Re-scaling The Geography of

Citizenship
Week 3
Contents of Lecture
• Introduction
• Locating Early Citizenships
• Citizenships throughout Classical Antiquity
• State-Citizenships and their Competitors
• Forming Modern Nation-State Citizenships
• Colonialism and Nation-State Citizenships
• From Modern to Post-Modern Citizenships
• The State Remains
Introduction
• David Hollinger posed the question "How Wide the Circle We?"
examining citizenship's scope.
• Reflex response: "Nation-State" concept shaped by constitutions, laws,
and maps.
• Globalization challenges national citizenship through processes like
neoliberal capitalism and migration.
• This chapter focuses on citizenship through the lens of territory.
• Citizenship is multifaceted:
• legal category,
• claim,
• identity,
• tool in nation building, and
• ideal.
• Citizenship varies in meaning across different circumstances and
locations.
• Reinterpretation and reformulation of citizenship are established, but
its location is often tied to specific scales or types of places.
• Growing literature questions the idea of citizenship having an optimal
territorial scale.
• The narrative of rescaling citizenship is not linear; it doesn't start with
the polis and end with the Nation-State.
• Various manifestations of sociospatial organization exist, including the
polis, empire, and Nation-State.
• Communities of belonging and obligation have existed outside
dominant politico-territorial structures throughout history.
• Cosmopolitan geographic imaginary offers an alternative to State-based
citizenships, opposing spatial fetishism and the "birthright lottery."
Locating Early Citizenships
• Early human socio-political organization: small nomadic bands of hunter-
gatherers with traditional governance and kinship-based egalitarianism.
• Merger or division of groups due to contingencies like food shortages or
conflicts.
• Neolithic Revolution (circa 10,000 BCE): emergence of agriculture
leading to permanent settlements, social-economic specialization, and
stratification.
• City-states (poleis) originated independently in various regions, notably
ancient Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Nile, and Yellow river basins,
Mesoamerica, and the northern Andes.
• City-states had urban cores and agricultural hinterlands, fostering
integrated economic systems.
• Ethnic-states formed with common cultural traditions, often through
inter-polity warfare.
• Empires extended control over larger territories, integrating diverse
cultural-linguistic groups.
• Citizenship within these entities tied to spatial structures of authority
and power.
• Many historical groups pursued alternative citizenship ideals outside
state-based systems.
• Debates on citizenship's origin: community as the starting point vs.
institutions laying groundwork for imagined communities.
• Those outside state-based systems had complex relationships with
citizens of political entities for resources and power.
• Early state citizenship, like today, defined against an "other"
suggesting bounded spaces of responsibility and moral concern.
• Ancient Greek philosophers promoted cosmopolitan ideals, rejecting
the polis as the sole source of identity.
Citizenships throughout Classical Antiquity
• Material technologies transition from Bronze to Iron marks the shift from
human prehistory to history, with chroniclers focusing on global empires.
• State and citizenship concepts diffuse from the Eurasian central hearth or
arise independently, seen in urban civilizations in the Americas.
• State as Empire dominates from the Mediterranean to east-central Asia, with
Parthian, Sassanid, Roman, and Han Empires contributing innovations.
• Empires often claimed universal sovereignty and divine sanction but had
"fuzzy boundaries" and less-than-absolute sovereignty.
• Empires symbolized territorial integration and centralized administration,
reshaping citizenship through the concept of rights.
• Presence of "non-citizens" or "stateless" people was notable, especially
around Rome, China, and the Americas.
• Impact of non-state societies profound, evident in events like the fall of
Rome and the accession of the Yuan Dynasty in China.
• State as Empire became the prevailing logic of socio-political
organization, often seen as the defining characteristic of "civilization."
• Despite its perceived inevitability, the concept of the State as Empire was
mutable, adapting to geographic expansion and integration of new groups.
• Voices of cosmopolitanism, like Plutarch's advocacy for regarding all
humans as fellow citizens and neighbors, emerged during this time.
State-Citizenships and their Competitors
• Competing visions of political organization emerged alongside the idea of the State
as Empire, including the Hanseatic League, Turkic Khaganates, Papal authority, etc.
• Large-scale migrations from the Eurasian steppe region by semi-nomadic groups
challenged settled notions of the State as Empire, such as the Scythian, Hunnic,
Germanic, Turkic, Slavic, Tartar, and Mongol tribes.
• Encounters between Eurasian nomads and sedentary imperial societies often
involved accommodation, sanctuary provision, plunder, and conquest, challenging
the idea of a "clash of civilizations."
• Arab armies surging out of the Arabian Peninsula due to religious conversion
provided additional impetus for upheaval.
• The seemingly ascendant imperial structure proved fragile, with famed Empires
falling amid internal strife, dramatic invasions, or piecemeal crumbling.
• Nomadic victors often assimilated to the structures of the vanquished, co-opting
the State as Empire but with their group assuming the role of the new ruling elite.
• The ideal of Empire persisted despite the undermining of imperial authority, such
as the notion of a caliphate ruling over all Islamic lands or Frankish and German
emperors claiming sovereignty as successors of Rome.
• Feudal arrangements of lord and vassal emerged in Europe, leading to
confrontations between nominal lords and lesser nobles acquiring broad
autonomy, further complicated by Catholic Popes claiming universal sovereignty
over religious matters.
• Feudal arrangements were not unique to medieval Europe and did not necessarily
lay the groundwork for a new manifestation of the State and ideal of communal
membership.
Forming Modern Nation-State Citizenships
• Medieval Europe, despite its fragmented and quarrelsome nature, saw the
strengthening of monarchical rule in alliance with a growing urban-based
merchant class.
• European monarchs gradually developed the capacity for absolute rule and
direct governance over their subjects, laying the foundations of modern States.
• The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 codified the system of Statehood, affirming
principles of absolute territorial sovereignty, equality among States, and non-
interference in domestic affairs.
• Despite common violations, this system of Statehood and its ideal of
membership gained practical and normative standing, becoming the basis of
the international system.
• Centralization of political power by European monarchs was challenged by
demands for greater popular representation, exemplified by the French Revolution's
emphasis on popular sovereignty.
• Notions of popular sovereignty and rising nationalist sentiment led to the recasting
of the State's role in service to the nation, resulting in the ideal of the Nation-State.
• Europe's wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reinforced the conflation of
national identity and State sovereignty, leading to the transition from quasi-feudal
principalities and multi-ethnic Empires to the logic of the Nation-State.
• Efforts to reconcile the principles of Westphalia with the new realities of nationalism
were reflected in international law, but this process was not natural or inevitable and
faced opposition from anarchists, Marxists, and internationalists.
Colonialism and Nation-State Citizenships
• Advances in military, industrial, and mobility technologies in Europe facilitated
the expansion of nascent Nation-States through imperialist endeavors abroad.
• Colonial annexation of territory during this period often did not extend full
citizenship to non-European populations and denied State status to existing
polities unless serving European interests.
• European explorers issued grand pronouncements claiming sovereign territory
without full understanding, leading to de jure claims on maps but slower de
facto establishment of colonial control.
• European colonization varied in processes, from direct rule with settlers to
indirect rule through local clients, often disregarding indigenous territorial
practices and political structures.
• Colonial actors, including joint-stock trading companies, circumvented indigenous practices
and structures to impose European preferences and ambitions, leading to the Scramble for
Africa and similar processes in Asia.
• Despite brief European colonial rule in world history, colonialism had profound demographic,
economic, and social impacts, disseminating modern notions of territorial sovereignty and
nationhood.
• The United Nations founding charter reaffirmed Nation-State principles as a global norm,
leading to most colonies transitioning to sovereign States by the 1970s.
• Newly independent States inherited colonial-era borders that often did not conform to the
Nation-State ideal, posing a fundamental contradiction within the modern Nation-State
system.
• Citizenship in most States remains complex, created by colonial powers often lacking
knowledge of the lands they claimed, reflecting the Janus face of nationalism with both
progressive and exclusionary functions.
From Modern to Post-Modern Citizenships
• Time-space compression, facilitated by advances in mobility and communication
technologies and global capitalism, has led to the scaling up of communities of
belonging and governance across international borders.
• Accelerated flows of people, resources, and ideas across borders, along with
advancements in communication technologies, have created networks that transcend
national territoriality.
• Markets and production increasingly require trans-State mobility of goods, capital,
and people, leading to the establishment of new regional organizations that
hybridize national identities with supra-State identities, such as the European Union.
• Efforts to establish a global legal infrastructure, including declarations of human
rights and international courts, represent an expanded ideal of citizenship beyond
Westphalian sovereignty.
• A global civil society movement, including trans-border institutions like
religious organizations, charities/non-profits, and human rights
advocates, challenges the rigidly bounded ideals of Westphalian
citizenship.
• Governments have bestowed extra-territorial privileges upon favored
businesses and workers, such as export processing zones, undermining
the basic foundations of State-citizenship.
• The rise of "new Argonauts," representing a fluid spatiality that resists
borders and restrictive definitions of citizenship, along with the
increasing prevalence of dual or multiple citizenship and non-citizen
voting, complicates traditional notions of citizenship.
The State Remains
• Increased trans-State dispersion of peoples (migration) and dynamics of de-territorialized
democracy, neoliberal capitalism, environmentalism, and new geographies of global
justice/human rights are seen by some as laying the groundwork for cosmopolitan citizenship.
• However, only a small percentage of people change their citizenship from their place of birth,
and traditional notions of patriotism, nationalism, and loyalty still resonate among the
majority.
• Nationalism remains prevalent, with demands for Nation-Statehood by minority groups
challenging some States, indicating a revision of the territorial framework rather than a
systemic undermining of the modern State.
• The collapse of Yugoslavia and the USSR led to the creation of new states, which still grapple
with complex negotiations of citizenship.
• Post-national, transnational, cosmopolitan, and global citizenships are constructed through
and in relation to citizenship-in-the-state, rather than being alternatives to it.
• The Nation-State retains its allure due to its role in regulating citizens for specific ends and
constructing sameness within a community.
• The notion of citizenship involves expansion and contraction of territorial scale, linking to
instrumental definitions of belonging.
• Inclusive identity politics coexists with exclusion and othering, with Nation-States deploying
discourses of fear and pride to reinforce the value of the State.
• Tolerance of the "other" is often contingent upon power dynamics, with the State-scale
reflecting concepts like multiculturalism and recognition.
• Despite challenges to national-scale identities and institutions, many States reinforce their
borders and enact policies of control on populations within them, often driven by fear.
• Borders of citizenship are everywhere, including physical boundaries, political practices,
social norms, and individual bodies, reflecting a multivalent and polilocal process of
organizing political space and setting limits on civil beneficence, rights, and responsibilities.
• Re-scaling citizenship in the twenty-first century is driven by increasing
mobilities beyond tourism and guest worker migrations, facilitated by advances
in communication technology.
• This re-scaling results in a hybridity of belonging and perceptions of personal
and group investment within different polities, extending across international
borders.
• Long-term migrant communities may possess a sense of investment and
belonging at the urban scale but lack allegiance to the host State, with their
citizenship ideal jumping scales according to their homeland conceptions.
• The institutions supporting these new citizenships are constructed and sustained
by nation-level institutions, blending loyalties and affinities from various
sources.
• Efforts to accommodate globalized realities include various forms of
citizenship such as dual citizenship, citizenship-by-investment, deprivation
(revocation), jus domicile, jus nexi, and e-citizenship/residency.
• Negotiating the optimal scale for citizenship is complicated by the
transition from religious-monarchial sovereignty to popular-territorial
sovereignty, solidified by the unity of peoples and their sanction of the
State to represent them.
• Criticizing territorial sovereignty is often interpreted as challenging the
rule of the people, as standard political maps portray the world as discreet
territorial units, obscuring the complexity of supra and sub-State
citizenships and cross-border relationships.