Citizenship destabilized - Featured Topic - social and political aspects of citizenship, human rights, and immigration

Liberal Education, Spring, 2003 by Saskia Sassen

PRECISELY BECAUSE IT IS AN INSTITUTION deeply articulated with the national stare, citizenship is a useful lens through which to understand the particular issue I want to address in this talk. How do some of the major changes in our world, such as globalization and the human rights regime, affect the relationships between national states and their citizens? To what extent are these major global changes actually affecting this most national of institutions? Are they signaling the possibility of an emerging political subjectivity that partly lodges itself outside the national, but also changes the meaning of the national?

From a general perspective, one might say that not much has changed about citizenship. It remains deeply connected to the national state. As citizens we thrive in the national domain; it is where we can exercise the powers we have been formally granted. Not that we exercise those powers enough, but we have the option. And while there is a whole literature on post-national citizenship, on transnational citizenship, and on transnational identities that is beginning to map transformations, there is little disagreement that citizenship as a formal institution is still largely national.

Micro-transformations

I want to focus on micro-transformations in the institution of citizenship that affect the relation between citizens and their national state. Let me do this through three arguments. One of them is that citizenship is embedded. It is not a purely formal institution unaffected by its place and time. Citizenship is actually partly shaped and reshaped by the conditions that rule and mark a period, a time, and a place. Today we have globalization and a human rights regime. Do these become elements within which citizenship is partly embedded? And does this embeddedness alter some of the features about citizenship?

The second argument is connected to the first. Citizenship is an incomplete institution, and, importantly, it is not meant ever to be complete. It needs to be able to respond to new conditions, new claims, and new ideas about what citizenship entails. Being complete would mean closed, and hence a dead institution. It would then cease to be embedded and responsive to the environment. This incompleteness is multivalent: There have been times when it has led to enormous injustices and abuses. But overall, the strong trend historically has been to expand the domain of citizen's rights, as the amendments of the civil struggles of the 1960s show us. I want to show you some of the micro-elements that capture the incompleteness of this institution. I am reminded of an intriguing phrase coined by one of my colleagues at the University of Chicago, Cass Sunstein: "incompletely theorized agreements." I think of citizenship as a kind of incompletely theorized agreement between the state and its citizens.

The third element is that globalization has the effect of partly unbundling the unitary character of citizenship. Globalization makes legible the extent to which citizenship, which we experience as some sort of unitary condition, is actually made up of a bundle of conditions. Some of them are far less connected to the national state than the formal bundle of rights at the heart of the institution of citizenship. There are citizenship practices, citizenship identities, and locations for citizenship that are not as inevitably articulated with the national state as is the formal bundle of rights. And to the extent that I map these micro-elements, I can actually detect transformations, among them a weakening of the relationship of citizenship to the national state.

Let us start with these micro-elements that alter the citizen/subject. Although citizenship is highly formalized as an institution, one can see changes in our recent legislative constitutional history. The best-known changes are the 1960s Civil Rights Acts. That is, in many ways, a very recent event. It was quite an extraordinary event and accomplishment that these changes could be incorporated at the highest level of our formal political system. To me it signals the possibility of additional changes. That is what I mean when I say it's an "unfinished institution." Changing conditions, human rights, globalization: all these signal the possibility of additional transformations. In this sense, citizenship can never be a completed institution. It is, in its nature as a political form, an incompletely theorized contract between the state and the citizen, subject to amendments.

I have my own ideas as to what some of these changes might be. For instance, as a citizen I would like to have some say about how the budget is allocated, especially when it can allocate vast amounts to go to war or enormous tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich. One of my questions is whether, in this broader frame of the incompleteness of the institution, a time might come where we will have a much greater and direct say without going through legislators with their own agendas and, frequently, obligations to major donors. If we look at the Civil Rights period, these changes did not fall from the sky. It took enormous mobilizing. It took citizenship practices to get these changes instituted. And this citizens' work started on the street, so to speak, in the domain of non-formalized politics.