Citizenship at Home and Abroad

Abstract

Editor's Note: What is the meaning of citizenship in the context of globalization? The proliferation of transnational organizations in the postwar era coupled with the internationalization of human rights and the rise of supranational governmental institutions have led some observers to claim a kind of postnational citizenship is emerging with its own set of benefits and burdens that is related to, yet distinct from, citizenship within any given country. Generally speaking, this burgeoning debate over postnational citizenship has been organized around two related questions. First, there is the question of what Thomas Pogge (2004) has called the morality of citizenship, that is, how should the role of citizen be designed and performed. In response to this question, scholars have disagreed not only about the specific elements of citizenship that ought to be preferred, but also about the very idea of citizenship as a single ideal that can be meaningfully theorized across different political settings. Second, there is the question offeasibility: what kind of shared citizenship is actually possible in a world made up of separate nation-states? In reacting to this question, scholars have disagreed about how the political relationships within and between sovereign states shape and constrain postnational citizenship, either making possible a wholly new type of transnational citizenship or simply permitting a new projection of national citizenship abroad. In an effort to advance discussion of the central questions in the postnational citizenship debate, the Sawyer Law and Politics Program at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs solicited five essays. With an eye toward the normative ideals and practical possibilities of postnational citizenship, the authors were asked to consider the conventional practices of citizenship out of which--and against which--new kinds of citizenship are thought to be growing. The resulting essays are presented here in edited form. The first two essays, by Margarita Este'vez-Abe, Glyn Morgan, and Jill Frank, squarely address the normative question of how citizenship ought to be structured. Este'vez-Abe and Morgan argue that citizenship ought to be structured around the maximization of individual choice, discovery, and invention. The authors root their argument in the observation that highly productive advanced industrial societies depend on the capacity for individual creativity. These societies and the ways in which they are organized must be taken seriously for reasons of power. In short, today, one either lives within an industrially advanced society or risks being dominated by one. Indeed, for Este'vez-Abe and Morgan, these societies not only are powerful, but they also are worthy of praise because they can promote social well-being through properly organized markets and appropriately crafted social policies. In contrast, Frank rejects the idea that good citizenship can be measured according to some fixed standard of law or institutional design. Drawing on a close reading ofAristotle's political philosophy, Frank argues that citizenship ought to be understood as an activity guided by practical wisdom and preserved by virtue. The hallmark of good citizenship is not an ideal of creative individuality, as Este'vez-Abe and Morgan would have it, but an ongoing practice of