Mojca Pajnik

Aporias of Citizenship and Prospects for an Active Citizenship Approach

Mojca Pajnik is a scientific counselor at the Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social

and Political Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, an assistant professor at the University of

Ljubljana, and, currently, a visiting fellow at the University of Florence.

E-mail: mojca.pajnik@mirovni-institut.si

Constraints in Citizenship Traditions: Towards the Recovery of Political Engagement

The paradoxes and conflicts within the contemporary phenomenon of citizenship arise, on the

one hand, from contrasts between two predominant citizenship traditions, liberal and

republican, and, on the other, from their dominant interpretations. These mainly depart from

T. H. Marshall’s triadic conceptualization of rights (civil, political and social rights) from the

1950s. The majority of interpretations, not to mention the level of institutional understanding

and policy formation, still view citizenship in terms of duties and obligations that citizens

need to fulfill as social beings. However, this is a legitimate position for understanding

citizenship only if considered from the standpoint of citizenship interpreted as social

membership out of a need, i.e. a need to perform specific social functions. This paper argues

that such an understanding, which encompasses elements of the utilitarian tradition, follows

from the waning of the memory of “political citizenship” or of what is developed in this paper

as “active citizenship”. The minimizing of political citizenship goes together with claims of

the decline or the end of citizenship that are adopted in the name of the reinforcement of

institutional management, or, to put it differently, for the pursuance of a more technocratic

application of citizenship.

Elements that enable us to theorize citizenship politically, beyond the prevailing

instrumentality of the concept, can be found in the classical Greek tradition, in the notion of

Aristotelian polis as a space and practice of citizens’ political engagement. Citizenship of the

polis was related to the notion of a public sphere, and of public engagement of citizens who

deliberate on res publica, common issues of a public character. Citizenship was

preconditioned by bios politikos, political living, Öffentliche Leben, as Habermas (1962/1989)

put it decades ago, or vita activa in terms of Arendt’s (1967) theorizing of the political

conditions for living in the world.

Certainly the positioning of Greek polis as a practice of citizenship did not go by unnoticed

for its exclusionary mechanisms. Critiques from feminist standpoints of the polis version of

citizenship that started to emerge in the late 1970s argued that political activity of the polis

was only possible because of the naturalization of oikos as a private sphere of necessity to

which large parts of the population were confined. Several feminist authors (Okin 1979,

Elshtain 1981) argued against Aristotelian citizenship since it excluded women, older people,

children, the disabled, and “foreigners” (metoikoi) from the political life of the polis.

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According to these interpretations, it is not correct to treat the polis solely as a variation of

political citizenship, since it can only be properly understood by a parallel characterization of

oikos as a sphere that necessitated the life of many. Still, even those critical of the privileged

notion of citizenship in Athenian democracy recognize that, despite the exclusionary elements

of polis, the zoon politikon activity embraced the notion of “political citizenship”, of active

citizenry, oriented towards the “care for the world” principle.

The medieval period, as Weber (1921/1968) has shown in his study on the European city, saw

citizens as inhabitants of towns, as subjects defined by specific urban relationships (with the

privileged legal position of male citizens who were obliged to enter military service). The

political elements of town-related-citizenship can be found in some specific practices of

citizens’ engagement in towns (the example of political and economic life in towns in Italy,

i.e. Genoa or Florence). To the contrary, elements of political citizenship cannot be found in

the representational performances of medieval authorities. Rather then having to do with

citizenship, these appear as apolitical practices of representation. As Habermas has shown in

his widely cited study on the structural transformation of the public sphere, medieval

authorities did not act to enable and stimulate citizens’ activity; rather, they understood public

engagement in terms of their own public performances, displaying themselves as the

embodiment of some higher power. These authorities practiced representation not so much of

citizens, which was a desirable practice after the introduction of the liberal tradition, but in

front of them. They introduced citizenship as exhibits of self-promotion of those in power

(Habermas 1962/2001: 7-8). Habermas has shown how the processes of societalization or, as

he has put it, depoliticization that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries (with the exception

of coffee-shop culture as a political domain in Western Europe) has led to the formation of the

liberal theory of citizenship. Liberalism introduced citizenship in the tradition of

argumentation of social contract theorists, i.e. the Hobbesian politike techné principle that

treated politics, and consequently the notion of citizenship, as a necessity, as a formal status

or an expression of privileged membership. From the 18th century onwards, citizenship was,

in various sociological and legal traditions, mostly interpreted as an instrumental concept that

exists in the service of the representational elite and the reproduction and development of the

social system.

The introduction and the pursuance of a formalist understanding of citizenship diminished the

attempts to view citizenship as a political concept with emancipatory potential. Early 20th

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century sociology, in the spirit of the functionalist tradition, reduced citizenship to a

privatistic and a prepolitical status. Sociological empiricism together with the mercantilist

ideals, according to which the marketplace, if regulated, can assure equal opportunities to

access the market for all, accelerated the a-political or anti-political understanding of

citizenship. This was not only confined to the exclusivity of the national state model (contrary

to the previous town-related-citizenship), but was also – through the promotion of

egalitarianism and the principle of access to the market for all – subjected to the logic of profit

and capitalist development. The subjection of citizenship to sociological inquiry, which

treated it as social membership, as a need for the reproduction of the system based on statuses,

together with the economic paradigm of development and prosperity, produced a situation

where the “common interest” (interest of the public or of the citizenry) was established as a

condition sine qua non of the liberal state. This appears as an “enterpreneurial state”

(Habermas 2000:53) that uses common interest ideology to sustain a kind of collective,

obligatory interest, which does not preclude citizens’ engagement but promotes citizenship as

a principle of inclusion in or exclusion from privileged membership.

The limits of liberal conceptions of citizenship have been critically addressed by several

authors, by theorists of postnational (Soysal 1994, Habermas 2001), or transnational (Balibar

2004) citizenship, as well as by theorists who point to gender deficits in the liberal tradition

(Yuval Davis and Werbner 1999, Lister 1997). These critiques point out, to put it bluntly, that

citizenship as membership of the national state functions as an apparatus that gives legitimacy

to public administration, and support to the system of market economy that consists of

“citizens” as private persons and their social work. Here the aspirations of citizenship are

reduced to the connections between the socio-private interests of citizenry and the interests of

the state apparatus. This is the relation that produced a Western type of liberal capitalism,

where citizenship has become a type of consumer good. In addition, the understanding of

citizenship as membership out of need promotes the national state as an ethnically solid

society, which is an attitude that produces the exclusion of those who are defined as non-

citizens, “illegals”, and in other ways demarcated “others”. Along these lines citizenship has

appeared as a marker between the insiders (the “nationals”) and the “outsiders” (migrants as

“non-nationals”) (Bauböck 2006: 19) or between “national legitimate citizens” and “migrants

as subjects, residents and the precarious” (Balibar 1993: 56).

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The liberal version of citizenship has been criticized for being limited in its reach, since it did

not associate democracy with citizen deliberation, but with the manufacture of a thin legal

framework to enable maximal effectiveness of an economically oriented society. As such, the

liberal model of citizenship, legitimized by the thin theory of rights, introduced the “drying

out of the public” (Habermas 1962/2001), and the triumph of particularistic and

individualized interests. These are put forward by bodies of institutional politics as ready-

made decisions with the purpose of gaining citizen’s recognition, and thus legitimization, but

not their involvement. Citizens were introduced as recipients of policies, and as bearers of

rights, which presupposes a passive conceptualization of both citizenship and the notion of

human rights. The classical liberal theory, as Delanty (2000: 10) has noted, with the

introduction of the formalist, state-centered project, managed to reproduce the detachment of

citizens from political activity. The mere fact of citizens’ recognition was now required to

gain legitimacy for policy-making, and not active engagement that would embrace the idea

developed by Arendt, of “world-care”.

The conceptualization of citizenship as exclusive membership of national states, or of

citizenship as a necessity did not remain unchallenged. After the civil society movements in

the 1980s in Central and Eastern Europe, the opportunity arose to develop a new kind of

citizenship-state-based model, which would build upon the bitter experiences of

totalitarianism and would evade the traps of Western liberal capitalism with its pervasive

consumerism. However, recent analysis of citizenship in the new states (Jalušič 2003) that

emerged as new sovereign political units in Central and Eastern Europe (i.e. Slovenia,

Croatia, and the Baltic states) has shown the obliteration of hopes for the emergence of

citizenship as a new political project.

These countries have witnessed the erosion of the concept of collective rights in social terms,

when social rights are neglected, and when the individual is reintroduced as the bearer of

rights, and the state legitimized in its role as protector of the rights against infringement. As a

consequence of globalization and the market-based economy, as well as of the new national

state contexts, this region has also been overwhelmed by new totalitarian temptations – even

if they differ from those confronted in the former times of communism, they are no less

problematic and dangerous. They have been connected with the issues of migration, refugees

and diverse identities, and with the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion for various

population groups that are not nationally defined or otherwise assimilated. They might be

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even more dangerous, since these new examples rarely exhibit the case of a “vampiric state”

that wants to control everything in the leviathan manner. Rather, it is the case of a different,

much more dispersed, “social totalitarianism of true mass society” and its compulsive

homogenization, which develops in line with a relatively weak state ruled by law, weak

protection of rights and, consequently, overall normalization of the practices of exclusion and

discrimination. These temptations proceed against a background of strong neo-liberal

discourse, which stimulates policies of discrimination that take place under the aegis of social,

political and ethnic diversification (Ibid.).

Theorizing the constraints of citizenship traditions nowadays requires that one unpack not

only the fallacies of the liberal tradition of treating citizenship as an exclusive form of social

membership, and of consumerist neoliberal applications in “older” or “newer” states, but also

the critical treatment of the republican model. The fallacy of the republican understanding of

citizenship is that, as with the liberal model, it did not recognize the need for intersubjective

communication between private and public autonomy. The simultaneous treatment of citizens

as private and public beings is a precondition for the pursuance of a political understanding of

citizenship. Lacking political dimensions, republican citizenship advocated an overly

idealistic connection between democracy and citizens’ virtues: it viewed individuals as

virtuous and committed to the noble cause of assuring the “public good”. An additional

fallacy is that, in its understanding of deliberation, republican views derive from a culturally

determined background, rooted in tradition, and a predetermined set of customs, all of which

eventually links citizenship to actual policies of exclusion (Pajnik 2005).

Citizenship, Nationality and Conceptualizations of Rights

The predominant modern conception of citizenship that has been concentrated on a dialogue

between the liberal and the republican tradition, evolved in a context of possessive

individualism driving ideas of social development. This was applied to the national state as

the body of implementation. Such a conception that introduced citizenship as membership

was based on the idea that membership in society must rest on a principle of formal equality.

Human rights were naturalized as a premise of citizenship equality, and Marshall’s theory of

citizenship, resting on a principle of ensuring formal equality, provided the legitimate

theoretical basis for such an understanding of citizenship.

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In his Citizenship and Social Class from 1950, Marshall’s tendency was to shift citizenship

from an overly heavy reliance on a market-based model of society to a state-welfare based

model. He extended the dualistic, rights-based model of citizenship that rested on civil and

political rights, to include social rights. The civil rights that include equality before the law,

freedom of speech, religious liberty and the right to property, and the political rights that

evolve around formal rights of participation, i.e. the right to vote and to get elected, or to form

political associations were supplemented by his introduction of social rights; these concentrate

on the welfare of citizens, whereby the state is to guarantee a minimum of social and

economic “rights”, such as housing, education, social and health security, unemployment

benefit, pensions etc.

Theorizing the renewal of citizenship as a political project requires that one address

Marshall’s theory by pointing out what appears as its salient problem, that is its lack of the

concept of political action, and its predominant view of the citizenry as a recipient body.

Marshall’s concept of citizenship takes “statuses bestowed on those who are full members of

a community” (Marshall 1950: 28) as a citizenship precondition. This said, his model can also

be viewed as a contribution to and not as a disruption of the predominant receiver-giver

structure of society – despite the fact that he introduced the triadic conceptualization for

completely opposite reasons.

Marshall sensed that the problem with the mercantilist development of citizenship was that it

deprived citizens of social welfare, which is why he introduced the notion of social rights.

Despite its corrective potential, his theoretical endeavor eventually supported a society of

divisions. It appears that the triadic model was not sufficiently innovative to change the

existing relations that support the passive citizenship approach. As Delanty (2000: 21) has put

it, rather than enhancing the power of citizens, citizenship as a nation-state-based-on-rights

project that naturalizes the nation-state as the exclusive citizenship unit eventually served the

structures of capitalist inequality. The problem in Marshall’s conceptualization is that he left

the social structure intact, i.e. he theorized equality by the introduction of rights, but he put

aside his rightful remark that “capitalism is a system not of equality, but of inequality”

(Marshall 1950: 92). Some authors (Barcellona 1988, Zolo 1994) have theorized the

impossibilities of marshallian social rights along the lines of their division from political and

civic rights: while the latter are defined once and for all and (at least in a normative

framework above the national-state interests), social rights are dependent on the autonomy of

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the market and of the national (and international) economic sphere. As such “social rights” are

by the very definition “conditionalized” and “imperfect” rights that serve to cover up the

inequalities and social differences (Barcellona 1988: 20, 24) – if they are rights at all – Zolo

(1994: 11, 32-33) for example, speaks of them as “social services” or of “simple consumer

rights”. In addition, along with political and civil rights social rights and their projection in

social citizenship “correlates” with the process of “nationalization of citizenship” (Balibar

1993: 69).

The welfare state model that departed from the utopian idea of peaceful coexistence between

democratic citizenship and capitalism, and nourished an ideal of the production of a better

way of life, has failed to embrace the potential for “active citizenship” in the sense of

engaging citizens in formulating public policies. Migration, for example, has shown the

shortcomings of the understanding of welfare regimes. The fallacy of such social organizing

is that it treats citizens solely as clients of welfare, and not as partners in communication. In

addition, it promotes the ideal of self-achievement through hardship and exclusion of indigent

“outsiders”. This is an indicator that points to exclusionary policies with predictable

consequences: the selective inclusion or the total exclusion of migrant populations from the

thin concept of rights, as well as their exclusion from the dominant signifiers, among which

national identity appears as the most sustained and difficult to negotiate.

Habermas has argued that such social organization produced a revival of Smith’s hard

economy principle of supposedly “helping people to help themselves”, where – for those

included – the failure to meet the demands of the welfare regime falls on individuals

themselves. The welfare state consequently reinforced client relationships, but, as Iris Marion

Young has claimed, the welfare distributive paradigm of justice also reinforced

depoliticization by reducing public debate to distribution, reducing it thus on the market

analogy. Young speaks about the “insurgency” of a welfare capitalist society and develops the

claim that a distributive paradigm “functions ideologically to reinforce depoliticization of

citizenship” (Young 1990: 66). To add to this, the welfare ideals left out the “non-nationals”

who, as “migrants for life”, find themselves doubly burdened: not only are they themselves

responsible for any possible failure to integrate into the dominant society; the bigger problem

is that the majority are not even recognized as those who can integrate. They are instead

trapped between the borders of the welfare regime and remain there to sustain the limits of

rights.

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It has become evident that modern apolitical conceptualizations of citizenship lack the

potential to adequately address contemporary relations and communications of dispersed

populations. Predominant conceptions are not able to think anew the theories and practices of

dispersed citizens’ activity. Concomitant with the ideas of multicultural citizenship and its

critique of the shortcomings of the liberal conception, it should be added that peoples’

relations nowadays also pose a question of cultural rights. These provide a supplement to

Marshall’s triadic model – with the idea of encompassing the notion of diverse and changing

cultural practices. In addition, complex relations that transgress national borders and cultural

boundaries point to the need for a redefinition of political rights as well. These should be

rethought to enable the transgression of current celebrations of procedural citizenship practice

embedded in the system of voting rights. The renewed political rights would bring the

recognition that citizens use other channels to act politically, i.e. public manifestations, civic

activities or community engagement.

In Marshall’s model, citizens have no place in the formulation of rights that in principle

should not be posed aside from the question of citizen participation. This makes such a model

a detached one, since, eventually, it has little to do with the agency involved; the agency is not

treated as a partner in communication, but as a recipient of policies. This becomes apparent in

contemporary migratory policies that are reproduced in detachment from migrants. The

approach of political citizenship practice would, in contrast, make the biographical plans of

migrating women and men a starting point for policy development, and not a marginal note to

it.

Marshall’s conceptualization would also require the decoupling of citizenship and nationality.

The predominant modern model of citizenship took as its precondition the following

parameters: nation-state sovereignty, territorially defined borders, and homogenous, or, in

Balibarian terms, fictively homogenous ethnicity. With the introduction of the modern nation-

state, nationality became the precondition for membership in the nation-state as the exclusive

polity that is, however, not a polity in political terms (Bellamy and Mason 2003). Modern

citizenship, established on the nationality principle, solidified the notion of ethnicity, and it

also introduced, through compulsory education, the notion of culturally unified identities.

Around these, if we refer to parameters defining the Westphalian nation-state model

contextualized by Fraser (2005), boundaries supported by national media, national languages,

national politics, and national economy were built.

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Over the course of the 20th century the articulation of the national, the “national substance”

and of related claims for territorial sovereignty have been consolidated as the “natural” human

condition. Territorial belongings and identities confined within the national state borders

constituted citizenship along the lines of national affiliations and ethnic homogeneity.

Consequently, the predominant model of citizenship evolved as a “weak” citizenship concept

that had developed along side the production of exclusionary practices of nationalism, racism

and xenophobia.

Although the actual patterns of living and practicing citizenship develop beyond national

borders and beyond the concept of ethnicity, many recent theoretical endeavors still

presuppose the national state as the guarantor of citizens’ rights. Contemporary migrations

show that migrants even when granted citizenship in terms of formal membership in a

nationally defined society, are excluded from participation in society. What appears as a

“paradox of human rights” (Pajnik 2007: 857) can actually be ideally viewed in migration

policies. These adopt the discrepancy between the attitude of granting rights to citizens and

“protecting” national sovereignty. To add to this, migrants are addressed as non-national

receives of rights and are prevented from being incorporated into the national body. And if

and when they are incorporated, meaning, to use Soysal’s explanation, “well adjusted”,

adapting to the life patterns of the nation-state, they tend to remain at a disadvantage, as

incomplete nationals, destined to remain less than complete. Thus a situation emerges where

individual rights as a heritage of the liberal tradition appear coercive, because their

implementation, having been left to the nation-state, is practiced as a mechanism primarily

aimed at protecting the majority culture.

A counterpart to the paradoxical situation related to human rights was elaborated by

Habermas (2001: 65), who opted for a change in the law at large in a direction enabling

citizens to be not only the bearers or subjects of rights, but also their authors. Habermas’s

discourse theory of law and his reinterpretation of the system of rights require the effort of

opting for public deliberation to enable a situation where citizens communicatively engage

with one another in a public sphere. This reformulation includes “some kind of collective

rights” that shatter the modern state tailored to non-negotiable individual rights. Still, the very

disparity between these rights and the sovereignty principle seem to leave the Habermasian

model at the level of descriptive aspiration.

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Discursive changes would only be possible within a transformed notion of citizenship that

would deal actively with this discrepancy and that would overcome the exclusive models of

citizenship anchored in national sovereignty and primordial membership. Nowadays, several

challenges have emerged to address the different global and transnational forms of

citizenship. These observations do not mean that the concept of state has become meaningless

when addressing transnational citizenship practices, but it does point to certain fallacies of

citizenship reduced to the national contexts and national policies of the (non)fulfillment of

rights. To add to this, new kinds of rights are emerging, related, for example, to ecology, or,

to the domain of technology – rights that await debate along the lines of “a new kind” of

transnational citizenship practice.

New Challenges for Citizenship

In her book Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe

published in 1994, Soysal challenged the prevailing citizenship model based on the principle

of national sovereignty. The book articulated a plea for the disruption of the assumptions,

both popular, political, and maybe to a lesser extent also scholarly, that national origin is the

imperative of citizenship and the condition enabling participation in a polity. Several attempts

have been made since to thematize larger and more flexible understandings of citizenship.

These are anchored in deterritorialized notions of personhood, and take into account life

practices, belongings and individual aspirations, even when they thematize policies.

Communitarian theories have emerged to challenge the dominant sociological perspectives of

the 1960s that worked to legitimize different variations of Marshall’s citizenship model.

These theories tried to extend the understanding of citizenship by including notions of culture

and identity: the example of Taylor’s (1999) concept of recognition, Kymlicka’s (1995)

modification of liberalism with the argument of embracing cultural difference, and Parekh’s

(2000) multiculturalism, to name a few.

Despite their revisionist attempts, these theories were criticized for ignoring the interrelations

between citizenship and democracy, and as in Marshall’s case, for putting aside the notion of

citizens’ public engagement. They were reproached by some for not providing argumentation

radical enough to disrupt the exclusionary certainties of the narrow framework of national

citizenship. Protagonists of multiculturalism were criticized for promoting the apolitical

aspects of culture, among them the folklorization of migrants, an approach which promotes

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the tasting of their food and the airing of their songs, where, however, migrants are not

envisioned as political beings (Pajnik and Zavratnik Zimic 2003: 175). Similarly, Taylor’s

notion of recognition was criticized for praising individuality, promoting individuals as naked

addressees of laws, for introducing fixed and frozen identities, and for reducing the

importance of actions oriented towards responsibility for world care, that is, for promoting the

current worldless model of citizenship. Responses to such critiques were also formed, and

these defended the notion of “cultural citizenship” as a redefinition of a formalistic

conception, claiming a broader understanding of culture (Ong 1999). Along these lines,

cultural citizenship would not equal folklorization, but would be about articulating belonging

and aspiration, as well as about practicing intercultural responsibility.

Attempts to address citizenship that take political engagement as its precondition have also

been developed, for example with radical theories of direct democracy, and theoretical

attempts to grasp the activities of new social movements. The political dimensions of a

feminist citizenship approach can be found in attempts to problematize the processes of

marginalization in prevailing understandings of citizenship. Gendering citizenship means

focusing on the position of women and disadvantaged groups, while claiming citizenship as a

process of creating conditions for the responsible and active existence of individuals of both

sexes. In addition, the rethinking of the public-private divide, introducing interplay between

rationality and emotional speech, theorizing a public space that encompasses diversity and

plurality, are all important to be mentioned as some among the significant feminist

contributions to en-gendering citizenship.

Feminists have also articulated the altered tensions that define citizenship: if the issue of

equality was once central to citizenship and defined as its precondition, nowadays the tensions

emerge between equality and difference. Citizenship must go beyond purely formal, jural

analyses and must take into account differing positions of citizens, and discrepancies in these

positions that arise from categorical definitions by gender, nationality, ethnicity, class etc. The

challenges of multiple identities, dual citizenships and diasporic realities also point to the fact

that there is no simple trajectory along which a logical model of a three concept of rights can

be projected, because citizenship only emerges as a reality of multiple existences.

Additionally, in the last decade several attempts have been made to thematize postnational

(Soysal 1994, Habermas 2001), or, more recently, transnational notions of citizenship (Balibar

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2004), including the ideas of cosmopolitan citizenship (Delanty 2000, 2007, Habermas 2001)

which thematize post- or trans-national changes in structural conditions, and also take into

account individual biographies. One of the circumstances of postnational constellations is that

they confer human rights upon every person who participates in polity formation (this goes

beyond the nation-state model of citizenship acquisition), regardless of their historical or

cultural ties belonging to a specific national community. In his Postnational Constellations

Habermas (2001) developed a discursive notion of rights to explicate the need to reformulate

human rights in a dialogical manner – to include citizens’ communicative engagement and

prevent the functioning of rights according to the deus ex machina principle.

If postnational conceptualizations of citizenship adopt the human rights principle of granting

citizenship, and transnational theories are more critical of how the principle of human rights is

advocated, both are oriented towards seeking new, multilayered notions of citizenship.

What can be viewed, despite their differences, as an aspiration common to both postnational

and transnational conceptualizations is the facilitation of new understandings of citizenship,

which encompass or at least try to encompass the multiplicity and flexibility of discourses and

action.

Parallel to these two understandings, let us here introduce the notion of “active citizenship,”

defined by the embodiment of a new kind of deterritorialized politics that has the potential to

generate new modalities of political membership. Active citizenship evolves beyond the

ideals of privileged membership of a nation-state, since it addresses shifting identities, and it

legitimizes transnational modalities of living, even forms of non-national citizenship. The idea

of “active citizenship” is related to the “role citizenship plays in the very constitution of a

polity through citizens formulating, deliberating upon, and disputing different views …” that

Bellamy envisioned as an “alternative view of citizenship, as ‘the right to have rights’ rather

than as a given set of rights” (Bellamy 2001: 41).

Theorizing the Possibilities for Active Citizenship

The multiplicity of particularisms that defines the process of placing oneself in the world, as

well as personal aspirations and the subsequent social fragmentation that appears most

evidently in transnational migration practices, all disrupt the presumed contiguities of

nationality and undermine the territorial sanctity of contemporary nation-states. The divided

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and unbound conditions of citizenship that pertains to minorities and migrants, and the

growing autonomization of life projects disrupt the imperative of sovereign statehood and

demand new modes for thinking and living the multiple realities of membership. In addition,

new discourses that emerge in the field of ecology, plus the activities of transnational social

movements also point to the dissolution of organized modernity and contribute to the

articulation of the need for a new kind of citizenship. Various transnational processes evolve

across the different levels of social and political life, across the national, transnational, and the

local levels, and such reality becomes a subsequent reason why worldly relations need to be

rethought at the intersection of the local, the national and the global. Still, the stubbornness in

predominant sociological practice that designates the nation-state as the imperative actor,

even when conversing about transnational processes such as migration, obscures the

multiplicity of living realities and attempts to change them.

Future research in citizenship should engage to grasp not only the structural dilemmas, but

also the individual migrant practices of being and acting in the world. By doing so, it would

be possible to lay the groundwork for the legitimization of practices, memberships and ways

of belonging that are multiple, not only in terms of interests, but also in the sense of spanning

local, regional and transnational livelihoods. Intersecting memberships of, for example,

migrating women that go beyond the prescribed national fixities allow for the practice of

shifting and fluid identities. Migrants traverse borders in search of a better life, of work; they

practice diasporic lives, keep up transnational family ties etc. The potential in the notion of

transnational citizenship lies in the concept’s capacity to grasp the multiple displaced subjects

who are always on the move, both physically and imaginary. Transnational citizenship thus

suggests new relations, new modalities of interconnectedness and mobility across space, and

tries to embrace transnational practices and imaginings of nomadic subjects.

Still, when thematizing transnational citizenship as a possible aspiration for the introduction

of an engaged and a political model of “active citizenship”, one should be careful to

distinguish this idea from some transnational or, more accurately, international trends and

activities. Some of the globalizing trends take place most obviously in the field of market

economy. These address the erosion of state sovereignty not as an opportunity for active

citizenship, but as the opportunity for the extension of capitalist market economy from a

national to a global level. Many such projects do not interfere with the existing structural

relations at all. On the contrary, they take these as given by employing the notion of passive

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citizenship, and the treatment of citizens as dutiful and obedient individuals who eventually

grant support to the acceleration of capitalist consumption.

Zolo has critically pointed out another apolitical dimension of emergent global or

international citizenship, which is the establishment of “legal globalism” or “juridical

globalism”. One might argue that legal globalism might be a desirable answer to the questions

evolving around the type of citizenship that would transgress national borders and encompass

transborder modalities of living. While, on the one hand, it seems that there is nothing

basically wrong with supporting such ideas and institutional practices, it is contestable, on the

other hand, that these unreflectively adopt Western legal language as a universal medium. The

unbiased and unreflected transnational institutional approaches applied to citizenship are

those trends that Zolo has lately addressed by using Hardt’s and Negri’s labeling of existing

international policies as a form of “imperial citizenship” (Zolo 2007a: 82).

The contemporary capitalist and consumerist conditions of life in Western democracies that

acquire global dimensions seem to obstruct “active citizenship”, or, to use another political

term (in contrast to the apolitical capitalist or neoliberalist notions of consumerist and

imperialist citizenship) “public-generated citizenship”. Our plea here would be not to dismiss

the notion of the public and the public sphere as another fallacy of liberalism (which some

authors have done), but instead to rehabilitate the political dimensions of the public and relate

these to the thematization of the new challenges of citizenship.

Capitalist economy has made the notion of individuality, agency and autonomy a precondition

for citizenship. Individual autonomy perceived as atomism and productive individualism has,

since its introduction in the 19th century, become the official policy promoted by

governments. The problem with such “autonomy” is that it is characterized by the

unknowability of the world and of worldly relations. Along these lines, Dean (2003: 41) has

argued that contemporary capitalism works “against citizenship” and produces split subjects,

through privatizing and individualizing practices that are related to the demand for constant

steering of subjects towards self-realization and self-maintenance. Such requirements are

seen, for example, in migration when migrants are embedded in integration policies, and if

they fail to meet their requirements, their subjectivity is held to blame and made the only

responsible agent (Pajnik 2007).

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Structural policies develop, to use Arend’t terminology, from worldless relations; they embed

individuals as atomized personalities into such relations, and blame them if they don’t cope

with self-maintenance. The personal integration plan as an integrational mechanism in

migration pursued around the world is proof of this case. The public-generated citizenship

that aspires to the recovery of worldliness has difficulty coping with the atomistic individual

as a product of capitalist relations, since this kind of groundedness of subjects produces

worldless, rather than worldly relations.

Of course, leaving the arguments mired in mere ideology will not suffice. Neither does this

paper want to reproduce some fallacies of bourgeois conceptualizations of citizenship that,

along with the Greek polis, implicitly suggest that public-generated citizenship is reserved for

the able elite, and for active citizens only, i.e. those full members who commit fully to

engagement. Women, children, the old and the foreigners were not admitted to the political

activity of the polis, nor to the rational debates of the 19th century coffee shops. In a similar

way, migrant engagements or projects of new social movements and of ecological groups are

dismissed today as not really relevant by policy makers. Although, to adopt Holloway’s

(2002) discourse, it is precisely such engagements that do not necessarily address the whole

citizenry directly, although they do perhaps indirectly address citizens in general – through

claims of a worldly character – which have the potential to rethink existing relations and

recover the political dimensions of citizenship.

From an active citizenship viewpoint alternatives need to be sought to a sustained framework

of choices for possessive and entrepreneurial subjects. What is needed is a form of subject-as-

citizen autonomy that is more meaningful than that maintained by contemporary policies.

Examples could include migration, or today’s ecological problems; these are topics where the

possibilities of making “good” choices that would enhance the well-being of individual

choosers are curtailed. Only the intelligibility of the world would permit choices that go

beyond altruistic and consumerist individuality. It would require an environment of

nurturance for politics, citizen engagement and significantly, for adopting an attitude of

responsibility for world care.

Public-generated citizenship would adopt Arendt’s (1967) dialogical thinking and acting,

which does not depend on preconceived frameworks of patterns imposed on the world.

Rather, it engages a kind of activity that is resistant to the profit-oriented necessities promoted

16

by the capitalist system. Arendt spoke about acting in concert to enable “natality”, to use

imagination in relation to others – i.e. to practice care for the world, and to actualize the

solidarity principle. This, however, cannot emerge or reinitiate a political reality in

circumstances of overwhelming technocracy and apolitical thinking, such as are typical of

today’s democracy.

The current version of autonomy that individuals are to adopt serves to support the atomistic

logic of capitalism that ignores the matter of interdependence and promotes an isolated

individuality. These cannot possibly act in a worldly manner, practicing what Arendt would

describe as “reflective judgment”, since interdependence is a precondition for worldly activity

or active, public-generated citizenship. The rationality of public-generated citizenship that

would require a kind of worldly education for the emergence of a post-capitalist sensus

communis, would need to be attached to rather then detached from the world and the plurality

of people in the world.

To use Arendtian terms, active citizenship requires the practicing of an “enlarged mentality”,

projecting individual identities onto others, exercising earnest mental visiting, and creating

commitments constituted by speech and action. Active citizenship as it is conceptualized here

requires more than correction to the legal system or the improvement of social policies, since

what merely appears as corrections does not suffice for the emergence of an engaged type of

citizenship. Therefore, more radical interventions in existing structural relations are necessary

for the adoption of a worldly kind of active citizenship.

Here it is useful to draw upon the concept of enlarged mentality in Arendt’s terms or the

communicative action described by Habermas, which refers to engagement with the activity

of putting ourselves in the place of others – to be able to think and act in a worldly manner, in

the direction of world care. Practicing such an enlarged mentality does not mean submerging

our own identity to a unity (as in the example of integration policies as the practicing of the

giver-receiver principle), but making a judgment about the world shared with others from an

enlarged point of view. Acting in the public, for Arendt, is about people in plural terms: her

principle of “plurality” (1961/1985: 73) relates this term to the Latin inter homines esse,

standing for “living” or “to be in the company of people”. Related to worldly reality, the

public or active citizenship principle can emerge when “things are seen by many in different

perspectives” (Ibid.: 59). By speaking and acting, an individual expresses her/his individuality

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in the public space, and her/his act is a public act when people are together with one another

and willing to expose themselves. The public-related citizenship thus appears when people

enter into a public space; it appears by an action in relation to exposure, and also to the

thinking process that happens not in isolation but in “communication with others” (Arendt

1961/1985: 220). The enlarged mentality is inclusive in the sense that it refers not only to

those who speak, but to those who listen, as well. Her words, “wherever you are you are

polis”, refer to the public space that is not tied to one’s home country (contrary to the notion

of citizenship as national membership) but can appear wherever there are people (Ibid.: 209).

Similarly, Habermas’s idea is that worldviews should not be seen in terms of closed or open

mentality (e.g. Popper); he calls for broader thinking that does not solely embody attitudes

towards the objective world. He affirms at the same time that worldviews are shared within

communicative action. They are not just constitutive for reaching understanding, but vital for

the formation and appearances of identities, as well. Worldviews do not happen in a linear

way; nor are they formed as the consequences of causality (Habermas 1981: 44, 45, 61-63),

but rather refer to communicative action that grasps the world as a whole, but at the same time

not in the sense of negating the particular. Being intersubjective, communicative action is a

reflexive action. It is plural, as it cannot happen in isolation but only together with others – it

is intersubjective in its orientation to truth and interactive in the sense that it enables

innovation. Communicative action does not alienate the mindful from the mindless, but

includes understanding and active recognition. Interaction comes from the “inside” and makes

individuals aware of others. Not serving as the goal of action, interaction, in terms of

intersubjectivity and plurality, is seen as something that emerges among inclusively and

communicatively acting individuals. It points to the public sphere as an “intersubjectively

shared space”, where actors do not just observe each other but take a “second-person-

attitude”, that results in reciprocal attribution of communicative freedom. Communicatively

acting subjects co-ordinate their actions in terms of intersubjective recognition. From this it

follows that only those reasons count that subjects jointly find valid, and these have a

rationally motivating imperative for those involved. Habermas goes for the transsubjective

validity claim (Habermas 1981: 9), which reflects the inclusive nature of communicative

action when the claim has meaning for observers, nonparticipants, as well as for the acting

subject.

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Active citizenship also refers to what Zolo (2007b: 11) has recently proposed, i.e. that citizens

need not only to have rights, but they need to practice “cognitive autonomy” (autonomia

cognitiva). Along these lines active citizenship is not so much realized in a new form of

“world government” since this is usually imagined as another kind of an international regime

that does not function in a much differentiated manner from the existing ones. Instead,

“cognitive autonomy” is envisioned as a political concept that avoids the “use of coercive

instruments of legal penalization and above-national police forces”. It refers to a kind of

“cooperative anarchy” (anarchia cooperativa) that, albeit nowadays limited to questions of

meteorology and whether changes, alternative forms of human activity for example in the

Antartics etc. – by not applying legal penalties to organize human activity (Ibid.) has an

imaginary potential of a new kind of citizenship.

This paper has proposed the notion of “active citizenship” to capture the sense of global

responsibility for human plurality in the world. The recovery of political dimensions of this

concept goes beyond worldless contemporary cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism, although

there have been several attempts to reconstruct this notion, for example Delanty’s (2007)

recent idea of “civic cosmopolitanism”, still supports the existing power relations, against

which Zolo has conceptualized “cognitive autonomy”. Related to this, it does not take as its

precondition a more radical aspiration towards change in the current structural relations,

which is why it seems that it is content with and confident of its promotion of an idealistic

universalism. It still supports the idea of the welfare system that eventually introduced

citizenship as clientilism – clientelism between the individual and the state that later evolved

into citizenship as consumerism. Active citizenship, as theorized in this paper, on the

contrary, takes as its precondition the responsible activity that reconstitutes worldly affairs for

future generations, not just for the present cosmopolitan elite. Active citizenship has the

potential to encompass the cognitive and the productive needs of the world and ensure that

these needs would be addressed in a worldly manner rather then economically and

instrumentally.

19

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