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Chapter 10 Citizens of a New Agora: Postnational Citizenship and International Economic Institutions türküler isiksel Globalization is eroding the certainties of citizenship, but not citizenship itself. Instead, new supernational regimes and institutions are increasingly populated by new forms of political subjecthood and participation, creating new possibilities for citizenship.1 Contrary to the hopes expressed in the literature on global citizenship, however, not all of these possibilities are salutary. In particular, although much of this literature has focused on the development of human rights regimes and transnational mobilization by civil society groups, the vocabulary of citizenship is unexpectedly relevant for characterizing the growing body of trade-related rights and entitlements that businesses enjoy under international economic institutions. This chapter traces the processes by which private economic actors, in claiming their newly minted rights, participate in building institutions of economic governance . Taken together, these rights add up to a deterritorialized and functionally specific status that I propose to call market citizenship.2 Insofar as market citizenship consists of political enfranchisement for private actors in postnational economic governance, it pinpoints a different kind of fragmentation and layering of citizenship. In recent years, scholars have documented highly consequential ways in which the traditional elements of citizenship are becoming disassembled at the national level and reassembled at different tiers of political organization.3 This chapter helps map the complex landscape of multilevel citizenship by documenting the A New Agora 185 functional specialization of citizenship practice. To continue the spatial metaphor, my overall argument is that the multilevel nature of citizenship should be understood not only vertically, across sub- and supranational levels, but also in terms of a horizontal dispersal: asymmetric rights of political participation attach to individuals and legal entities by virtue of the particular activities they pursue as well as by virtue of their territorial presence or membership. Those who engage in cross-border commerce, for example, increasingly enjoy special legal protections and political enfranchisement under specialized international regimes that operate quasiautonomously from national jurisdictions. By contrast, the relinquishment of certain functionally delimited domains of policy to supernational or nonmajoritarian institutions of governance can leave large constituencies of citizens with few effective channels through which to contest the policy decisions that affect them. Market citizenship is symptomatic of a world in which citizenship entitlements are not only reshuffled along a vertical axis stretching from local to regional and global levels of governance but also redistributed horizontally across different policy domains, disproportionately favoring the interests of some and excluding others. In what follows, I begin by unpacking the phrase market citizenship and outlining three distinct dimensions of market citizenship. I then critically evaluate the impact of this new form of political agency on traditional democratic institutions, emphasizing the asymmetries that they create between different forms of citizenship practice. Preliminaries Can specialized international regimes, particularly economic ones, engender some form of citizenship practice? In what sense can one be a citizen of the market, as opposed to a mere market actor? When speaking about the citizenship of market actors, we usually refer to their broader social obligations . Good corporate citizenship means assuming responsibility for the places and communities within which a firm operates, beyond the profits those places and communities make possible for the firm’s shareholders.4 Thus, businesses are called upon to maintain labor standards that correspond to the needs of employees, comply with human rights, refrain from corrupt business practices, respect local cultures and ways of life, and ‘‘give back’’ to the community through philanthropic projects. Moreover, as (2024-04-19 17:05 GMT) 186 Türküler Isiksel environmental disasters such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 periodically remind us, we also expect corporations to offset the ‘‘negative externalities’’ that they cause—that is, to clean up after themselves . Somewhat like regular citizenship, then, good corporate citizenship entails certain duties that arise as a result of participating in the life of a community. This chapter is not about corporate citizenship in that sense. Rather, I argue that the term citizenship captures the ways in which private economic actors participate in the operation of international economic institutions as political subjects in their own right. Many such bodies foster the involvement of corporations and industry groups in their political and legal development by bestowing on them rights, entitlements, and advantages that go beyond the domestic. Most important, the adjudicative mechanisms commissioned by institutions such as the European Union (EU), the World Trade Organization...

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