needs of minority groups.”16
The 1990s experienced “an explosion of interest in the concept of citizenship.”17 Far from the early liberal understanding of citizenship as limited to political activity, which some critics presently view as translating simply into the right to pursue individual economic interests in a market,18 contemporary citizenship theories have a broad, flexible sense of participation in public life. Some perceive citizenship as a reciprocal relation between an individual’s location and his or her rights.19
In 1949 T. H. Marshall distinguished three types of citizenship that emerged “in such a way that each new type was standing on the shoulder of its predecessor.”20 Indeed, since Marshall’s conception of “the ideal of citizenship as full participation in the community,”21 the relational aspect of citizenship has shifted from an individual-vis-à-vis-state model to an individual-vis-à-vis-society model.22
5.3 Citizenship in a Globalized World
In today’s globalized world, citizenship is a contested concept. The rethinking of citizenship along critical lines is informed by the application and development of cross-fertilized ideas of rights. As such it promotes, defends, and facilitates full participation in society, in particular by those persons who live at the margins.23
The concept of citizenship in a globalized world is unlike the liberal idea(l) of citizenship24 that embraces the notion that human beings are “atomistic, rational agents whose existence and interests are ontologically prior to society.”25 Feminist writers have objected to such a model as “something like equal membership in an economic and social sphere … dedicated to the assumption that the ‘market maketh man’ … [and] less a collective, political activity than an individual, economic activity—the right to pursue one’s interests, without hindrance, in the marketplace.”26 Nor is this idea of citizenship even like Marshall’s27 broader notion of full participation in the community, as outsiders also have criticized his view for its lack of focus on or furtherance of equality and participation.
Also essential to a realistic formulation of citizenship in a globalized world is the failure of both the legal and social versions of citizenship for marginalized groups. One writer has suggested that for persons at the margins, citizenship “may not make much difference to one’s life” as neither vision has enabled such persons to attain desired social justice and equality.28 The two rationales offered to explain this failure of citizenship are significant to this analytical project of ending trade and human rights’ splendid isolation. Just as trade, inconsistently in light of Article XX of the American Declaration, insists that it is a discipline separate from human rights, so too do some citizenship theorists suggest that the concept of citizenship might aspire to but cannot guarantee full participation in society. One explanation of the failure of citizenship for those at the margins suggests that because citizenship is a political category, it cannot “deal with substantial inequalities in the social and economic spheres.”29 The other posits that a notion of citizenship that focuses on “an evolving complex of civil, political and social rights” could include “even more characteristics of the dominant groups”30 and thus reinforce marginalization.
In considering the intersection of the trade and human rights discourses especially in the context of globalization, any citizenship construct must deal with social, economic, and political inequalities as well as account for varied cultural concerns and circumstances within which real people lead their real lives. In this context, citizenship is not just about individual rights, but also about culture, community, and society. The proposed idea of citizenship incorporates and is responsive to varied cultural concerns, ideas, and traditions. It is not about individuals as “independent of any immediate social or political condition,”31 but about individuals having and living within varied cultures and communities. Interestingly, the popular market notion of globalization itself is one that reinforces and confirms “the Western liberal commitment to the primacy of universal markets over national borders [which] necessarily undermines … claims of citizenship”32 that are atomistic, individualistic, and tied to those transcended borders.
To reconceptualize citizenship, the right to participate in government must be problematized (see also chapter 13) to expose how hegemonic discourses and conceptualizations about community suppress subaltern ones. For example, the deterritorialization of states effected by globalization, along with the undoing of sovereignty effected by human rights norms, effectively have upended the notion of citizenship as a condition of membership specific to the nation-state. As persons, culture, and capital travel and become diffused and not bound to territorial borderlands, membership in more than one community—even more than one political community—becomes inevitable.
Globalization, particularly the aspect of movement of persons across myriad borders, signifies that multiple alliances will be formed. As globalization renders citizenship an increasingly deterritorialized concept, its nexus to and communion with a nation-state will continue to erode and widen.33 The migrations and relocalizations of members of national, ethnic, religious, sexual, racial, and gender groups outside of clearly defined national territorial borders will result in inter- and transnational communities that exist without respect to nation-state boundaries. These new geographies and locations will result in changing concepts and boundaries of accountability, and an erosion and re/constitution of the citizenship model(s).
The redefined concept of citizenship in the globalization context uses as its foundation the critically re/formed, developed, expanded, and transformed international human rights vision.34 It embraces and includes as indivisible, interdependent, and inviolable not only the non-discrimination norms and other civil and political rights (which include, for example, language that is often absent from U.S. discourses), but also social, economic, and cultural rights.35 Certainly, this is a much broader notion of citizenship than the “legal status” that binds a person to a state—although, as the Nottebohm Case has taught us, even such a purportedly narrow, statist conception of citizenship has less clear boundaries than many would have us believe36—or even the desirable activity model that focuses on social relations, both of which have failed marginalized groups.
For individuals, citizenship, in the framework of globalization, is a paradigm based on attributes of human beings qua human beings.37 It is centered and founded on the reality that the fulfillment of personhood is indivisibly connected to the entitlement not only to individual rights, including the amalgamation of geographies and locations of individuals’ identities and conduct, but also to membership and participation in their varied and various communities, including political communities as well as economic and social locations such as the family, religious affiliations, and place(s) of employment.38 Thus citizenship as full personhood does not view the liberal individualistic and communitarian traditions as alternative, independent, irreconcilable visions, but rather as indivisible and interdependent dimensions of human existence. Full personhood requires not only an individual freedoms and dignity component but also a relational community component.
It cannot be disputed that globalization already has dramatically transmogrified the concept of participation. With the adoption of a fitting citizenship model, the holistic construct of human rights norms, and not the narrow concept of legal, individual rights, forms the legitimate foundation on which personhood is evaluated and determined within an individual’s various spaces, even within the state.39 Personal citizenship constitutes the proverbial bundle of sticks that belong to persons because they are human beings. In this regard, individual and group citizenship is a concept, an exercise, an orientation with a commitment to shared responsibility within human reality that is exercised through participatory, democratic mechanisms (see also chapter 13).
5.4 Transnationalization of the Individual
Before we were able to travel with ease, people developed stronger ties to the community, communities were smaller,
