citizens’, that of providing ‘to each the material and cultural basis necessary to be a conscious citizen and participate in public life’. In the New State, ‘political power ceases to be the mere guardian of civic freedoms to become a manager of services’ (ibid., pp. xxx–xxxvi, 176). Thus, the expansion of the welfare state during the Portuguese ‘economic miracle’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s was used to legitimize the censorship, the arbitrary powers of the security services, and the ban on political parties that had always constrained public life under the New State. On the other side of the barricades, however, the mainly left-wing opposition against the New State—old PRP notables, radical students and a Soviet-backed Communist Party—shared the Salazarists’ ambiguous view of ‘bourgeois’ democracy and its prospects in Portugal. While, like the right-wing opposition under the Republic, the anti-Salazarists were united in their demand for political freedom, namely free elections under universal suffrage, anti-Salazarists, especially those who had fallen under the increasing influence of the Marxist left in the 1960s, had become more interested in a socialist revolution than in the mere restoration of civic rights (Brochado Coelho, 1974; Cunhal, 1974, pp. 127–8, 134). Left-wing historians reinforced this view by asserting that there were no foundations for a ‘bourgeois democracy’ in Portugal, as a result of the failure of industrialization in the nineteenth century (Godinho, 1969). Anti-Salazarists put all their hopes in an armed insurrection and never concealed their increasing contempt for the electoral and procedural trappings of democracy. Thus, although elections were regularly held under the New State and the right of suffrage was extended further than it had been under the First Republic, the anti-Salazarists never made any sustained effort to register voters and very rarely tried their luck at the ballot box. On the contrary, the opposition reversed the traditional equation between citizenship and voting by considering voting in the framework of the New State, a sign of servility (Ribeiro, 1970, pp. 80–5). In fact, the proportion of registered electors was higher in the rural districts than in the coastal urban districts and most of the electors were civil servants (Schmitter, 1999, pp. 65, 98). This ambiguity towards democracy partly explains the confused nature of the Portuguese democratic transition in 1974–75. On the one hand, there was an initial effort to honour democratic promises. Thus, censorship and all limitations on political activity were abolished and, for the first time in Portuguese history, full citizenship was granted to all people, irrespective of education, income or gender. The New State had already granted women the same electoral rights as men in 1968.
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The military-led government extended the right to vote to those aged 18–20, curiously justified by invoking the role of the students in the resistance to the Salazarist regime, and to the illiterate, still 41 per cent of those aged over 50. Significantly, no comment was made on the capacity of the illiterate, whose predictable difficulties in recognizing the names of the political parties on the ballot papers were solved by including the parties’ symbols. With electoral registration made obligatory, 6,231,372 people were registered as electors in 1975, as against 1,800,000 in 1973. The only restriction applied to expatriates, who, after a massive migration to northern Europe in the 1960s, represented 10 per cent of the Portuguese and whose remittances amounted to 8 per cent of the GNP. Nevertheless, the new authorities understood that the right to vote should derive from the ‘real participation of the citizen in the economic and social life of the community’ (Ferreira, 2001, pp. 164–5). In the months preceding the election of a Constituent Assembly, however, the consensual transition to a parliamentary democracy was suddenly turned into a socialist revolution directed from above by junior army officers and intellectuals from the Marxist left. Most sectors of industry and business were nationalized. The young officers who had toppled Caetano reinvented themselves as a ‘liberation movement’ for ‘internal de-colonization’, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). Old arguments resurfaced: the Portuguese were not yet a free people, and as such their status should be that of objects of ‘education and mobilization’. Although it renounced the ‘violent or dictatorial’ imposition of socialism, the MFA decided that legitimate political action was its preserve and that of some associated ‘progressive’ parties. Discussion and pluralism were meant as a simple elucidation of the problems of building a socialist society. There would be free elections, but electoral results could not be ‘an obstacle to the liberation struggle’. To overcome ‘bourgeois democracy’, the more radical in the MFA devised a more social system of representation based on factory and neighbourhood committees (see documents in Mello, 1977, Vol. II, p. 748 ff.). Meanwhile, the security force orchestrated the occupation of urban buildings and rural estates, and condoned acts of contempt for court rulings. ‘Counter-revolutionary’ suspects were subjected to purges and lengthy periods of extra-legal detention (Barreto, 1989; Magalhães, 1995, pp. 63–5; Pinto, 2001). As under the Salazarist regime, the idea that political and civil rights were merely formal and required a material foundation of economic and social rights was used to justify the widespread violation of basic human rights. Nevertheless, the MFA did not dare to cancel or postpone the election of the Constituent Assembly in April 1975. The voter turnout was massive:
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91.2 per cent of the electors. The parties of the Marxist left allied to the radical MFA suffered a catastrophic defeat, winning less than 20 per cent of the vote, mostly cast in Lisbon and the southern towns. However, the MFA felt entitled to force the non-communist majority in the assembly to accept Marxist socialism as an ideological imperative. Social Democrats and Christian Democrats fought back by asserting the principles of rights-oriented ‘democratic citizenship’. The Portuguese had to be treated as citizens and granted the right to have their own political opinions, free from the tutelage of a self-appointed liberation movement: ‘There is no such thing as a democratic dictatorship’ (Programa, 1974, pp. 30–1). Mário Soares (b. 1922), the leader of the Socialist Party, the main non-communist force, proclaimed that it was only as a ‘citizen’ that he was a ‘socialist’, and as such he could not conceive of socialism without civic freedoms (Soares, 1984, p. 14). The new Constitution reflected this view. It defined the republic as a ‘democratic state’ rather than a ‘revolutionary state’. It refused to grant any privileged political role to the ‘working class’. It gave priority to civil and civic rights over ‘social and economic rights’, although the latter were asserted by an expanding welfare state and rather inflexible labour laws (Andrade, 1989; Ferreira, 2001, p. 178). In November 1975, the radical MFA was eliminated in another military coup. In the following decade, the civilian political class managed to force the military back to the barracks and do away with some of the revolutionary policies such as state control of most economic sectors. In this process, the language of virtue-oriented citizenship was recovered and its emphasis on civic responsibility became instrumental in the efforts to channel political activity away from the direct street action promoted by the MFA to the formal venues of regular elections and legal proceedings (Soares, 1984, pp. 21–2). Portugal’s entry into the European Community in 1986 confirmed the decision to fashion Portuguese democracy according to a west European pattern of political pluralism, regulated private enterprise and state welfare. By the early 1990s, social scientists had discovered that the attitudes, patterns of consumption and expectations of the Portuguese, though at a lower level of affluence, were very similar to those of northern Europeans (Almeida, 1990; Barreto, 1995). According to opinion polls the Portuguese were, among the Europeans, the most inclined to accept European citizenship and a European government in the framework of the European Union. Some sociologists took this Europhilia, shared by other southern Europeans, as bad news. They ascribed it to a general alienation from national institutions or to a deep dissatisfaction with
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public life within the country. For some, these feelings derived from the lack of integration of the Portuguese into a homogeneous culture of citizenship. Two causes were cited: the continuing division between a highly educated elite and the poorly schooled masses, and the opposing cultures of the Catholic north and the more secular south, which all the maps of political preferences from 1975 onwards made clear (Cabral, 1992). Alternative explanations for civic alienation cited the imperviousness of the state to the demands and participation of the citizens. This was seen as part of the legacy of authoritarianism, or a result of the legal monopoly of public life by the same four political parties since 1974 (although party members represented no more than 5 per cent of the registered electors, the law prevented independent candidates from entering parliament and, until recently, local councils). To remedy the ‘impoverishment of citizenship in Portugal’ (Pinto and Almeida, 2001, p. 69 ff.) governments resorted to classical remedies: ‘civic education’, introduced in school curricula, and the re-establishment of the 320 local councils and 4200 civil parishes—now freed from arbitrary interference by the government and ruled by assemblies democratically elected—as venues for citizen participation, despite general complaints about the lack of financial resources to turn local self-government into a reality (Montalvo, 1989). In the 1970s, Portuguese citizenship evolved from a republican to a democratic, rights-based concept, with the full integration of all adults in the civic community on an equal footing irrespective of gender or other bases of qualification. This coincided, however, with the re-imagining of the civic community as an ethnic-centred community, a process triggered by the independence of all Portuguese overseas territories in 1974–75. With the abolition of the Native Status in 1962, the black African population had been recognized as possessing the rights of citizenship, and theoretically they could have opted to remain Portuguese and move into European Portugal when independence became an option in 1974. On 24 June 1975, to prevent an influx of black refugees, the government simply deprived the entire population of the African colonies of Portuguese citizenship, with the exception of those of European–Portuguese origins (Ferreira, 2001, p. 71). This decision prepared the ground for the law of nationality of 1981, with its new emphasis on ius sanguinis. The change was justified as a way to base the state on the people rather than on territory. Its defenders argued that ius soli was typical of monarchies, and as such the predominance of ius sanguinis was part of the democratization of the Portuguese state. But some of the participants in this debate were willing to admit that the real aim of the law was to
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prevent Portugal, now deprived of its colonial Empire, from becoming a ‘country of immigration’ (Moura Ramos, 1984). The 1981 law made it easier for someone born of Portuguese parents and resident abroad to obtain nationality than for someone born of foreign parents in Portugal and resident in Portugal. It reinforced the links between Portugal and its expatriates, who, overcoming the restrictions of 1974, were now represented by four seats in parliament and had acquired the right to vote in the presidential elections. But this happened precisely when emigration ceased and the country became a net importer of people, causing the percentage of foreign residents to increase dramatically. The recognition of a ‘citizenship’ of the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP), being the social and political rights that through treaties are extended to CPLP nationals residing in Portugal, does not change the closed nature of the Portuguese democratic community (Canotilho, 1998, pp. 381–3).
Conclusion In the case of Portugal, appeals to the principle of citizenship have not resulted in forms of rule that involve actively seeking the people’s consent. Strong concepts of citizenship, such as the republican, can certainly be equated with deeper participation, but not necessarily with wider participation, a point that has not been sufficiently emphasized by the recent literature on republican and neo-republican civic models. For instance, Quentin Skinner has duly emphasized that neo-Roman theorists insisted that the liberty to realize chosen ends can be secured only within the kind of self-governing community whose members transcend private interests to pursue a common good. But it is only in an aside by Skinner that we learn of their admission that some among the population are more ‘pre-eminently deserving’ than others of the ‘title of citizens in the fullest classical sense’ (Skinner, 1998, p. 87). A republican community can easily become, as the liberal and republican experience in Portugal between 1820 and 1926 seems to suggest, the rule of free men over an unfree population. Basically, the strong concept of citizenship adopted by the liberals and the republicans was incompatible with the differences in levels of education and ways of life, and the plurality of views in Portuguese society. It resulted in the legitimization of minority rule. As such, it precluded a more participatory form of political life and it failed to create immunity against full-blown authoritarianism in the twentieth century.
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Bibliography Actas da Assembleia Nacional Constituinte de 1911 (1986), (Lisbon: Assembleia da República). Almeida, J. F. de (1990), Portugal: Os Próximos 20 Anos, Vol VIII: Valores e Representações Sociais (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian). Almeida, P. T. de (1991), Eleições e Caciquismo no Portugal Oitocentista (1868–1890) (Lisbon: Difel). Andrade, J. C. V. de (1989), ‘Direitos e Garantias Fundamentais’, in M. B. Coelho (ed.), Portugal: O Sistema Político e Constitucional, 1974–1987 (Lisbon: Instituto de Ciências Sociais), pp. 685–99. Barreto, A. (1989), ‘Reforma Agrária e Revolução em Portugal (1974–76)’, in M. B. Coelho (ed.), Portugal: O Sistema Político e Constitucional, 1974–1987, pp. 453–68. Barreto, A. (1995), ‘Portugal na Periferia do Centro: Mudança Social, 1960–1995’, Análise Social, No. 134, pp. 841–55. Brochado Coelho, M. (1974), ‘Direito ao Sufrágio e Participaçáo’, in F. S. Carneiro (ed.), Os Direitos do Homem em Portugal (Oporto: Editora Telos), pp. 81–101. Cabral, M. V. (1992), ‘Portugal e a Europa: Diferenças e semelhanças’, Análise Social, No. 118, pp. 943–54. Caetano, M. (1941), Problemas da Revolucao Corporativa (Lisbon: Editorial Acção). Caetano, M. (1971), Renovação na Continuidade (Lisbon: Verbo). Cándido, A. (1878), Princípios e Questões de Filosofia Política: Condições Científicas do Direito de Sufrágio (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade). Canotilho, J. J. G. (1998), Direito Constitucional e Teoria da Constituição (Coimbra: Almedina). Coelho, T. (1908), Manual Político do Cidadão Português (Oporto: Empresa Literária e Tipográfica). Coissoró, N. (1961), ‘A Política de Assimilação na África Portuguesa’, Estudos Ultramarinos, No. 3, pp. 76–90. Costa, A. (1976), Discursos Parlamentares, 1911–1914 (Lisbon: Livraria Bertrand). Costa, F. D. (1995), ‘O recrutamento militar no final do século XVIII’, Análise Social, No. 130. Cruz, M. B. da (1988), O Partido e o Estado no Salazarismo (Lisbon: Editorial Presença). Cunha, J. M. da Silva (1960), Questões Ultramarinas e Internacionais (Lisbon: Edições Ática). Cunhal, Á. (1974 [1965]), Rumo à Vitória (Lisbon: Edições A Opinião). Diário das Sessões da Assembleia Nacional (1935) (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional). Dias, A. da Costa (ed.) (1978), Discursos sobre a Liberdade de Imprensa no Primeiro Parlamento Português (1821) (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa). Ferreira, M. de Fátima de Sá e Melo (1995), Résistances Populaires au Libéralisme au Portugal (1834–1844), unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Paris I. Ferreira, J. M. (2001), Portugal em Transe (1974–1985), Vol. VIII of J. Mattoso (ed.), História de Portugal (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa). Garrett, J. B. S. L. A. (1969), Portugal na Balança da Europa (1830) (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte). Garrett, J. B. S. L. A. (1985), Escritos do Vintismo (1820–1823), ed. Costa Dias (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa). Garrett, J. B. S. L. A. (1991), Doutrinação da Sociedade Liberal (1824–1827) (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa).
Rui Ramos 111 Godinho, V. M. (1969), Estrutura da Antiga Sociedade Portuguesa (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte). Herculano, A. (1983–86), Opúsculos, two volumes (Lisbon: Livraria Bertrand). Lopes, F. F. (1994), Poder Político e Caciquismo na Primeira República Portuguesa (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa). Lucena, M. de and C. Gaspar (1991), ‘Associações de Interesses e Institucionalização da democracia em Portugal’, Análise Social, No. 114, pp. 847–903; No. 115, pp. 135–87. Magalhães, P. (1995), ‘Democratização e Independência Judicial em Portugal’, Análise Social, No. 130, pp. 51–90. Mello, F. R. de (ed.) (1977), Dossier Segunda República, two volumes (Lisbon: Edições Afrodite). Mónica, M. F. (1996), ‘As Reformas Eleitorais no Constitucionalismo Monárquico (1852–1910)’, Análise Social, No. 139, pp. 1039–84. Montalvo, A. R. (1989), ‘O Poder Local e a Participação dos Cidadãos’, in M. B. Coelho (ed.), Portugal: O Sistema Político e Constitucional, 1974–1987 (Lisbon: Instituto de Ciências Sociais), pp. 469–83. Moura Ramos, R. M. (1984), Do Direito Português da Nacionalidade (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora). Neto, V. (1998), O Estado, a Igreja e a Sociedade em Portugal (1832–1911) (Lisbon: Instituto de Ciências Sociais). Neves, J. A. das (1987), Cartas de Um Português aos seus Concidadãos (1822–1823) (Oporto: Afrontamento). Ogg, F. A. (1913), The Governments of Europe (New York: The Macmillan Company). Oliveira, C. de (ed.) (1996), Historia dos Municipios e do Poder Local (Lisbon: Círcul de Leitores). Pereira, J. E. (1982), ‘António Ribeiro dos Santos e a Polémica do Novo Código’, Cultura-História e Filosofia, Vol. I, pp. 289–409. Pereira, M. H. (1999), ‘As Origens do Estado-Providência em Portugal’, in N. S. Teixeira (ed.), A Primeira República Portuguesa (Lisbon: Colibri), pp. 47–76. Pinto, A. C. (2001), ‘Settling Accounts with the Past in a Troubled Transition to Democracy’, in A. B. Brito (ed.), The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice in Democratising Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 65–91. Pinto, R. L. and J. M. Ferreira de Almeida (2001), O Sistema Político-Administrativo Português (Lisbon: Instituto Nacional de Administração). Praça, J. J. L. (1997 [1878–1880]), Direito Constitucional Portuguez: Estudos sobre a Carta Constitucional de 1826, three volumes (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora). Proença, M. C. (1989), ‘As cartas de adesão ao movimento liberal (1820–1823)’, in F. M. Costa (ed.), Do Antigo Regime ao Liberalismo, 1750–1850 (Lisbon: Editorial Vega), pp. 131–41. Programa do Partido Popular Democrático (1974). Ramos, R. (1998a), ‘O chamado problema do analfabetismo’, Ler Historia, No. 35, pp. 45–70. Ramos, R. (1998b), Liberal Reformism in Portugal: Oliveira Martins, the Movement for a New Life and the Politics of the Constitutional Monarchy (1885–1908), unpublished DPhil. thesis, University of Oxford. Ramos, R. (2001a), A Segunda Fundação (1890–1926), Vol. 6 of J. Mattoso (ed.), História de Portugal (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa).
112 Citizenship in Contemporary Portugal Ramos, R. (2001b), João Franco e o Fracasso do Reformismo Liberal (1884–1908) (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais). Raposo Costa, J. (1976), A Teoria da Liberdade no Período de 1820 a 1823 (Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra). Ribeiro, S. (1970), Dossier Candidatura: Leiria, 1969 (Lisbon: Prelo Editora). Rocha, M. A. C. da (1848), Instituições do Direito Civil Português (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade). Salazar, A. de Oliveira (1939), Discursos e Notas Políticas, Vol. I (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora). Santos, A. P. R. dos (1990), A Imagem do Poder no Constitucionalismo Português (Lisbon: Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas). Schmitter, P. C. (1999), Portugal: do Autoritarismo à Democracia (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais). Skinner, Q. (1998), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Soares, M. (1984), A Árvore e a Floresta (Lisbon: Perspectivas e Realidades). Vargues, I. N. (1997), A Aprendizagem da Cidadania em Portugal (1820–1823) (Coimbra: Minerva). Vieira, B. M. D. (1987), A Revolução de Setembro e a Discussão Constitucional de 1837 (Lisbon: Salamandra). Vieira, B. M. D. (1992), O Problema Político Português no Tempo das Primeiras Cortes Liberais (Lisbon: Edições João Sá da Costa).
5 Italian Citizenship and the Republican Tradition Luca Baccelli
Introduction Some years ago, during the debate on German reunification, Jürgen Habermas pointed to the dangers of ‘a national identity not based, first of all, on a republican self-understanding of constitutional patriotism’ (1990, p. 217). As is well known, the republican tradition originated in Italy, or at least in the city-republics of the centre north of the country. This holds true whether its origins, following John Pocock’s account (1975), are traced to fifteenth-century Florentine ‘civic humanism’ or, following Skinner (1998), are located in fourteenth-century ‘neo-Roman’ political thought. An Italian is the eponymous champion of the ‘Machiavellian moment’ and it is in Italy where, following the establishment of national monarchies, some republican polities still persisted, if not flourished, during the eighteenth century. Venice long remained the paradigm of a republic, and when, in 1651, Hobbes introduced his deliberately anti-republican conception of negative liberty, his target was the word libertas on the turrets of the city-republic of Lucca (Hobbes, 1991, p. 149). Yet how far did republican political thought influence Italian national identity and the Italian concept of citizenship? And is it still relevant today?
Republican patriotism There is much more than a family resemblance between the political language of the republican tradition and the early literary appearance of an Italian national identity. More than 600 years ago, Francesco Petrarch complained about the ‘deadly wounds’ afflicting the ‘beautiful body’ of the country. He urged Italian rulers to give the ‘ancient value’, 113
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still living in the ‘Italians’ Hearts’, an opportunity to express itself. 1 It is noteworthy that the most important lyrical poet of fourteenth-century Italy spoke in this way. Italy was part of the Empire, which was in reality fragmented into a number of states. It had been divided since the sixthcentury Longobard invasion and was characterized by deep regional linguistic differences. The only, remote, unitary experience had been the hegemony of Rome and then the Roman Empire. In Italy there were no nascent national monarchies similar to those forming in France or England. Nor did Italy have an ideological drive similar to the Reconquista carried out against Islam by the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula. Thus it is highly significant that in such a country a sense of national identity is expressed so strongly, as a cry for freedom from foreign domination. Petrarch’s poetry is remarkably influenced by the myths of ancient Rome, notably republican Rome. The outcry over the foreign domination of Italy and the denunciation of the poverty of its rulers are persistent themes in the history of Italian literature. About 200 years later, these verses of Petrarch would be echoed in the dramatic final chapter of The Prince, where Niccolò Machiavelli called for the liberation of Italy, and observed how ‘this barbarous domination stinks in the nostrils of everyone’ (1992, p. 298). After another three centuries of heavy foreign domination, Machiavelli, the theorist of republican liberty, was among the national heroes celebrated by Ugo Foscolo in his ‘Dei sepolcri’. 2 In Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, Foscolo denounced the treason of Napoleon Bonaparte, who, with the Treaty of Campoformio, had handed over his republic-country, Venice, to the Hapsburg empire. In ‘Dei sepolcri’ he complains about the fate of Italy more generally. Addressing Florence, he writes that such characters as Machiavelli, Galileo, Dante and Petrarch, whose graves are in the church of Santa Croce, are the only major national figures.3 In Ortis Foscolo referred to Venice with the word ‘country’ (‘the sacrifice of the country has been accomplished’),4 while bemoaning that ‘we Italians wash our hands in Italians’ blood’ (Foscolo, 1955, pp. 137, 295). In ‘Dei sepolcri’, Florence, owing to foreign invasion, has been lost to the ‘country’—here the term clearly referred to a wider national perspective. This literary patriotism went hand in hand with a significant theorization of Cicero’s idea, so important to the Roman tradition, that ‘omnium societatum nulla est gravior, nulla carior quam ea, quae cum re publica est uni cuique nostrum’ (Cicero, 1987, I.17.57). Mention of 1494—the year of the French invasion of Italy—occurred with a nearly obsessive frequency in the work of Machiavelli, from the theoretical writings to the comedies, poems and letters, 5 while the final sentence of
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The History of Florence referred to the ‘bad seeds which brought, and are still bringing, Italy to ruin’ (Machiavelli, 1992, p. 844). Machiavelli’s writings are pervaded by a sense of belonging to the Florentine country, which he declared he loved ‘more than his own soul’ (ibid., pp. 696, 1527); but this republican city patriotism was intertwined with a national patriotism.6 His last important opportunity for ‘rolling a stone’ (ibid., p. 1160) was when serving as a politician and diplomat in the camp of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, along with Guicciardini and Vettori, in their attempt to resist the Spanish invasion. If Machiavelli considered himself a patriot, we can see emerging from his work a concept of belonging to a political community that was free of genealogical references and did not rely on a notion of cultural homogeneity. Of course, Machiavelli cannot be thought of as a theorist of multicultural society; these questions were outside his experience. Yet his idea of citizenship was clearly cast in political terms. Love of country, greater than the love of one’s own soul, was above all love of libertà and the institutions of vivere libero, insofar as they protected individual freedom and pursued the public interest. The essence of this conception of citizenship was that, while one kind of dissensioni had a destructive impact and could cause the republic to become enslaved and corrupt, another kind of conflict was required for the development of freedom. This kind of conflict expressed citizens’ basic umori (humours) and led to ‘laws and institutions whereby the liberties of the public benefited’ (Machiavelli, 1992, p. 82; see also pp. 119–20). Moreover, Machiavellian patriotism was far from being triumphal. Machiavelli recognized all the limitations of his country and diagnosed its crises and weaknesses sternly. In the History of Florence the dissection of Florence’s political and social pathologies was so merciless that it seems strange to think it a work written for the Medici (ibid., pp. 632–3). Machiavelli took the fact that it was born a ‘servant’ as a characteristic of Florence, in other words as an ineffaceable feature of its genetic code, and began his analytical reconstruction of its history with the first violent clash between two noble families (ibid., pp. 660–1). A passage from Discorsi sums up the link between Machiavelli’s patriotism and his republicanism (and political realism): It is good to defend one’s country in whatever way it is to be done . . . when on the decision to be taken wholly depends the safety of one’s country, no attention should be paid either to justice or injustice, to kindness or cruelty, or to its being praiseworthy or ignominious. On the contrary, every other consideration being set aside, that alternative
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should be wholeheartedly adopted which will save the life and preserve the freedom of one’s country. (1992, p. 249) Republican political culture became progressively weaker in sixteenthcentury Florence with the advent of the domination of the Medici, sanctioned by the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (Albertini, 1955). Yet this political culture still contributed to the last attempts at a national liberation from oppressive governments and foreign domination: I refer not only to the final republican experiences of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Siena’s resistance against the Medici and the Neapolitan revolution of 1647 (Villari, 1996), but also to the ‘Jacobin’ republics of 1796–99, in particular the Neapolitan republic of 1799; the Republics of Rome and Venice of 1848–49; the deeds of Garibaldi; and, less than a century later, the Resistance. These historical experiences were often accompanied by significant theoretical efforts to justify them. Republican patriotism did not end with Machiavelli’s contemporary Donato Giannotti: it can be found, after centuries, in the work of Paolo Mattia Doria and Melchiorre Gioia, in Vincenzo Cuoco’s critique of the Neapolitan Republic, and in thinkers as different as Carlo Cattaneo and Giuseppe Mazzini. Thus the republican tradition made a major theoretical and ideological contribution to the difficult, centuries-long building of an Italian citizenship. Massimo Rosati singles out four traditions in the history of Italian national identity: the liberal patriotism of the Risorgimento, moderate Catholicism, nationalism, and the republican and radical democratic tradition itself. The key stage in the emergence of the last in the late eighteenth century can be said to be the ‘three Jacobin years’ of 1796–99. It was in the language of the Jacobin patriots that the theoretical seeds, already partially formed, ripened; it was the disappointment of Campoformio and the end of the Cisalpine Republic that aroused the patriots’ new awareness (Rosati, 2000, pp. 107–16). In this context, the first stirrings of unitary patriotism were marked by republican ideology. Among eighteenth-century Jacobins, Melchiorre Gioia equated patriotism with the principles of liberty and equality, and restated the importance of the ‘negative’ character of national identity: ‘Everybody speaks of perpetuating the memory of republican virtues, so as to arouse their imitation: why not perpetuate the memory of tyranny, so as to make us hate it forever?’ (Gioia, 1988, p. 27). Despite the wide cultural gap between the Jacobin Enlightenment and his own romantic mysticism, Giuseppe Mazzini revamped the idea of a close link between patriotism, republicanism, democratic constitutionalism
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and, notably, a positive view of conflict. Republic, Mazzini observed, meant ‘a public thing: government of the nation by the nation itself; social government: government by laws truly expressing the people’s will . . . political equilibrium, balancing of the three powers, orderly struggle of legal elements, mixed parliamentary rule, etc.’ (Mazzini, 1972, pp. 263, 270). Unlike Mazzini, who envisaged a strictly unitary solution to the problem of national independence, Carlo Cattaneo put forward the idea of multiple membership of the city and the national community, and cast it in federal terms. For Cattaneo, love of ‘singular countries’ could not be ignored; ‘liberty’ was synonymous with ‘republic’, but it was a ‘manyrooted plant’. Cattaneo’s idea of an Italy of ‘one hundred cities’ was expressed even more radically: ‘municipalities [comuni] are the nation: they are the nation in the innermost shelter of its liberty’ (Cattaneo, 1972, p. 406). Cattaneo believed liberty and self-government were logical and axiological conditions of national independence and unity. Rosati makes another point: for the Jacobins, as well as for Mazzini and Cattaneo, to be a patriot was to be an ‘internal’ (Walzer, 1994) critic of the problems, distortions and limitations of national history and character. There emerged a notion of citizenship opposed to the idea of emphasizing the traits of national ‘primacy’ in the manner of the moderate Catholic thinker Vincenzo Gioberti. Gioberti tended to ignore the limitations and distortions of national historical experience, exalting instead an alleged ‘moral and civil primacy’ of Italy stemming from the millenary presence of the Pope. Gioberti was among the first to subordinate the civic element of national membership to the natural, linguistic, geographical and chiefly religious elements, inverting the priority of republican patriotism. In his account, the link between country and liberty became progressively weaker, and was ultimately lost. In the twentieth century, the language of patriotism became monopolized by right-wing nationalists and could not easily be used by progressive thinkers and politicians. Nevertheless, republican themes appeared in the works of a number of authors, notably those belonging to the various strands of the Italian liberal socialist school, the ‘Justice and Liberty’ movement and the Action Party. Members of these groups were among the key figures of the Resistance and the opposition to Fascism. The ‘liberal revolutionary’ Piero Gobetti criticized the fear of social conflict as one of the most dangerous elements of Italian identity (Gobetti, 1960, pp. 677–8; 1995, p. 46), and denounced those traits of Italian character that made fascism possible. Yet Gobetti suggested another national identity, rooted in
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a recognition of the democratic value of political conflict and people’s struggle against tyranny and for self-government. A theoretical, ideological and political continuity can be established between Gobetti’s radical liberalism, the protagonists of the liberal socialist movement such as Carlo Rosselli, and members of the Action Party. Moreover, in Rosati’s view, much of Gramsci’s analysis can be regarded as republican patriotism, despite Gramsci’s membership of the communist party and his endorsement of Marxism (Rosati, 2000, pp. 141–62).
A history of defeats Republicanism may be one of the historical roots of Italian national identity, but can the republican tradition be said to play a significant theoretical, ethical and political role today? Here some scepticism is warranted. Reference has been made already to the ideological position of small elite groups. Even the leading figures of the Risorgimento were aware that, once the process of unification was carried out, once Italy was made, so to speak, it remained necessary to ‘make Italians’. Indeed, only after the Second World War, when the impact of basic education combined with the spread of television, did Italian became the common spoken language of the majority. Not only was Italian national identity limited for centuries to a minority of the ruling elite, however significantly widespread that elite was, but also, and more specifically, the history of its republican form is one of defeats. The republican Jacobin experiences of the late eighteenth century were destroyed by conservative powers, by Sanfedisti, and by Napoleon’s geo-political strategy. It was the republicans who gave the first political impetus to the process of Italian reunification, and the main heroes of that historical process continued to be republicans. Nonetheless, the republican experiences of 1848—from Milan to Venice and Rome—were both heroic and ephemeral. The political leadership of the unifying process passed to the Savoy monarchy and its strategist Cavour. The same holds true for the heroic liberation of southern Italy from the Bourbon monarchy by Garibaldi’s volunteers. Here too, Piedmont rapidly took control and every hypothesis of self-government was soon defeated. Through less-than-open plebiscites southern regions were annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia, which became the Kingdom of Italy without either a formal change in the dynasty (King Vittorio Emanuele remained ‘the Second’) or any alteration of the octroyée (benevolently granted) constitution of the old kingdom. The price of this annexation was brigandism, illiberal violent repression and, probably,
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the preclusion of every chance of southern Italy’s economic development and civil evolution. The unitary state resulting from the unifying process was a centralized monarchy that adopted the legal and administrative framework of the Savoy kingdom. The resulting rhetoric of national identity left no room for republican principles. Early twentieth-century nationalism moved even further from the republican tradition; indeed it appropriated the language of patriotism, severing its link with liberty and democracy. Fascism was eventually to monopolize such terms as ‘nation’ and ‘country’, making them unavailable for a long time in democratic argument. The underground river of republican ideology surfaced again in the second phase of nation-building, namely the experience of German occupation and the Resistance against Nazism and Fascism. The Justice and Liberty groups played a significant role in the partisan struggles— second only to the communist ‘Garibaldi Brigades’—and the Action Party had a key position in the temporary post-war cabinets. But with the advent of republican democracy and the start of the Cold War, the Action Party rapidly disappeared from the political scene. Its leading members went in different directions, though they became major influences in Italian politics and culture (consider people as diverse in their careers and political affiliations as Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Norberto Bobbio, Ugo La Malfa and Bruno Trentin). Instead, since the Second World War, national identity has been shaped by the clash between the two dominant political cultures, the Christian Democratic and the Communist (Bodei, 1998). It is this conflict that configures, in republican Italy, the emergence of a collective identity through the transformation, in Alessandro Pizzorno’s phrase, of ‘private hate’ into ‘public friendship’. 7 The ‘republican’ element of Action Party intransigence has surfaced in many stages of recent history, but it has been invariably contained and defeated. Its last stirring might be said to be the movement for the renewal of politics that, albeit with some ambiguities, cut through Italian civil society from 1992 to 1996, as an answer to the general corruption of the political system brought to light by the ‘Clean Hands’ inquiry. This process led to the disappearance or transformation of all major political parties of republican Italy, and the establishment of a majoritarian, albeit spurious, electoral system. Today this movement seems finally to be exhausted. It may be added that recent scholarship on the problems of Italian national identity has charged the very republican–Action Party political culture with some significant responsibilities. Authors such as Ernesto Galli della Loggia have taken up the idea that the armistice and the
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king’s flight from Rome, on 8 September 1943, were the ‘death of the country’. Galli della Loggia emphasizes the long-term traumatic impact of the division of the country between the Kingdom and the Republic of Salò, between the Resistance and Fascism. He favours waiving the anti-Fascist legacy so as to reconstruct an Italian national identity. He supposes, moreover, that a monarchic continuity would have fostered a more solid national identity (Galli della Loggia, 1996). Even authors more closely linked to the anti-Fascist tradition, such as Pietro Scoppola or Gian Enrico Rusconi, have argued about the limitations of the Action Party culture. The former stresses the value and genuine popular nature of the ‘passive resistance’ to Nazi occupation, widespread among the Catholic population, in comparison with the armed resistance of communist and Action Party elites (Scoppola, 1991). Rusconi himself—though, as we shall see, proposing a revamping of republican constitutional patriotism— emphasizes the elite character of Action Party democratic radicalism (Rusconi, 1993, pp. 86–91). Apart from an assessment of the normative meaning of the republican tradition, some more general considerations are needed. It is possible to question the sense of appealing to an ancient and early-modern political tradition to cope with the question of citizenship in today’s complex and diverse societies. It could be argued that game theory and system’s theory are more useful for understanding the process of social integration than are the writings of Machiavelli or Cattaneo. Contemporary Italy is a complex post-industrial society, pervaded by the media and forms of social differentiation much more articulated than the ‘humours’ of the city-republics. Republican virtù can hardly be supposed to have an impact, in terms of social integration, greater than, for example, such phenomena as the institutionalization of behavioural expectations and ‘expectations of expectations’, or the role of the political system in producing consensus (the so-called ‘legitimation through procedures’) (Luhmann, 1970, pp. 179–204). However, a novel and very recent feature of Italian history is that, for the past 15 years at most, Italy has been no longer a country of emigrants, but one of immigrants. To be sure, the foreign communities are far fewer than in countries with a history of immigration, such as Britain, France, Germany or the Netherlands, even though the extremely low Italian birth rate is expected to have long-term effects. In any event, a cultural, religious and linguistic unity, which had been the basis of Italian citizenship for a long time, seems to have come to an end. Faced with this scenario, the recent Italian legislation on nationality,8 subordinating naturalization to long and complex procedures and relying on ius sanguinis
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to a significant extent, already seems inadequate. The recent constitutional amendment allowing Italian citizens living abroad to vote in national elections also goes against the link between nationality and dwelling, and the generalization of the ius soli principle. A further element should be considered. I think that in Italy the link between national identity and European identity can be said to be deeply felt. In certain respects this is a paradoxical effect of that ‘negative’ element we have found in the republican notion of citizenship. At the popular level, it is expressed through an ironic and resigned criticism of national mores, the inefficiency of the civil service and widespread corruption. In this respect, European integration is seen as an opportunity for reconstruction not to be missed. Significantly, in Italy the heavy sacrifices imposed on the national economy by budgetary compliance with the Maastricht criteria did not cause significant social conflict or meet with much political opposition: even far-left groups have endorsed the substance of cabinet policy. The very secessionist project of the Northern League is quite likely to have been defeated by the adoption of the euro. Paradoxically, a policy aimed at limiting sovereignty and giving up one of its most typical marks, the monetary unit, has had the effect of strengthening national solidarity.
The virtues of a negative identity It may be asked whether, in spite of this series of defeats, the republican tradition is still useful for dealing with the problem of Italian national identity. This identity has become problematic for at least three reasons. First, a significant political force, rooted in many areas of northern Italy, explicitly demands a form of ‘devolution’ aiming at a breach in national solidarity. The ‘ethnodemocracy’ of the Northern League has been endorsed by important political theorists, has been provided with a symbolic apparatus—however unlikely and approximate (but which myths are rational?)—and, most important, it still expresses widespread feelings, moods and interests. Second, Italy, as noted above, has only recently become a country of immigration and is, by virtue of its geographical location, the first landing place for immigrants to the First World from the Mediterranean south and east. It goes without saying that the League’s success is also due to its propensity to give voice to widespread racist feelings against immigrants (as well as against southern Italians). Third, the recent Italian political transition, started in the early 1990s, has not yet been accomplished: renewed political institutions have not been established, nor has a fresh political culture replaced that
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which had shaped the post-war period. Can the republican tradition— on either an analytic or a normative level—help in the difficult task of redesigning Italy’s national identity? If a standard picture of the republican tradition is correct—for example, Habermas’s picture in Between Facts and Norms—I do not think it can. On this view, drawing on elements of Pocock’s account in The Machiavellian Moment (1975) read in the light of Hannah Arendt’s thought, republican political thought stems from Aristotle’s conception of the individual as zoon politikon, who can develop his moral rational nature only through political participation. From this perspective, the republican tradition is seen as the political translation of communitarian theses. It expresses a notion of membership rooted in ‘the ethical substance of a particular community’ (Habermas, 1992a, p. 341). Quentin Skinner, however, has challenged this picture, pointing to a ‘neo-Roman’ strand in classical republicanism. In Skinner’s view, this theoretical strand departs from the Aristotelian tradition: the individual is no longer seen as zoon politikon, nor is politics considered to be the achievement of the human essence. For neo-Roman republicans, says Skinner, political participation is a means to defend civil liberties, and virtue itself has an instrumental meaning, which is the set of dispositions and powers required for effective political activity. In particular, Machiavelli—the beacon of this tradition—would have put forward an original conception of liberty, distinguished from both ancient ‘positive’ liberty and modern ‘negative’ liberty as lack of interference (Skinner, 1998; cf. Berlin, 1969). A positive evaluation of conflict is typical of this version of republicanism (Geuna, 1992, 1998). Close affinities can easily be seen between this ‘neo-Roman’ strand of republicanism and that of the Italian patriots. Unsurprisingly, authors such as Maurizio Viroli and Gian Enrico Rusconi have recently appealed to the republican tradition itself in order to propose a fresh version of patriotism as the virtue of democratic citizenship. They insist on the link between republican citizenship and democracy, and emphasize the deep difference between republican patriotism and the organic and ethnic forms of nationalism (Viroli, 1995). Whereas Viroli plays the (republican) concept of country against the (ethnic-cultural) concept of nation, Rusconi sees the republic as ‘the junction of nation, qua the outcome of a long history of conflict, and democracy, qua an imperfect, though perfectible, political project’ (Rusconi, 1997, p. 9). Defeated in the Risorgimento, republicanism had a major impact during the framing of the Constitution which, Rusconi maintains against revisionist historians, remains ‘the event richest in value and collective national pathos’
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(ibid., p. 15). Rusconi makes it clear that this process does not refer to an ethnic and anthropological ‘hard core’, but to historic interaction and communication among individuals and groups through which ‘civil society’ and the republican nation were established within precise cultural and geographic boundaries. Moreover, in Rusconi’s view, republicanism makes it possible to redefine ‘a democracy’s necessary link between the institutional framework and the citizens’ motivation’ (ibid., 1997, p. 18). Meanwhile, recent empirical social research shows evidence that in Italian history the republican political tradition has been something more significant than a genre or the idle ideology of some political-cultural elite. Robert Putnam, in particular, argues that there is a link between the ‘civic tradition’ characterizing the Italian regions affected by the republican experience and institutional performance (Putnam, 1993).9 In the light of this finding, I think that the republican tradition can provide some useful clues about the complex relationship between citizenship and national identity, with respect to both historical interpretation and normative proposal. First, the emergence of an Italian national identity cannot be understood without reference to that tradition. As we have seen, for centuries an appeal to collective myths, heroic battles and a shared epos was not available. Italians did not suffer ethnic or religious persecutions, nor did they engage in crusades. In their literary legacy there are no sagas of half-divine heroes nor poems of Christian knights, but the Divina commedia, the Decameron and Orlando furioso. Nor could any reigning dynasty play a significant mythopoetic role. This very lack of traditional mythomoteurs emphasizes the importance of centuries-old literary production, the appeal to Roman antiquity and, above all, the protest against ‘barbarian’ foreign domination: in a word, the constitutive features of republican identity. Second, the republican tradition in political thought can provide us with ideas, principles and values useful at the normative level, in building a conception of community membership suitable for current challenges. In an age of emerging ethnic states and claims to secession, but also, less dramatically, of weaker bonds of solidarity between rich and poor regions, current theoretical–political debate opposes an organic, even ethnic, notion of membership, rooted in a community’s substantive ethos, to the rejection of the very notion of citizenship (Ferrajoli, 1994, 2001) or its formulation in purely legal–normative terms. I do not think any of these alternatives is viable. A more promising redefinition of national identity begins with an awareness that any collective (ethnic
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and, a fortiori, national) identity is ‘artificial’, and ‘invented’ or ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Smith, 1986; Hobsbawm, 1990). Early modern republicans felt a strong bond to their own polis, but they were far from tracing this link to ethnic or genealogical origins. Rather, they felt themselves the keepers of a shared history and, mainly, the holders of a ‘liberty’ worth fighting for. Membership of the republic was seen as a feeling of loyalty to a political–legal order, free from references to ius sanguinis and the ‘community of history and fate’. From this point of view, there are many similarities to Dworkin’s notion (1989) of ‘liberal community’ or the idea, adopted by Habermas, of ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Verfassungs patriotismus) (Habermas, 1992b, 1998). But there emerges a significant difference as well. Membership of the republic includes important emotional and symbolic elements—precisely, a feeling, a passion—and it is membership of a particular republic, backed up by endorsing a specific political culture (Viroli, 1995; Michelman, 1996, pp. 1170–1). Rusconi takes ‘constitutional patriotism’ to mean ‘accepting a Constitution where the status of citizenship is characterised not only by the bill of rights and individuals’ duties but also by acknowledging that the constraints of the Constitution presuppose and lead back to a shared history and culture, succinctly referred to as the nation’ (Rusconi, 1997, p. 16). Thus, Rusconi parts company with Habermas’s universalism: citizenship and national identity need to be rooted in a cultural ‘life-world’, historically constituted; they cannot be identified with the endorsement of universal normative principles (Rusconi, 1993, pp. 126–37; Belvisi, 1996, pp. 60–71). We have found in the republican tradition the idea that membership— apart from being articulated vertically in cultural, ethnic, associational and religious elements—must also have several levels of political identity: from neighbourhood, locality and village to the region and the country, possibly up to European identity. The idea that, under given conditions, a plural patriotism does not mean a weaker sense of national identity is expressed by Cattaneo’s model of the many-rooted plant and his thesis that ‘municipalities are the nation: they are the nation in the innermost shelter of its liberty’ (Cattaneo, 1972, p. 406). I think that articulating civic memberships, in particular valuing the city element, does not simply lead towards institutional innovation. It provides an important clue for the difficult task of rebuilding an Italian civic culture, after the crisis of the institutions characterizing post-war history. In an age of globalization and the telematic revolution, perhaps especially in Italy, cities are likely to be a preferred place for a politics more controlled by citizens, one that activates the available resources of ‘patriotism’ and civic responsibility.
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Perhaps it is only in city politics that democratic experiences may be rooted that are not merely formal but can also attach some ‘sense’ to politics.10 Besides the civic notion of collective identity and the pluralist articulation of membership, I think a third relevant element is what Rusconi has called ‘expiation patriotism’: ‘a form of passive participation in the nation’s bereavements, conspicuous in the period 1943–45, characterized by a vague sense of guilt, not personal (individually one feels indeed an innocent victim) but collective’. The grief caused by international and Civil War comes to appear ‘as the price the community must pay to redeem itself for having given consent to the Fascist regime which led to catastrophe’. It is a feeling that ‘yields a new acknowledgement of a common fate’ and goes on in the republic’s history ‘being a link with the new civil order’, playing even ‘a role similar to or substitutive of “civil religion” ’ (Rusconi, 1997, pp. 22–3). In my view, ‘expiation patriotism’ is not without risks. In the symbolic apparatus of aggressive nationalism there are often not only half-divine leaders, triumphant saints, more or less unlikely genealogies and original myths; there are also narratives of (perhaps imagined) defeats.11 But I suppose that Italian expiation patriotism is different in kind, precisely because it opposes the idea of national ‘primacy’ and refers to the republican tradition. For this very reason it is a legacy to accept and use. Republican theorists and patriots, being ‘internal’ critics of national history and character, closely linked their notion of collective identity to the collective rejection of oppression, the ‘barbarous domination’ referred to above (Machiavelli, 1992, p. 298). This idea is embodied in the tradition of Italian identity and has a direct connection to a conception typical of neo-Roman republicanism, namely liberty as non-domination, as an exclusion of arbitrary interference (Pettit, 1996; Skinner, 1998). This is a good argument against the thesis of the ‘death of the country’. Here too, I think, there is a connection with the theme of European citizenship. It is only after two centuries of wars amongst Europeans, after the catastrophe of the Second World War, after Shoah, that the difficult process of building a common identity started in Europe (Cerutti, 1996, pp. 38–41). Finally, I think a common misconception should be disposed of: Many authors see a close link between republican patriotism, military virtue and the endorsement of government policies (for example, MacIntyre, 1984). In this respect I think we should part company with Machiavelli, or at least with a certain reading of his thought: if the democratic process is a requirement of republican citizenship, if social conflict is a condition
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of ‘public liberty’, then criticism, dissent and civil disobedience are resources as vital as loyalty, consensus and obedience. This holds true, in a highly significant way, with respect to key issues such as a country’s engagement in war. A split public opinion on such themes need not mean weaker bonds of membership with the national community (Panebianco, 1991). Appearances notwithstanding, the saying ‘Right or wrong, my country’ is not very consistent with republican citizenship, at least not with the kind of republicanism discussed above. The idea of ‘constitutional patriotism’ is much more fitting. In the Italian case, it means fidelity to Article 11 of the country’s Constitution: ‘Italy rejects war as a means of offending other peoples’ liberty, and a means of settling international disputes.’12
Notes 1. ‘By God, let this sometimes move your minds; and with pity look on the tears of the sorrowing people, who only from you (after God) can hope for peace. And, if you merely show some sign of pity, manhood shall take up arms against rage, and the fighting shall be short: for ancient valor is not yet dead in Italic hearts.’ (Petrarch, 1976, p. 260). 2. ‘. . . the monument / that shelters the remains of the great writer / who tempers the scepter of rulers and / strips it of laurel leaves to show the blood / and tears it soaks, for all people to see . . .’ (Cambon, 1980, p. 332). 3. ‘. . . none / other are left perhaps since the ill-defended Alps / and the fateful vicissitudes of human / power robbed you of weapons, of possessions / of altars and of country and of all things / save memory alone . . .’ (Cambon, 1980, pp. 337–8). 4. The sonnet ‘A Zacinto’ (Foscolo, 1985) should be considered, too. It is devoted to the island where the poet was born, and is pervaded by the feeling of exile and nostalgia for the ‘mother land’: in Foscolo there is an articulation of concentric memberships that characterizes the ‘patriotism’ of many republican authors. 5. Just a few examples: the ‘labours of Italy’, narrated in Decennale primo (1504), are those of the 10 years after the invasion. A clear reference is in the poem ‘Dell’ambizione’. See also Mandragola, Act I, scene 1 (Machiavelli, 1992, p. 869), and Clizia, Act I, scene 1 (ibid., p. 893). 6. ‘Liberate diuturna cura Italiam, extirpate has immanes belluas, quae hominis, preter faciem et vocem, nichil habent.’ Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini, 17 May 1526 (ibid., p. 1232). 7. ‘National identity, which can be intense in the revolutionary formation of a state or in confrontations with the enemy, is backed up in everyday life by rituals too intermittent, not very intense, easily ignored, thus insufficient to meet more limited and circumscribed needs for recognition of identity and the constitution of solidarity. It is instead in the conflict between enduring political parties— which the framers of democratic republics did not value—that there seems to be again the chance of a strong, everyday recognition, and so of forms of active
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10.
11. 12.
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solidarity, though not exceeding the constitutional limitations of a wider collective solidarity’ (Pizzorno, 1993, pp. 193–4). Legge n. 91 of 5 February 1992. It may be noted that Putnam does not distinguish ‘Aristotelian’ from ‘neoRoman’ republicanism. The distinction might be useful for empirical enquiry itself, for example, in assessing conflict. Among other things, Putnam’s account entails taking the distinction between central northern Italy and southern Italy seriously, acknowledging its deep historical roots. However, it is clear that if central northern regions can claim something on their behalf, it is precisely the tradition of republican self-government, surely not their Celtic (or Etruscan) origin or the blessing of the god River Po. Nevertheless, I think the republican tradition can contribute to the ‘reconstruction’ of a democratic theory that is distinct from ‘democratic elitism’: it is not another call for popular participation at all levels of decision-making. The political division of labour should not be ignored, but institutions should be kept open to contestability by citizens (see Pettit, 1996, pp. 8, 201–2), and the political system should be ‘permeable’ to communicative processes from civil society (see Habermas, 1992a, especially Ch. 7, and 1992b). The reference is, most obviously, to the relevance of the ‘defeat’ of Kosovopolije as the mythomoteur of Serb nationalism. I do not want my conclusion to suggest an all-legal, insipid approach to citizenship like the one I criticized above. I propose, therefore, another literary quotation. In the poem ‘All’Italia’, surely not the best example of his poetry, Giacomo Leopardi opposes the fate of Italian soldiers in Napoleon’s army to the fate of those who fight to defend their country: ‘Wretched the man, on fields of battle slain, / Not for his native shores, nor for his wife / Or children dear, but by the hands / Of enemies not his, for the sake of alien folk, / Who cannot, dying, say / Dear native land, the life / you gave me, now, behold, I will repay’ (Singh, 1990, p. 79). Leopardi wrote 181 years ago, yet his thought is perfectly consistent with Italian constitutional law and the United Nations Charter: both allow only defensive wars.
Bibliography Albertini, R. von (1955), Das florentinische Staatsbewußtsein im Übergang von der Republik zum Prinzipat (Bern: Francke Verlag). Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Belvisi, F. (1996), ‘Rights, World-Society and the Crisis of Legal Universalism’, Ratio Juris, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 60–71. Berlin, I. (1969), Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Bodei, R. (1998), Il noi diviso: Ethos e idee nell’Italia repubblicana (Torino: Einaudi). Cambon, G. (1980), Ugo Foscolo: Poet of Exile (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Cattaneo, C. (1965), ‘Sulla legge comunale e provinciale’, in M. Boneschi (ed.), Scritti Politici, Vol. IV (Le Monnier: Firenze). Cattaneo, C. (1972), Storia universale e ideologia delle genti: Scritti 1852–1864, ed. D. Castelnuovo Frigessi (Torino: Einaudi).
128 Italian Citizenship Cerutti, F. (1996), ‘Identità e politica’, in F. Cerutti (ed.), Identità e politica (Roma and Bari: Laterza), pp. 5– 41. Cicero, M. T. (1987), De Officiis (I Doveri) (Milano: Rizzoli). Dworkin, R. (1989), ‘Liberal Community’, California Law Review, Vol. 77, No. 3, pp. 479–504. Ferrajoli, L. (1994), ‘Dai diritti del cittadino ai diritti della persona’, in D. Zolo (ed.), La cittadinanza: Appartenenza, identità, diritti (Roma and Bari: Laterza), pp. 263–92. Ferrajoli, L. (2001), Diritti fondamentali (Roma and Bari: Laterza). Foscolo, U. (1955), ‘Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis’, in G. Gambari (ed.), Edizione nazionale delle opere, Vol. IV (Firenze: Le Monnier). Foscolo, U. (1985), ‘Dei Sepolcri’, in G. Folena and M. Scotti (eds), Edizione nazionale delle opere, Vol. I (Firenze: Le Monnier), pp. 121–53. Galli della Loggia, E. (1996), La morte della patria: La crisi dell’idea di nazione tra Resistenza, antifascismo e repubblica (Roma and Bari: Laterza). Gellner, E. (1983), Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Geuna, M. (1992), ‘Il linguaggio del repubblicanesimo di Adam Ferguson’, in E. Pii (ed.), I linguaggi politici delle rivoluzioni in Europa (Firenze: Olschki), pp. 143–59. Geuna, M. (1998), ‘La tradizione repubblicana e i suoi interpreti: famiglie teoriche e discontinuità concettuali’, Filosofia politica, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 101–32. Gioia, M. (1988 [1796]), Quale dei governi liberi meglio convenga alla libertà d’Italia (Roma: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea). Gobetti, P. (1960), Opere complete: Scritti politici, Vol. I, ed. P. Spriano (Torino: Einaudi). Gobetti, P. (1995 [1924]), La rivoluzione liberale, (intro.) G. De Caro (Torino: Einaudi). Habermas, J. (1990), Die Nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Habermas, J. (1992a), Faktizität und Geltung [Between Facts and Norms] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Habermas, J. (1992b), ‘Staatsbürgerschaft und nationale Identität’, in J. Habermas (ed.), Faktizität und Geltung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), pp. 632–60. Habermas, J. (1998), Die Einbeziehung des Anderen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Hobbes, T. (1991), Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990), Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Luhmann, N. (1970), Soziologische Aufklärung I (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag). Machiavelli, N. (1992), Tutte le opere, ed. M. Martelli (Firenze: Sansoni). MacIntyre, A. (1984), ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’, Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas. Mazzini, G. (1972 [1841–1860]), Dei doveri dell’uomo, in T. Grandi and A. Comba (eds), Scritti politici (Torino: Utet), pp. 837–943. Michelman, F. (1996), ‘Family Quarrel’, Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 17, Nos. 4–5, pp. 1163–77. Panebianco, A. (1991), ‘Representation without Taxation: L’idea di cittadinanza in Italia’, Il Mulino, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 54–60. Petrarch, F. (1976), Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. R. M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Pettit, P. (1996), Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pizzorno, A. (1993), Le radici della politica assoluta (Milano: Feltrinelli).
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Pocock, J. G. A. (1975), The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Putnam, R. (1993), Making Democracy Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Ricci, A. G. (2001), La repubblica (Bologna: Il Mulino). Rosati, M. (2000), Il patriottismo italiano: Culture politiche e identità nazionale (Roma and Bari: Laterza). Rusconi, G. E. (1993), Se cessiamo di essere una nazione (Bologna: Il Mulino). Rusconi, G. E. (1997), Patria e repubblica (Bologna: Il Mulino). Scoppola, P. (1991), La repubblica dei partiti (Bologna: Il Mulino). Singh, G. (ed.) (1990), I canti di Leopardi nelle traduzioni inglesi, trans. M. Bottrall (Recanati: Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani). Skinner, Q. (1998), Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Smith, A. D. (1986), The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Villari, R. (1996), ‘Patriottismo e riforma politica’, conference paper, ‘Libertà politica e coscienza civile: Liberalismo, comunitarismo e tradizione repubblicana’, Fondazione Agnelli, Torino, 21–22 November. Viroli, M. (1995), For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Walzer, M. (1994), Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
6 Spanish Citizenship: Democracybuilding and Plural Nationhood in the European Context Carlos Closa
Introduction The refashioning of democratic citizenship in Spain after the end of the Franco regime does not follow traditional models of citizen building. The innovations concern a number of issues, such as the complex relationship between identity and rights, the validity of the Marshallian sequence of rights creation, and the role of social struggles and of constructivist approaches to the making of citizens. As the introduction to this volume argues, three issues dominated the interaction between state and civil society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contributed to the formation of the modern conception of citizenship. These were the emergence of the nation-state as the dominant political context; the development of commercial and industrialized societies, and the growth of social democracy. In Spain, at the time of the transition to democracy in the mid-1970s, none of these questions had been fully resolved. Traditional Spanish national values and symbols played only a secondary role in their settlement, for the twentieth-century experience of citizenship-building was perceived as a break in the nation’s history requiring a reconstruction of the democratic state on the entirely new foundations established by the 1978 Constitution.
The history of Spanish nationhood and citizenship The nineteenth-century legacy The history of Spanish citizenship in the nineteenth century is characterized by the separation of the forming of a national identity from the 130
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development of a participatory and republican model of citizenship. Inspired by the example of the French Revolution, the liberal elite saw the nation as a new political agent, which was instrumental in the checking of monarchical sovereignty. The 1808 rebellion against the Napoleonic invasion provided the occasion for the nation to be united as an active and fighting political subject. However, this happy coincidence between aspirations and reality lasted only until 1812 (Álvarez Junco, 2001, p. 130). During that period, the idea of the ‘nation’ assumed the dual role of mobilizing the population against the intruder and posing as an alternative to the sovereignty of the king. Indeed, the 1812 Spanish Constitution identified the nation as the source of sovereignty (Articles 2 and 3 read: ‘The Spanish nation is free and independent, it is not and it cannot be the patrimony of any person or family’). Following the French model, the whole citizenry, acting as the body politic, constituted the nation, while, borrowing directly from the French Constitution of 1791, the Spanish Constitution clearly distinguished between Spaniards and citizens: ‘All free men born and living within the Spanish territories [including the American colonies], and those foreigners who obtain the carta de naturaleza [that is, are naturalized] enjoy the condition of being Spanish, and hence are entitled to civil freedom, rights of property and other legitimate rights.’ This model of nationality, based on an extensive catalogue of rights, was influenced as much by the French revolutionary experience as by the Spanish natural law tradition of Francisco de Vitoria, who, in the sixteenth century, had used the idea of universal natural rights to legitimate Spanish conquest. In spite of the generous catalogue of rights associated with nationality, this did not give access to political rights such as the right to vote and to be elected as representatives of the nation itself. Such rights were reserved for the citizens. As in the French model, three criteria were used to differentiate the condition of citizenship from that of nationality: independence (to have useful employment and/or pay taxes), personal autonomy (which excluded minors and those dependent on a master), and being in possession of some minimal qualifications and mental capacities (originally conceived at the lowest possible level) (Pérez Ledesma, 2000, p. 122). The 1812 Constitution excluded from citizenship Spaniards of African origin (except in the case of those who had rendered exceptional services to the state), domestic servants and the unemployed. The minimum-capacity requirement was not applied until 1830, after which time citizens were required to be able to read and write (Articles 22 and 25), while a minimum level of personal income was required in
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order to stand as a representative (Article 92), but not to have the right to vote. The way in which the ideas of national independence, sovereignty and citizenship combined during the War of Independence corresponds to the fusion of the republican and national ideals that, according to Habermas, took place during the French Revolution and was typified by the willingness to fight and, if necessary, to die for one’s country (Habermas, 1994, p. 23). But reality did not entirely match this idealization, as the people lacked a full awareness of this idea of the nation as a new political subject. Popular resistance against the French army rested on strong xenophobic and anti-French sentiments. It was motivated by a hatred against things foreign (particularly French) rather than by adherence to indigenous values, by local community links and ‘local patriotism’ rather than by nationalism or national identity (Álvarez Junco, 2001, pp. 121–5). Moreover, resistance was counter-revolutionary in character, and part of an anti-modernist crusade against enlightenment, atheism and Jacobinism. The anti-modernist and traditionalist character of the uprising against the French is further evinced by the popular support for the restoration of an absolutist monarchy and the general condemnation of the idea of ‘freedom’. Some have argued that this eventually forced the Spanish liberals to accept the monarchy, though in a limited and constitutional form (Sepúlveda, 1996, p. 413; Moreno, 1997, p. 95). The War of Independence was the birth of modern Spanish nationalism. It became the primary focus for collective pride and was at the root of the myth of the Spanish nation. It failed, however, to establish any serious link between nation-building and either the process of modernization or citizens’ participation. Modernization itself was often identified with either French or European influences, which were seen as running counter to the Spanish spirit. The 1836 Constitution reaffirmed political citizenship but in a significantly weakened form, limiting political rights to taxpayers and reducing the franchise to 200 electors per representative. Politicians maintained that, though civil rights were common to all members of society, political rights were privileges and prerogatives (Pérez Ledesma, 2000, p. 126). During the rest of the century, successive revolutionary movements struggled to extend both the franchise and the catalogue of rights. The 1868 revolution, for instance, attempted to extend citizenship rights to humanity at large. But the ruling elite resisted liberal revolutions and popular mobilization by appealing to the cause of the nation and to its defence. Enfranchisement was not a social conquest resulting from popular mobilization. It was only in 1890 that the monarchy reintroduced universal male suffrage, but in a context in which the governing
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groups had total control over both the electoral processes and its outcomes. Paradoxically, it was at more or less the same time that social rights were introduced as a way of addressing popular claims. The Comisión de Reformas Sociales was created in 1833, and the Instituto de Reformas Sociales and the Instituto Nacional de Previsión in 1908. A number of social rights were established through legislation, such as the Bill on Safety at Work (1890), which was mainly aimed at the protection of women and children. In the following years, new bills were introduced that regulated working conditions, working hours, health and safety, and the handling of accidents. In 1919 a bill on pensions was introduced, the Retiro Obrero. Throughout the nineteenth century, rights creation and nation-building did not progress in parallel, so that there was no simple identification between nationality and citizenship. From its original liberal character, Spanish nationalism evolved into a conservative attitude with a strong Catholic component (Álvarez Junco, 2001, p. 600). Due to a lack of external enemies—with the exception of the 1898 war against the United States— Spanish nationalism became inward-looking and focused on its ‘internal’ enemies, identified in those social groups that demanded political rights, and in the emerging sub-nationalisms. As a consequence, the demands for new rights remained outside the discourse of Spanish nationalism, while the formation of plural identities was perceived as threatening the Spanish nation. The defence of the Mater dolorosa became the central theme of Spanish nationalism (Álvarez Junco, 2001), giving it a definite reactionary dimension. Three factors characterized the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first was the 1898 defeat by the United States, which prompted an anguished reflection on Spanish decadence. This ran along two opposing lines. On the one hand, a number of intellectuals claimed that traditional Spanish values such as mysticism, chivalry and religious devotion had been abandoned in favour of foreign liberal values. On the other hand, the ‘regeneracionistas’ (so-called for their attempt to revive the early nineteenth-century effort towards modernization) favoured the opening of Spain to the influence of other European countries and to novel cultural, social, political and economic trends. Both tendencies vied for influence throughout the twentieth century, but the former prevailed for most of it. The second factor was the consolidation of sub-national movements; and the final factor was Spain’s neutrality in both major European conflicts of the twentieth century. This insulated Spain from the effects that the two wars had had on the formation and self-comprehension of contemporary European nation-states and
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their ideals of patriotism and citizenship. Spanish twentieth-century history was deeply marked, instead, by the Civil War, which resulted in a fascist dictatorship with long-term implications for the way in which the ideal and practice of citizenship were shaped. The Francoist period Francoism appropriated Spanish nationalism, giving it a traditionalist, Catholic and anti-democratic reading. It reinforced some traditional and mythical elements of Spanish culture, such as religiosity, Hispanic imperial grandeur, dislike of democracy and, especially, of political parties. Franco saw the 1936 rebellion as a ‘national crusade’, the ultimate purpose of which was the protection of Catholic values against the ‘bastard, French, Europeanised doctrines of liberalism’ (Franco, 1975, p. 116). Francoism promoted political and social subordination, treating people as subjects rather than free and equal citizens. As in other authoritarian regimes, the cult of the ‘nation’ was coupled with policies of political and ideological demobilization. A sense of mistrust towards politics was encouraged, and political activities portrayed as irrelevant to people’s everyday lives and preoccupations (Benedicto, 1997, pp. 244–5). Of the classic triad of rights—civil, political and social—Francoism tended to undermine the former two. The practice of dictatorship weakened the feeling of belonging to a political community and stifled involvement in civil society, thus further undermining citizenship. Family and community links maintained their central role, not just as the primary means of social cohesion, but also as compensation for the inadequacies of state support (García, 1994, p. 228). The model of corporatist representation increased the rigidity of social life. Only in the last years of the regime did economic development and a number of liberalization measures slowly revive civil society, encouraging citizens to think of themselves as bearers of rights and protagonists in the public sphere (Benedicto, 1997, p. 248). The story of social rights under the Franco regime was quite different, characterized as it was by paternalistic welfare policies. Originally, these were exclusively aimed at workers. Both the Fuero de los Españoles and the Fuero del Trabajo, two of the basic laws of Francoism, sanctioned the right to work, supplementing it with some welfare support. Francoism was committed to the principle of full employment. This was achieved through intensive production, strict labour market regulation (curbing employers’ power of dismissal), and the limitation of the labour market itself, excluding married women or discouraging women in general to work while encouraging emigration. However, the welfare provisions
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associated with the full-employment policy lacked the universalism of social rights. The 1942 Compulsory Illness Insurance, for instance, covered only 25 per cent of the population. Although in 1967 this became part of the national Social Security system, extending healthcare entitlements to workers’ families, it still covered only 84 per cent of the population (Rubio Lara, 1991, p. 261). Other services that provided for social rights, such as education, were also limited in their extension. The Francoist state cannot be regarded as a proper form of universal welfare state. It has been described as a kind of ‘marginal’, rather than ‘institutional’, welfare state. Its objectives were limited, using incomebased and anti-poverty policies for no real redistributive purpose (García, 1994, p. 232). Nonetheless, its policies deeply affected people’s perception of citizenship. The welfare standards that Francoist social policies guaranteed were perceived by the Spanish people as something that one would naturally expect from state intervention. The state had an exclusive role in the promotion, design and control of these policies (Benedicto, 1997, p. 241). Properly considered, these were not rights in the civic– democratic sense, nor did the structure of the welfare policies allow for interpretation by the courts. As will be shown below, Francoist policies had a lasting influence on the way in which citizenship was perceived in democratic Spain. Francoism had both theoretical and practical implications for the configuration of democratic citizenship in Spain. From a practical perspective, it contributed to a certain attitude of dependency on the part of the citizens, so that they considered social rights as something entirely dependent on the good will of the state, rather than on social and political action. From a more theoretical perspective, the Spanish experience under Franco suggests a different sequence of rights creation from the one famously elaborated by Marshall.
The transition to democracy: the practice and institutional configuration of citizenship The transition to democracy in Spain ended 40 years of authoritarianism. This change offered the opportunity for recasting both the institutions and practice of citizenship. The theoretical model underlying the reconstruction of citizenship offers three areas of reflection. First, the Marshallian historical model does not seem to apply to the Spanish experience of democratic transition. As García, following Mann, has argued, the process of citizenship formation in southern European societies did not follow a slower and more chaotic pattern of development
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than it did in the rest of western Europe, but an entirely different one (García, 1994, p. 227). Second, the process of democratization highlighted the complex relationship between identity and rights. The idea of nationhood lost its mobilizing force, for Francoism had both used and abused nationalist rhetoric. Because of this, the democratic forces in Spain were wary of appealing to things specifically Spanish. National symbols such as the Spanish flag and the national colours were associated with the most reactionary sectors of the old regime. This led to continuous appeals to Europe as a source of legitimacy, as well as to a process of administrative and territorial devolution (Moreno, 1997, p. 111). Both of these new processes of legitimation resulted in the redefinition of the idea of Spanishness and in a more differentiated and multi-level configuration of citizenship. The third area for reflection concerns the constructivist interpretation of citizenship-building and the role played in it by social struggles. The ‘negative’ legacy of the Francoist regime, on the one hand, and the consolidation of an international regime of human rights and co-operation, on the other, provided a context within which to place a new extensive catalogue of rights. These three areas of theoretical reflection connect to three specific issues, which will be discussed below to illustrate the nature of democratic citizenship in contemporary Spain. These comprise the structure of rights of Spanish citizenship envisaged by the 1978 Constitution; the configuration of nationality and the status attributed to resident aliens; and the multi-level character of citizenship following the devolution process.
The rights of citizenship The 1978 Spanish Constitution provided a catalogue of rights that is extensive and ambitious, yet ambiguous. The first Title of the Constitution (Fundamental Rights and Freedoms) lists most of them, though some others are listed in other parts of the text. Title I is divided into three chapters, each of which addresses different rights: Fundamental Rights and Basic Freedoms (Articles 15–29); Rights and Duties of Citizens (Articles 30–38); and Principles of Social and Economic Policy (Articles 39–50). The distinction between fundamental rights and the rights of citizens suggests that the Constitution regards citizens differently from other persons. As will be further discussed below, the difference between citizens and aliens is drawn not only in terms of political rights, which are expressly reserved for Spaniards, but for more general purposes, hence establishing an a priori difference of treatment between Spaniards and non-Spaniards.
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In fact, the identification of the various categories of subjects (citizens, Spanish nationals and aliens) is not always clear. The criteria adopted for including different rights within each of the three chapters comprising Title I of the Constitution make reference to the kind of guarantees provided by each category of rights. Current doctrine argues that the rights included under Fundamental rights and basic freedoms are those which are directly applicable, so that the Constitution itself provides the common-law basis for their enforcement. The rights included in the second chapter, regulating the Rights and duties of citizens, function as weaker guarantees, while the third group of rights mainly refers to political objectives to be fulfilled by public authorities. It follows that the three chapters function as a hierarchy of rights, although it is often impossible either to separate them clearly or to identify a single criteria that distinguishes them. The extensiveness and ambitiousness of the rights listed in the Constitution were a response to the specific characteristics of the democratization process in Spain. Reacting to the limitation of rights imposed during the Francoist regime, the drafters of the Constitution opted for the ‘positivization’ of a large number of rights and freedoms. The international legal system provided a rich and consolidated framework for this operation. In 1977, the year before the drafting of the new Constitution, Spain ratified the UN’s 1966 International Pact on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Some of the rights provisions established by the Constitution were directly inspired by the 1961 Social Charter of the Council of Europe. The drafters found further inspiration in some of the constitutions of other post-totalitarian regimes, such as post-war Germany’s, which also included long lists of rights. However, in the process of drawing up the list of positive rights, a certain ambiguity arose. This resulted from the confrontation between those wishing to maintain the status quo and those who saw the transition as an opportunity for changing the social and political structure of the country (Pérez Luño, 1991, pp. 56–7). Although it might be argued that the qualities of citizenship derive from structural conflicts and negotiations between political and social forces, the reconstruction of democratic citizenship (as with most institutions of democratic Spain) was partly an elite-driven process determined by a search for consensus. This provided the context for the more traditional struggles for citizenship rights, so that the law and the ordinary political system, rather than direct collective action, played a major role in the definition of rights. During the early phase of the transition to democracy, however, civil-society organizations such as unions, and
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student and local organizations played an active part. Nonetheless, mobilization rapidly decreased, mainly because the consensus model dominating the Spanish transition to democracy required different kinds of involvement. It required that the elite should have a margin for manoeuvre and compromise, as is often the case in consociational politics. The Pactos de la Moncloa (1977) epitomize such a consensual model. These social pacts addressed the state’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, providing new social rights for citizens in exchange for their accepting the introduction of personal income tax (Cruz, 2000). Citizens’ acquiescence to the deals struck by institutional and semi-institutional agents, such as political parties and trade unions, was essential for the success of this consensual politics. At the same time, the political elite liked to portray an image of a normal public life, which acted as an obstacle to citizens’ awareness of the demands and duties of citizenship, and in particular of the need for their continuous involvement in the democratization process (Benedicto, 1997, p. 250). Therefore, citizens’ active participation in the struggles for rights was limited. As the memories of the Francoist period started to fade, a form of moderate reformism prevailed. As Morán and Benedicto (1995) have argued, many Spaniards view their relationship with politics with detachment, and as one in which they are powerless. In Spanish civic culture, there is a consolidated view of politics as an inaccessible arena, where the only function of citizens is to elect their representatives (ibid., p. 44) and they feel they have little influence over the decisions and actions of policy-makers. This exclusion from the public realm is reflected in the weakness of forms of collective mobilization (ibid., p. 52) as well as in the disaffection with politics. There are, however, two notable exceptions. First, there is a widespread belief that democracy is associated with freedom (ibid., pp. 98–9), so that Spaniards have been quick to react whenever they have felt a threat to their democratic freedoms and political rights. The large demonstrations after the attempted coûp d’Etat in 1981 and the frequent, occasionally huge, marches against ETA prove this fact. These displays of collective action and mobilization emphasize the citizens’ identification with the political system, and their adherence to and defence of its underlying values. The second exception is periodic popular mobilizations fostering citizens’ participation but not concerning citizenship rights directly: for example, the large turnout at the 1986 referendum on NATO membership, or the 1994 movement in favour of the 0.7 per cent Budgetary Allocation for International Development. The consensual political culture of post-Franco Spain may also explain the limited role that social struggles have played in the promotion of the
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social rights enshrined in the 1978 Constitution (Articles 39–52). As I noted, their formulation was influenced by the Social Charter of the Council of Europe. However, they also reflect the social paternalism that prevailed during the Franco regime, which encouraged a socio-economic culture that saw the state as a kind of deus ex machina. Part of the legacy of social paternalism has been a conception of social citizenship as intrinsic to democratic citizenship, so that any attempt by the state to weaken it could result in major conflicts and antagonisms (Benedicto, 1997, p. 240). Indeed, the level of social provision increased throughout the 1980s, as the Socialist governments undertook the task of constructing a welfare state in Spain. This was tacitly understood as being part of the social pact for a consensual transition to democracy, and it followed the same pattern of social consultation, with the trade unions playing a significant role in the process of mediation and negotiation. A system of universal provision for education, healthcare and pensions was developed over the decade, with social security covering 99 per cent of the population by 1989. State pensions and free public education, with the exception of higher education, was extended to all levels. The role of collective action and mobilization in this process was limited to a defence against perceived threats to particular rights. Workers reacted with strikes to the industrial restructuring that commenced in 1983; there was a general strike in 1988 against the government’s employment and salary policies, and other demonstrations in response to the reforms of the educational system in 1986–87 and 2001. The image of citizenship in modern democratic Spain is that of individuals who are conscious of their rights, but not particularly inclined to engage in direct action except in defence of their claims for state protection. In Spanish political culture, the state, as the expression of public authority, retains the role of the main service provider and the guarantor of citizens’ welfare. It acts as the main referent for citizens’ demands, while maintaining its image as the centre of society (Morán and Benedicto, 1995, pp. 43, 131). As a result, some have argued that the Spanish idea of citizenship is perhaps closer to that of ‘subjecthood’ (Pérez Díaz, 1993)—a subject who lacks the civic resources and values to claim his or her role in the political process. The rights of foreigners and the principle of equality The explicit differentiation between the notions of citizenship and that of nationality within Spanish law goes back to the early nineteenth century. While nationality could be granted to almost anyone, citizenship involved political rights and was restricted to only a few categories of
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individuals. This difference was sanctioned by the attribution of a separate juridical status to citizens and nationals. The distinction was further reinforced at the beginning of the twentieth century by judicial doctrine describing nationality as belonging to a nation, while citizenship was being an active member of the political community, playing a part in its operations (Santamaría de Paredes, 1909, pp. 160–1) and exercising political rights (Del Castillo Alonso, 1910). The nineteenth-century legal tradition treated foreigners generously. Its objective was to promote the establishment of the category of ‘aliens’ under the law and to protect their rights. The two constitutions promulgated towards the end of the nineteenth century declared the right of foreigners to reside on Spanish soil.1 Spanish law protected the right to asylum and declared Spanish territory to be an open land for refugees. 2 The attribution of residency rights to foreigners was motivated by the wish to attract capital. Accordingly, the legislation extended the same civil rights to foreigners as it did to Spaniards,3 and in particular it protected their freedom of contract and their rights to own and transfer property, to acquire land, to promote industry and to engage in trade. Even the confiscation of property in case of war was ruled out. Current regulation of the rights of foreigners takes into account two new realities: membership of the EU and mass immigration. Neither of them, however, was yet in place when the 1978 Constitution was written. The Constitution established that foreigners enjoyed public freedoms according to the terms established by the international treaties and laws referred to in Article 13. But given the more general ambiguity surrounding the identification of the rights-holders in the Constitutional text, the relationship between nationality and rights is neither clear nor systematic. Be that as it may, the Constitution considers the rights of foreigners as rights of ‘legal configuration’. These are rights the content and effect of which are established by particular laws and not directly granted by the Constitution. In the absence of specific legislation, the Constitutional Court clarified their meaning, content and extent by dividing them into three groups:4 1. Rights belonging equally to Spaniards and foreigners alike. Their regulation must be equal for both. 2. Rights belonging to foreigners depending on specific laws and treaties. 3. Rights reserved exclusively for Spanish citizens, specifically political and electoral rights. The Spanish Constitution reserves a large number of rights to the third of these groupings, namely those reserved solely to Spanish citizens.
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But, leaving this group of rights to one side, the definition of the status of aliens depends on what rights are included in the other two groups of rights listed by the Constitutional Court, in particular the first of those listed above. Although the rights that the Constitution attributes to aliens are limited, the Constitutional Court has explicitly ruled that the first group of rights extends to everyone. 5 These universal rights include the rights to life, physical and moral integrity, intimacy and ideological freedom. However, the Court has not constructed an exhaustive and systematic catalogue of rights; therefore, one could distinguish between ‘hyperfundamental’ rights (Aguelo Navarro, 2001), such as the ones listed under the first group, and other rights for which unequal treatment between nationals and foreigners would still apply. This leads to the second group of rights, for which equality must be introduced through legislation. This possibility allows the legislature to choose to disregard nationality when framing its laws, thereby treating people equally. 6 This procedure applies largely to legislation concerning political and social rights. Civil rights are normally based on a presumption of equality between Spanish and aliens, even though discrimination can always result from legislation and international treaties.7 The first post-Constitutional attempt to define the status of foreigners was the 1985 law regarding aliens. Articles 7 and 8, on the rights of assembly and association, respectively, were considered to be too restrictive. Indeed, the Constitutional Court made them void.8 Both articles had particular relevance for political and trade-union liberties. On the right of assembly, the Court argued that nationality was irrelevant to the Constitutional principles regulating the exercise of such a right. Hence, the requirement that foreigners must have prior administrative authorization for any political gathering drastically changed the nature of this right. On the right of association, the Court ruled that the government could not dissolve associations of foreigners (either promoted by foreigners or with a large majority of them as members). This could be decided only through a judicial process, as was the case with associations of Spaniards. During the 1990s, there was a wave of new immigration, especially from North Africa. This made the regulation of immigration a political necessity, and accordingly the government reformed the legislation twice in 2000. The first law, Ley 4/2000, was a radical change from previous legislation in the area. Even its title, Ley Orgánica sobre Derechos y Libertades de los Extranjeros en España y su integración social, indicated its novelty: equality as the guiding principle, involving social integration and a wide recognition of social and political rights. The bill was based on the principle of an equalization of treatment of Spaniards and aliens, ensuring
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that foreigners enjoyed the same rights and freedoms attributed to Spanish citizens. The recognition of political rights to foreigners bypassed the criterion of reciprocity with the countries of origin, which was one of the guiding principles of the Constitution on such matters. The law guaranteed the rights of foreigners to assemble, demonstrate, organize trade unions and withdraw their labour. The right of association, however, was restricted to legal residents. Finally, the law included an extensive catalogue of social rights. Some of them, such as that of the protection of children and their rights, were already regulated under other legal norms. Others, such as the provision of free education, the right to work and to healthcare, implied an effective broadening of the rights enjoyed by foreigners. Finally, the sanction of heavy penalties for those discriminating on the basis of race and nationality completed the catalogue of rights and guarantees that the new legislation gave to aliens, thus contributing to their social integration. However, the government had second thoughts about the new legislation, which had been drafted by its more progressive faction. It was argued that the legislation could act as a ‘magnet’, attracting more immigrants because of the generosity of its provisions. Almost immediately, a new bill was drafted.9 The new law made a sharp distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, imposing heavy restrictions on the latter’s rights. More significantly, the equalization of treatment criterion was no longer the basis of the new legislation, leaving more scope for interpretation. A similar backtrack occurred in the case of political rights, which were attributed once again according to the principle of reciprocity with the countries of origin. Other rights with a political and trade-union dimension (such as rights of assembly, association, trade-union organization and demonstration) were restricted to legal residents. Social rights, such as the free provision of education, public assistance in purchasing homes, social security and legal assistance, were similarly unavailable to ‘non-legal’ immigrants. Citizenship and territorial autonomy The introduction of the Estado de las Autonomías in Spain attempted to address the claims for recognition and self-government advanced by the so-called ‘historic nationalities’ of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia. The Spanish Constitution distinguished between these ‘nationalities’ and the regions, recognizing their fundamental differences of language and culture. The devolution model introduced by the Constitution was an attempt to combine new institutions of self-government to fulfil the requirements for differential treatment, with a generalized
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administrative devolution across the country. Both the structure and the dynamic of this model have deeply affected the configuration of citizenship in Spain. Devolution has unsettled the relationship between rights and identity. Although there is no specific legal status differentiating the citizens of a given Autonomous Community from the rest of the Spanish citizenry, in practice, differentiated treatment through the enjoyment of ‘different’ rights and duties has become diffuse. The Spanish Constitutional Court has backed this trend by ruling that the Constitution does not require that the rights and duties of citizens be treated in a uniform way, since such similar treatment would be incompatible with the political autonomy of certain territories.10 The only limitation imposed by the Constitution is to ensure that there are no unreasonable and disproportionate inequalities introduced as a result of this policy.11 Such differential treatment with regard to rights and duties is based on residence, with no appeal to essentialist definitions of belonging (despite attempts to move in this direction by radical Basque political groups). The principle of territoriality is, however, often combined with ius sanguinis by extending rights to descendants of persons born in that area. The effect of such policies, however, is the de facto creation of a separate juridical position for the citizens of the autonomous communities. By allowing them full competence over policies affecting citizenship rights, new inequalities are introduced amongst Spanish citizens. As a result of the politics of autonomy, a circular logic has come to define the relationship between identity and rights. On the one hand, subnational identity has provided the ground for claims to self-government and autonomous policies. On the other hand, these policies have provided an institutional framework for enhancing identity claims to further institutional autonomy. The recognition of the sub-national identities of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia and the concession of autonomy were at the origin of the Spanish system of devolution. Since then, other regions, such as Andalucia, have claimed a right for their differential identity to be recognized and institutions of self-government to be granted. This has had the effect of encouraging other regions to make similar claims for self-government even when there is no clear identity basis for them. Those areas that the Constitution designates as regions have given themselves names that bear close resemblance to those of established historical sub-nationalities. Andalucia and Valencia also call themselves ‘nationalities’ and, since 1996, Aragón and Canarias have followed suit. Other regions, including Baleares, Canarias, Extremadura, La Rioja
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and Murcia, have adopted the mixed formula of ‘historical regional entities’. The introduction of the system of political autonomies in post-Franco Spain has therefore produced a mimetic logic, which has led more and more regions to make demands for similar levels of political selfgovernment, which have a direct impact on the condition of their citizens. Paradoxically, this logic of ‘comparative grievances’ has resulted in a kind of equalization and uniformity (Moreno, 1997). This has been further enhanced by the way in which, since the early 1980s, central governments have directed their regional policies according to the principles of non-discrimination and solidarity (Fusi, 1996, p. 461). The way in which ‘regional’ citizenship has emerged piecemeal has had at least two different effects. First, the granting of autonomy to the historical sub-nationalities has contributed to the phenomenon of Spanish citizens’ identifying themselves increasingly with both the regional and the national levels of government. The affective links with the nation and with one’s own region re-emerged at the beginning of the political transition to democracy, and regional institutions have gradually consolidated such dual and differential identification and instrumentalized some of their historical peculiarities, equating them with those of the three main sub-nationalities. Regions have also portrayed themselves as providers of community services. Both nationalities and regions, though to differing degrees, have used television and education policies to promote subnational identities. In short, the institutions of self-government have contributed to cementing identities and allegiances alternative to those centred on the nation-state (Sepúlveda, 1996, pp. 433–4; Moreno, 1997, p. 125). Second, the process of consolidation of regional identities has, somewhat paradoxically, eroded the ‘differential value’ attributed to the historical sub-nationalities of the Basque, Catalan and Gallician territories. In this respect, identity itself no longer justifies differential treatment between citizens belonging to different nationalities and regions. As a result, the sub-nationalities have been aggrieved by the implicit process of equalization, making fresh claims for autonomy and independence. But in the new situation emerging from administrative and political devolution, the ‘centre’ is no longer the obvious target for political claims towards further autonomy. Regions too feel mistreated and looked-downupon. This has contributed to the re-emergence of a ‘defensive Spanish nationalism’, tolerant of regionalism and critical of the excesses of peripheral nationalism. In spite of these tensions, both the national and the territorial communities have accommodated a model of dual identity. According
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to data presented by Moreno, over two-thirds of the total Spanish citizenry describe themselves as having a dual identity (1990–95). Exclusive identification applies to less than a third, with a fifth identifying themselves as only Spanish and 10 per cent as having an exclusively regional identity (Moreno, 1997, pp. 125–36). However, dual identity is of two very different types. On the one hand, there are those for whom their regional identity is ‘nested’ within their Spanish identity. Dual identity as claimed by the majority of Spaniards implies equal and shared loyalty towards state and regional institutions (ibid., p. 123). On the other hand, those citizens belonging to the historical sub-nationalities possess a much stronger local identity. As a result, they suffer a kind of split identity, feeling themselves to be alternately Spanish or a member of their own sub-nationality. Thus, a differentiated citizenship has emerged in Spain stemming from the different ways in which citizens interpret their dual (or multilevel) identities. It has been fostered by the proliferation of institutions of political autonomy and regional self-government. The institutional dimension does not mean that Spanish and regional identities cannot coexist (Moreno, 1997, p. 124). The way in which identities enter into conflict or can be accommodated is not predetermined. Institutions have both the means and a large margin for manoeuvre to shape these identities and determine the ways in which they can be combined and made to co-operate.
Conclusion The reconstruction of Spanish citizenship after the Franco regime was not based on national values. During the transition to democracy, a number of outstanding issues (the configuration of democratic rights, territorial diversity, mass immigration and so on) needed to be solved. Traditional Spanish nationalism was not considered a useful tool for dealing with these problems. Yet, the transition to democracy, full incorporation into the EU and a sustained improvement in living standards have all fuelled a certain pride in the country’s collective destiny and created a basis for a new patriotism. Some authors still argue that Spain has a strong nationalist culture (Lamo de Espinosa, 2001), though the evidence for the existence of national pride and patriotic sentiments is scant. Others argue this is more a ‘reactive nationalism’ (Tusell, 2000), caused by the emergence of sub-nationalisms within Spain (Catalan and Basque) and by the process of European integration. The Eurobarometer data suggest that Spanish patriotism (based on national pride) is not different to that of any other country in Europe.
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As for the theoretical model underlying Spanish citizenship, the one that seems to have prevailed during the period of transition to democracy is perhaps closer to a republican conception emphasizing effective participation and citizens’ willingness to advance claims and to fight for their own rights. But the practice of citizenship is not always uniform and congruent with this ideal. It shows a citizen who, far from being active and engaged, expects the state to provide for his or her needs. Ultimately, the Spanish case indicates the multi-dimensional character of modern citizenship and the difficulty of matching empirical reality to theoretical models.
Notes 1. The Constitutions of 1869 (Article 25) and 1876 (Article 2). 2. Real Decreto de Extranjeros 1852; Ley de Asilo 1855. The latter, drafted during the so-called progressivist period, declared Spanish territory ‘inviolable asylum land for all foreigners and their property’. 3. Article 27, Civil Code, 1889. 4. STC 107/1984, FJ 4°. 5. See also STC 94/1985, FJ 2°; STC 242/1994 FJ 4°. 6. STC 107/1984, FJ 3°. 7. Foreigners will enjoy the same civil rights as Spaniards, with the exception of provisions in special laws and treaties (Article 27, Civil Code). 8. STC 115/87, 7 July 1987. 9. Ley Orgánica, 8/2000. 10. STC 37/1988, FJ 10°; STC 150/1990, FJ 7°; STC 186/1993, FJ 3°; STC 227/1993, FJ 4°. 11. STC 48/1988, FJ 25°.
Bibliography Aguelo Navarro, P. (2001), ‘Derechos humanos y legislaciones de extranjería’, in N. Fernández Sola and M. Calvo García (eds), Inmigración y derechos (Zaragoza: Mira Editores), pp. 215–35. Álvarez Junco, J. (2001), Mater dolorosa: La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus). Benedicto, J. (1997), ‘Las bases culturales de la ciudadanía democrática en España’, in P. del Castillo and I. Crespo (eds), Cultura política (Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch), pp. 223–58. Del Castillo Alonso, J. (1910), ‘Ciudadanía’, entry in Enciclopedia Jurídica Seix (Barcelona: Seix). Cruz, R. (2000), ‘El derecho a reclamar derechos: Acción colectiva y ciudadanía democrática’, in M. Pérez Ledesma (ed.), Ciudadanía y democracia (Madrid: Editorial Pablo Iglesias), pp. 263–91. Franco, F. (1975), Pensamiento político de Franco, Anthology and selection by A. del Río Cisneros (Madrid: Sevicio Informativo Nacional, 1964).
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Fusi, J. P. (1996), ‘El desarrollo autonómico’, in J. Tusell and A. Soto (eds), Historia de la transición y consolidación democrática en España (Madrid: Alianza), pp. 444–64. García, S. (1994), ‘Ciudadanía en España’, in A. Alabart S. García and S. Giner (eds), Clase, poder y ciudadanía (Madrid: Siglo XXI), pp. 225–45. Habermas, J. (1994), ‘Citizenship and National Identity’, in B. Van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage). Lamo de Espinosa, E. (2001), ‘¿Patriotismo español?’, El País, 22 November. Morán, M. L. and J. Benedicto (1995), La cultura política de los españoles: Un ensayo de reinterpretación (Madrid: CIS). Moreno, L. (1997), La federalización de España. Poder político y territorio (Madrid: Siglo XXI). Pérez Díaz, V. (1993), La primacía de la sociedad civil (Madrid: Alianza Editorial). Pérez Ledesma, M. (2000), ‘La conquista de la ciudadanía política: el continente europeo’, in M. Pérez Ledesma (ed.), Ciudadanía y democracia (Madrid: Editorial Pablo Iglesias), pp. 115–47. Pérez Luño, A. (1991), Los derechos fundamentales, 4th edn (Madrid: Tecnos). Rubio Lara, J. (1991), La formación del Estado social (Madrid: Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social). Santamaría de Paredes, J. (1909), Curso de derecho político, 8th edn. Sepúlveda, I. (1996), ‘La eclosión nacionalista: Regionalismos, nacionalidades y autonomías’, in J. Tusell and A. Soto (eds), Historia de la transición y consolidación democrática en España (Madrid: Alianza), pp. 409–43. Tusell, J. (2000), ‘Nacionalismo reactivo’, El País, 18 November.
7 The Scandinavian Model of Citizenship and Feminist Debates Birte Siim and Hege Skjeie
Introduction Feminist debate on gendered citizenship in Scandinavia is strongly influenced by a specific social democratic model of the citizen. As a result, Scandinavian debates over political and social inclusion and exclusion assume an active conception of citizenship based on a positive perception of social movements as central agents of change. This notion of citizenship emphasizes the importance of collective action. What inspires the formation of collectives in the first place—whether injustices, identities, interests or issues—remains an open question. Social movements express a continuum of identifications ranging from ‘thick’ identities to ‘thin’ interests (or even ‘thinner’ issues), and they claim social and political rights for the groups they speak for and care about. The fairness of such claims must be justified normatively, but this justification occurs within processes of political mobilization and counter-mobilization. These political struggles occur within two distinct institutionally defined channels of political influence and power typical of social democratic systems: the numerical–democratic channel, and the corporate–pluralist channel (Rokkan, 1987). There is thus a tension in social democratic citizenship between an egalitarian, participatory tradition based on movement activism, and traditions of governance in which consensusbuilding is mediated through centralized corporate negotiations between major economic organizations. The importance of social movements for notions of citizenship is also evident in the way Scandinavian feminist analyses have been inspired by the demands made by movement politics to extend social and political 148
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rights for women. However, we should note that the concept of citizenship was only taken up in the late 1980s. Earlier debates focused primarily on notions of equality, justice and universal social rights. These issues were only later related to democracy and seen as part of a political practice and identity (Andersen et al., 1993). In both the Danish and the Swedish investigations of citizenship, researchers focused on the horizontal aspect of citizenship—that is, on the political participation of citizens in voluntary organizations and social movements. A key question was the relation between ‘small’ democracy and ‘big’ democracy. ‘Small democracy’ is here defined as the citizen’s capacity to influence matters of common concern in everyday life within local communities. By contrast, ‘big democracy’ relates to the citizen’s influence over matters of common concern at the national level. The emphasis on the notion of active citizenship in Scandinavia is obviously closer to the republican than to the liberal tradition of citizenship as outlined, for instance, by Habermas (1998). Social democratic citizenship has, however, been interpreted as a third model of citizenship, one with a specific gender profile, which in contrast to both liberalism and republicanism does not accentuate a state/society division (Hernes, 1987; Siim, 2000). From a gender perspective, Scandinavian citizenship presents an interesting case for several reasons. First, women’s political integration in Scandinavia over the last 30 years clearly contrasted with their political marginalization in most other countries of the world (see, for example, Chapman, 1993). From an international perspective, it is remarkable that Scandinavian women’s representation rates have increased to somewhere between 35 and 50 per cent in both parliamentary and corporate structures of governance. Second, Scandinavian family policies, which in particular aim to support women’s labour-market participation— such as parental leave and public childcare arrangements—have become institutionalized to the extent that researchers talk about a shift in the conceptualization of ‘the worker’ whereby demands of social reproduction may take priority over those of production (Leira, 1993). In terms of political development over the last 30 years, democracy in Scandinavia has changed to include women as active citizens (Karvonen and Selle, 1995). Feminist scholars generally agree that the key to women’s active citizenship has been a combination of women’s political mobilization ‘from below’, in social movements and voluntary organizations, and political integration ‘from above’, in political parties and institutions. The Norwegian political scientist Helga Hernes termed this two-way interaction ‘state feminism’ (Hernes, 1987).
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Feminist scholarship has shown that there are important differences in the gender profiles of Norway, Sweden and Denmark (see Bergqvist et al., 1999), yet there is a widespread impression that problems of women’s political and social exclusion have largely been solved in Scandinavian countries. However, this chapter also shows that there are clear disagreements about this ‘success story’ among Scandinavian feminist scholars. One key to these disagreements is differences in the interpretation, first, of social democracy—in particular the interconnections between parties and labour unions through corporate decision-making—and, second, of the status and power of women’s independent organizations. Corporatism has been interpreted both as paternalist, for example as in Sweden (Hirdman, 1990), and as a means to include women in citizenship through the quota system, as in Norway (Skjeie, 1992). Recent debates on Scandinavian citizenship emphasize the two ‘grand inclusions’ over the past 30 years: in terms of social citizenship, the move from a male-breadwinner to a dual-breadwinner model, and in terms of political citizenship, the dramatic increase in women’s participation and representation in decision-making bodies. These shifts illustrate two key points in feminist thinking about citizenship: the connection between social policies and women’s political integration, and the interplay between political participation, representation and power. Corporatist governance and social democracy are changing, and there is less pressure ‘from below’, because the role of social movements has diminished. This has challenged the Scandinavian model of citizenship and has created new problems for feminism, especially in Denmark, where social movements, including the women’s movement, have played a stronger role within social democratic parties and structures (Borchorst, Christensen and Raaum, 1999, p. 287).
Social democratic citizenship The social democratic conception of citizenship is ‘an activist, participatory and egalitarian ideal’ (Hernes, 1987, p. 139), that is, an ideal largely shaped by the waves of social movements in Scandinavian history since the mid-nineteenth century, which at first were based on direct participation, but later absorbed into the structure of representative democracy. Social movements have played a crucial role in the political history of Scandinavia, and the formation of the universal welfare state is often described as an alliance between the working class and the peasant movements, which, through their democratic struggles, have exercised a strong influence on the state apparatus (Kolstrup, 1996). Whether we
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look to history, political science or political sociology, this general description of the gradual integration of movements into state structures—of ongoing transformations of state–citizen relationships based on movement politics—remains central to an understanding of the distinctiveness of the social democratic tradition of governance and participation. Quite often, such descriptions are made as grand statements about the historical changes in the political regimes of social democracies. In Norway, a recent reformulation of this process emphasizes not only two well-known factors—the political successes of the peasant and the labour movements—but also a third factor, which might still be considered somewhat controversial: the replacement of the labour movement by the women’s movement as a main agent of political change (Slagstad, 1998, p. 417). This grand description is also practised by political scientists who describe women’s political integration as either ‘the silent revolution’ (Togeby, 1994) or as ‘the most important single change in Scandinavian social life in the post-war era’ (Karvonen and Selle, 1995, p. 21). Usually, the notion of social democratic citizenship includes the assumption that perceptions of both ‘the state’ and ‘the individual’—of rights and obligations—are shaped by the defining characteristics of movements mobilizing for political control. To create the nation to which the citizen belongs, ideologies of opportunity must combine with ideologies of identity that pay due respect to what inspired national movements in the first place. In Stein Rokkan’s analysis of numerical democracy and corporate pluralism, the labour movement’s historic development is connected to a permanent struggle on two distinct fronts. From the 1930s onwards, the labour movement had a dual strategy for gaining power: to attain ideological hegemony, it fought other political parties through the electoral channel; for negotiable interests it fought employers through the corporate channel (Rokkan, 1987, p. 99). In this combination of numerical democracy and corporate pluralism, the Scandinavian tradition of governance was established, a tradition in which the negotiation of conflict between labour and capital has remained paramount. Both Norway and Sweden have strong traditions of corporative political– administrative structures. In Denmark, the corporatist element in the political–administrative system has been weaker, but still far stronger than in countries such as Great Britain, France, the United States and Canada (cf. Bergqvist et al., 1999). As an administrative system, corporatism is constructed through a network of publicly appointed boards and commissions that either prepare major policy initiatives or, by delegation, exercise public authority over specific areas of responsibility.
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Appointments to such commissions are guided by two main principles: that governments are able to bring large organizations into binding collaboration, and that professional expertise is well represented. The aim of corporatism is simply to build consensus on major policy moves through unanimous proposals. Ideally, through corporative pluralism affected parties are granted the right to shape decisions that involve them. Thus corporatism implies an extension of democratic participation, although—and this is an important point—adhering to a different decision-making logic than that of parliamentary decision-making, that is, the logic of consensus. But granting participation rights is hardly ever formalized in terms of specific criteria for participation. As a political– administrative system, therefore, corporatism is open to the criticism that it favours skewed participation patterns and closed decision-making processes. In Rokkan’s description, a major problem of corporatism is its tendency to create informal decision-making situations where participants ‘become tied up in intimate circles by known negotiators, and bureaucrats become immune to influence at the grassroots level’ (1987, p. 104).
Feminist critiques of social democracy The way the first Norwegian version of the social democratic state handled the so-called ‘woman issue’ provides a good illustration of the particular strength of a governance tradition that combines numerical and corporate power. In 1945 the Labour Party achieved a majority in parliament, and the government takeover represented a political ‘year zero’ for the labour movement. The future ideal society was to be created. According to the Labour movement’s national strategy for class elevation, the family was a model of the smallest of all the harmonious communities upon which the ‘new nation’ was to be founded. Government officials called this normative family model the ‘index family’, constituted by a working father, a housewife/mother and two children (Skjeie, 1999). When the main independent women’s organization attempted shortly after the war to put the question of individual taxation of spouses on the political agenda, the following restriction was delivered by the corporate board that debated the issue: The economic community of a marriage entails no discrimination of the woman, provided that this is a marriage of two equal partners . . . Renouncing this economic community will have serious unfortunate consequences for the family, considering the ways that
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all aspects of life are entwined within a home. (Cited in Lønnå, 1996, p. 164) However, the valuable family work undertaken by housewives still left them marginalized in the social security system, since they lacked the right to earn additional entitlements, sickness benefit, or work-related injury compensation. In Norway, political reforms in these areas have for the most part been adopted only during the last 15 years, as a result of the criticism raised by feminist legal scholarship, which was taken up by women’s organizations in different political parties (cf. Dahl, 1984). Hernes (1987, 1988) was among the first to discuss the potential of and barriers to social democratic citizenship from the perspective of gender. She strongly criticized the traditional social democratic model’s paradigmatic exclusions as a hegemony that has concentrated its attention almost totally on the citizen as worker. Members of the trade unions were until recently the prototypical social democratic citizens. This is the citizen worker, a male family provider, a working class hero. HIS rights, identities and participation patterns were determined by HIS ties with the labour market and by the web of associations as well as corporate structures that had grown up around these ties. (Hernes, 1987, p. 142) Hernes’s critique of paradigmatic exclusions resembles the theory of the modern gender system developed by the Swedish historian Yvonne Hirdman. Hirdman argues that the history of the Swedish welfare state should include the evolution of culturally constructed, and historically distinct, normative ‘gender contracts’, and she describes what we might call gender regime changes as a transition from a ‘housewife’ contract to contracts of ‘equality’ (Hirdman, 1990). According to Hirdman, the contract of equality is still based on the two main organizing principles of segregation and hierarchy, though in new forms. Women’s participation in politics and paid work has changed dramatically since the late 1960s, and politics and ideologies now support the equal right of men and women to wages and influence. But the patterns of labour-market participation show new forms of ‘private/public’ splits, with women dominating the public-sector caring professions and men the private-sector business professions. Salaries are low, work conditions harsh and negotiation strength limited in women’s occupations when compared to men’s. In political arenas, similar patterns of segregation can be demonstrated, with limited access for women, particularly in areas of corporate
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decision-making. According to Hirdman, these differences tend to reflect a new normative ranking of ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ work. Feminism is always confronted with the controversial question of whether difference is the result of individual preference, of prejudice or of discrimination. Affirmative action should be adopted in the latter case. It was not until the late 1980s, after intense public debate about corporate structures of exclusion, that the Swedish government introduced a plan to increase women’s access to professional and corporate institutions. In Norway, this had been an issue for public reform since the early 1970s, and in 1987 the government adopted a minimum 40/60 per cent gender quota regulation for all publicly appointed boards and commissions as a legally binding rule. Norway, Sweden and Denmark have similar stories of formal regulations and institution-building on equality issues, including both laws on equality and state-appointed councils of equality, from the 1970s onwards. But the process started in Norway, and equality policies have been less institutionalized in Denmark than in the other two countries (Borchorst, Christensen and Raaum, 1999). Hernes’s concept of ‘state feminism’ embodies her belief that Nordic democracies—despite their historical adherence to a male-worker paradigm—have the potential to transform themselves into ‘womenfriendly’ societies. As stated above, state feminism is politics that combines women’s political mobilization ‘from below’ with integration politics ‘from above’. Hernes thus reads the policy changes of the 1970s and 1980s as yet another example of movements mobilizing for, and gaining, political influence. At the same time, she is aware of the possible negative effects of corporatism: ‘In this particular intersection of the state, organised interests and technical expertise we might well find the major barrier to women’s equal citizenship in Scandinavia’ (Hernes, 1987, pp. 96–7). Although corporatism has evolved since the late 1980s, there is still a relatively strong feminist critique of the influence of corporatism in social democratic governance. At present, this critique is particularly strong in Sweden. In spite of the similarities in the patterns of women’s inclusion in the corporate system in recent years in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, there have been clear differences in the political discourse and feminist debate about the role of the state, social democracy and corporatism in the three countries. Hirdman’s work, presented as part of the work of the Swedish Commission on Power and Democracy in the late 1980s, stresses the negative aspects of social democratic corporatism and paternalism. But other Swedish feminists offer a more positive
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interpretation of social democracy and the effect of politics on gender equality (see Bergqvist, 1994). Another point of disagreement concerns the different interpretations of the strategies to include individual women—according to their professional status as experts, bureaucrats, or organization representatives. Individual women are increasingly included as participants within this system of collective decision-making because of the formal regulations that today govern access to corporate systems. However, women’s organizations remain marginal participants. In Norway, some sectors of corporate decision-making are still far from meeting the legally required 40/60 quota after more than 30 years of regulation. Government officials repeatedly maintain that this is mainly because it is hard to find enough ‘qualified’ women (cf. Solhøy, 1999). Changes in recruitment practices, which would shift the balance of power among the participating organizations, are seldom applied. Gustafsson, Eduards and Rönblom’s (1997) investigation of women’s organizations in Sweden in the 1990s concluded that the male-dominated state was the main barrier to the inclusion of women’s independent organizations: ‘The Swedish version of democracy formally allows for pluralism, but in fact it has difficulty dealing with women organizing as women’ (Gustafsson, Eduards and Rönblom, 1997, p. 22). The major tendency in Danish and Norwegian scholarship since the mid-1980s has been towards a more pragmatic perception of the welfare state, and a stronger belief in the ability of movements to influence public policies. Drude Dahlerup’s study of the new women’s movement in Denmark illustrates how a pragmatic attitude towards the state— ‘learning to live with the state’—was part of the Danish feminist movement, which co-operated extensively with the national as well as local political structures (Dahlerup, 1993, 1998). But Dahlerup also argued that the crucial element in the Redstocking (women’s liberation) movement was ‘new thinking’, placing feminist issues on the political agenda and changing the discursive opportunity structure of political reforms. She concluded that feminism in Denmark was an important political force but with largely indirect effects on public policies. In Norway, a more interventionist feminist project made more direct contributions to political reforms. An early example is the controversies that raged over the adoption of a law on equality in the 1970s. The question arose as to how generally formulated values of justice, fairness and equality should be translated into legally binding rules. The involvement of women legal scholars in this decision-making process brought about one of the largest controversies regarding the interpretation of ‘justice’. The issue was whether the general clause should only prohibit
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discrimination, or in addition allow for differential treatment in order to promote equality. Working together, women lawyers and feminist organizations were successful in arguing that the first solution implied a seriously flawed understanding of justice (Dahl, 1984; Skjeie, 1992). This achievement led to the introduction of a comprehensive package of affirmative-action programmes during the 1980s, which enabled positive differential treatment in both education and employment in state-run and community-led activities. The feminist critique of the traditional ‘worker paradigm’ of Scandinavian social democracy resembles in many ways the criticism of women’s second-class citizenship first introduced by Carole Pateman in The Sexual Contract (1988). Pateman’s argument was part of a critique of liberal political theory, which she described as being based on two different contracts: the social contract, which applies in the public sphere and is agreed between free and equal individuals, and the sexual contract, which applies in the private sphere and is based on a subordination of women through the gendered division of labour. Her main point is that the two contracts are complementary and presuppose each other: liberalism in the public sphere presupposes paternalism in the private sphere (Pateman, 1988, 1989). The social contract hides an underlying sexual contract that is based on a distinction between motherhood and wage work. The sexual contract illustrates a fundamental dilemma in modern democracies that Pateman calls Wollstonecraft’s dilemma. It points towards two mutually incompatible routes to citizenship: either women demand to be integrated in politics and become ‘like men’, giving up their experiences, needs and interests ‘as women’, or they make demands on the basis of their social experiences as women, and remain politically marginalized. Thus full and equal citizenship for women can be achieved only by extending notions of democracy from the traditional framework of parliamentary politics to the workplace and the family. Pateman’s vision of a sexually differentiated citizenship has inspired feminist scholarship, but it has also been criticized because the emphasis on women’s experiences ‘as women’ conceptually tends to tie ‘women’ to ‘motherhood’ and thus to reinforce their motherly role (Mouffe, 1992). This point has been further explored by Scandinavian feminist scholars who argue that Pateman tends to underestimate the role of politics and of women’s agency in transforming citizenship (for example, Siim, 1988; Jonasdottir, 1991). This is supported by Scandinavian research that shows how the relative autonomy of politics has contributed to women’s integration (Skjeie, 1992; Siim, 1994).
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Demands for political representation Hernes defines a ‘women-friendly society’ as ‘a society where justice on the basis of gender would be largely eliminated, where women are able to have a natural relationship to their children, their work and to public life—without an increase in other forms of inequality, such as among groups of women’ (Hernes, 1987, p. 15). This vision largely corresponds to Pateman’s, but, in contrast to Pateman, Hernes explicitly underscores the transformative role of party-based politics in the move towards such a society. In Scandinavia, the feminist criticism of political exclusion was generally followed by a demand for inclusion. It did not rest on a normative-based rejection of participation within traditional political institutions, as was the main tendency in American and European feminism during the 1970s and early 1980s. Men’s monopolization of party politics was seen as a problem for democracy rather than party politics being considered a problem for women. As stated in Unfinished Democracy: Women in Nordic Politics, As women researchers we are concerned with forms of injustice and inequality based on gender. As political scientists we are concerned with the disbursement of values and benefits which have been set in place via the political system. In both cases we are concerned with power and its just distribution. (Haavio-Mannila et al., 1985, p. 1) According to this line of scholarship, gender-structured political interests are combined with an emphasis on political integration as a strategy for empowerment. In Scandinavian countries, from the early days of the 1960s feminist movements, parliaments and political parties were important for the political aim of social policies that are more redistributive. Political parties were perceived as arenas for ‘contestation over questions of value’ rather than as arenas for ‘deciding on questions of preferences’ (Habermas, 1998, p. 23). Scandinavia has a distinct tradition of political networks and alliances formed between women in different political parties, and a number of parties have separate women’s organizations. On issues of gender equality and social politics, the women’s branches of different political parties have often co-operated with women’s organizations outside parties (Hobson, 1993; Dahlerup, 1998). In Norway, feminist alliances aimed at changing political parties’ own recruitment practices were formed through a series of campaigns to promote women’s political representation in both national and local elections. In 1975, the leader of the
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Socialist Left Party, Berit Ås, introduced before the Norwegian parliament a constitutional amendment to establish quotas as a principle for parliamentary representation. This proposal was rejected by a majority of the country’s parties, but at the same time both the Socialist Left Party and the Left Party introduced a similar quota system in their own parties. These quotas laid the foundation for a series of party regulations in Norway, by which a minimum representation of 40 per cent for each sex applies to both the composition of internal party organizations and the nominations for public elections. Today such statutes regulate nominations and elections in five of the seven largest Norwegian parties; only the two parties on the right have rejected such quotas. Formal regulation of integration politics by means of quotas has been most important in Norwegian party politics. In Denmark, quotas have been limited to the Socialist Folk Party and the Social Democratic Party, and they have primarily been directed towards the internal party structure. The two parties adopted quotas in 1986 after pressure from women members but abolished them in 1996. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party has used quotas as a major gender-equality strategy only since 1993. In all three countries, however, women have come closer to equal political representation with men in both parliament and the cabinet in the course of the 1990s. A feeling of having reached a point of no return was thus demonstrated when young Danish women in the Socialist party proposed to abolish the party’s quota system, arguing that ‘women no longer needed it’ (Christensen, 1999). The tendency to underscore the possible transformative role of partybased representative politics closely parallels Anne Phillips’ discussion of democratic citizenship. Her approach rests upon a conception of the relative autonomy of politics (Phillips, 1992, 1993, 1995) and is partly inspired by Scandinavian feminist demands for political inclusion. The new emphasis on a ‘politics of presence’ claims that the issue of representation is of great importance to feminism. Grassroots participation and local activism cannot by themselves solve the problem of political exclusion, and the solution is to adopt new institutional designs, including quotas, that challenge the liberal principles of representation (Phillips, 1995). Iris Young’s work (1990a,b, 1994) is another example of a feminist approach that emphasizes democratic inclusion and diversity through ‘a politics of difference’ based on group representation. Phillips and Young share the ideal of a pluralist and differentiated citizenship that may enable not only women but also other marginalized social groups to ‘have a voice and a vote’ and influence their own situation as well as
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decision-making processes in society. This pluralist framework distinguishes between social and political communities, and has opened the debate about the interplay between gender, class, ethnicity and race. Young has proposed a new feminist solution to the dilemma between the essentialist view of women as a social collectivity with specific qualities and interests, and the post-modern view which denies that women are a separate group (Young, 1994, p. 733). She describes three possible social identities of women: as a social collectivity that is passively constructed from their position as individuals, as a group in which they actively recognize themselves as part of a collectivity organized around concrete issues, and as feminist militants (Young, 2000). In her view, the collective is united in a passive way by material structures and actual experiences, without attributing common qualities to all women, or presuming that women have a common identity (Young, 1994, p. 715). Young’s position comes close to the same kind of pragmatic continuum of identity–interest politics that studies of social movements often rely on. Phillips’ and Young’s frameworks mark a shift of focus from the causes of women’s marginalization to the conditions of women’s inclusion in politics in a broad sense. They represent two different models, or strategies, for the inclusion of women in politics—‘from below’ or ‘from above’— both of which in spite of their differences rest on the transformative role of politics. And they both connect the inclusion of women with the inclusion of other marginalized social groups and perceive women’s participation and representation in the public arena as the key to political influence and empowerment.
The discursive dangers of ‘difference’ Scandinavian feminist research in the 1970s was situated within the context of a dual political project. On the one hand, criticism of existing power structures challenged the exclusion of women from political institutions, while, on the other, research on ‘women’s lives’ often focused on the positive aspects of women’s culture and values of caring. In Norway, the significance of these parallel projects is particularly evident in the combination of Helga Hernes’s and Tove Stang Dahl’s criticism of social democratic citizenship’s dual exclusion—the political and the social. Here a precarious new balance was achieved on the central point in normative discussions about women’s rights, the famous equality difference dimension. An analysis of Norwegian arguments for political integration in the last 30 years shows how ‘gender’ was conceptually transformed from a synonym for ‘division of work’ to
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a synonym for ‘values’ and ‘interests’. The main statement of this political rhetoric of difference is indeed familiar: it matters whether it is men or women making political decisions; men and women have different values, experiences and priorities; men therefore can make no legitimate claim to represent women (Skjeie, 1992). A new rhetorical ‘identities–interests’ continuum was thus produced in which, to use Joan Scott’s words, ‘the terms of exclusion on which discrimination is premised are at once refused and reproduced in demands for inclusion’ (Scott, 1999, p. 3). Once an argument from a position of power—a reason why women should be excluded from politics—this rhetoric of difference became an argument that mobilized counter-power—a reason for inclusion. In Norway, it gradually came to constitute a basis for an argument for quota policies. It is noted, however, that in Denmark and Sweden, integration politics were more often based on a rhetoric of gender equality. And it is interesting that in these countries quota systems never became the favoured solution to problems of political exclusion as they did in Norway (Christensen, 1999). The parity movement in France is another example of new feminist interest in gaining access to established political institutions. This movement demanded legal reform to ensure there are ‘as many women as men in all elected assemblies, as well as in the advisory cabinets and committees nominated by the executive and legislative branches to participate in decision making’ (Gaspard, 1998). Here the demand for parity is similar to that of the legally binding quotas for the composition of corporate bodies in Norway, yet the two approaches have a different logic and basis of legitimation. Parity is not only a means to equality but also the permanent goal, whereas the quota system is normally seen as a temporary means to equal citizenship. Furthermore, quotas are regulations adopted voluntarily by the parties themselves, whereas the demand for parity is a demand for legally binding, or even constitutional, guarantees. Finally, the notion of quotas is a form of regulation that more easily links political representation of women and marginalized social groups. The quota system can therefore be interpreted as a specific strategy that is more closely related to pluralist conceptions of citizenship. In Françoise Gaspard’s explanations of the principle of parity (1998) there is a strong resistance to any arguments about either shared interests or common identities. In this respect, the parity movement may well have moved on since the early 1990s (cf. Outshoorn, 1994). This progress is also conveyed in Scott’s comment on the parity debate: ‘Gender is not a community’ (1997, p. 13). Generally speaking, much has been done to avoid approaching ‘the meaning of gender’ by identifying
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essentialized differences, how women and men ‘really are’, and, following this, what women may ‘have to offer’. The Swedish political scientist Anna Jonasdottir has criticized the way debates on gender difference tend to be positioned within a conceptual framework of utility. In her analysis, utilitarianism continues to place a heavy burden of proof on claims to political and social rights. This is the legacy of two centuries of political discourse in which ‘women’s place’ has been defined according to what ‘good’ women should and could do—for the order and stability of the state, for the pleasure of men, or for the development of public life and the transformation of politics. This legacy, Jonasdottir claims, still influences public policies on equality: ‘If we take a look at these equality arguments . . . I guess that the most usual kind still imply a utilitarian view of women’ (Jonasdottir, 1991, p. 190). Utilitarian arguments contribute to perpetuating the definition of ‘women’ as ‘the other’, with ‘special interests’ or ‘experiences’. If women cannot demonstrate that they represent something different from men, the easy conclusion may be that there is no point in their presence. Jonasdottir’s analysis of what we might call the discursive dangers of difference poses an important warning that is of particular relevance to consensus-oriented cultures such as the Scandinavian ones. Yet the standard argument in public discourse, which maintains that claims have to be justified, cannot be easily ignored. For feminism the paradoxical choice remains between making the effort to prove prejudice and making the effort to prove worthiness. The very construct of ‘representative politics’ implies that justifications must be provided. Justifications are a common aspect of representative politics, as these politics all make promises to be fulfilled. Collectively, women are relative newcomers to positions of political leadership, and the focus on ‘promises of difference’ makes pragmatic use of a set of well-known political strategies. In Jonasdottir’s claim to ‘full and equal’ citizenship, there is nevertheless an interesting resemblance to the recent French claims for parity discussed above. ‘Since the dawn of patriarchy’, Jonasdottir claims, ‘until its change into its prevailing free and equal form, women have been excluded from equal status with Mankind not in any particular aspect, but as such. Thus women have to demand citizenship simply as womankind’ (Jonasdottir, 1991, p. 203). In Gaspard’s words: ‘Parity in representation is quite simply an application of the principle of equality among the people who make up the human race’ (Gaspard, 1998, p. 97). Both statements could be interpreted to mean that the ‘final struggle’ for citizenship should not be fought through endless investigations into
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the balance between preferences and prejudices, nor through endless justifications underscoring women’s contributions. Rather, such claims should be treated as universal rights, seen finally to belong among other famous ‘self-evident’ truths.
Conclusion: dilemmas of active citizenship In terms of changes in public policies, Scandinavian political culture has proven itself comparatively favourable to the social and political integration of women. In both Denmark and Sweden, the inclusion of women in the labour market during the 1970s was accompanied by a parallel expansion in public childcare centres, and social equality gradually came to include gender equality. In Denmark, the expansion of public childcare facilities came about in response to concerns about social policy and was not explicitly carried out as a gender equality policy. In Norway, however, these issues were promoted by the women’s movement as slogans in the many demonstrations of the 1970s, becoming parliamentary propositions and governmental resolutions only in the late 1980s. It was not until the Labour party’s first ‘women’s cabinet’ that a series of comprehensive reforms was introduced to extend rights to parental leave and increase the number of kindergartens, the goal being to make kindergarten placement available to every child by the year 2000. On issues of access to decision-making, Norway has developed the most comprehensive system of formal regulations to promote access. Analysis of changes in party political agendas from the 1970s to the 1990s reveals how the new priority of childcare politics became the most important demand from women politicians across the political spectrum (Skjeie, 1992). In all of the Scandinavian countries, the social democratic ‘worker paradigm’ remained paramount, but within this paradigm a new understanding of gender relations has gradually been established. While the family may still be envisioned as the ‘smallest of society’s harmonious communities’, the society of equality is built on the premise of dual breadwinners. This new normative premise means that actual political reforms, such as the expansion of kindergartens and the extension of parental leave, tend to be presented as being in ‘the common interest of the community’ rather than as gender-issue conflicts. Within national frameworks the key to more inclusive citizenship in Scandinavia over the last 30 years has been the interaction of women’s
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political mobilization ‘from below’ with political integration ‘from above’, as already noted. Social rights have been expanded to include the rights of working mothers; motherhood and care-giving have become part of political life; and there is a new emphasis on men as fathers and as parent–citizens. There has been an institutionalization of gender equality policies in all three Scandinavian countries, and a new discourse about participation which implies that political fora where women are not involved have lost their legitimacy. Increased participation by women in different societal arenas should be seen as an important shift in both the discourse and the practice of gender and citizenship. But the Scandinavian model of citizenship is today at a crossroads. Social democracy as well as the labour movement has lost both power and legitimacy. The political and economic situation has put pressure on gender equality from within and without, and feminist scholars debate the new constraints on gender equality and the means to combat them. New debates about women’s access to decision-making increasingly focus on arenas other than the party political. At the same time, there is also a new debate about women’s access to decision-making outside the party-defined one. With regard to employment practices in business, academia and the media, women’s access has been extremely limited, and new questions have arisen about how ‘the right to speak’ in public settings can still entail the exclusion of women (Skjeie, 1999). In relation to ethnic minorities, established practices of inclusion have been challenged, partly because they are not successful, and partly because they are viewed as simply representing inflexible practices of assimilation. European integration and transnational politics have made new conflicts between representation and power more visible in Scandinavia. These conflicts focus on three separate developments: on the gap between women’s access to national politics and their exclusion from the EU centres of political–economic decision-making; on new tendencies towards a gendered citizenship based on a division of local, national and transnational levels of politics—particularly gendered aspects of transnational immigration standards—and, more generally, on a growing tendency to separate democracy from power and governance in EU institutions. In terms of theories and models of citizenship, Scandinavian scholarship has challenged feminist notions of citizenship based on universal theories of the public/private divide. The major claim has been that politics matters. The evolution of civil, political and social rights may have different patterns and need not be determined by the same logic (Siim, 2000). Research has concluded that women’s political integration in
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Scandinavia is in different ways connected to social democratic citizenship, and thus women’s inclusion cannot be explained by a general lessening of male domination in society, nor as an effect of women’s labour-market participation. Instead, it is a result of a series of political alliances that have consistently challenged political exclusion from the basis of these institutions’ main source of legitimacy—their representativeness. The overall statement has been clear and simple: social rights without access to politics is paternalism, and political rights without social rights cannot secure an equal citizenship for women and men alike.
Note 1. This chapter is a revised version of the article ‘Scandinavian Feminist Debates’, International Political Science Review, Vol. 21, No. 4 (2000), pp. 346–60. We would like to thank Richard Bellamy for helpful comments on the present chapter.
Bibliography Andersen, J. et al. (1993), Medborgerskab: Demokrati og politisk deltagelse (Herning: Systime). Bergqvist, C. (1994), Mäns makt och kvinnors intressen, PhD dissertation (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis). Bergqvist, C. et al. (eds) (1999), Equal Democracies: Gender and Politics in the Nordic Countries (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget). Borchorst, A., A.-D. Christensen and N. Raaum (1999), ‘Equal Democracies?: Conclusions and Perspectives’, in C. Bergqvist et al. (eds), Equal Democracies: Gender and Politics in the Nordic Countries (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget), pp. 277–89. Chapman, J. (1993), Politics, Feminism and the Reformation of Gender (London: Routledge). Christensen, A. D. (1999), ‘Women in the Political Parties’, in C. Bergqvist et al. (eds), Equal Democracies: Gender and Politics in the Nordic Countries (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget), pp. 65–87. Dahl, T. S. (1984), Kvinnerett (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget). Dahlerup, D. (1993), ‘From Protest Movements to State Feminism: The Women’s Liberation Movement and Unemployment Policy in Denmark’, NORA: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 4–20. Dahlerup, D. (1998), Rødstrømperne: Den danske rødstrømpebevægelses udvikling, nytænkning og gennemslag 1970–1985 (København: Gyldendal). Gaspard, F. (1998), ‘Parity: Why Not?’, Differences, Vol. 9, No. 2. Gustafsson, G., M. Eduards and M. Rönblom (eds) (1997), Toward a New Democratic Order: Women’s Organizing in Sweden in the 1990s (Stockholm: Nordstedt Trykkeri). Haavio-Mannila, E. et al. (eds) (1985), Unfinished Democracy: Women in Nordic Politics (Oxford: Pergamon Press). Habermas, J. (1998), ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’, in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 21–30.
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Hernes, H. (1987), Welfare State and Woman Power: Essays in State Feminism (Oslo: Norwegian University Press). Hernes, H. (1988), ‘Scandinavian Citizenship’, in Acta Sociologica, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 199–215. Hirdman, Y. (1990), ‘Genussystemet’, in Demokrati och Makt i Sverige, Maktudredningen huvudrapport, SOU, 44, pp. 73–114. Hobson, B. (1993), ‘Feminist Strategies and Gendered Discourses in the Welfare States: Married Women’s Right to Work in the United States and Sweden’, in S. Koven and S. Michel (eds), Mothers of the World: Maternalist Politics and the Origin of the Welfare State (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 396–429. Jonasdottir, A. (1991), Love, Power and Political Interests, PhD dissertation, Ørebro Studies, 7 (Kumla: Ørebro University). Karvonen, L. and P. Selle (eds) (1995), Women in Nordic Politics: Closing the Gap (London: Dartmouth Press). Kolstrup, S. (1996), Velfærdsstatens rødder: Fra kommunesocialisme til folkepension (København: Selskabet til forskning i arbejderbevægelsens historie). Leira, A. (1993), ‘Hankjønn, hunkjønn, intetkjønn?: Forståelser av kjønn i norsk kvinnesosiologi’, in A. Taksdal and K. Widerberg (eds), Forståelser av kjønn i samfunnsvitenskapenes fag og kvinneforskning (Oslo: Ad Notam Gyldendal), pp. 117–20. Lønnå, E. (1996), Stolthet og kvinnekamp: Norsk kvinnesaksforenings historie fra 1913 (Oslo: Gyldendal). Mouffe, C. (1992), ‘Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics’, in J. Butler and J. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge), pp. 69–84. Outshoorn, J. (1994), ‘Being Present to Make Difference Visible?’, paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York. Pateman, C. (1988), The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Pateman, C. (1989), The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (London: Polity Press). Phillips, A. (1992), Engendering Democracy (London: Polity Press). Phillips, A. (1993), Democracy and Difference (London: Polity Press). Phillips, A. (1995), The Politics of Presence (London: Polity Press). Rokkan, S. (1987), Stat, nasjon, klasse: Essays i politisk sosiologi (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget). Scott, J. (1997), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Scott, J. (1999), ‘The Conundrum of Equality’, Occasional Paper No. 2 (Princeton: School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University), available at http://www.sss.ias.edu/papers/papertwo.pdf. Siim, B. (1988), ‘Towards a Feminist Rethinking of the Welfare State’, in A. Jonasdottir and K. Jones (eds), The Political Interests of Women: Developing Theory and Research with a Feminist Face (London: Sage Publications), pp. 160–87. Siim, B. (1994), ‘Engendering Democracy: The Interplay between Citizenship and Political Participation’, in Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 286–305. Siim, B. (2000), Gender and Citizenship: Politics and Agency in France, Britain and Denmark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
166 Scandinavian Model of Citizenship Skjeie, H. (1992), Den politiske betydningen av kjønn: En studie av norsk topp-politik, PhD dissertation (Oslo: Institutt for Samfunnsforskning). Skjeie, H. (1999), ‘Likestillingsprosesser og kjønnsmakt’, in Østerud et al. (eds), Mot en ny maktutredning (Oslo: Ad Notam Gyldendal), pp. 94–114. Slagstad, R. (1998), De nasjonale strateger (Oslo: Pax). Solhøy, S. H. (1999), Politisk vilje møter institusjonell autonomi: En studie av innføring, praktisering og håndheving av Likestillingslovens §21, Master’s thesis (Oslo: Universitetet i Oslo, Institutt for statsvitenskap). Togeby, L. (1994), Fra tilskuere til deltagere, summary of Doctoral dissertation (Politica, Institut for Statskundskab, Århus Universitet). Young, I. (1990a), Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Young, I. (1990b), ‘The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference’, in L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 300–23. Young, I. (1994), ‘Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective’, Signs, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 713–38. Young, I. (2000), Inclusive Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
8 Citizenship and Cultural Difference in France and the Netherlands Siep Stuurman
Introduction: nation-states and cultural difference In the democratic states of western Europe, citizenship is primarily defined in terms of rights. Immigrants generally enjoy civil and social rights, and some countries have granted them limited political rights. Naturalized immigrants and second-generation immigrants who become nationals on the grounds of ius soli enjoy full civil, social and political rights. That is not to say, however, that they are fully accepted as fellow citizens by the autochthonous population. Moreover, they are frequently compelled to adapt in various ways to the national culture of the host country. Nation-states promote, among other things, cultural homogeneity. But as liberal states they also organize pluralism, and the catalogue of rights in many modern European states expressly forbids discrimination on religious, racial, ethnic, sexual or other grounds. Consequently, every nation-state has to strike a specific balance between homogeneity and difference. This chapter discusses two European nations that are, world-historically speaking, very similar to each other, and yet have coped with the above problem in significantly different ways. France and the Netherlands are nation-states with a high degree of administrative centralization and linguistic and cultural homogeneity. Both were major colonial powers until quite recently, and in the post-1945 era they faced decolonization and waves of migration from their colonial empires. At the same time, there began an influx of migrant workers. This resulted, among other things, in the formation of a sizable Islamic community: in the early 1990s, an estimated 3.2 per cent of the Dutch population and 4.9 per cent of the French were Muslims (Vermeulen, 1997, p. 9). Presently, both countries are wrestling with the problem of ‘turning 167
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immigrants into citizens’, and the related issue of the integration of a Muslim community into a secularized, post-Christian society. Moreover, since the Islamic Revolution in Iran the issue of Muslim citizenship in European countries has become intertwined with the worldwide resurgence of militant Islamist politics. There are, however, important differences in the way France and the Netherlands cope with these issues. These differences were highlighted in the so-called ‘Islamic scarf’ affairs. In France, the issue of Muslim girls’ wearing of the foulard in the classroom led to a political and intellectual upheaval that some observers have compared with the Dreyfus affair (Kepel, 1997, p. 1). In the Netherlands, it generated anti-Islamic feelings as well, but nothing like the acrimonious polemics surrounding the affair in France. As these troubling episodes made clear, there are major differences in the way the separation of Church and State is interpreted and experienced in the two countries, and these are, in turn, tied to divergent conceptions of citizenship. What makes the difference between France and Netherlands in this respect particularly fascinating is their long history. From the responses to religious pluralism in the early modern period to the politics of education in the nineteenth century, and finally the response to Muslim subcultures today, the reactions of the state and civil society in France and the Netherlands have consistently diverged. National political cultures, one feels tempted to say, represent a ‘deep structure’ of politics that persists over centuries. Today’s politicians may fancy that they are free to innovate in this field, but actually they are the unwitting prisoners of the past. Such a deterministic approach surely flies in the face of common sociological sense as well as historical experience, and yet the problem of the persistence of differences over time remains. The explanation is probably that unity was harder to achieve for France than for the Netherlands, which had become a fairly compact and homogeneous civil society as early as the seventeenth century. Religious pluralism was also a basic feature of the Dutch Republic. By contrast, French absolutism under Louis XIV consecrated the idea of religious homogeneity as the foundation of the realm. Thereafter, the ‘solutions’ the two nations arrived at in the course of their histories constituted, to some extent at least, a cumulative sequence. Nations are, among other things, sustained by their own historical myths. In the extremely delicate matter of finding a balance between homogeneity and diversity, French and Dutch national myths consistently pointed to opposite ends of the scale. The rest of this essay outlines the basic differences between the historical trajectories of French and Dutch political culture, and the resulting
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conceptions of citizenship. The concluding section returns to the contemporary divergences between the French and Dutch models of citizenship, in particular immigrant citizenship.
Ancien régime legacies The French monarchy emerged from the religious civil wars as the supreme arbiter of all conflicts. For all the liberties it granted the Protestants, the Edict of Nantes (1598) retained Catholicism as the state religion of France (Garrison, 1997). In the language of the Edict, the Huguenots are called ‘ceux de la religion prétendue réformée’: a ‘so-called’ religion, not a real and legitimate one. The Protestants were admitted to public office, but not as Protestants. Conversely, public manifestations of the Protestant faith were restricted as much as possible, and entirely proscribed at the Court, in Paris, and in the presence of the king, wherever he resided. The strategy of the Edict of Nantes was thus to make Catholicism public and Protestantism private. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 marked a decisive turning point in French history. It was part of a broader process of fortifying and centralizing the monarchy, accompanied by a vigorous cultural nationalism organized around the personal cult of the king. Protestants were excluded from this national–royal body politic. Even the slaves in the French colonies had to be Catholics, stated the Code Noir, promulgated in the same year (Sala-Molins, 1987, pp. 94–107). The Jews, for their part, had always been considered as aliens who had no right to live in France at all. After their expulsion from the kingdom in 1394, only tiny minorities survived. Moreover, the communities of Jewish merchants of Iberian extraction who had settled in the Atlantic ports in the early sixteenth century practised a public conformity to Christianity. The Code Noir ordered the Jews to leave the French colonies, but the decree was only partly enforced. However, the annexation of Alsace in 1648 added some sizable Jewish communities. The expulsion decree was reaffirmed in 1615, and most of the remaining Jews were forced to leave Paris. With very few exceptions, seventeenth-century French culture was suffused with a virulent Catholic anti-Judaism. The overwhelming majority of the French regarded the Jews as a pathological infection that had to be eradicated from the body politic (Poliakov, 1981, Vol. 1, pp. 333–53). This was already so before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. By outlawing Protestantism, Louis XIV completed the ‘religious cleansing’ of the kingdom. France was now, at least in theory, a homogeneous community.
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In the century following the revocation, the Calvinists were forced underground. Their citizenship rights, including the rights to marry and to transfer and inherit property, were severly curtailed (Wells, 1995, pp. 113–18). By 1760, their numbers were reduced to about 2.7 per cent of the population. The surviving Calvinist communities were largely confined to the Midi, and, except for Alsatian Lutheranism, northern Protestantism virtually disappeared (Garrison, 1986, pp. 68–71; CarbonnierBurkhard and Cabanel, 1998, pp. 66, 111). When Alsace was ceded to France at the Peace of Westphalia, the Lutherans living there retained the religious rights they had enjoyed in the German Empire. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes did not change their status, but neither were they accepted as fully loyal subjects of the French king. Like the Calvinists, they were debarred from public office. To put the above in the proper perspective, we have to take into account the specific nature of French Catholicism. The French or ‘Gallican’ Church was staunchly monarchist and only reluctantly acknowledged the spiritual authority of the Pope. Consequently, ‘Frenchness’ and Gallican Catholicism were to some extent interchangeable. Let us now consider the case of the Dutch Republic. Despite Calvinist yearnings for a purely Reformed polity, the Dutch Revolt against Spain produced a de facto religious pluralism. It should be stressed, however, that Calvinist Protestantism was always dominant, numerically as well as culturally and politically. Around 1800, the adherents of the dominant Dutch Reformed Church made up 55 per cent of the population (68 per cent in the seven northern provinces, which originally consituted the Republic), while Catholics accounted for only 38 per cent, and Lutherans, Mennonites, Remonstrants and Jews for the remaining 7 per cent (Israel, 1998, p. 1029). There was freedom of conscience, but no complete freedom of practice for Catholics, Protestant Dissenters and Jews. Decisions about what to tolerate and what to surpress were taken by the towns or the provincial estates, so that there were often considerable divergences within the Republic. However, state-sponsored, forced conversion of religious minorities, as in France after 1685, was never attempted. Nevertheless full citizenship, including the right to hold public office, and frequently membership of the guilds, the militia and educational institutions, was restricted to the Calvinist majority. The Jews, or the ‘Jewish Nation’, as they were officially called, had immigrated to the Republic in the late sixteenth century. Their numbers slowly increased, and around 1800 there were almost 40,000 Jews in the Netherlands (1.8 per cent of the population; at that time, France’s
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41,000 Jews represented a mere 0.15 per cent). Almost 30,000 of the Dutch Jews were living in the province of Holland, most of them in Amsterdam. One important difference between the Jews in France and those in the Netherlands was thus that the Dutch Jews were mainly living in the commercial, civic and political core of the country, while the French Jews were mostly found in peripheral regions. The Jews were outsiders in a deeper sense than the Catholics and the Dissenters were. They came to enjoy a limited freedom of worship but they were excluded from the trading guilds, and many towns passed legislation curtailing Jewish economic freedom. Some cities, such as Utrecht as well as the major southern towns, denied them the right to settle until the end of the eighteenth century (Israel, 1998, pp. 1024–7). Such restrictions were never applied to the Catholics or the Protestant Dissenters.
The state and civil society in France and the Netherlands The level of urbanization was significantly higher in the Netherlands: around 1790, 32 per cent of the Dutch lived in cities with more than 10,000 inhabitants, as against less than 10 per cent of the French. Moreover, 9 per cent of the Dutch were concentrated in four cities of over 25,000 inhabitants, whereas only 4 per cent of the French resided in cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants. In addition, the Dutch were living more closely together than the French. More than 30 per cent of the Dutch population were living in the core area enclosed by the perimeter consisting of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, The Hague, Leyden and Haarlem, and over 70 per cent of this area was urbanized. Economically, politically and culturally, this was the heart of the Republic. The Republic had a highly developed inland waterway network. All of the cities and towns were interconnected by daily, and in many cases, hourly or two-hourly shipping services (including an overnight service). The network covered the entire Republic, and the data on passenger traffic show a frequency and amount of inland travelling quite unique in Europe before the coming of the railway. Despite its political and institutional fragmentation the Republic was thus a highly integrated economic and civil network. Amidst the myriad of provincial and urban particularisms, the burgher community maintained a high level of economic, political and personal interaction. By contrast, distances in France were enormous, and waterways were impracticable in the greater part of the country. Road transport was slow and seasonally unreliable,
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despite great efforts to enlarge and improve the network during the eighteenth century. The level of inland transport and communication attained by the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century was not equalled by France until the coming of the railway in the mid-nineteenth century. Dutch society was more literate as well. In 1810, the Netherlands were annexed to the Napoleonic Empire and, just like France itself, carved up into departments. At that time, the average number of booksellers per department was 18 in France and 72 in the Netherlands (Popkin, 1992, pp. 275–6). The overall level of literacy was about 68 per cent in the Netherlands as against (at best) 43 per cent in France (Knippenberg, 1986, p. 35). Consequently, civil citizenship in the Dutch Republic meant being part of the above network, while political citizenship was mainly local and provincial. The unitary national state, however, was only put in place by the Batavian Revolution (1795). In comparison, French society was less closely knit and more state-centred. In France, the idea of national sovereignty preceded the emergence of a nationwide civil society; in the Netherlands, the civic community predated the modern state.
The revolutionary creation of secular citizenship In the nineteenth century, the Dutch and the French frequently used the same, basically liberal, language of citizenship. However, they did not necessarily give the same meanings to its terms, because they were drawing on disparate political cultures, underpinned by major differences in the composition of civil society and its relation to the state. The French Revolution produced a new, emotionally and politically charged, concept of citizenship. All inhabitants of the nation would henceforth be citoyens passifs, enjoying equal civil rights, but only part of them were to become citoyens actifs, that is, voters. In theory, the distinction between active and passive citizens had nothing to do with religion. In practice, however, full religious equality was not a foregone conclusion, and Protestants and Jews were not treated alike. The inclusion of a clause granting unrestricted religious liberty in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, in August 1789, led to heated debate in the National Assembly and the final result was a compromise that left open the possibility of legal curtailment of the rights of religious minorities. Still, the qualifications for active citizenship in the Decree of 22 December 1789 contained no reference to religion. Thereafter, the political rights of Protestants were no longer contested.
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With the Jews it was an altogether different matter. They were seen as ‘others’ in a way the Protestants were not. Opponents of Jewish emancipation argued essentially that Jews, by their ‘peculiar’ looks and food laws, and their ‘self-imposed’ isolation, did not belong to the French nation (Singham, 1994, p. 118). By contrast, their defenders stood for individual citizenship rights and cultural assimilation. The Protestant deputy Rabaut Saint-Etienne, a fervent champion of Jewish emancipation, expected the Jews to adopt ‘our manners and customs’ once they were citizens (Badinter, 1989, p. 118). Another defender of emancipation, Clermont-Tonnerre, expressed an individualist doctrine of assimilation in a statement that was to become famous: ‘Jews . . . must be refused everything as a nation, and granted everything as individuals’ (quoted in ibid., p. 149). The debate in the National Assembly was chiefly about the Jews of the northeast, where anti-Semitism was rampant. In the end, the opponents of a Jewish emancipation hic et nunc gained the day: the Assembly decreed that ‘non-Catholics’ (read: Protestants) were to be eligible for all public offices, but expressly excluded the Jews ‘for the time being’. This led to a well-organized lobby on the part of the wealthy, Sephardic Jewry from Bordeaux, who now stood to lose rights they had always enjoyed under the Old Regime and that the Revolution had thus far confirmed. The eventual outcome was a new Decree (28 January 1790), which conferred full citizenship on the Sephardic Jews as well as those of Avignon but excluded the Jews of the northeast. The next phase of the struggle concerned the right of the Jews, both Sephardic and ‘German’, to be active citizens in Paris; the debate went through all the sections of the municipality and was resolved in favour of the Jews by the early spring of 1790. Finally, on 27 September 1791, all Jews residing in France were granted (reluctantly, on the part of many members of the Assembly) full citizenship rights. In the Netherlands, Catholics and Protestant Dissenters were granted full citizenship rights during the Batavian Revolution in 1795, but Jewish emancipation was enacted only after the revolution. In the first National Assembly election of the new Batavian Republic, in February 1796, the Catholics and the Protestant Dissenters could stand for election, but the Jews were not yet allowed to do so. However, on 5 August 1796 the National Assembly decreed the separation of Church and State, and less than a month later the Jews were granted full citizenship rights. The committee preparing the draft decree passed it with a two-thirds majority, the Assembly unanimously (Michman, 1995, p. 24). In 1798, two Jewish delegates were elected to the National Assembly. This was a European first, even though their tenure did not last long.
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A tentative conclusion from the foregoing might be that Jewish emancipation met with less resistance in the Netherlands than in France. This conclusion is strengthened when we consider the nature of anti-Semitism in the two countries. In France, violent anti-Semitism had a long history in the ancien régime, especially in the northeast. In the Netherlands, this was not so common, although anti-Semitic attitudes and prejudices were widespread. Furthermore, the nature of these sentiments differed: in both countries the usual prejudices about the ‘greediness’ and the ‘repugnant customs’ of the ‘Israelites’ were frequently aired; while in the Netherlands it was more Christian in tone, in France we find a modern, Blut-und-Boden variety of anti-Semitism as early as the Revolution (Le Cour Grandmaison, 1992, pp. 242–51). Dutch Catholics and French Protestants generally met with less hostility than did the Jews in both countries, but in many cases they were not seen, or treated, as fully trustworthy either. Their stature in civil society and politics was somewhere between that of the real insiders and that of the Jews. The real insiders were the Protestants and post-Protestants in the Netherlands, and the Catholics and post-Catholics in France. As for relations between the outsiders themselves, they were more cordial between Jews and Protestants in France than they were between Jews and Catholics in the Netherlands.
Nation and religion in the late nineteenth century In France and the Netherlands, as elsewhere in Europe, the introduction of public education in state-financed schools led to a protracted struggle over the control of education between liberals and various religious movements and parties. However, the struggle had completey different outcomes in the two countries. To summarize: in France the liberals emerged victorious, while their Dutch counterparts had to accept a compromise that gave the confessional movements a strong position in the state and the educational system. In both cases, the outcome of the conflict over education produced a specific model of the state–nation–church configuration that subsequently set the tone of political life in the twentieth century. In France, this was the état laïque (the secular state); and in the Netherlands, the verzuiling model (consociational segmentation). These models can be usefully contrasted according to what they promoted and what they sought to exclude. The Dutch model was above all else a compromise between the major organized groups in society: the liberals, the Catholics, the Orthodox
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Protestants and the Socialists. The liberals represented the non-Orthodox and secularized, broadly middle-class, Protestants, Jews and, to a far smaller extent, Catholics. The school compromise was written into the 1917 Constitution. It must be stressed that this outcome was against the wishes of the liberals. In the 1870s, they had sought to strengthen public education at the expense of confessional schools. They advocated a mix between Enlightenment and ecumenical Christianity (‘general Christian and societal virtues’), or, as their spokesman, Kappeyne van de Copello, declared in 1874, ‘a thoroughly Enlightened and Civilized Nation’. Had they emerged victorious, Dutch political culture might have moved closer to the French état laïque model. The liberals failed, however, mainly because their opponents were able to organize effective mass action and propaganda, while they could not. Likewise, they were unable to compete with the Socialists for the political soul of the secularized and non-Orthodox components of the working class. The contest over public education went on from 1878 to 1917. This period saw three extensions of the franchise for males (1887, 1897, 1917), with women acquiring the franchise in 1919. This timing is crucial, for it meant that the majority of petty bourgeois and working-class people became full political citizens, as organized Catholics, Calvinists or Socialists. For the majority of the population, citizenship acquired its meaning within the political and religious subculture to which they belonged. That is where they learned the language of politics. Coming back to the school issue, one could say that a certain kind of collective right was introduced. For example, Catholic parents were entitled to a state-financed Catholic school for their children; however, they did not enjoy that right as individuals, but as members of a Catholic collectivity (the law required a minimum number of Catholic parents in order to establish a Catholic school in a locality). The ensuing model of citizenship was a curious mixture of liberal-individualist and consociational elements. In a formal sense, all Dutch citizens enjoyed the same basic civil and political rights, but there was a tacit agreement that these rights would be exercised within, rather than against, the great sociopolitical blocs (the zuilen, as they began to be called in the 1930s). In due course the Jews adapted to this pattern, so that they, too, became a small zuil with their own schools and other social institutions. To the denizens of the four great socio-political blocs, the national community was basically a live-and-let-live relationship: tolerance meant leaving each other alone. Catholics and Protestants, for example, would cooperate in politics insofar as necessary, but their cultural and leisure pursuits were organized in separate spheres, and they would
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never intermarry. Neither would they marry non-churchgoing partners, let alone unbelievers. Paradoxically, this political and cultural segmentation went together with a deeply felt national identity. Underpinning the whole polity were certain ideals and values that were seen as basic and almost selfevident: productivity, the love of the Fatherland and the Royal family, and the validity of the Colonial Empire. Perhaps most important of all was the vague but nonetheless real Christian culture that every Dutch citizen was supposed to share. It was frequently observed that this was such a ‘general’ Christian morality that even ‘well-thinking’ Jews would willingly subscribe to it. Finally, there was the tacit conviction that there was a good, ‘Dutch’ way of doing things, as against less recommendable ‘foreign’ ways of going about the business of life. This sedate nationalism contained a great deal of whiggish complacency: phenomena such as revolutions, or sexual ‘perversion’, were definitely un-Dutch. Those who overstepped the boundaries set by those common values might in practice be circumscribed in the exercise of their civil and political rights. Left-wing socialists, communists, sexual reformers, republicans and militant atheists were considered ‘alien’ to the nation, as were many immigrants and refugees. Developments in France followed an entirely different course. The political culture of the état laïque originated in a series of bitter struggles between the Catholic Church and the Third Republic over the control of culture, and the school system in particular. French republicanism found its natural enemies in the traditionalist monarchists and the Catholic Church. Traditionally, these were also the enemies of the French Protestants and the French Jews. It is no wonder, then, that Protestants and Jews were strongly represented in the republican camp (Cabanel, 2000). Likewise, it comes as no surprise that the right-wing press often depicted the Third Republic as a Jewish–Protestant takeover of the French nation (Baubérot and Zuber, 2000). These tensions reached their height during the Dreyfus affair. The victory of the Dreyfusards was also a victory of the secular Republic. After 1900, the last positive references to religion were edited out of the Tour de la France par deux enfants, the most popular of all schoolbooks (Leymarie, 1999, p. 186). In 1905, a rigorous legal separation of Church and State was enacted. Consequentially, it came to stand for more than just the distinction between the secular and the spiritual sphere. Given the ubiquitous presence of Catholicism in French society, secularization took the form of a catharsis of the national soul. The evil Catholic presence had to be obliterated from the public sphere, and the French Republic was
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inclined to define virtually all space, except for churches and private homes, as public space. The neutral principle of the separation of Church and State was turned into a militant, and by no means neutral, secularist creed. In combination with the strongly political, state-centred French tradition of citizenship, this easily led to an ‘over-politicization’ of cultural issues. The republican founding myth depicts these conflicts as a valiant defence of universal values in the face of an intransigent, ‘fundamentalist’ Catholic establishment. Another, perhaps more realistic, way of characterizing the emergence of the état laïque is to see it as a ‘civil religion’. In France, the nation became highly visible: its symbols and architecture dominated public space to a far greater extent than in the Netherlands. In many ways, the state installed its symbols and values in place of those of the Church. The nation was the new sacred object, and ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ the new Holy Trinity. The signs changed; the impulse towards homogeneity remained. If anything, that impulse was strengthened by the legacy and the myth of the Revolution. The Revolution, Françoise Mélonio has recently argued, left the French with a dream of unity that makes it extremely hard to accept cultural pluralism (2001, pp. 19–20). Finally, secular, and frequently anti-clerical, political formations have dominated the political scene in France from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. In the Netherlands, by contrast, the Catholic and Protestant parties polled well over 50 per cent of the vote in all national elections from 1918 to 1963.
Political trends at the close of the twentieth century The nineteenth-century language of political citizenship—the citoyen as opposed to the bourgeois—was attuned to conflicts over education, religion and the nature of nationhood. It did not so easily adapt to the left–right cleavages tied to class conflict and the Cold War that dominated European politics from Versailles to Gorbachov. After 1989, however, the Cold War was supplanted by the ‘clash of civilizations’. In the wake of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the politics of religion acquired a significance they had not enjoyed in Europe since the late nineteenth century. The citizens of west European nations, who had come to take the separation of Church and State for granted, suddenly found themselves in a world where this principle no longer appeared self-evident. Moreover, the end of the Cold War coincided with a profound transformation of social structure and social life: from industrial society to
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the high-tech service economy, and from a culture of labour, duty and family to a culture of professionalism, consumption and individualism. The May 1968 upheaval in France symbolized that transition, as did its less spectacular counterpart in the Netherlands. The nation was still a powerful emotional reality but it, too, had to be ‘reinvented’ in an era of European integration and mass migration. In the ensuing cultural climate, identity politics acquired a greater poignancy. Regionalism and feminism, to take two major examples, were significantly different, but both cut across the old left–right cleavages, presenting a challenge to the traditional political cultures. The resurgence of the language of the citoyen provided the answer. In France, Mitterrand’s campaign in the 1980s employed traditional ideas of ‘Frenchness’ and in the 1988 elections republican themes played a major role (Berstein, 1999, p. 140). In 1984, the school question re-entered politics. In the face of gigantic street demonstrations, the Socialist government had to renege on its project to bring the private, Catholic, schools under state control. Significantly, the Catholics avoided a direct attack on the état laïque, but campaigned under the civic slogan liberté, attracting many parents who were more interested in a free choice of schools than in Catholic education as such (Becker, 1998, p. 303). When the right regained power in 1986, the Chirac government put the reform of the Code de la nationalité on the agenda. The law was finally changed in 1993, abolishing the automatic acquisition of French nationality by children born in France to immigrant parents. Opinion polls showed that the nationalist sentiments among the French rose but little between 1986 and 1990, but the most striking finding was that most of the French now had a partisan opinion about the question, while in 1971 some 40 per cent had had no opinion at all (Gastaut, 2000, p. 566). The 1989 bicentennial of the Revolution, coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Rushdie affair and the first foulard Islamique incident, in Creil, reinforced the salience of nationalist as well as republican themes. The considerable electoral gains of the Front National in the early 1990s suited the new political climate, in which immigration and the ‘spectre’ of Islam played a significant role. Finally, the bitter contest over the Maastricht Treaty, resulting in an extremely narrow (50.8 per cent) pro-European majority in the 1992 referendum, further promoted the centrality of the ideological contest over the meaning of citizenship, the nation and the republic. French politics remained strongly polarized along a left–right axis. In the late 1980s, traditional working-class support for left-wing parties, for example, was significantly stronger in France than in the Netherlands
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(Gallagher, Laver and Mair, 1992, p. 104). Moreover, the left–right divide in French politics largely coincided with the agnostic–Catholic cleavage; this did not change much in the 1980–2000 period (Bréchon, 2000, p. 120). What was changing were the issues over which the contest between the left and the right was fought. The politics of identity and nationhood were on the rise; economic and class issues took second place. A similar evolution occurred in Dutch politics. Infighting over immigration was traditionally avoided by the major political parties, but it became a significant electoral issue when some conservative liberals began to use anti-Islamic and anti-immigration language in the late 1980s. In the same years, the accelaration of the process of European integration provoked some questioning of the long-taken-for-granted Dutch national identity, but there was nothing like the French nationalist and ‘sovereignist’ politics, and the Maastricht Treaty was ratified amidst general indifference, both inside and outside Parliament. No Dutch politician in one of the major parties would dare to attack European integration with anything like the aggressive language of Charles Pasqua, who asserted in August 2001 that the Eurocrats were ‘an aristocracy that had robbed the European peoples of their sovereignty’ (Pasqua, 2001). Likewise, no viable extreme-right party emerged in the Netherlands. The major turning point in recent Dutch politics was the appearance of the so-called ‘violet’ ( paarse) coalition government, composed of social democrats, progressive liberals and conservative liberals. Its accession to power, in 1994, marked the end of the hegemony of the Christian Democrats, who had held key positions in all governments since the first elections following the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1917. The new coalition moved ahead on ‘moral’ issues such as the introduction of homosexual marriages, and its left–right composition blunted the traditional political conflicts over socio-economic issues. The immigration issue, however, and in particular the problem of ‘Islam’ became a bone of contention between the parties in the governmental majority. Parliamentary squabbles over a tightening of immigration laws were accompanied by broader debates in the mass media about immigration, Islam and the ‘clash of civilizations’. More than they had done before, politicians, journalists and intellectuals voiced their apprehension about the future of the Dutch nation in Europe and in the wider global arena. In this context, and against the background of the waning of the traditional political culture of the consociational blocs (verzuiling), the issue of citzenship became more central in political discourse. The word ‘citizen’ (burger) became almost
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a buzzword, but its meaning proved highly volatile, depending on the political language and practice in which it was embedded. Therefore, the fact that languages of citizenship have in the past two decades acquired a greater relevance in both French and Dutch politics is not by itself sufficient to bring about a convergence of the two political cultures.
Contemporary models of citizenship and cultural difference Let us for a moment return to the ‘Islamic scarf’ affair. Considering the issue of the foulard in the classroom, we may ask a deceptively simple question: Is the classroom a public space or a private space? In fact, the differences between the French and the Dutch cases begin right here. The French regard the classroom as an unequivocally public space, an extension of the state, to put it starkly. For the Dutch, by contrast, the classroom is a semi-public extension of the home, and certainly not the undisputed territory of the state. This difference partly explains their more lenient attitude to the headscarf in the classroom. Generally, the Dutch are very attached to their personal liberty in the private sphere. Moreover, they are inclined to regard as ‘private’ all social space that does not belong to the state sensu strictu (this is in part a post-1960 reaction against the moral discipline the zuilen used to impose on their ‘members’). The French also cherish their personal liberty, but they are used to a greater presence of the state in their lives. All this has obvious implications for the theory and practice of citizenship. In the Netherlands, citizenship is in the first place located in civil society; the political is of secondary importance. To be a Dutch citizen is to be a member of ‘society’. By contrast, French citizenship is primarily political. Notions of nationhood in the two countries vary accordingly: the Dutch conceive of the nation as a society; the French conceive of it as a republic. The French seem to worry more about their own nation than do the Dutch, while they are also more nationalistic and prone to the belief that their country is better than others. The Dutch, by contrast, combine a strong national identity with weak nationalism. A similar picture emerges in comparing the founding myths of the two nations. The French founding myth is revolutionary and political. Asked about their views on French history, most pupils of the collège Gabriel-Havez at Creil (where the first headscarf controversy took place) pointed to the Revolution as the major event (Malaurie, 1992, pp. 35–45). Looking at the Dutch case, two differences stand out. First, history has less of a public presence. Second, the founding myth of the Netherlands is about religious liberty, Protestant industriousness, gradual reform and
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toleration. The French founding myth fosters a voluntarist conception of politics, the conviction that resolute political action is the solution to the ills of society. The far more ‘whiggish’ Dutch view of history emphasizes the limitations of political agency (Stuurman, 1993). The rise of the discourse of citizenship has naturally led to a reaffirmation of the paramount value of civic virtue. In France, the good citizen is a person who has emotionally invested in the Republic. This view furthers a politicized ethics. In the Netherlands, civic virtue is rooted in a privatized ethics of care: the good citizen is he or she who cares for the well-being of others. A similar ethics permeates Dutch political discussion about the future of the welfare state: social citizenship rights are felt to be of great value, not only for the individual security they provide, but also, and perhaps primarily, for their efficacy in sustaining community ties. In France by contrast, the defence of social rights is framed in a politicized, republican discourse that is less moralistic than its Dutch counterpart. In French political discourse, the cohesion of society is theorized as a political project, pitted against the threat of an ‘American’ ultra-liberalism. France and the Netherlands, we may conclude, are both liberal states that guarantee basic individual rights. Moreover, they have much in common as highly secularized west European nations. They differ, however, in the way citizenship rights are embedded in social practices and political culture. The headscarf controversies mirror this mix of similarities and differences. In the first place, they display a basic similarity: the presence of sizable Muslim communities produces apprehension and distrust. Islam is not treated as just another religion, but as a newcomer whose credentials have yet to be verified. Much discussion about the essential otherness of Islam is in fact comparable to discussions about other religious newcomers, in particular the Jews, in earlier periods of history. Both in France and in the Netherlands, the appearance of girls with headscarves in schools was quickly defined as a ‘problem’ to which a ‘solution’ had to be found. In both countries, the politics of gender occupy centre-stage. Most politicians and journalists took for granted that headscarves constituted an impediment to women’s emancipation, in accordance with the long European tradition of Orientalism, in which the Islamic East is associated with the despotic subjection of women. Finally, the headscarf issue is part of a broader transformation of the discourse on immigration: from national difference to religious difference. In the 1970s, immigrants from Muslim countries were associated with their country of origin and known as Turks, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians and so on; in the 1990s, everyone routinely referred to them as ‘Muslims’.
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In both countries, discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, ethnicity or gender is illegal. Principles of non-discrimination are highly valued, although less unanimously in France than in the Netherlands, witness the sizable electoral success of the Front National. That nondiscrimation is upheld by French law was made abundantly clear by the decisions of the Conseil d’État on the headscarf issue. It ruled that Muslim girls, like every other citizen, have the right to wear symbols displaying their personal identity, including their religious identity. This is also the rule laid down in Article 1 of the present Dutch Constitution (generally known as the ‘anti-discrimination article’). In the French case, however, the decision of the Conseil d’État was fiercely contested and the 1994 decree of the secretary of education, François Bayrou, which banned ‘ostentatious’ signs of religiosity from the classroom was widely approved by French public opinion. The ex-Maoist philosopher André Glucksmann even termed the wearing of headscarves ‘a terrorist operation’ (Gastaut, 2000, p. 594). Thus, French law safeguards the freedom of religious expression, but the ban on ‘ostentatious’ signs that ‘disturb public order’ provides legal cover to schools that expel Muslim girls for wearing headscarves. In the Netherlands this issue was usually managed on the local level, and nobody ever asserted that girls wearing headscarves were undermining the political foundations of the nation. Utterances such as Glucksmann’s are unthinkable in the Netherlands, except perhaps on the extreme-right lunatic fringe. The girls were not seen as unlawfully proselytizing individuals, but rather as exponents of a Muslim subculture. Accordingly, school directors and local authorities sought a compromise, often involving representatives of the local Muslim community in their ‘dialogue’ (an expression beloved by the Dutch). By contrast to the response in France, the judiciary and the Ministry of Education have never directly intervened (Kuijeren, 2000). The handling of the headscarf issue reflects broader patterns of political culture. In the Netherlands, multiculturalism has almost attained the status of an official government policy, while to most French politicians and intellectuals it denotes an ‘American’ deviation from republican values. In the Netherlands, the subcultural community and the nation are primarily regarded as complementary, and only secondarily as competing. Muslim or Turkish citizens are bearers of rights that are exercised within the orbit of their own group as well as in the wider community. Of late there has been a good deal of debate about the proper relationship between the two, with some politicians arguing that Muslim subcultures impede succesful participation in the national arena, but almost no one
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in the Netherlands considers subculture and national culture as mutually exclusive categories (Entzinger, 1994). Comparative research on Turkish pupils in secondary schools has shown that Turkish boys in France and the Netherlands quickly appropriated these national political cultures: the French Turks understood that the ‘ethnic card’ was taboo, while the Dutch Turks knew that you might play it but not in an overly exclusionary way (Sunier, 2000). Finally, the Dutch Constitution guarantees the right of religious communities to their own state-financed schools. At present, there are dozens of Islamic primary schools and a few secondary schools. In this way, the Muslim community seems to adapt to the logic of verzuiling.
Conclusion We may conclude that the Dutch legacy of the consociational model is pragmatically superimposed on the liberal model of individual citizenship: the Dutch seem to want to have their cake and eat it too, in that they want to have the advantages of universal rights while retaining their community quasi-rights as well. The French, true to their Cartesian heritage, have no use for such dubious logic. In their model of citizenship, individuals, not communities, have rights. Against the Dutch formula of universal rights and community quasi-rights, the French prefer to think in terms of universal rights versus community quasi-rights. To put it as succintly as possible: the French model of citizenship is liberal– republican, while the Dutch model is communitarian–liberal. These models represent, of course, only the dominant concepts of citizenship in the two nations. They are disputed by critics who question the soundness of mainstream views; accordingly, there is a multiculturalist opposition in France and an assimilationist opposition in the Netherlands. The Europe-wide moral panic over Islam following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 has created an Islamophobic assimilationist mood in political life and public opinion. At the present time we cannot yet say what its long-term effect on political culture will be. In France it has, thus far, by and large confirmed the existing political culture, albeit with a noticeable shift to the right. In the Netherlands, the huge electoral gains of the Pim Fortuyn Party (LPF) in the May 2002 elections (following the assassination of Fortuyn himself shortly before the elections) indicate an increased xenophobia and assimilationism, even though the LPF has in the meantime largely collapsed as a result of internal conflicts (a significant contrast to the consolidated presence of the Front National in France). Consequently, multiculturalism is now more contested than it
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was before, but so far the basic features of Dutch political culture remain unchanged.
Note 1. This essay is part of an Erasmus University Faculty of History research project on politics and cultural difference in France and the Netherlands, on which I am collaborating with Thijl Sunier, Mira van Kuijeren and Karin Hofmeester.
Bibliography Badinter, R. (1989), Libres et Égaux: L’émancipation des Juifs sous la Révolution française (Paris: Fayard). Baubérot, J. and V. Zuber (2000), Une haine oubliée: L’antiprotestantisme avant le ‘pacte laïque’, 1870–1905 (Paris: Albin Michel). Becker, J. J. (1998), Crises et alternances, 1974–1995 (Paris: Seuil). Berstein, S. (1999), ‘Le Modèle républicain’, in S. Bernstein (ed.), Les Cultures Politiques en France (Paris: Seuil), pp. 113–43. Birn, R. (1994), ‘Religious Toleration and Freedom of Expression’, in D. van Kley (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 265–99. Bréchon, P. (2000), Les Valeurs des Français: Évolutions de 1980 à 2000 (Paris: Armand Colin). Cabanel, P. (2000), Les Protestants et la République (Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe). Carbonnier-Burkhard, M. and P. Cabanel (1998), Une Histoire des Protestants en France (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer). Entzinger, H. (1994), ‘A Future for the Dutch Ethnic Minorities Model?’, in B. Lewis and D. Schnapper (eds), Muslims in Europe (London and New York: Pinter), pp. 19–38. Gallagher, M., M. Laver and P. Mair (1992), Representative Government in Western Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill). Garrison, J. (1986), L’Homme Protestant (Brussels: Éditions Complexe). Garrison, J. (ed.) (1997), L’Édit de Nantes (Biarritz: Atlantica). Gastaut, Y. (2000), L’Immigration et l’opinion en France sous la Ve République (Paris: Seuil). Israel, J. I. (1998), The Dutch Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Kepel, G. (1997), Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press). Knippenberg, H. (1986), Deelname aan het Lager Onderwijs in Nederland gedurende de Negentiende Eeuw (Amsterdam: KNAG). Kuijeren, M. van (2000), ‘Hoofddoekjesaffaires: Over de Franse en Nederlandse Worstelingen met Gesluierde Leerlingen’, Groniek: Historisch Tijdschrift, Vol. 33, pp. 455–70. Le Cour Grandmaison, O. (1992), Les citoyennetés en révolution, 1789–1794 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Leymarie, G. (1999), De la belle époque à la grande guerre (Paris: Livre de poche). Malaurie, G. (ed.) (1992), La France, elle a besion de tout ces idées que j’ai écrit (Paris: Robert Laffont).
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Mélonio, F. (2001), Naissance et affirmation d’une culture nationale: La France de 1815 à 1880 (Paris: Seuil). Michman, J. (1995), Dutch Jewry during the Emancipation Period, 1787–1815 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press). Pasqua, C. (2001), ‘Rendez leur souveraineté aux Européens’, Le Monde, 7 August. Poliakov, L. (1981), Histoire de l’Antisémitisme, two volumes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy). Popkin, J. D. (1992), ‘Print Culture in the Netherlands on the Eve of the Revolution’, in M. C. Jacob and W. W. Mijnhardt (eds), The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment, and Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), pp. 273–91. Sala-Molins, L. (1987), Le Code Noir ou Le Calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Singham, S. M. (1994), ‘Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks, and Women, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man’, in D. van Kley (ed.), The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and The Declaration of Rights of 1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 114–53. Stuurman, S. (1993), ‘Le centenaire de la Révolution française: Les Pays-Bas entre la France et l’Angleterre’, in P. Den Boer and W. Frijhoff (eds), Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), pp. 93–104. Sunier, T. (2000), ‘Civil Enculturation: Nation-State, School, and Ethnic Difference in Four European Countries’, Journal of International Migration and Intregration, Vol. 1, pp. 305–29. Vermeulen, H. (ed.) (1997), Immigrantenbeleid voor de Multiculturele Samenleving (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis). Wells, C. C. (1995), Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press).
9 American Citizenship: Between Past and Present Brunella Casalini
Introduction One of the main principles of contemporary liberal thought is the idea that individuals possess a set of basic universal rights. However, liberals rarely address the tension between universal rights and membership of a particular body politic. In both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, for example, Rawls (1971, 1993) envisages a closed society whose members are born and die as citizens. Free movement only figures as a basic right of citizens within a state (Smith, 1997, p. 481). All of the questions associated with the problems of inclusion and exclusion, immigration, and the rights of legal residents and illegal aliens living within national borders are left unasked and unanswered. Also left neglected are the challenges that these problems pose to the identity of a political community that aims consistently to protect and secure people’s rights. Liberal theory has still to think through the implications of its own main principles. According to some contemporary commentators, for instance, the possibility of appealing to a supranational judicial body, such as the European Court of Justice, has already transformed the old nation-state into an agent implementing decisions taken outside its borders. At the same time, the extension of a set of basic rights to legal residents—both in Europe and the United States—is seen as demoting the status of nationality (Jacobson, 1996). The case of the United States lends itself well to a discussion of such a tension, since it has long been considered either an exception to the exclusive and particularistic character of the European nation-state, or an anticipation of a post-national kind of citizenship. The protection of rights by an extensive and widespread judicial review—now considered a model for the European Court of Justice—contributed, particularly in 186
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the constitutional decisions of the past 30 years, to an almost complete equalization of the statuses of legal residents and nationals, through the extensive application of due process and equal protection of the law. This phenomenon has been interpreted as paving the way to a process of reshuffling—if not actually devaluing—the functional meaning of citizenship.1 The modern procedural republic, deriving from liberal individualism, tends to emphasize and defend the existence of rights considered so fundamental as to be required for and prior to any conception of the common good. According to some critics of contemporary American society, this liberal tendency has changed public life radically, weakening social ties and reducing the motivation for political participation. In recent years, faced with the current degradation of the social fabric, critics of liberalism have been tempted to look back to the origins of American society in their search for an alternative to liberal thought. Laments for ‘the lost souls’ of the American political tradition—from Protestantism to republicanism, from populism to communitarianism—have become commonplace (Diggins, 1984; Bellah et al., 1985; Lasch, 1991, 1995; Sandel, 1996). This debate sets the scene for the present chapter, the aim of which is twofold: to reconstruct the main defining moments of American citizenship, emphasizing the plurality of often conflicting civic ideals that shaped American political identity, and to analyse recent developments and transformations in immigration and citizenship. The comparison between past and present is meant to highlight the ambivalence of both liberal and communitarian images of American citizenship.
Federalists, anti-federalists and the issue of citizenship In The Morality of Consent (1975), Alexander Bickel argued that the concept of citizenship [played] only the most minimal role in the constitutional scheme . . . The original Constitution presented the edifying picture of a government that bestowed rights on people and persons, and held itself out as bound by certain standards of conduct in its relations with people and persons, not with some legal construct called ‘citizen’. (Quoted in Smith, 1997, p. 116) In sharp contrast to this account, American history shows that the extension of the Constitution’s formal scope was limited for a long time by the kind of answer given to the recurrent question ‘Who belongs to “We the People”?’
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As late as the beginning of the twentieth century and to a lesser extent as late as the 1950s and 1960s, a large part of the American population was deprived of the most fundamental rights because it was barred from citizenship on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender. The 1856 Supreme Court opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which Justice Taney maintained that blacks were not ‘included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States’ (Landmark Cases, 2002), is the saddest example of the weight given to a citizen’s formal legal standing. Women, meanwhile, were second-class citizens or, rather, they were citizens only in a derivative way: their will was in fact legally subordinated to that of their husbands and fathers. If the Revolution had demolished the patriarchal relationship between sovereign and subjects, it certainly did not impinge on the domestic sphere. Considered the moral guardians of the new republic, women nevertheless had none of the privileges of American citizenship: ‘the vote, the right to hold office, eligibility to serve on juries or as judges, and, if married, the right to independent ownership of property’ were all denied to them (Kerber, 1991, p. 25). Smith (1997, p. 117) suggests that overturning Bickel’s interpretation makes it possible to read the silence of the Constitution on the issue of citizenship as an important indication of the crucial role played by citizens’ formal legal status and the framers’ need to compromise on such matters as slavery and the relation between state citizenship and federal citizenship. In the heated constitutional debate of 1787 between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, one of the fundamental issues concerned their divergent and conflicting civic ideals. Anti-Federalists granted important functions to the state in matters such as civic education and religion. They were suspicious of the Constitutional clauses, in particular of Article VI, Section 3, which proscribed the imposition of religious oaths on holders of public offices. Henry Abbott, an Anti-Federalist from North Carolina, defined the secular underpinnings of the Constitution as ‘dangerous’. Indeed, he believed, it encouraged ‘Pagans, Deists, and Mahometans’ to hope that they could attain public office (quoted in Kramnick, 1990, p. 268). Another worry of the Anti-Federalists was the waning homogeneity of a republic of such great dimensions and open borders. Their criticism of the liberal immigration policy of Pennsylvania went along the following lines. ‘Pennsylvania,’ they observed has chosen to receive all that would come there. Let any indifferent person judge whether that state in point of morals, education, energy
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is equal to any of the eastern states . . . [which] by keeping separate from the foreign mixture, [have] acquired their present greatness in the course of a century and a half, and have preserved their religion and morals . . . Reasons of equal weight may induce other states . . . to keep their blood pure. (Quoted in Kramnick, 1990, p. 268) The Anti-Federalists’ civic humanism clashed with the Federalists’ liberal– republican views. The Federalists thought that the expanded nature of the federal republic as opposed to the parochialism of the smaller-scale states, together with its pluralism of sects, interests and opinions, would be a great advantage. As they envisaged it, the commercial republic was more inclusive and less demanding in terms of civic virtues. The new federal state would be peaceful and industrious and rely more on citizens’ private virtues (such as thrift, industriousness and frugality) than on their active participation in public life. Though the republican lexicon of both sides stressed ‘public interest’ and the ‘common good’ rather than an individualistic conception of rights, any resemblance between them ended there. In civic-humanist discourse, in the words of the Federalist Benjamin Rush, citizens were seen as mere ‘public property’ (quoted in Kramnick, 1990, p. 273). Rather than private virtues, the Anti-Federalists emphasized the public and martial spirit of citizens. Indeed, it is no coincidence that we owe the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which was to establish the basis for an ‘armed citizenry’, to the Anti-Federalists themselves. In James Madison’s liberal–republican view, by contrast, there prevailed the idea of a political economy of virtue and of respecting the private citizen, as well as a conception of the republic in which justice (the protection of rights) and the public good could not be separated (Epstein, 1984, p. 60). In order to achieve this, the Federalist experiment focused on the overcoming of parochialism and on the selection of representatives. These representatives constituted— in keeping with classic republicans’ aristocratic view of politics—a select body of ‘Optimates’, independent and landed citizens, gifted with a wisdom that would allow them to resist the call of personal interests and devote their time to public life. According to Madison, the country’s very size would mean that the representatives’ narrow focus on the demands of local and particularistic pressures would be broadened, making it possible to refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of
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justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation it may well happen that the public voice pronounced by the representatives of the people will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. (Quoted in Kramnick, 1990, p. 270) Nevertheless, at times, Federalists contradicted the Anti-Federalists’ fears about the lack of homogeneity of the American population, indirectly revealing their awareness of the difficulties raised by the nation-building process. While in The Federalist Papers Madison argued that the only way of removing differences was to abolish freedom itself, or to compel every man to follow the same opinions, ideas and interests (Federalist, No. 10), John Jay tried to deny the evidence of diversity, affirming the existence of a ‘one connected country’ and a ‘united people’, ‘descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manner and customs’ (Federalist, No. 2). If in the Founding the term ‘nation’ was used with caution in order not to fan state resistance, the Federalists’ liberal–republican view implied a clear supremacy of national citizenship. Federalists believed that neither review by the federal courts of justice nor the constitutional constraints imposed on states in such matters as currency or the prohibition of retroactive laws were sufficient to strengthen the federal government. A common monetary policy and a uniform regulation of commercial relations were necessary to create a strong economic federation, and a national army and navy were required as a solid bulwark against foreign countries. But they were still not enough. Madison attempted to steer the integration process towards the transformation of the central government within the national political arena, proposing to give the federal government the power of veto over state legislation and then struggling for a Bill of Rights that might be resorted to against not only the federal government but also state governments (Hobson, 1979). Madison’s failure to overcome Anti-Federalists’ hostility—which some have compared to the hostility of the supporters of a ‘Europe of States’ against any federal European project (Meehan, 1996)—left undecided the matter of the relation between state and federal citizenship, which was to remain a part of the issue of slavery until the end of the Civil War. The consequences of these uncertainties were significant because of the sharp disparities among citizens of different states. If the First Amendment, for
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example, made it unconstitutional for Congress to make any ‘law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’, the impossibility of relying on the Bill of Rights as protection against the infringement of basic rights by a state government meant that the situation of each state was to be considered separately. Thus, some states continued to impose religious tests for access to public office, while others, such as South Carolina, kept Protestantism as the state religion.2 The Constitution established some guiding principles as to the form of government the states could assume: it stated that no title of nobility could be granted and in Article IV, Section 4, it established the republican form of government for all states. The constitutional dictates rejected the monarchical form of government and all of the old noble aristocracies, but by their vagueness gave rise to different orders of power, which—as James Fenimore Cooper pointed out in The American Democrat (1838)—were not necessarily fit for ‘free governments’. Article IV, Section 2, of the Constitution maintained that ‘[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States’. This clause could have left room for the federal government to establish a more uniform treatment of citizens of different states. The efforts made in the following years by blacks appealing to the ‘privileges and immunities clause’ with the aim of eliminating the hostile and discriminatory attitudes of slavery states towards them were probably a major reason why the federal courts and the Supreme Court never developed the liberal meaning of this constitutional dictate in the nineteenth century. Indeed, it clearly could have had incendiary consequences (Smith, 1997, pp. 187–9). In the end, the Constitution (Article I, Section 8) entrusted Congress with the task of establishing the main principles of naturalization policies. But there were ambiguities in these matters too, for states, in observance of the federal criteria, preserved a concurring power on naturalization legislation. This power had an impact too often forgotten by historians. The myth of an America with open gates up to 1875 collapses if we consider the fundamental role played by individual states in immigration regulations leading up to that moment, including instituting measures forbidding immigration by those convicted of crimes by European governments, the prohibition of geographical mobility and of entry to poor immigrants or those immigrants with mental or physical handicaps, as well as measures legislating racial subordination (Neuman, 1983).
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Ascriptive and consensual ideals The image of America as the ‘anti-Europe’, granting equality to all and rejecting the old Continental feudal hierarchies, and the idea of America as the land of freedom and asylum for all oppressed people—promoted in works such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer—were attractive from a rhetorical point of view, but difficult to reconcile with the country’s fears of disruption and moral degeneration. From the beginning, doubts arose about the wisdom of allowing Catholics, Jews and others to have free access to citizenship, and subsequently emphasis was repeatedly placed upon the dangers of admitting and welcoming immigrants who, having been living under monarchical or aristocratic forms of government, were not thought to be adequately trained in the exercise of republican virtues. After the ratification of the Constitution, the dispute over citizenship was all but closed. Federalists and Jeffersonians were divided over the former’s Anglophilia and the latter’s Francophilia and over the distance between the Federalists’ project of a centralized, commercial republic and the Jeffersonians’ preference for an agrarian, strongly decentralized republic. But this was not all. The Federalists’ will to strengthen the national community against the still powerful local pressures of the states and their fear of a possible wave of immigration from revolutionary France, which could eventually favour their political adversaries, pushed them into a hereditary conception of loyalty to the nation. In this way, they became champions of a nativist policy and suspicious of the Lockean consensual theory of citizenship with its potentially anarchical consequences. The naturalization law enacted in 1798, which increased the required length of residence to 14 years, and, in the same year, the Alien and Sedition Acts, aimed at deporting and silencing political dissidents, were both expressions of the Federalists’ claim that American citizenship was as much ‘a matter of birth, heritage, and natural allegiance as of choice, and that certain sorts of “blood” were more truly American than others’ (Smith, 1997, p. 153). The Jeffersonian victory and the adoption in 1802 of a new naturalization law, which moved residence requirements for access to citizenship back to 5 years, saw the triumph of the rhetoric of consensus. Not ius soli, considered by the Jeffersonian democrats as a residue of a feudal conception of citizenship, but a voluntary act of choice was placed at the very base of the citizen’s loyalty to the state. However, we should not overestimate the effects of these transformations and their liberal and inclusive meaning. Among the reasons prompting the democrats to
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reject birth as a criterion for citizenship was also the desire not to be obliged to recognize as citizens blacks born in the United States, and Native Americans (Smith, 1997, p. 230). It is not surprising, then, that the consensual rhetoric had no effect on the conditions of Native Americans, blacks and women. On the contrary, it gave even greater strength to justifying the exclusion of those subjects who, because of their supposed natural inferiority, were not seen as able to respect and subscribe to the loyalty oath that linked citizens to a republic. The principle of consensus had no relevance in the case of the peoples of Louisiana and Mexico, who were never consulted regarding the political situation created by their annexation to the United States (Shklar, 1998, p. 142). The years when the word ‘democracy’ was no longer used with the negative meaning it had had during the Founding, the years of Jacksonian democracy and of universal male suffrage, were the same years that saw the stiffening of exclusion barriers along lines of race and gender. From Crania Americana by George Morton to the works of Josiah Nott, George R. Gliddon and Louis Agassiz, a new American school of ethnography mobilized itself to uphold the white race’s supremacy with pseudoscientific evidence (Smith, 1997, p. 103). Classed among the inferior races were not just blacks and Native Americans, but also Chinese and Mexicans. During the Mexican War of 1848, racist arguments were advanced by democrats and their Whig adversaries alike. If Daniel Webster, a leading figure in the Whig party, feared the conquest of a people inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race in culture, manners, morals and religion, Jacksonian democrats saw the annexation of Mexico as proof of the United States’ ‘manifest destiny’, a sign of their superiority over those peoples who had been subject to the negative influence of Jesuits and Spanish despotism (ibid., p. 205).
The republican machine Republican America inherited from the Founding Fathers an awareness of the internal fragility of its institutions, a concern that periodically aroused fears of decadence and corruption. A response to these anxieties, aimed at normalizing and disciplining the body politic, emerged in the nineteenth century. It went further than the mere exclusion of ‘inferior’ races from citizenship. The American civic religion imposed the duty of creating subjects up to the task of their providential destiny, the signs of which had been detected by the first Puritans in the sublime geography of the New World, while republicanism placed a particular emphasis on civic virtues. Both urged the moulding of the American citizen, a task
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that was renewed more and more forcefully with each wave of immigration or each new conquest. The ‘conversion’ of individuals into a ‘republican machine’—imagined by Benjamin Rush in The Mode of Education Proper in a Republic (quoted in Kerber, 1983, p. 109)—was to become the recurrent idea of the American, democratic republic in the Jacksonian era. The creation and spread of penitentiaries, almshouses, lunatic asylums, common schools and temperance societies—sustained particularly by the Whigs—and the state regulation of undesired immigration, consisting mostly of convicts transported from Europe and the mentally ill or physically handicapped, were two different manifestations of the same widespread disciplining power (Rothman, 1971), aimed at controlling not only bodies and behaviour, but also, as Tocqueville saw it, ‘souls’. The reason underpinning this ‘complex and paradoxical complementarity’ between a democratic republic and social control was, as Emilio Santoro has noted, singled out by Tocqueville himself in the chapter of De la démocratie en Amérique dedicated to the despotism of the majority, in which ‘the French philosopher underlines . . . that, as paradoxical as it may seem, a democratic republic like the United States, which thinks of law and order as emanating from popular will, treats disobeying minorities with more severity than monarchical regimes disregarding their subjects’ will’ (Santoro, 1998, p. 35). After 1830, with the creation of common schools, financed by public taxation, there was an unprecedented increase in school attendance. The educational philosophy of these schools placed greater emphasis on the task of moulding the future republican citizen than on the general aim of illuminating students. A school superintendent in Illinois in 1862 unequivocally stated the inspiration of the educational project underlying the common schools: ‘The chief end is to make GOOD CITIZENS. Not to make precocious scholars . . . not to impart the secret of acquiring wealth . . . not to qualify directly for professional success . . . but simply to make good citizens’ (quoted in Kaestle, 1983, p. 98). Scholastic education was conceived first and foremost as moral education. A fundamental role in the transmission of moral principles was assigned to religion, to the reading of the Bible and to prayer. In the great metropolis, common schools were the primary means of assimilating the offspring of the new immigrants into the American culture, and eradicating prejudices, manners and ties that still bound them to other countries. The internalization of the ethics of work and sacrifice, of patriotic values and Christian religious principles, of respect and reverence for laws, was the means of forming individuals oriented to the new
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capitalist and Protestant republic. Future citizens had to feel a moral duty to protect and defend American institutions, a duty that, for the more conservative, coincided with the denigration of workers’ organizations and foreign cultures in America (ibid., p. 97). In these same years, US penitentiaries imprisoned a disproportionate number of foreigners and first-generation citizens in comparison with the number of imprisoned native-born citizens. In fact, the penitentiary acted as a means of socialization, a public school for those who had slipped through the scholastic system (Dumm, 1987, p. 107). In America (unlike in Europe) prisoners were not subjected to severe corporal punishment. After an initial period of strict solitary confinement, which left the prisoner feeling lost, isolated and deprived of all his past social ties, there followed a re-education phase that consisted mostly of Bible readings and then, assuming the programme was successful, an increased desire to work resulting from the long periods spent in loneliness and inactivity (ibid.). The components of the re-education process were not different in substance from the educational principles that inspired the common schools: self-control, internalizing of community values and moral principles, sacrifice and hard work, frugality and sobriety—in sum, all the virtues required of citizens in the modern American republic, which were quite different to the ancient republican virtues. It is worth mentioning the general attitude towards indigence within this disciplinary politics. The aim of abolishing all social distinctions and hierarchies between gentlemen and commoners, of creating, in other words, a middle-class society (Lasch, 1995), produced a natural social contempt for the extremes of poverty and wealth, of which the poor were clearly the principal victims. One of the main putative causes of poverty was located in the poor’s moral failure. They were considered incapable of recovering from a state of dependence that led them to such abhorrent behaviour as drunkenness and laziness. Jacksonian democracy’s answer to the problem of pauperism was twofold: the creation of institutions, the so-called almshouses, in which the poor were segregated from healthy society, and a policy of exclusion of immigrants who were so poor as to lack means of subsistence. Until 1875, in fact, states exercised control on immigration in many ways. This control was particularly unfair towards indigent or mentally and physically handicapped immigrants, indeed all people who could become too heavy a burden on the community. They were considered a dangerous mob threatening the new continent with the contagious disease ‘pauperism’, which had already infected Europe. ‘Many feared that European states were sending their lazy and intemperate subjects, as well as mentally
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and physically disabled, to burden America’ (Neuman, 1983, pp. 1847–8). Masters of vessels transporting disabled or indigent immigrants, or unmarried women with children were required to pay security for those alien passengers whom the town officials thought might become public charges, or a sum per alien passenger landed. Moreover, the poor were always subject to deportation. These measures did not explicitly involve ethnic discrimination, but in practice they particularly affected the Irish, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, when they were forced to emigrate to escape famine. Even on the frontier, which the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1893) had called the training ground for American democracy, things were not that different: none of the new states in the West granted blacks and Native Americans political and civil rights. In Oregon and California, discriminatory legislative measures were taken against Chinese immigrants—who were exploited in the building of the western railroads and in agricultural labour—depriving them of the right to own property or even to bring their wives and children with them to America or marry an American woman.
Myth and reality The Reconstruction amendments, ratified from 1865 to 1870 following the Civil War, could have marked a liberal turn in the history of American citizenship. By establishing the supremacy of national citizenship and forbidding states from enacting laws restricting the immunities and privileges of citizens born or naturalized in the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment could have permitted—as was to happen in the 1960s—an effective policy of civil and political rights. Cultural and political resistance, however, prevented any meaningful and radical changes. The ‘separate but equal’ principle, asserted by the Plessy v. Ferguson judgement of 1896, was a de facto denial of the recently acquired equal citizenship of blacks. At the same time, a renewed nationalism introduced the Pledge of Allegiance in elementary schools, 3 and a revival of doctrines inspired by Darwinian evolutionism nourished a never completely appeased racism. For this school of thinkers, sexism and racism were two of a kind: ‘lower races represented the “female” type of human species, and females the “lower race” of gender’, as Nancy Stepan wrote (quoted in Smith, 1997, p. 294). This racist wave gave rise to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a punitive law that meant the loss of citizenship for American women who intended to marry aliens excluded from access to the naturalization process,4 and
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then to the Quota Act of 1924, a response to the flow of immigration from eastern and southern Europe since the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, during the First and Second World Wars, legislation on naturalization requirements reflected the same sense of ideological threat that had inspired the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. The idea of America as the anti-Europe was again promoted as a bulwark, not only against the European feudal past, but against the ‘menace’ of communism and totalitarianism. With the McCarran–Walter Act of 1952, which removed racial and ethnic barriers to immigration and facilitated the deportation of immigrants or naturalized citizens engaging in ‘subversive activities’, the term ‘alien’ was no longer defined ethnically, but ideologically. The image of the melting pot, of a pluralistic yet united society, needs to be revised in the light of recent historical studies. It would be as appropriate to speak of the different forms of pluralism represented by the various ethnic and racial groups, as it would be to bring our attention to the sufferings inflicted on them by the disciplining process of the body politic. The melting pot—as Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen and John Dewey were already maintaining at the beginning of the twentieth century—has not been a real acceptance of pluralism so much as an attempt to reduce heterogeneity to ‘a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity’ (Bourne, 1916), not unlike the European nation-state building in its substance, though more complex and controversial in its inspiring principles because of the interaction of competing civic ideals. In Bourne’s description of the American nation, ‘[t]he Anglo-Saxon element is guilty of just what every dominant race is guilty of in any European country, the imposition of its own culture on the minority peoples’ (ibid.; see also Ryan, 1996, p. 1051). While the melting pot has never been a reality, the idea draws its resilience from its ritual character. It is an example of those symbolic ceremonies of communitarian consensus on which the American nation is founded—ceremonies centred, we might say, not on a ‘myth of origin’ (Smith, 2000) but on a mythology of rebirth and palingenesis. Indeed, the idea of melting together, of fusion, evoking both Biblical and alchemical imagery (Sollors, 1986, Ch. 3) revives the notion of an uninterrupted transformation and regeneration yielding a new man. The reference to the ‘new’, to what is ‘not yet here’, evoked by the symbolism of fusion as much as by the narration of the Puritan ‘errand’—as Bercovitch (1991) maintains—has neutralized internal dissent in American history. It has masked economic and social inequalities, stopped individualism from erupting into anarchy, and veiled national particularism behind a national–universalistic ideology.
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Liberal citizenship American citizenship underwent a change in a liberal direction only in the second half of the twentieth century, with the civil rights acts of the 1960s and the 1965 immigration law, banning exclusion on ethnic grounds. Also, the new direction of the Supreme Court in the 1950s started a process of nationalization of the Bill of Rights through the partial incorporation of the first eighteen amendments into the Fourteenth Amendment. In order to have a complete picture of the new situation, however, we must consider the major demographic change caused by the high number of legally admitted new immigrants, the strong inflow of political refugees, particularly Vietnamese and Cubans, the increasing number of illegal immigrants penetrating the ‘colander’ border separating Mexico from the United States, and last, but not least, the activism of the ethnic groups themselves, often working against each other on immigration issues. In spite of the internal resistance created by a public opinion pressing for restrictive measures, liberal political rhetoric, inspired by ideas of an ‘open society’ and the ‘rule of law’, has transformed the face of American citizenship well beyond the simple redefinition of the criteria of belonging. New constitutional decisions, informed by the principle of ‘equality before the law’, liberalized immigration issues and considerably reduced the disadvantages deriving from the status of legal resident. They even recognized some basic rights of illegal immigrants. In its Plyler v. Doe judgement of 1982, which was in certain respects as momentous in its bearing on the definition of national community as Brown v. the Board of Education had been in 1954 (Schuck, 1998, p. 54), the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional Texas’s attempt to exclude children of illegal aliens from the right to free public education. In this case, the Court did not simply affirm that aliens within the national territory were entitled to some constitutional protections, whatever their legal status. Instead, by recognizing their substantive rights, it enlarged, as Schuck observes, ‘the national community to uncertain dimensions and on the basis of uncertain principles’ (ibid., p. 55). Legal residents, by contrast, have in recent years achieved rights almost equal to those of American citizens and are now entitled to virtually all social benefits and services. Among the rights reserved solely for citizens there remain only the right to vote, the right to serve on a jury and the right to hold public office or to be elected to certain positions within the public administration. Unlike citizens, legal residents are subject to deportation though even this risk is now diminished thanks to the evolution in the application
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of the ‘due process’ principle (Schuck, 1998, pp. 167–8). This has meant that many legal residents eligible for citizenship never ask for naturalization. Schuck reports that, according to the 1980 census, more than 25 per cent of legal residents did not pursue naturalization, a percentage that rises to 56 in the case of Latinos. This is despite the fact that the qualifications for citizenship are not at all burdensome. To apply for citizenship it is sufficient to be fluent in English, to have a good knowledge of American history and institutions, to have continuous residence for 5 years in the United States, to have a Permanent Resident Card or Alien Registration Card (Green Card), and to be of ‘good moral character’. In addition, in accordance with the Immigration and Nationality Act, new citizens must take an oath of allegiance to the principles of the United States Constitution. They must swear (1) to support the Constitution of the United States; (2) to renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty of whom or which the petitioner was before a subject or citizen; (3) to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; (4) to bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and (5) (a) to bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law, or (b) to perform non-combatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law, or (c) to perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law. (Quoted in Levinson, 1986, p. 1452; see also US Immigration Service) Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, two important acts concerning non-immigrant aliens entering the United States were signed into law: the USA Patriot Act (26 October 2001) and the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002 (14 May). Many aspects of this new rule are related to visa procedures and are aimed at strengthening the existing monitoring and verification requirements. They introduce new restrictions on certain visa categories and on visitors. Since the introduction of the USA Patriot Act, the US Department of Justice has instituted a ‘special registration’ process for certain groups of non-immigrants, particularly citizens of countries that the US considers state sponsors of international terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Jordan and Kuwait. Special registration includes being
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photographed, fingerprinted and interviewed. Any non-immigrant, regardless of nationality, can be required by an Immigration and Naturalization Service officer to undergo special registration. Reasons may include, for example, unexplained travel to one of the above-mentioned countries (US Department of Homeland Security; Electronic Frontier Foundation).
Oaths of allegiance The oath of allegiance, seems to be one of the few traces left of the republican inspiration behind the Constitution. The requirement to take oaths goes as far back as the the Puritan settlers of New England, who, Levinson reminds us, had agreed even before leaving old England to prohibit settlement of those ‘not conformable to their government’, and by 1634 local governments measured conformity by, among other things, a citizen’s willingness to take an oath of loyalty pledging, ‘by the great and dreadful Name of the everliving God’, to be ‘true and faithful’ to the government of the commonwealth. (Levinson, 1986, p. 1449) This also entailed a promise of doing no evil against the government, nor being a party to those who would. Even today some American citizens are required to take oaths in certain situations, for example in order to accept employment in some universities, to become members of the bar or to apply for a passport. But no citizen by birth is required to take an oath to remain a citizen. Oaths of allegiance have become subject to strict scrutiny and substantial suspicion as the Supreme Court has become more and more attentive to the protection of individual rights. In West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), a case in which a child, a Jehovah’s Witness, had been suspended from school for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, the Supreme Court declared the suspension unconstitutional. In his famous majority opinion, Justice Jackson affirmed: ‘If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein’ (quoted in Levinson, 1986, p. 1451). However Sandel reports what, only 3 years before in dissent with Jackson, Justice Frankfurter had said: ‘The Constitution should not be understood
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to prevent states and school districts from “evok[ing] that unifying sentiment without which there can ultimately be no liberties, civil or religious”, or from “inculcating those almost unconscious feelings which bind men together in a comprehending loyalty”’ (Sandel, 1996, p. 53). If supporters of a republican revival have reasons to appeal to Justice Frankfurter’s opinion, both liberals and republicans should recognize that this is one of the many internal contradictions of American citizenship (Neuman, 1994). From a consistent liberal perspective, the oath of allegiance might appear unjustifiable because it limits freedom of conscience, whether required of citizens by birth or of naturalized citizens, but in the republican view the communitarian value of this act is diminished by its being compulsory only for naturalized citizens. Indeed, any person born in the United States, even of non-naturalized parents, automatically becomes a citizen without any need of further qualifications.
The devaluation of citizenship Reduced differences between the citizen’s and the legal resident’s status have produced what some define as a process of devaluation of citizenship, in that being a citizen does not entail privileged access to civil and social rights. Indeed, in some circumstances, it might be a supplementary burden. In a society with an increasing tendency to retreat into privacy, citizens often regard privileges such as voting, jury duty or being eligible for public office as a nuisance. The American government has recently tried to re-value the meaning of citizenship with the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, excluding many aliens, even if permanent residents, from welfare programmes and allowing states to introduce further restrictions widening the gap between citizens’ and aliens’ rights. The act is meant to give immigrants a stronger incentive to become naturalized US citizens and it has, as expected, resulted in increased numbers of applications for naturalization. Most applicants wish to keep all of the rights they had enjoyed as legal residents and to escape prospective discrimination against aliens in favour of citizens. The 1996 reform of the welfare system does not tackle the difficult problems associated with the devaluation of citizenship. It does not help us to understand why there is something negative in the loss of value and significance of being a citizen. On the contrary, as Schuck points out, it discards in good measure the only positive aspect the loss of meaning of a citizen’s status had produced in terms of respect for ‘the
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liberal values of inclusiveness and equal treatment’ (Schuck, 1998, p. 173). The kind of revaluation of citizenship proposed by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act conceives the status of citizen only in functional terms: becoming a citizen is seen here as a means to achieve certain entitlements. Thus, it develops citizens’ passive and instrumental attitude towards institutions and favours the rise of a sort of ‘entitlements mentality’ (ibid., p. 172). The devaluation of citizenship may dry up the sources of civic virtue or it may push citizens towards more particularistic loyalties, strengthening ethnic identities and conflicts—as the identity politics of the 1970s demonstrates. A polity that devalues a citizen’s status may also encourage forms of the privatization of citizenship (Schuck, 1998, pp. 194–5), such as the spread—conspicuous in the United States—of private residential lifestyle enclaves, characterized by a homogeneous population in terms of class and economic status. These enclaves are now becoming a new locus of civic membership, constituting a real form of devolution of powers, such as police power, traditionally monopolized by government. In comparison to the equalization of the legal status of citizens with that of legal residents, much more significant phenomena—such as electoral apathy and the decline of associationalism—could be added to those just mentioned to illustrate the present crisis of citizenship. Since the 1960s, electoral participation has been rapidly declining: voting has decreased by nearly a quarter in federal elections and there has been an analogous trend in state and local elections. The same trend of disengagement, as Putnam (1995) has shown, is confirmed by the data on active commitment to religious and trade-union organizations, parent and teacher associations, and voluntary organizations (such as the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross). Only mass-membership organizations seem to be gaining ground now, such as national environmental organizations (for example, the Sierra Club), feminist groups (for example, the National Organization for Women) and the American Association of Retired Persons (the so-called ‘Gray Panthers’). These are fundamentally different from the classic ‘secondary associations’. As Putnam observes, ‘For the vast majority of their members, the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter’ (1995, p. 71).
Conclusion This decline in the ‘social capital’ suggests that the United States is now, as Mary Ann Glendon puts it, ‘like an athlete who developed muscles in
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his upper body, but [who] lets his legs grow weak . . . [The United States] has nurtured [its] strong rights tradition while neglecting the social foundation upon which that tradition rests’. Contemporary American citizenship is faced with a fundamental dilemma: no policy consistent with the protection and respect of individuals’ and minorities’ rights nor any welfare measure can be sustained in the long run unless citizens feel that they are committed to and responsible for a common social project (Glendon, 1992, p. 537). The communitarian critique of the procedural republic grasps the weaknesses of the liberal tradition, but it does not seem able to meet the challenges of modern societies. It is clear, for example, that a stronger communitarian national identity cannot itself satisfy the demands of marginal groups claiming recognition of their differences, such as handicapped persons, homosexuals, women and ethnic minorities, who have suffered most because of the prejudices and the discriminations of the dominant culture. These groups ask for a space of public visibility for their differences, making for a real democratization of the processes of collective self-determination. As for those attempts, internal to the liberal tradition itself, that interpret the contemporary social crisis as an attack on traditional morality and try to reinforce familial and religious values by such measures as stricter divorce legislation or the promotion of the right to pray in public schools, these seem unconvincing and even dangerous (Galston, 1991, Ch. 5). It is crucial instead to recover the connection between the public good and justice or, in other words, between individual rights and public interests, which Madison considered the main goal of a liberal– republican political vision. One of Madison’s key ideas may be worth revisiting: namely, that within a complex society one can reach a common view of the public interest that respects individual and group differences only by creating public arenas where a shared identity is not discovered in a tradition but arises from the dialogue and peaceful confrontation between different traditions, opinions and interests. When conflict— and within American society there are still several economic and social conflicts and divisions, besides those of ethnicity and race—finds channels of communication, it may constitute a source of communitarian ties even stronger than consent. As Sennett writes, following Louis Coser: In conflict, [people] have to work harder at communicating; as often happens in labour or diplomatic negotiations, gradually the ground rules of engagement bind the contending parties together . . . The
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scene of conflict becomes a community in the sense that people learn how to listen and respond to one another even as they more keenly feel their differences. (Sennett, 1998, p. 143) Because contemporary constitutional debate focuses on the charter of rights and the judicial protection of individual and minority rights, many other important aspects of the American constitutional system have taken a back seat. Federalism and the role of legislative and constituent powers are instruments that could be used in a revaluation of citizenship.5 As James Bradley Thayer foreshadowed at the beginning of the century: ‘The tendency of a common and easy resort to [judicial review] is to dwarf the political capacity of the people, and to deaden its sense of moral responsibility’ (quoted in Brest, 1988, p. 1629). Today it is necessary for non-judicial institutions to regain an active role in political discourse and constitutional decisions. The Supreme Court’s role should be that of assisting the process rather than, as has often happened in the past century, directing it. In this regained space of non-judicial institutions, federalism should play a key role. One of the key problems facing the United States after the Civil War and the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment was how to strengthen federal power and affirm the supremacy of national citizenship over state citizenship. Today, attention should focus again on local powers, on the subsidiarity principle and on the logic of sharing the sovereignty of federalism, while at the same time maintaining the gains made in the last century for the protection of rights.
Notes 1. On the role played by the Supreme Court, see Schuck (1998, pp. 73–6, 82–7, 164–71). 2. Even though prohibited by Article VI, Section 3 of the federal Constitution, religious tests were required by more than 11 state Constitutions (Goldwin, 1990, p. 19). 3. The Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy (1855–1931), a Baptist minister. It was introduced in elementary schools in 1892. It now reads: ‘I pledge allegiance to the Flag, of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ On the pledge of allegiance, see Baer (1992). 4. The 1922 Cable Act established that a female citizen who married ‘an alien ineligible for citizenship’—that is, an immigrant from China, Japan or India—‘shall cease to be a citizen of the United States’ (Kerber, 1991, p. 18). This federal legislation had been anticipated by earlier state laws affirming the same principles (ibid., pp. 27–9). 5. See Ackerman (1991, pp. 44–5), who proposes a revision of Article V of the Constitution, and Sunstein (1993).
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Bibliography Ackerman, B. (1991), We the People, Volume 1: Foundations (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press). Baer, J. (1992), The Pledge of Allegiance, A Centennial History, 1892–1992 (Annapolis, MD: Free State Press, Inc.). Bellah, R. et al. (1985), Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press). Bercovitch, S. (1991), America puritana (Roma: Editori Riuniti). Bourne, R. (1916), ‘Trans-national America’, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 118 ( July), pp. 86–97. Text available at www.theatlantic.com/issues/16jul/bourne.htm. Brest, P. (1988), ‘Radical Republicanism’, Yale Law Journal, Vol. 97, No. 8, pp. 1623–31. Diggins, J. (1984), The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-interest and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books). Dumm, T. L. (1987), Democracy and Punishment: Disciplinary Origins of the United States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press). Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/ Terrorism_militias/20011031_eff_usa_patriot_analysis.html. Epstein, D. F. (1984), The Political Theory of the Federalist (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Galston, W. (1991), Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Glendon, M. A. (1992), ‘Twentieth-Century Constitutions’, in G. R. Stone, R. A. Epstein and C. R. Sunstein (eds), The Bill of Rights in the Modern State (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), pp. 519–38. Goldwin, R. A. (1990), Why Blacks, Women, and Jews are not Mentioned in the Constitution, and Other Unorthodox Views (Washington, DC: AEI Press). Hobson, C. F. (1979), ‘The Negative on State Laws: James Madison, the Constitution, and the Crisis of Republican Government’, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 3.36, No. 2 (April), pp. 215–35. Jacobson, D. (1996), Rights across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press). Kaestle, C. F. (1983), Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang). Kerber, L. K. (1983), Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press). Kerber, L. K. (1991), ‘A Constitutional Right to Be Treated like American Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship’, in L. K. Kerber, A. Kessler-Harris and K. K. Sklar (eds), US History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press). Kramnick, I. (1990), ‘ “The Great National Discussion”: The Discourse of Politics in 1787’, in I. Kramnick (ed.), Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Landmark Cases (2002), website of the Supreme Court Historical Society, www.landmarkcases.org/dredscott/home.html. Lasch, C. (1991), The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company).
206 American Citizenship Lasch, C. (1995), The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company). Levinson, S. (1986), ‘Constituting Communities through Words that Bind: Reflections on Loyalty Oaths’, Michigan Law Review, Vol. 84, No. 7, pp. 1440–70. Meehan, E. M. (1996), ‘European Integration and Citizens’ Rights: A Comparative Perspective’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 107–13. Neuman, G. L. (1983), ‘The Lost Century of American Immigration Law (1776– 1875)’, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 93, No. 8, pp. 1833–1901. Neuman, G. L. (1994), ‘Justifying US Nationalization Policy’, Virginia Journal of International Law, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 237–78. Putnam, R. D. (1995), ‘Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 65–78. Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Rawls, J. (1993), Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press). Rothman, D. J. (1971), The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown). Ryan, A. (1996), ‘Pragmatism, Social Identity, Patriotism, and Self-Criticism’, Social Research, Vol. 63, No. 4, pp. 1041–65. Sandel, M. (1996), Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press). Santoro, E. (1998), Carcere e società liberale (Torino: Giappichelli). Schuck, P. H. (1998), Citizens, Strangers and In-betweens: Essays on Immigration and Citizenship (Boulder, CO: Westview Press). Sennett, R. (1998), The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company). Shklar, J. N. (1998), ‘The Boundaries of Democracy’, in S. Hoffmann, and D. F. Thompson (eds), Redeeming American Political Thought (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), pp. 127–45. Smith, A. D. (2000), The Nation in History (Cambridge: Polity). Smith, R. M. (1997), Civic Ideals (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Sollors, W. (1986), Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Sunstein, C. (1993), The Partial Constitution (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press). Turner, F. J. (1893), ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, Annual Report of the American Historical Association, pp. 199–227. US Department of Homeland Security, http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/ display?theme = 24. US Immigration Service, http://www.usais.org/cz.htm.
10 From National to European Citizenship: A Historical Comparison Pietro Costa
Introduction In the juridical tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, citizenship was simply a matter of a person’s nationality. In more recent debates, however, it has become linked to one’s political identity (Cerutti, 1996; Cerutti and D’Andrea, 2000). The principle questions involved in this new conception of citizenship regard the political order, membership and its symbols, the combination of rights and duties applicable to the individual, and the devices of inclusion and exclusion. Applied to the European Union, these questions appear extremely demanding. To deal with them properly would require the combined competences of a philosopher, a sociologist, a political scientist and a jurist. In this chapter, these questions will serve only as reference points for a historical analysis comparing the development of citizenship in the European Union with that found in European nation-states during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The individual and the political–juridical order: the sovereign state and the ‘European juridical space’ Centred on the relationship between the subject and the political community, the concept of citizenship is closely linked to the political– juridical order within which the subject acts. Hence, the characteristics of the European institutional space are not an insignificant fact, but one of the conditioning factors determining the political–juridical identity of the individual. 207
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Given that the order with which citizenship seems necessarily associated is the state order (according to a received, if recently contested, view), a historical comparison of the most consolidated tradition (or traditions) of citizenship with the image of the new European order clearly provokes the sense of a fundamental break. The link between citizenship and state sovereignty was an essential part of the entire formation (both structural and cultural) of the ‘modern’ state, but became especially important in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when, with evermore insistence, the immediate relationship between the individual and the state was presented as the determining factor in the identity of the individual (Costa, 2000). The political and juridical tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was dominated by the need to identify a magnet that could attract individuals with an irresistible force, to create a unity that could resist the centrifugal forces and lacerations of growing social conflict. This need did not automatically imply a devaluing of the liberty of individuals; however, liberty was strictly associated with a collective entity (the nation-state), which constituted not only the ‘external’ guarantee, but also the intrinsic foundation, of liberty itself. The ‘statist’ choice of nineteenth- and twentieth-century juridical culture (in Germany as well as in Italy and France)—a choice that was not unanimous but certainly made by the majority—can be interpreted as the juridical expression of a more general tendency for the dislocation or de-centralization of the individual. The new ‘centre’ had to be the ‘organic’ society, or the nation, or the class or, finally, the state: whatever the central point, the ‘enemy’ to overcome was the (enlightened) self-sufficiency of the individual, whose liberty (even when it was claimed as an important value, as it often was) had to be deduced from (and rooted in) some collective entity. It was from this perspective that the continental juridical tradition chose the state as an ‘absolute’ reference point, conceived the individual in relationship to it, and made it the condition by which individual rights were possible. In the juridical tradition, ‘statism’ was not merely an ideological option, but, it appears, an axiom on which the possibility of a scientific (rational, well-founded) understanding of the juridical order itself depended. It was precisely the fundamental importance of the state and its absolute sovereign power that made the foundation of rights problematic. Given the state and its sovereignty, points of ‘absolute’ resistance to its power could not be acknowledged; if they were, they would infringe upon the sovereignty of the state (the individuals and their rights would be ‘sovereign’), and the very possibility and conceivability of the juridical order would be lost. The trick that made
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Jellinek’s theory famous was exactly the attempt to render the ‘absolute’ power of the state compatible with a strong juridical basis for the individual’s rights ( Jellinek, 1905). When history took a direction that belle époque optimism had not foreseen and moved (first in Italy, then in Germany) to the dismantling of liberal-democratic institutions and principles, the fascist juridical doctrine (the National Socialistic doctrine is largely different from this point of view) could easily claim some continuity with the juridical tradition of the liberal age, at least with regard to the statist perspective that characterized it, presenting itself as the continuation of the ‘healthy’ part of the tradition. The fact that the fascist discourse on citizenship appealed to the exaltation of state sovereignty, to the contraction of individual liberty and to the refusal of pluralism is confirmed a contrario by the direction that a multifaceted anti-fascist culture took both during the dictatorship and then, more openly, in the post-war years. This direction was antithetical to fascism in its questioning of the obsessive cult of unity and homogeneity, and its rejection of plurality and the religious absoluteness of state sovereignty. This anti-totalitarian conviction was evident in the plans for a united Europe that circulated throughout the European Resistance (Lipgens, 1985, 1986) and particularly in the writings of the Italians Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi (Malandrino, 1990; Graglia, 1996; Albertini, 1999). The (generically federalist) idea of the ‘United States of Europe’, which boasted illustrious forebears (Malandrino, 1998), is not as important as the conviction that the conflict between liberty and sovereignty (once only latent, but now dramatically brought out into the open by the fascist regime) could no longer take place only on the ‘internal’ fronts of the various nation-states. The link between individual liberty and state sovereignty was strong but disjunctive, and liberty, far from being mediated and promoted by a state that presented itself as the comprehensive and exclusive horizon of individual action, required a drastic re-dimensioning not only of the state’s internal order, but also of its external meaning. The reasons behind the diagnosis and proposed therapy of the first European federalists were clear. The individual’s rights (liberty, yes, but also the aspiration for socio-economic equality) could not be achieved within the closed borders of the nation-state; rather, they involved going beyond the ‘statist’ perspective and the creation of a hierarchically superior order. By overcoming the absolute and exclusive nature of nineteenthcentury sovereignty, this new order would neutralize the ‘totalitarian temptation’ (lato sensu) of the state and become the most appropriate institutional framework for the implementation of individual rights.
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Thus, the presuppositions and meaning of the federalist discourse on citizenship were as follows: totalitarianism was a senile disease of the nation-state; liberty and individual rights were the epicentre of a renewal that went beyond the old national confines; and the creation of a European federation capable of reconfiguring the archaic absolutist pretensions of nation-states, while offering them a new unifying fabric, provided a necessary and new institutional framework. In this context, the position of the individual was clearly determined. In the transition from a national to a federal structure of sovereignty, although the competences of each type were maintained, individuals would see their reference points multiply; they would find themselves moving in a polycentric reality that increased their chances for liberty. However, the model towards which Europe seems to be orienting itself in the ongoing and complicated process of integration is not the federal state. Inevitably, the ‘real’ process has been more uncertain and tortuous than the ‘ideal’ linearity of the federalism coveted by Spinelli or Rossi. It has been distinguished not only by frequent stops and starts, but also by ‘gradualist’ strategies that, on the one hand, seem imposed by reality itself but, on the other, obscure the target model. Already invested with powers and functions that are anything but secondary, while at the same time still obliged to take on the sovereignty of the member states, the current European Union can plausibly be labelled a kind of tertium genus, situated between the two ‘classic’ extremes, between a simple confederation of states (each of which maintains its original sovereignty intact) and a federal ‘super state’ (Weiler, 1985, 1999; Telò, 1995; Weale, 1995). The very success of the concept of ‘subsidiarity’ can be explained by the singular ‘intermediary’ position of the Union. In the name of the principle of subsidiarity, the Union intervenes where a common goal can be pursued or a vital problem resolved better than it could be by the intervention of the nation-states acting alone (Adonis, 1991). Such a principle perfectly corresponds to the image of an order that constrains the member states less than the principles underlying a federation would do, yet erodes (though in a ‘subsidiary’ manner) their ability to keep completely their ‘traditional’ sovereignty. It is in this context, anomalous compared to the more consolidated typologies (a context in which the presence of the European Union coexists given the continuing relevance of national sovereignty), that the individual is now situated. Whatever the impact of the Union on individual lives, for those used to dealing with the ‘old’ nation-state, the limitation (though ‘subsidiary’) of national sovereignty implies the
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emergence of an unknown dimension: the dimension of a multiplicity of memberships, and therefore of a complication and dilation of the space in which the individual acts. In linking European citizenship with citizenship of the various member states, the Maastricht Treaty formally acknowledges a duplicity of membership that is inscribed in the very configuration of the Union (Castiglione, 1995). The ongoing and fluid nature of the European order and the difficulty of resorting to tried and tested models pose problems for legal and political theorists seeking to describe the place of the individual citizen within the EU context. The jurist will in all probability have to make a complete break with the ‘statist’ outline, which not only determined the contents of juridical knowledge, but was presented as its very paradigm until relatively recently (MacCormick, 1995). Ultimately, it is a matter of taking the idea of the historical character of the nation-state and its ‘absolute’ sovereignty seriously; it is a matter of realizing that, on the one hand, the ‘modern’ state is not an ens realissimum, but rather a linguistic– conceptual construction, and, on the other hand, that this construction has ‘functioned’ in relationship to an organization of power whose present crisis stimulates, if not the immediate prefiguration of alternatives, at least a complication of the traditional framework. This circumstance has led jurists to become interested in pre-modern society, and medieval society in particular, as offering the possibility of ‘law without a state’. Medieval society is viewed as a polycentric world, exempt from a determining and unifying ‘sovereign’ power (in the modern sense of the word), a world of autonomous and original civitates, boasting iura propria and yet forced to turn, in order to regulate many vital relationships, to the ius commune as an indispensable normative framework. This ancient ius commune, a kind of shared juridical space, is seen as potentially evoking, by analogy, that ‘European space’ in which single sovereign states and their citizens are beginning to operate (Bull, 1977). Have we come upon a plausible use for analogy? I believe that we must distinguish between two levels of investigation, two ‘genres of discourse’. For the historian, interested in clarifying the peculiarity of different contexts, analogy risks being a shortcut he or she cannot take; for the jurist (or the philosopher) interested in the construction of a model, of a theory, analogy can offer a valid inventive and rhetorical support. In this second sense, analogy may be useful for our historical comparison: it can extend the spectrum of the possible and conceivable, putting us in touch with a culture that ignores the absolute nature of ‘modern’ sovereignty, does not express the (equally modern) tendency
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to regularity and homogeneity, and is at ease with a multiplicity of memberships (as opposed to a monolithic representation of the relationship between the individual and the sovereign). It must not be forgotten, however, that the origins of the recent reconfiguration of national sovereignty, and the essential value of the European federal movements of the 1940s and the 1950s, lie in the prime role given to the individual (to his or her liberty and rights).
The symbols of belonging: the theme of European identity An individual’s membership does not simply rest on rules determining the prerequisites and modalities of belonging. It is impossible to separate a political and social order (the displacement of resources, the distribution of power and, therefore, the real condition of individuals and the recognition of their rights and duties) from the discourse and symbols that express it, render it comprehensible and give it meaning. If the ‘European juridical space’ is not a mirage or a mere juridical construction, or even a simple governmental (or intergovernmental) technique, but a true order (albeit flexible, fluid and ‘post-modern’) that individuals face in the planning of their conduct and the manifestation of their expectations and fears, the question of its symbolic foundation is unavoidable. If there is such a thing as European citizenship–membership, we must understand and evaluate the modality and thoroughness of the discourse, or rather discourses, and of the symbols that express its meaning and legitimization. In our historical comparison, the most recent and relevant phenomenon of the construction of a collective identity is the process of nationbuilding. It is to this process that we should refer in order to grasp (in terms of difference or of analogy) some features of the problem of European identity. It appears to have had the following common characteristics throughout Europe. First, the ‘modern’ (nineteenth-century) concept of the nation is a cultural construction in two respects. The term ‘nation’ is not used in its traditional sense, but is creatively redefined (in a variety of ways according to the different European cultures): it is filled with new content and placed at the centre of a complex transformation of the political lexis. In addition, ‘nation’ is not a given reality that only awaits the right name to emerge on the scene, as if there already existed a French, German or Italian ethnicity, a homogeneous class of individuals, to which the term could be fitted like a glove to a hand. On the contrary, it is the concept of nation that intervenes as the criterion for
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the classification and distribution of individuals, deciding what unites and what divides them. The invention of the nation is not a declarative or receptive process, but an imaginative and creative one. Second, the fact that the nation is a symbolic and ‘imagined’ construct must not lead us to consider it an arbitrary invention. Precisely because the nation is a cultural construct, its elaboration is a phenomenon that is deeply rooted in a ‘life-world’; developed within a particular context of which it is an inseparable manifestation. Once again, the fact that the nation is not a passive receptor of a pre-existing reality does not mean that it gathers and distinguishes individuals while inventing its criteria from nothing. There is no such thing in rerum natura as a German, French or Italian nation: it is nation-building that determines the nation, interpreting ‘reality’, choosing from among its innumerable profiles the elements that allow it to offer an irrefutable foundation for the new symbol of belonging. In nation-building, ‘reality’ is interpreted and constructed in numerous ways; hence in the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury debates the essential features of the nation remained largely undecided. Nor was the matter solved by appealing to race (with its pretensions of being biologically irrefutable): if, on the one hand, the criterion of race seemed to guarantee the maximum ‘homogeneity’ possible, on the other hand, it forced the question of racial crossovers, which was addressed by inventing the idea of a ‘superior race’ or the ‘racially prevalent characteristic’. From this point of view, the contrast between ethnos and demos is misleading. Within the nation-building process, ethnos is only one of the possible arguments for the ‘invention’ of the symbolic construct demos (Weiler, Haltern and Mayer, 1995; Rusconi, 2000). Third, the ‘nation’, as the symbol of a strong new collective identity, is not the expression of an impetuous and undifferentiated mass movement, the romantic affirmation of a people finally aware of its identity; rather, it is the product of intellectual and political elites. It requires the activism of ‘militants’ of the new ‘faith’, it asserts itself in competition with opposing ideologies, and it spreads with an intensity and effectiveness that varies according to the context. While the nation operates as a symbol—a key concept that can be employed to support the re-founding or radical restructuring of a given order of power—it often finds in the new order (the nineteenth-century nation-state) the frame that allows it to affirm itself as a ‘shared value’. Fourth, as a global symbol of the collective identity, the nation not only is political, but also involves all other aspects of existence (from art to religion and morality). Nevertheless, the essential meaning of ‘nation’ discourse is indeed political. The nation has to do with the organization
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of powers within a given space: it is the invisible vitalizing force of a state order that, stripped of this symbolic foundation, would risk appearing a blind and brutal mechanism. However, it is equally true that the nation would remain a weak and fluctuating symbol of identity if it did not have the state standing as a clear sign of its existence and augmenting its persuasive and suggestive force. Finally, as the catalyst and mover of a state’s foundation process (re-founding, transforming and restructuring), the nation demands a precise spatial ‘projection’. A nation implicitly involves a territory and requires the delineation of borders. As a collective entity and a symbol of belonging, the nation dictates criteria of differentiation and implies an ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, an internal and external, although this does not necessarily lead it to develop aggressive and competitive behaviour towards strangers. If these are some recurrent traits of the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury process of nation-building, we can now ask what lessons can be drawn from them (by comparison or contrast) for the case of Europe. For the analogy to stand, we must distinguish the contents of the process of nation-building from the formal characteristics of its development. We can take for granted the impossibility of finding meaningful correspondences between the models, values, expectations and fears on which the German and Italian nationalism of the nineteenth century fed, for example, and those which nurtured the European federalism of the twentieth century. However, it is conceivable that we might find forms of collective action and processes of symbolic and discursive construction in the building of the United Europe that are not dissimilar to those operating in the formation of national identities. At least three factors could be common to both nation-building and Europe-building. First, in both cases the need to create a new collective identity that is added to its predecessors, or perhaps replaces them by demonstrating their insufficiencies, is not born spontaneously; it emerges as a result of confronting real problems and satisfying real need that seem to require recourse to a political order higher than the traditional ones. Second, in both cases it is the intellectual, political and economic elites who intervene, reshuffling the cards and proposing new images of citizenship and belonging. Third, the delineation of the new collective identity presupposes a creative and imaginative force that cannot rely on some previously constituted reality: the idea that the ‘nation’ involves a natural correspondence between ‘name’ and ‘thing’ is only an indication of the extraordinary success of nation-building. Nation-building and
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Europe-building are, from this point of view, perfectly analogous, imaginative and inventive processes. There is, however, a fourth aspect: the symbol of the nation does not reproduce an already given reality, nor does it arbitrarily invent the criteria of identity. It selects certain traits from ‘reality’ rather than others; it privileges them and takes them on as necessary and sufficient to shape the new collective entity. It is at this point that the much-debated question of European identity emerges. There is no pre-existing, historically formed European entity to which the intellectual and political elites can appeal in order to delineate the symbols of European identity with which to legitimize a European political order and juridical space. Rather it is the elites who, by isolating certain traits from the magma of European history, create the symbols of a new European identity. The problem of European identity cannot, therefore, be critically addressed by seeking out historical precedents for the idea of Europe. One can certainly take this route, but it amounts to a simple ‘internal’ strategy for the process of constructing the symbol of European identity. The logic parallels that followed by the nationalist historians of the nineteenth century, caught up in the search for the first signs of the nation (and willing to argue ferociously over the prevalence of the ‘Latin element’ or the ‘Germanic element’ in the Italian Middle Ages). The question of European identity can be historically placed only inasmuch as we see in it not an unambiguous and consolidated reality in the past, but an endless repertoire of possibilities. Who the European is, is not a question that arises from the Maastricht Treaty or the Treaty of Rome. It is an ancient question, continuously re-proposed over time, raised and resolved in a myriad of ways. It is with this archive of contradictory possibilities that the process of constructing the symbol of a European identity (assuming that this process evolves and probes deeper) can concretely be compared, defining the ideal borders of Europe, attributing to it one or another of the putatively characteristic contents. Whichever of the criteria is adopted, it is certain that the discourse on Europe developed continuously by confronting the need to establish differences and delimitations: Europe is a geographic, political and cultural space only insofar as it distinguishes itself from another space. Western and Eastern Christianity, or Christianity and Islam, and then Europe and the Orient, and finally Europe and the ‘savage populations’, Europe and colonized countries: whatever the criterion for differentiation, the discourse (or fragments of discourse) on Europe tends to characterize its subject by comparing it to a reality that is (for some reason) incompatible with it. There is no historically consolidated and prevalent image
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of European identity. Instead, the concrete process of the creation of a European order leads us to attribute to Europe an identity which is congruent with the type of order that is actually being planned. Thus, the European federalist plan of the 1940s, while inseparable from the experience of fascism and national socialism, the catastrophes of war and post-war uncertainties, nevertheless looked for its roots (both implicitly and explicitly) in the past, linking the new Europe, the Europe of the future, with an enlightened Europe interpreted as the Europe of liberty. These early federalists did not aim at offering an accurate historical account; rather, they were involved in (borrowing an appropriate expression from Hobsbawm) the invention of a tradition—the affirmation of the existence of an ideal line that, without drastic breaks in continuity, moved from the proclamation of the individual’s liberty, proceeded by demanding the multiplication of rights, and finally linked ‘liberalism’ with ‘socialism’, overcoming the barriers that traditionally separate them. When the federalists first began planning the new Europe, they did not foresee it as an empty concept, but filled it with substantive values (liberty and the rights of its individuals) the symbolic force of which was increased by the decision to see in it the ‘true’ nature, the authentic identity of Europe. From this perspective, the problem of European identity was resolved by a clearly normative choice that linked the Europe of the future with that of the past (with one Europe, whose ethical– historical essence is made to coincide with the enlightened message of human emancipation) and that set it against the Europe of intolerant sovereignty, brutal totalitarianism and internal wars. One must ask which of the expectations of these ‘Founding Fathers’ are still alive in the current debate on Europe. The federalist objective does not seem to be at the centre of contemporary preoccupations. The theme of the individual and his or her rights, however, still seems present and relevant. Indeed, it is the determining role of rights and the need to implement and guarantee them that is often seen as the key to solving two of the main problems confronting the EU: the problem of European identity, and the associated problem of the relationship between the new ‘trans-national’ order and the nation-states (perhaps weakened, but certainly not supplanted). Rights (and the institutions that guarantee their implementation) are presented as a necessary and sufficient condition for a European order that does not need a symbolic foundation analogous to the ‘people’ or ‘nation’ of nineteenth-century nation-building. There is no European ‘people’ to which we can attribute an identity comparable to the presupposed demos of the individual member states: this ‘people’ does
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not exist at present and must not exist in the future, if we are to avoid jeopardizing the various national identities that Europe (of the present and of the future) is called on not to repress, but rather to include within it. However, if there is no European Volk that is conceivable as an organic unit, as a historically homogeneous collective, there is, as both a presupposition and object of the European Union, a ‘people’ in a different sense: a ‘people’ as a group of individuals who find their point of convergence in an order of shared rights and duties. In this argument, the individual and his rights are presented not only as the inherent telos of the entire formation process of the European Community, but also as the symbol of the legitimization and unification of the European juridical space. The collective identity resolves itself without residue in the game of rights and duties: the discourse on citizenship (understood according to the new definition) is not composed of two closely linked but distinct ‘chapters’ (the symbols of identity and of belonging, the system of rights and duties); rather, it revolves around an individual capable of a new ‘patriotism’, willing to recognize the necessary and sufficient condition of his trans-national identity in his juridical status of European citizen (Habermas, 1992). We must ask ourselves whether and how the discourse on rights can single-handedly provoke such a strong source of identification. Can it satisfy the image of a Europe that others would like to present as a ‘destined community’ (Morin, 1988), to use a perhaps overloaded expression, but one that reveals a preoccupation with alternative sources of belonging that should perhaps not be underestimated (Rusconi, 1998)?
Rights between ‘nation-building’ and ‘Europe-building’ Throughout the process of European integration, attention to rights has been a key element from the early days of the European Community to the recent proclamation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Even in the absence of a constitution that offers a rigorous catalogue of the rights and duties of European citizens, one certainly cannot say that there has been any lack of effort in the definition and implementation of rights. The most discussed and defended have been the rights fundamental to the liberal–constitutional tradition (in Europe and America)—liberty and its principle contents, such as respect for the individual’s sphere, religious freedom and liberty of thought. These have been enshrined not only in normative texts (such as the European Convention of Human Rights and the new EU Charter), but above all in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice, which has presented ‘fundamental rights’
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as the general principles that inspire the European juridical order as a whole. Certainly, a close analysis of rights would in all likelihood demonstrate that in the formation and structuring of the European Union they have received different levels of attention according to their different ‘classes’. One of the many examples is the difficulty of fully developing the political rights of the European citizen. Attempts to do so have had to confront, on the one hand, persistent national exclusivism and, on the other, the relatively secondary position of the European parliament (with the resulting problem of the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ of the European Union). However, an internal analysis of European citizenship is not the objective of this work. My goal, in carrying out a historical comparison, is merely to reflect on some of the characteristics that differentiate the current discourse on rights from their development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the French Revolution, a discourse on rights has developed out of which, though with numerous variables and tensions, some constant characteristics have emerged. First, rights belong not so much to the moment of the ‘governing’ action of the state, to the sphere of Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ (Burchell, Gordon and Miller, 1991; Foucault, 1994) (though we certainly cannot exclude a ‘governmental’ use of rights), as they do to the contestative, demanding and transformative claims of individuals. Repeatedly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rights were, as Jhering (1906) pointed out, linked to struggle: people struggle for and through rights that serve as a symbolic vehicle, as instruments with which to denounce an imperfect order and pursue a better one. Second, rights seem difficult to separate from a forward looking projection, from a movement towards the future and from a judgement on the past and present that often includes (though not necessarily and explicitly) a judgement of value, a criterion of ‘justice’ to which rights aspire to be an approximation. Third, as the symbolic content and vehicle of a struggle for a partially or totally renewed order (and against an ‘unjust’ order), rights cannot be separated from the singling out of an adversary. To introduce a new right is to modify the rules of the game, changing shared values as well as the way in which power is organized and distributed. Fourth, linked to conflict and to the modification of the existing order, the discourse on rights presupposes an enunciative context that is delineated with precise spatial, institutional and social co-ordinates (Bellamy, 1995). In 1789, the struggle was for the rights of man ‘as such’, but the theatre of the struggle was France: the struggle for rights (whatever the representation and the foundation
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of the rights themselves) involves a given politico-social and institutional space within which the protagonists of the struggle operate. Animated by a strong ideal linked to a process of destructuring and restructuring the existing order, projected towards the future, rights run through the nineteenth century and reach, without their traditional ‘aura’ undergoing drastic transformation, the constitutional process of the post-war years. Is it possible to extend the characteristic traits of the nineteenth-century discourse on rights to the process of European Integration? It seems the answer must be in the affirmative when we look at the project of the European federalists of the 1940s. In this project, civil, political and social rights (which the federalists presented as an essential part of a new European order that is finally free from the totalitarian nightmare) continue to perform their function as a symbol for (and a means to) a new order. The federalists struggled against the totalitarian past, criticized the present, which was still too vulnerable to the dangers of intolerant and exclusive sovereignty, and identified liberty and rights as the ‘true’ nature of Europe. They had an enemy (totalitarianism) to fight in the name of rights; they had memories and expectations, a strong sense of their ideal origins and an explicit orientation towards the future. Rights were the central moment of a political plan that considered itself destined to unleash, through natural propagation, a movement capable of freeing up the cautious resistance of the state apparatus. In the European Union’s present phase of realization, is it possible to find any confirmation of those traits of the nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century discourse on rights that are perfectly recognizable in the initial phases of the unification of Europe? The impression—the comparative approach allows me only to touch on the problems and not to express true ‘judgements’—is that several elements have intervened to reconfigure the original framework. The role of elites is not in question. In both nation-building and Europe-building the elites are the guiding force and their role constitutes a clear point of analogy between the two processes: in both cases intellectual, political and economic elites confronted certain practical and cultural needs by elaborating on a vision, designing a plan and striving to realize it. The important aspect is not the role of the elites and their exponents, nor the normative content of the project, but the way the project is formulated, its symbolic and communicative functions. The discourse on rights is not absent: rights, on the contrary, tend to multiply in the European juridical space, and the need to improve their definition and application has been the subject of constant concern on
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the part of various Community bodies. The impression, however, is that this important process of regulating the individual’s condition in the European space risks limiting itself to a brilliant operation of institutional engineering, while the symbolic dimension that rights had always expressed in past centuries seems to have lost strength and visibility. The paradox is that the exponential multiplication of rights and of ‘bills of rights’ is the counterpart of an obstinate compression of their symbolic and communicative efficacy (Weiler, 1997). A recent example is the European Charter of Fundamental Rights: what is striking is not so much its failure to find a precise juridical position in the ‘hierarchy of rules’, but its difficulty in entering the popular European consciousness. The prevalence of the ‘engineering’ approach over the symbolic element in the discourse on rights can be related to another aspect of the European constitutionalization process as it moves away from its origins: the diminishing forward looking element and the difficulty in imagining the future (D’Andrea, 2001). The ‘struggle for rights’, in its long uninterrupted history from the French Revolution to the post-Second World War constitutions, has always been connected with a vision of society that, on the one hand, drew strength and solidity from the catalogue of claims that was put forth over time, and, on the other, both gave the struggle its historical roots and defined its final destination. The ‘struggle for rights’ was inseparable from a movement of people and ideas willing to ‘wager’ on a future order, capable of opening up possibilities impeded by the existing governments. It is the link between rights and planning, the placing of rights in a context in which the past and present draw meaning from the expectations for a possible future, that seems difficult to transplant to the cultural environment of contemporary Europe. The result is that the rights which are multiplying in the European juridical space risk appearing rights whose meaning is problematic and whose link with a complex vision of the individual, the European order, and its future, is even weaker. Of course, the rights within the frame of the European Union are not historically conceivable without the plans, expectations, tensions and struggles that have imposed them on the political agenda of the last two centuries. The problem is that the plans and the conflicts that made them possible are now behind us and in any case developed within the confines of nation-states. The result is that the new Europe seems to be the legitimate heir of a patrimony built by others. If it is true that the discourse on rights is afflicted by a weakening of meaning when it is not sustained by an adequate vision of the future, then it seems problematic for a ‘patriotism of rights’ to be the necessary
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and sufficient condition of European identity. The love of rights that, according to widespread opinion, could constitute the most reliable pivot of a post-national identity seems unlikely to be compatible with the ‘engineering’ attitude of the European Community, and the very meaning of European citizenship risks being weakened by the ‘symbolic deficit’ of the discourse on rights that should offer it its main support.
The borders of Europe between identity and project The relationship between the individual and the political community takes place in a space that not only is geographically circumscribed, but also has precise political–juridical limits that contribute, along with other elements, to the complex characterization of citizenship. In the nation-building of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the determination of the spatial confines of the nation immediately appeared as one of the relevant aspects of the new national identity: inventing a new nation is imagining a collective entity whose space is determined by ‘reality’ itself (by history, blood, soil and so on). The delimitation of the national space is an integral part of the process of inventing and imagining a nation. The contours of a nation’s boundaries are set by the intellectual and political elites. They describe the new collective identity by freely assembling the ‘data of reality’ they find before them and alloting it a certain space. The determination of the national space is internal to the creative process of the collective entity ‘nation’ and, more than an objective description of any existing area, is a normative determination of what ‘must’ be assigned to the nation as ‘its’ space: the space is a predicate of the identity attributed to the nation (whatever the criteria used to define it, be they language, culture, history, race and so on). Bearing in mind that the nation is translated into a state and that it is realized thanks to the co-active force it exercises within a given territory, one can understand why, in nineteenth-century juridical science, population and territory constituted two essential elements of the state and, as in ‘just’ territorial claims, could be used as effective rhetorical devices for the legitimization of war (a frequent pretext for hostilities at least until the First World War). Though frequently made, the link between the determination of the national space and war is not necessary but a precise spatial projection of the nation, an accurate determination of territorial boundaries, seems indispensable to nation-building. In short, a national identity effectively executes its integrative and unifying function inasmuch as it
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reinforces the dialectic between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, underlines the distinctiveness of its defining characteristics, and links them to a space that is certain and determined within its boundaries. What effect does the formation process of the European Union have on the chessboard designed by two centuries of nation-building? When pursuing an ambitious federalist objective, and when, more cautiously, being satisfied with some limitation of national sovereignty, the new political–juridical order cannot fail to induce (in either the short or the long term) the relativization of the various national spaces. Given the strong and constitutive link between state, nation and territory, any attempt to launch a trans-national organizational formula cannot fail to have a ‘destructuralizing’ effect and consequently require a precise juridical orchestration of the new order. The novelty of this process should not be underestimated. The dialectic of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, so strong and exclusive in the nineteenth-century nation-states, is not annulled, but it is certainly de-dramatized and anyway transposed in the new European juridical space. It is clear why freedom of movement and residence is identified in the Maastricht Treaty as a central element of European citizenship, given the symbolic role of this principle of liberty. Even though the ‘new’ rights of the European juridical space and the ‘old’ rights consolidated in the various nation-states are treated as being on a continuum that seems to reduce the European Union’s innovative effort to implement rights, the new common space nevertheless seems to show signs of a clear discontinuity with the traditional exclusive national sovereignties. There is, therefore, no substantial continuity between nation-building and Europe-building from this point of view. But can we still use our register of analogies and differences to consider the question of European ‘confines’ and ‘space’? In the creation of national identity, there has been a strong emphasis on space and borders; but only insofar as it has contributed to making the new collective entity a reality in and of itself, distinct from other national identities. Is it possible to find for Europe such a strong link between the construction of identity and the delimitation of space? When we look at the archive of the different, historical European ‘identities’ (East/West, Christianity/Islam and so on), there is a recurring tendency to link the supposed European ‘essence’ to a clearly delimited space. The most recent and strongest perception of a European identity that is precisely connected to a (geographical, cultural and socio-political) ‘space’ must perhaps coincide with the colonial era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though the protagonists were individual colonial states, involved in a ferocious struggle with each
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other, they shared a sense of the general supremacy of a civilization that is essentially European, even emphasizing the ‘racial’ roots of a homo Europaeus genetically destined for dominion. After the Second World War, after the events of colonialism d’antan, the confines of Europe were no longer dictated by the ‘civilizing’ mission of Europe. The Europe of the first European federalists, the United Europe in statu nascenti, is the Europe of liberties: it is a Europe that chooses liberty and rights as its very identity; and it is a Europe that, due to a singular coincidence of historical contingencies, links its identity to a geo-political space limited to the east by the Soviet bloc. Insofar as the new Europe recognized itself in liberty and rights, its identity was not threatened, but limited and corroborated by the existence of a model that made its internal coherence stand out by contrast: there were two ‘democracies’ and two ‘spaces’ that confronted and defined each other. This game of contrasting models did not begin with the Cold War: in the Weimar constitutional assembly, Friedrich Naumann underlined the necessity of making a choice about civilization—European democracy versus Soviet democracy. He saw that the present and the future were and would be dominated by competition between the two incompatible models (Naumann, 1920). Soviet ‘democracy’ was taken seriously as a dangerous competitor in the market of political models. There was a widespread conviction that the competition could be won only if Western constitutions emphasized and multiplied those ‘social rights’ that were believed to be integrally realized in the countries of ‘true socialism’. Though precisely delineated on the eastern front thanks to the opposing ‘identities’ of the two blocs, the confines of Europe appeared more vague and uncertain on the western side. Paradoxically, the collapse of the Soviet system, while sanctioning the triumph of the model that revolved around the individual and his or her rights, made the delimitation of the European ‘space’ more fluid and problematic. It is no accident that the debate on the future expansion of the European space is dominated by considerations of Realpolitik (not to mention Realöconomie). From a ‘realistic’ point of view such considerations certainly seem a priority, yet their prominence confirms the difficulty of attributing a symbolic identity to Europe. However, if the old boundaries have gone and the new ones have difficulty in finding a satisfactory foundation, this has not prevented the game of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ from returning in the new (for Europe) and disturbing form of immigration. While, historically, European societies were the source of a great migratory flow, now they are the coveted destination of masses who,
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though they still have to deal with the policies and the police of the member states, have increasingly become the object of a common European strategy. This issue has raised the problem of the delimitation of space, of boundaries, with a new urgency. Once again it seems difficult to discuss the relationship between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ without invoking a collective identity, laying down shared values and elaborating a plan (Bonanate, 1997). It is quite possible that precisely this ‘crisis point’ will bring a new movement towards the future, one that risks being put aside in favour of a cautious evaluation of the existing situation. However, a dry, ‘technical’ approach will not help us choose between different ‘visions’ of Europe and different projects. We must now decide whether to construct a ‘fortress Europe’ (armed against the invasion of the hycsos), or to engage in a cosmopolitan breaking down of the boundaries or, finally, to create a European civitas as a locus of integration and welcome.
Note A longer version of this chapter is published in Bonacchi (2001). I would like to thank Furio Cerutti, Dimitri D’Andrea, Anna Loretoni and Emilio Santoro for their assistance and invaluable suggestions.
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Castiglione, D. (1995), ‘Contracts and Constitutions’, in R. Bellamy, V. Bufacchi and D. Castiglione (eds), Democracy and Constitutional Culture in the Union of Europe (London: Lothian Foundation Press), pp. 59–79. Cerutti, F. (1996), ‘Identità e politica’, in F. Cerutti (ed.), Identità e politica (Roma and Bari: Laterza), pp. 5–41. Cerutti, F. and D. D’Andrea (eds) (2000), Identità e conflitti: Etnie, nazioni, federazioni (Milano: Franco Angeli). Costa, P. (2000), Civitas: Storia della cittadinanza in Europa, 2., L’età delle rivoluzioni (Roma and Bari: Laterza). D’Andrea, D. (2001), ‘Europe and the West: Identity Beyond Origin’, in F. Cerutti and E. Rudolph (eds), A Soul for Europe: On the Cultural and Political Identity of the Europeans, an Essay Collection, Vol. II (Leuven: Peeters), pp. 133–51. Foucault, M. (1994), Résumé des cours 1970–1982 (Paris: Gallimard). Graglia, P. (1996), Unità europea e federalismo: Da Giustizia e libertà ad Altiero Spinelli (Bologna: Il Mulino). Habermas, J. (1992), Morale, diritto, politica (Torino: Einaudi). Jellinek, G. (1905 [1892]), System der subjektiven öffentlichen Rechte (Tübingen: Mohr). Jhering, R. von (1906), Der Kampf ums Recht, 16th edn (Manz: Wien). Lipgens, W. (ed.) (1985), Documents on the History of European Integration, Vol. 1: Continental Plans for European Union 1939–1945 (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter). Lipgens, W. (ed.) (1986), Documents on the History of European Integration, Vol. 2: Plans for European Union in Great Britain and in Exile 1939–1945 (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter). MacCormick, N. (1995), ‘Sovereignty, Democracy and Subsidiarity’, in R. Bellamy, V. Bufacchi and D. Castiglione (eds), Democracy and Constitutional Culture in the Union of Europe (London: Lothian Foundation Press), pp. 7–104. Malandrino, C. (1990), Socialismo e libertà: Autonomie, federalismo, Europa da Rosselli a Silone (Milano: Angeli). Malandrino, C. (1998), Federalismo: Storia, idee, modelli (Roma: Carocci). Morin, E. (1988), Pensare l’Europa (Milano: Feltrinelli). Naumann, F. (1920), Speech delivered to the Weimar constitutional assembly, in Verhandlungen der verfassunggebenden Deutschen Nationalversammlung, Aktenstück n. 391 (Berlin: Heymann), pp. 180–1. Rusconi, G. E. (1998), ‘Cittadinanza e costituzione’, in L. Passerini (ed.), Identità culturale europea: Idee, sentimenti, relazioni (Firenze: La Nuova Italia), pp. 133–53. Rusconi, G. E. (2000), ‘La questione della cittadinanza europea’, Teoria politica, Vol. XVI, No. 1, pp. 25–38. Telò, M. (1995), ‘Démocratie internationale et démocratie supranationale en Europe’, in M. Telò (ed.), Democratie et construction européenne (Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles), pp. 1–70. Weale, A. (1995), ‘Democratic Legitimacy and the Constitution of Europe’, in R. Bellamy, V. Bufacchi and D. Castiglione (eds), Democracy and Constitutional Culture in the Union of Europe (London: Lothian Foundation Press), pp. 81–94. Weiler, J. H. H. (1985), Il sistema comunitario europeo (Bologna: Il Mulino). Weiler, J. H. H. (1997), ‘To Be a European Citizen: Eros and Civilization’, in Weiler (1999), pp. 324–57.
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Index 1848 revolutions, 28, 33, 37, 47, 118 Abbott, H., 188 Act of Union 1707 (UK), 76 affirmative action, 154, 156 Afghanistan, 199 Africa, 92, 102, 108, 141 Agassiz, L., 193 Alien Act 1884 (UK), 77 Alien and Sedition Acts 1798 (US), 197 Alien Registration Card (US), 199 aliens, 136–7, 140–2, 176, 186, 192, 196, 198, 201 see also immigrants Alsace, 170 Alsace–Lorraine, 52 American Civil War, 190, 196, 204 American Declaration of independence, 76, 162 American oath of allegiance (Immigration and Nationality Act), 199 American Revolution, 6, 188 ancien régime, 47, 52, 63, 88 Anderson, B., 27 anti-federalists, 19, 187–90 anti-Semitism, 28, 169, 173–4 see also racism Arendt, H., 122 aristocracy, 98, 191 Aristotle, 122 Asia, 92 assimilation, 15, 53–4, 59–60, 173, 183 asylum, 192 asylum-seekers, 88 see also refugees Augsburg Treaty of 1555, 39 Austria, 27–8, 31, 33 authoritarianism, 34, 48, 93, 108–9, 134–5 autonomy, 12, 48–51, 65, 67, 79, 95, 131, 142–5, 158
Baccelli, L., 17 Bangladesh, 199 Batavian Revolution, 172–3 Bayrou, F., 182 Belgium, 33 Benedicto, J., 138 Bentham, J., 74 Bercovitch, S., 197 Bickel, A., 187 bigotry, 150 see also xenophobia; racism Bill of Rights (US), 189–91, 198 Bill on safety at work 1890 (Spain), 133 Bismarck, O., 28, 33, 37–8 Bobbio, N., 119 Boers, 79 bourgeoisie, 37–8 petty, 37 see also middle classes Bourne, R., 197 Britain, 4–5, 10–16, 24, 73–89, 120, 151 Edwardian, 84–6 Victorian, 12–13, 77, 84, 86 British Nationality Act 1948, 79, 80 British Nationality Act 1981, 80 Brown v. the Board of Education 1954 (US), 198 Brubaker, W. R., 33, 53 Bürger, 22–3, 29, 35, 37, 179 Caetano, M., 104–5 Calvinists, 170, 175 Canada, 151 capitalism, 38, 51, 86 Casalini, B., 18 Catalonia, 142–3 Catholic Church, 16, 47, 49, 99–100, 102–3, 176–7 Catholicism, 53, 93–4, 96, 116, 120, 134, 169–71, 173–4, 176 see also religion 227
228 Index Catholics, 33–4, 39, 77, 94, 169, 174–5, 177–8, 192 Cattaneo, C., 116–17, 124 Cavour, 118 censorship, 105 Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 (US), 196 Chirac, J., 178 Christian Democracy, 11, 119 Christian Democrats, 179 Christianity, 39, 85, 169, 175, 194, 215, 222 see also religion Church of England, 12 Churchill, W., 85 Ciampi, C. A., 119 Cicero, 114 cidadão, 93 citizenship active, 23, 35, 148–9, 162, 172–3 as belonging, 9, 12 as participation, 9, 17 as rights, 9 civil, 172 conceptions of: abstract, 50; civic–liberal, 46–7, 51, 55, 57, 62, 66, 130; communitarian, 12, 55; communitarian–liberal, 183; fascist, 209; federalist, 210; feminist, 18, 148–64; feudal, 192; gendered, 148–9, 163; highbrow, 59; liberal, 4, 18, 46–8, 51, 55, 93–4, 96, 101, 104, 175, 183, 198; liberal–republican, 183, 189–90, 203; Lockean consensual theory of, 192; multicultural, 18; Muslim, 168; normative, 5; passive, 172; patriotic, 47; personal, 73; political, 2, 14–17, 37, 47, 55, 82, 132, 150, 172, 177; post-national, 1–3, 58, 186; regional, 144; republican, 4, 17–19, 46–55, 68, 87, 93, 108, 131, 146, 200; Roman, 5; sexually differentiated, 156, 158; social, 13, 38, 139, 150; social democratic, 148–9, 151, 153, 159, 163; supra-national, 1;
trans-national, 1; universal, 87; world, 78 consociational, 175 democratic, 107, 122, 130, 135, 137, 139 devaluation of, 201 discourse of, 8, 16, 50, 55, 63–4, 66, 181, 217 dual, 200 history of, 2, 74 immigrant, 169 international, 1 languages of, 3–5, 10, 172, 180 laws, 78 national, 35, 54, 62, 190, 196, 207–24; American, 186–204; British, 73–89; Dutch, 167–84; European, 1–2, 5, 19, 80, 107, 207–24; French, 46–68, 167–84; German, 22–40; Italian, 17, 113–26; Portuguese, 92–109; Scandinavian, 148–64; Spanish, 17, 130–46 taxonomy of, 40 citizenship-building, 130, 136 citoyens, 22–3, 37, 172, 177–8 civic consciousness, 7 civic culture, 1, 7, 124, 138 civic humanism, 113, 189 see also republicanism civic virtue, 12, 19, 46, 49, 53, 67, 86, 181, 189, 193, 202 see also duties civil society, 11–13, 15, 37, 55–6, 66–7, 119, 123, 127, 130, 134, 137, 168, 171–2, 174, 180 cleavages class, 8, 10, 23 cultural, 8, 10, 14, 18, 39 political, 177–8 Closa, C., 17 Code noir 1685, 169 cold war, 119, 177, 223 collectivism, 74 colonialism, 102 common good, 187, 189 Commonwealth, 75, 79–81 communism, 105 see also Marxism; socialism
Index communitarianism, 7–8, 12–13, 15, 19, 46, 48, 58, 62–4, 68, 187, 201, 203 community, 7 global, 1 national, 5, 7, 12, 14, 34, 47, 117, 192 political/civic, 5, 19, 23, 51–2, 55, 97–8, 102, 108–9, 115, 134, 140, 143, 172, 181, 186, 207, 221 conservatism, 4, 12, 38, 68, 102 Constitutional Court (Spain), 140–3 constitutions French 1791, 131, Spanish 1812, 131–2, Spanish 1836, 132, Spanish 1978, 136, 138–40 contract, 48, 156 freedom of, 6, 13, 140 Cooper, J. F., 191 Corn Laws, 13 corporatism, 150–2, 154 cosmopolitanism, 1, 5, 36 see also universalism Costa, P., 19 Crèvecoeur, M. G. J. de, 192 Cuba, 199 cultural differences, 58, 180 see also pluralism currency, single, 190 da Rocha, M. A. C., 97, 102 Dahlerup, D., 155 Dante, Alighieri, 114 Darwinian evolutionism, 196 De Vitoria, F., 131 Debray, R., 66–7 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen 1789, 47, 49, 172 decolonization, 167 della Loggia, E. G., 119–20 democracy, 6, 18, 36, 51, 53, 55–6, 64, 85, 92, 100, 105, 107, 119, 122, 130, 135, 138–9, 144–5, 149, 155–7, 163, 193, 195–6, 223 bourgeois, 105–6 European, 223 liberal, 35 parliamentary, 106 representative, 150
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Scandinavian, 18 Soviet, 223 democratic constitutionalism, 37, 116 democratization, 136–8, 203 devolution, 121, 136, 142–3, 202 Dewey, J., 197 Dicey, A. V., 82–3 Dissenters, 169–70, 173 Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856), 188 Dreyfus affair, 47, 62, 168, 176 Durkheim, E., 15, 48, 57, 60, 62 Dutch Reformed Church, 170 duties, 7, 9, 32, 50, 74–5, 81, 87–8, 101, 124, 136–8, 143–4, 177, 207, 212, 217 see also obligations Dworkin, R., 124 eastern Europe, 79 Edict of Nantes 1598, 169–70 education, 6–7, 13, 15–16, 49–50, 57, 62, 83, 94, 96–7, 99, 105–7, 109, 118, 135, 139, 142, 144, 156, 168, 174–5, 177–8, 182, 194–5, 203 Catholic, 177–8; see also Catholicism civic, 7, 188 Muslim, 183; see also Islam public, 174–5, 194, 203 Egypt, 199 electoral systems, 8, 10 emigration, 99, 109, 120, 134 empire, 6, 16, 29, 56, 114 Empire, British, 16, 74 German, 29, 31–4 Holy Roman, 24–6, 29, 40 England, 26, 76, 114 English civil war, 75 English common law, 16, 74–6, 78, 80, 83 Enlightenment, 47, 58, 175 entitlements, 9, 11, 13, 153, 202 see also rights equality, 6, 16, 47–9, 58–9, 82, 104, 141, 149, 172, 192, 198, 209 equality, gender, 153–63 equality of opportunity, 6 see also gender ETA, 138
230 Index état laïque, 174–8 see also laïcité ethnicity, 9, 47, 61, 63, 182, 188, 203 Euro, 121 European Charter of Human Rights, 2, 217, 220 European Community, 1, 80, 107, 217, 221 European Convention of Human Rights, 88, 217 European Court of Human Rights, 74, 81 European Court of Justice, 81, 186, 217 European parliament, 218 European Union, 1–2, 19, 40, 74, 88, 107, 140, 145, 207, 210–11, 216–22 Fabian society, 85 Factory and Employers’ Liability Acts (UK), 13 fascism, 117, 119–20, 125, 134, 209, 216 federalism, 204, 209–10 European, 19, 209–10, 214, 216, 219 national, 101 federalists, 18, 39, 187–90, 192, 209, 216, 219, 222–3 feminism, 4, 80, 85, 148–9, 152–9, 161–3, 177 first world war, 78, 85, 197, 221 Foscolo, U., 114, 126 foulard affaire, 168, 178, 180–2 France, 14–15, 17–18, 24, 26–7, 46–70, 94, 101, 114, 120, 132, 134, 151, 160–1, 167–84, 192, 208, 212–13, 218 France, Third Republic, 46–7, 53–4, 56, 60, 62, 67 Franco, 17, 134–9, 144–5 Frederick II, 25 freedom, 12–13, 36, 38, 104–5, 107, 115, 131–2, 137–8, 142, 190 religious, 171–2, 180, 182, 201, 217 of speech, 92, 97, 141 see also rights French Revolution, 6, 15, 23, 27, 28, 47–8, 51–2, 54, 62, 131–2, 172–3, 177–8, 180, 218, 220 Front National, 57–8, 178, 182–3
Galicia, 142–3 Galileo, Galilei, 114 Garcia, S., 135–6 Garibaldi, G., 116, 118–19 Gaspard, F., 160 Gauchet, M., 65 Geimenschaft, 64 gender, 18, 63, 83, 96, 105, 108, 148–64, 181–2, 188, 193, 196 see also women gender quotas, 154, 158, 160 see also equality German Democratic Republic (GDR), 28–9 German Reunification, 113 Germany, 5, 14–15, 22–40, 73, 120, 208–9, 212–14 Germany, Federal Republic of, 28–9 Gesellschaft, 64 Giannotti, D., 116 Gioberti, V., 117 Glendon, M. A., 202–3 Gliddon, G. R., 193 Globalization, 5, 64–5, 124 Glucksmann, A., 182 Gobetti, P., 117 Goethe, J. W., 25 Gorbachov, M., 177 governmentality, 218 Gramsci, A., 11, 118 Greece, 5, 73, 84 Green, T. H., 12–16 habeas corpus, 16, 74, 82, 101 Habermas, J., 2, 40, 113, 122, 124, 132, 149 Harris, J., 5, 13, 15–16 Hayek, F. A., 83 Hegel, G. W. F., 37 hegemony, 151, 153 Herculano, A., 95, 97, 103 Herder, J. G., 26 Hernes, H., 149–50, 153–4, 157, 159 hierarchy, 97, 104, 153 Hirdman, Y., 153–4 Hobbes, T., 113 Hobsbawm, E., 216
Index homogeneity, 15, 31, 34, 39, 54, 108 cultural, 28, 167, 176, 188, 190, 209, 212–13 religious, 18, 39, 168, 176 Huguenots, 169 identity, 130, 136, 142–4, 148, 151, 159, 179, 214, 217, 221–2 British, 79 civic/political, 53, 74–5, 87, 93, 124, 187, 207 collective, 61, 123–5, 212–14, 217, 221, 224 dual, 144–5 ethnic, 58–9, 202 European, 121, 124, 212–17, 221–3 individual, 58 plural, 133 post-national, 221 regional, 145 Spanish, 145 trans-national, 217 immigrants, 1, 18, 59–60, 142, 167–8, 176, 178, 181, 191–2, 194–5, 197–8, 201 immigration, 18, 53–4, 57, 63, 77–8, 80, 87–8, 109, 120–1, 140–1, 145, 163, 178–9, 181, 186–8, 191–2, 194–5, 197–8, 200 imperialism, 59 Independent Labour party (UK), 85 individualism, 61, 63, 65–7, 74, 103, 177, 197 Indonesia, 199 Industrial Revolution, 6, 11, 14, 51 industrialization, 8, 14, 105 industry, 6, 106, 140 integration, 59–61 American, 190 European, 19, 66, 107, 121, 145, 163, 177, 179, 191, 210, 214–17, 219, 224 international law, 30 Iran, 199 Iranian Revolution, 168, 177 Iraq, 199 Ireland, 73, 76, 80
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Islam, 54, 63, 114, 167–8, 177–9, 181, 183, 215, 222 see also Muslims; religion Italian unification, 4, 118 Italy, 4, 17, 73, 113–26, 208–9, 212–15 ius commune, 211 ius sanguinis, 31–3, 52, 73, 77–8, 80, 92, 108, 120, 124 ius soli, 15, 31, 52, 59, 73, 75–8, 80, 92, 108, 121, 167, 192 see also ius territoriale ius territoriale, 24–5 see also ius soli Jay, J., 190 Jellinek, G., 209 Jews, 50, 169–76, 181, 192 see also religion Jhering, R. von, 218 Jonasdottir, A., 161 Jordan, 199 judiciary, 8 see also law Kallen, H., 197 Kant, I., 22–3, 51 Klopstock, F. G., 26 Krieger, L., 36 Kuwait, 199 La Malfa, U., 119 Laborde, C., 15 labour market, 16, 83, 134, 164 labouring classes, 8, 12, 93 see also working class laïcité, 58 see also état laïque languages, political, 3, 7, 22 see also republicanism Laski, H., 84 law, 4, 49, 51, 55, 57, 59, 66–7, 74–7, 102, 108–9, 117, 134, 139–42, 155, 178 French, 182 immigration, 198 roman, 73–4 rule of, 6, 52 Le Monde, 63, 67 liberal individualism, 48, 187
232 Index liberalism, 4, 7–8, 12–19, 46, 48, 55, 85, 94, 96–101, 103–5, 109, 134, 149, 156, 181, 187, 203, 209, 216 see also liberty liberals, 4, 95, 174–5, 179, 186, 201 liberty, 31, 36, 48, 74, 117, 119, 124, 172, 180, 208–10, 212, 216–17, 222–3 negative, 113, 122 republican, 109, 122; see also republicanism Libya, 199 lifeworld, 38, 213 Louis XIV, 168–9 Lutheranism, 170 Maastricht Treaty, 1, 178–9, 211, 215, 222 McCarran–Walter Act 1952 (US), 197 Machiavelli, N., 114–15, 122, 125–6 Madison, J., 189–90, 203 Magna Carta, 87 Malaysia, 199 market economies, 2, 6, 68 marriage, 31, 83, 152, 176 marriage, homosexual, 179 Marshall, T. H., 4–5, 15, 81–3, 87–8, 130, 135 Marx, K., 37, 50–1 see also Marxism Marxism, 65, 86, 105–7, 118 see also socialism Mazzini, G., 116–17 means of production, 13 membership, 9, 12, 23, 34, 36, 51, 66, 123–5, 186, 211–12 civic, 5, 14, 123–4, 202 national, 14, 47, 82, 117 Mexican War, 193 Mexico, 193, 198 middle classes, 12, 23, 25, 27, 85, 195 see also bourgeoisie migration, 20, 78–9, 106, 167, 177 military service, 5, 7, 32, 101 minorities, ethnic, 17, 59, 163, 203 Mitterrand, F., 65, 178 modernity, 57, 60–1
monarchy, 5–6, 14, 17–18, 24–5, 27, 75, 93–4, 99, 102, 119, 132, 169, 191 absolute, 18, 47, 132 Montesquieu, 94 morality, 65, 213 Christian, 12–13, 176, 194; see also Christianity liberal capitalist, 13 Moran, M. L., 138 Morton, G., 193 multiculturalism, 56–8, 60, 63, 68, 182–3 Muslims, 168, 181–2 see also Islam mysticism, 116, 123 Napoleon Bonaparte, 52, 114, 118 nation-building, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, 19, 35, 47, 119, 132–3, 190, 197, 212–14, 216–17, 219, 221–2 nation-state, 1–3, 6, 11, 14, 18–19, 23–4, 34–5, 40, 130, 144, 208–10, 213, 216, 220, 222 national identity, 1, 7, 24, 26, 33, 56–7, 62, 68, 75, 78, 81, 113, 116, 121, 123, 130, 132, 176, 179–80, 203, 221–2 national membership, 32 national socialism, 209, 216 see also Nazism nationalism, 1, 51, 67, 116, 119, 122, 125, 144, 169, 176, 180, 196, 200, 214 nationality, 1–2, 14–17, 23, 30–3, 35, 41, 52–6, 59, 64, 75–7, 80, 92,102, 109, 131, 133, 186, 200, 207 British, 78, 81, 87, 89 French, 59, 178 German, 29 territorial conception of, 52 Nationality Act 1870 (Germany), 33 nationhood, 14, 19, 24, 26–9, 32, 34–5, 130, 136, 177–80 native Americans, 193, 196 NATO, 138 natural law, 93 naturalization, 31, 76–8, 96, 120, 131, 191, 196–7, 199–200 Naumann, F., 223
Index Nazism, 28, 119–20 see also national socialism Neapolitan Revolution of 1647, 116 Netherlands, 18, 120, 167–84 neutrality, 39, 59, 113 Noiriel, G., 54 Nora, P., 63 Northern Ireland, 10, 83, 87 Norway, 150–5, 157–9, 160, 162 Nott, J., 193 O cidadão, 94 oaths of allegiance, 199–201 obligations, 5, 19–20, 74, 89, 157 see also duties Orientalism, 181 Paine, T., 192 Pakistan, 199 particularism, 15, 17, 31, 33–4, 36–7, 46–8, 55, 58–9, 61, 64, 66–7, 197 see also universalism Pasqua, C., 179 Pateman, C., 156–7 paternalism, 13, 17, 139, 150, 154, 156, 164 patriotism, 17, 36, 53, 62, 97–8, 104, 114–17, 124–5, 134, 145, 217, 220 constitutional, 36, 40, 113, 120, 124 local, 132; see also regionalism republican, 97, 113, 115, 117–18, 120, 122, 125 peasantry, 16, 93, 98 perfectionism, 47, 51 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act 1986 (US), 201–2 Petrarch, F., 113–14 Phillips, A., 158–9 Pim Fortuyn Party, 183 Pizzorno, A., 119 Pledge of Allegiance (US), 196 Plessy v. Ferguson 1896, 196 pluralism, 15, 18, 47, 55–6, 106–7, 151–2, 155, 167–8, 170, 177, 189, 197, 209 Plyler v. Doe 1982, 198 Pocock, J. G. A., 113, 122 Poland, 29, 33 political participation, 187, 202
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political representation, 157–8, 160 popular democracy, 47, 84 Portugal, 16–17, 92–109 Portugal, First Republic, 93, 105 positivism, 53, 85–6, 103 poverty, 30, 195 Preuß, U., 14 proletariat, 38, 96 see also working class propaganda, 175 property, 16, 23, 74, 76, 83, 95, 131, 140, 170, 188 proportional representation, 10 Protestantism, 19, 76, 169–74, 180, 187, 191 see also religion Protestants, 39, 76, 175–7 Prussia, 24, 27–8, 31–4, 37 public space, 176–7, 180 public sphere, 55, 59, 134, 176 Pufendorf, S., 25 Puritans, 193, 197, 200 Putnam, R., 123, 127, 202 Quebecois, 79 Quota Act of 1924 (US), 197 race, 47, 58, 142, 159, 182, 188, 193, 196, 203, 213, 221, 223 racism, 1, 28, 57–8, 121, 196 see also xenophobia; bigotry; anti-Semitism Ramos, R., 16 Rawls, J., 186 Realpolitik, 223 reciprocity, 7 refugees, 76, 88, 108, 140, 176, 198 see also asylum-seekers regionalism, 143–4, 178 religion, 59, 98–9, 171–2, 174, 177, 182, 188, 190–1, 193–4, 200, 213 see also Catholicism; Protestantism; Islam; Christianity religion, civic, 18, 125, 193 republicanism, 4, 7–8, 12, 15–19, 46–9, 58–66, 97, 100–1, 103–4, 109, 113–28, 132, 149, 176, 182, 187, 191, 193–4, 201 see also civic humanism
234 Index resistance, European, 209 right of association, 141–2 rights, 1–2, 6–9, 12, 15, 19–20, 30, 32, 50–1, 53, 56, 74–6, 81–3, 87–9, 92–3, 96, 101, 104–6, 124, 130, 134, 136, 137–9, 140–3, 145–6, 151, 159, 162, 167, 183, 186–8, 198, 203, 207–10, 212, 216–23 citizenship, 7, 16, 47, 74, 83, 108, 136–8, 143, 170, 173, 181 civil, 5–8, 15–17, 19, 39, 80, 83, 107, 132, 140–1, 163, 167, 172, 175–6, 196, 198, 201, 219 individual, 18–19, 49–50, 88, 181, 189, 204 legal, 36; see also law minority, 203 natural/human, 17, 63, 102, 131, 136 participation, 152 political, 5, 15–16, 19, 50, 54, 83, 100, 102, 104, 106, 109, 132, 136, 138–9, 140–2, 148, 161, 163–4, 167, 175–6, 196, 218–19 property, 6, 131; see also property social, 5–8, 14–18, 56, 82–3, 104, 106, 109, 133, 135, 138–9, 141–2, 148–9, 161, 163, 181, 201, 219, 223 voting, 5, 7, 12–13, 16, 37, 50, 82, 92, 100, 103, 105, 109, 131–2, 175, 179, 193, 201 women’s, 101, 105, 149; see also women Risorgimento, 116, 118, 122 Rokkan, S., 151–2 romanticism, 58 Rome, 73, 84, 114 Rosselli, C., 118 Rossi, E., 19, 209–10 Rousseau, J.-J., 17, 48, 51, 53, 88 Rusconi, G. E., 120, 122, 124 Rush, B., 189, 194 Rushdie affair, 178 Ruskin, J., 85 Salazar, O., 103–6 Salmond, J. W., 83 Sandel, M., 200–1
Santoro, E., 194 Saudi Arabia, 199 Scandinavia, 17, 148–64 Schiller, F., 26 Schnapper, D., 61–2, 64 Scoppola, P., 120 Scotland, 76 second world war, 28, 36, 79, 84, 86, 118–19, 125, 197, 220, 223 secularization, 47, 62–3, 174 segregation, 153 self-determination, 29, 49–50, 55, 58 self-government, 38, 48, 51, 108, 117–18, 142–5 Sennett, R., 203 September 11th terrorist attacks, 199 sexuality, 83 Sidney, A., 94 Sieyès, A., 23, 52 Siim, B., 18 Skinner, Q., 11, 109, 113, 122, 125 Skjeie, H., 18 slavery, 188, 190 Social charter of the Council of Europe 1961, 137, 139 social democracy, 130, 150–2, 154–6 social exclusion, 24, 93, 150 social movements, 148–9 labour, 18, 33–4, 55, 85–6, 138–9, 141–2, 150–3, 163, 195, 202 peasants, 150–1 retired persons, 202 women’s, 149–53, 155–7, 202 socialism, 12–13, 33, 65, 67, 85, 106–7, 216, 223 socialists, 4, 28, 175–6 solidarity, 7, 34, 60, 66, 121, 123, 144 Somalia, 199 South America, 92 sovereignty, 18–19, 28, 30, 36, 37, 47, 49, 52, 55, 74, 103, 121, 131–2, 172, 179, 199, 204, 208–12, 219, 222 Spain, 17, 24, 26, 130, 170 Spanish revolution 1868, 132 Spanish war of independence, 132 Spinelli, A., 19, 209–10 Stuurman, S., 18
Index sub-national identity, 143–5 Sudan, 199 Supreme Court (US), 188, 191, 198, 200, 204 Sweden, 149, 154–5, 158, 160, 162 Switzerland, 33 Syria, 199 Third Reform Act 1884 (UK), 84 Tocqueville, A., 48, 51, 194 toleration, 31, 175, 181 totalitarianism, 19, 210, 219 Treaty of Amsterdam, 1–2 Treaty of Rome, 80, 215 Trentin, B., 119 Turkish, 180–3 Turner, F. J., 196 unemployment, 78, 86, 131 United States, 18, 63, 133, 151, 186–204 universalism, 15, 28, 33–4, 36, 46–50, 52–68, 124, 135, 162, 183 see also particularism urbanization, 171 utilitarianism, 161 utility, 74
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van de Copello, K., 175 Viroli, M., 122 volk, 22, 26, 28, 30, 36, 217 Von stein, L., 37 war, 3, 140, 221 civil, 169 Webb, B., 85–6 Webb, S., 85–6 Webster, D., 193 welfare state, 83, 105, 107, 135, 139, 142, 150, 153, 155, 181 West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette 1943, 200 Westphalian Treaty of 1648, 25 Wollstonecraft, M., 156 women, 7, 13, 16–18, 80, 89, 96, 101, 134, 149–64, 193, 196 see also gender working class, 4, 12–13, 15, 38, 84, 107, 139, 175, 178 see also labouring class xenophobia, 1, 28, 54, 132, 183 see also racism; bigotry Yemen, 199 Young, I., 158–9