What is Citizenship?

Derek Heater

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745667003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Structured analytically, the book introduces the reader to all the facets of citizenship.

1

The Liberal Tradition

Origins

Something of an oversimplification it may be, but it is most helpful to easy comprehension – not to mention quite fashionable – to distinguish between two traditions and interpretations of the nature of citizenship. These are the civic republican style, which places its stress on duties, and the liberal style, which emphasizes rights. Now, despite the former’s origins in classical antiquity and therefore its longevity, it is the liberal form that has been dominant for the past two centuries and remains so today. It is therefore fitting to start with the liberal tradition, postponing consideration of civic republicanism to the next chapter. Compared with the republican variant, liberal citizenship is much less demanding of the individual. It involves a loosely committed relationship to the state, a relationship held in place in the main by a set of civic rights, honoured by the state, which otherwise interferes as little as possible in the citizen’s life.

Liberal citizenship was the offspring of the liaison between revolutionary upheaval and contractarian natural rights theory, Great Britain playing the role of midwife. True, it was the French Revolution that first established the principle and practice of citizenship as the central feature of the modern socio-political structure, but it was the British (including, crucially, the American) experience over one-and-a-half centuries prior to 1789 that laid the foundations for the transition from a monarch–subject relationship to a state–citizen relationship. Paradoxically, the actual terms ‘citizen’ and ‘citizenship’ were rarely used in the liberal sense in the English-speaking world. Yet the English Civil War and its aftermath, the political theory of John Locke, and the seizing of independence by the American colonies and their transmutation into the United States were all absolutely vital to the evolution of the liberal mode of citizenship and citizens’ rights.

A citizen has the right to vote: Colonel Rainborough declared in 1647, ‘I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under’ (see Wootton, 1986, p. 286). A citizen also has a right to just treatment by the law: the first Habeas Corpus Act was passed in Britain in 1679. In about this year Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Civil Government (though they were not published until a decade later, in 1690). In the second of these Locke influentially expounded his theory of natural rights, that every man should have the free and equal right ‘to preserve … his life, liberty, and estate’ (Locke, 1962, s. 87). The American revolutionaries adapted this formula to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, and the French, to ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression’. These rights are God-given; but it is the function of the state to ensure their protection. We therefore step from generalized natural rights, which individuals have qua human beings, to specific civic rights, which are assured by the state to individuals qua citizens. Hence the dual title of the French Declaration – of Man and the Citizen.

The distinction could be telling, as Marx recognized. The rights of man are negative, allowing the individual to pursue his own, personal life, not committing him to a life as a member of a community, a citizen. Marx cites Art. 6 of the French Declaration, which defines liberty as ‘the power of doing anything that does not harm others’, and he continues:

The freedom in question is that of a man treated as an isolated monad and withdrawn into himself… none of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man … namely an individual withdrawn behind his private interests and whims and separated from the community.

(‘On the Jewish Question’, in McLellan, 1977, pp. 53–4)

The rights of the citizen, on the other hand, have a more defined, positive character. For example, the French Declaration and the American Bill of Rights (the first ten Amendments to the Constitution), finalized within weeks of each other in 1789, concentrated particularly on a range of legal rights such as freedom of speech and conscience, equality before the law, presumption of innocence, trial by jury (see French Declaration Arts. 3–11; Bill of Rights, Arts. 1, 5–9).

Another feature of citizens’ rights considered to be crucial in these early days of defining liberal citizenship was the right to property. Locke firmly established this principle. He declared quite trenchantly that ‘government has no other end but the preservation of property’ (Locke, 1962, s. 94). The language of the Declaration of Rights is even more forceful, asserting that the right to property is ‘inviolable and sacred’ (Art. 17). Ownership of property was not only a right, it was, as a universal practice, a requirement for the basic political right of citizenship, namely the right to vote. For instance, even in Massachusetts, hub of the rebellion against the British government, the franchise was restricted in c.1790 to the owners of real estate worth $12 a year or any property with a capital value of $240. The political crises of the late eighteenth century threw up the issue of universal manhood suffrage, a cause persistently supported, for example, by Thomas Paine. But the mystique of property was too powerful for its implementation yet. Not until the 1820s did some American states lead the way.

How, then, may we characterize the concept of liberal citizenship in these emergent years? It is an important question because the consolidation of the basics from roughly Locke to the French Revolution provided a legacy which still shapes our assumptions about citizenship in our own times.

First, the individual remains an individual. The acquisition of citizenly status does not necessitate abandonment of the pursuit of self-interest. Public and private spheres are kept distinct, and citizens are under no obligation to participate in the public arena if they have no inclination to do so. Nor have citizens any defined responsibilities vis-à-vis their fellow citizens. All are equal, autonomous beings, so that there is no sense that the state has any organic existence, bonding the citizens to it and to each other. Citizens have the odd duty to perform, it is true – mainly the payment of taxes – in return for the protection of their rights by the state. But there is only a slight change of heart, a weak sense of identity, no necessary pride in thinking oneself into the station of citizen. Citizenship largely means the pursuit of one’s private life and interests more comfortably because that private life is insured by state-protected rights. In short, therefore, the extrapolation of the rights of the citizen from the rights of man may marginally have adapted, but by no means transformed, the individual from Marx’s ‘isolated monad’.

If the liberal citizen is expected to feel only a limited obligation to the state, pari passu the state is expected to impinge on the citizen’s life in only a feeble way. This is the second feature of liberal citizenship as laid down from the late seventeenth century. The state is useful to the citizen as, in Locke’s striking image, a ‘nightwatchman’. And if any government oversteps its limited powers and interferes in its citizens’ activities to the detriment of their life-styles, or, conversely, fails in its protective function, then the citizenry has the right to rouse itself from the quiet pursuit of private affairs and rebel, as the American colonists did in 1776.

And what, we ask thirdly, are these private affairs that the citizen must be allowed independently to pursue? It is the accrual of wealth. Is, then, liberal citizenship a political expression of capitalism? Yes; but the relationship is, in fact, much more complicated than that.

Citizenship and capitalism

We cannot say categorically that the evolution of modern liberal citizenship would have been impossible without the emergence of a capitalist market economy and an accompanying, increasingly powerful, bourgeois class. For one thing, pressure for the legal and political rights that were conceded by the three revolutions in England, America and France was spearheaded as much by a lawyer-dominated professional class as by entrepreneurial capitalists, perhaps even more so. Nevertheless, the decay of a feudal or quasi-feudal society and its supersession by a market economy did introduce changes that were, if no more, at least conducive to the emergence of a liberal form of citizenship. (Henceforth, in this chapter, let us take ‘liberal form of’ for granted.) Three kinds of change may be identified.

1 Pre-capitalist society was based on personal subservience – vassal to lord, apprentice to master, subject to prince. In contrast, the free exercise of individual initiative is the very essence of capitalism. Similarly, citizenship grew by the extraction of rights for the individual.

Feudalism →	Capitalism →	Citizenship
Individual subservience	Individual initiative	Individual rights
Hierarchical society	Permeable class structure	Civic equality
Provincially fragmented economy	Open access to markets	National identity

Figure 1.1

2 Feudal structure was socially hierarchical. As the Victorian poet Cecil Frances Alexander unequivocally expressed the distinction between rich and poor: ‘God made them, high or lowly, / And order’d their estate.’ Capitalism, in contrast, requires social fluidity. Class divisions, it is true, are inevitable – middle class and the lower orders; but not caste rigidity. Initiative, to refer back to our first kind of change, required the partitions between classes to be permeable. The concept of citizenship took this alteration to the logical conclusion of equality of status. A citizen is a citizen is a citizen: no differentiation.

3 Ancien régime society was, to modern minds, unbelievably provincially fragmented. Economically, that is; not to be confused with the modern convenience of devolution. Internal customs barriers, even provincially distinct measurements of weights and capacity, were anathema to the capitalist’s essential requirement of free and open access to markets. The integration and solidification of the nation-state, so essential for the capitalist, made way for citizenship as national identity.

The foregoing interpretation is simply tabulated in figure 1.1. One feature of this transformatory process was the alteration in the relationship between civil society and citizenship. In the Middle Ages citizenship meant being a privileged inhabitant of a city or other municipality, and the status tended to be accorded to members of corporate bodies such as guilds, that is, the component organizations of civil society. The growth of capitalism and the revolutionary changes wrought in Europe from the late eighteenth century undermined this localized and fragmented political role of civil society, and citizenship became attached to the national instead of the municipal sphere. The individual’s communal identity was therefore bifurcated.

Marx, in fact, takes an extra step and argues that the collapse of the old structure also destroyed the sense of commitment which had made civil society such a co-operative network. ‘The shaking off of the [feudal] political yoke’, he explained, ‘entailed the shaking off of those bonds that had kept the egoistic spirit of civil society fettered’ (McLellan, 1977, p. 56). In so far as this analysis is valid, it means that citizenship in the modern, broader sense could alone provide a feeling of communal togetherness (stiffened, of course, by the ideology of nationalism).

One further introductory point on this matter of the relationship between capitalism and citizenship: we have a picture of a movement from a hierarchical to an increasingly egalitarian society as the rights of citizenship became democratized. But we must examine this picture more closely because, lurking there, is the counterbalancing economic inequality induced by unfettered capitalism. This is how Bryan Turner has explained this ‘progress’: ‘The growth of modernity is a movement from de-jure inequalities in terms of legitimate status hierarchies to de-facto inequalities as a consequence of naked market forces where the labourer is defined as a “free” person’ (Turner, 1986, p. 136).

So, in various ways and with outcomes not all necessarily an advance on what had been left behind, capitalism facilitated the emergence of liberal citizenship. But the connection has not been a one-way process, it has been reciprocal; for citizenship, in turn, has supported capitalism. We have already seen how prominent in the list of citizens’ rights as drafted in the early years was the right of property ownership. In times of political upheaval this was a comforting formula for the middle classes. For instance, even the French Declaration of Rights of 1793, formulated by the radical Convention on the eve of the Terror, reiterated this right. The nervousness of the wealthy in the face of social and political upheaval provides another consideration, too: the damping down of civil discord by the broad concession of civil (i.e. legal) and political rights in practice affords a welcome calming of these fears. What is more, the middle classes benefited not just in this indirect manner. Chronologically it was they, not the working classes, who first had access to and made use of these civil and political rights of citizenship.

Nevertheless, the relationship between capitalism and citizenship has by no means been all mutual cosiness. In some circumstances citizenship has been threatening to capitalism and capitalism has been hostile to citizenship. The basic question has then arisen whether the state can ever, or indeed should ever, be a neutral observer when the interests of capitalism and citizenship are in collision.

One must, naturally, recognize that the state has an obligation to protect its citizens. How far does this extend? In practice, the state has often intervened on behalf of the citizen by curbing the absolute freedom of the capitalist to maximize his profit. This intervention has taken two main forms. One is by regulating the market by laws, for instance, against the formation of cartels and monopolies. The other is by increases in taxation on higher income and heritable wealth in order to fund welfare and educational services for the mass of citizens. For, particularly in the twentieth century, the belief that citizenship embodies social as well as legal and political rights has taken hold. Consider one illustration of this. Even in the Reagan–Thatcher era, when the Republican administration in the USA and the Conservative in the UK pursued quite radical neo-liberal free-market policies, the amounts spent by the governments on health and social security still increased. From 1979 to 1984 in the UK expenditure on health rose by 16 per cent and on social security by 26 per cent; from 1980 to 1984 in the USA expenditure on health rose by 38 per cent and on social security by 12 per cent. Taxation inevitably increased.

The capitalism–citizenship coin, however, has another side: the threat posed by capitalism to citizenship. We must not forget that the citizenship model presents a state composed of citizens of equal status, equally enjoying their rights and relating to the state by virtue of those rights and concomitant duties. Capitalism weakens this egalitarian political structure by giving primacy to economic relationships.

New class divisions open up, separating the wealthy entrepreneurs from the general populace, a gulf condoned by the liberal virtue of individual enterprise. For the successful, profit in the market place, not civic loyalty, gives social identification. For the rest, they are consumers of products and services, not citizens in the proper sense. The Citizen’s Charter published by the British Conservative government in 1991 lets the capitalist cat out of the civic bag: the text refers in a number of places to ‘customer’ and ‘client’ as if these were synonymous with ‘citizen’. The danger is that if citizenship is perceived as a set of rights to protect the individual qua consumer against some of the problems exposed by a private or privatized economy, then the need to preserve and improve the core rights of real citizenship will be lost to sight.

Marx, as one would expect, portrayed the hostility of capitalism to citizenship in the starkest of terms, as embedded in the very nature of the state. According to his interpretation, the modern state is a bourgeois state, the expression and protector of bourgeois interests. It follows that the state is incapable of resolving the conflict between capitalism and citizenship because it is not itself a disinterested party. Citizenship as a status and a value is therefore in reality nothing more than a sop, a cloak for the citizen’s impotence: ‘political man is only the abstract fictional man’ (McLellan, 1977, p. 56).

If there are two apparently contradictory arguments – that capitalism and citizenship are mutually supportive and mutually antipathetic – what conclusions can be drawn? There are two options.

The first is to settle for the view that the relationship is shot through with ambivalence. The modern state (certainly since the collapse of Communism) – swayed but gently by the doctrinal differences between moderate Left and Right political parties – juggles as best it can with guaranteeing both profit-making for the businessman and -woman and a measure of welfare and education for the general citizenry. In addition, there are two quite valid but different interpretations of the relationship between civil and political rights on the one hand and social rights on the other. One interpretation declares, following Marx, that th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 The Liberal Tradition
• 2 The Civic Republican Tradition
• 3 Who Are Citizens?
• 4 Multiple Citizenship
• 5 Problems and Resolutions
• References
• Select Reading List
• Index