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ОглавлениеChapter 2
What We Talk About When We Talk About Belonging: A New Framework for Analyzing Political Controversies
The Discreet Existence of an Ordinary Language Typology of Memberships
As we have seen, the contrast between civic and ethnic is conceptually problematic in a number of ways. However, comparative study of the politics of belonging does require some kind of overarching conceptual framework for identifying and comparing ideas of citizenship and national membership that emerge in different times and places. Moreover, without an external analytical framework through which to interpret the stakes of particular national controversies, there is little chance of political actors gaining critical distance on current events. In the absence of a clear alternative, the continued influence of the contrast between civic and ethnic in comparative politics, whatever its conceptual limitations, is not surprising.
Drawing on methods and insights from ordinary language philosophy, this chapter shows that this is actually not the only way we know how to distinguish between different kinds of membership. In reality, we already have another, more subtle and precise way of categorizing memberships, one that informs the way we talk about them in ordinary English. This alternative, “ordinary language” approach to classifying and categorizing memberships is at least as orderly and systematic as the dichotomy of civic and ethnic, and permits a variety of distinctions that simpler, dichotomous approaches have tended to conceal.
The way we discuss membership in our ordinary speech is more orderly and systematic than it might first appear. The surprisingly systematic way in which we unreflectingly classify memberships is apparent in the way we normally choose verbs to discuss voluntary terminations of membership in various groups. As we shall see, the pattern underlying our ordinary choice of verbs in this area is not arbitrary or isolated. It is reflected also in the way we discuss entering and involuntarily exiting from different kinds of groups. In fact, in choosing verbs that sound right when we talk about these aspects of various forms of memberships, we are already semiconsciously classifying all memberships into five basic categories.These five types of belonging in fact correspond to five distinct ways of understanding political membership. Ordinary language analysis thus suggests an alternative theoretical framework for examining and comparing public debates on citizenship and nationality, including those triggered by reactions to immigration and its long-term effects.
Memberships: Some You Cancel, Some You Quit, Some You Leave, Some You Change, and Some from Which There Is No Escape
Voluntary Terminations of Membership
In discussing voluntary termination of a given membership, not just any verb will do. In English, we have what at first appears to be a vast array of verbs from which to choose for this. A closer examination of this long preliminary list, however, shows that what we really have is a much smaller number of relatively common, less specialized verbs, such as “quit,” “leave,” or “cancel,” and a much larger number of relatively more specialized terms, such as “abjure,” “resign,” or “renounce.” Appendix Table 1 provides a full list of English-language verbs for referring to voluntary terminations of memberships of different kinds. Each of the verbs most commonly used to designate voluntary terminations of memberships can be used to form colloquial, normal, and natural-sounding sentences about ending some memberships, but not others.
Cancel. Take the relatively common membership-ending verb “to cancel.” One may “cancel” one’s membership in the American Automobile Association (AAA), the Sierra Club, Costco, Elvis’s fan club, the American Political Science Association (APSA), the racquetball club, or the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). By contrast, one does not “cancel” one’s membership in one’s bridge club, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the Communist Party, the Republican Party, the gay community, one’s gender, or the squash team. Only some memberships end by being canceled, namely those in which the member’s status as such is essentially contingent on paying fees, whether the member receives services or materials or merely contributes to a cause. Memberships one ends by “canceling” comprise one distinct subset of memberships.
Quit. A second subset consists of memberships that one ends by “quitting.” One might “quit” the soccer team, the debate team, PTSA, Little League, or the army. However, members are not ordinarily said to have “quit” AAA, their families, or their countries. Memberships that are voluntarily terminated by quitting are those in groups where the member’s contribution consists primarily of rendering time and services, even if fees are also required.
Leave. The third subset of memberships consists of those one ends by “leaving” a group. One may “leave” one’s church, the Communist Party, one’s co-op, the KKK, the Democratic Party, and any “communities” to which one might belong, whether or not they are geographically defined. Memberships one “leaves” are those in which the member’s role is defined primarily in terms of subjective identification with the group or its aims and characteristics, although members may often also be expected to pay fees (as they would to a Cancel group) or to render time and services (as they would to a Quit group).
Consider the way one would view a member of a Leave group who did not actually subjectively identify with the group and yet did not leave. A person who hates reading and, moreover, thinks that the novels she receives from the Book of the Month Club are of inferior literary quality and unworthy of being read, but nonetheless neglects to cancel the membership, perhaps because it was a gift and the books look nice on the shelf, is unremarkable, if a bit lazy. By contrast, a person who is adamantly opposed to racism but is a member of the KKK because her mother already paid the membership dues, she loves the pointy hats that come in the mail, and enjoys horseback riding is shocking. That person’s membership is morally compromising in a way that the first person’s continued membership in the Book of the Month Club is not.
The reason is that being a member of the Book of the Month Club is a matter of paying fees. It is a membership you voluntarily end by canceling. As long as the fees are paid, membership in the Book of the Month Club is unproblematic. Conversely, one’s integrity as a member and the very issue of whether one “really” is a member do become problematic if one fails to pay the bills for several months. The KKK, by contrast, is a membership you voluntarily end by leaving. As such, it is a membership whose defining feature is subjective identification with the group. Being a dues-paying KKK member who dislikes racism is therefore a contradiction in a way that being a Book of the Month Club member who dislikes reading is not.
Change, and No Exit. These last two categories are comprised of those troublesome memberships in groups one might think you would “leave,” except that you cannot. Such groups include your family (of birth), your gender, or your sexual orientation. In these cases, you cannot just cancel or quit. You cannot even leave. You have to “change,” if you can; otherwise, you are stuck. Let us call these last two categories Change memberships and No Exit memberships respectively. One might argue that people do “leave” their families of origin all the time, just as they “leave home.” However, when one talks of someone “leaving” his or her family or “leaving home,” one is usually referring to physical departure, not to the termination of the membership in question.1 If one leaves one’s family of origin to attend a college out of town, one is still a member of the family, like it or not. Conversely, however, one also cannot be expelled. The family to which one belongs by birth differs in this respect from that to which one may belong by marriage, which one may theoretically leave or abandon.
In contrast to memberships one can get out of by quitting, canceling, or leaving, memberships one can terminate only by “changing” or cannot terminate at all are not normally acquired by choice and do not depend on subjective identification. Change and “No Exit” memberships are memberships in categories to which one is assigned, by oneself or by others, based on personal attributes, such as mother tongue, sexual orientation, or income bracket. Like memberships in Leave groups, memberships in Change groups often figure prominently in members’ personal self-definition. But unlike memberships in Leave groups, memberships in Change groups do not depend on such identification. Whether or not one subjectively identifies with the category or defining attribute in question or “chooses” such memberships, one “is” a member of such groups if one meets some given objective criteria.
When people deny belonging to particular Leave groups to which they are thought by other people to belong, they may simply be correcting others’ beliefs about how they identify themselves. By contrast, seemingly equivalent denials of Change and No Exit membership are more apt to be regarded as untrue. There are other possibilities, however. Such denials may also be corrections of misperceptions regarding the purported members’ actual possession of the defining characteristic. For instance, the person who denies being a speaker of Hungarian may simply mean: “You think I speak Hungarian because my parents do, but I actually do not speak Hungarian.” Or, the person who denies being a woman may mean simply: “Because of my delicate features you seem to have mistaken me for a woman, but I am actually a man.”
In other cases, denials of such memberships may represent challenges to others’ understanding of the boundaries and definition of the attribute(s) defining the category. For instance, the person who denies being a German speaker may mean that he or she speaks too little German to really qualify as such. Disagreements of this kind also arise concerning race. “Whites” typically consider the skin color, hair, or epicanthic fold of the individual in question and his or her ancestors the defining attribute, but others in some cases regard speech, social circle, and demeanor as decisive, leading to disagreements about what people “really” are.
Finally, in some cases, individuals’ denials of Change or No Exit memberships attributed to them signal deeper confusion about whether a given membership is really a Change type that depends on objective characteristics or rather a Leave type depending instead on personal identification. For instance, a person who denies being a “New Yorker” may mean that, though assumed to be a New Yorker based on the fact of living in New York, he still, deep down, feels and considers himself a Minnesotan. The person is asserting that “New Yorker” is correctly understood as a Leave-type membership depending on personal identification, not a Change-type membership depending on objective characteristics. Similarly, but at a much more profound and consequential level, someone who denies being a “man” may mean: “I have the anatomical features you think objectively define someone as a man, but I do not feel like a man and thus am truly a woman. You are wrong about what defines being a ‘man.’” The speaker here, again, is asserting that, contrary to what many may think, the membership to which s/he has been assigned depends ultimately on personal identification, that it is not really a Change-type membership but rather a Leave-type membership. Such disputes show both that there is not always unanimity about what kind of membership a given instance of belonging represents and that the difference between Leave and Change memberships is consequential, giving rise to potentially significant confusion and disagreement.
Although people may, in fact, identify with memberships that can be ended only by changing, as they do with memberships that can be ended simply by leaving, subjective self-identification is not the defining feature of Change memberships.2 Subjective self-definition is the defining feature of memberships only in Leave groups. We implicitly recognize that this difference exists, as is demonstrated by our using the verb “to leave” for ending some kinds of memberships and not others. Accidental Anglophones are bona fide English-speakers, like it or not—unless they can change. An accidental Democrat (e.g., someone who accidentally made a stray mark on a voter registration form) is not a bona fide Democrat.
In short, memberships can be divided into five types according to the verbs we ordinarily use for the act of voluntarily ending them: Cancel memberships, Quit memberships, Leave memberships, Change memberships, and those we cannot end voluntarily, which I shall call No Exit memberships (see Table 2.1). These subtypes are already implicitly distinguished in ordinary English usage as reflected in the regularities of verb choice. That is, in choosing between voluntary exit verbs, we already unreflectively classify memberships this way all the time.
Appendix Table 2 shows how the initial full list of verbs can be regrouped into a few categories, each consisting of one more common and general verb together with a larger number of more specialized verbs of each type. Although the existence of a much larger number of voluntary exit verbs than the four discussed here does complicate the picture somewhat, it does not undermine the idea of a basic fivefold typology implicit in ordinary language. Indeed, the same typology also accounts for patterns of usage revealed by examining our usual ways of referring to involuntarily losing or acquiring one’s membership in different kinds of groups.
Involuntary Terminations of Memberships
In ordinary language, our discussion of involuntary terminations of memberships follows regularities that can be readily grasped in terms of the same fivefold schema presented in Table 2.1. That typology is thus not merely idiosyncratic, or limited only to choice of voluntary exit verbs. It is also reflected in patterns of usage for discussing other actions related to different sorts of memberships.
Some memberships can be terminated by groups without the consent of their members. Such involuntary terminations of membership are normally possible in the case of Cancel, Quit, and Leave groups. Memberships in No Exit groups by definition cannot normally be terminated, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and involuntary terminations of memberships in Change groups are extraordinary. Our analysis in this section will therefore focus on Cancel, Quit and Leave group memberships.
Table 2.1. Categorization of Memberships by ordinary Exit Verbs
Cancel groups can normally “revoke” or “refuse to renew” memberships. In such cases, revoking or refusing to continue one’s membership is simply the prerogative of the organization to which one belongs. It could be that the member has done something wrong or broken some rule, but it is not normally a matter or any great embarrassment if this should occur. More often, involuntary termination of such memberships represents more of an annoying bureaucratic inconvenience than anything else. In the case of involuntary loss of Cancel memberships, the organization that revokes or refuses to renew the membership is in the position of a seller, since such memberships are defined by the paying of fees. The implication of revocation or nonrenewal is often simply that it is no longer in the interests of the organization to sell the services to which members are entitled in exchange for the usual fee required. For example, AAA may refuse to renew the membership of someone who has made the mistake of calling for emergency road service twenty-eight times during the previous year. Or the racquetball club may quit issuing summer memberships to students because they have too much free time and jam up all the courts, causing the club to become concerned that it may lose its older, employed members who do not like to wait and who will pay the same annual fee for less actual playing time. Many Cancel memberships give one unlimited access to some kind of services for a set fee. Since the price is fixed, such organizations may ensure their viability by granting memberships selectively, in effect gambling on the cost of the services a given member is likely to use. Thus, if a membership is revoked or the organization refuses to renew it, the implication may simply be that the member was making so much use of the organization’s services that the organization no longer wanted to keep the person on the rolls. However, since membership in such organizations is a matter of fee-paying rather than active service, loyalty or identification, having one’s membership revoked for costing the organization too much is not normally stigmatizing.
In fact, one is often encouraged to join such organizations precisely on the grounds that the value of the benefits will exceed the fee required. Such memberships work more or less like insurance policies. The organization from which one buys the membership collects the fee, gambling that the services the member uses will cost it less than the fee it collects. The member makes the opposite gamble: that the services used will be worth more than the fee. If a member joins the YMCA and goes there to swim only twice, the YMCA is apt to be pleased with the transaction, but the member is apt to feel he should not have joined. If the member swims often enough that the cost per swim is much less than he would have paid at pools where fixed rates are charged, the member is apt to want to rejoin. But the YMCA may start charging more, or it may decide to quit accepting such members if it can find a way to guess what sort of members are likely to be exceptionally frequent swimmers. Cancel memberships are thereby subject to the same sort of mutual strategizing by prospective buyers (members) and sellers (organizations) as other market transactions.
Memberships in Quit groups can also be discontinued without one’s consent. In such cases, however, one’s membership is not normally said to have been revoked or its renewal to have been refused. Instead, one is normally “taken off,” “thrown out,” “expelled,” or “removed” from the group. For example, one may be thrown out of the drama club, taken off the basketball team, thrown out of the Parent Teacher Association, removed from or taken off a committee, or thrown out of the army. Even though it is possible that one may have been “taken off,” “thrown out,” or “removed” unfairly or for a trivial reason, there is normally a stigma associated with losing a membership this way, certainly more than in cases where a membership is revoked or its renewal is refused. The implication is that one failed to perform the services expected from members.
One could also be “thrown out” of the YMCA or Costco, even though one’s memberships in those organizations are Cancel memberships rather than Quit memberships. Although this might appear to contradict the argument just presented regarding the differences in the language used in the two cases, the contradiction is only apparent. If someone says he was “thrown out of” or “removed from” the YMCA or “thrown out of” Costco, he is assumed to mean he was forced to leave the building or to remove himself from the premises, not that his membership was discontinued. Of course, if he were to get himself thrown out of the YMCA repeatedly, it would probably come as no great surprise if the YMCA decided to revoke his membership or not to renew it the following year, but it would be revocation or refusal to renew, not being thrown out per se that would constitute discontinuation of membership in this case. Thus, despite the fact that one can get “thrown out” by an organization in which one has a Cancel membership, the terms used to designate involuntary termination of Cancel memberships are nonetheless not the same as those used for involuntary termination of a Quit membership. “Throwing out” or “removing from” a Cancel membership organization refers to physical removal. In Quit organizations, it designates discontinuation of membership.
Sometimes these verbs are used for involuntary discontinuation of a Leave membership as well. Thus, one can be thrown out of a church, a political party, or a union. Like the involuntary losses of membership in Quit groups from which one is “thrown out,” these losses of membership are stigmatizing. “Throwing out” connotes denigration of the former member. People do not normally relish the prospect of being thrown out of groups.
Note the violence of the verbs we normally use in such cases. We do not refer to former members as having been “set aside,” “led out,” “relocated,” or even “sent away,” for example. Such expressions would also refer to a process of getting something that was inside onto the outside, just as groups do to members they “throw out,” “remove,” or “expel.” The image of removal that such alternative expressions would call to mind would be kinder and gentler and suggest greater respect of the expelling organization for the expellees. It is interesting that we do not ordinarily use such readily imaginable alternative verb phrases to designate these sorts of involuntary discontinuations of membership. Being “thrown out” not only gets the insider onto the outside, it also conjures up images of denigration. The same is true of other less common, more specialized verbs for involuntarily terminations of memberships in these sorts of groups, verbs like (for former clergy) “defrocked,” or (for former Amish) “shunned.”
Interestingly, in the case of Cancel memberships it is one’s membership that is acted upon by the organization that discontinues, revokes, or refuses to renew it. Members are not revoked. By contrast, in the case of Quit and Leave memberships—where one is thrown out, removed or expelled—it is the member who is acted upon by the group. The difference in the object of the verbs used in the different cases is in keeping with the fact that suffering involuntary loss of a Quit or Leave membership is taken to reflect on the worth of the member in a way that the involuntary loss of Cancel memberships does not.
Interestingly, involuntary terminations of memberships in states do not conform to the regular pattern. The way we normally talk about losing citizenship is more like the way we talk about Cancel memberships than Quit or Leave memberships in this respect. Citizens are not revoked; their citizenship is revoked. And it is “revoked,” not “thrown out.” Being “thrown out” of a state implies the same thing as being “thrown out” of Cancel membership organizations like the YMCA: physical removal from the premises, in this case the territory. Citizenship is treated as a Change membership when it comes to voluntary exits, so that one “changes” one’s citizenship rather than leaving, quitting, or canceling it. Yet, when it comes to involuntary termination, words we ordinarily use suggest that we tend to think of citizenship as a Cancel membership. And when it comes to residency in a country, we speak as though it were a Leave membership.
People can of course be “expelled” from a state, just as they can be “expelled” from Leave groups. However, normally only illegal immigrants or resident aliens lacking proper documentation or breaking the law are “expelled” from states, not citizens. Like the would-be member of the Leave membership group who does not really identify with or share the beliefs expected of group members, those expelled from a state are “in” something to which they do not “really” belong. They are properly outsiders who, prior to expulsion, were on the inside. States, like Leave membership groups, are prone to harboring people who are not really members. In Leave organizations, such people come in the form of the church member with heretical beliefs, the accidental Democrat, or the Communist Party member who proves to be secretly reactionary. In the case of states, the potential expellee is typically the illegal immigrant or, in some states, the resident alien who breaks the law.
Acquisitions of Membership
The verbs we ordinarily use for acquisitions of memberships are somewhat less rich and varied than those English provides for voluntary terminations of membership. If we look at which verbs sound right for acquisition of membership in different kinds of groups, however, the underlying pattern maps surprisingly neatly onto the fivefold schema revealed by our examination of how we talk about ending memberships. The most general and common verb for acquiring memberships is, simply, “to join.” It can normally be used without any apparent awkwardness for voluntary acquisitions of membership in the first three types of membership groups we have identified: Cancel, Quit, and Leave groups. One thus joins Cancel groups like the AAA or the racquetball club just as one joins Quit groups like the softball team or Leave groups like the Communist Party or the clergy.
The next most common verbs for acquiring memberships—“to sign up” or “to enroll”—are almost as general. The two verbs are close synonyms, and they apply to memberships in both Cancel and Quit groups. One can sign up for an amateur soccer team or the outdoor club just as one can sign up or enroll in the AAA. Interestingly, however, in contrast to the verb “to join,” these verbs are not at home when it comes to referring to memberships in Leave groups. One does normally “join” but does not normally simply “sign up for” the clergy or the Communist Party. The difference in application of these verbs thus marks the same distinction between these kinds of memberships as do the ways we ordinarily refer to voluntary terminations of memberships.
The pattern then also extends to Change and No Exit memberships. For Change groups, the way one enters the group is to “become” something. Interestingly, here the verb refers to a change in quality of the member, not merely acquisition of the membership as something external to the person. In the case of No Exit memberships, since the membership is fixed, one never really enters it by “becoming” something; one simply “is.”
Table 2.2 summarizes these patterns of verb usage for acquisitions and involuntary terminations of memberships and shows how they map onto ordinary patterns of usage for verbs referring to voluntary terminations. In the end, we have a whole pattern of regularities in ordinary English, all informed by the same implicit, underlying typology.
Ordering the Typology: Memberships’ Varying Distance from the Subject
As the arrangement of Table 2.2 implicitly suggests, the five understandings of membership can be ordered in the following sequence: No Exit, Change, Leave, Quit, and Cancel. There is an underlying logic to this order. As one moves from right to left, memberships become more and more distant from the subject. At one extreme, No Exit memberships, not only is the person a member of the group or category, but the category-defining feature is part of the person. In fact, it is normally understood as an “identity.” With memberships of this type, one would normally say simply: “I am an x.” At the other extreme, with Cancel-type memberships, there is only an arms-length and typically instrumental relationship between the person and the group of which he or she is a member. The membership may even be referred to as something the member “has” rather than “is.” For instance, one might say, “I am a member of AAA,” but it would be equally natural to say, “I have an AAA membership.” The same does not go for other sorts of memberships; compare “I am a member of the clergy” and “I have a clergy membership.”
Table 2.2. Correspondence Between Principal Exit Verbs, Other Exit Verbs (Voluntary and Involuntary), and Entrance Verbs
Moving from the opposite poles of our continuum toward the center, a Change membership is still apt to be understood as an “identity.” However, as it can be changed, it is also understood as less tightly bound to the subject. The subject could cease to be a member of the group, much as some might counsel against it.
Quit memberships are more distant from the subject. A membership of this type is thus not an “identity.” However, it does directly involve the person—usually the body—of the member, not merely his or her money. Some people, certainly, may come to define their identities around their activities, as in the case of the athlete who boasts, “I am a member of the football team,” or the professional who says, “I am a member of the faculty.” Even here, though, it is interesting that the phrase “a member of” is ordinarily apt to be used, whereas it is clearly awkward and misplaced in the case of No Exit memberships. Other aspects of ordinary language also suggest that such memberships are less generally understood as “identities” than are memberships in Change or No Exit groups. Political mobilizations of professors or football players are not called “identity politics,” for example. And the question, “What are you?” is, at least in large portions of the United States, customarily answered with information concerning one’s ancestry. Someone wishing to learn another’s occupation there would instead normally ask, “What do you do?” Finally, in contrast to other forms of memberships, Leave memberships reach beyond both the wallet and the body, to the “heart,” mind, or spirit of the member.
Five Models of Political Membership
Descent: Belonging by Virtue of “Blood” or Ancestry
Using the typology of forms of membership that ordinary language analysis uncovers, we can clearly discern five distinct ways of thinking about the nature of belonging in political communities as well. A first model of political membership may be called the “Descent” view. As seen in this model, political membership appears as an instance of No Exit membership. From this perspective, “citizenship” is usually equated with “nationality,”3 and both appear as innate characteristics that cannot be acquired other than by birth. It is seen as a common genetic or biological inheritance rather than a properly “ethnic” one with a significant cultural component.
This model figures in discussions of citizenship in two ways. First, it underlies representations of the nation as an extended family and members of a given political group as descendants of common (biological) ancestors. Second, such perspectives are commonly invoked in contemporary political debates, though usually attributed to others.
Actual European social and political organization has only rarely corresponded to the Descent model. While there are examples of societies organized on the basis of such an idea, they may more readily be found in ancient Rome and Greece than in modern or even medieval Europe. In classical Athens, citizenship was restricted to those both of whose parents were citizens (Walzer 1983: 53–55). The Roman gens, vast clans supposedly united by common ancestry, also corresponded to the Descent vision (Bloch 1961: 137–40).
Today, German immigration and citizenship policy might most clearly appear to reflect a Descent perspective on political membership, especially in the unusual ease of entry accorded to foreigners of German ancestry and the difficulty of acquiring German nationality for those who are not. Even in the case of policy regulating acquisition of German nationality, however, recent reforms suggest that the importance attributed to ancestry is declining relative to birthplace and long-term residency, and presumably thus socialization, in Germany (Götz 1995; Murray 1994). Nonetheless, the Descent idea does figure significantly in current political discussion of citizenship and immigration issues, often as a view that parties to contemporary debates accuse others of holding and are at pains to avoid being perceived as endorsing.
Because it attributes membership to a biological foundation, the Descent model might appear to be inherently “racial.” However, whether such a conception is racial in character actually depends on whether the fact of kinship or phenotype is stressed (Nieguth 1999: 164–66). The Descent category may therefore be disaggregated into two subtypes usefully distinguished by Nieguth: ancestry and race.
Culture: Citizenship as Attachment to a Particular Way of Life
If the Descent perspective entails treating citizenship as a No Exit membership, the corollary of treating it as a Change membership is, instead, the Culture or Cultural Attachment model. According to this perspective, polities, like other Change groups, are permeable; unlike polities in the Descent model, here polities can gain and lose members (by other means besides birth and death). Nonetheless, from this perspective citizenship and nationality, like other Change memberships, are not generally acquired by choice. Proponents of this conception typically understand the origin of political membership as being neither “blood” nor “choice,” but rather socialization.4
From the Culture as from the Descent perspective, the nation is frequently depicted as a family. However, in the Culture conception, the national family is understood primarily as a vehicle for socialization, not biological transmission of inherited characteristics. From this perspective, the role of parents in raising children takes precedence over procreation as such. Logically, adoption into the nation is therefore possible. While, this may appear as a rather trivial point, it often makes a significant difference in immigration and citizenship debates.
History often appears especially important from the Cultural Attachment perspective; learning a particular national history may play a key role in developing a sense of belonging to a particular people. Thus, Argentines, including many descended from twentieth-century Italian immigrants, will say “San Martin liberated ‘us,’” while generations of French children, from Paris to Guadeloupe, long were taught, by French textbooks, about “Our ancestors the Gauls.”
According to the Descent model, membership in a given nation is natural and innate. Here, by contrast, it is cultural and potentially changeable. One cannot change one’s genetic profile, but one may learn a new language or history. Despite the label, not everything that might be referred to as “cultural” is relevant in this conception. Political membership—like other meaningful affiliations—involves the sense of “deep-rooted” attachment normally associated with things toward which one develops deep attachments through primary socialization.
This perspective is readily apparent in, though by no means limited to, the work of contemporary communitarian thinkers. Invoking a Cultural view of membership—with corresponding understandings of justice and obligation—Sandel (1984) defends the communitarian view that the deep-seated attachments to particular groups commonly instilled by primary socialization are necessary in order to understand people:
as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic. Allegiances such as these are more than values I happen to have, and to hold, at a certain distance. They go beyond the obligations I voluntarily incur and the “natural duties” I owe to human beings as such. They allow that to some I owe more than justice requires or even permits, not only by reason of agreements I have made but instead in virtue of those more or less enduring attachments and commitments that, taken together, partly define the person I am. (90)
Although the cultural attachments involved in this sort of belonging can in fact be broken, and the memberships associated with them can thus be changed, their intensity is such that, Sandel warns, breaking them may threaten one’s sense of identity.
The Culture view of citizenship also figures centrally in the thinking of certain noncommunitarians. Slavoj Žižek, for example, argues that membership in “a given community” is not a matter of “symbolic identification,” but results from “that elusive entity called ‘our way of life’.” Žižek understands that as “the unique way a community organizes its enjoyment,” the “social practices” involved, and the “national myths” that sustain them (1992: 194–96).5
While the communitarian sense of membership Sandel describes may appear most characteristic of local and family ties, Gellner argues that cultural attachment is also theoretically definitive of the modern nation-state. He notes:
nations can indeed be defined in terms both of will and culture, and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political units. In these conditions, men will be politically united with all those, and only those, who share their culture. Polities then will to extend their boundaries to the limits of their cultures, and to protect and impose their culture within the boundaries of their power. (Gellner 1983: 55, my emphasis)
Gellner maintains that one of the distinctive features of national political units is that “the individual belongs to them directly, in virtue of his cultural style” (138). The fact that he says “will and culture,” and “impose their culture” suggests that forms of political membership not defined by culture are also possible: without “will” and imposition, political and cultural membership might diverge. However, nationalism as understood by Gellner challenges the legitimacy of such disjunctures. Thus, while recognizing a de facto plurality of forms of political membership, Gellner argues that the advent of nationalism marks the ascendancy of the Culture model over others.6 Contrary to what this account would lead one to expect, however, there are actually three other, distinctly different, conceptions of the nature of belonging in given polities that currently actively compete with this perspective.
Belief: Citizenship as Identification with a Polity’s Founding Principles
In contrast to “communitarian” and other advocates of the Culture view, American liberal thinkers often stress political culture and belief in certain common and fundamental liberal political values or principles as the basis of citizenship and national identity, at least in liberal democracies. For instance, the ideas of “constitutional patriotism” (Levinson 1988) or “constitutional faith” are often presented as central and defining elements of American national identity. Jacobsohn (1996: 23) argues, “being an American consists largely of sharing in those constitutive ideas that define membership in the political community. Assimilation in this context relates exclusively to principles” (cf. Huntington 1981: 24).
While many authors present this “Belief” conception of nationality as quintessentially American (Kohn 1957a; Mead 1975; Huntington 1981; Jacobsohn 1996; Walzer 1992), similar arguments also figure centrally in current European political and social theory. Defending the value of understanding political membership this way, Habermas argues that a “liberal political culture has a constitutional patriotism as its only common denominator” and concludes that “democratic citizenship does not necessarily have to be rooted in the national identity of a people” (1992: 28–29). The cultural integration of groups must therefore be distinguished from the “political integration of citizens,” the latter based on shared principles (1994: 132). Similarly, Mouffe (1992) argues, “What we share and what makes us members in a liberal democratic regime is not a substantive idea of the good but a set of political principles specific to such a tradition: the principles of freedom and equality for all.” Such a perspective implies that citizenship is properly understood not as “a legal status,” but as “a form of identification” (231). In other words, from this perspective, citizenship appears as a Leave membership.
While increasingly common among European as well as American defenders of the Belief model, the expression “constitutional patriotism” can actually be somewhat misleading. Examples of a political community united by belief in common values or principles can be found in the absence of constitutions as well, as this idea’s Christian antecedents suggest (Levinson 1988; Mead 1975). Nor need the Belief conception of political membership be limited to nation-states. At points in his writing, St. Augustine advanced what would qualify as a “Belief” vision of citizenship, in the City of God (Augustine 1958: 469–71, 63). And Habermas (1992) sees the Belief vision of political membership as the one most auspicious for development of a supranational European citizenship.
Because of the sense of identification and commitment involved, the Belief conception of citizenship resembles the Culture view. However, in the Belief model, there is also an important element of choice. Citizenship, by this view, is supposed to be a form of membership whose acceptance involves asserting one’s autonomy and individuality.
One shortcoming of the literature praising the Belief model as the basis of U.S. national identity is its partial and selective reading of U.S. history (Smith 1988).The way this literature typically presents the alternatives where understandings of citizenship are concerned is also flawed logically and conceptually. Advocates of the Belief model often misleadingly depict it as the only alternative to an illiberal, exclusionary, or ethnocultural approach to membership in the nation. In reality, however, “the” illiberal or ethnocultural view of nationality is often an amalgam of the Culture and Descent views. There are also other alternatives to those views: the Contract and Monetized Contract models.
Contract: Citizenship as Equal Rights for Equal Duties, or a Rights-bearing Status Acquired by Virtue of Living Together Cooperatively
A different, equally significant, alternative to Culture or Descent conceptions of political membership is the idea of citizenship as a “contract” between the citizen and the state consisting of a set of duties toward or participation in the state or community balanced by a set of rights the citizen enjoys, guaranteed by the state. Citizenship in this case is conceived of as a Quit-type membership, based not on blood, culture, or convictions, but rather on active performance, whether participation in key activities or fulfillment of required tasks. This perspective can be readily illustrated by reference to contemporary British liberal thinking. According to Albert Weale, for example, “the concept of citizenship makes the question of identity the ground of rights and duties” (1991: 158). In other words, what rights and duties one has depends on whether one “is” British, Italian, Brazilian, or something else. Similarly, Hall and Held draw on the Contract perspective in characterizing citizenship as “a matter of right and entitlement” that “is two-sided: rights in, but also responsibilities towards, the community” (1989: 175). Reading Hall and Held as proponents of what I call the “Contract” view might appear to be unfair, since their view is not narrowly “contractarian,” but rather emphasizes civic participation. Such an emphasis is by no means at odds with the “Contract” perspective as defined here, however. Of the five conceptions of citizenship identified here, it is in fact the “Contract” view that places the greatest emphasis on active participation.
In this understanding, insofar as it emphasizes reciprocal rights and duties, citizenship is, surprisingly, not altogether different from a traditional feudal relationship, particularly as it linked lords and vassals within the more elite sociopolitical strata. Bloch notes that “reciprocity of unequal obligations” was the hallmark of “European vassalage” (1961: 158). In exchange for a fief, protection of person and property, and rendering of justice, the feudal vassal was normally obliged to perform military service, as well as participate in courts of law and consultative councils (219–24, 228).
Where democratic citizenship is envisioned according to this model, the reciprocity of obligations involved has increasingly been generalized to incorporate the masses of the population into what were originally aristocratic, or at least gentlemanly, roles. Alfred Marshall depicted the extension of the duties associated with citizenship as a progressive process that promised eventually to make “every man” into “a gentleman” (Marshall 1950: 4, 7–9). The same idea was reiterated by British Home Secretary Douglas Hurd in the following terms: “Public service may once have been the duty of an elite, but today it is the responsibility of all who have time and money to spare” (quoted in Heater 1990: 140).
As it was extended from the elite to commoners, the feudal “contract” increasingly became the same for all. From this perspective, citizenship generally appears a matter not simply of rights and duties, but of equal rights and equal duties. Hence T. H. Marshall’s famous definition of citizenship as “a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community,” who thereafter “are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed” (1950: 28–29).
There are actually two distinct variants of the Contract view: state-centered and society-centered, both of which figure significantly in current controversies about political membership. Besides obeying the law, the duties most often included in the state-centered version of the “rights for duties” contract are military service and voting. The place of voting in the state-centered Contract model sometimes figures as a duty of citizens, but is also often mentioned as one of the rights they receive.
In the society-centered version, the duties of the citizen, such as voluntary community service and charity work, are closer to those of members of the traditional upper class toward those below them. The medieval local lord, for instance, often was responsible for the commons and had such charitable duties as caring for babies abandoned on “his” lands, while later the local gentry in England were responsible for administering the Poor Laws. The ideal of citizenship thus came to be associated with the national and local roles of the English gentry during the Elizabethan period (Heater 1990: 27, 30). In the modern society-centered Contract vision, the worthy “citizen” may fight fires, keep up the parks, work with the homeless, and care for aging neighbors.
This vision of citizenship was asserted with particular clarity by British Conservative proponents of “active citizenship”—one element of Conservative reaction against the welfare state—during the late 1980s. Conservatives presented the “active citizen” as “the person who seeks out opportunities to succour the needy, protect the environment, administer schools and defend, through neighbourhood watch schemes, the local community against the depredations of the burgeoning criminal class” (Heater 1991: 141). While some criticized this understanding of citizenship as “essentially apolitical” (Oliver 1991: 165), others felt that the idea recaptured an important dimension of what being a “citizen” meant. For example, recalling an elderly neighbor he had known in Polingsford, Suffolk, Andrew Phillips praised the Conservative society-centered, service-oriented vision of citizenship for being attuned to traditional social virtues. Underlining the danger that a more political and less localist understanding of citizenship might dishonor such worthy people, Phillips described his neighbor as follows:
In 85 years she had only spent one night out of the village. Her sense of belonging to it was innate and complete. According to some notions, she was scarcely a citizen at all, never having played any part in civic affairs, yet, like millions of our countrymen even today, her diurnal partaking of the life of that village, her attachment to the little platoon of its inhabitants, made her an exemplary neighbour and, I would say, citizen. In our notions of the active citizen, therefore we must always allow honour to such people. There is a real danger that because the care they give so abundantly cannot be counted, it will not be held to count at all. (Phillips 1991: 545)
Phillips’s description of his neighbor reveals both a certain ambivalence about this understanding of citizenship and the potential, because of its localism, for it to shade into the idea of citizenship as a matter of cultural attachment. Thus, even while he defends this elderly woman’s entitlement to be counted as a “citizen,” Phillips admits that calling the sort of belonging she represents “citizenship” is apt to be controversial, and his own tendency is to revert to describing her as a “neighbor” instead. Ultimately, however, he defends her right to the title “citizen” because of the “care” she and people like her contribute to the community, thus suggesting that those who serve the community are thereby entitled to citizenship, an argument clearly in keeping with the society-centered Contract view. Earlier in that same passage, however, Phillips emphasizes his neighbor’s “innate and complete” “sense of belonging” and her “attachment” to her village’s inhabitants, drawing on the idea of citizenship as a matter of cultural attachment instead. The two conceptions begin to shade into one another here because it is the neighbor’s “attachment” to those around her that presumably motivates her generously to provide “care” and act as “an exemplary neighbor.” It is not entirely clear whether Phillips thinks it is the service or the attachment that entitles the neighbor to recognition as a citizen, but he ultimately says it is the “care” that should be “held to count.” In the end, then, like other defenders of “active citizenship,” Phillips appears to favor a contractual view involving an exchange of duties between the individual and the community; in exchange for “the care they give,” people like this neighbor are entitled to receive the “honor” of being “counted” as exemplary, “active” citizens.
Monetized Contract: Citizens as Material Contributors
Given changes in military organization, the decline in military service as a regular duty of all (or, more often, all male) citizens, and the ambiguity of voting’s status as a “duty” as opposed to a right, the activity-oriented “rights for duties” Contract, at least in its state-centered version, seems bound to lose some of its attraction. Perhaps this accounts for the current salience of monetized versions wherein full membership in the polity is earned by paying one’s dues to the state financially or contributing economically to the national community, through tax paying, employment, or financial investment. Here, as in the case of Cancel groups, membership is something one receives in exchange for paying required fees or making expected financial contributions to a group.
It is not only the obligations side of the contract that increasingly appears in economic terms. The rights side is also subject to monetization. In place of rights, the advantages accruing to national membership are increasingly characterized in terms of material benefits, such as rights to welfare, access to public housing and education, or other social rights and benefits.
While more commonly invoked in the heat of particular political debates, this way of thinking about who belongs to a given polity also appears in the recent literature on citizenship. Parry, for example, proposes an understanding of citizenship whereby society would appear as a social insurance club financed by contributing members (1991: 186–87), while Harrison (1991: 209–13) argues that “privatized forms of social provision” may “amount to an alternative form of ‘modern citizenship.’” However, the fact that Harrison places “modern citizenship” in quotation marks here suggests that he himself recognizes the deviation of his use of the phrase from ordinary usage.
There is actually less of an existing legal basis for such an understanding of citizenship than one might imagine. In reality—with a few socially and economically significant exceptions such as access to public service jobs in some countries—most social rights and economic benefits in the United States and Western Europe do not legally depend on citizenship. In Western Europe, citizenship is rarely an important factor in determining access to social service programs; legal residents qualify for most of the same social benefits as citizens (Soysal 1994: 123–25). In the United States, prior to the contested reforms of the 1990s, even legal residency was not a legal requirement for such valuable social benefits as public education, emergency hospital care, or social security (Schuck and Smith 1985: 108; Soysal 1994: 124).
What is essential here, however, is not the legal relationship between citizenship and social entitlements. Rather, it is the existence, even prevalence, of the belief that only contributing economically to the community qualifies one as a full member, as someone entitled to benefits. This is a belief about moral entitlement and how citizenship or membership in the political community should be understood, not just about what the current rules regulating access to entitlements by those with various juridical statuses in the community actually are. As in the case of the Descent model, historical and legal reality are largely at odds with the idealized vision by which they are supposed to be described, but this conception of citizenship has a life of its own and contributes to shaping public discussion. To understand the current politics of citizenship, it is therefore important to recognize this idea.
Like the Contract model, the Monetized Contract view has state-centered and society-centered variants. The dues paying involved in the state-centered version consists in paying taxes; recognition as a full and legitimate member of the national community or “citizen” (taxpayer) entitles one to social benefits. In the society-centered variant, it is those who contribute to the economy through engagement in productive employment who have a legitimate claim on citizenship.
While many scholars see the American understanding of citizenship and national identity as quintessentially expressive of the Belief model, others have argued that, as Shklar puts it, “earning” was historically “implicit in equal American citizenship” (1991: 100) in the sense that it was essential to being seen as someone worthy of citizenship (63–100). Shklar argues that by the late nineteenth century the economy “was where citizenship and its rewards and duties … rested” (87). It was actually the link between wage earning (as opposed to slave labor) and the personal autonomy it supposedly permitted that was most significant in American thinking about the connection between citizenship and productive employment (63–67, 95–96). However, the idea of earning as an exercise of a civic duty to contribute to national prosperity also played a role in American thinking about who should be counted as a “citizen” (67–68, 87), by which Shklar means someone with full and equal standing in the community (3, 63).
Claims for rights based on a society-centered version of the Monetized Contract view are ultimately difficult to defend, however. The argument is seldom taken to its logical conclusion; if it were, it would give rise to a host of problematic political and theoretical questions. Moreover, grounding political claims in this line of argument is politically risky because public opinion on what contributing to the economy actually means is often changeable and even contradictory.
It is often less than entirely clear just what kind of work immigrants economically contribute to the nation by performing, or whether being gainfully employed counts as an economic contribution to the nation at all. Some use the Monetized Contract view to argue that immigrant workers should be recognized as legitimate members of the polity because they contribute to the national economy; others appeal to the same perspective to argue that they should be excluded because they take jobs from native workers. If unemployment rises and jobs become scarce, popular opinion may switch from one position to the other. And if immigrants can fulfill their economic duty of contributing to the national economy and thus earn entitlement to recognition as citizens by working, what sort of work is the worthy immigrant supposed to perform? Public opinion on this point is also often contradictory. As Honig notes, successful migrants’ accumulation of great wealth and ascension to very desirable positions are often lauded in the American press as evidence of their industriousness and eagerness to contribute to American society (1996: 187–88). Yet, in other cases, immigrants are said to be contributing economically to the nation (not taking scarce jobs from native workers) because they are willing to work for low wages (saving the community money) or to take jobs native workers regard as undesirable. This very willingness is also sometimes blamed for lowering wages and standards for native workers.
Another difficulty with the Monetized Contract model is that it logically points to a much broader extension of citizenship than almost anyone seems ready or willing to accept. If contributing to the national economy entitles those immigrating to perform necessary labor for national companies to political rights, what if the same companies set up export platforms and hire the same workers to perform the same tasks outside the national territory? According to the society-centered Monetized Contract view, their membership status and the rights associated with it should be the same in both cases. Yet one would be hard pressed to find advocates of such a position, even among those relying most heavily on the work-centered view of entitlement to citizenship as a basis for legitimating extension of new rights to immigrant workers.
Moreover, if one were logically to extend the society-centered Monetized Contract argument to employees of national firms who work outside the country, a new series of questions would then need to be answered. What of the peasants who grow the grain to feed the workers who work for the national company abroad? What if a worker changes jobs, leaving an American plant to work for a Japanese one? Should his citizenship change accordingly? What if the company is an international joint venture, or is bought out by a foreign competitor? Some of the same problems may arise regardless where the worker lives, since there need be no correlation between the nationality of a corporation and the territory where it operates, let alone the nationality of its owners.
In an increasingly internationally integrated economy, the society-centered Monetized Contract approach to membership is thus apt to be exceedingly difficult to apply. It is too difficult to determine just which political community is the ultimate beneficiary of any given worker’s labor for it to be at all practical to determine who should count as a member of what nationstate on that basis. Moreover, defining citizenship that way would make changes in national status highly unpredictable for individuals, and for some possibly quite frequent as well. Defining citizenship on such an unstable basis would greatly reduce its value in providing people with a secure legal status on the basis of which to plan and organize their lives. Nonetheless, implicit references to this model of citizenship in political discussion are quite common; it is often seemingly taken for granted that the model itself makes sense.
It is important to note the distinction between the state-centered and the society-centered versions of the Contract and Monetized Contract models because, when used in arguments about contemporary issues, they often have ultimately different implications. For instance, Walzer (1983) uses the state-centered variant to defend guest workers’ entitlement to citizenship, arguing: “Men and women are either subject to the state’s authority, or they are not; and if they are subject, they must be given a say, and ultimately an equal say, in what the authority does” (61). While working “in the local economy” is one of the conditions Walzer mentions as giving rise to a right to citizenship in the sense of enjoying equal political rights, his argument is not, as one might expect, that guest workers are entitled to rights because they contribute to the national economy. Instead, he emphasizes that guest workers are subject to national law. That explains why, in his view, working in the local economy gives rise to rights to citizenship only where the workers concerned also live on a given (democratic) state’s territory, so that they are “subject to local law” (60).
If Walzer had based his argument for guest workers receiving citizenship on the society-centered version of the Monetized Contract model instead, an argument that also readily suggests itself in this case, his claims would then have become much less tenable, as the above discussion of the limitations of the society-centered version of the Monetized Contract model suggests.
Distinguishing Between the Culture and Belief Models
One may wonder whether the values and principles stressed by the Belief model are really distinct from culture and thus whether the Belief and Culture models truly differ. Are shared values and principles not cultural products? And are they not in most, if not all, cases culturally specific? Answering these profound ethical and philosophical question is unfortunately beyond the scope of this study.
However, whether or not values and political principles are culturally based, or can even be shown to be entirely culturally specific, the Culture and Belief conceptions of political membership are still analytically distinct ideas. As defined in this study, the Culture conception of citizenship grounds commonality in the kinds of shared language, manners, customs, and habits typically associated with primary socialization. The Belief model focuses more narrowly on political culture, values, and identification.
Where one might logically expect the Belief and Culture models to come into the most direct conflict would thus be in the case of migrants raised in a non-European cultural milieu who nonetheless come to identify politically with a European state or the values for which it claims to stand. The case of native non-European soldiers who fought on the French side during the Algerian War (the harkis) is an excellent example in this regard. The Belief and Culture conceptions of being French had notably different implications for harkis’ treatment after the war; in practical policy terms, the two models were clearly opposed.
The harkis had Belief as well as state-centered Contract claims to French political membership that were stressed throughout the war, but eclipsed in practice by more Culture and Descent-based understandings of political membership in the war’s immediate aftermath. During the conflict in Algeria, not only the harkis’ military service but also their love of and political identification with France were frequently emphasized. Indeed, their numbers were taken to demonstrate the justice of the French cause, showing that not only European settlers in Algeria but also significant numbers of native Muslims had become “French” and wished to remain so. Those who demonstrated their love and loyalty by fighting on France’s side were promised faithful French support; their Contract- and Belief-based claims to political membership were thus validated and encouraged. When the military conflict ended, however, far more refugees than anticipated sought immediate departure to France, overwhelming French authorities and officials. Perhaps seeking to thin the numbers, the director of France’s Military Cabinet ordered the military to try to prevent resettlement of “French Muslims” in the metropole (Perville 1991: 121), even though the former harkis were in imminent danger in Algeria (Hamoumou 1990: 25–45, 1991: 112–14; Meliani 1993; Roux 1991).
The idea that those who fought for the French military, and supposedly demonstrated their love of and identification with France by doing so, showed themselves to have become as indelibly “French” as the settlers of European origin in Algeria would logically have entailed putting the harkis on the same boats “back” to France as the European refugees. Both the state-centered Contract and the Belief models of political membership favored that conclusion and pointed to such a commitment, above and beyond more general human rights claims. However, the policy implications of the Contract and Belief models were directly at odds with those of the Culture and Descent models. Ideas of political membership based on cultural affinity or ancestral ties, albeit with a larger European family, unfortunately came more decisively to the fore once Algeria’s independence was conceded. An immediate practical consequence was that French military personnel were ordered to discriminate ethnically between Muslim and other “French” refugees seeking passage to France.7
For years Contract and Belief ideas of political membership had contributed to legitimizing France’s political and territorial claims in Algeria and in colonies elsewhere. But after Algeria’s independence was granted and the longer process of what came to be understood as “decolonization” was thereby all but concluded, such broader Belief and Contract visions of political membership quickly lost much of their political cachet.8 The harkis’ treatment after the Algerian War illustrates how the Culture and Belief models can in practice have starkly contrasting entailments for policy, regardless whether the values and principles grounding Belief-based claims to political membership are truly universal or culturally relative. In this regard, the Culture and Belief conceptions of political membership are distinct from one another, just as they are analytically distinct from each of the other models of political membership.
Conclusion
Citizenship is a political form of membership, and we think about it in the same ways that we think about other memberships with which we are familiar. But there are several different kinds of memberships, and what we tend to talk about when we talk about belonging depends largely on what kind of membership we have in mind. With respect to most sorts of groups, this is not particularly problematic. We ordinarily have little occasion to contemplate the fact that our memberships in different sorts of groups are different in kind.
In the case of political membership, however, it is possible to think of belonging as modeled on each of the types of membership with which we are familiar in other spheres. Political membership may be understood and discussed as an unchangeable characteristic determined by descent, and thus as a particular case of No Exit membership. As with other memberships of that type, it figures as something one simply “is.” Or it may be discussed as something one “becomes,” a matter of acquiring and becoming defined in terms of a particular culture, and thus as a type of Change membership. At other times, it is discussed as if it were a Leave membership, a political membership defined in terms of subjective identification with a particular group and a project associated with it. It can also, however, be imagined as a form of Quit membership, a status conferring rights achieved on the basis of participation in or fulfillment of certain duties. In that case, the necessary condition for membership is then not what one is but what one does. Finally, citizenship may be discussed as if it were a form of Cancel membership, in which membership rights are granted to those who “pay their dues” through taxes, work, or economic investment. Citizenship, in that view, is defined neither by what one is nor by what one does but by what one contributes. One of the reasons discussions of political membership are often confused is that we are rarely altogether consistent in this regard. When we talk about belonging to a polity or political community, we wind up talking about disparate things: descent, cultural attachments, beliefs, civic duties and participation, and taxes and benefits. Table 2.3 summarizes the key features of our five main conceptions of political membership, and their relationship to our ways of understanding membership more generally.
One of the reasons for the intractability and confusion that surround current debates about the meaning, appropriate criteria, and implications of political forms of membership is that we do not even realize that these five very different models are in play. Our inconsistencies may well be an almost inevitable reflection of the multifaceted ways in which we understand and experience citizenship, but the fact that the existence and nature of these inconsistencies are seldom, if ever, consciously recognized makes for a good deal of confusion in public discussions of citizenship-related issues. The nature of some of these conflicts and the part they play in particular citizenship-related controversies is explored in the chapters that follow.
Table 2.3. Competing Conceptions of Political Membership
