Multilevel Citizenship

Chapter 1 Varieties of Multilevel Citizenship

Chapter 1 Varieties of Multilevel Citizenship willem maas Citizenship in contemporary societies has come to be defined as a homogeneous legal and political status within the context of a nation-state: in the now-dominant meaning, the only form of membership that may be termed citizenship is membership in a sovereign state. Although undeniably important , this narrow and exclusionary definition of citizenship obscures important developments at both sub- and suprastate levels. For example, the rise of citizenship of the European Union (discussed further below) has raised expectations that other regional integration efforts may also result in meaningful supranational rights. At the same time, many states, particularly federal or multinational ones, face demands for special regional or group-based statuses that directly contradict the ideal of equality before the law. Similarly, some cities are starting to reassert what used to be the dominant meaning of citizenship until current forms of statehood crowded out alternatives: a citizen meant a member of a city (citizen descends from the French cité and, before that, the Latin cı̄vitās, the community of citizens) entitled to the privileges and rights of that city.1 The comparative history of citizenship provides rich examples of multilevel citizenship in theory and practice, although such examples are today often forgotten or obscured by the dominant narrative of a single and homogeneous, territorial, state-based citizenship. This book aims to upset the now-dominant conception of citizenship by providing a series of examples of alternative concepts of citizenship as they operated or operate in practice or as they are (re-)emerging. The focus is on levels of citizenship, particularly nested and overlapping geographical levels: citizenship not only of the state but also of substate, suprastate, or nonstate political communities. The motivation is the urgent need to reflect 2 Willem Maas on citizenship as a construction of political and legal practices and of territorial affiliations that are not limited by physical borders. Rather than advance a single alternative theoretical model of citizenship—an exercise that in any case might be doomed to fail, given the nuances and complexity that the chapters in this book uncover—the intention is to question takenfor -granted assumptions currently embedded in the concept. Although citizenship as an analytical category has come to be narrowly defined as legal and political equality within the context of a sovereign state, such equality has never existed in pure form.2 Indeed, unitary citizenship is the historical exception; more common are varieties of multilevel citizenship. The claim that varieties of multilevel citizenship are historically dominant and that the main contemporary definition of citizenship is a recent aberration in no way challenges the close relationship between this version of citizenship and statehood or the widely shared belief that citizenship in today’s dominant definition would be meaningless without states. The idea that ‘‘without a state, there can be no citizenship’’ is prevalent.3 This poses an existential problem for multilevel citizenship: if only states can confer citizenship, then alternative sources of citizenship such as cities, provinces, nations (to the extent that they do not coincide with a state that they control ), or supranational entities such as the European Union cannot bestow citizenship, or at the very least cannot be the primary locus of citizenship.4 By demonstrating that alternative, nonstate communities or jurisdictions do in fact constitute important sources of rights and status, the artificiality and arbitrariness of the sovereign state’s monopoly on conferring citizenship becomes clear. The emergence of the modern institution of citizenship cannot be understood apart from the formation of the modern state and the international state system, but the reverse is equally true.5 States collude to limit competition to their power and authority. One way in which this collusion manifests itself is through the institutionalization of citizenship as the foundational status that individuals must possess under international law—a status epitomized in the form of passports (states choose to recognize only the passports of other states). International agreements specifying that each individual should have precisely one nationality and that this nationality be conferred only by recognized states, rather than alternative forms of citizenship such as those explored in this book, underscore this collusion.6 Much of social science has been infected with the view that, because the world is divided into sovereign nation-states, social scientists should study (2024-04-26 13:17 GMT) Varieties of Multilevel Citizenship 3 and understand the world according to that division rather...