Introduction: realignments of citizenship: reassessing rights in the age of plural memberships and multi-level governance

Abstract

The contributions to this special issue of Citizenship Studies generally understand citizenship as referring to a status of equal membership in bounded political communities. This introduction sketches three realignments of citizenship that challenge the common equation between the community of citizens and territorial populations of independent states. First, the imagined co-extensionality of state, nation and people is increasingly challenged by processes of migration and globalization. However, as proposed in Chwaszcza's contribution to this issue, the unity of the political people may still be needed as a necessary fiction in order to ensure the diachronic continuity of a democratic polity. Second, as discussed in Bauböck's and Keating's contributions, the territorial boundaries of citizenship are no longer identical with those of states for two reasons. External citizens can claim status and rights from outside the territory and territorial devolution has created new spaces for sub-state models of social citizenship. De Witte's and Guiraudon's contributions, finally, discuss the tension between norms of equality derived from principles of citizenship and non-discrimination respectively. As we argue in this introduction, the European anti-discrimination legislation has produced complex realignments of the boundary between negative and positive conceptions of liberty and universal and particularistic norms of equality.