The Meaning of Citizenship

Index

INTRODUCTION

MARC KRUMAN AND RICHARD MARBACK

The essays assembled in this volume are drawn from the tenth anniversary conference of the Center for the Study of Citizenship. The theme of that conference, The Meaning of Citizenship, provided an appropriate opportunity to reflect on a decade of research in the study of citizenship. Formally chartered in 2002, with a director and advisors drawn from across the Wayne State University campus, the Center for the Study of Citizenship began as an effort to promote campus-wide interdisciplinary research and conversation about citizenship in its many permutations. Initial participants in the center’s efforts came together from across disciplines to bring their specific knowledge to bear on charting a single emerging field—the field of citizenship studies. This is not to say that the study of citizenship had previously gone unnoticed within academic disciplines. Far from it. The center’s focus on citizenship developed out of recognition that citizenship, as a concept central to modern civilizations, is a key concept across humanistic disciplines.

The idea of citizenship, an idea invoked so broadly across so many disciplines, is a necessarily dynamic idea. Unfortunately, such dynamic ideas often fail to pass disciplinary scrutiny, a failure that threatens to rob those vibrant ideas of some of their incisiveness. The idea of citizenship is no exception. A basic definition of citizenship useable across the widest possible array of disciplines describes citizenship in political terms, as a legitimate personal claim to certain rights, liberties, and immunities. According to this view, the study of citizenship would involve an exploration of such concepts as inclusion and exclusion, possession and dispossession, freedom and slavery, as well as identification with or alienation from a collectivity. In the modern era, the default collectivity associated with citizenship has been the nation-state or its political equivalent, a body with which individuals are legally identified, a body within which they enjoy relations of mutual obligation and privilege.

To articulate the idea of citizenship in terms of its political dimensions is to account for a great deal. At the same time though descriptions of political citizenship only begin to hint at the richer nuances of membership in a political community. There is a broader society beyond government, as Woodrow Wilson pointed out in his book The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (1897), Society, it must always be remembered, is vastly bigger and more important than its instrument, Government. Government should by no means rule or dominate it (636). Constituent members of society claim to be citizens within a particular polity not because they are legal subjects but because they find the relationships to a society and to fellow citizens to be useful, gratifying, or simply inevitable. As Wilson made clear, in modern democracies, the state exists for the sake of Society, not Society for the sake of the State. The relationship of citizens to a state, then, does not provide a comprehensive definition of citizenship because the potential associations citizens have with each other exceed relationships to the state. Again in Wilson’s words, one of the central limits of the state is that it cannot encompass necessary cooperation on the part of Society as a whole (636). Which is to say that citizenship is not exclusively political in nature, it is very much civic in nature as well. Citizens are people who have an opportunity and so a willingness to volunteer themselves to a broader enterprise, to sacrifice a certain amount of their individual autonomy in order to claim the benefits of membership in their communities. Richard Bellamy has recently identified these civic and political dimensions—as well as the tensions between the political and the civic—as fundamental to a definition central to the study of citizenship: So membership, rights and participation go together. It is through being a member of a political community and participating on equal terms in the framing of its collective life that we enjoy rights to pursue our individual lives on fair terms with others (Bellamy 2010, xix).

The political membership that is fundamental to any understanding of citizenship establishes conditions for citizens to make associations outside the political community. Recognizing that citizenship broadly understood requires people to give up some measure of their individual autonomy in exchange for the benefits of community membership weaves the study of citizenship into humanistic inquiry—specifically inquiry into the cultural, social, and political fabrics within which human beings live public and private lives. Understood in this way, the study of citizenship raises questions about the proper relationship between individual freedom and civic obligation, about ongoing exchanges between systems of public and private moralization, and about the shifting nature of self as it interacts dynamically with collective or alien forces. Across disciplines, scholars generally agree that human beings create structures, frameworks, and languages that bring order and meaning to their lives. As historian Kenneth Karst observed about the American polity in 1989, To speak of self-definition, of the sense of community, and of the community-defining functions of law [or politics] is not to identify different parts of a machine but to view a complex social process from several different angles (Karst 1989, 12–13). Language, literature, art—the media through which people express who they are—these are the means by which communities define themselves, placing humanistic inquiry at the very center of the study of citizenship.

Nor do scholars doubt that, since at least 1945, a relatively stable, state-centered system of global organization has been destabilized. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz reminds us, The function of ideology is to make an autonomous politics possible by providing the authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive images by means of which it can be sensibly grasped (Geertz 1973, 218). In the absence of such authoritative symbols, or with the introduction of new, multifaceted, or interlocking symbols—as when a person identifies simultaneously with profession, gender, family, and religion, as well as the state—society threatens to fragment. Alternative systems of identification appear, all of which compose topics long associated with humanistic research: the resurgence of religious doctrines and institutions; new political and social languages; the widespread acceptance of capitalism as both a political and economic ethos; and the transmutation of private systems of identification into primary, public categories.

As W. H. Auden put it, There is no such thing as the State / And no one exists alone / Hunger allows no choice / To the citizen or the police / We must love one another or die (Auden 1939). But still the character of human organization and self-identification scarcely resembles its post–World War II antecedent. These changes provide ample justification and fertile ground for sustained humanistic inquiry. In the end, the pursuit of happiness, a people’s ability to work collectively toward the Good, and individuals’ willingness to sacrifice degrees of freedom in combination, all seem to require close investigation not only of public structures (governments, laws, institutions) but also of shifting inner landscapes and the ways those changes remap the way that individuals connect themselves to others. As Hannah Arendt cautions, Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all citizens before the law; yet they acquire their meaning and function organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups or form a social and political hierarchy (Arendt 1973, 312).

Such reflections on the affordances that attend defining citizenship in terms of state-sanctioned rights and responsibilities as well as civic dispositions and valuations figured centrally in the establishment of the Center for the Study of Citizenship. At the same time, it was the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that gave compelling immediacy to those reflections on citizenship and community membership. The year of the first conference of the Center for the Study of Citizenship, 2003, brought together more than three hundred students, faculty, and members of the public to a two-day event titled The Many Faces of Patriotism. The conference planners aimed to encourage serious contemplation of patriotism and its complex relationship to nationalism, multiculturalism, dissent, and the events surrounding 9/11. Keynote speaker Dennis W. Archer, then president of the American Bar Association and former mayor of Detroit, joined panels of citizenship scholars from around the nation and from South Africa to deliberate these issues. A volume of essays drawn from the presentations, The Many Faces of Patriotism, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in January 2007.

In the ten years since 2003 that scholars have been gathering at Wayne State University to discuss the nature and meaning of citizenship, the conference has grown beyond the boundaries of the university to include scholars from across the nation and around the world. As the chapters included in this volume attest, scholars attend the conference from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, bringing to the event concerns and insights specific to their regions. With scholars from across the globe engaging one another in the study of citizenship, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry has evolved. As an identifiable field of scholarly inquiry, citizenship studies has experienced significant growth in the first decade of the millennium. Not only have issues of citizenship become more pressing over the last ten years, encouraging broader study by greater numbers of scholars, the study of citizenship has also enlarged its concerns and matured into an interdisciplinary field to which multiple academic disciplines make contributions. In an edited collection oriented more toward understanding citizenship in terms of membership in political communities, Citizenship, Richard Bellamy and Antonio Palumbo have included chapters covering the major themes of inclusion, rights, outsiders, and sovereignty. They have also included chapters on gender, diversity, and the environment, chapters without which the collection would seem incomplete. Outside the field of citizenship studies itself, across the range of academic disciplines, scholars are assessing the impact of citizenship on their particular fields of study. As documented in Citizenship in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Selective Bibliography, 2000–2009, traditional academic disciplines from anthropology, art, and business, to education, health, psychology, and sociology all share a robust concern for the study of citizenship. The over one thousand journal articles, chapters, and books listed in the bibliography are only representative of a decade of scholarship; as such, it is suggestive of the breadth and the depth of current research on citizenship issues.

As a forum for discussing these issues in all their disciplinary diversity, the Center for the Study of Citizenship constructs conversations that extend beyond the humanistic disciplines to include a broad spectrum of students, public officials, professionals of all kinds, entrepreneurs, and others, at home and abroad. Broad academic interest in citizenship reflects the immediacy of citizenship issues to a larger public. For this reason the mission statement of the Center for the Study of Citizenship commits the center to sustained exploration of actual, possible, or shifting relationships between citizens (that is, members of political, social, economic, religious, intellectual, or ethno-cultural communities) and the broader societies within which these identifications have meaning. Such explorations carry the concerns associated with humanism well beyond traditional boundaries.

A standard criticism of the kind of interdisciplinary research agenda we just defined is that such disciplinary diffuseness gathers under the umbrella of a concept like citizenship what is more precisely a series of distinct issues best addressed separately. According to this criticism those distinct issues, despite their relevance, do not, when taken together, add up to a coherent description of just what citizenship is. Certainly the connections are not always clear. For example, David Chaney’s Cosmopolitan Art and Cultural Citizenship (2002) does appear quite removed from Kibeom Lee and Natalie Allen’s Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Workplace Deviance (2002), which is itself removed from the issues Geraldine Boyle (2008) addresses in The Mental Capacity Act 2005: Promoting the Citizenship of People with Dementia?

These three references alone—to art, organizational behavior, and dementia—suggest the wide range of issues taken up within the interdisciplinary field of citizenship studies. Whatever else may be gained from such research, there are those who will argue that our attention is better focused on such traditional citizenship issues as, say, civic engagement, human rights, and representation in government. As central as these issues will always be to the proper study of citizenship, we believe their importance does not preclude sacrificing interdisciplinary inquiry. Quite the opposite. If we study issues of civic engagement and representation in government in isolation or even in relation to each other alone, we fail to fully grasp the human dimension that cultural, ethnographic, or gerontological studies provide, and we constrain those citizenship issues to a technocratic realm where their resolution becomes nothing more than a matter of better management. By enlarging our study of civic engagement or representation in government to the interdisciplinary inquiry of citizenship studies, we emphasize the central place of the person in our understanding as well as our resolution of those issues. Interdisciplinary inquiry helps us frame traditional citizenship problems as human problems that involve, among other things, artistic production, organizational behavior, and mental capacity, problems the resolution of which requires the attention, energy, and resolve of people invested in the well-being of their community.

The challenge to citizenship studies today is to continue to articulate as convincingly as possible that a wide range of concerns—from issues associated with art, with aging, with the environment, as well as with progress in technology—are issues of the nature of human belonging in political communities. These issues are the issues at the core of the meaning of citizenship. As a contribution to the conversation on the meaning of citizenship, this volume contains essays that elaborate four themes identified by Rogers Smith in his keynote address to the Tenth Annual Conference of the Center for the Study of Citizenship. Smith has been a major voice in the study of citizenship for over twenty years. His major contribution to the study of citizenship, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History, documents the history—for better and for worse—of the all-too-human struggle to shape the legal framework for citizenship in the United States. It is a chronicle of narrow-mindedness and unrealized ambitions. From this history Smith nonetheless concludes with the hope that Americans can realize the ambition of their civic ideals, and he presents to them a set of three tasks for doing so. He first recommends to scholars and teachers that they provide a more nuanced account of American history that precludes any mythologizing, so as to assist reflection from all points of view on the realities of American life, its potentials, and its limitations (Smith 1997, 505). He next tasks politicians to similarly forego mythologizing and to make the tough political compromises, challenging them to know when not to push too hard for reforms; but they must also recognize that hard choices in favor of liberal purposes must sometimes be made if they are not to give grimmer meaning to American national life (505). To American citizens he assigns the task of skeptical attachment and deliberate judgment: They must recognize that their ties are both to all the real people that inhabit their country, to whom their obligations are deep, and to the ideals which their nation should advance, to which their obligations are also deep even when those ideals point beyond, and against, their country’s narrower interests (505–6). Smith’s recommendations at the end of Civic Ideals remain prescient for a population of Americans increasingly divided by race and class whose government is stymied by polarizing partisan politics.

In his keynote address to the Tenth Annual Conference of the Center for the Study of Citizenship, published here in this volume, Smith reflects on the ongoing imperative for hard choices, skepticism, deliberateness, and open-mindedness in the form of four questions most critical to our current thinking about the conditions of citizenship:

1.How in theory and practice do we appropriately differentiate citizenship?

2.What are/ought to be the proper horizons of political citizenship (nation-state or other)?

3.What is/ought to be the character of politically sustainable and normatively appropriate civic bonds (including the means used to foster those bonds)?

4.How do we define and resolve conflicting civic and personal obligations?

The essays that follow respond to and elaborate on Smith’s four questions. The authors of these essays bring a breadth and depth of interdisciplinary background to their work, including ethnography, literary study, rhetorical analysis, and travel narrative. They also demonstrate the global resonance of Smith’s primary questions, focusing on experiences in Brazil, the Caribbean, Germany, Israel, and Pakistan. To highlight the relationship of the individual essays to each other, they are organized into four sections, one each for the four questions Smith raises.

In response to the question of how we ought to differentiate citizenship in both theory and practice, Lawrence Hatter, Nora Gottlieb, and Dani Kranz respond by considering the benefits as well as the drawbacks that attend our practices of differentiating ourselves and others as citizens. Dani Kranz in Expressing Belonging through Citizenship uses ethnographic interviews to reveal the dilemmas of national identification faced by third-generation Israeli citizens who are of German descent. On the one hand, these people feel like Yekkes, or Germans in Israel, even though they are, on the other hand, far more Israeli than German. Focusing on the strategic use of ambiguous national identity, Lawrence Hatter, in To Acquire the Equivocal Attributes of American Citizen and British Subject, looks back to the early years of the American republic, when the lines drawn between American citizenship and British subjecthood remained usefully malleable. Drawing attention to structural issues inherent in differentiating citizen from noncitizen, Gottlieb, in her essay State, Citizenship, and Health in an Age of Global Mobility, focuses on the current global expansion of migrant labor to show how policies excluding migrant workers from the health care entitlements of a host country’s citizens do not so much protect the rights of those citizens as reveal a more systemic erosion of the rights of all, citizens and noncitizens alike.

Authors who reflect on the theme of the proper horizons of political citizenship—the second of Smith’s four concerns—bring their distinct disciplinary perspectives to bear on the problems of identifying citizenship with nation-states. Karen Thomas-Brown, in Immigrant Teachers and Global Citizenship, describes the practice of training teachers in Jamaica for careers abroad, teaching in the highest-need urban schools in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. As Thomas-Brown makes clear, the specific geopolitical history of Jamaica has promoted a transnational identity that informs the pedagogical export of Jamaican teachers. Alternatively, in Exclusion, Island-Style, Kristy Belton examines the denial of rights to stateless persons living in The Bahamas and Dominican Republic, particularly persons of Haitian descent. As Belton argues, the denial of rights to Haitians living in The Bahamas and Dominican Republic demonstrates an ongoing need to preserve the formal recognition of state membership, if for no other reason than that nation-states retain the legal mechanisms for rights provisions. In his contribution to this volume, Justice for Border-Crossing Peoples, David Watkins encourages us to consider the question of political membership less in terms of categories of inclusion in and exclusion from nation-states and more in terms of people whose lives daily bring them back and forth across established national borders. ‘Free’ Men and African Colonization by Eugene Van Sickle returns to the early years of the American republic to describe how the organized movement to repatriate freed Africans reflects the ambiguity of American citizenship.

Smith’s third question regarding the sustainability and appropriateness of civic bonds is taken up by several authors who document the intricacies of institutional organization and individual participation. Candice Bredbenner, in Searching for the Civic Soul of the University documents the impact of World War I on the evolution of American colleges and universities into partners with the federal government in training students for military preparedness. Bredbenner finds in this history of higher education an institutional imposition of civic responsibilities. Jay Leighter asks, in his contribution, What Is an ‘Average Citizen?’ drawing on a case study of public meetings in Seattle, Washington, to document what people mean when they use the word citizen. Focusing on participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Teresa Melgar, in Voices from the Periphery, weighs the organization and commitment needed to sustain an expanded role for citizens in the management of their government. Howard Lupovitch argues in his essay, Citizenship and the Ambiguities of Jewish Self-Confidence, that the legal emancipation of Hungarian Jews in 1868 creates a legal demarcation that belies a far more complex and protracted history of a struggle for equal citizenship.

Finally, the essays that engage Smith’s fourth question asking how we define and resolve conflicting civic and personal obligations span time, space, and method. Gregory Garvey, in his essay, Democratic Hopes and Majoritarian Fears, argues for a revision of our understanding of Emerson in light of his responses to the presidential election of 1834. From his reading of Emerson’s journals, Garvey proposes a more nuanced view of Emerson, a person at one and the same time hopeful about participatory equality and skeptical of public sincerity. In her essay French Citizens and Muslim Law, Larissa Kopytoff analyzes the consequences that followed from passage in the French National Assembly in 1916 of a law extending French citizenship to colonial subjects in Senegal. As Kopytoff makes clear in her history, the silence in the law regarding, among other things, the status of Muslim law, created opportunities for contesting both colonialism and citizenship status. Finally, Jonah Steinberg, in his essay Writing Transnationality takes an autobiographical look at the experience of transnationality, recounting his travels among a global minority Muslim sect, travels he writes about in his book Isma‘ili Modern, a book that, as he puts it, moves across a terrain of relationships, intimacies, times, and spaces, the spinning and imagining of multiple overlapping maps and domains of mood and mind.

The four primary concerns identified by Smith and taken up by the contributors to this volume are as timely as they are timeless. Appropriately differentiating citizenship identities and their proper political horizons, clarifying the character of politically sustainable and normatively appropriate civic bonds, and establishing means for defining and resolving conflicting civic and personal obligations will remain primary concerns as long as people continue to live together in communities. The contributors to this volume demonstrate through their engagement with these concerns that the challenges to citizenship in our world today derive from a range of prior practices and require of us that we imagine interdisciplinary solutions. The contributors to this volume in this way advance an ongoing conversation about the full meaning of citizenship.

WORKS CITED

Abbott, Philip. 2007. The Many Faces of Patriotism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace.

Auden, W. H. 1939. September 1, 1939. First published in The New Republic, October 18, 1939. Available at www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/september-1-1939.

Bellamy, Richard. 2010. Introduction. In Citizenship, edited by Richard Bellamy and Antonio Palumbo. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Boyle, Geraldine. 2008. The Mental Capacity Act 2005: Promoting the Citizenship of People with Dementia? Health and Social Care in the Community 16 (5): 529–37.

Chaney, David. 2002. Cosmopolitan Art and Cultural Citizenship. Theory Culture and Society 19 (1–2): 157+.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Karst, Kenneth. 1989. Belonging to America: Equal Citizenship and the Constitution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lee, Kibeom, and Natalie A. Allen. 2002. Organizational Citizenship Behavior and Workplace Deviance: The Role of Affect and Cognition. Journal of Applied Psychology 87 (1): 131–42.

Smith, Rogers. 1997. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Van Loon, James E., and Hermina G. B. Anghelescu, eds. 2010. Citizenship in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A Selective Bibliography, 2000–2009. School of Library and Information Science Faculty Research Publications. Paper 1. http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/slisfrp/1.

Wilson, Woodrow. 1897. The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. Boston: Heath.

1

THE QUESTIONS FACING CITIZENSHIP IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

ROGERS M. SMITH

As the plethora of outstanding scholarship at the extraordinary Tenth Anniversary Conference of the Wayne State Center for the Study of Citizenship confirmed, serious and sustained academic attention to a wide range of citizenship topics has expanded dramatically in many disciplines since I first began studying American citizenship more than three decades ago. Although I have tried to attend to the growth of that scholarship and the real-world events that have spurred it over time, neither I nor, I venture to say, any other single person can authoritatively delineate the full scope and significance of citizenship developments occurring now and in the years ahead. Yet in an age in which there are many pressures to hyperspecialize, it is valuable from time to time to try to map out the big picture onto which our more particular scholarly endeavors fit. In that spirit, this chapter offers an account of the main questions facing both scholars and practitioners of citizenship in the twenty-first century.

As preliminaries, let me note that there are many definitions of citizenship, including legal membership that entitles one to hold a passport from a nation-state; persons who are entitled to rule as well as be ruled within some sort of democratic or republican regime; persons who as a sociological matter are members of communities of shared fate, whatever their legal statuses in those communities; persons who engage in active service in virtually any type of human association, whether political, civil, private, or even divine, as in St. Augustine’s City of God; and persons who simply are members of such associations.¹ In common parlance, all these identities and statuses and more are sometimes called citizens. Although we may rightly identify different conceptions as our specific concerns in particular analyses, I suggest we cannot avoid the fact that any and all uses of the terms citizen and citizenship will often tacitly invoke a whole range of other meanings. So the broad endeavor of studying citizenship cannot rule any of these meanings wholly out of consideration. To try to do so probably means that we will fail to grasp important dimensions of the phenomena of citizenship we profess to be focusing on in our inquiries.

As a second preliminary, like the great bulk of recent scholarship, I presume that all the different forms of membership, activity, and identity that we may call citizenship are products of social and political processes of construction, and indeed, all are also always part of processes of continuing and changing social and political construction and demolition. Scholars are, to be sure, far from agreed on just how to theorize those processes, and we face a daunting array of empirical questions in describing and explaining them, as well as a perhaps still more daunting array of normative questions when we seek to evaluate those processes and the forms of citizenship they have generated and are generating. But virtually all scholars of citizenship, certainly including me, believe they are engaged in a shared endeavor of trying to understand and/or evaluate the social and political processes through which the many things called citizenship are created and changed. Most believe this endeavor holds the promise of helping us and others to think how we might best live the forms of citizenship that are available to us or that we can hope to create.

This chapter briefly identifies four large questions of citizenship that I regard as the main ones facing those of us who are engaged in these endeavors of inquiry and of life choice today, in the still-new twenty-first century. These questions have empirical and normative dimensions that are closely linked, and they are all linked to each other, though they are distinct enough to merit separate mention. The four are (1) the question facing both democratic theory and democratic governance of appropriately differentiated citizenship; (2) the question of the proper horizon or horizons of political citizenship; (3) the question of the character of politically sustainable and normatively appropriate civic bonds; and (4) the question of defining and resolving conflicting civic and personal obligations.

The first question, of appropriately differentiated citizenship, has been made central to me through studies of the arc of American civic development in the twentieth century (Smith 2012). But I see it as a central question around the world, in every regime that professes to be some kind of modern democracy or republic, as today most regimes do. The question has become more visible in the United States in the course of its modern history. At the dawn of the twentieth century, due to the clash of the egalitarian post–Civil War amendments with resurgent doctrines and practices of racial as well as ethnic, gender, religious and class inequality, American laws were structured in ways that created putatively equal but visibly first- and second-class forms of citizenship: the second-class forms were enacted in Jim Crow segregation laws; the related voting tests and poll taxes that disfranchised many of the poor and illiterate of all races; domestic spheres or republican motherhood gendered citizenship laws; the systems of imperial governance of Spanish American war territories and Native American reservations; the segregation by race, gender, class, and religion in systems of public education in much of the nation and at all levels, and much more.

These forms of putatively equal, effectively second-class citizenship led American citizenship struggles in the twentieth century to focus most on achieving legally equal citizenship, understood as unitary or uniform citizenship—citizenship in which all citizens would legally possess exactly the same bundle of rights and duties, especially voting rights, property rights, and due process rights. Separate could not be equal citizenship, for the races, for the genders, for any subgroup of citizens.

Or it seemed to many, as the battles to enfranchise women, overthrow segregation laws, and establish national antidiscrimination laws were fought during the first two-thirds of America’s twentieth century. But even then, many—perhaps even most—who worked on behalf of those causes were not really attracted to, much less committed to, a political society that would be fully color-blind, gender-blind, religion- and culture-blind, one in which all citizens were seen as individuals with identical rights and duties, regardless of other, differing features of their identities. The views of figures like Philip Randolph, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Pauli Murray could not adequately be so described. But they thought the prevailing forms of racial and gender civic differentiation, especially, were clearly unjust, and they joined together under the banner of equal citizenship, widely understood as unitary citizenship, in order to achieve coalitions potent enough to attack those forms of second-class citizenship with considerable success.

But in the last third of the twentieth century, an array of empirical realities and normative considerations became more and more clear. The empirical reality is that neither the United States nor any other democratic society ever has had or ever will have full unitary, uniform legal citizenship. The considerations that contribute to this empirical reality are that in many respects, it does not seem defensible or desirable to define meaningfully equal citizenship as unitary, uniform citizenship. These are facts that the very triumphs of civil rights struggles on behalf of equal citizenship can lead us to ignore or deny, in ways that ill equip us to deal with many of the central challenges that democratic civic governance as well as democratic theories and citizenship theories face today.

The empirical reality that the laws of democratic societies never establish fully uniform unitary citizenship is easily shown. Any democracy large enough to have cities, states or provinces, and a national government has at least three levels of citizenship, and the rights and obligations of citizens are sure to vary somewhat between different cities and states and between those levels and national citizenship. Sometimes quasi-colonial forms of territorial citizenship also exist. Some citizens are native-born, almost always some are not, and the latter usually face some legal vulnerabilities the former do not. Some people are able to claim two or more legally recognized national citizenships, some are not. The very young and the severely mentally disabled usually do not possess all the rights of other citizens. For certain very limited but far from trivial legal purposes, corporations are often legally recognized as kinds of citizens and sometimes can claim multiple citizenships, but they are obviously not citizens like any others. A particular society’s laws also cannot help but accommodate some religious and cultural practices, sexual orientations, and physical and mental abilities more than others, and this reality among others often leads to successful demands for explicit, counterbalancing legal accommodations for various sorts of minority groups. The reality of legal construction of citizenship in all societies, then, is and will always be differentiated citizenship, not fully uniform, unitary citizenship.

And the truth is, for many differing and often conflicting reasons, that is the way most people believe things ought to be. Many see advantages to having different levels of governance and permitting diversity in the laws of different cities and states or provinces even within the same nation-state. Few in any modern democracy agree that it is just or beneficial to confine citizenship exclusively to the native-born, even though that is how John Rawls theorized about it. Few agree that the very young or severely mentally disabled should possess exactly the same rights as able adults. Most want legal rules that allow corporations to sue and be sued in turn and so find it practical to assign them some kinds of legal citizenship.

More controversially, some still believe, on the one hand, that some traditional laws privileging certain religious, gender, and even racial and ethnic identities over others remain appropriate. And many believe, on the other, that the greatly varying histories, unequal current conditions, and the differing aspirations of particular racial, religious, cultural, and economic groups and persons of different sexes and sexual orientations make it appropriate for laws to treat them differently in important respects. Many think that groups historically subjected to unjust imperial subjugation and/or racial, religious, and gender discrimination, producing economic hardship and social marginalization, merit some forms of affirmative aid and accommodation. Many believe that equality requires restructuring institutions to serve persons with a variety of disabilities as fully as those with more conventional capacities. And some think that special accommodations are warranted even for groups that have not experienced past injustices or other forms of special hardship.

The philosopher Robert Audi, for example, defends a protection of identity principle, holding that the deeper a set of commitments is in a person, and the closer it comes to determining that person’s sense of identity, the stronger the case for protecting the expression of those commitments tends to be, even if this requires exemption from laws applying to all other citizens (Audi 2011, 42). Audi is thinking of exemptions for religious conscience but stresses the principle applies more broadly, to any deeply valued identities. One might argue that he therefore is defending a kind of unitary citizenship, because all are entitled to accommodations for their deeply valued identities. But in practice, this approach means that citizens will possess bundles of rights and duties that are significantly different in their specific content.

Despite this range of normative beliefs and empirical practices, in modern American political rhetoric and in modern political theories more broadly, the bitter historical experiences with legal forms of putatively equal, effectively subordinating second-class citizenship have fostered great and in many ways salutary resistance to recognizing the legitimacy of differentiated citizenship. But understandable as it is, I submit that the time for such resistance is over. We need to recognize that in reality, governments create and sustain forms of differentiated citizenship all the time. There is always a danger that doing so creates or sustains forms of unjust subordination and domination. There is also always a danger that failing to do so sustains structures of citizenship that are formally equal, but that are in reality, for many important purposes, highly unequal civic statuses. Theories of democracy and citizenship must take the question of what kinds of differentiated citizenship are appropriate in particular, ever-changing contexts as one of their most central questions, as most have not done until now. And we need to recognize that one of the central tasks of democratic governance is to determine on a continuing basis what kinds of differentiated citizenship are and are not appropriate, recognizing that the answers are likely to shift over time and must always be seen as legitimately contestable. So, this first question, the question of appropriately differentiated citizenship, is a very big one indeed.

So is the closely related second question—the issue of the proper horizon or horizons for citizenship. By this I mean above all the question of how far and in what ways we should think about citizenship in the twenty-first century not primarily and paradigmatically as membership in a sovereign nation-state, and should instead think of citizenship far more extensively as involving membership in other sorts of political communities or, indeed, multiple political communities, all of which claim some authority but none of which presents itself as fully sovereign. In this regard, the scholarly literature on citizenship has gone through a cycle that many have noted. In the late 1980s and 1990s, various works by scholars including Yasemin Soysal, David Held, and others began to proclaim that the era of the nation-state was over, that we were seeing simultaneous moves toward new transnational forms of political community like the European Union and new forms of devolution, such as the establishment of greater autonomy for Scotland and Wales in the United Kingdom and Catalonia in Spain (Soysal 1994; Held 1995). Some like Held celebrated these developments as steps toward a cosmopolitan world federation governed by the old Catholic principle of subsidiarity—problems would be dealt with by the most local level of democratic government capable of resolving them (e.g., Held 2003, 471). Others like Saskia Sassen quickly pointed out that we were seeing transnational arrangements that profited cosmopolitan elites who resided in multiple global cities and benefited from the transnational labor of poor migrants, but these arrangements did not obviously promote either economic or political equality (Sassen 1998). And soon, a wave of scholarship argued that it was premature to proclaim anything approach the death of nation-states. They still decisively shape transnational and subnational political associations and remain hegemonic in structuring citizenship and much else, even if they are far from uncontested.

I agree that the era of the predominance of nation-states is not ended, but I am also conscious that it is in fact a relatively recent development in world history—the age of religious and secular multinational empires is not long or even entirely past—that nation-states have not been even in the last century the only form of political community, and that they are indeed undergoing a range of challenges and transformations. The book that received the Wayne State Center for the Study of Citizenship’s first book award, Jonah Steinberg’s Isma‘ili Modern (2011), is, for example, a fascinating account of how, with the initial aid of the British empire, the Isma‘ili Muslim sect led by the Agha Khan has formed a globe-spanning, relatively wealthy, transnational community with its own constitution, laws, educational, cultural, political, and economic institutions. Its more than two million members are supposed to abide by the laws of the nation-states in which they reside, but often they are more effectively governed through their distinctive institutions, and many feel themselves Isma‘ili first, Tajik or Pakistani or Kenyan or English decidedly second.

And though it is true that the project of the European Union that excited many scholars in the 1980s and 1990s has now stumbled over the nationalistic opposition of many of its members, many North Atlantic scholars have so far missed the fact that at its sixth summit in November 2012, the Union of South American Nations, representing Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela, approved a process to advance in a flexible and gradual manner toward the consolidating of the South American identity . . . with the aim of attaining a true South American citizenship as the backbone of an integrated South American space (Ishmael 2012). Some leaders hope to establish formal South American citizenship within the next ten years. Whether this will happen is, of course, an open question. But the point is that there is indeed a range of developments that raise pressing empirical questions as to whether and why the nation-state as the horizon of the most important forms of citizenship may be giving way to new forms of political association, and what those new forms will be. They are accompanied by perhaps even more pressing questions about whether the organization of the world primarily as a Westphalian system of nation-states is as desirable from the standpoint of promoting egalitarian democratic citizenship and material well-being as other arrangements. I have argued in favor of seeking to transform our memberships into more fluid and overlapping semisovereign democratic communities of various sorts, but I have many doubts about how empirically feasible and normatively desirable this trajectory really is (Smith 2003). So my point now is simply that the question of the appropriate horizon or horizons for citizenship, in both its manifold empirical and normative dimensions, has to