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 competing hegemonic projects that operate within simultaneous and interrelated levels and arenas of governance (van Apeldoorn and Horn 2007). Thus far however, this account does not give us much indication as to how our alternative approach differs from the predominant PNC and MLG conceptions of the EU polity. We depart from these conceptions by suggesting that although the institutional setup of the EU is distinct from the state in many ways, it still fulfils the same role as a site of accumulation and competing class interests, contained within a hybrid EU state/civil society complex. As in the case of state citizenship outlined above, EU citizenship also acts as a mode of social regulation, this time within the EU polity, creating “new and compatible social identities to match the European social body” (Scott-Smith 2003: 261) while attempting to legitimate configurations of power relations that underpin EU policy making and governance.
Taken as a whole, we argue that this alternative critical history equips us with the conceptual tools for explaining the historical emergence and movement of the politics of citizenship in the EU, with the overall aim of elucidating its underlying social purpose. As a result, we do not seek to merely describe the current state of EU citizenship and endorse it as a route to a more progressive world order (in the case of PNC) nor to propose narrow problem-solving solutions that portend to modify EU citizenship in ways that make it into a mechanism for the legitimation of EU policy making and governance (as in MLG). Given the current crisis of EU legitimacy, we feel there is a dire need for social scientific research that instead directs its energies toward uncovering the limits and contradictions of EU citizenship from a historical perspective. Ultimately, the overall efficacy of the alternative problématique and underlying theoretical assumptions sketched here to sustain it can only be assessed based on how well the empirically thick historical account they buttress can capture the dynamics of citizenship politics as they have developed in the EU through more than half a century. It is to this task that we now turn.
Notes
1. For a key critique of PNC from within the moral philosophical tradition—one that we draw theoretical inspiration from and attempt to give empirical grounding to—see Balibar (2004).
2. We consider this conception of the nation-state within PNC to be the most common, “moderate” position, espoused by figures such as Daniele Archibugi and David Held. There is, however, a considerable divergence of thinking on the nation-state within PNC, so that it makes sense to plot differing views on a continuum ranging from moderates of a more realist bent to those with more doctrinaire outlooks, such as the one espoused by Ulrich Beck (2006: 170), who likens the nation-state to an “experimental chamber of horrors,” the one responsible for “the two world wars, the Holocaust, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Stalinist death camps and genocides.” For a thorough delineation and critical scrutiny of the various cosmopolitan and post-national perspectives and positions, see Calhoun (2007).
3. According to Eurostat figures for 2006, there were approximately 18.5 million third-country nationals residing in the EU-25 (CEC 2007f: 3).
4. Wood’s argument thus relies on the notion that early forms of capitalist social relations