## 1. Dimensions of citizenship


### 1.1 Definitions



The concept of citizenship is composed of three main elements or
dimensions (Kymlicka and Norman 2000; Carens 2000). The first is
citizenship as legal status, defined by civil, political and social
rights. Here, the citizen is the legal person free to act according to
the law and having the right to claim the law's protection. It
need not mean that the citizen takes part in the law's
formulation, nor does it require that rights be uniform between
citizens. The second considers citizens specifically as political
agents, actively participating in a society's political
institutions. The third refers to citizenship as membership in a
political community that provides a distinct source of identity.



In many ways, the identity dimension is the least straightforward of
the three. Authors tend to include under this heading many different
things related to identity, both individual and collective, and social
integration. Arguably, this is inescapable since citizens'
subjective sense of belonging, sometimes called the
"psychological" dimension of citizenship (Carens 2000,
166), necessarily affects the strength of the political
community's collective identity. If enough citizens display a
robust sense of belonging to the same political community, social
cohesion is obviously strengthened. However, since many other factors
can impede or encourage it, social integration should be seen as an
important goal (or problem) that citizenship aims to achieve (or
resolve), rather than as one of its elements. As we will see, one
crucial test for any conception of citizenship is whether it can be
said to contribute to social integration.



Relations between the three dimensions are complex: the rights a
citizen enjoys will partly define the range of available political
activities while explaining how citizenship can be a source of
identity by strengthening her sense of self-respect (Rawls 1972, 544).
A strong civic identity can itself motivate citizens to participate
actively in their society's political life. That distinct groups
within a state do not share the same sense of identity towards
'their' political community (or communities) can be a
reason to argue in favour of a differentiated allocation of rights
(Carens 2000, 168-173).



Differences between conceptions of citizenship centre around four
disagreements: over the precise definition of each element (legal,
political and identity); over their relative importance; over the
causal and/or conceptual relations between them; over appropriate
normative standards.


### 1.2 Two models of citizenship: republican and liberal



Discussions about citizenship usually have, as their point of
reference, one of two models: the republican or the liberal. The
republican model's sources can be found in the writings of
authors like Aristotle, Tacitus, Cicero, Machiavelli, Harrington and
Rousseau, and in distinct historical experiences: from Athenian
democracy and Republican Rome to the Italian city-states and
workers' councils.



The key principle of the republican model is civic self-rule, embodied
in classical institutions and practices like the rotation of offices,
underpinning Aristotle's characterization of the citizen as one
capable of ruling and being ruled in turn. Citizens are, first and
foremost, "those who share in the holding of office"
(Aristotle *Politics*, 1275a8). Civic self-rule is also at the
heart of Rousseau's project in the *Contrat Social*: it
is their co-authoring of the laws via the general will that makes
citizens free and laws
 legitimate.[3]
 Active participation in processes of deliberation and decision-making
ensures that individuals are citizens, not
 subjects.[4]
 In essence, the republican model emphasizes the second dimension of
citizenship, that of political agency.



The liberal model's origins are traceable to the Roman Empire
and early-modern reflections on Roman law (Walzer 1989, 211). The
Empire's expansion resulted in citizenship rights being extended
to conquered peoples, profoundly transforming the concept's
meaning. Citizenship meant being protected by the law rather than
participating in its formulation or execution. It became an
"important but occasional identity, a legal status rather than a
fact of everyday life" (Walzer 1989, 215). The focus here is on
the first dimension: citizenship is primarily understood as a legal
status rather than as a political office. It now "denotes
membership in a community of shared or common law, which may or may
not be identical with a territorial community" (Pocock 1995,
37). The Roman experience shows that the legal dimension of
citizenship is potentially inclusive and indefinitely extensible.



The liberal tradition, which developed from the 17th
century onwards, understands citizenship primarily as a legal status:
political liberty is important to protect individual freedoms from
interference by other individuals or the authorities themselves.
Citizens exercise these freedoms primarily in the world of private
associations and attachments, rather than in the political domain.



At first glance, the two models offer a clear set of alternatives:
citizenship as a political office or a legal status; central to an
individual's sense of self or as an "occasional
identity". The citizen appears either as the primary political
agent or as an individual whose private activities leave little time
or inclination to engage actively in politics, entrusting the business
of law-making to representatives. If the liberal model of citizenship
dominates contemporary constitutional democracies, the republican
critique of the *private* citizen's passivity and
insignificance is still alive and well.



Republicans have problems of their own. First and foremost is a
concern, often repeated since Benjamin Constant, that their ideal has
become largely obsolete in the changed circumstances of the
"*grands Etats modernes*" (Constant 1819).
Aiming to realize the original republican ideal in the present context
would be a disaster, as was the Jacobins' attempt during the
French revolution (Walzer 1989, 211). Today's citizens will not
be Romans: first, the scale and complexity of modern states seem to
preclude the kind of civic engagement required by the republican
model. If an individual's chances of having an impact as an
active citizen are close to nil, then it makes more sense for him to
commit himself to non-political activities, be they economic, social
or familial. His identity as citizen is not central to his sense of
self and politics is only one of his many interests (Constant 1819,
316). Second, the heterogeneity of modern states does not allow the
kind of "moral unity" and mutual trust that has been
projected onto the ancient *polis*, qualities deemed necessary
to the functioning of republican institutions (Walzer 1989, 214).
However, if ancient virtue is irrecoverable, the republican model may
still act today as "a benchmark that we appeal to when assessing
how well our institutions and practices are functioning" (Miller
2000, 84). In essence, this involves a reformulation of the model,
questioning some of its original premises while holding onto the ideal
of the citizen as an active political agent.



Instead of opposing the two models, we could reasonably see them as
complementary. Political liberty, as Constant pointed out, is the
necessary guarantee of individual liberty. Echoing Constant, Michael
Walzer considers that the two conceptions "go hand in
hand" since "the security provided by the authorities
cannot just be enjoyed; it must itself be secured, and sometimes
against the authorities themselves. The passive enjoyment of
citizenship requires, at least intermittently, the activist politics
of citizens" (Walzer 1989, 217). There are times when
individuals need only be "*private* citizens" and
others when they must become "private *citizens*"
(Ackermann 1988). Can we expect passive spectators of political life
to become active citizens should the need arise? This is no easy
question and may explain why Constant ended his famous essay by
insisting that the regular exercise of political liberty is the surest
means of moral improvement, opening citizens' minds and spirits
to the public interest, and to the importance of defending their
freedoms. Such habituation underpins their capacity and willingness to
protect their liberties and the institutions that support them
(Constant 1819,
 327-328).[5]


### 1.3 The feminist critique



Since the 1970s, feminist theorists have sharply criticized the
republican and liberal models' shared assumption of a rigid
separation between the private and the public spheres. Their critique
has provided the impetus to the development of alternative conceptions
of politics and citizenship.



In its classical formulation, the republican conception sees the
public/political sphere as the realm of liberty and equality: it is
there that free, male citizens engage with their peers and deliberate
over the common good, deciding what is just or unjust, advantageous or
harmful (Aristotle *Politics*, 1253a11). The political space
must be protected from the private sphere, defined as the domain of
necessity and inequality, where the material reproduction of the
*polis* is secured. Women, associated with the 'natural
world' of reproduction, are denied citizenship and relegated to
the household.



Feminists have criticized this rigid division as mythical since both
the separation itself and the radically unequal conception of the
household that it presupposed "were clearly the outcome of
political decisions made in the public sphere" (Okin 1992, 60).
If the division ostensibly made it possible for citizens to engage
with each other as equals, feminists doubt whether it ever was the
ideal way of achieving this goal. Hence Susan Okin's question to
republicans: "Which is likely to produce better citizens,
capable of acting as each other's equals? Having to deal with
things part of the time -- even the 'mundane' things
of daily life? Or *treating most people as things?*"
(Okin 1992, 64-65). An egalitarian family is a much more fertile
ground for equal citizens than one organized like a school for
despotism (J.S. Mill); if this means that the political space cannot
remain insulated from the world of things, there's no great
loss.



The liberal model, for its part, gives primacy to the private sphere.
Political liberty is seen in instrumental terms: the formal rights of
individuals secure the private sphere from outside interference,
allowing the free pursuit of their particular interests (Dietz 1998,
380-81). However, the neutral language of Lockean egalitarian
individualism hides the reality of women's subjection:
"woman's sphere" can be read as "male
property" since wives are described as naturally subordinated to
their husbands. Here as well, the division between private and public
has prevented women from gaining access to the public (Pateman 1989,
120; Dietz 1998, 380-81; Okin 1991, 118).



Since the public and private "are, and always have been,
inextricably connected" (Okin 1992, 69), the upshot of the
feminist critique is not simply to make models of citizenship
inclusive by recognizing that women are individuals or to acknowledge
that they too can be citizens. Rather, we must see how laws and
policies structure personal circumstances (e.g. laws about rape and
abortion, child-care policies, allocation of welfare benefits, etc.)
and how some 'personal problems' have wider significance
and can only be solved collectively through political action (Pateman
1989, 131). This does not make the distinction irrelevant and the
categories collapsible. However, it does mean that the boundaries
between public and private should be seen as a social construction
subject to change and contestation and that their hierarchical
characterization should be resisted.



Once the abstractions that characterize both the classical and the
liberal conceptions are discarded, the citizen sheds his
"political lion skin" (Pateman 1989, 92 quoting Marx 1843)
and appears as "situated" in a social world characterized
by differences of gender, class, language, race, ethnicity, culture,
etc. To accept that politics cannot and should not be insulated from
private/social/economic life is not to dissolve the political, but,
rather, to revive it since anything is as political as citizens choose
to make it. This contextualized conception of the political has
informed much of the criticism aimed at the universalist model of
citizenship and has inspired the formulation of a differentialist
alternative.


## 2. The challenge of internal diversity


### 2.1 Universalist vs differentialist conceptions of citizenship



The universalist or unitary model defines citizenship primarily as a
legal status through which an identical set of civil, political and
social rights are accorded to all members of the polity. T.H.
Marshall's seminal essay "Citizenship and Social
Class" is the main reference for this model, which became
progressively dominant in post-World War II liberal democracies.
Marshall's central thesis was that the 20th
century's expansion of social rights was crucial to the working
class's progressive integration in British society (Marshall
 1950).[6]
 Similar stories were told in other Western democracies: the
development of welfare policies aimed at softening the impact of
unemployment, sickness and distress was fundamental to political and
social stability. The apparent success of the post-war welfare state
in securing social cohesion was a strong argument in favour of a
conception of citizenship focused on the securing of equal civil,
political and social rights.



The universalist model was aggressively targeted at the end of the
1980s as the moral and cultural pluralism of contemporary liberal
societies elicited increasing theoretical attention. Scepticism
towards the universalist model was spurred by concerns that the
extension of citizenship rights to groups previously excluded had not
translated into equality and full integration, notably in the case of
Afro-Americans and women (Young 1989; Williams 1998). A questioning of
the causal relation assumed between citizenship as a uniform legal
status and civic integration followed.



Critics argued that the model proves exclusionary if one interprets
universal citizenship as requiring (a) the transcendence of
particular, situated perspectives to achieve a common, general point
of view and (b) the formulation of laws and policies that are
difference-blind (Young 1989). The first requirement seems
particularly odious once generality is exposed as a myth covering the
majority's culture and conventions. The call to transcend
particularity too often translates into the imposition of the majority
perspective on minorities. The second requirement may produce more
inequality rather than less since the purported neutrality of
difference-blind institutions often belies an implicit bias towards
the needs, interests and identities of the majority group. This bias
often creates specific burdens for members of minorities, i.e. more
inequality.



Critics of this (failed) universalism have proposed an alternative
conception of citizenship based on the acknowledgment of the political
relevance of difference (cultural, gender, class, race, etc.). This
means, first, the recognition of the pluralist character of the
democratic public, composed of many perspectives, none of which should
be considered *a priori* more legitimate. Second, it entails
that, in certain cases at least, equal respect may justify
differential treatment and the recognition of special minority
rights.



Once these two points are conceded, the question becomes when, and for
what reason, the recognition of particular rights is either justified
or illegitimate. This discussion is necessarily context specific,
focusing on concrete demands made by groups in particular
circumstances, and shies away from easy generalizations. It has led to
an array of publications covering issues ranging from the fate of
'minorities within minorities' to how tolerant liberal
societies should be of illiberal groups,
 etc.[7]



The model of differentiated citizenship has generated its own share of
criticisms and queries, particularly with regards to the overall
effects of its implementation. Critics focus on its impact on the
possibility of a common political practice. Consider Iris
Young's vision of a heterogeneous public where participants
start from their "situated positions" and attempt to
construct a dialogue across differences. This dialogue requires
participants to be 'public-spirited' -- open to the
claims of others and not single-mindedly self-interested. Unlike
interest group pluralism, which does not require justifying
one's interest as right or as compatible with social justice,
participants are supposed to use deliberation to come to a decision
that they determine to be best or more just (Young 1989, 267). While
welcoming Young's conception of the democratic public, one may
doubt that the policies and institutions associated with a
differentiated model of citizenship would either motivate or enable
citizens to engage in such dialogue.



This analysis is tied to a wider literature on the virtues required of
citizens in pluralist liberal democracies and on ways to favour their
development. Stephen Macedo (1990), William Galston (1991), and Eamonn
Callan (1997), among others, have all emphasized the importance of
public reasonableness. This virtue is defined as the ability to listen
to others and formulate one's own position in a way that is
sensitive to, and respectful of, the different experiences and
identities of fellow citizens, acknowledging that these differences
may affect political views. This raises many questions: how and where
does one develop this and related virtue(s)? If a differentiated model
of citizenship simply allows individuals and groups to retreat into
their particular enclaves, how are they to develop either the
motivation or the capacity to participate in a common forum?



This explains the abiding interest of political philosophers in
education. If citizens of diverse societies are to develop the
'right' attitudes and dispositions, does this mean
encouraging a common education, the development of a school curriculum
that teaches respect for difference, while providing the necessary
skills for democratic discussion across these differences? In this
case, should demands for separate schools or dispensations for
minorities be resisted? How flexible should public schools be towards
minorities if the goal is to make them feel welcome and ensure that
they do not retreat into parochial institutions (Callan 1997; Gutmann
1999; Brighouse 2000,
 2006)?[8]



Critics of differentiated citizenship have also argued that policies
that break with difference-blind universalism weaken the integrative
function of citizenship. If embracing multicultural and minority
rights means that citizens lose their sense of collective belonging,
it may also affect their willingness to compromise and make sacrifices
for each other. Citizens may then develop a purely strategic attitude
towards those of different backgrounds. As Joseph Carens puts it:
"From this perspective, the danger of [...] differentiated
citizenship is that the emphasis [it] place[s] on the recognition and
institutionalization of difference could undermine the conditions that
make a sense of common identification and thus mutuality
possible" (Carens 2000, 193).



In addressing these and similar queries, Will Kymlicka and Wayne
Norman have broadly distinguished between three types of demands:
special representation rights (for disadvantaged groups),
multicultural rights (for immigrant and religious groups) and
self-government rights (for national minorities) (Kymlicka and Norman
1994; Kymlicka, 1995, 176-187). The first two are really demands
for inclusion into mainstream society: special representation rights
are best understood as (temporary) measures to alleviate the obstacles
that minorities and/or historically disadvantaged groups face in
having their voices heard in majoritarian democratic institutions.
Reforming the electoral system to ensure the better representation of
minorities may raise all sorts of difficult issues, but the aim is
clearly integration into the larger political society, not
isolation.



Similarly, the demands for multicultural rights made by immigrant
groups are usually aimed either at exemption from laws and policies
that disadvantage them because of their religious practices or at
ensuring public support for particular education and/or cultural
initiatives to maintain and transmit elements of their cultural and
religious heritage. These should be seen as measures designed to
facilitate their inclusion in the larger society rather than as a way
to avoid integration. It is only claims to self-government rights,
grounded in a principle of self-determination, that potentially
endanger civic integration since their aim is not to achieve a greater
presence in the institutions of the central government, but to gain a
greater share of power and legislative jurisdiction for institutions
controlled by national minorities.



Addressing this kind of demand through a simple reaffirmation of the
ideal of common citizenship is not a serious option. It may only
aggravate the alienation felt by members of these groups and feed into
more radical political projects, including secession. Further, to say
that recognition of self-government rights may weaken the bonds of the
larger community is to suppose that these bonds exist in the first
place and that a significant proportion of national minorities
identify with the larger society. This may be overly optimistic. If
these bonds do not exist, or remain quite weak, what is needed is the
construction of a genuine dialogue between the majority society and
minorities over what constitutes just relations, through which
difference can be recognized. The hope is that dialogue would
strengthen, rather than weaken, their relationship by putting it on
firmer moral and political grounds (Carens 2000, 197).



This broadly positive assessment of the effects of differentiated
citizenship on civic integration is contested. On the one hand,
left-leaning authors have complained that multicultural politics make
egalitarian policies more difficult to achieve by diverting
"political effort away from universalistic goals" and by
undermining efforts to build a broadly based coalition supporting
ambitious policies of redistribution (Barry 2001, 325). On the other
hand, events like September 11, the Mohammed cartoons affair (2005,
see Klausen 2009), riots in the *banlieux* of Paris (2005),
London (2011) and Stockholm (2017), as well as a series of terrorist
attacks in Europe have led to a backlash against multicultural
policies. The belief that demands for multicultural rights are really
demands for inclusion in the larger society has been thrown into
doubt, notably in the case of Muslim immigrants.



To allay fears about the supposed trade-off between cultural
recognition and redistribution, supporters of multiculturalism cite
the lack of empirical studies establishing a negative correlation
between the adoption of multicultural policies and a robust welfare
state (Banting and Kymlicka 2006, Banting 2005). Further, claims that
the push for multicultural policies diverts energies, time and
resources from the struggle for redistributive policies assume that
the pursuit of justice is zero-sum, seemingly a false generalization.
On the contrary, it can be argued that: "the pursuit of justice
in one dimension helps build a broader political culture that supports
struggles for justice in other dimensions" (Kymlicka 2009). In
the same vein, to claim that paying attention to issues of cultural
recognition tends to warp our sensitivity to economic injustice is to
assume that we can only be sensitive to one dimension of injustice at
a time. However, it is equally plausible that sensitivity to a
particular type of injustice may favour, rather than hinder,
sensitivity to other injustices.



In response to concerns about social and civic unity, liberal
democracies have introduced a series of policies aimed at better
securing the integration of immigrants: requiring minimal linguistic
proficiency in the majority language as a condition of citizenship or
banning religious symbols from public schools. These policies have
sometimes been heralded as signaling the development of a
'muscular liberalism' (Former British PM David Cameron,
quoted by Joppke 2014) as an alternative to multiculturalism. They
have been hotly debated from the perspective of factual efficacy as
well as from a normative perspective. The introduction of
'citizenship tests' for resident immigrants has led to a
vigorous debate among normative theorists: under what conditions and
in what form can they be justified? Some, like Carens (2010a), have
argued that they are basically unjust, no matter what form they take.
If one understands membership in a society to flow from long-term
residence, as Carens does, then any test that "prevents a full
member of a society from becoming a citizen unjustly deprives her of
an entitlement to citizenship" (Mason 2014, 143). Other
theorists have taken a more positive view of the tests: seeing them as
an incentive for immigrants to acquire basic knowledge of
liberal-democratic principles, as well as the political institutions
and history of the host country. As such, they also serve as an
"implicit statement of the nation's political
values" (Miller 2016, 138). On this view, as long as certain
conditions are met, so that the tests are neither too difficult nor
too expensive and give applicants the possibility to take them again
if they fail, etc., then there is nothing deeply objectionable to them
(though the empirical question of their efficacy remains open). In
contrast, tests that purport to 'weed out' immigrants who
do not share 'our' liberal values are generally held to be
incompatible with liberal principles. This has led some theorists to
question how 'muscular' can liberalism really be (Joppke
2014).



In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, some liberal
democracies have introduced legislation giving the state the power to
revoke the citizenship of those convicted or suspected of terrorist
 activities.[9]
 Given the principle recognized in international law that no one
should be left stateless, these legislations usually apply only to
citizens holding dual or multiple citizenships.
'Denationalisation' is sometimes described in this context
as "a technique for extending the functionality of immigration
law in counter-terrorism" (Macklin 2015, see also Barry and
Ferracioli 2016). Though states cannot deport their own citizens,
denationalisation allows them to first withdraw citizenship and then
deport. These legislations raise several normative issues. Firstly,
they seem to contradict the basic idea that citizenship is a
fundamental right, not a privilege (Lenard 2018; Gibney 2013; Macklin
2015). Secondly, since they weaken the security normally attached to
the status of citizen, they can be described as demoting citizenship
"to another category of permanent residence" (Macklin
2015). Thirdly, it is argued that by targeting only dual (or multiple)
citizens, the new legislations treat them as second-class citizens
(Gibney 2013, 653). In contrast, other theorists insist that that the
nature of terrorist crimes (akin to acts of war against the state)
warrants this kind of response (Schuck 2015; Joppke 2015). Concerning
the worry that the legislations discriminate against dual citizens,
the response is that the difference in treatment between mono-citizens
and dual citizens is justified since the consequences of
denationalisation are also very different in each case. Individuals
holding a single citizenship are the only ones facing statelessness as
a consequence of denationalisation (Barry and Ferracioli 2016). Where
participants in the debate find some common ground is in their shared
criticism of the specific form that some legislations have taken, most
notably the 2006 British Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act. In
the wake of the 7 July 2005 Tube bombing in London, the Act replaced
the standard for deprivation present in the 2002 legislation (the
"vital interests of the state" test) with a much weaker
and vague standard providing for revocation in cases where an
individual's holding citizenship is "not conducive to the
public good" (quoted by Gibney 2013, 650). Also deeply
concerning is the progressive expansion of legislative measures to
allow for "*proactive* and *administrative*
denationalisation" (Brown Prener 2023, 3-4). While the
efficiency of denationalisation as a measure aimed at reducing the
incidence of terrorist activity remains doubtful, its value appears to
be primarily symbolic, expressing what some authors see as a
'fitting' response of liberal democracies to those intent
on attacking their very foundations (Barry and Ferracioli 2016; see
Lenard 2018 for a counterargument). This symbolic understanding of
denationalisation highlights the persistent significance of the
language of allegiance in contemporary liberal democratic thought,
though some argue that this very language is incompatible with liberal
democratic principles (Irving 2022).



Worries about the integration of Muslim immigrants in Western liberal
democracies have fostered a persisting interest in the complex
relations between the liberal political cultures dominant in the West,
the different versions of secularism that they affirm, religion, and
citizens of faith. Research has focused on religion's place in
the public sphere (Parekh 2006, Laborde 2008, Brahm Levey and Modood
2009, Modood 2019) as well as on the relation between religion,
gender, and
 citizenship.[10]


### 2.2 Liberal nationalists vs postnationalists



The debate between supporters and critics of differentiated
citizenship centres on the model's supposed effect on civic
integration. It is assumed that democratic citizenship, properly
construed, can indeed function as a significant lever for integration.
The idea is that citizenship as a set of civil, political and social
rights and as a political practice can help generate desirable
feelings of identity and belonging. This statement hides significant
disagreement over how to characterize the relation between citizenship
and nationality. Some consider that citizenship's capacity to
fulfil its integrative function depends on, and feeds upon, the prior
existence of a common nationality while others counter that, under
conditions of pluralism, nationality cannot function as a suitable
focus of allegiance and identity. The collective identity of modern
democratic states should rather be based upon more abstract and
universalistic political and legal principles that transcend cultural
difference. This debate brings to the fore differing assessments of
the role that citizenship can play in contemporary societies
characterized by a high degree of complexity and internal
diversity.



Liberal nationalists like David Miller have argued that only specific
forms of political practice can produce high levels of trust and
loyalty between citizens (Miller 2000, 87). The political activities
of the citizens of Athens or of Rousseau's ideal Republic
presumed face-to-face relations of cooperation that favour the growth
of such sentiments. The scale and complexity of modern states have
made the kind of political practice envisaged by Rousseau and
described by Aristotle at best marginal. Citizens do not meet under an
oak tree to formulate the laws; they are basically strangers and
citizens' involvement in the politics of representative
democracies is episodic and diluted. Politics in this context cannot
be expected to play a central role in most individuals' lives;
something else must generate the trust and loyalty necessary to the
functioning of a political community. Historically, it is the nation
that has allowed large numbers of individuals to feel a sense of
commonality, setting them apart from others and making solidarity
among strangers possible.



Postnationalists do not dispute the key role played by the nation in
making republican politics possible in large modern states. They agree
that reference to a common nationality allowed the political
mobilization of their inhabitants, calling on their shared descent,
history, or language. However, democracy's association with the
nation-state is contingent rather than necessary. Democratic politics
can, in principle, free itself from its historical moorings.
Postnationalists claim that this dissociation is not only possible,
but necessary for moral and pragmatic reasons (Habermas 1998,
132).



On the one hand, the historical balance sheet of the nation-state
reveals a legacy of oppression of minority cultures within and
cultural, political, and economic imperialism outside its borders. On
the other hand, the acknowledgment of the nation-state's
(growing) internal diversity and sensitivity to the injustice of
forced assimilation undermine its ability to continue playing the role
it fulfilled in the 19th and early 20th
centuries. Imposing the majority culture upon minorities may simply
make it more difficult for them to identify with the nation-state and
weaken its legitimacy.



In conditions of pluralism, therefore, the majority culture cannot
serve as the grounding of a shared identity. It must be replaced by
universalistic principles of human rights and the rule of law, which
do not, it is argued, imply the imposition of a particular majority
culture on minorities. Each political community develops distinctive
interpretations of the meaning of these principles over time, which
become embodied in its political and legal institutions and practices.
These in turn form a political culture that crystallizes around the
country's constitution and makes those principles into a
'concrete universal'. This embedding of democratic and
liberal principles in a distinctive political culture can, in turn,
give rise to what Jurgen Habermas has called a
"constitutional patriotism", which should replace
nationalism as the focus of a common identity. In countries that have
achieved a strong national consciousness, the political culture has
long been entangled with the majority culture. This
"fusion", argues Habermas, "must be dissolved if it
is to be possible for different cultural, ethnic, and religious forms
of life to coexist and interact on equal terms within *the
same* political community" (Habermas 1998, 118).



The thrust of the argument is that democratic political practice can
provide a sufficient stimulus to integration in complex democratic
societies and is indeed the only one properly available to them. There
is no need for a background consensus based on cultural homogeneity to
act as a 'catalyzing condition' for democracy to the
extent that the democratic political process, involving public
deliberation and decision-making, makes "a reasonable political
understanding possible, even among strangers." Democracy, as a
set of procedures, can secure legitimacy in the absence of more
substantive commonalities between citizens and achieve social
integration. Since it is not wedded to particular cultural premises,
it can be responsive to changes in the cultural composition of the
citizenry and generate a common political culture (Habermas 2001a,
73-74). Habermas's position, then, gives pride of place to
the democratic process and to the political participation of citizens,
which play a key role in securing social integration: "In
complex societies, it is the deliberative opinion- and will-formation
of citizens, grounded in the principles of popular sovereignty, that
forms the ultimate medium for a form of abstract, legally constructed
solidarity that reproduces itself through political
participation" (Habermas 2001a, 76).



However, the democratic process can fulfil its role only if it
achieves a certain level of output legitimacy: appropriate levels of
solidarity are sustainable only if basic standards of social justice
are satisfied (Habermas 2001a, 76). If it is to remain a source of
solidarity, citizenship must be seen as a valuable status, associated
not only with civil and political rights, but also with the fulfilment
of fundamental social and cultural rights (Habermas 1998,
118-119).



For most liberal nationalists, this seems like putting the cart before
the horse since a successful welfare state, they argue, is possible
only if citizens already enjoy high levels of mutual trust and
loyalty. Welfare policies suppose that we make sacrifices for
anonymous others who differ from us in terms of their ethnic origin,
religion, and way of life. But in democracies, redistributive policies
can be sustained only if they enjoy strong levels of public support.
This support is dependent on a sense of common identity that
transcends difference and motivates citizens to share their revenues
with people whom they do not know, but to whom they feel related by
common bonds. This sentiment implies reciprocity: the expectation
that, in times of need, one could also benefit from the solidarity of
fellow citizens (Miller, 1995; Canovan, 1996).



Liberal nationalists and other critics of the postnationalist position
go on to argue that freeing the liberal democratic state from its
historical moorings is neither possible, nor necessary. They recognize
that the link between liberal democracy and the nation is historically
contingent rather than necessary or conceptual while adding that this
does not mean that they can or should be dissociated (Miller 1995,
29-30; Kymlicka 2003). Calling for the separation of a
country's political culture from the majority group's
culture is easier said than done. While it may be comparably easy to
discard the most egregious forms of fusion, if there is the political
will to do so (for instance, by de-establishing the Anglican church in
the case of England), any political culture will be ethically
patterned in ways that are difficult for members of the majority to
appreciate. Expressions such as "cutting the umbilical
cord" or "dissolving" the fusion overstate the
extent to which a political culture may be disengaged from the
background culture. This is not necessarily cause for alarm, it is
argued, since the nation need not be construed in ways that exclude
minorities. Nationhood can be understood in sufficiently
'thin' terms to accommodate minorities while being
'thick' enough to generate appropriate sentiments of
solidarity, loyalty, and trust.



There are different versions of this thin understanding of nationhood.
What they share is the downplaying of substantive commonalities of
descent, culture and religion in favour of political and legal
principles and institutions as well as a description of national
identity as flexible and open to change
 .[11]
 Once immigrants are citizens, they can participate in the collective
conversation in which citizens debate and constantly reinterpret the
nation's identity. What immigrants are required to display is a
"willingness to accept current political structures and to
engage with the host community so that a new common identity can be
forged" (Miller 1995, 129). They are expected "to speak a
common national language", "feel loyalty to national
institutions" and "share a commitment to maintaining the
nation as a single, self-governing community into the indefinite
future" (Kymlicka 2003, 273).



Given the thin version of national identity they propose, one might
conclude that liberal nationalists are not that far from the
constitutional patriotism of Habermas. After all, both positions seem
to give the central role to a common political culture. The distance
separating them becomes clear when we look at the political
implications of their respective views, like when evaluating the
prospects of the European Union. Liberal nationalists are often
sceptical towards the European experiment while postnationalists are
firm
 supporters.[12]
 This difference flows from their respective conceptions of what makes
and sustains a political culture as a source of integration. For
liberal nationalists, continuity is essential: a political culture
derives much of its strength from an anchoring in the history and
narrative of a distinct political community extending backwards and
forwards in time. They are sceptical of political voluntarism and of
what can be achieved through formal political institutions. Democratic
procedures alone, divorced from a richer background, can neither
generate nor sustain a robust political culture or a sense of common
identity.



In contrast, postnationalists like Habermas consider that the
democratic process is crucial. The postnationalist conception gives
greater weight to political practice and to the legal and political
institutions that sustain it rather than to their cultural and
historical moorings. This explains Habermas's militant support
of the European project and his belief that adopting a constitution
could have a "catalytic effect" on the process of
constructing a 'more perfect Union' (Habermas 2001b,
16).


## 3. The challenge of globalisation



For the better part of the last century, conceptions of citizenship,
despite many differences, have had one thing in common: the idea that
the necessary framework for citizenship is the sovereign, territorial
state. The legal status of citizen is essentially the formal
expression of membership in a polity that has definite territorial
boundaries within which citizens enjoy equal rights and exercise their
political agency. In other words, citizenship, both as a legal status
and as an activity, is thought to presuppose the existence of a
territorially bounded political community, which extends over time and
is the focus of a common identity. In the last thirty years, this
premise has come under scrutiny. A host of phenomena, loosely
associated under the heading 'globalisation', have
encouraged this critical awakening: exploding transnational economic
exchange, competition and communication as well as high levels of
migration, of cultural and social interactions have shown how porous
those borders have become and led people to contest the relevance and
legitimacy of state sovereignty.



Three questions are particularly salient. First, the intensification
of migratory movements from poorer to richer countries in the context
of growing inequalities between North and South has led some authors
to contest the state's moral right to choose its members by
selectively closing its borders. Second, what R. Baubock calls
the "mismatch between citizenship and the territorial scope of
legitimate authority" (Baubock 2008, 31) has prompted a
growing questioning of the acceptability of the different rights
accorded to citizens and non-citizens living within the same state.
Does contesting the tight association between the territorial state,
citizenship, and rights risks weakening the very institutional
framework that makes citizenship a meaningful practice? This question
raises a third set of issues as it assumes that the democratic
nation-state is the only institutional context in which citizenship
can thrive. This is contested by those who claim that citizenship can
be exercised in a multiplicity of 'sites' both below and
above the nation-state.


### 3.1 Citizenship and borders



Does the state have the moral right to decide who can become a citizen
or is there a fundamental right to free movement? The philosophical
debate has largely focused on two issues: first, on the nature of
obligations that wealthy states have towards people from impoverished
countries who seek better lives for themselves and their families;
secondly, on the moral status of political communities and their
supposed right to protect their integrity by excluding
non-members.



One way of characterizing one's obligations towards strangers is
to insist that, absent any relations of cooperation, common humanity
is our only bond. Only a weak, imperfect or conditional duty of
assistance, it is argued, can be inferred from this premise. This duty
limits the basic right of a political community to distribute
membership as it wishes without, in any way, displacing it.
Individuals have a duty to assist strangers in urgent need if they can
help without exposing themselves to significant risk or cost. At a
collective level, the implications are more considerable as political
communities have greater resources and can consider a broader range of
benevolent actions at comparably negligible cost. The principle of
mutual aid may justify redistribution of membership, territory, wealth
and resources to the extent that certain states have more than they
can reasonably be said to need (Walzer 1983, 47). However, in this
framework redistributive policies remain entirely dependent on
wealthier countries' understanding of their needs and of the
urgency of a stranger's situation. There is no obligation to
give equal weight to the interests of non-members.



Institutionally, this position supports what the Geneva Convention on
the Status of Refugees (United Nations 1951) calls the principle of
"*non refoulement*": signatory states are not to
deport refugees and asylum seekers to their countries of origin if
this threatens their lives and freedom. It can also support claims in
favour of increasing the number of immigrants admitted into richer
countries, depending on how the latter evaluate the potential effects
on their own interests.



Critics contend that obligations towards migrants and asylum-seekers
go well beyond this and call for a policy of open borders and/or deny
the state's right to decide alone who exactly, and how many
people, may enter its territory. Three basic strategies are employed:
the first consists of arguing that freedom of movement is a
fundamental human right. For example, some have argued that any theory
recognizing the equal moral value of individuals and giving them moral
primacy over communities cannot justify rejecting aliens' claims
to admission and citizenship. As Carens demonstrated in an early
article, this argument applies to the three main strands of
contemporary liberal theory: libertarianism (*a la*
Nozick), Rawlsianism and utilitarianism (Carens 1987). If the
principle of moral equality is given its full extension, the
distinction between citizen and alien appears as morally arbitrary,
justified neither by nature nor achievement. When evaluating border
and immigration policies, the equal consideration of the interests of
all affected (be they aliens or citizens) is required. Political
communities cannot decide whether they can afford to accept refugee
claimants or prospective immigrants simply according to their
understanding of their own situation, needs and interests.
Consideration of consequences (e.g. in terms of public order, the
sustainability of welfare policies, the potential effects of a brain
drain in developing countries, etc.) is not prohibited; what changes
radically is how we are to evaluate them. Institutionally, this would
doubtless lead to substantial changes in the immigration and refugee
policies of most Western democracies.



A second strategy advocated by Arash Abizadeh (2008) relies on the
principle of democratic legitimacy, holding that the exercise of
coercive power is legitimate "only insofar as it is actually
*justified by and to* the very people over whom it is
exercised" (41). Since a regime of border control subjects both
citizens and non-citizens to the state's coercive use of power,
"the justification for a particular regime of border control is
owed not just to those whom the boundary marks as members, but to
nonmembers as well"
 (45)[13].
 The argument's upshot is that no democratic state has the right
to unilaterally control its own borders, but must either allow freedom
of movement or, at the very least, give voice to prospective
immigrants when formulating border policy. The latter condition would
itself lead to significant changes in immigration policies in the
Western world, since jointly controlled borders would presumably be
more porous as well.



The third strategy is less direct. To the extent that states do not
satisfy their moral obligations to guarantee the universal human right
to security and subsistence through international redistributive
policies, they have a moral obligation to admit those wishing to
enter. Here the idea of open borders is an instrumental, rather than
intrinsic, moral principle: it is a means towards achieving global
distributive justice (Bader 1997). The advantage of this line of
argument is that it closely reflects a central motivation for open
borders: the outrage provoked by the huge inequalities between North
and South and rich countries' role in perpetuating this
situation. This strategy, if successful, would establish specific
rights for people from poorer countries towards the North, rather than
a broadly framed right to free movement, to be 'equally'
enjoyed by individuals of rich and poor countries alike.



To be convincing the argument must show: first, that severe global
poverty requires immediate action; second, that it is a matter of
justice, not charity. To that effect, it is crucial to show that the
extreme poverty of some countries is not simply the result of
endogenous factors (e.g. bad governance; corrupt political culture,
etc.), but is linked to a global political and economic order that
systematically produces an unjust distribution of resources and
political power, which rich northern countries, as its main
beneficiaries, are in no hurry to
 reform.[14]
 The third step in this argument purportedly shows that justifications
of restrictive immigration policies premised on ethico-political
claims lose much of their force in the context of profound
international inequalities and injustice. Proponents claim that
regulating immigration to preserve the integrity of the political
community is a legitimate goal only if duties of international
distributive justice are satisfied (Tan 2004, 126, referring to Tamir
1992, 161). The argument's upshot is that "[r]ich Northern
states have a double moral obligation to seriously fight global
poverty and to let more people in" (Bader 1997, 31).



Most supporters and critics of (more) open borders agree that liberal
democratic states have a moral status and are worth
 preserving.[15]
 They disagree over what exactly is worthy of protection and how much
weight should be given to securing their integrity (however it is
defined) relative to duties of international justice.



The division of the world into states is arguably justifiable on
functional grounds, to the extent that states appear as "first
approximations of optimal units for allocating and producing the
world's resources" (Coleman and Harding 1995, 38). If we
think that states matter simply as local units of efficient production
and distribution, then this would be the main consideration when
evaluating immigration policies. Public order arguments would still
matter, likewise claims pertaining to a society's basic capacity
to secure its material reproduction, but not arguments relating to its
cultural integrity or way of life. Unless, of course, the capacity of
states to act as efficient units of production and distribution is
linked to their being distinctive political communities with a
particular culture of shared meanings worth preserving.



Some forty years ago, Michael Walzer defended this view, based on the
idea that "distributive justice presupposes a bounded world
within which distribution takes place" (Walzer 1983, 31). Since
the goods to be divided, exchanged and shared among individuals have
social meanings that are specific to particular communities, it is
only within their boundaries that conflict can be resolved and
distributive schemes judged either just or unjust. The crucial
assumption here is that the "political community is probably the
closest we can come to a world of common meanings. Language, history,
and culture come together [...] to produce a collective
consciousness" (Walzer 1983, 28). Politics itself, moreover, as
a set of practices and institutions that shape the form and outcome
that distributive conflicts take, "establishes its own bonds of
commonality" (Walzer 1983, 29). To reject political
communities' right to distribute the good of membership is to
undermine their capacity to preserve their integrity as
"communities of character". It is to condemn them to
become nothing more than neighbourhoods, random associations lacking
any legally enforceable admissions policies. The probable result of
the free movement of individuals would be "casual
aggregates" devoid of any internal cohesion and incapable of
being a source of patriotic sentiments and solidarity. In a world of
neighbourhoods, membership would become meaningless. The upshot is
that the political community's right to regulate admission
should be recognized to secure its cultural, economic and political
integrity.



Walzer's position, notably his choice of analogies, has been
extensively
 discussed.[16]
 His assumption that sovereign states constitute communities of shared
meanings appears particularly shaky. Most often, existing states
incorporate various political communities that are themselves
internally pluralistic: linguistically, culturally and ideologically.
One would be hard pressed to identify the community whose integrity is
at stake. Indeed, few states correspond to the picture Walzer
envisages as the appropriate context for distributive justice.



Because it is premised on a thinner conception of the political
community, liberal nationalists may be able to offer a similar account
of the state's right to control its borders that may be less
vulnerable to this kind of criticism. David Miller, for instance,
argues that liberal democratic states "require a common public
culture that in part constitutes the political identity of their
members, and that serves valuable functions in supporting democracy
and other social goals" (Miller 2014, 369). A society's
public culture provides its citizens, their diverse identities and
ways of life notwithstanding (i.e. what Miller calls their private
culture), with shared reference points (e.g. an overlapping set of
beliefs about the kind of political system they want to live in,
social norms about how to behave in the public space, etc.) that
enable them to confront their society's challenges. The public
culture also acts as a bridge between the society's past, its
present, and its future. It plays a key role in securing the kind of
trust between citizens and towards political institutions that is
essential for the provision of public goods and for supporting
policies involving economic redistribution. "Where trust is
lacking", writes Miller, "deliberation is likely to be
replaced by self-interested bargaining on the part of each group,
where the outcome reflects the balance of power between them"
(Miller 2016, 64). Citizens of liberal democratic states have a
legitimate interest in preserving their public culture. This includes
the capacity to decide the scale and type of immigration allowed in
the country in order to regulate the changes that the common public
culture may experience because of new arrivals. According to Miller,
the concern here is not about diversity, but "about areas in
which private culture and public culture intersect - in which it
becomes harder to reach agreement on public matters because people
approach them on the basis of conflicting and privately held beliefs
and values" (Miller 2016, 68).



Miller's argument has been widely discussed over the years
(Carens 2013; Stilz 2022; Wellman 2008, 2022). His account of the
common public culture has been described as unstable and unrealistic.
Anna Stilz claims, for instance, that the internal diversity of
liberal states is such "that it may be impossible to pick out
any single 'common public culture', a[ny] set of
understandings about how their collective life should be led"
(Stilz 2022, 13).



Some theorists try to defend the state's right to
self-determination - including the right to restrict immigration
- without making any reference to the (common public) culture of
the political community. Chritopher Heath Wellman has argued that this
can be done by focusing on freedom of association as an integral part
of self-determination (Wellman 2008, 2012; see also Ferracioli 2022).
Since "freedom of association includes a right to reject a
potential association and (often) a right to dissociate"
(Wellman 2008, 110), liberal democratic states - or legitimate
states - have a presumptive right to exclude immigrants:
"it does not matter how culturally diverse or homogeneous a
country's citizens are; if they are collectively able and
willing to perform the requisite political function of adequately
protecting and preserving human rights, then they are entitled to
political self-determination" (Wellman 2012, 52). The
presumptive right to exclude does not cancel duties of international
distributive justice. It means that "whatever duties of
distributive justice wealthy states have to those abroad, they need
not be paid in the currency of open borders" (Wellman 2012,
 66).[17]



None of the authors involved in this debate consider that the current
levels of global inequality are morally acceptable or that prosperous
liberal democratic states are doing enough to discharge their duties
of international justice. Those who defend the state's right to
exclude, like Wellman, recognize that "affluent societies must
dramatically relax their severe limits on immigration *if they are
unwilling to provide sufficient assistance in other ways*"
(Wellman 2012, 77; see also Miller 2014, 368). As Kok-Chor Tan has
remarked, "the national projects of well-off nations lose their
legitimacy if these nations are not also doing their fair share as
determined by their duties of justice" (Tan 2004, 129; see also
Brock
 2020).[18]
 Whether liberals should concentrate on reforming the international
system or fight for both greater international distributive justice
and more open borders remains open for debate. The two prescriptions
are by no means incompatible: insisting on the illegitimacy of
restrictive immigration policies under current conditions is also a
way of putting rich countries on the spot and of prodding them to
accept their moral responsibilities towards the world's poor
(Goodin 1992, 8).


### 3.2 Citizens, non-citizens, and rights



Should one infer from the preceding discussion that citizenship is
"hard on the outside and soft on the inside" (Bosniak
2006, 4) with the border representing a firm line between those who
are part of the community of equal citizens and those who remain
outside? The short answer is no. International migration produces what
Baubock calls a "mismatch between citizenship and the
territorial scope of legitimate authority" with "citizens
living outside the country whose government is supposed to be
accountable to them and inside a country whose government is not
accountable to them" (Baubock 2008, 31). To resident aliens
who live within a specific community of citizens, the border is not
something they have left behind, it effectively follows them inside
the state, denying them many of the rights enjoyed by full citizens or
making their enjoyment less secure (Bosniak 2006).



One way to address this mismatch is to reconsider how entitlement to
citizenship is determined. In a world characterized by significant
levels of migration across states, birthright citizenship --
acquired either through descent (*jus sanguinis*) or birth in
the territory (*jus soli*) -- may lead to counterintuitive
results: while a regime of pure *jus sanguinis* systematically
excludes immigrants and their children, though the latter may be born
and bred in their parents' new home, it includes descendants of
expatriates who may never have set foot in their forebears'
homeland. On the other hand, a regime of *jus soli* may
attribute citizenship to children whose birth in the territory is
accidental while denying it to those children who have arrived in the
country at a very young age.



The stakeholder principle (or *jus nexi*) is proposed as an
alternative (or a supplement) to birthright citizenship: individuals
who have a "real and effective link" (Shachar 2009, 165)
to the political community, or a "permanent interest in
membership" (Baubock 2008, 35) should be entitled to claim
citizenship. This new criterion aims at securing citizenship for those
who are truly members of the political community, in the sense that
their life prospects depend on the country's laws and policy
choices.



If the stakeholder principle alleviates the mismatch, it does not
question the tight association between rights, citizenship, territory,
and authority. For some, it is precisely this association that should
be questioned since it contradicts the increasing fluidity of the
relations between individuals and polities in a globalized world. This
context is thought to necessitate more than a friendly amendment to
current principles of citizenship allocation: it requires the
disaggregation of rights, commonly associated with citizenship, from
the legal status of
 citizen.[19]
 This process is thought to have already begun in contemporary
democracies since, as noted above, many of the civil and social rights
associated with citizenship are now extended to all individuals
residing in the state, notwithstanding their legal status. Political
rights to participation should likewise be extended to resident
noncitizens, and perhaps even to those "noncitizen
nonresidents" who have fundamental interests that are affected
by a particular state (Song 2009).



The emergence of human rights instruments at the international level
has lent some credibility to the perspective of a deterritorialization
of rights regimes and the possibility of securing a person's
basic rights irrespective of her formal membership status in a given
polity. In this context, it is not in virtue of our (particular)
citizenship that we are recognized rights, but in virtue of our
(universal) personhood.



Over and above diverging assessments of the empirical plausibility of
unbundling, some authors highlight the risks involved and contest its
desirability. Stable citizenship regimes "promote internal
redistribution and support co-governance". "[B]y
encouraging the dissolution of the bundle of benefits and protections
that currently attach to citizenship, proponents of the unbundling
vision will also begin to fuel an alternative discourse as well
- one that urges the privatization and fragmentation of
citizenship, and that implies less collective responsibility for the
well being of members" (Shachar 2009, 67).



The debate over voting rights, in particular, is complex and covers
both external (extending voting rights to nonresident citizens) and
internal voting (expanding the franchise to resident non-citizens).
Theorists with sympathies to the social membership thesis (arguing
that residence over time in a specific territory is the key to
membership in a society) or to the stakeholder conception of
citizenship usually consider that long-term residence in a country
should be the basis for the allocation of democratic rights. The
argument may cover not only migrants who qualify for permanent
resident status, but also those who have entered illegally in the
country (Carens 2010b, 2013) as well as temporary migrants, in
particular 'guest workers' who are often denied any access
to citizenship (Lenard 2015). On this view, safety from deportation
and the entitlement to the state's protection when abroad is
what distinguishes citizens from resident noncitizens. Citizenship
rights are understood as extra-territorial ("they follow the
citizen rather than the territory") while voting rights are best
understood as territorial (Lenard 2015,
 131).[20]



Though some states do extend voting rights to resident noncitizens at
the local level, it is the growing extension of voting rights to
nonresident citizens over the last decades that is particularly
striking (Pogonyi 2014). It shows the persistence of a conception of
membership premised on understanding the nation-state as a historical
community of citizens with common values and shared ethno-cultural
traits. On this view, voting rights are not understood territorially,
but follow the citizen when she settles outside of her home country.
Though one can understand some of the pragmatic reasons that often
motivate states to recognize voting rights to expatriates (e.g.
acknowledging and encouraging their continued contribution to the home
country through payment of remittances), normative theorists have been
mostly critical of this phenomenon (see especially Lopez-Guerra 2005).
The policy followed by certain states of the former socialist
federations (USSR and Yugoslavia) of recognizing voting rights to
co-ethnics residing in territories integrated in neighbouring
independent states, as well as the more recent decisions by states
like Hungary and Romania to extend voting rights to trans-border
ethnic kin populations, should alert us to the dangers to regional
stability that the "re-ethnicization of citizenship"
involve (Joppke 2005, cited by Pogonyi 2014; see also Pogonyi 2023).
Moreover, where the electoral system is not designed to limit the
potential political impact of the nonresident electoral body, external
voting may effect the "resident constituency's right to
democratic self-determination" (Pogonyi 2014, 135-136).



The rise of "cash-for-passports" programs over the last
ten years in many liberal states is yet another sign of an increasing
"privatization and fragmentation of citizenship". These
programs - like the one introduced by the government of Malta in
October 2013 - have provoked a heated debate over normative
issues (Shachar and Hirschl 2014; Shachar 2017; Hidalgo 2016; Joppke
2019; Erez 2021; Irving
 2022).[21]
 There are two main objections. First, these programs raise issues of
fairness towards other potential immigrants lacking the resources to
qualify as well as towards those who remain in the country of origin.
Second, they represent a government-induced commodification of
citizenship that may distort the citizens' understanding of the
kind of commitment to the political community and to co-citizens that
citizenship entails. In contrast, those who refuse to condemn investor
citizenship programs point to the normative inconsistencies that often
permeate their critics' accounts. Is it consistent to defend a
state's right to restrict immigration while claiming that it is
not permissible for states to sell foreigners access to the country
(Hidalgo 2016)? Can one reject as unethical investment-based criteria
for immigration while condoning skilled-based criteria (Erez 2022)?
Can one criticize citizen-investors for not residing in their new
country while not condemning those who acquire dual citizenship (based
on ancestry or descent) without having any serious intention of
residing in the state (Irving
 2022)?[22]
 Other theorists emphasize that worries over the corrupting effect of
cash-for-passports schemes are premised on a conception of citizenship
that gives an overblown importance to its political dimension in an
age of decreasing participation in democratic institutions (e.g.
voting, membership in political parties, etc.). One should face
squarely the fact that citizenship is essentially about the
opportunities and protection that passports issued by certain states
provide to individuals (Kochenov 2018). For those who share
Shachar's robust view of citizenship, the depressing reality may
well be that investor citizenship programs are more a symptom than a
cause of the larger malaise provoked by the "material forces of
globalization" (Spiro 2018, 19; see also Joppke 2019,
866-867).


### 3.3 Debating transnational citizenship: statists vs. globalists



As we have seen in the preceding sections, the nation-state's
sovereignty is often described as an impediment to global justice. Its
capacity to deal with economic, social and environmental problems that
increasingly cut across borders is also questioned. Under these
circumstances, should the sovereign, territorial state still be seen
as the necessary institutional context for justice and democracy? What
are the alternatives?



This kind of question has sparked at least two responses from
theorists of citizenship. 'Globalists' insist on the need
to rethink democracy and citizenship beyond the nation-state,
proposing schemes to extend democratic politics to regional and global
 levels.[23]
 'Statists', in contrast, argue that democratic
citizenship requires a bounded territorial space, the state, within
which citizens can see themselves as part of a common *demos*.
Central to this debate is a disagreement over the meaning of
democratic political agency and its basic conditions.



The disagreement over conditions is crucial since conditions can be
defined in ways that limit the potential extension of the political
community. Democratic agency's meaning can also be contested. To
what extent should it be understood as a collective agency? Should
political action be characterized as a common practice, in which
citizens are in relations of interaction and mutual awareness, or can
it be defined as primarily individual? 



Supporters of global democracy reject the conventional identification
between *demos*, territory, and citizenship. In their view,
citizenship is not a set of practices and of rights that need to be
anchored in a particular *demos* defined by specific
territorial boundaries. On the contrary, citizenship is ideally
exercised in a multiplicity of 'sites', situated at
different levels of governance: local, national, regional, and global
(Maas 2017). Global democrats sketch a multilayered, global democratic
order in which no single layer or site is dominant (Pogge 1992, 58,
Young 2000, 266). This scheme implies a 'vertical'
dispersal of power above and below existing sovereign states, which
lose their centrality. This would lower incentives for conflicts over
power and wealth within and between states, "'thereby
reducing the incidence of war, poverty, and oppression' and
environmental degradation" (Kuper 2004, 30, quoting Pogge 1992,
102-105).



Globalists would balance this dilution of state power by strengthening
certain global regulatory regimes in areas like peace and security,
human rights, the environment, trade and finances, etc. These regimes
would set down general rules "regarding that small but vital set
of issues around which peace and justice call for global
co-operation" (Young 2000, 267; see also Held 2005). A set of
global institutions would be needed to ensure the application of these
rules; though globalists are quick to point out the importance of
democratic principles -- consent, self-determination and autonomy
-- and their institutional implications (Pogge 1992, 64).



The formal political institutions and procedures envisaged are often
familiar: representative assemblies based on elections and referenda.
These institutions would exist at each level of the multilayered
scheme: local, national, regional, and global. Following the European
Union model, continent-wide parliaments are envisaged, as well as a
reformed general assembly of the United Nations. At the informal
level, globalists insist on the need for globally active organizations
of civil society, welcome the emergence of a transnational public
opinion and call on global agencies such as the World Trade
Organization and the International Monetary Fund to commit themselves
to basic principles of publicity.



Global democrats assume that the extension of democracy beyond the
limits of the nation-state is neither conceptually nor practically
impossible. Their response to claims that scale constitutes a major
obstacle is twofold: first, they put the principle of subsidiarity at
the centre of their institutional scheme (Held 2005, 14; Pogge 1992,
65-66); second, they insist that robust democratic politics is
truly possible only at the local level. In existing nation-states,
representative institutions are already far removed from ordinary
citizens, who feel largely disempowered and disaffected (Young 2000,
270-271). Since the proposed multilayered scheme involves
significant decentralization from the national to the sub-national
level, the argument runs that global democracy would, in fact,
translate into more, rather than less, 'real' democracy.
It would serve to increase the ability of citizens to participate
effectively in shaping the policies that concern them directly (Pogge
1992, 64; Young 2000, 269). However, no matter how forcefully the
principle of subsidiarity is applied, the global democratic project
would still entail the implementation of global principles and
standards (e.g. (re)distributive principles, human rights standards)
that would rely on coercive enforcement agencies (Benhabib 2004, 113).
This means that the democratic legitimacy of political institutions
above the level of the state is an issue that cannot be avoided.



Statists have tried to identify some basic background conditions to
democratic institutions and procedures that cannot be satisfied beyond
a certain threshold. Their argument is empirical, rather than
conceptual. A common language is one plausible candidate put forward
by Kymlicka. He insists that linguistic/territorial political
associations are the primary forum for democratic participation,
rather than higher-level political associations that cut across
linguistic lines, because democratic politics is essentially
"politics in the vernacular" (Kymlicka 1999, 121). Even in
cases where average citizens are conversant in one or more foreign
language, they rarely have the level of fluency necessary to
participate in political debate in a language other than their own:
only a select few have the ability and opportunity to acquire and
sustain the necessary language skills. Political debate in
multilingual settings is essentially an elitist pursuit.



In fact, political discussions require a higher degree of fluency than
what is needed for business transactions or tourism: "political
communication has a large ritualistic component, and these ritualized
forms of communication are typically language-specific. Even if one
understands a foreign language in the technical sense, without
knowledge of these ritualistic elements one may be unable to
understand political debates" (Kymlicka 1999, 121). In that
case, the hope that English's emergence as a new global
*lingua franca* could overcome the linguistic obstacles that
impede the development of transnational democratic politics appear
overstated. English's growing use may be enough to increase
mutual understanding between individuals, but it is unlikely to become
a transnational vernacular allowing democratic politics to transcend
national
 boundaries.[24]
However, that argument may not prove to be the insuperable obstacle
that statists suppose. If the development of a global public sphere,
extending across state boundaries, is indeed necessary for democratic
politics at the global level, this can be interpreted in terms of
making national public spheres responsive to each other. This does not
require that citizens themselves become multilingual, but that the
media inform citizens about how issues of common interest are debated
in other (national) public spheres (see Habermas 2009, 87).



The development of transnational advocacy networks may also indicate
that the statists' worries are overstated. Their existence shows
that it is possible for individuals to exercise political agency in
forums other than those provided by democratic states and that the
absence of a common vernacular does not impede participation. Global
democracy becomes thinkable once we focus on the development of
transnational civil society rather than on the transposing of
representative institutions at the global level. In response, it
should be noted that such networks usually coalesce around a common
ideology or a conception of the good (e.g. the environment; rights of
indigenous peoples, critique of neo-liberal forms of globalisation,
etc.), serving as a functional equivalent to a common vernacular. More
importantly, these networks are composed of voluntary associations
organized around shared interests and cannot stand as a surrogate for
the political community *per se*, which acts as the addressee
of claims made by the organisations and groups of civil society.



Which political community or communities can act as the addressee of
claims made by organisations of transnational civil society? Though
something like a global political society can be seen as emerging in
global events like the United Nations Climate Change Conferences
(COP), national political communities and their formal institutions
still appear as the main adressees of claims. In that case, Kymlicka
is right to claim that: "the weak transnationalism of advocacy
networks is predicated on, even parasitic on, the ongoing existence of
bounded political communities" (Kymlicka 2003, 291). In this
respect, though the organisations and associations of an emerging
transnational civil society can offer possibilities of political
agency for certain committed individuals and groups, they do not offer
a solution to the problem posed by the extension of democratic
citizenship to the global
 level.[25]



However, this conclusion may be faulted for putting too much weight on
the formal institutional context within which democratic citizenship
is set. Important strands in the citizenship literature display
attempts to break free from this way of conceptualizing citizenship,
focusing instead on practices of citizenship defined independently of
its formal legal status. These strands point to perhaps more fruitful
avenues to conceptualize transnational democratic citizenship. James
Tully's contribution is particularly important here because of
the broader, practice-based definition of citizenship he offers. Tully
uses "the term 'citizen' to refer to a person who is
subject to a relationship of governance (that is to say, governed)
*and*, simultaneously and primarily, is an active agent in the
field of a governance relationship" (Tully 2008a, 3). Governance
relationships take place at all levels of political and social life:
below, beyond and across the boundaries of the state. Citizenship,
considered primarily as an activity, cannot be reduced to "a
status given by institutions of the modern constitutional state and
international law". It refers instead to the "negotiated
practices in which one becomes citizen through participation"
(Tully 2008b,
 248).[26]



The "acts of citizenship" literature, formed around the
writings of Engen Isin, is also relevant here (Isin 2008; 2009; 2017).
Isin developed his theory to make sense of what he calls an
"unnamed figure", "which belies the modern figure of
the citizen with singular loyalty, identity and belongings". He
related its appearance to the emergence of new 'sites' and
'scales' while insisting that it could not be adequaltely
grasped by conventional categories like 'foreigner',
'migrant', 'refugee', 'nomad',
etc. He suggested escaping from conventional accounts by focusing on
the "'acts' through which 'actors' claim
to transform themselves (and others) from subjects into citizens as
claimants of rights" (Isin 2009, 368). This suggestion has led
to a fluid and dynamic conception of citizenship that attempts to make
sense of phenomena that extend below, beyond and across state
boundaries without denying the stubborn reality of states (see e.g.
Tonkiss 2022; Muller 2022; Roy and Neveu 2023).



There is still another version of the global democratic project that
involves an individualist conception of democratic political agency.
Here citizens can engage in significant political activities that do
not require high levels of interaction and cooperation between them
(Kuper 2004). This position requires, first, that one abandon the
conception of democratic legitimacy implicit in deliberative,
participatory and republican conceptions of democracy, which all
attempt to maintain a broadly Rousseauian understanding of legitimacy:
laws are legitimate only if citizens can see themselves, somehow, as
their coauthors. Kuper suggests that this vision of democratic
legitimacy be discarded in favour of one focusing on the
responsiveness of the political system as a whole. The central issue
becomes whether this system is made to act "in the best
interests of the public, in a manner responsive to them" (Kuper
2004, 75 quoting Pitkin 1967). On this view, the vertical, rather than
horizontal, dimension of communication is of overarching importance:
individual citizens must have access to relevant information about
what various authorities are doing, there must exist institutional
channels through which they can pressure authorities and let them know
their views on proposed policies. Doing so does not require that they
"act together with high levels of mutual awareness" (Kuper
2004, 127); they can exercise these capacities individually, via
specific agencies. Responsiveness is also a dimension of democratic
legitimacy favoured by some empirical political scientists, referring
to the responsiveness of representatives to the opinions, preferences
and concerns of citizens communicated via various agencies. It is
measured through statistical correlation in which public opinion is
the dependent variable and policy output is the independent variable
(for an overview see Page (1994)).



In contrast to the vertical and sometimes causal picture of
citizenship depicted in responsiveness, one may insist, as does
Bernard Manin, that meaningful political agency requires that citizens
be capable of learning what their co-citizens think about important
policy issues or events independently of the authorities. Horizontal
communication between citizens appears as a necessary condition to
their being capable of political action (Manin 1997,
 170-171).[27]
 The thing that makes citizens political agents is their capacity to
act independently of authorities and this ability, in turn, depends on
whether they regularly act and communicate together, even if this
interaction is often mediated through institutions like the electronic
media.


## 4. Citizenship's new frontier?



Despite their many differences, the conceptions of citizenship
discussed in the preceding sections share the idea that citizenship
supposes a certain kind of agency, one that involves the
individual's capacity to reflect on his/her subjective good as
well as on the good of the whole. And this has long been associated,
in the Western tradition, to a complex discursive capacity that only
human beings are thought to possess. Following Aristotle:



> 
> [W]hereas mere voice is but an indicator of pleasure or pain and is
> therefore found in other animals (...), the power of speech is
> intended to set forth the expedient and the inexpedient, and therefore
> likewise the just and the unjust. And it is characteristic of man that
> he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the
> like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a
> family and a state (Aristotle, 1996, 1253a10-1253a18).
> 



The capacity for rational agency has long functioned as a threshold
condition for citizenship. In Aristotle's *Politics*, for
example, the exclusion of women and slaves from citizenship is based
on an account of their souls as lacking the appropriate kind of
rationality. The long history of the extension of citizenship to
groups previously excluded did not change this basic understanding. It
involved the recognition that the newly included (e.g. women, workers,
descendants of former slaves) did, in fact, satisfy the threshold
condition.



Contemporary democratic and republican theories often rely on an ideal
picture of the citizen as actively involved in the political life of
the community. This encompasses a vast array of activities and
practices, including voting in elections, canvassing, participating in
public deliberation, demonstrating against government decisions or
policies, etc. These activities all presuppose the capacity for a
certain kind of agency, one that relies heavily on rational,
discursive abilities. This common view sits uncomfortably with the
fact that many individuals -- in some cases because of deep
cognitive disability -- do not have these capacities. Though they
may be members of the society, can they -- truly -- be
citizens? From Locke to Rawls, the answer has been overwhelmingly
negative, confining these individuals to the category of wards (Arneil
2009 and 2016, Pinheiro 2016, Clifford Simplican 2016). Though society
may have the responsibility to ensure their welfare, they can have no
say in its definition, and are fated to remain society's passive
beneficiaries.



Over the last forty years, disability advocates and scholars have
contested this view of the disabled, insisting that they should be
seen and treated as citizens, not as wards. Some philosophers and
political theorists have rallied to this view and questioned the
conception of agency presupposed in the conventional view of
democratic citizenship as unduly exclusionary (Nussbaum 2006, Arneil
2009, Arneil and Hirschmann 2016). Building on the work of disability
theorists, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (2011, 2016) have argued
further that if one accepts -- as one should -- that a
capacity for complex discursive agency is not necessary for
citizenship, then one should also recognize domestic animals as
co-citizens since they qualify as members of
 society.[28]



Donaldson and Kymlicka define agency as "self-willed or
initiated action that carries an expectation of efficacy"
(Donaldson and Kymlicka 2016, 180, fn 16). On this view, agency does
not require discursive rationality and individuals with deep cognitive
disability as well as domestic animals can be described as agents. The
scope of agency is conceptualized into two parts: micro (the capacity
to have a say over everyday choices) and macro (the capacity of
individuals to shape the "fundamental dimensions of their
lives" (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2016, 180)). In *Zoopolis*
(2011), this macro dimension of agency is described more explicitly in
political terms, referring to a capacity for political participation.
To the extent that individuals act in ways that can be construed as
expressing approval, acquiescence or dissent with the laws and
regulations that affect them, they can be described as acting
politically and as displaying a form of democratic agency.



The absence of linguistic agency creates specific challenges since
both individuals with deep cognitive disability and domestic animals
are "dependent on others to support and interpret their
participation" (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2016, 176). They can be
agents only with the help of others, who have discursive rationality,
and with whom they share relations of trust. The latter can help
structure or "scaffold" meaningful choices for the former
and interpret their expressions.



Accepting that instances of "dependent agency" can count
as political participation supposes that we abandon the binary between
independent and dependent forms of agency as well as the belief that
only the former counts as the right kind of agency when it comes to
citizenship. This should not be too difficult to do if we are willing
to recognize that "[w]e are all interdependent, relying on
others to enable and sustain our (variable and contextual) capacities
for agency" (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 107). This is not to
claim that we are all the same, but to argue in favour of replacing
the binary between "an autonomous, rational agent" and
"his or her opposite, the 'disabled'"
"with a gradient scale in which we are all in various ways and
in different degrees both dependent on others and independent"
(Arneil 2009, 234).



Donaldson and Kymlicka's argument becomes less convincing when
they attempt to illustrate with concrete examples what they mean by
the political participation of domestic animals. In some of the
examples they use, the humans involved appear as the real agents of
the actions described while animals come across as the objects of
their masters' agency (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011,
112-116; Hinchcliffe 2015). In response to this criticism,
Donaldson and Kymlicka have conceded the weakness of some of their
examples while maintaining the possibility of finding better ones.
More interestingly for our purposes, they insist that:
"capacities for agency are embedded in ongoing social relations
amongst responsive, reflexive, and interdependent selves, not located
in a threshold individual capacity for rational reflection and public
deliberation" (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2015, 331). If we accept
that people with deep cognitive disability and domestic animals are
members of society, then the right question to ask is not whether they
meet the threshold condition of discursive rationality and can be
recognized as citizens. We should rather enquire about the kind of
spaces in which their political agency could be expressed as well as
look for the mechanisms through which their citizenship could be
enacted. In short, instead of defining who can be a citizen according
to whether or not an individual or group can function in the existing
spaces of citizenship (i.e. whether they can participate in elections
or militate for political parties), we should create distinct spaces
that are commensurate to the capacities of all those who possess
rights of
 citizenship.[29]



Donaldson and Kymlicka's main objective is to secure the rights
of animals against the terrible and unjust consequences of human
beings' lordship over them. From the perspective of democratic
theory, the upshot of their argument is mixed. On the one hand, it may
offer a promising response to the persisting complaints about the
alleged incompetence of 'ordinary' citizens in
contemporary mass democracies (Brennan 2016) by stimulating our
institutional imagination to create better spaces of citizenship for
everyone. On the other hand, extending the definitions of political
participation and democratic agency to cover the actions of domestic
animals may also weaken the very significance of democratic
citizenship. Perhaps more importantly, they highlight an abiding
tension in democratic theory between two models of citizenship: the
membership model, where citizenship is defined in terms of social
membership, and what they call the "capacity contract", in
which citizenship is defined in terms of "capacities for
particular kinds of agency" (Kymlicka and Donaldson 2018,
161).


## 5. Conclusion



Our survey of contemporary discussions has highlighted important
differences over each of the three dimensions of citizenship. As a
legal status, citizenship remains the keystone of contemporary
conceptions: its normative core is the principle that citizens shall
enjoy equal rights, although most would now agree that, in certain
circumstances, equal consideration of individuals' interests may
justifiably result in differential treatment by the state. This broad
agreement on principle leaves ample room for disagreement over the
particulars, as witnessed by the recurring debates over affirmative
action and minority rights. These discussions have become a hallmark
of contemporary liberal societies, and our legal and political
discourses are well equipped to handle them. The deeper worry, which
new forms of political violence have made more acute, centres upon
achieving a proper balance between the recognition of difference and
the affirmation of common principles to which all citizens adhere.



How robust an identity can citizenship provide in complex and
internally diverse societies? There is a tension here that is
difficult to resolve: our awareness of the pluralist nature of
contemporary societies leads us to underscore the importance of
general legal and political principles (democracy, human rights, rule
of law) rather than the traditional emblems of nationality: common
history and culture. Postnationalists, in particular, emphasize the
role of democratic political practice in securing social integration.
Yet, the complexity and scale of contemporary liberal societies tend
to make this practice less significant in the lives of most citizens,
a fact reflected in declining levels of participation in formal
political institutions. Are we not expecting too much from democratic
political practice under current circumstances?



This question brings us face to face with the difficult issue of
citizens' political agency, which has long been central to
debates between liberals and republicans. Whether we understand
democracy in terms of civic self-government (republican version) or as
the ability to exercise control over government (liberal version), it
is not easy to determine how, and through what institutional
mechanisms, citizens can exercise meaningful political agency in
complex societies. This difficulty is epitomized in the debate over
transnational citizenship. Although global citizenship is conceivable
first and foremost as a legal status securing a number of fundamental
human rights, most authors agree that it should not be strictly legal
in nature and must have a significant political dimension. One senses,
however, a distinct malaise when it comes to identifying appropriate
normative standards and to locating the institutions through which
these could be approximated.



In the end, our dismissal of the
*encyclopediste*'s interest in distinguishing
subject and citizen may have been too hasty. If being a citizen in a
liberal-democratic political community is to mean something more than
the status of legal *subject*, we must be ready to state what
this "more" entails. This stubborn blind-spot of theories
of citizenship leads us to some of the most difficult issues
pertaining to the very possibility of democracy in the contemporary
world.