28 Feb A moment to ponder citizenship

T.H. Marshall’s rather utopian vision of the growing inclusiveness in citizenship projects was premature, at best. In the 1950’s, at the time of his writing, social welfare was hierarchically organized decrying the reality of a universalist social citizenship. And while women, ethnic minorities, differently abled people, children and the elderly were not excluded, they did have problematic relationships within these frames (McGuinness, 2002).  Citizenship is not a single and static denomination of personhood. As Chantal Mouffe points out, “citizenship is not just one identity among others” – it is not a fixed, immutable character, rather, stands as a forceful antagonism to pre-scribed universalist and cosmopolitan constructs  (1992, 378). It is a constant state of negotiation and re-negotiation at the individual and collective levels, politically, socially and economically. Hannah Arendt argues that the liberal state, though it purports to protect the rights of men (people, see Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights), truly only protects the rights of its citizens – and apparently not very well at that.

The reconfiguration of economic and political powers through supra-national organizations has moved political mobilization, and indeed, the very nature and possibility of negotiation out of reach and even out of view of many people. This brings to bear questions about the new scale of citizenship – even as geographers grapple with questions of de- and re-territorialization and transnational migrations, citizenship is still spatially bounded to an ever-increasingly-nebulous nation-state (see: Mitchell, 2003). That political engagement, and democratic participation (particularly) are exercised at the scale of the nation-state means that the re-formation and de-formation of particular economic and political processes across various scales and through a multitude of institutions brings about questions of actual possibilities of political engagement of individuals and of groups. These shifts force us to ask: what does this do to claims to entitlements and protection of individual freedoms? (And really – what is “freedom”?)

sources available upon request