Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory

Abstract

There has been an explosion of interest in the concept of citizenship among political theorists. In 1978, it could be confidently stated that "the concept of citizenship has gone out of fashion among political thinkers" (van Gunsteren 1978, p. 9). Fifteen years later, citizenship has become the "buzz word" among thinkers on all points of the political spectrum (Heater 1990, p. 293; Vogel and Moran 1991, p. x). There are a number of reasons for this renewed interest in citizenship in the 1990s. At the level of theory, it is a natural evolution in political discourse because the concept of citizenship seems to integrate the demands ofjustice and community membership-the central concepts of political philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively. Citizenship is intimately linked to ideas of individual entitlement on the one hand and of attachment to a particular community on the other. Thus it may help clarify what is really at stake in the debate between liberals and communitarians. Interest in citizenship has also been sparked by a number of recent political events and trends throughout the world-increasing voter apathy and long-term welfare dependency in the United States, the resurgence of nationalist movements in Eastern Europe, the stresses created by an increasingly multicultural and multiracial population in Western Europe, the backlash against the welfare state in Thatcher's England, the failure of environmental policies that rely on voluntary citizen cooperation, and so forth. These events have made clear that the health and stability of a modern democracy depends, not only on the justice of its 'basic structure' but also on the qualities and attitudes of its citizens:' for example,