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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
Theorizing Citizenship in the EU
Towards a Critical History
Introduction
The growing importance of citizenship within the EU political arena has been paralleled by a surge of academic interest in its subject matter (see e.g. Rosas and Antola 1995; Wiener 1998; Bellamy and Warleigh 2001; Bellamy, Castiglione and Shaw 2006; Maas 2007). What stands out within this wide-ranging, and ever-growing, body of literature has been the diverse range of social scientific fields, from philosophy and sociology to industrial relations and gender studies, that have grappled with the extension of EU supranational (or as some would have it “post-national”) competencies in the realm of citizenship, and the implications this has for contemporary European societies. Yet for all this diversity in disciplinary terms, the study of EU citizenship is still dominated heavily by a narrow set of theoretical frameworks which take the current political parameters of EU citizenship as given, either endorsing it as a progressive model or seeking to correct what are regarded to be more or less surmountable institutional deficiencies in citizenship practice. Drawing inspiration from van Apeldoorn, Overbeek and Ryner’s (2003) critique of mainstream integration theories, we argue here that although these approaches are not necessarily uninterested in issues of power and legitimacy, their very conceptual designs render them inherently unable to explain the contradictions between citizenship practice and principles of legitimacy which are at the heart of the EU’s currently unfolding legitimacy crisis (see Introduction).
Accessing these dynamics, we suggest, therefore requires that analyses of EU citizenship go beyond narrow concerns with normative prescription and institutional problem solving, and instead take up the central problématique that unites a varied set of approaches within the theoretical tradition of critical political economy: “to understand the nature of power in the EU, including its organization and distribution, and to access the implications of a given set of power relations for legitimacy” (van Apeldoorn, Overbeek and Ryner 2003: 17). In attempting to historically uncover the “social purpose” of EU integration, who benefits from it, and what kind of polity it seeks to promote, critical political economy has the potential to contribute unique insights describing not only how EU citizenship has been limited in securing legitimacy, but also to explain why this has been the case (Holman 2004; van Apeldoorn 2002). Essential to this explanatory critical-historical framework is the examination of capitalist market structures in engendering asymmetrical power relations, which crucially shape the content of citizenship politics.
To this point, however, save for a few book chapters and conference papers, there has been no systematic attempt to develop a critical political economy approach to EU citizenship. In this chapter we aim to begin filling this void in the literature by outlining the ways in which critical political economy contributes to our understandings of citizenship politics in the EU. In developing what we prefer to call a “critical history”—shorthand for this book’s application of critical political economy insights to the long-term history of citizenship in the EU since the early 1950s—the central purpose here is to intervene in the existing literature by rendering explicit the social purpose of EU citizenship within the EU as a hybrid, but nevertheless capitalist, form of statehood (Jessop 2002). Before proceeding to outline this alternative approach in detail, we begin by first fleshing out our conceptual critique of what we broadly identify as the predominant theoretical approaches to EU citizenship. Considering the enormous body of work already existing in this area, any attempt to review and critique this literature in its entirety within the space allocated here would tend toward caricature. We choose here to focus on the debates and issues surrounding two theoretical perspectives that we argue to be most significant in regards to EU citizenship: namely, the moral philosophical approach known as “post-national cosmopolitanism,” and the legalist-institutionalist approach with affinities to the “multilevel governance” approach to EU integration.
“Post-National Cosmopolitanism” and EU Citizenship
Is it desirable, or even possible, for legitimate and democratic citizenship to function outside the confines of the nation-state? Should EU citizenship be endorsed as the basis for a progressive post-national European identity? These are the main questions that have concerned approaches to EU citizenship falling within the moral philosophical tradition, which involves competing interpretations of the European “demos,” its possibilities, ethical implications, and consequences for traditional political concepts associated with the nation-state. By far the most influential theoretical perspective on EU citizenship within moral philosophy has been “post-national cosmopolitanism” (hereafter PNC), also referred to as “cosmopolitan democracy”.1 As a normative theoretical perspective located within the tradition of “Kantian-Habermasian critical theory” (Patomäki 2006: 116), PNC seeks to advance an academic and political project of an “international system based on the rule of law and democracy” and respect for universallyrecognized human rights (Archibugi and Koenig-Archibugi 2003: 273). PNC holds that in an era of “globalization,” defined as the “transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and power” (Held, interviewed by Guibernau 2001: 427), new constraints have been placed on the nation-state, which increasingly serve as barriers to, rather than as facilitators of, effective political cooperation and democratic participation.2
As a result, PNC prescribes the establishment of new democratic institutions at the local, regional and global levels, to accommodate and politically harness the diffusion of power across the different levels at which it is exercised. Crucially, the formation of a multilayered democratic world order would require the establishment of a universal form of political membership based upon “global citizenship” (Falk 2000; Carter 2001), with the rights and obligations of global civil society and global institutions being based on civil, political, economic, social, and reproductive rights (Held 1991; see also Held 2006). PNC scholarship has been engaged in efforts to assess existing regional and global institutions to serve as prospective “models” for the establishment of an alternative world order.
According to the criteria set by PNC, the EU represents “the last politically effective utopia” (Beck and Grande 2007: 2), and the “the only normatively satisfactory alternative . . . an alternative that points to a cosmopolitan order sensitive to both difference and social inequality” (Habermas 2001a: xix, cited in Manners 2007: 81). In this way the institutional setup of the EU serves as a nascent cosmopolitan polity, and a blueprint for further development:
The first international organization which begins to resemble the cosmopolitan model is the European Union. Its members are in fact sovereign states which have voluntarily transferred increasingly broad tasks (from coal and steel policy to human rights) to the Union. . . . The centripetal force of the European Union is even greater than that of the United States, which has extended geographically without absorbing culturally heterogeneous communities. From the constitutional point of view, it is extremely significant that intergovernmental institutions such as the Council of Ministers are now backed by technical institutions such as the Commission, and even by a body directly elected by citizens, such as the European Parliament. The principle of subsidiarity has allowed European institutions to intervene in selected policy areas of member countries. Seen from a global perspective, the European Union is an experiment of great importance. We can only hope that it will be imitated by other regional organizations, be it the Union of African Unity or the Organization of American States. At the same time, the European Union offers interesting cues for a possible reform of the United Nations and the setting up of new institutions (Archibugi 1998: 219–220).
EU citizenship, which serves as the legal embodiment of a European identity based on “the secularization of the egalitarian and individualist universalism that informs our normative self-understanding” (Habermas 2001b: 20; see also Delanty 2005), serves an essential function within PNC’s conception of the EU. The potential of EU citizenship to act as an avenue toward the establishment of a cosmopolitan democracy of global citizens lies in the fact that it represents the only concrete example of a legally established citizenship model not based upon the boundaries of the nation-state. In their penchant for normative prescription, PNC theorists argue that EU citizenship should continue to evolve along the lines of “constitutional patriotism” (as coined by Habermas), under which loyalties and allegiances are derived not from national or ethnic origin but instead from an identification with a truly inclusive “post-national” and multicultural EU polity, where rights and obligations are accessible to all, including migrant third-country nationals (TCNs) residing within EU member states (Soysal 1994; for an overview, see Prentoulis 2001).
In order to secure the support of citizens, and to foster their self-consciousness as members of the EU polity based on “common values” (Habermas and Derrida 2003), PNC advocates an expansion of EU-level citizenship, beyond the socially thin and market facilitating citizenship currently on offer, to include the whole constellation of rights previously guaranteed by the nation-state during the “thirty glory years” of the post-war period (Habermas 2001b). From the perspective of PNC, EU citizenship therefore has the potential to combat two main obstacles to the realization of a progressive cosmopolitan order: namely, the destructive effects of twentieth-century European nationalism and the “hollowing out” of national citizenship rights as a result of neoliberal globalization. Despite the academic and political influence of PNC, and indeed the merits of many of its goals and visions, we hold that its conception of EU citizenship faces severe limitations.
To begin, we take issue with PNC’s conceptualization of the interrelations between globalization, the nation-state, and EU integration. While we agree with claims that globalization represents a diffusion of power across multiple scales of governance and that state functions have been adjusted, if not necessarily diminished, as a result, we find problematic the fact that there is no systematic attempt within PNC scholarship to explain why it has come into being, and who (in terms of concrete social and political actors) is pushing it forward in the first place. Instead globalization is treated as an independent variable, an exogenous, almost inevitable, and most crucially, agent-less process bearing down on the political capabilities of nation-states. In focusing on globalization as a process, this “logic of no alternative” (Hay and Rosamond 2002: 158; see Chapter Four) within PNC ignores the fact that globalization is just as much a project reflecting the interests and power of identifiable social and political actors (Overbeek 2004), with many of its key facets authored by nation-states habitually portrayed by PNC as globalization’s victims (Görg and Hirsch 1998; Panitch 1996; Murray 1971). Thus if globalization is, as PNC is willing to concede, primarily about the acceleration of global capitalism, then the role of “critical” theory, from which PNC finds its lineage, should accordingly be to scrutinize the role of capital as a class actor, explaining the role of its structural power in disciplining and ultimately subordinating the interests of other competing class forces (Morton 2006).
This critique of PNC’s conception of globalization and its relation to the nation-state has direct implications for the perspective’s approach to EU integration and citizenship. While PNC is primarily interested in endorsing the EU as a “buffer” against the apparent negative effects of globalization on the nation-state, it is not equipped with the conceptual and analytical tools to inquire into the historical and material dimensions of the EU project: explaining its origins and limitations, in addition to identifying the power relations that underpin it. Much like in its assessment of globalization, PNC is willing to concede that EU integration has, to this point, been primarily about market-making integration (Habermas 2001b), and subsequently argues in favor of market-correcting mechanisms to counter market integration along the lines of an EU project envisioned by former Commission President Jacques Delors. Yet at no point does it take into consideration the structural barriers in place that have historically constrained the realization of EU-level market-correcting mechanisms (Deppe 2004: 311), explaining for instance why Delors’ social democratic vision for the EU was eventually cast aside (see further Chapter 3). Processes linked to EU integration, therefore, much like the PNC account of globalization, are taken as given instead of serving as phenomena to be explained in their own right. Thus the PNC’s endorsement of the EU project serves as a “totalizing blueprint” that is “not grounded in realist analysis of the relevant context, concrete embodied actors, social relations and mechanisms, and transformative possibilities” (Patomäki 2003: 347).
Similar shortcomings also plague PNC’s views on citizenship, which involve declaring support for the EU project and its citizenship policy on the basis of their supposed promotion of progressive, cosmopolitan values without inquiring into the historical and material context through which EU citizenship has developed. To cosmopolitan reasoning, however, there is little room for such hesitance. For many within this school of thought, one of the chief intellectual tasks is rather to venerate the EU’s past achievements and outline hopeful visions for the EU’s future. “The historical success of the European Union,” writes Jürgen Habermas (2006: 48, italics in original), “has confirmed Europeans in the conviction that the domestication of the state’s use of violence also calls for a reciprocal restriction of the scope of sovereignty at the global level.” Given, moreover, that this enterprise is founded on a passionate conviction that the EU project eventually will yield a progressive cosmopolitan return—working, for instance, to the advantage of migrants’ rights and inclusion—it can neither afford any agnosticism as regards the EU project’s allegedly benign founding intentions, nor as regards its allegedly benign teleology (for examples of this passionate conviction, see Beck 2006: 168; Beck and Grande 2007: 2; Giddens 1998: 142–7). This, in much the same way, then, as yesterday’s nationalist intellectuals could not afford such questioning of the national project. To declare support for, and invest hope in, this form of cosmopolitan subject making while neglecting the power relations through which subjects “forge themselves” (Davies 2005: 135) is tantamount, as André Drainville (2004: 31) has argued in his critique of PNC, to treating citizens as “ghosts.”
A more nuanced power perspective, anchored in the critical-theoretical procedures of negative dialectics, which assess conceptual frameworks and analytic models “in terms of how they are not serving” humanity’s material needs and “self- and mutual recognition of human subjectivities and their aspirations” (Ryner 2005: 145), would place two burdens of proof on the PNC endorsement of EU citizenship. First, the extent to which EU citizenship actually entails a more effective and democratic guarantor of rights vis-à-vis national citizenship; and second, the reasons why EU citizenship serves as a more inclusive basis for identity and rights formation and not merely as a regional mode of exclusiveness based on a new European platform of anti-immigrant nationalism and ethno-cultural chauvinism (Hansen 2000, 2009; Kveinen 2002). Today’s cosmopolitans may assert that Islamophobia only can be tackled above the nation, since, as Beck (2006: 166–7) claims, it is “utterly un-European” to be anti-Muslim—a fact that Beck links directly to the condition that, in sharp contrast to the nation-state, “[r]adical openness is a defining feature of the European project and is the real secret of its success”. Yet, when searching for the empirical corroboration of this and other assertions holding forth the EU project’s inherently benign and anti-racist spirit, one looks in vain for any systematic account demonstrating how such “radical openness” actually manifests in more concrete terms and how it serves to mitigate the current plight of Muslims (see further Chapters 5–6). When a disjuncture exists between the exercise of power and legitimacy (whether defined in terms of social rights, inclusiveness or non-discrimination), as is the case in the contemporary EU project, the task of critical theory must therefore be to scrutinize the contextual environment in which this disjuncture has emerged, to grasps the limits that EU citizenship faces in its task of popular legitimation. PNC, in endorsing EU citizenship on the basis of an abstract model, clearly falls short of this task.
“Nested Membership”: EU Citizenship in a Multilevel Governance Polity
The second body of literature, grounded primarily in the disciplinary traditions of legal studies and political science, goes beyond the narrow focus of PNC to analyze the legal interactions between citizenship models at the EU and national levels. With direct affinities to multilevel governance (hereafter MLG) integration theory, this approach is interested in uncovering potential areas of conflict and congruence that characterize the overlapping competencies of the EU and national governments with specific reference to their formal institutional arrangements for citizenship. The MLG approach relates citizenship to processes of integration and seeks to highlight the ways in which EU citizenship is shaped by actors within the “fragmented, complex, and multi-sited” EU polity (Bellamy and Warleigh 1998: 466). Ultimately the MLG approach to EU citizenship, though characterized by a diverse range of theoretical positions and empirical applications, is captured succinctly by Thomas Faist (2001: 37), who observes that “European citizenship is nested in various sites: regional, state and supranational forms of citizenship function in complementary ways—while the associated norms, rules and institutions are subject to constant revision and further development on all governance levels.” Discussions of social citizenship and rights, on the one hand, and the status of migrants, ethnic minorities and third-country nationals, on the other, have figured prominently in the MLG citizenship literature, and it is to these two themes that we now turn.
There is a general consensus between scholars working within the MLG approach to EU citizenship that, to this point, there has been an absence of EU-level social rights. Disagreement exists however, over the implications of “de-socialized” EU citizenship, and whether or not EU-level social rights are obtainable or even a necessary component of a legitimate EU polity. Pessimists argue that the lack of EU social rights is a main factor contributing to the EU’s legitimacy crisis, and that the current institutional configuration of the EU imposes severe limits on the realization of a “social Europe” underpinned by social citizenship provisions (Closa 1996; Downes 2001).
Though not dealing explicitly with the issue of EU citizenship, the work of Fritz Scharpf serves as one of the most sophisticated, and we think justifiably respected, frameworks effectively capturing the MLG line of thinking of European social rights. For Scharpf, the lack of EU social rights can be attributed to the fact that the relationship between positive market-correcting integration and negative market-making integration has become increasingly asymmetrical: while economic policies have been progressively Europeanized, social-protection policies have remained at the national level (see further Chapter 3). “As a consequence,” Scharpf (2002: 666) argues, “national welfare states are constitutionally constrained by the ‘supremacy’ of all European rules of economic integration, liberalization and competition law.”
Intensifying economic interdependence in the EU has proceeded rapidly. This has imposed restrictions on national governments’ abilities to provide social goods. At the same time, according to Scharpf, a “joint decision trap” has prevented governments in the Council of Ministers from agreeing on integration in areas of social policy. The EU therefore suffers from a multilevel and dual-faceted legitimacy crisis of both input-legitimacy (government-by-the-people) and output-legitimacy (government-for-the-people) (Scharpf 1999). Scharpf’s solution to this dual crisis of legitimacy runs counter to the proposals of PNC based on strengthening collective European identity and the input-based model of constitutional patriotism. Instead Scharpf (1999: Ch. 1) argues that the diversity of the EU’s member states prevents the formation of a collective European identity and that this diversity, in turn, renders input-based models of legitimacy based on majoritarian democracy unsuitable in the EU context (Thomassen and Schmitt 2004). The EU should therefore concentrate on strengthening output-based legitimacy, an important component of which would be to strengthen the social dimension of EU governance. Although the nature of the EU polity places daunting obstacles to EU-level social rights, Scharpf (2001: 19) suggests that a more effective route, against both supranational and intergovernmental decision making, may lie in the “open method of coordination” (OMC) and the hopes that EU-level “monitoring, benchmarking and peer review could increase the effectiveness of national employment and social policies” (see Chapter 4).
The second theme that has preoccupied much of the MLG literature involves the status of non-citizen migrants or resident third country nationals (hereafter TCNs). MLG scholars working on this issue have come to a simple yet significant observation: since the claim to EU citizenship is tied to national citizenship in a member state, it excludes the more than 18 million TCNs3 resident in the EU from its provisions. Whereas barriers to free movement and residence are increasingly removed for Union citizens, possession of member state nationality remains a qualifying criterion for eligibility to the benefits afforded by Community rules in the post–Amsterdam Treaty Europe. Union citizenship remains conditioned on possession or acquisition of state nationality. This has resulted in the relegation of long-term resident nationals of third countries to the periphery of the emerging European civil society, despite the fact that they are an integral part of the EU and contribute to the development and flourishing of European societies (Kostakopoulou 2002: 444).
The exclusionary and limited nature of EU citizenship as relates to TCNs, as MLG scholars are keen to point out, runs contrary to the assertions made by cosmopolitans that it forms the basis for a more progressive post-national identity detached from the nation-state (Kostakopoulou 2005: 240). MLG scholars also point to the fact that the position of TCNs challenges the notion that EU citizenship serves as a route to popular legitimacy for the EU project, as a large base of the EU population, directly subject to supranational policy making, are denied the democratic right to participate in the political process (Geddes 2000a; Day and Shaw 2002). This also raises concerns about the abilities of the EU to promote the social integration of TCNs, given the increased institutional capacities of the EU in areas of migration and asylum policy since the Amsterdam Treaty (ratified in 1999) (Kostakopoulou 2005). In terms of possible solutions, the MLG approach advocates a number of institutional reforms that could remedy the precarious position of TCNs and expand upon EU citizenship beyond its current exclusionary nature. This would entail either modifying EU citizenship, basing it on residence rather than nationality (“denizenship,” as coined by Hammar [1990]) (Hansen, R. and Weil 2001; Hansen, R. 1998), or building upon existing EU initiatives that seek to give TCNs rights and obligations that are comparable to those of EU citizens (Kostakopoulou 2002: 449; see also Chapters 5–6).
The MLG approach to citizenship thus has several advantages over PNC: most importantly, it situates EU citizenship within the concrete historical context of EU integration, recognizing how the politics of citizenship in the EU is influenced by several actors and institutions at multiple levels of governance. It also, especially in the work of Scharpf, offers a more nuanced approach to the scalar dimensions of EU citizenship, challenging the portrayal of globalization and EU integration as necessarily negative exogenous pressures on national citizenship models. At the same time, however, the MLG approach to citizenship suffers from the same pitfalls that characterize MLG integration theory. In narrowly focusing on the institutional form of EU citizenship, the MLG approach to EU citizenship fails to address its socioeconomic content, explaining why it has emerged, who benefits from it, and what kind of citizenship model it seeks to promote (Holman 2004). Although MLG recognizes that certain elements of society have indeed lost out when it comes to EU citizenship (social rights beneficiaries, TCNs), it does not make any systematic attempt to explain why this has been the case. Thus the institutional reforms that MLG proposes tend toward pluralism—failing to take into account the power relations that limit the efficacy of such measures (van Apeldoorn et al 2003). As a descriptive theory concerned mostly with the “problem solving” (see Cox 1986) dimensions of EU citizenship, MLG cannot account for the origins and trajectories of structural power that underpin the provision of rights and responsibilities in the multilevel governance polity. Much like PNC, the explanatory dimensions of EU citizenship, especially as they relate to issues of power and legitimacy, are largely out of reach.
Towards a Critical History
Despite their obvious differences, the two broadly categorized streams of thought outlined above are likely to accept as a starting point a basic definition of citizenship as the concept or category defining the rights and responsibilities of civil society to the polity/state and vice versa (Hay 1996; Tilly 1995). As our critique suggests, PNC tends to focus its energies completely on a nascent European civil society, the coming together of diverse European peoples who have supposedly begun to shed their outdated, regressive allegiances to the nation-state. It cannot, however, due largely to crude conceptualizations of globalization and the concomitant process of EU integration, provide any compelling reasons as to why a European polity as a political organization would differ fundamentally from the nation-state. The MLG approach to EU citizenship on the other hand concentrates narrowly on the institutional dynamics between the EU and national levels or polities, thus largely ignoring the role of civil society in shaping and influencing the content of supranational and national laws and institutions. Most crucially furthermore, both of these approaches tend toward pluralism in failing to systematically explain the ways in which different social and political actors are differentially impacted by citizenship politics in the EU. In the absence of any such treatment of the power relations underpinning EU citizenship, PNC is limited in its abilities to account for the structural barriers preventing the realization of its progressive vision of the EU; whereas MLG, though it recognizes asymmetries between national and European social citizenship regimes and between EU citizens and TCNs, faces troubles in trying to explain why or how these asymmetries came into being, and how they can be transformed.
Citizenship and Capitalist Power Relations
Our alternative critical history starts out from the same basic definition of citizenship, but radically departs from the dominant approaches by analyzing the historical power relations underpinning the relationship between civil society and the polity. As such, we emphasize that the politics of citizenship is never isolated from broader processes of social transformation; and while the phenomena of societal change have certain transformative effects on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, at the same time rights and responsibilities entrenched in prior social struggles can have an impact on, and even limit the degree of such change (Purcell 2002). By explicitly situating our analysis within the broader historical context of EU integration, we start our analysis from the obvious but nevertheless crucial argument that since the EU is a capitalist social formation, our explanatory approach must place primary emphasis on the role of capitalist social relations as a key mode of power shaping the content of citizenship politics in the EU. Of course the state, civil society, and indeed citizenship have all historically preceded the emergence of capitalist social relations, and so our first task will be to explicate historically the social purpose of citizenship within a capitalist context. This, we argue, will help to address the charges of “economic reductionism” that inevitably arise to challenge these observations regarding the centrality of capitalist social relations.
In order to think historically about the relationship between citizenship and capitalism, we feel that it is useful to draw insights from the literature tracing the gradual rise of industrial capitalism in eighteenth-century England. This is by no means the place to revisit the controversial and protracted debates over the precise origins of capitalism (for an instructive overview, see Wood 2002); instead, we single out the work of Ellen Wood (1995) as particularly helpful in elucidating the historical specificity of citizenship in capitalist societies. For Wood (1995), the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England brought with it a new form of state embodied by the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (see also van der Pijl 1998). Whereas feudal communities were characterized by (1) peasant possession of the “means of labour and subsistence,” (2) “extra-economic” modes of surplus extraction by feudal lords in the form of rent and taxation, and (3) formal inequality excluding peasants from political participation in the state, emergent capitalist communities were predicated on a combination of relative political and civil equality in the form of representative liberal democracy, and socioeconomic inequality whereby the institution of private property ensured that “purely economic advantage [took] the place of juridical privilege and political monopoly” (Wood 1995: 211).4
This explication of the specific rise of capitalist citizenship in England gives us clues as to what the primary function or social purpose of citizenship within the capitalist state is in general; namely, to legitimate the unequal power relations in the realm of capital accumulation through a discourse of purportedly equal political subjects. Echoing Dannreuther and Petit’s (2006: 184) regulationist approach, we see that the state’s role in conferring (or denying) citizenship status can be conceptualized as a mode of social regulation over processes of capital accumulation:
One of the clearest ways that the state has contributed to the maintenance of capital accumulation has been in its exclusive ability to grant rights to its subjects. In their constitutional form, rights provide cultural as well as formal references for acceptable behaviour through statements of ideals and beliefs that inform legislative behaviour. More practically, rights establish the primary legislation from which secondary legislation is enacted to, for example, empower voters, secure property, and enable trade.
Dannreuther and Petit (2006: 185) go on to explain convincingly how the historical development of rights and responsibilities—which spell out the need for citizens “to not steal, to accept the primacy of market forces, to vote and to work when well”—have played a crucial role in maintaining the compliance of subjects by regulating social behavior in a manner that not only sustains, but also legitimately reproduces particular regimes of accumulation. In other words, the composition of citizenship and especially social rights, as the “constituent element of citizenship” and the “cement of social cohesion” (Aglietta 1998: 64), act as a bridge between accumulation and regulation.
At the same time it is crucial to emphasize that the politics of citizenship cannot be reduced to an instrumentalist reading whereby citizen rights and responsibilities serve merely as a “top-down” instrumentalist tool of legitimation for the ruling class. As an institutionalized outcome of (politically contingent) class struggles (Mann 1987), the content of citizenship reflects the balance of social power relations that vary considerably over time and space. For example, explaining the emergence of, but also the considerable variations in, social citizenship regimes in advanced capitalist states during the post–World War II period must take into account not only ruling class strategies, but also situate these in relation to working class strategies for social protection (see Chapter 2).
We therefore prefer to anchor our conceptual framework within what Bob Jessop (1990) terms “hegemonic projects,” a concept denoting the competing strategies through which competing class forces vie for “moral and intellectual leadership” over the state. Crucially, the actual historical formation of hegemonic projects in terms of strategies, interests and allegiances (in short, politics and ideology) cannot merely be reduced to their structural positions in the original process of accumulation, and must instead be identified in terms of class agency, whereby open-ended political struggles play a defining role. In moving from narrow “economic” objectives toward uniting together the “divergent views, identities and interests” (van Apeldoorn 2002) into a “general interest” incorporating subordinate groups, most successful hegemonic projects all rely on notions of equality, fairness and the “common good.” In capitalist societies these find their fullest expression in particular constellations of civil, political, and social citizenship rights and responsibilities. This view of citizenship has obvious affinities with the framework of T. H. Marshall, whose classic work Citizenship and Social Class (1950) made plain the contradictory nature of citizenship under capitalism. While citizenship, as Marshall argued, had been at war with the class system for centuries, citizenship simultaneously harbored the potential to serve as a “legitimate architect of social inequality” that characterizes capitalist social relations.
The Politics of Citizenship: Being and Becoming a Citizen
Marshall’s analysis of the historical evolution of Anglo-Saxon citizenship from civil rights in the eighteenth century, political rights in the nineteenth century, culminating in the institutionalization of social rights in the twentieth century (Mann 1987), never addressed the issue of migration, which as our introduction suggest, is central to a broader understanding of the underlying politics of citizenship in the EU. It is important in this regard to take into account the historical context in which Marshall wrote, where, at least in terms of social rights, migrants in the advanced capitalist countries were included, or at least about to become included, in the “nationally oriented settlements of the Keynesian Welfare [National] State” (Ryner 2000: 51; Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006). Nevertheless, in the contemporary context of the increasing political salience of migration and the decline of the Keynesian Welfare National State (KWNS) (Jessop 2002) it has become imperative, both for positive (empirical) and normative reasons, to render explicit the inextricable linkages between citizenship and migration. We feel it is useful to draw on Castles and Davidson’s (2000: 84) distinction between “being a citizen,” implied in our basic definition of citizenship offered above, and “becoming a citizen”:
Becoming a citizen is clearly of crucial importance to an immigrant, but gaining formal access to citizenship—symbolized by getting the passport of the country of residence—is only one aspect of this. Equally important is the extent to which people belonging to distinct groups of the population actually achieve substantial citizenship, that is, equal chances of participation in various areas of society, such as politics, work, welfare systems and cultural relations.
As these authors go on to point out, the distinction between “being” and “becoming” a citizen is always a blurred one “because of the discontinuities and fluidity of different aspects of citizenship” (Castles and Davidson 2000: 103). The blurring of reality that occurs when migration is added to the citizenship equation has direct implications for Marshall’s evolutionary depiction of the line from civil to political to social rights. As discussions of the migrant integration, or incorporation, experiences in Western Europe during the postwar “golden age” attest to, the Marshallian formula was actually reversed for migrants and ethnic minorities, who most often were drawn into social welfare schemes before being given the political right to vote (Guiraudon 2000; Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006). In the case of EU citizenship, however, these matters are further complicated as it appears as though this model has been reversed back to its original Marshallian formulation, with the EU recently introducing a “civic citizenship” model for TCNs—“but with no guarantees of an evolutionary follow-up in the future in terms of a social citizenship of the Union” (Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006: 63, italics in original; see further Chapter 5–6).
We therefore suggest that it makes sense to speak of differential degrees of inclusion into particular citizenship regimes and their accompanying rights and responsibilities. Schematically, these may be divided into separate regimes, for instance, for “formal” citizens, legally, “illegally” or irregularly resident TCNs, asylum seekers, and those on the borderlands trying to enter a specific territory—all of which are further complicated by the differential power relations that divide societies along class, gender, sexual, ethnic, racial, and religious lines. In this way, the centrality of hegemonic projects to our critical-historical framework enables us to identify the structural division between capital and labor in the accumulation process, but is also sensitive to the fact that this must give way to an overtly political discussion of the divisions and fractures within classes themselves (e.g. organized labor lobbying alongside employer associations for stricter migration controls for employment and social protection reasons). Overall, it is crucial to the critical aspect of our framework to be able to highlight such disjunctions between the structural and political, not the least in order so that knowledge can be used to formulate alternative projects that identify the barriers and offer tangible strategies toward the mobilization of subordinate social forces in ways that cut across these political divides.
Conclusion: Citizenship and the EU Polity
Thus far our conceptual framework has been concerned with the historical interrelations between citizenship and the state. In what ways does it need to be modified in order to take into account the interrelations between the EU, a different form of political organization from the nation-state, and EU citizenship, a category which is at the same time distinct from, yet still necessarily linked to the national citizenship models of EU member states? In general terms, we accept the premises of both PNC and MLG that the EU has taken on several policy-making and governance powers that were once the exclusive domain of the nation-state. We also accept the argument that the rescaling of power to the EU level has altered the functions and powers of EU member states in certain respects. Finally, we agree that the rescaling of policy making and governance to the EU level has been heavily biased toward market-making negative integration, and also that EU citizenship has, as a result, been limited especially in terms of social rights.
According to our alternative approach, the EU can be conceived of not as a nation-state in the traditional sense but, as James Caporaso (1996: 46) makes clear, as an “ongoing structure of political authority and governance.” It is a hybrid and evolving form of polity, one that contains its own modes of regulation that govern and coordinate the pan-European regime of accumulation (reflected in the Single Market). This in turn means that the EU takes on several important functions of statehood, mediating competing hegemonic projects that operate within simultaneous and interrelated levels and arenas of governance (van Apeldoorn and Horn 2007). Thus far however, this account does not give us much indication as to how our alternative approach differs from the predominant PNC and MLG conceptions of the EU polity. We depart from these conceptions by suggesting that although the institutional setup of the EU is distinct from the state in many ways, it still fulfils the same role as a site of accumulation and competing class interests, contained within a hybrid EU state/civil society complex. As in the case of state citizenship outlined above, EU citizenship also acts as a mode of social regulation, this time within the EU polity, creating “new and compatible social identities to match the European social body” (Scott-Smith 2003: 261) while attempting to legitimate configurations of power relations that underpin EU policy making and governance.
Taken as a whole, we argue that this alternative critical history equips us with the conceptual tools for explaining the historical emergence and movement of the politics of citizenship in the EU, with the overall aim of elucidating its underlying social purpose. As a result, we do not seek to merely describe the current state of EU citizenship and endorse it as a route to a more progressive world order (in the case of PNC) nor to propose narrow problem-solving solutions that portend to modify EU citizenship in ways that make it into a mechanism for the legitimation of EU policy making and governance (as in MLG). Given the current crisis of EU legitimacy, we feel there is a dire need for social scientific research that instead directs its energies toward uncovering the limits and contradictions of EU citizenship from a historical perspective. Ultimately, the overall efficacy of the alternative problématique and underlying theoretical assumptions sketched here to sustain it can only be assessed based on how well the empirically thick historical account they buttress can capture the dynamics of citizenship politics as they have developed in the EU through more than half a century. It is to this task that we now turn.
Notes
1. For a key critique of PNC from within the moral philosophical tradition—one that we draw theoretical inspiration from and attempt to give empirical grounding to—see Balibar (2004).
2. We consider this conception of the nation-state within PNC to be the most common, “moderate” position, espoused by figures such as Daniele Archibugi and David Held. There is, however, a considerable divergence of thinking on the nation-state within PNC, so that it makes sense to plot differing views on a continuum ranging from moderates of a more realist bent to those with more doctrinaire outlooks, such as the one espoused by Ulrich Beck (2006: 170), who likens the nation-state to an “experimental chamber of horrors,” the one responsible for “the two world wars, the Holocaust, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Stalinist death camps and genocides.” For a thorough delineation and critical scrutiny of the various cosmopolitan and post-national perspectives and positions, see Calhoun (2007).
3. According to Eurostat figures for 2006, there were approximately 18.5 million third-country nationals residing in the EU-25 (CEC 2007f: 3).
4. Wood’s argument thus relies on the notion that early forms of capitalist social relations relied upon market compulsion (“economic” versus “extra-economic” power) as the central mechanism through which workers are drawn into wage labor and capitalists are drawn to “maximize” profits. The dichotomy between “economic” and “extra-economic,” we argue, is blurred in the initial transition to capitalism through its reliance on violent forms of “primitive accumulation” (Marx 1976), and also with the rise of oligopolistic corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Josephson 1934).
