manner that not only sustains, but also legitimately reproduces particular regimes of accumulation. In other words, the composition of citizenship and especially social rights, as the “constituent element of citizenship” and the “cement of social cohesion” (Aglietta 1998: 64), act as a bridge between accumulation and regulation.
At the same time it is crucial to emphasize that the politics of citizenship cannot be reduced to an instrumentalist reading whereby citizen rights and responsibilities serve merely as a “top-down” instrumentalist tool of legitimation for the ruling class. As an institutionalized outcome of (politically contingent) class struggles (Mann 1987), the content of citizenship reflects the balance of social power relations that vary considerably over time and space. For example, explaining the emergence of, but also the considerable variations in, social citizenship regimes in advanced capitalist states during the post–World War II period must take into account not only ruling class strategies, but also situate these in relation to working class strategies for social protection (see Chapter 2).
We therefore prefer to anchor our conceptual framework within what Bob Jessop (1990) terms “hegemonic projects,” a concept denoting the competing strategies through which competing class forces vie for “moral and intellectual leadership” over the state. Crucially, the actual historical formation of hegemonic projects in terms of strategies, interests and allegiances (in short, politics and ideology) cannot merely be reduced to their structural positions in the original process of accumulation, and must instead be identified in terms of class agency, whereby open-ended political struggles play a defining role. In moving from narrow “economic” objectives toward uniting together the “divergent views, identities and interests” (van Apeldoorn 2002) into a “general interest” incorporating subordinate groups, most successful hegemonic projects all rely on notions of equality, fairness and the “common good.” In capitalist societies these find their fullest expression in particular constellations of civil, political, and social citizenship rights and responsibilities. This view of citizenship has obvious affinities with the framework of T. H. Marshall, whose classic work Citizenship and Social Class (1950) made plain the contradictory nature of citizenship under capitalism. While citizenship, as Marshall argued, had been at war with the class system for centuries, citizenship simultaneously harbored the potential to serve as a “legitimate architect of social inequality” that characterizes capitalist social relations.
The Politics of Citizenship: Being and Becoming a Citizen
Marshall’s analysis of the historical evolution of Anglo-Saxon citizenship from civil rights in the eighteenth century, political rights in the nineteenth century, culminating in the institutionalization of social rights in the twentieth century (Mann 1987), never addressed the issue of migration, which as our introduction suggest, is central to a broader understanding of the underlying politics of citizenship in the EU. It is important in this regard to take into account the historical context in which Marshall wrote, where, at least in terms of social rights, migrants in the advanced capitalist countries were included, or at least about to become included, in the “nationally oriented settlements of the Keynesian Welfare [National] State” (Ryner 2000: 51; Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006). Nevertheless, in the contemporary context of the increasing political salience of migration and the decline of the Keynesian Welfare National State (KWNS) (Jessop 2002) it has become imperative, both for positive (empirical) and normative reasons, to render explicit the inextricable linkages between citizenship and migration. We feel it is useful to draw on Castles and Davidson’s (2000: 84) distinction between “being a citizen,” implied in our basic definition of citizenship offered above, and “becoming a citizen”:
Becoming a citizen is clearly of crucial importance to an immigrant, but gaining formal access to citizenship—symbolized by getting the passport of the country of residence—is only one aspect of this. Equally important is the extent to which people belonging to distinct groups of the population actually achieve substantial citizenship, that is, equal chances of participation in various areas of society, such as politics, work, welfare systems and cultural relations.
As these authors go on to point out, the distinction between “being” and “becoming” a citizen is always a blurred one “because of the discontinuities and fluidity of different aspects of citizenship” (Castles and Davidson 2000: 103). The blurring of reality that occurs when migration is added to the citizenship equation has direct implications for Marshall’s evolutionary depiction of the line from civil to political to social rights. As discussions of the migrant integration, or incorporation, experiences in Western Europe during the postwar “golden age” attest to, the Marshallian formula was actually reversed for migrants and ethnic minorities, who most often were drawn into social welfare schemes before being given the political right to vote (Guiraudon 2000; Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006). In the case of EU citizenship, however, these matters are further complicated as it appears as though this model has been reversed back to its original Marshallian formulation, with the EU recently introducing a “civic citizenship” model for TCNs—“but with no guarantees of an evolutionary follow-up in the future in terms of a social citizenship of the Union” (Schierup, Hansen and Castles 2006: 63, italics in original; see further Chapter 5–6).
We therefore suggest that it makes sense to speak of differential degrees of inclusion into particular citizenship regimes and their accompanying rights and responsibilities. Schematically, these may be divided into separate regimes, for instance, for “formal” citizens, legally, “illegally” or irregularly resident TCNs, asylum seekers, and those on the borderlands trying to enter a specific territory—all of which are further complicated by the differential power relations that divide societies along class, gender, sexual, ethnic, racial, and religious lines. In this way, the centrality of hegemonic projects to our critical-historical framework enables us to identify the structural division between capital and labor in the accumulation process, but is also sensitive to the fact that this must give way to an overtly political discussion of the divisions and fractures within classes themselves (e.g. organized labor lobbying alongside employer associations for stricter migration controls for employment and social protection reasons). Overall, it is crucial to the critical aspect of our framework to be able to highlight such disjunctions between the structural and political, not the least in order so that knowledge can be used to formulate alternative projects that identify the barriers and offer tangible strategies toward the mobilization of subordinate social forces in ways that cut across these political divides.
Conclusion: Citizenship and the EU Polity
Thus far our conceptual framework has been concerned with the historical interrelations between citizenship and the state. In what ways does it need to be modified in order to take into account the interrelations between the EU, a different form of political organization from the nation-state, and EU citizenship, a category which is at the same time distinct from, yet still necessarily linked to the national citizenship models of EU member states? In general terms, we accept the premises of both PNC and MLG that the EU has taken on several policy-making and governance powers that were once the exclusive domain of the nation-state. We also accept the argument that the rescaling of power to the EU level has altered the functions and powers of EU member states in certain respects. Finally, we agree that the rescaling of policy making and governance to the EU level has been heavily biased toward market-making negative integration, and also that EU citizenship has, as a result, been limited especially in terms of social rights.
According to our alternative approach, the EU can be conceived of not as a nation-state in the traditional sense but, as James Caporaso (1996: 46) makes clear, as an “ongoing structure of political authority and governance.” It is a hybrid and evolving form of polity, one that contains its own modes of regulation that govern and coordinate the pan-European regime of accumulation (reflected in the Single Market). This in turn means that the EU takes on several important functions of statehood, mediating
