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The poverty of postnationalism: citizenship, immigration, and the new Europe

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Abstract

Over the last decade and a half, in a literature otherwise obsessed with citizenship in all its forms, a broad array of scholars has downplayed, criticized, and at times trivialized national citizenship. The assault on citizenship has had both an expansionary and a contractionary thrust. It is expansionary in that the language of citizenship is no longer linked with nationality, but rather protest politics. An earlier generation of social scientists would have described these actions as lobbying; they have now become “citizenship practice.” It is contractionary in that what one might have thought to be the core of citizenship; nationality, the possession of a nation-state’s passport is viewed as less and less relevant to citizenship. Scholars have dislodged both the substance of citizenship, what it is, and the location of citizenship, where it “happens,” from the nation-state and national citizenship. The article challenges this devaluation of citizenship and the nation-state on empirical, conceptual, and normative grounds. Empirically, scholars, whom I link together under the umbrella term “postnationalists,” have based their anti-statist arguments on evidence that, when subjected to further inspection, wholly fails to support the arguments advanced. Conceptually, postnationalists rely on categories that are confused and untenable, being that national variables are cited as evidence of transnational developments. Normatively, postnationalists have lost the emancipatory thrust that once gave concerns with citizenship real-world purchase.

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Notes

  1. A similar trend is easily detected in works on “diaspora,” in which an apparently endless number of ethnic, religious, sexual and other groups—Francophone, Anglophone, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucian, Huguenot, Muslim, Catholic, Belarusian, Latvian, Soviet, Tutsi, Dixie, Yankee, white, queer, deaf, redneck, terrorist, and fundamentalist—are now defined as “diasporas.” See Brubaker (2005:2–4).

  2. I owe these categories to Bosniak 2006.

  3. On this, see Favell (2005).

  4. R. Brubaker, In the Name of the Nation, 118, Alan Milward (1992).

  5. Ash (1992)

  6. The same is true of the US. See David Abraham (2002), 28 on the equal protection clause.

  7. Brubaker, The ‘diaspora diaspora, 10.

  8. As argued by critics of transnationalism. See in particular Waldinger and Fitzgerald (2004).

  9. As conceded by Sassen (2002:278).

  10. For a touching description of one Jewish émigré’s attachment to his native Stuttgart, see Fred Uhlman (1997).

  11. See the forthcoming Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies special issue on citizenship and integration in Europe.

  12. The example is a contentious one, but prayer groups that require women to have separate entrances and/or to sit at the back behind men are no different than clubs requiring separate entrances and rooms for black people. Both practices have their particularistic justifications; both are illiberal.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3K7, Canada

    Randall Hansen

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Hansen, R. The poverty of postnationalism: citizenship, immigration, and the new Europe. Theor Soc 38, 1–24 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-008-9074-0

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