BECOMING A CITIZEN

ABSTRACT

Although citizenship and youth have traditionally seemed to be two terms with very little in common, recent years have shown an enormous interest in analysing their relationships. On one hand, exploring how the new generations become citizens is a key issue for understanding the characteristics of the civic life of a society. On the other, the concept of citizenship has revealed itself as a potent conceptual and analytic instrument for explaining youth transitions. In order to acquire a deeper comprehension of these relationships, we believe it necessary to advance in their empirical study, to acknowledge their multidimensional character, and to defend a dynamic perspective of citizenship. This paper approaches the study of citizenship from its cultural dimension and proposes an analytical framework for the empirical study of the discourses and representations of what being a citizen means to young Europeans. Our analytical framework is structured along two axes: the dimension of belonging and the dimension of involvement.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• youth
• social representations

Notes

A preliminary version of this article was discussed at the Research Network Youth and Generation during the 5th Conference of the European Sociological Association that took place in Helsinki in August 2001. We would like to thank Emilio Luque for his constant collaboration in improving the text and Claire Wallace for her comments on the first draft.We also wish to thank the two journal's anonymous referees for their detailed comments. This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (PB 98-0005) and by the Autonomus Community of Madrid (06/0010/2003).

²Both the European Commission and the Council of Europe have repeatedly insisted on the the importance of linking citizenship themes to youth themes as a way to have youth participate in the development of European society. The European Union's ‘Youth in Action’ programme is a good example of the position.

³In several European countries, such as Italy and Spain, the family supports over 68 and 62%, respectively, of the young people (Schizzerotto and Gasperoni 2001: 42).

⁴As Lockwood states, a situation of civic deficit can be defined as ‘a situation in which a lack of resources prevents the exercise of rights that are formally enjoyed …’ (1996: 537).

⁵According to a feminist perspective, the analysis of citizenship practices should not be confined to the public sphere (Siim 2000).

⁶These results were presented in Morán and Benedicto (2003b) and in J. Benedicto, E. Luque and M.L. Morán, ‘El acceso de los jóvenes a la ciudadanía’ (Research Report 2005). A first draft of the analysis appeared in ‘The civic identities of Spanish young people’ presented at conference ‘Young people 2002’, Keele University, 2002.

⁷In recent years, the balance between rights and responsibilities has become one of the axes of political and ideological discussion. The neoliberal challenge of the 1980s has almost achieved the substitution of the language of rights – characteristic of the political discourse of the post-war welfare state – for the language of obligations and responsibilities (Roche 1992; Bellamy and Greenaway 1995).

⁸The predominance of rights in the Spanish case is directly related to the historical process of construction of a democratic citizenship following the transition to democracy (Benedicto 2006).On the other hand, in the British case the predominant political discourses during the past two decades, first from Thatcherism and then from New Labour, have centred on the duties and obligations of citizens (Dean 2004).

⁹This is precisely the predominant situation in the Spanish case. The majority of young people do not use well-defined criteria of civic belonging in their discourse. Only when a reference to immigration is introduced, a vision of citizenship based on a hypothetical national identity is articulated.The immigrant functions as ‘the other’, as the mirror image that demands thinking about what and, above all, who is a Spaniard and who is a citizen (Morán and Benedicto 2003b: 120).

¹⁰Craig Calhoun establishes an interesting distinction among three forms of social membership that also includes three ways of understanding solidarity: first of all, communities, constituted by means of dense networks of interpersonal relationships; secondly, categories based on cultural similarity or on the juridical equivalence of people, such as the nation; and, finally, the public category, constituted by mutual involvement in discourses that define public space. ‘Citizenship, by contrast to community or categorial nationality, is a specific mode of belonging directly dependent on public space’ (Calhoun 1999: 219).

¹¹An interesting research subject would be the comparison between the conceptions of the competent citizen held by the adults who act as gatekeepers to citizenship and the conceptions of the young people themselves.