Introduction: Reconfiguring Canadian Citizenship

Abstract

In a ‘Fact Sheet’ on ‘Citizenship’, the Canadian government department charged with immigration and citizenship matters asks the question, ‘What does it mean to be a Canadian citizen?’. In its response, Citizenship and Immigration states that Canada, and thus Canadian citizenship, are deŽ ned in terms of the following characteristics: free and democratic; multicultural; two ofŽ cial languages; and equal treatment to all its citizens. While the contributors to this special issue on ‘reconŽ guring Canadian citizenship’ might agree with the formal accuracy of some aspects of this ofŽ cial discourse on Canada and Canadian citizenship, most would probably wish to contest, qualify, or indeed reject such terms as ‘democratic’ and ‘equal treatment’ when measured against the experience of many groups. Some would also look critically at what is at stake, which interests are represented and which identities and realities are suppressed, in the characterization of Canadian citizenship as ‘multicultural ’ and ‘bilingual’. The robust rediscovery of citizenship as an organizing frame for studies on relations among individuals , rights, states, territories, communities, and markets in Canadian and international scholarship is now as likely to focus on citizenship as inequality and exclusion, rather than citizenship as forms of equal and inclusionary membership. One irony of the dramatic reawakening of scholarly interest in citizenship over the past two decades is that much of its focus has been on the exhaustion and discrediting of nation-state forms of citizenship without a clear sense of the contours and substance of new forms of citizenship, such as post-national , global, cosmopolitan or urban, that might replace the old. The unsettling of nation-state citizenship is inextricably linked to the economic, political, technological , and cultural transformations associated with globalization that have profoundly altered relationships between state, territory and persons. The erosion of nation-state citizenship is also the product of changes that have accompanied corporate globalization , including the weakened capacities of individua l states, the decline in social rights, and the hegemony of neo-liberal governance. In his celebrated analysis, written during the expansion of social programs after the Second World War, T.H. Marshall (1992 [1950]) saw the deŽ ning features of twentieth century citizenship as consisting of the expansion of social citizenship rights, their distribution to previously marginal-