History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 209–210
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History of European Ideas
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Editorial
Metamorphoses of citizenship
Christophe Salvat a,b
a
b
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, GREQAM, France
Robinson College, Cambridge, United Kingdom
In memory of Emile Perreau-Saussine.
‘Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that
even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this
reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made
right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that
the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger
sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society
the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled’ (J. Rawls, A
Theory of Justice. Revised Edition, 1999, 3).
In the Kantian well-ordered society imagined by Rawls, we are
all equal citizens, all members of a free and democratic State.
Citizenship is granted by birth and one only loses it by death.
Political, social or moral individual merits are irrelevant when it
comes to the principles of justice: all citizens are equally protected
by universal rights. According to this view, in a civil society all
individuals are citizens but out of it citizenship is an impossibility.
In reality, however, citizenship has often proved to be a
selective condition in civil societies: until the very recent past
equal citizenship could hardly be taken as ‘settled’ in occidental
societies. Social, religious, sexual and racial criteria have drawn
sharp lines between the insiders and the outsiders of civil society.
Birth, wealth, social status, education, religion, language, sex, race,
age, and nationality have alternatively or simultaneously been
used in man’s history to determine who was entitled to be a full
member of the civil society and who was not (with very different
consequences in terms of political rights notably). But, at the same
time, none of these ‘objective’ criteria (or a combination of them)
can fully characterize the idea of citizenship.
The progress of democracy over the last two centuries certainly
contributed to the extension of citizenship. The importance of
liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill in Victorian England
played a decisive role in the enfranchisement and legal recognition
of women and the working classes. Citizenship has become even
more inclusive in the 20th century thanks to decolonisation and
movements for racial equality lead by such protagonists as Martin
Luther King. Equal citizenship is of very recent existence and had
often to be fiercely crusaded for. In France, for instance, women
only won the right to vote in 1944 because of the prominent role
they played during WWII. South Africa’s victory against apartheid,
E-mail address: cs495@cam.ac.uk.
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which was established after the 1948 election only to be
abandoned in 1994, has come with a heavy price for the Black
population and its political leaders.
Citizenship is not, however, reducible to nationality or to
enfranchisement. There is almost always a subjective element in it,
a mark of personal achievement, which functions as a moral or a
political dubbing from the community and which, therefore, can be
used for discriminating purposes. Article 2 of the Reich Citizen Law
(known as the Nuremberg Laws) promulgated by Hitler in 1935, for
instance, reads that ‘A citizen of the Reich may be only that subject
who is German or kindred blood, and who, through his behaviour,
shows that he is both desirous and personally fit to serve loyally
the German people and the Reich.’ Being of German or Aryan origin
is indeed a condition to citizenship, but all subjects of ‘German or
kindred blood’ are not necessarily entitled to it. Because they were
not ‘fit to serve loyally’ their country, homosexuals, political
opponents and disabled people were thus sent, along with the Jews
and gypsies, to the Nazi concentration camps.
Other forms of civil exclusion have survived the democratisation of our societies. The Fifteenth Amendment of the US
constitution, allowing people of colour, the right to vote dates
from 1870 but racial segregation was, for instance, only officially
declared unconstitutional in 1970. Homosexuality, legalised in
most western countries in the 1970s, is still criminalized and
severely punished (including labour camps and death) in a number
of Muslim countries. According to a survey published in 2007 by
the International Gay and Lesbian Association, 40 out of Africa’s 53
countries had laws against homosexuality, some of which had been
inherited from their former Christian colons. This is not exclusive
to Islam however. In 2002, only 36 states of the USA had repealed
their sodomy laws. The U.S. Supreme Court decision Lawrence v.
Texas then invalidated the remaining ones.
Overall, and despite some noticeable backward steps, one can
reasonably conclude that citizenship has become much more equal
over the last few centuries. Equal citizenship is surely not ‘settled’
yet but it has become natural to think of it as a natural fact.
In 2008, a group of intellectual historians and historians met in
Cambridge to discuss citizenship from their own perspectives. The
results of some of these stimulating discussions are presented in
this special issue. My attention has been caught, in particular, by
the social and moral (rather than strictly political) difficulties and
resistances met during this process. Bestowing citizenship to a new
category of individuals can have very unsettling effects on the
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C. Salvat / History of European Ideas 37 (2011) 209–210
long-established categories of citizens, who lose de facto their
relative specificity. It is indeed never easy to recognise and
welcome as your equal those who had been previously considered
unworthy to fully belong to the civic community and it often
announces (or follows) a social transformation of the society.
Catherine Larrère shows that Rousseau’s reason to exclude
women from citizenship does not (at least not exclusively) rely on
misogyny but on a simple rationale: by accepting women in the
public sphere one would irremediably attain to the specificity of
the male condition, characterized for Rousseau by courage, civic
virtue and heroism. At the core of Rousseau’s political philosophy
lays a romantic belief that republics are based on male qualities,
which are epitomized by Greek mythical figures. I personally
believe that the physical and moral corruption of his masculine
ideal – had it been real – signs off for Rousseau the possibility of
establishing a republic in modern civilisation. The question is then
not whether Rousseau was defending or not women’s condition
but if his republican ideal could suffer a feminisation of citizenship.
Similarly, bestowing citizenship to members of a minority
religion (or of no religion at all) in a deeply religious country comes
up against insuperable difficulties. Not only can this affect the
authority of the State (which is an expression of God’s will) but it
can also undermine the foundations of the current citizenry, which
is in large part united through its common faith. Granting
citizenship to someone, unlike granting nationality or enfranchisement, has value of moral recognition from the community. It
means: ‘you are worthy enough to be one of us’. In the case of 19thcentury Italy, remarkably studied in this issue by Eugenio Biagini,
most of the states took care to exclusively limit citizenship to the
members of the Roman Catholic Church, sometimes, adds Biagini,
to the point where the spiritual intolerance of their constitutions
was unrivalled, even by the Pope himself. The short-lived Roman
Republic (1849), dreamed by Mazzini, has been of course a
noticeable exception, but, to some extent, its failure shows that,
despite the influence of thriving republican movements, the Italian
society was not ready yet to open up to dissenting Churches.
Because most of these restrictions to equal citizenship have
been lifted today within western countries, liberals seem confident
that the movement towards universal citizenship is on the right
track: if one looks back at the progress achieved over the last two
centuries, it is – they say – reasonable to hope that we shall all be
citizens of the world one day. Has Rousseau then lost his case
against Diderot (and Kant)? In a sense yes, but one can argue that
the extension of the legal conditions of citizenship is not
paramount to a universalization of citizenship.
Take the example of the European construction continuously
advocated since the 18th century. In many cases, originals plans to
extend citizenship to European non-nationals were often balanced
out by strong social criteria. European citizenship remained
exclusive. This is admirably illustrated by the discussions of the
pro-European Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences
Sociales, studied here by Christian Müller, which reactivated the
republican distinction between active and passive citizens.
‘Respectability, earnestness, education, economic independence,
moral yet rational conduct, and masculinity’ were then considered
as necessary for applying to a European or trans-national
citizenship. Europe will perhaps become a full political entity
one day. It will not be an easy process, and the result might sensibly
differ from its actual form, but a united Europe will, I think,
eventually supersede the Nations it originated from, and similar
movements will follow elsewhere in the world. One would be
wrong, however, to see in it the advent of universal citizenship.
Citizenship can become worldwide but it will never be unconditional. New forms of civil rewards (and hence discriminations or
persecutions) will inevitably appear. They already do.
As the last resort, the State is the only authority able to name
who is a citizen and who is not, who is under its protection and
who is not. There is a difference between having the feeling of
being a citizen of a country (of Europe or even of the world) and
being legally recognised as such. Absence of recognition, reckons
Arendt, amounts to persecution. Amongst those who do not
benefit today from any civil recognition are refugees. Having been
suddenly (and usually unjustly) deprived of their original
citizenship without having necessarily gained a proper civil
status in their new country, refugees often live in a civil no man’s
land. Regaining citizenship is, for them, not only a matter of
dignity but of safeness. Amongst different possible solutions to
restore their citizenship, repatriation (when possible) offers,
explains Katy Long, interesting perspectives as it engages both
parts into a new social contract.
To conclude this short introduction, I would like to thank all
the participants for the quality of their research and for the
conviviality of the meeting. I also wish to thank Robinson College
and the Centre for History and Economics in Cambridge for their
generous financial and organizational support as well as the
editor of this journal for the interest he has shown for this project
and for his patience throughout the process of the present
publication. Finally, it is with immense sadness that I end this
conclusion. We all share a sorrow for Emile Perreau-Saussine,
who contributed to this workshop, and who was sadly and
unexpectedly taken from us last year. None were prepared for his
untimely departure and he will be severely missed. This special
issue is dedicated to him.