Investigating Citizenship: An Agenda for Citizenship Studies

Abstract

This essay takes stock of our editorial collaboration in the past decade and outlines those ideas that we find most promising and approaches that are most fruitful in investigating citizenship. We offer it as an agenda; not so much a dogmatic sequence of principles as an ethos toward conceiving democratic citizenship as a cosmopolitan virtue. We propose a cosmopolitan mobility tax and a cosmopolitan goods and services tax to illustrate how that cosmopolitan virtue must find a practical expression.

Introduction

Modern citizenship is constructed historically from a set of contributory rights and duties that are related to work, public service (for example, military or jury service) and parenthood or family formation. It defines belonging to a society through the entitlements associated with service, and is perhaps most clearly evident in a national system of taxation. This model of citizenship as social rights has been closely associated with the legacy of the English sociologist Thomas H. Marshall (1893–1982). Marshallian citizenship has been subject to extensive criticism over the last two decades and the social model of citizenship has been expanded and deepened by approaches that emphasize the flexibility of social membership, the limitations of citizenship merely as rights, and by perspectives that emphasize identity and difference. Also, concern to defend human rights has often outmatched the defence of citizenship as entitlement, status and social membership. While we recognize the limitations of Marshall, we nevertheless build upon his approach. In particular we stress crucial compatibility of citizenship and human rights, emphasizing the importance of citizenship in effective democratic societies. Citizenship is essential for cultivating civic virtues and democratic values. The notion of duty should not be separated too sharply from rights and we attempt to develop a notion of rights (such as “rights of mobility and transaction”) that is relevant to globalization. Although globalization is often assumed to create a world in which citizenship loses its importance, we demonstrate its vital importance to contemporary political institutions.

Although the origins of the western institution of citizenship can be sought in the political cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, citizenship rights became significant as an aspect of modern politics only when certain key revolutionary events had appropriated the political norms of ancient Greece and Rome as their own: the English civil war, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. These revolutions had much in common; for example, the evolution of citizenship, involving a set of exclusionary rights that established claims to collective resources, and contributing to the formation of the state and then the nation. There was a shared emphasis on the contributions of the “common man” in services to the state through taxation and military service. Each revolution, however, appropriated and interpreted citizenship quite differently. The republican French tradition assumed the suppression of differences between citizens, who were to share a common loyalty to the republic in which religious identities were excluded from the public domain. French notions about citizenship were the results of the rational Enlightenment and were expressed radically in the writings of aristocrats like the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), who among other things championed the rights of women as citizens in his essay of 1790 “On giving women the right of citizenship” (McLean & Hewitt, 1994). In the United States, citizenship emerged with the characteristics that were described classically by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) in his two volumes on Democracy in America (2003) in 1835 and 1840. The citizen was seen to participate in the state through civil society, which was composed of a multitude of voluntary associations such as chapels, denominations, and towns. Citizens shared a radical doctrine of egalitarianism, and there was a profound suspicion of central institutions of government. In the British case, citizenship was constituted within the framework of the common law, which safeguarded the privileges of property owners, and was a barrier against the power of the state over the individual. Parliament and the rule of law established a system of checks against the rise of an absolutist state. The rights of the citizen were essentially negative freedoms from interference rather than positive rights to enjoy certain privileges. Again, these forms of citizenship were very different from social citizenship in Otto von Bismarck's Germany where rights to social security were more important than civil liberties.

Perhaps the first thing to say therefore about investigating citizenship is that it inevitably involves the comparative study of the rights and duties of citizens across diverse states. Those rights that depend on obligations to the state have played an important part in the emergence of two modern movements: nationalism and capitalism. We have observed that much of the research undertaken into modern citizenship has been, implicitly or explicitly, concerned with the tensions and contradictions between citizenship and the state (exclusion versus inclusion, rights versus obligations), and between nationalism and capitalism (inward versus outward movements, social cohesion versus accumulation).

While investigating citizenship had been an inherent concern of political thought for centuries (wrapped, as it were, within more illustrious terms such as authority, freedom, state, law, right, and obligation), it is in the early modern era, at the onset of the three revolutions mentioned earlier, that we see the separation of subjects from citizens. While Thomas Hobbes was having difficulties recognizing the citizen, we find Baruch Spinoza bravely declaring in the Tractatus Politicus (published posthumously in 1677) that “I call men citizens in so far as they enjoy all the advantages of the commonwealth by civil right; and subjects in so far as they are bound to obey the ordinances or laws of the commonwealth” (Spinoza, 1958, p. 285). Early modern political thought had, therefore, already implicitly concentrated on the rights and obligations of citizens in relation to the state. By contrast, modern social thought initially concentrated on the social structures that have distorted and limited the formal rights of citizens, and these structures are typically social class, gender and race. The debate about citizenship in the United States has concentrated heavily on the issues of slavery, race and immigration, whereas the debate in British social science has been conducted in terms of the tensions between citizenship, capitalism and class structure. Marshall developed the principal theory of citizenship within the context of post-war welfare institutions, drawing from a deeper tradition of struggling for redistribution. We shall now turn our attention to those two forms of struggle—redistribution and recognition—that structure claims to and demands of citizenship. Then we shall question the dominant conception of human rights and proceed to develop a conception of cosmopolitan citizenship that undergirds a broader but pragmatic conception of human rights.

Struggles for Redistribution and Citizenship

We need to understand Marshall's contribution to investigating citizenship from the perspective of post-war reconstruction and the dominance of John Maynard Keynes's (1883–1946) economic and social policies on redistribution. Marshall saw citizenship as an institution that would guarantee the workers a “modicum” of civilized life by protecting them from the unpredictable vagaries of accident, sickness and unemployment. Keynesian economic strategies of redistribution were intended to increase employment through state investment in utilities when the business cycle was in a downturn. Marshall's view of social rights was as much about offering the minimum of civilized existence to a depressed, urban working class as it was about giving them protection from unemployment. Perhaps this uncivilized urban squalor in British post-war life was nowhere better described than by George Orwell in his The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Orwell painted a bleak picture of the squalor, grime and drudgery of everyday life in the northern cities of industrial Britain. “Wigan Pier” was as outlandish to the English middle classes of southern England as Timbuktu or Khartoum. The book that had been commissioned by Victor Gollancz in January 1936 to provide an analysis of the “condition of England” joined the tradition of William Cobbett (1763–1845), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) as an indictment of grinding poverty. It was against such conditions that Marshallian citizenship offered some hope of social reform, drawing from a deeper tradition that extended back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

We can also see that in some ways Marshallian citizenship theory provides the sociological underpinning to Keynes's theory of money. Working-class politics was an important aspect of pressure on the state to protect workers from unemployment and insecurity. The welfare state often appears as an aspect of social reconstruction because reformers like William Beveridge (1879–1963) thought idealistically that the welfare state would remove the five giant evils of post-war Britain, namely, want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Richard Titmuss (1958) saw more clearly that social citizenship was the unintended consequence of wartime mobilization and strategies to rebuild post-war Britain in the context of imperial failure.

The Marshallian understanding of citizenship, which came to dominate sociological approaches to social rights in the second half of the twentieth century, hardly needs any elaboration (Barbalet, 1988). His argument that citizenship was composed of three sets of rights is well known. Civil rights developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were institutionalized in common law, habeas corpus and the jury system. In English common law, its great spokesman was Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) whose legal philosophy was expressed in the Petition of Right (1628) against arbitrary taxation and arbitrary imprisonment. In the second stage, political rights were institutionalized in parliament and an extension of the franchise, and social rights in the twentieth century were built into the welfare state.

Marshall's ideas articulated the basic principles of social policy in Britain, but his ideas have come under increasing criticism. There is the obvious criticism that he neglected gender, assuming a conventional sexual division of labour that was increasingly irrelevant as women entered the formal labour market and the traditional family disappeared. He was less concerned with race and ethnicity (though see Marshall, 1981), despite Britain's dependence on Commonwealth labour to feed its post-war recovery. These problems can be summarized by saying that Marshall took the definition of citizen for granted, whereas contemporary theories of citizenship have been primarily concerned with rapidly changing identities: who is the citizen? If contributory rights and duties, relating to work, taxation, military service and parenthood, defined Marshallian citizenship, what is the status of the unemployed, the disabled, the elderly or the migrant worker? As identity has become a dominant issue of modern social movements, the relevance of Marshall's world appears to have been eclipsed, and with it, his approach to social rights. But we have argued that identity and citizenship are deeply connected (Isin & Wood, 1999; Isin & Turner, 2002).

Social Keynesianism was of course resisted in the United States, which retained a stronger notion of individual responsibility for welfare and relied upon local community initiatives to address social questions. The social dimension of rights claims has not sat easily with the American emphasis on community action and individual autonomy. Alexis de Tocqueville's theory of associational democracy rather than Marshall's welfare assumptions dominated American social science. De Tocqueville claimed to demonstrate that the absence of centralized, bureaucratic administration had encouraged individual initiative, and voluntary associations and community groups rather than state agencies had emerged to solve social and political problems. It is commonly argued that Americans are characteristically alienated from formal politics, big government and centralized authority, and hence their political commitments are channelled through local and informal associations (Bellah et al., 1985). Many argue that this active citizenship—participation in churches, voluntary associations and clubs—has, however, declined throughout the post-war period resulting in an erosion of trust, political participation and interest in politics (Putnam, 2000). There is, as we have noted, a powerful ideology of individualism that has been deeply suspicious of state involvement in welfare and therefore often antagonistic to the development of social rights. Individual rights such as freedom of conscience are championed, but social rights have been seen as aspects of socialism. The American Bar Association's House of Delegates opposed the Declaration of Human Rights because it contained social and economic rights in 1948, the Eisenhower Administration attempted to downplay the importance of the two Covenants on rights and, following action by Secretary of State Dulles, the United States did not ratify the Convention on Genocide (Galey, 1998). The American political class opposed the Declaration on the grounds that its social provisions smacked of communism and with the fall of communism American conservatives have been able to celebrate neo-liberal economic policies as the only viable global strategy.

Citizenship and welfare have consequently been profoundly altered by the Anglo-American neo-conservative revolution of the late 1970s, which created a political framework in which governments were no longer committed to the universalistic principles of social rights, a comprehensive welfare state, and full employment. Its tenets were either emulated by or, more frequently, imposed on other governments throughout the 1980s and 1990s, becoming global. These global redistribution strategies that promoted welfare for work saw a reduction of state intervention, deregulation of the labour and financial markets, implementation of free trade, reduction in personal taxation, and fiscal regulation of state expenditure. These strategies harnessed the doctrines of F. A. Hayek (1899–1992), Karl Popper (1902–1994), and Milton Friedman (1912–2006) to the purposes of policy formation. New Right theorists argued that judgements about human needs should be left to the operation of the market, not to governments. The historical period of Keynesian redistribution was replaced by more aggressive neo-conservative regimes in which the enterprising and self-regarding consumer became the driving force of the economy and the free market was a necessary condition of freedom. Although these doctrines are called either neo-liberal or neo-conservative, they may well be thought as a return to Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees in 1705 in which he set out to prove that private vices such as personal greed produce public goods such as wealth.

Struggles for Recognition and Citizenship

Traditional welfare forms of Marshallian citizenship were based on social rights, resulting from the contributions of individuals to the state in the form of work, military service (or similar public duty) and parenting. Contributory and redistributive entitlements presuppose a necessary relationship between right and duty. The entitlements of full-time employment in which the worker has paid taxes and pension contributions include unemployment benefit, health care, pensions, and education. Taxation and pensions are the two economic institutions that defined Marshallian, post-war citizenship, and the other was wartime service. The hallmark of a democratic modern state composed of citizens is a universal taxation system with few loopholes for the majority of the population. Tax evasion and corruption are correspondingly the hallmarks of failing states. Where an adequate taxation system is not functioning effectively, governments turn to the use of such instruments as a national lottery as in Thailand to generate funding for cash-strapped public utilities. This pattern of Keynesian welfare economics and Marshallian citizenship has been eroded by broad changes in the labour market, the transformation of modern warfare, the decline of the traditional family, the erosion of pension funds, the changing sexual division of labour, and changes in reproduction associated with new reproductive technologies (Turner, 2001).

The post-war model of social citizenship and state involvement is under additional strain because the ageing of the populations of the developed world and the decline in fertility is placing increased financial burdens on state pensions, health care and welfare services. As the active workforce declines in relation to the retired population, there is a reduction in the tax base and an erosion of private income flowing to the state through personal taxation. Because the majority of the population has inadequate savings to support themselves in sickness, retirement and old age, there are few easy solutions to this problem, or at least few solutions that an electorate will happily accept. Middle-class voters have typically welcomed cuts in personal income tax, accepting the argument that left-wing governments are high spending governments, producing inflation, inefficiency and indebtedness. In recent years in the United States and the United Kingdom, major companies have reneged on final salary pension schemes, leaving even more people without adequate pension coverage for old age.

The economic relationship between house prices, savings, investment and pensions in both countries is indicative of the recent transformation of citizenship by western governments that have embraced neo-conservative policies. Individuals and their families in the developed world seek to fund retirement by selling their homes on the basis of extraordinary increases in the property values of their houses. Personal savings remain low, and young people cannot enter the property ladder even where interest rates and mortgage repayments are at historically low levels. Homelessness has become a stigmatizing feature in a society dominated by home ownership, not only as an economic asset, but also as a moral criterion (Arnold, 2004; Feldman, 2004). The defining economic principles of Keynesian citizenship—high personal taxation, adequate pensions for retirement and a welfare safety net—are being eroded. The institutional framework of a common experience of membership of a political community—taxation, military service, a common framework of national education, and a vibrant civil society—is declining, and this development is the real basis of the erosion of social citizenship in modern democratic states. This decline is in fact the privatization of public identities following the privatization of public utilities. We would suggest, however, at least in Europe and the United States, social citizenship is eroded as a consequence of changing government strategies rather than as an outcome of the social changes analysed by Robert Putnam (2000) in his Bowling Alone. In authoritarian regimes, such as contemporary Russia, social citizenship has been squandered, because the government of President Putin has suppressed both foreign and domestic NGOs in the interests of the state's domination of civil society. The result of the damage done to civil society is a rapid decline in the life expectancy of Russian citizens as they face an unchecked increase in infectious diseases, alcoholism, prostitution, and drug abuse (Turner, 2004). This interpretation of recent Russian history since the reforms of Boris Yeltsin is of course controversial, but given Russian opposition to large-scale immigration the country will continue to slide down the hierarchy of populous and thriving societies in which the Russian state depends heavily on rent from energy resources (Desai, 2006).

Governments that are faced with ageing populations and low birth rates are forced to rely on foreign migrant workers to keep their economies growing. The labour markets of western states also depend on these workers, because their own labour force is not sufficiently mobile and is reluctant to take on unskilled or low-paid work. This is, for example, the dilemma facing the French government, where its own economic competitiveness is compromised in a global economy, where labour costs in Asia are much lower than in northern Europe. There is however a paradox in terms of this growing dependency on the migration of foreign labour. Western states need migrant labour, but their democratic governments, responding in part to electoral pressures and media campaigns against foreign labour, especially in Europe, cannot be seen to be too lenient towards high levels of migration, especially illegal immigration.

The argument about state security and the need to defend political borders has turned public opinion against outsiders in general and against Muslim foreign workers in particular. The heightened securitization of the state has therefore typically conflated three categories of persons: migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Right-wing parties in Austria, Denmark and Germany have successfully mobilized electorates against liberal policies towards labour mobility, porous frontiers and foreign workers. The Danish case is a good illustration of a society with a low reproductive rate and an ageing population, and yet a right-wing media generated the cartoon crisis of 2005–2006, which is antagonistic to migrants. Although economic migrants contribute significantly to growth, they are often thought to be parasitic on the welfare system of the host society. These workers do not fit easily into a welfare model of contributory rights in an age of terrorism, when states have turned to the maintenance of security as their principal contribution to the functioning of society. European governments have been reluctant to give citizenship status to migrants without stringent criteria of membership and naturalization is often a slow and complex process. Applicants for citizenship are increasingly expected to pass a test to prove that they are more knowledgeable about the society they want to join than its current citizens. Even more absurdly, conservative politicians in the United Kingdom have famously expected new citizens, such as Indians and Pakistanis, to support English cricket teams rather than their national sides (Ameli, 2002). Once conceived as an asset, dual citizenship is increasingly regarded as a threat, because of the question of securing and maintaining undivided loyalty to the state. Where dual citizenship is technically possible, it is becoming discouraged. There is as a result an increasing level of political criticism against quasi-citizenship, dual citizenship and flexible work arrangements, because these forms of membership are thought to undermine the model of traditional political loyalty. The hostility of many American Congressmen to illegal Mexican migration, even when many southern states rely heavily on Hispanic communities in the labour market, is further evidence of the new emphasis on security and territory in modern electoral politics. We coin a new term—the enclave society—to express the securitization of liberal societies, the building of physical barriers against foreign immigration and the creation of gated communities to defend citizens against urban incivility.

Yet, dual citizenship is also becoming a strategy of government. India and Australia have both embraced dual-citizenship policies for strategic reasons. Modern China may well wish to give some political status, such as dual citizenship, to overseas Chinese to attract wealthy Chinese businessmen back into the fold. Some states may also use dual citizenship as a method of expelling unwanted residents who happen to have dual citizenship. In short, we cannot take the existence of dual citizenship as an automatic measure of political liberalism.

Multiculturalism is in crisis, because most liberal governments are retreating from open commitment to cultural diversity, emphasizing instead security, cohesion and integration. In the United States, sociologists like Nathan Glazer (1997) are claiming that multiculturalism has failed and in particular that the United States is a balkanized community, fragmenting along ethnic divisions. The crisis over Hispanic migration and the ostensibly porous nature of the Mexican border is a further evidence of the retreat from multicultural policies as a method of incorporating migrant communities into the dominant society. These economic and social problems are compounded by the current conflicts between “political Islam” and the West, which has been epitomized in the notion of “a clash of civilizations”.

Yet, the combined effects and unintended consequences of neo-conservatism and multiculturalism may well have been to expose the fundamental weakness modern citizenship based upon the nation. The process of nationalization of citizenship meant that citizenship had become synonymous with nationality. The aspirations to universality of citizenship of the state came up against its national definitions whether understood as racial, ethnic or even religious. It was Hannah Arendt (1951, p. 275) who pointed out the paradox of what she described as the conquest of the state by the nation. She argued the rise of the discourse on minorities articulated “in plain language what until then had been only implied in the working system of nation-states, namely, that only nationals could be citizens, only people of the same national origin could enjoy the protection of legal institutions, that persons of different nationality needed some law of exception until or unless they were completely assimilated and divorced from their origin” (Arendt, 1951, p. 275). She described this conquest of the state by the nation as “the transformation of the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation” (p. 275). It was this conquest that defined citizens of the state as nationals whether defined racially, ethnically, culturally or even religiously. This was the real origin of the struggles for recognition of those groups that were ostensibly of the state but remained out of the nation.

Citizenship Versus Human Rights

These struggles that are now associated with recognition and citizenship rights for social and cultural minorities are actually an aspect of a still more complex issue which is the relationship between the human rights of people qua humans and the rights of citizens as members of a nation or the state. Human rights and citizenship, and state sovereignty and rights are often contradictory couplets. The declaration of the National Assembly of France in 1789 claimed that “the natural and imprescriptible rights of man” were “liberty, property, security and resistance of oppression”. It went on, however, to assert that “the nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty” and that no “individual or body of men” could be entitled to “any authority, which is not expressly derived from it”. While human rights are regarded as innate and inalienable, the rights of citizens are created by states. These two contrasted ideas—the imprescriptible rights of human beings and the exclusive rights of citizens—have remained an important dilemma in any justification of rights.

Social rights are entitlements enjoyed by citizens and are upheld by courts within the framework of a sovereign state. These rights can be called “contributory rights” because effective claims against a society are made possible by the contributions that citizens have made to society typically through work, war, or parenting (Turner, 2001). By contrast, human rights are rights enjoyed by individuals by virtue of being human, and as a consequence of their shared vulnerability. John Rawls (1999, p. 79) in his The Law of Peoples has asserted that “Human rights are distinct from constitutional rights, or from the rights of liberal democratic citizenship”, and he calls human rights “a special class of urgent rights” that protect people from slavery, mass murder and genocide. They are deployed in states of emergency where states have failed to protect their people or indeed have been instrumental in genocide as appears to be the case in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

The paradox is that human rights are not connected to duties and they are not based on past contributions. There is no corresponding system of taxation or military service relating to the possession of human rights. The United Nations Declaration implies obligations, but they are not clearly or forcefully defined. While states enforce social rights, there is no sovereign power uniformly to enforce human rights at a global level.

Again, Hannah Arendt (1951) developed the most devastating criticism of “the rights of Man”. She complained that these inalienable rights are said to exist independently of any government, but once the rights of citizenship have been removed, there is no authority left to protect people as human beings. Human rights that cannot be enforced by an authority are mere abstractions. They are almost impossible to define and it is difficult to show how they add anything to the specific rights of citizens of states. The “right to have rights” only makes sense for people who already enjoy membership of a political community. Arendt concluded ironically that these arguments against abstract human rights were originally put forward by conservatives like Edmund Burke (1729–1797) who argued that the rights of an Englishman were more secure and definite than any number of abstract rights of man.

In other words, a viable state is important as a guarantee of rights. Human rights abuses are characteristically a consequence of state tyranny, dictatorship, and state failure resulting in civil war and anarchy. There is some validity to the argument by Burke: the liberties of citizens are better protected by their own state institutions than by external legal or political intervention. The state is the authority through which human rights legislation is enforced. Perhaps even more strongly, there is no international authority for human rights and “the purpose of international concern with human rights is to make national rights effective under national laws and through national institutions” (Henkin, 1998, p. 512). In addition, the chaotic outcome of “human rights wars” in East Timor, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq should cause us to look with radical scepticism on those governments that claim a right to intervene in the name of protecting citizens from their own states (Chandler, 2002). In any case, human rights wars tend to occur selectively when powerful states have a direct interest in the conflict. The United States shows little interest in intervening militarily in Darfur or in the Horn of Africa, but has committed billions of dollars intervening in Afghanistan and Iraq in its “war against terror”. The security provided by an authoritarian state might be preferred to fragile democracy that requires foreign armies to sustain it. From a Hobbesian point of view, a strong state will be required to enforce agreements between conflicting social groups. Another way of expressing this idea is to argue that we need to maintain a distinction between the rights of citizens that are enforced by states, and the human rights of persons that are protected, but frequently and inadequately enforced, by both states and international institutions.

The problem with human rights is that we experience them as important but often as remote forms of legal protection against threats to our safety and security, but in general people do not exercise their human rights until they are confronted by a crisis. By contrast, having an active, dynamic and vital citizenry is an absolute precondition of democracy that upholds human rights. There is currently no community within which to have an educational experience of human rights, apart from the somewhat abstract community of humanity. The only genuine opportunity for an experience of human rights as a cosmopolitan citizen would be through an international NGO working at a local level, but such experiences are not open to everybody. The point of a tax on mobility is to create indirectly a sense of cosmopolitan duty, thereby making the notion of a cosmopolis less abstract. Citizenship remains important as an active domain of democracy and as the principal expression of being political as belonging. In an age of globalization, it should be regarded as a foundation of human rights and not as a competitor.

Global Citizenship Versus Cosmopolitan Citizenship

If citizenship is considered a foundation for human rights, we need to discuss whether an expanded conception of citizenship as global citizenship can express a combination of human and citizenship rights. This is less straightforward than it appears. There has been some discussion of the possibility of global citizenship and global governance.

It is doubtful whether citizenship can become global since it remains a state institution, and it is based on contributions that presuppose a reciprocal relationship between rights and obligations, and imply a relationship between rights and territory. To employ the notion of citizenship to understand rights claims outside the confines of the state often neglects the effective conceptual domain of the concept. A citizen exists originally within the political confines of a state, and until a genuinely global state exists that has sovereign powers to impose its will, it is misleading to talk about the “global citizen”. This criticism suggests that some terms in social science are based on the state and cannot be redefined arbitrarily. Yet, it does not follow that the concept of citizenship is obsolete, inadequate or must remain contained within the state. Citizenship does extend beyond the state but through institutions and practices that cannot be captured by the concept “global citizen”. We need to distinguish “global citizen” from “cosmopolitan citizen”.

Citizenship is both a legal status that confers an identity on persons and a social status that determines how economic and cultural capital are redistributed and recognized within society. While its existence is confirmed by the provision of an identity card or passport, its practices and virtues also expand beyond the borders that the passport identifies. This expansion happens not because there is an identical polity that exists at another scale but because struggles for redistribution and recognition expand beyond and across borders. Such expansion occurs primarily because of mobility not only of people but also ideas, images, products, values and concerns across borders. Over the last several decades, with the development and deployment of telecommunications, media and transportation technologies there has been an intensification social relations—both affinities and hostilities—across borders. While citizens may be contained within state boundaries with their rights and obligations, neither their social existence nor the practices of their own states follow such containment. We will consider the impact the mobility of people shortly. As regards how states implicate citizens without their movement, there have been multilateral arrangements and international accords that implicate (or fail to implicate) their citizens in a web of rights and responsibilities concerning the environment (wildlife, pollution), trade (copyright, protection), refugees, crime, minorities, war, children and many other issues. While the enforceability of these accords and compliance are ongoing matters, virtually no state exists in a social, political or economic isolation. This implicates citizens of states in an international regime of responsibilities and obligations by virtue of the involvement of their states in them. This complex web of rights and responsibilities implicating citizens in various ethical, political and social decisions is important to think about citizenship beyond the state. It does not follow that such thinking should assume citizenship without the state but investigate the ways in which such overflowing rights and responsibilities can be institutionalized without an appeal to a “world” or “global” state. We will now consider citizenship as cosmopolitan rather than as a global institution with a proposal for rights of mobility and to transaction.

Rights of Mobility and Rights to Transaction

The underlying rights of a cosmopolis are what we might call “rights of mobility” and “rights to transaction”. Many modern rights claims are implicitly or explicitly about crossing or interacting through borders or creating new settlements—rights of migrant labour, rights to hold a passport, rights to enter a country, rights of asylum, rights of refugees and other rights to residence, rights to marry outside one's state, or the right to buy property, goods and services or invest across other states. However, these rights to mobility and transaction do not appear to relate to any duties of mobility and transaction. Let us consider a proposal to develop a Tobin-type tax related to various forms of mobility and transaction. The taxation scheme proposed by James Tobin (1978) was initially designed to stabilize national governments by getting greater regulation over international financial transactions as opposed to goods and services. The original Tobin proposal was basically a stamp duty on foreign exchange trading. This basic idea was later developed and expanded to include other taxation possibilities such as a global lottery. The Tobin proposal, which was both simple and radical, has the overwhelming merit of being global. However, it does not reach far enough down the social ladder of income and wealth by covering goods and services purchased on the Internet across states. It is to some extent a tax on elites and it does not therefore have sufficient social or political depth. Multinational corporations such as Amazon, eBay, Apple and Google mediate global transactions worth billions of dollars and each deals with taxes by setting state-based subsidiaries with many loopholes and variations. If we add thousands of smaller companies and individuals who sell goods and services via credit card transactions, the global marketplace created by ecommerce is vast and largely untaxed. We should look therefore towards a more general and widespread tax on the geographical movements and goods and services transactions of especially the middle classes—a tourist tax on petrol consumption or tourist tax on air fuel or aviation, a mobility tax on people entering other countries for tourism by the use of a passport, or a sports tax for people travelling abroad to watch sporting events, a transaction tax on goods and services purchased over the Internet across state boundaries or even internal taxes on crossing internal state boundaries in federal constitutions. These taxes would be modest from the point of the individual but they could produce a substantial resource for cosmopolitan agencies in struggles against urban and rural poverty, illiteracy, diseases such as AIDS, environmental degradation, climate change, or civil unrest.

There are obvious practical problems with such a cosmopolitan tax on mobility and transaction. There would presumably be considerable political resistance, because there would be arguments about getting some appropriate balance between contributions and benefits. In the United States, citizens may feel that this is yet another tax on rich societies to support foreign countries that have failed economically or have authoritarian governments. However, a Tobin-like cosmopolitan tax would also generate resources that could be used as relief from losses resulting from flooding and the failure of their own government the residents of Louisiana, or to fund the re-housing of American citizens in Alaska where global warming is making their continuing residence problematic. American citizens of Indonesian descent might approve of human rights relief going to their relatives in Ache after the tsunami. In these terms, it would be more difficult to argue that human rights are only treated as important when they provide a justification for United States intervention in Iraq and elsewhere. The mobility and transaction tax is conceptualized as an obligation that applies in principle to everybody and that the resources from this cosmopolitan tax would create funding to meet the needs of rights claimers everywhere. This argument therefore involves a radical overhaul of the original Tobin argument by a creating a tax on global movements and transactions, thereby involving large numbers of people in cosmopolitan citizenship, and providing a material foundation for cosmopolitanism.

Conclusion: Invigorating Citizenship

Citizenship is vital partly because, when people put investments into their states, they can assume that they have a legitimate claim on that state when they fall ill, or become unemployed, or become too old to support themselves. The past contributions to the community become the basis of legitimate claims on the “commonwealth”. In this respect, they can see or experience a clear connection between effort, reward and virtue. Citizenship in this way involves, often covertly, an education in civic culture in which, because citizens are patriotically proud of the society to which they belong, and they are therefore committed to defending its democratic institutions. In terms of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics citizenship creates civic virtues that can only be produced by an education in a particular political and social habitus. It is not clear what virtues flow from human rights which, following Rawls, exist to address urgent and immediate crises such as famines resulting from failed states. By contrast, citizenship virtues emerge from the humdrum politics of everyday life in democratic societies. This is where the significance of cities for both cultivating democratic virtues in everyday politics and linking these virtues to cosmopolitan virtues becomes apparent. It is in cities as democratic spaces that “acts of citizenship” unfold and constitute links that bind various sites of becoming citizens (Isin & Nielsen, forthcoming).

These relationships between aesthetics, ethics and politics do not exist with respect to human rights, or if they do exist then the relationship is vague and fragile. If people started, albeit in a modest way, to pay for their rights and to contribute through taxation to the common good at a global level, human rights would become a more tangible part of everyday life. The “ordinary man and woman” would feel involved in global projects to prevent famine and drought, and they would begin acting as cosmopolitan citizens. Without a cosmopolitan taxation system, the UN will continue to be largely dependent on US funding and generosity, both of which have been declining anyway. Without these changes, human rights will be subject to the criticism that they are fake rights because they do not correspond to duties. More importantly, the prospect of global governance and global citizenship remain merely political fantasies.

If over the last decade we have witnessed the emergence of citizenship as a vital political, social and cultural issue of our time that is because citizenship is a vital democratic or democratizing institution. This has been attested by a growing number of scholars who have investigated an extraordinary number of issues associated with citizenship focusing on different aspects from various different perspectives, widening its scope and deepening its meaning (Isin & Turner, 2002). This body of work coincides with the vitality and importance of citizenship as both legal institution and lived experience.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr Eileen Richardson for their analysis of informal methods of taxation in weak states. They are also indebted to three anonymous referees who provided critical and constructive comments on an earlier draft of the essay.