The Dialectics of Citizenship: Exploring Privilege, Exclusion, and Racialization

Chapter 2. Conceptualizing Citizenship: Disjunctive, Dual, Divided, Entangled, or What?

23 CHAPTER 2 Conceptualizing Citizenship Disjunctive, Dual, Divided, Entangled, or What? Theory is theoria: the gaze that puts us face to face with something and inspects it . . . I can elucidate my relation to language, but I cannot abstract myself from it and “look at” it, nor can I “construct” it from the outside. I cannot make a “theory” out of the institution, for I am on the inside. . . . There is therefore a deep-seated dependence, in respect to language, between what I think and what I say. CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS, 1985 In his seminal work on CITIZENSHIP AND SOCIAL CLASS, T. H. Marshall ([1950] 1992) argued that in Europe, civil rights preceded political rights, and once both these rights were achieved, social rights would follow . Marshall predicted that the twentieth century would see an expansion of social rights, which he defined as “the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in society. The institutions most closely connected with it are the educational system and the social services” (Marshall 1992: 8). For him, the state was called upon to reduce the risks associated with capitalism for the poorest citizens (Jones and Gaventa 2002: 3). As explained by Jones and Gaventa, this state action would lead to an “overarching sense of community and civilization” (Jones and Gaventa 2002: 3). When the twentieth century came to an end, it became clear that 24| Chapter 2 Marshall’s prediction was too optimistic. In 2012, many European citizens are effectively still excluded from social rights, to the point where some analysts argue that Europe is developing an apartheid system (Balibar 2004). Especially, nontraditional, nonwhite European citizens see their civil rights curbed by the forces of prejudice and racism. In many countries, they are treated as foreigners and intruders despite their legal citizenship.1 Instead of social rights following civil and political rights, it rather appears that the exercise of civil rights depends on the previous achievement of social rights, as racism is undermining the effectiveness of civil and political rights of all those stigmatized as “others within.” Racism is at the core of this exclusion, and it is Marshall’s underestimation of the power of racism that led him to formulate overly optimistic predictions about Europe’s democratic future. In Europe, as elsewhere, racism continues to be functional for the maintenance and reproduction of privilege. Worse, under conditions of increased market competition, characteristic of advanced capitalist systems, the importance of racism might grow. Racism becomes more pronounced when different actors compete for scarce, and thus highly desirable, goods (Winant 2001). Under such conditions, whiteness functions as additional capital, bestowing competitive advantages on those able to claim it with success (Reiter 2010). CITIZENSHIP Citizenship is a broad concept. According to Webster’s definition, it is “the status of being a citizen.” T. H. Marshall (1992), in turn, defines citizenship as “a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed” (Marshall 1992: 18). Tom Bottomore, who wrote the essay “Forty Years On,” which together with T. H. Marshall ’s own essay constitutes the publication through which Marshall’s work is accessible (1992), already points out that citizenship in our day (his were the days of the 1990s) faces new challenges, some of which Marshall could not have foreseen. Among others, he mentions the problems triggered by increased migration, thus causing greater ethnic heterogeneity among European citizenry and posing new challenges to citizenship. To capture these new challenges, Bottomore proposes a distinction between formal and substantive citizenship—a distinction introduced by Rogers Brubaker (1989, 1992). He quotes Brubaker, who had argued that “formal citizenship is Conceptualizing Citizenship| 25 neither a sufficient, nor a necessary condition for substantive citizenship” (Brubaker 1992: 36, quoted in Bottomore 1992: 66). Several authors have disputed the notion of citizenship as a status. For communitarians such as Michael Sandel (1998), citizenship is more than a right, it is an obligation and a calling to participate and actively engage in one’s community. Civic republicans, such as Jürgen Habermas (1998), have stressed that what makes one a citizen is the ability to participate in collective decision making and...