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5

Who Belongs, Who Rules

Citizenship—Voice and Participation in the Global Marketplace

5.1 Overview

Globalization is changing the nature of citizenship. What used to be considered a legal status now becomes more of a social bond. What used to be a particular relationship of an individual to the state may now be a relationship of an individual to multiple states. A status that once defined national belonging may now signify marginalization. Moreover, the power that individuals derived from citizenship to define the political, social, and cultural landscape now has been shifted to corporate entities whose loyalties lie in economic well-being as defined by the bottom line. This chapter will explore these new meanings, and attendant tensions, of citizenship in an era of globalization.1

5.2 Human Rights Framework

(A) Normative Setting

The concept of citizenship is well-grounded in the human rights documents. These documents ensure a right to a nationality,2 the right of members of society to the realization “of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality,”3 the right to participate in the cultural life of a community,4 self-determination,5 and a citizenship’s right to participate in the government.6

(B) The Development of the Concept of Citizenship

Two different concepts of citizenship—the “legal status” model and the “desirable activity” model7—underlie general understandings of citizenship as a legal, political, and social construct that resonates and has impacts both locally and globally.8 In seeking to identify the framework that defines and delineates citizenship and its attendant rights, privileges, and obligations, some theorists refer to its natural law foundations.9

A classic usage of citizenship identifies groups of persons with shared descent, language, culture, and traditions.10 In this regard, “Citizenship … becomes less an entitlement than a definition … [for p]eople [who] want to know where they belong, and they want to belong to familiar and homogeneous groups.”11

Contrary to such “definition” of citizenship is the view that “the true test of the strength of citizenship is heterogeneity [because] common respect for basic entitlements among people who are different in origin, culture and creed proves that combination of identity and variety which lies at the heart of civil and civilized society.”12 Significantly, some posit that “modern citizenship is inherently egalitarian.”13 A different characterization of modern citizenship is that it does not permit “arbitrary treatment … [yet] acknowledges individuals’ abilities to make judgments about their own lives.”14 Hence citizenship is like “a series of expanding circles” that increasingly includes outsiders.15 Consequently the very concept of citizenship incorporates the ideal of equality. Indeed, many contemporary theorists insist that the concept of citizenship must embrace differences among persons—differences of race, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion, to name a few—and that a new conception of citizenship must be developed because, as “originally defined by and for white men, [it] cannot accommodate the special needs of minority groups.”16

The 1990s experienced “an explosion of interest in the concept of citizenship.”17 Far from the early liberal understanding of citizenship as limited to political activity, which some critics presently view as translating simply into the right to pursue individual economic interests in a market,18 contemporary citizenship theories have a broad, flexible sense of participation in public life. Some perceive citizenship as a reciprocal relation between an individual’s location and his or her rights.19

In 1949 T. H. Marshall distinguished three types of citizenship that emerged “in such a way that each new type was standing on the shoulder of its predecessor.”20 Indeed, since Marshall’s conception of “the ideal of citizenship as full participation in the community,”21 the relational aspect of citizenship has shifted from an individual-vis-à-vis-state model to an individual-vis-à-vis-society model.22

5.3 Citizenship in a Globalized World

In today’s globalized world, citizenship is a contested concept. The rethinking of citizenship along critical lines is informed by the application and development of cross-fertilized ideas of rights. As such it promotes, defends, and facilitates full participation in society, in particular by those persons who live at the margins.23

The concept of citizenship in a globalized world is unlike the liberal idea(l) of citizenship24 that embraces the notion that human beings are “atomistic, rational agents whose existence and interests are ontologically prior to society.”25 Feminist writers have objected to such a model as “something like equal membership in an economic and social sphere … dedicated to the assumption that the ‘market maketh man’ … [and] less a collective, political activity than an individual, economic activity—the right to pursue one’s interests, without hindrance, in the marketplace.”26 Nor is this idea of citizenship even like Marshall’s27 broader notion of full participation in the community, as outsiders also have criticized his view for its lack of focus on or furtherance of equality and participation.

Also essential to a realistic formulation of citizenship in a globalized world is the failure of both the legal and social versions of citizenship for marginalized groups. One writer has suggested that for persons at the margins, citizenship “may not make much difference to one’s life” as neither vision has enabled such persons to attain desired social justice and equality.28 The two rationales offered to explain this failure of citizenship are significant to this analytical project of ending trade and human rights’ splendid isolation. Just as trade, inconsistently in light of Article XX of the American Declaration, insists that it is a discipline separate from human rights, so too do some citizenship theorists suggest that the concept of citizenship might aspire to but cannot guarantee full participation in society. One explanation of the failure of citizenship for those at the margins suggests that because citizenship is a political category, it cannot “deal with substantial inequalities in the social and economic spheres.”29 The other posits that a notion of citizenship that focuses on “an evolving complex of civil, political and social rights” could include “even more characteristics of the dominant groups”30 and thus reinforce marginalization.

In considering the intersection of the trade and human rights discourses especially in the context of globalization, any citizenship construct must deal with social, economic, and political inequalities as well as account for varied cultural concerns and circumstances within which real people lead their real lives. In this context, citizenship is not just about individual rights, but also about culture, community, and society. The proposed idea of citizenship incorporates and is responsive to varied cultural concerns, ideas, and traditions. It is not about individuals as “independent of any immediate social or political condition,”31 but about individuals having and living within varied cultures and communities. Interestingly, the popular market notion of globalization itself is one that reinforces and confirms “the Western liberal commitment to the primacy of universal markets over national borders [which] necessarily undermines … claims of citizenship”32 that are atomistic, individualistic, and tied to those transcended borders.

To reconceptualize citizenship, the right to participate in government must be problematized (see also chapter 13) to expose how hegemonic discourses and conceptualizations about community suppress subaltern ones. For example, the deterritorialization of states effected by globalization, along with the undoing of sovereignty effected by human rights norms, effectively have upended the notion of citizenship as a condition of membership specific to the nation-state. As persons, culture, and capital travel and become diffused and not bound to territorial borderlands, membership in more than one community—even more than one political community—becomes inevitable.

Globalization, particularly the aspect of movement of persons across myriad borders, signifies that multiple alliances will be formed. As globalization renders citizenship an increasingly deterritorialized concept, its nexus to and communion with a nation-state will continue to erode and widen.33 The migrations and relocalizations of members of national, ethnic, religious, sexual, racial, and gender groups outside of clearly defined national territorial borders will result in inter- and transnational communities that exist without respect to nation-state boundaries. These new geographies and locations will result in changing concepts and boundaries of accountability, and an erosion and re/constitution of the citizenship model(s).

The redefined concept of citizenship in the globalization context uses as its foundation the critically re/formed, developed, expanded, and transformed international human rights vision.34 It embraces and includes as indivisible, interdependent, and inviolable not only the non-discrimination norms and other civil and political rights (which include, for example, language that is often absent from U.S. discourses), but also social, economic, and cultural rights.35 Certainly, this is a much broader notion of citizenship than the “legal status” that binds a person to a state—although, as the Nottebohm Case has taught us, even such a purportedly narrow, statist conception of citizenship has less clear boundaries than many would have us believe36—or even the desirable activity model that focuses on social relations, both of which have failed marginalized groups.

For individuals, citizenship, in the framework of globalization, is a paradigm based on attributes of human beings qua human beings.37 It is centered and founded on the reality that the fulfillment of personhood is indivisibly connected to the entitlement not only to individual rights, including the amalgamation of geographies and locations of individuals’ identities and conduct, but also to membership and participation in their varied and various communities, including political communities as well as economic and social locations such as the family, religious affiliations, and place(s) of employment.38 Thus citizenship as full personhood does not view the liberal individualistic and communitarian traditions as alternative, independent, irreconcilable visions, but rather as indivisible and interdependent dimensions of human existence. Full personhood requires not only an individual freedoms and dignity component but also a relational community component.

It cannot be disputed that globalization already has dramatically transmogrified the concept of participation. With the adoption of a fitting citizenship model, the holistic construct of human rights norms, and not the narrow concept of legal, individual rights, forms the legitimate foundation on which personhood is evaluated and determined within an individual’s various spaces, even within the state.39 Personal citizenship constitutes the proverbial bundle of sticks that belong to persons because they are human beings. In this regard, individual and group citizenship is a concept, an exercise, an orientation with a commitment to shared responsibility within human reality that is exercised through participatory, democratic mechanisms (see also chapter 13).

5.4 Transnationalization of the Individual

Before we were able to travel with ease, people developed stronger ties to the community, communities were smaller, and the rights and obligations of the citizen were closely tied to land as well as to status. But the ease with which we can now communicate and displace ourselves has resulted in a change in the rights and obligations that attach to citizenship. It is no longer useful to think of citizenship as synonymous with one nation beyond the borders of which nationals seldom travel. Thus, what originated as a static concept of citizenship has been transmogrified into a dynamic one—one that, for instance, allows for the possibility of having social and cultural ties to one country, but economic and physical ties to another.

At the heart of the intersection between trade and human rights, particularly considering citizenship, is the exponentially rising number of people crossing national borders, particularly between South and North America. Over the last three decades, the United States has been experiencing an overwhelming increase in the number of Latin American immigrants, who have been settling throughout the nation. Although still predominantly Mexican,40 these Latin American migrants now represent virtually every country in Central and South America. This magnitude of migration has raised critical questions about its dynamics, management, and ramifications for the U.S. economy, as well as for U.S. cultural identity.

Despite such a flow of persons from South to North, the countries of Central and South America keep losing the battle for equity, democratic participation, human security, and true development. Income distribution indicators reveal that the gaps between rich and poor are widening, and that trade is not benefitting all.

Core-periphery exploitation is not a new phenomenon, as the history of colonialism makes evident; it is a product of the globalization that has been going on in the world since at least the 17th century.41 With the end of the Cold War and the advent of the information age, however, the relationships of dependencies and the populations that are affected have been deterritorialized and redefined by a core of unified global actors, classified in terms of capital ownership and political access. Thus, it is no longer useful to attach the description of rich and poor to countries. This overly simplified model fails to take into account the extraordinarily high living standards enjoyed by very few in the upper echelons of power in the developing world, as well as the deteriorating situation of the poor in the global North. In both locations, however, the poor lack voice, a key characteristic of citizenship (see also chapter 13).

Migration from Latin American, and the potential exploitation that it entails, is closely tied to trade. While it is not the “poorest of the poor” who migrate, those who travel northward away from their cultural roots and their families do so to satisfy the North’s demands for cheap labor42 (see section 8.7 on trade and immigration). On the other hand, globalization also has seen the embrace by the South of neoliberal economic policies. The expansion of markets in the South has also affected citizenship as it has “reconfigur[ed] … popular culture and … introduc[ed] … new consumption standards bearing little relation to local wage levels.”43 Ironically, while the North increasingly tries to close borders to the human migrants on whose labor it so greatly depends, it works exhaustively to facilitate the cross-border movement of goods, capital, commodities, and information—a reality incorporated in the NAFTA in 1994 and embraced by the aspiring FTAA.44

The migration is ultimately the result of the expansion of markets into peripheral, nonmarket, or premarket societies, and the disruptions that occur in the process.45 The diametric opposition with which we regard the transmigration of cultures through the migration of individuals across national borders, as juxtaposed to the integration of world markets, is affecting the very right of citizenship. Indeed, with no shame, former Mexican President Vicente Fox actively encouraged emigration, and called for a fully open border within ten years to ensure a continuing flow of remittances—“the third largest source of revenue in Mexico’s economy, trailing only oil and manufacturing”—a record of thirteen billion dollars in 2003.46 Moreover, Fox also worked to change the law so that former Mexican citizens living in the United States, even if naturalized, could continue to vote in Mexican elections. This move is indicative not only of the transnationalization of citizenship but also of the impact of globalization on the very institutions of citizenship.

Fox’s legal change rewards those who send remittances home and makes them feel that they still have a home—that they are still full citizens. It is significant because of another linkage with citizenship: according to one author, “Migrants remain active in their homelands because they are unable to achieve full social membership in the United States.”47 To be sure, the climate in the United States is that new migrants will seldom become completely accepted as full citizens—as “American”—because they “often experience blocked mobility, racism, and discrimination.”48 Thus, these migrants, even those who are naturalized citizens, live in two spaces and experience two partial levels of citizenship simultaneously—one in their spiritual homeland in which they no longer live and another in their migration geography where they live but do not fully belong—and constantly strive to bridge the gap between the two. Another author suggests that “persons in the sending and receiving societies become participants in a single social unit. To [engage] this [notion of citizenship], researchers must boldly sever their concept of society from their concept of national territory.”49

One author observes that the new center and periphery of dependency in the context of globalization is not based on geography, but instead on economics and politics.50 The core has been transnationalized through the affluent elites, regardless of geographical location. This “core-periphery conflict persists as a form of interaction, but it occurs mainly between social sectors within both developed and less-developed societies.”51

In the context of both trade and human rights, the regional integration that has occurred “serves both as a mechanism to protect disparities that have arisen within the world-system, and as an ideological mask and justification for the maintenance of these disparities.”52 Thus, some claim that NAFTA, CAFTA-DR-US, GATT, and other similar integration initiatives are actually not so much about free trade as about protectionism, and not of workers so much as the profit interests of multinational industries such as the pharmaceuticals companies. They also instigate wage competition among Latin American countries, to see who would produce goods for the U.S. and Canadian consumer markets for the lowest possible wages.53 This is a major economic component of the “race to the bottom”—the competition between states that, in order to attract investment—that is, to improve the state’s competitive advantage—results in increased deregulation of, among other things, labor and the environment, which, in turn, results in lower socioeconomic conditions and erodes the social safety net.54

The process of integration has facilitated core-periphery exploitation and the accumulation of corporate wealth on the backs of the working class who travel North for employment opportunities.55 Those who engage in Northern migration, the Latin American diaspora, have mainly, through the continual stream of remittances, become deterritorialized dual citizens who facilitate the core-periphery exploitation and are not full citizens in any location.

At the heart of this core-periphery, North-South relationship is the increasingly powerful corporate entity. With globalization, the transnational corporation’s power has multiplied; it increasingly affects governments and governance, such as in creating the ubiquitous race to the bottom. Yet, as a private actor, its actions are not fully transparent and it is not fully accountable. The corporation’s new influence over global social and political systems endows it with innovative citizenship status.

5.5 The Transnational Corporation and the Rise of Economic Citizenship

Any discourse on globalization and citizenship is incomplete without consideration of what the idea signifies for the corporation—undoubtedly a powerful and influential global actor central to the trade regime. The emergence of the corporation, and its growth as an economic superpower capable of exerting great influence on individuals, communities, and even governments and public policy, creates yet another layer of analysis with respect to the already complex concept of citizenship. Traditionally, the association of citizenship was between individuals and their country. It has been extended, however, to juridical persons. Thus now, corporate entities, with great economic power, and with their citizenship rights, can have more influence on the state than the average individual citizen. Such powerful citizenship, emerging from globalization, is having an impact on the citizenship discourse.

Saskia Sassen engages in an in-depth analysis of corporate power on the institution of citizenship.56 After reviewing the particular “combination of conditions that had to crystallize for citizenship as we know it to emerge,” she deploys the notion of economic citizenship as a construct to destabilize the “linearity” of history. As she poignantly observes: “Economic globalization has transformed the sovereignty and territoriality of the nation state.” But her take has a “twist”: economic globalization has eroded the environment in which the idea of citizenship evolved, particularly “social rights.” Consequently, Sassen urges that there is a need to develop the idea of economic citizenship to include the “rights to economic well-being and to economic survival,”57 which includes the right to work for a living. Sassen concludes that there “exists a reality today that represents an aggregation of economic rights that one could describe as a form of economic citizenship in that it empowers and can demand that governments be held accountable in economic matters.”58 The holders of such economic citizenship, however, are not individuals but “global economic ‘actors.’” Thus, such economic trappings of citizenship need to be extended to individuals (see section 8.9 on corporate abuse of labor rights).

The basis for the economic citizenship demanded by Sassen is the impact of the increasingly global capital market on economic policy and hence governmental policy. The global financial markets have many new rights and huge power, giving them much economic influence over government policy and other, even noneconomic, initiatives.59 The global economic reality translates to “a partial privatization of key components of monetary and fiscal policies” that inevitably results in the undermining of the voice of the individual citizen in the social, economic, and political system to which he or she belongs. Thus, the economic interests of the larger corporate actors trump the popular vote; the basis of public decision-making is the corporate interest rather than the desires of individual citizens as expressed at the ballot box. (See, however, section 13.4(A), examining the idea of voting.)

In sum, the new corporate actors that have emerged, as a result of existing globalization and the world economic systems, have put pressure on, if not effectively changed, the traditional concept of citizenship. Powerful private economic actors have supplanted the individual vote by gaining access to and having the ability to influence the government’s decision-making. Governments thus implement policies favorable to corporate interests; hence, corporate enjoyment of a somewhat innovative citizenship status—Sassen’s “twist” on the traditional notion of economic citizenship, which concerns individuals’ economic rights.60

Globalization has centralized market economies and marginalized, indeed rendered invisible, human economies. In a peculiar turn, hegemonic globalization forces, because of their emphasis on financial markets and their marginalization of human lives, currently equate the existence of a market economy with democracy (see section 13.4(A)), a notion that effectively excises pluralistic participation from democracy.

5.6 Final Thoughts

Bringing together the discourses on trade and human rights can offer a balance to this morphing of the citizenship idea. While trade depends on the economic actors, it also largely depends on human capabilities to realize the trade goals of economic well-being for all. Reinforcing individual citizenship in its social and economic sense—access to a job that enables human thriving; access to food, health, shelter—would enhance, not detract from global actors’ economic goals. A human rights lens on globalization can recapture personhood from the edges or perimeters to the center of a globalization project. It can reconstruct the concept of citizenship as one that includes the relocalizations, multiplications, and recreations of cultures, people, communities, and languages61—events that occur because of the ubiquity of global actors and the opportunities created across increasingly porous borders.

As we already are seeing in the travel of goods and peoples across myriad borderlands, globalization has blurred the characteristics of citizenship. We see much exportation and importation of language, culture, dress, food, and religion. It explains the travel of music, musicians, food, and dress from Peru to Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin, every Sunday during the Farmers’ Market. On the other hand, one travels to Peru and sees Levis and Burger King.

A human rights perspective on globalization and citizenship will return value to human economies; it will relocate people from the margins to the center.62 This new geography, centrally mapping human rights, reconstitutes sovereignty, redefines legitimacy of states under the rule of law and the concept of territoriality, and revaluates humanity irrespective of borders or boundaries.