Abstract
Over the last decade and a half, Christian Joppke has provided important insights into the multifaceted meanings of citizenship. His work (19 articles and books are listed in the bibliography) is a model of academic integrity. Dedicated here to telling the story of Citizenship and Migration, Joppke conveys the optimistic message that ‘rather than being reproduced in nationally distinct ways, or being set on a global path of decline, citizenship [has] continued to evolve, toward becoming more inclusive and universalistic’ (p. 31). He points to a ‘drastic liberalizing trend in Europe whose citizenship regimes were not built for a world of migration’ (p. 31), with anti-discrimination rights going from strength to strength (p. 32).
In constructing his argument, Joppke provides an exposition of citizenship as status, as a bundle of rights and as national identity. He emphasizes legislation in the leading liberal democratic states of the European Union, focusing for the most part on laws enacted in Germany, France, the UK and the Netherlands, with glances to Canada, Australia and the USA. In his view, there is currently a decided inclination to view citizenship as a configuration of ‘rights without obligations . . . socially inconsequential, and devoid of a particular cultural content’ (p. 33). The Scandinavian states provide examples to support some of his claims; but, as Joppke avows, his description applies almost not at all to the Eastern European states (or, of course, to states in other parts of the world) where citizenship is interpreted in terms of ethnicity.
The book is divided into five sections: ‘The concept of citizenship’, ‘Status’, ‘Rights’, ‘Identity’ and ‘Citizenship light’. In the first part, Joppke traces the ‘notoriously polyvalent concept’ (p. 1) of citizenship from ancient Greece to the 20th century, quoting Rogers Smith’s explanation that the most acceptable meaning is ‘a certain sort of membership in a political community’. The normative meaning of ‘political’ leads to ‘the idea of citizenships’ in the plural, membership in several political communities. To his mind, citizenship also has ‘a factual meaning’, and that means simply belonging to a state (p. 2). After surveying ‘citizenship in history’ (pp. 6–9), Joppke goes on to a review of ‘citizenship in social and political theory’ (pp. 9–26). He surveys Marshall’s contributions to conceptions of social citizenship, and presents the meanings attributed to national citizenship: membership in an ethnic group; multicultural citizenship: signifying the fixed differentiation of cultural groups; and post-national citizenship (Soysal, 1994): the conceptualization of citizenship as attached to the person, a right which cannot be detached through territorial mobility.
The chapter on status traces changes in legal regulations along with the impact of international conventions. With the steady rise in the number of immigrants to developed countries (from 48 million in 1980 to 110 million in 2000), states have had to revise their modes of controlling nationality, naturalization and expulsion (p. 46). Because of rising rates of labor migration after the Second World War, and the pressing need for the integration of permanent residents, the 1930 Hague Convention proviso that people could hold only a single citizenship became outdated. Increasing tolerance of dual citizenship has come about not least because of the rise in the number of families where the parents each hold a different citizenship and their affiliations are passed on to the children by ‘the right of a blood relationship’ (jus sanguinis). But states continue to set often formidable conditions for admittance and residency. Immigrants are allowed to enter states if they meet requirements for ‘qualities’ and skills. As conditions for naturalization, states may raise and/or lower the demands for knowledge of the state language, and for knowledge of the culture. Appended assertions that immigrants must ‘assimilate’ to the majority culture or that they must be ‘integrated’ reflect a conception of the basis on which the majority population will accept given numbers of immigrants. At the same time, governments have renewed efforts to attract emigrants to return to full citizenship. Sensitivity to perceived needs has led both right-wing and left-wing governments to advance similar types of legislation. At the same time, the European Union has made residency available to the populations of all the member states.
In regard to citizenship as rights, there is now evidence of rights as ‘contract’, subject to negotiation, rather than as taken for granted constituents of the ‘status’, citizen. Citing findings to the effect that increased immigration causes a reduction of trust in both in-groups and out-groups (Putnam, quoted on p. 75), Joppke concludes that increased immigration should increase distrust and thus weaken the social rights embedded in welfare society. Paradoxically, however, to his mind, no such connection was found between immigration and the allocation of social rights in welfare programs in 21 OECD countries (p. 76). Moreover, an examination of legislation over the last two decades shows that the ‘politics of group recognition’ (Taylor, cited on p. 110), which ‘freezes’ people into their cultures of birth, has been deserted in favor of laws that are flagged as anti-discriminationist and anti-racialist. Such legislation, which, in Joppke’s view, accords with the liberal ideals of universalistic respect for the individual, heralds the elimination of legal segregation in host societies.
Concomitantly, citizenship as identity is far less salient than in the past. In the presumably homogeneous societies in which citizenship was primarily contingent on ethnicity, it was relatively easy to define ‘us’ and ‘them’. The regulations of the EU, however, which enable territorial mobility, residence and employment in all the member countries, is steadily undermining the blind dedication to national citizenship as an identity. With the extension of ‘the radius of citizenship’ (p. 154) through the admission of immigrants, national identity is far from self-evident. For some, solidarity and identity are found in religious communities, but in Western Europe religion is recognized as a private matter. Identities may be rooted in language, or in emotional ties with both the country of origin and the host country – transnational identities. The tradition of demanding total identification with the majority cannot be maintained.
In attempts to placate the ‘native’ population for rising rates of migration, which, though selective, remains unpopular (p. 156), states have made efforts to ‘upgrade’ citizenship by revising naturalization legislation and propagating rules that accord with popular ideological positions as well as with economic needs. Immigrants, however, increasingly demonstrate an instrumental interest in returns on immigration. In states where long-term residents have access to employment, as well as social benefits such as health care and children’s education, there has been a steady drop in rates of application for naturalization. According to Joppke, those who do seek to fulfill the requirements for naturalization, attain a status which is ‘thin and procedural and not thick and substantive’ (Habermas, quoted on p. 116). In short, the consensus on rights in the liberal societies that make up the western world is increasingly a consensus on universalistic values rather than one on loyalty to the nation and its symbols.
While at the outset Joppke posits a causal chain – from status to rights to identity – he finds no evidence that there is a consistent succession in any direction (p. 150) in liberal states. But having recognized that the outline of the book does not constitute an explanatory theory, Joppke does not go on to explore the trends that he has uncovered or to contextualize them in terms of broader political and economic processes. Instead, he is satisfied to state that the trend toward universalistic rights is inevitable in the ‘liberal democracies’ he discusses, and finds that this trend is supported by international institutions committed to egalitarianism. ‘Citizenship light’ – a weak association with states serves to summarize the richly detailed ‘story’ of significant developments in ‘citizenship and immigration’.
Despite the logical arguments and the careful organization, this book is peculiarly anemic in relation to the plethora of books that deal with citizenship or with migration. I would like in closing to refer to one that can serve as a pertinent contrast. At the turn of the century, Castles and Davidson (2000) published a book with a similar title: Citizenship and Migration. The difference between their book and that of Joppke is not merely in the form of the word. With their subtitle, Globalization and the Politics of Belonging, the authors assumed responsibility for defining globalization concretely and for showing its effects. These include macro-effects of political and economic destabilization and micro-effects on meanings of belonging. They considered the importance of ‘global virtues’ and ‘social capital’ in education for citizenship and wrestled with the interrelations of citizenship with poverty, risk, and violence in states in different parts of the globe where democracy is interpreted in different ways. By contrast, Joppke’s book (which does not cite Castles and Davidson) looks at developments of citizenship by examining an abundance of bloodless legalities. Thus, although it is useful as a compendium of information, it avoids a serious confrontation with basic sociological concerns, and its ‘insights-light’ on citizenship are ultimately disappointing.