The Politics of European Citizenship. Peo Hansen

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nascent European civil society, the coming together of diverse European peoples who have supposedly begun to shed their outdated, regressive allegiances to the nation-state.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 played a crucial role in maintaining the compliance of subjects by regulating social behavior in a 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