answered with information concerning one’s ancestry. Someone wishing to learn another’s occupation there would instead normally ask, “What do you do?” Finally, in contrast to other forms of memberships, Leave memberships reach beyond both the wallet and the body, to the “heart,” mind, or spirit of the member.
Five Models of Political Membership
Descent: Belonging by Virtue of “Blood” or Ancestry
Using the typology of forms of membership that ordinary language analysis uncovers, we can clearly discern five distinct ways of thinking about the nature of belonging in political communities as well. A first model of political membership may be called the “Descent” view. As seen in this model, political membership appears as an instance of No Exit membership. From this perspective, “citizenship” is usually equated with “nationality,”3 and both appear as innate characteristics that cannot be acquired other than by birth. It is seen as a common genetic or biological inheritance rather than a properly “ethnic” one with a significant cultural component.
This model figures in discussions of citizenship in two ways. First, it underlies representations of the nation as an extended family and members of a given political group as descendants of common (biological) ancestors. Second, such perspectives are commonly invoked in contemporary political debates, though usually attributed to others.
Actual European social and political organization has only rarely corresponded to the Descent model. While there are examples of societies organized on the basis of such an idea, they may more readily be found in ancient Rome and Greece than in modern or even medieval Europe. In classical Athens, citizenship was restricted to those both of whose parents were citizens (Walzer 1983: 53–55). The Roman gens, vast clans supposedly united by common ancestry, also corresponded to the Descent vision (Bloch 1961: 137–40).
Today, German immigration and citizenship policy might most clearly appear to reflect a Descent perspective on political membership, especially in the unusual ease of entry accorded to foreigners of German ancestry and the difficulty of acquiring German nationality for those who are not. Even in the case of policy regulating acquisition of German nationality, however, recent reforms suggest that the importance attributed to ancestry is declining relative to birthplace and long-term residency, and presumably thus socialization, in Germany (Götz 1995; Murray 1994). Nonetheless, the Descent idea does figure significantly in current political discussion of citizenship and immigration issues, often as a view that parties to contemporary debates accuse others of holding and are at pains to avoid being perceived as endorsing.
Because it attributes membership to a biological foundation, the Descent model might appear to be inherently “racial.” However, whether such a conception is racial in character actually depends on whether the fact of kinship or phenotype is stressed (Nieguth 1999: 164–66). The Descent category may therefore be disaggregated into two subtypes usefully distinguished by Nieguth: ancestry and race.
Culture: Citizenship as Attachment to a Particular Way of Life
If the Descent perspective entails treating citizenship as a No Exit membership, the corollary of treating it as a Change membership is, instead, the Culture or Cultural Attachment model. According to this perspective, polities, like other Change groups, are permeable; unlike polities in the Descent model, here polities can gain and lose members (by other means besides birth and death). Nonetheless, from this perspective citizenship and nationality, like other Change memberships, are not generally acquired by choice. Proponents of this conception typically understand the origin of political membership as being neither “blood” nor “choice,” but rather socialization.4
From the Culture as from the Descent perspective, the nation is frequently depicted as a family. However, in the Culture conception, the national family is understood primarily as a vehicle for socialization, not biological transmission of inherited characteristics. From this perspective, the role of parents in raising children takes precedence over procreation as such. Logically, adoption into the nation is therefore possible. While, this may appear as a rather trivial point, it often makes a significant difference in immigration and citizenship debates.
History often appears especially important from the Cultural Attachment perspective; learning a particular national history may play a key role in developing a sense of belonging to a particular people. Thus, Argentines, including many descended from twentieth-century Italian immigrants, will say “San Martin liberated ‘us,’” while generations of French children, from Paris to Guadeloupe, long were taught, by French textbooks, about “Our ancestors the Gauls.”
According to the Descent model, membership in a given nation is natural and innate. Here, by contrast, it is cultural and potentially changeable. One cannot change one’s genetic profile, but one may learn a new language or history. Despite the label, not everything that might be referred to as “cultural” is relevant in this conception. Political membership—like other meaningful affiliations—involves the sense of “deep-rooted” attachment normally associated with things toward which one develops deep attachments through primary socialization.
This perspective is readily apparent in, though by no means limited to, the work of contemporary communitarian thinkers. Invoking a Cultural view of membership—with corresponding understandings of justice and obligation—Sandel (1984) defends the communitarian view that the deep-seated attachments to particular groups commonly instilled by primary socialization are necessary in order to understand people:
as members of this family or community or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic. Allegiances such as these are more than values I happen to have, and to hold, at a certain distance. They go beyond the obligations I voluntarily incur and the “natural duties” I owe to human beings as such. They allow that to some I owe more than justice requires or even permits, not only by reason of agreements I have made but instead in virtue of those more or less enduring attachments and commitments that, taken together, partly define the person I am. (90)
Although the cultural attachments involved in this sort of belonging can in fact be broken, and the memberships associated with them can thus be changed, their intensity is such that, Sandel warns, breaking them may threaten one’s sense of identity.
The Culture view of citizenship also figures centrally in the thinking of certain noncommunitarians. Slavoj Žižek, for example, argues that membership in “a given community” is not a matter of “symbolic identification,” but results from “that elusive entity called ‘our way of life’.” Žižek understands that as “the unique way a community organizes its enjoyment,” the “social practices” involved, and the “national myths” that sustain them (1992: 194–96).5
While the communitarian sense of membership Sandel describes may appear most characteristic of local and family ties, Gellner argues that cultural attachment is also theoretically definitive of the modern nation-state. He notes:
nations can indeed be defined in terms both of will and culture, and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political units. In these conditions, men will be politically united with all those, and only those, who share their culture. Polities then will to extend their boundaries to the limits of their cultures, and to protect and impose their culture within the boundaries of their power. (Gellner 1983: 55, my emphasis)
Gellner maintains that one of the distinctive features of national political units is that “the individual belongs to them directly, in virtue of his cultural style” (138). The fact that he says “will and culture,” and “impose their culture” suggests that forms of political membership not defined by culture are also possible: without “will” and imposition, political and cultural membership might diverge. However, nationalism as understood
