16 Jan Citizenship, institutions, and government

Today, i’m writing on citizenship. I have a vague sense of it form all the prattling i do about health citizenship, but i’ve felt that my focus has been too narrow. So, in three sentences or less, i need to define citizenship and the ways in which it has been employed socially and politically.

In going through my bibliography, i came across a fantastic article by Robert Lake and Kathe Newman that i’d read a few years ago when i was trying to disentangle health citizenship for my master’s thesis: Differential Citizenship in the Shadow State (GeoJournal, 58: 109-120). Their work is what really turned me on to trying to understand it, and using the definition by Gershon Shafir (1998, 23) :

By ‘citizenship’…we need to understand not only a bundle of formal rights, but the entire mode of incorporation of a particular individual or group into society

They go on to say that:

On this view, we look for citizenship not in the citizen but as situated in the social practices of integration and inclusion exercised by institutions of the state (Young, 2000). Under conditions of state contraction and restructuring, however, the state increasingly relinquishes the integrative functions of governance and redistribution while retaining function of repression, exclusion, and social control (Gilmore, 98; Jessop, 93). It is thus increasingly left to the shadow state to provide the arena, the mechanisms and the points of institutional access through which the offer of citizenship is extended and social integration can be accomplished.

Institutions of the state. I’ve been struggling lately with understandings of the state. On the one hand, massive state bureaucracy and surveillance is dastardly. Social services in this country are used as a telescope through which to examine, define, and control the poor. So the exercise of their citizenship right within this frame means that they also lose a rather large portion of other rights. On the other hand, if the state does not provide social services, then who does? and within what frame – with what accountability and to whom? De-democratization of the social services demobilizes the political power of the poor.

But that idea, in and of itself is a bit condescending – as if that is the only way to mobilize politically for the poor – through their collective bargaining for a meaningful social safety net. Then again, people who are struggling simply to survive hardly have time to engage politically or even socially – there is a whole host of much more complex questions that arises at this point.

It’s a question i’ve been struggling with for a few years. Less government vs. more government. What is the role of government? If the government is creating an economic climate that creates greater disparity, doesn’t it then have the responsibility to provide social safety net?

I found in my Master’s thesis a kind of utopia that i was feeling rather brazen to be so gloriously positive about. It was about the Model Cities Program funded by Johnson in 1965 (ish). What evolved from this was not only local institutions (community-built programs) that were tailored to meet the communities’ needs, but through whose process of building created political mobilization – written into the mandates were a return of citizenship to some of the most-disenfranchised populations. I worried that i was being overly optimistic until i met Jenna Lloyd, who at the time was at the CUNY Center for Place Culture and Politics. She had written her PhD on a similar project, also funded with Model Cities money.

This model was a great mixture of government bureaucracy and community involvement. At the time that the clinic i studied was dreamed up, there were 11 major hospitals and clinics within or adjacent to the model neighborhood (not one would was more than 2 miles from anyone within the bounded space), yet all were closed to the people who lived in the area. The only option for children was 11 miles away – it required at least two buses to get to. The clinic was dreamed up and built by the members of the community – and in this process taught the 100’s of people who were involved how to mobilize their citizenship toward concrete action with real consequences. All with minimal involvement from the government.

There is a balance in there that is hard not to fantasize about. Part of the fantastic-ness of it all is the historical legacy of the place – the community remembers and the people who work there and who attend there are reminded every day of the importance of dignity within this social service institute. Jenna’s dissertation did not end on quite so happy a note, from what i understand. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to discuss it in too much detail (i blame that on my own social ineptitude).

So how does this apply internationally? What if, in the transnationalizing of citizenship (see Matt Sparke’s discussion with Saskia Sassen on this), we also transnationlized the model cities project? Or is that too radical?

In the end, the conservatives managed to slowly strangle the program till it died of asphyxiation. A point that has stayed with me and still gives me chills stated that this program had provided a “blueprint for revolution” and “mayors across the nation charged the federal government with financing an attack on city hall.” I feel compelled to note that most of the model neighborhoods (including the one here in Seattle) were African American. Ah yes – citizenship…whom exactly is actually allowed to exercise citizenship and in what ways?

On that note, i am leaving off today with two videos that pose the same question: What if the Tea Party were Black? The first video is a rather inane “discussion” (insultingly so, i have to say) on CNN that fails to actually address the question (let’s not get too radical, now, CNN). The second is pointed and incredibly powerful in its exploration of the topic.