This vision of citizenship was asserted with particular clarity by British Conservative proponents of “active citizenship”—one element of Conservative reaction against the welfare state—during the late 1980s. Conservatives presented the “active citizen” as “the person who seeks out opportunities to succour the needy, protect the environment, administer schools and defend, through neighbourhood watch schemes, the local community against the depredations of the burgeoning criminal class” (Heater 1991: 141). While some criticized this understanding of citizenship as “essentially apolitical” (Oliver 1991: 165), others felt that the idea recaptured an important dimension of what being a “citizen” meant. For example, recalling an elderly neighbor he had known in Polingsford, Suffolk, Andrew Phillips praised the Conservative society-centered, service-oriented vision of citizenship for being attuned to traditional social virtues. Underlining the danger that a more political and less localist understanding of citizenship might dishonor such worthy people, Phillips described his neighbor as follows:
In 85 years she had only spent one night out of the village. Her sense of belonging to it was innate and complete. According to some notions, she was scarcely a citizen at all, never having played any part in civic affairs, yet, like millions of our countrymen even today, her diurnal partaking of the life of that village, her attachment to the little platoon of its inhabitants, made her an exemplary neighbour and, I would say, citizen. In our notions of the active citizen, therefore we must always allow honour to such people. There is a real danger that because the care they give so abundantly cannot be counted, it will not be held to count at all. (Phillips 1991: 545)
Phillips’s description of his neighbor reveals both a certain ambivalence about this understanding of citizenship and the potential, because of its localism, for it to shade into the idea of citizenship as a matter of cultural attachment. Thus, even while he defends this elderly woman’s entitlement to be counted as a “citizen,” Phillips admits that calling the sort of belonging she represents “citizenship” is apt to be controversial, and his own tendency is to revert to describing her as a “neighbor” instead. Ultimately, however, he defends her right to the title “citizen” because of the “care” she and people like her contribute to the community, thus suggesting that those who serve the community are thereby entitled to citizenship, an argument clearly in keeping with the society-centered Contract view. Earlier in that same passage, however, Phillips emphasizes his neighbor’s “innate and complete” “sense of belonging” and her “attachment” to her village’s inhabitants, drawing on the idea of citizenship as a matter of cultural attachment instead. The two conceptions begin to shade into one another here because it is the neighbor’s “attachment” to those around her that presumably motivates her generously to provide “care” and act as “an exemplary neighbor.” It is not entirely clear whether Phillips thinks it is the service or the attachment that entitles the neighbor to recognition as a citizen, but he ultimately says it is the “care” that should be “held to count.” In the end, then, like other defenders of “active citizenship,” Phillips appears to favor a contractual view involving an exchange of duties between the individual and the community; in exchange for “the care they give,” people like this neighbor are entitled to receive the “honor” of being “counted” as exemplary, “active” citizens.
Monetized Contract: Citizens as Material Contributors
Given changes in military organization, the decline in military service as a regular duty of all (or, more often, all male) citizens, and the ambiguity of voting’s status as a “duty” as opposed to a right, the activity-oriented “rights for duties” Contract, at least in its state-centered version, seems bound to lose some of its attraction. Perhaps this accounts for the current salience of monetized versions wherein full membership in the polity is earned by paying one’s dues to the state financially or contributing economically to the national community, through tax paying, employment, or financial investment. Here, as in the case of Cancel groups, membership is something one receives in exchange for paying required fees or making expected financial contributions to a group.
It is not only the obligations side of the contract that increasingly appears in economic terms. The rights side is also subject to monetization. In place of rights, the advantages accruing to national membership are increasingly characterized in terms of material benefits, such as rights to welfare, access to public housing and education, or other social rights and benefits.
While more commonly invoked in the heat of particular political debates, this way of thinking about who belongs to a given polity also appears in the recent literature on citizenship. Parry, for example, proposes an understanding of citizenship whereby society would appear as a social insurance club financed by contributing members (1991: 186–87), while Harrison (1991: 209–13) argues that “privatized forms of social provision” may “amount to an alternative form of ‘modern citizenship.’” However, the fact that Harrison places “modern citizenship” in quotation marks here suggests that he himself recognizes the deviation of his use of the phrase from ordinary usage.
There is actually less of an existing legal basis for such an understanding of citizenship than one might imagine. In reality—with a few socially and economically significant exceptions such as access to public service jobs in some countries—most social rights and economic benefits in the United States and Western Europe do not legally depend on citizenship. In Western Europe, citizenship is rarely an important factor in determining access to social service programs; legal residents qualify for most of the same social benefits as citizens (Soysal 1994: 123–25). In the United States, prior to the contested reforms of the 1990s, even legal residency was not a legal requirement for such valuable social benefits as public education, emergency hospital care, or social security (Schuck and Smith 1985: 108; Soysal 1994: 124).
What is essential here, however, is not the legal relationship between citizenship and social entitlements. Rather, it is the existence, even prevalence, of the belief that only contributing economically to the community qualifies one as a full member, as someone entitled to benefits. This is a belief about moral entitlement and how citizenship or membership in the political community should be understood, not just about what the current rules regulating access to entitlements by those with various juridical statuses in the community actually are. As in the case of the Descent model, historical and legal reality are largely at odds with the idealized vision by which they are supposed to be described, but this conception of citizenship has a life of its own and contributes to shaping public discussion. To understand the current politics of citizenship, it is therefore important to recognize this idea.
Like the Contract model, the Monetized Contract view has state-centered and society-centered variants. The dues paying involved in the state-centered version consists in paying taxes; recognition as a full and legitimate member of the national community or “citizen” (taxpayer) entitles one to social benefits. In the society-centered variant, it is those who contribute to the economy through engagement in productive employment who have a legitimate claim on citizenship.
While many scholars see the American understanding of citizenship and national identity as quintessentially expressive of the Belief model, others have argued that, as Shklar puts it, “earning” was historically “implicit in equal American citizenship” (1991: 100) in the sense that it was essential to being seen as someone worthy of citizenship (63–100). Shklar argues that by the late nineteenth century the economy “was where citizenship and its rewards and duties … rested” (87). It was actually the link between wage earning (as opposed to slave labor) and the personal autonomy it supposedly permitted that was most significant in American thinking about the connection between citizenship and productive employment (63–67, 95–96). However, the idea of earning as an exercise of a civic duty to contribute to national prosperity also played a role in American thinking about who should be counted as a “citizen” (67–68, 87), by which Shklar means someone with full and equal standing in the community (3, 63).
Claims for rights based on a society-centered version
