Multilevel Citizenship

Chapter 11 Sites of Citizenship, Politics of Scales

Chapter 11 Sites of Citizenship, Politics of Scales catherine neveu There is in the literature on citizenship a frequent tendency to focus on nation-state citizenship, obscuring other sites, spaces, and levels where citizenship manufacturing processes also take place. But even when citizenship analysis does include other sites, spaces, and levels, such diversity is too often analyzed through the lens of nation-state citizenship, which is thus maintained as the implicit norm. As a contribution to the debates on the notion of multilevel citizenship, I argue that they might be more fruitful if connected to an in-depth analysis of their ‘‘politics of scale’’ as a way in which to grasp how, in processes that are built on circulation and exchange, the role of some levels or scales become forgotten and denied and that of others (especially the central or nation-state one) is underlined, made central , and reified. It is indeed not just the sheer plurality of levels and spaces that matters when considering how to grasp and understand such politics of scale but the ways in which each is generally connected to specific competences, attitudes , or audiences. That is, for some analysts, there are different ways to be a citizen (or even an impossibility in becoming one), depending on the level or space where one acts; thus, configurations connecting competences, audiences, and levels depend not on these levels as such but on the political projects at play and their politics of scale. It is such sets of (dis)connections with which I would like to critically engage, both by replacing them within a more general discussion about the ‘‘topographic imaginations of politics’’ underlying them and by relying on empirical research, the aim being to highlight the extent to which maintaining ‘‘scalar thought’’ today constitutes a major obstacle to the analysis of a growing number of processes. 204 Catherine Neveu Critically Questioning ‘‘Scalar Thought’’ This chapter starts by discussing scalar thought as one of the main sources through which citizenship is assigned to one and only one level; that is, the national or central state. It then proceeds to explore some of its effects and alternative practices, based on the French context. According to Isin, ‘‘the scalar thought that underlies our understanding of modern political entities (cities, regions, nations, states . . . ) assumes exclusive, hierarchical and ahistorical relations among and between these entities, and conceals their multiple, fluid and overlapping forms of existence.’’1 In terms of citizenship, such scalar thought implies that there is one and only one level of belonging and loyalty, which is the state level: ‘‘because of its exclusive and encompassing logic, the scalar thought implies an exclusive thought of citizenship itself, as being essentially connected to the state as the only producer of identification, belonging and engagement. A critical analysis of such conceptions is then a pre-condition to grasp the very complexity of citizenship, and the diversity of its sites, levels and spaces of production and enactments.’’2 But before going any further, it seems useful to clarify the meanings given to citizenship and citizen here; indeed (and it is an issue French speakers are often confronted with in English), it is not meant to refer, or at least not only, to a status, a reduction implied by the often-found confusion between nationality and citizenship and typical of seeing ‘‘through the gaze of scalar thought.’’3 If such a confusion has indeed to be analyzed as part of this scalar thought, instead of being taken for granted, enlarging our understanding of citizenship processes beyond their sole statutory dimension is essential for yet other reasons. According to Balibar: I don’t think one can entirely follow legal writers and political scientists who define as of principle citizenship as a status (like nationality ). Because what makes for the continuity in history of different modes of instituting citizenship . . . is precisely the fact that the notion of citizen . . . expresses a collective capacity to ‘‘constitute the state’’ or the public space. In other words, it expresses a social link in which the rights and freedoms recognized to individuals, and the obligations that are their counterparts, as limited as they might be, do not emanate from a transcendent power, but only from the ‘‘convention’’ of citizens.4 (2024-04-25 06:58 GMT) Sites of Citizenship 205 Questioning the politics of scale from the perspective of citizenship processes thus requires including a wider set of practices and representations than those connected to its legal dimensions...