The future of national citizenship: Going, going, gone?

Citizenship is back in vogue. Politicians speak about it; public-policy makers debate how best to make citizenship meaningful in an age of globalized security threats and migration pressures. Legislatures worldwide have also taken an interest, introducing new citizenship tests and more restrictive admission criteria. Scholars, too, have turned their gaze to citizenship once again, after many years of neglect.¹ This renewed interest in citizenship is avant-gardist and futuristic in orientation: intellectuals and dreamers alike imagine how citizenship might evolve in the twenty-first century and beyond. The urgency of such a task is typically explained as follows: with the rise of economic globalization, on the one hand, and the fragmentation of cultural identity within established societies, on the other, the national model of citizenship no longer fits the bill. The world is changing; so should citizenship. Indeed, some are claiming that citizenship is already undergoing major transformations – and that this is a good thing, too.

What remains under fierce debate is what is in store for this glorious yet unfinished institution. Are we witnessing the semblances of global or cosmopolitan citizenship?² The rise of more commodified and stratified interpretations of political membership?³ Or perhaps the future of citizenship lies in the emergence of alternatives that are no longer tied solely to membership in a single political community? Such notions include concrete legal options such as dual citizenship and still embryonic ideas that fit under the headings of supranational (citizenship above the state), postnational (citizenship beyond the state), or transnational (citizenship across states). In this already crowded field, Dora Kostakopoulou's elegant book, The Future Governance of Citizenship, advocates a radical break away from anational conception of citizenship. Her goal is to develop an anational (or denational) model of citizenship that relies on individual-centred notions of domicile and civic registration, freeing, as it were, the notion of citizenship from any thick or thin 'communal' affiliation. As Kostakopoulou ambitiously declares, '[t]his book seeks to furnish the tools required to transcend the present limitations of citizenship and make it more meaningful in the twenty-first century' (3). This is a bold project indeed, and what makes it attractive is that Kostakopoulou does not assume that if we are to address the ills of the national model, the very institution of citizenship must go with it. Instead, she argues that citizenship can be rewritten in a more inclusive fashion. As Kostakopoulou rightly points out, the narrative of expanding the body politic and democratizing membership has been central to the modern tale of citizenship, although this process has not been unidirectional or linear. As Rogers Smith documents in his seminal work Civic Ideals, patterns of expanding citizenship are often followed by dramatic periods of contraction and growing exclusion.⁴ The more important point for Kostakopoulou's project is to plead that the future of citizenship can be different but no less meaningful and socially relevant; nothing proves this better than citizenship's past, which reflects 'remarkable plasticity' (3).

This book's overall invitation to start 'thinking about a genuinely post-national framework of democratic citizenship' is well pursued (9). Kostakopoulou does an excellent job of identifying and celebrating citizenship's impressive institutional flexibility, or its 'variable geometry' (143). This variable geometry, she argues, permits us to overcome the manufactured 'couplings and equivalences between the state, the nation, sovereignty, territoriality, democracy and citizenship' (5). This assessment, upon which Kostakopoulou builds the edifice of her alternative model, is not free from contestation; however, it fits comfortably in line with a host of related arguments advanced in recent years by other critics of the national model of citizenship.⁵

The challenge for Kostakopoulou is to persuade her readers that citizenship remains viable but must undergo a radical reformation. To that end, The Future Governance of Citizenship begins with a concise overview of citizenship's past (chapter 1). This is significant: the historical overview demonstrates that citizenship need not necessarily be attached to any particular level or structure of government in order to thrive. In the past, it flourished (on a much...