that EU citizenship serves as a route to popular legitimacy for the EU project, as a large base of the EU population, directly subject to supranational policy making, are denied the democratic right to participate in the political process (Geddes 2000a; Day and Shaw 2002). This also raises concerns about the abilities of the EU to promote the social integration of TCNs, given the increased institutional capacities of the EU in areas of migration and asylum policy since the Amsterdam Treaty (ratified in 1999) (Kostakopoulou 2005). In terms of possible solutions, the MLG approach advocates a number of institutional reforms that could remedy the precarious position of TCNs and expand upon EU citizenship beyond its current exclusionary nature. This would entail either modifying EU citizenship, basing it on residence rather than nationality (“denizenship,” as coined by Hammar [1990]) (Hansen, R. and Weil 2001; Hansen, R. 1998), or building upon existing EU initiatives that seek to give TCNs rights and obligations that are comparable to those of EU citizens (Kostakopoulou 2002: 449; see also Chapters 5–6).
The MLG approach to citizenship thus has several advantages over PNC: most importantly, it situates EU citizenship within the concrete historical context of EU integration, recognizing how the politics of citizenship in the EU is influenced by several actors and institutions at multiple levels of governance. It also, especially in the work of Scharpf, offers a more nuanced approach to the scalar dimensions of EU citizenship, challenging the portrayal of globalization and EU integration as necessarily negative exogenous pressures on national citizenship models. At the same time, however, the MLG approach to citizenship suffers from the same pitfalls that characterize MLG integration theory. In narrowly focusing on the institutional form of EU citizenship, the MLG approach to EU citizenship fails to address its socioeconomic content, explaining why it has emerged, who benefits from it, and what kind of citizenship model it seeks to promote (Holman 2004). Although MLG recognizes that certain elements of society have indeed lost out when it comes to EU citizenship (social rights beneficiaries, TCNs), it does not make any systematic attempt to explain why this has been the case. Thus the institutional reforms that MLG proposes tend toward pluralism—failing to take into account the power relations that limit the efficacy of such measures (van Apeldoorn et al 2003). As a descriptive theory concerned mostly with the “problem solving” (see Cox 1986) dimensions of EU citizenship, MLG cannot account for the origins and trajectories of structural power that underpin the provision of rights and responsibilities in the multilevel governance polity. Much like PNC, the explanatory dimensions of EU citizenship, especially as they relate to issues of power and legitimacy, are largely out of reach.
Towards a Critical History
Despite their obvious differences, the two broadly categorized streams of thought outlined above are likely to accept as a starting point a basic definition of citizenship as the concept or category defining the rights and responsibilities of civil society to the polity/state and vice versa (Hay 1996; Tilly 1995). As our critique suggests, PNC tends to focus its energies completely on a nascent European civil society, the coming together of diverse European peoples who have supposedly begun to shed their outdated, regressive allegiances to the nation-state. It cannot, however, due largely to crude conceptualizations of globalization and the concomitant process of EU integration, provide any compelling reasons as to why a European polity as a political organization would differ fundamentally from the nation-state. The MLG approach to EU citizenship on the other hand concentrates narrowly on the institutional dynamics between the EU and national levels or polities, thus largely ignoring the role of civil society in shaping and influencing the content of supranational and national laws and institutions. Most crucially furthermore, both of these approaches tend toward pluralism in failing to systematically explain the ways in which different social and political actors are differentially impacted by citizenship politics in the EU. In the absence of any such treatment of the power relations underpinning EU citizenship, PNC is limited in its abilities to account for the structural barriers preventing the realization of its progressive vision of the EU; whereas MLG, though it recognizes asymmetries between national and European social citizenship regimes and between EU citizens and TCNs, faces troubles in trying to explain why or how these asymmetries came into being, and how they can be transformed.
Citizenship and Capitalist Power Relations
Our alternative critical history starts out from the same basic definition of citizenship, but radically departs from the dominant approaches by analyzing the historical power relations underpinning the relationship between civil society and the polity. As such, we emphasize that the politics of citizenship is never isolated from broader processes of social transformation; and while the phenomena of societal change have certain transformative effects on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, at the same time rights and responsibilities entrenched in prior social struggles can have an impact on, and even limit the degree of such change (Purcell 2002). By explicitly situating our analysis within the broader historical context of EU integration, we start our analysis from the obvious but nevertheless crucial argument that since the EU is a capitalist social formation, our explanatory approach must place primary emphasis on the role of capitalist social relations as a key mode of power shaping the content of citizenship politics in the EU. Of course the state, civil society, and indeed citizenship have all historically preceded the emergence of capitalist social relations, and so our first task will be to explicate historically the social purpose of citizenship within a capitalist context. This, we argue, will help to address the charges of “economic reductionism” that inevitably arise to challenge these observations regarding the centrality of capitalist social relations.
In order to think historically about the relationship between citizenship and capitalism, we feel that it is useful to draw insights from the literature tracing the gradual rise of industrial capitalism in eighteenth-century England. This is by no means the place to revisit the controversial and protracted debates over the precise origins of capitalism (for an instructive overview, see Wood 2002); instead, we single out the work of Ellen Wood (1995) as particularly helpful in elucidating the historical specificity of citizenship in capitalist societies. For Wood (1995), the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England brought with it a new form of state embodied by the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (see also van der Pijl 1998). Whereas feudal communities were characterized by (1) peasant possession of the “means of labour and subsistence,” (2) “extra-economic” modes of surplus extraction by feudal lords in the form of rent and taxation, and (3) formal inequality excluding peasants from political participation in the state, emergent capitalist communities were predicated on a combination of relative political and civil equality in the form of representative liberal democracy, and socioeconomic inequality whereby the institution of private property ensured that “purely economic advantage [took] the place of juridical privilege and political monopoly” (Wood 1995: 211).4
This explication of the specific rise of capitalist citizenship in England gives us clues as to what the primary function or social purpose of citizenship within the capitalist state is in general; namely, to legitimate the unequal power relations in the realm of capital accumulation through a discourse of purportedly equal political subjects. Echoing Dannreuther and Petit’s (2006: 184) regulationist approach, we see that the state’s role in conferring (or denying) citizenship status can be conceptualized as a mode of social regulation over processes of capital accumulation:
One of the clearest ways that the state has contributed to the maintenance of capital accumulation has been in its exclusive ability to grant rights to its subjects. In their constitutional form, rights provide cultural as well as formal references for acceptable behaviour through statements of ideals and beliefs that inform legislative behaviour. More practically, rights establish the primary legislation from which secondary legislation is enacted to, for example, empower voters, secure property, and enable trade.
Dannreuther and Petit (2006: 185) go on to explain convincingly how the historical development of rights and responsibilities—which spell out the need for citizens “to not steal, to accept the primacy of market forces, to vote and to work when well”—have
