Propositions on Citizenship

Abstract

Much has recently been said about "new citizenship," although often in an unclear way. The turn of phrase may be only a gimmick, as was, recently, the "new philosophy" or that kind of auberge espagnole where you have to bring your own food, also known as "la nouvelle cusine." Most of all, it risks soon passing out of fashion with the ups and downs of French socialism. Yet whatever the future redistribution of political power may be, several of the problems raised by discussions of the "new citizenship" will still have to be faced. These include racism and the status of immigration (or rather of "the communities that have issued from immigration") in France. Nevertheless, the form in which these problems will be faced and the chances of finding a solution to them may be singularly transformed depending on whether dominant parties confront or fail to confront certain fundamental alternatives. "Citizenship" (in Greek politeia) is a concept as old as politics itself and which has always marked two distinctions: it is bound to the existence of a state and therefore to a principle of public sovereignty, and it is bound to the acknowledged exercise of an individual "capacity" to participate in political decisions. This is why the dimension of equality-with all the problems of definition which it poses and the mystifications which it may conceal-is always present in the constitution of a concept of citizenship, even when the latter is paradoxically combined with a hierarchical principle and with caste distinctions (as seen in the difference between "active citizens" and "passive citizens" in the nineteenth century). Beyond the conflict between citizenship and allegiance to an actual or transcendentally legitimate state, history still shows that this concept has no definition that is fixed for all time. It has always been at stake in struggles and the object of transformations. Not only because, as Aristotle has already shown, each political regime builds the distribution of powers into a specific defintion of citizenship but also because, in juridically (or quasijuridically) delimiting a certain type of "human being" and a certain model of rights and duties, this definition crystalizes the constitutive social relations of a society at the level of the individual.