Universal Citizenship and the Problem of Alienage

Abstract

Many commentators have noted the return of the to normative political and legal theory. Yet there is a widespread tendency among theorists to treat the subject of national citizenship status as thematically and analytically separate from the rest of the citizenship field. Something of a division of labor in the literature has developed, according to which threshold questions regarding both access to, and the significance of, formal national citizenship status are treated as distinct from questions about the nature and quality of citizenship as practiced within the political community. The former questions are usually consigned to the domain of immigration scholarship, while the latter are treated as political and legal theory's core enterprise. This essay argues that the prevailing tendency to bracket citizenship's threshold questions is intellectually problematic because it has the effect of limiting, and perhaps distorting, analysts' ability to theorize the nature of citizenship as it exists within the political community. Questions concerning citizenship's threshold and it's substantive character are, in fact, deeply interwoven. Regulation of citizenship's boundaries reaches deep into the heart of the national political community, and profoundly affects the nature of relations among those residing within. To make the argument, the essay focuses on one recent development in normative citizenship theory - the growing perception that rights and status-based approaches to citizenship are exhausted or otherwise obsolete. This perception reflects a theoretical world in which citizenship's threshold, national questions are assumed away - a world in which everyone is presumed to be a formal citizen and in which citizenship's basic rights are presumed to be universally available. To the extent these presumptions are problematized, however, and citizenship's national dimension is taken into account, the ideal of universal citizenship can no longer be so easily presumed. The challenge to universal citizenship becomes especially clear if we focus on the condition of non-citizens, or aliens, who reside within the liberal democratic community. Aliens, by definition, are outsiders to citizenship. Yet they are also persons residing within the liberal democratic political community, and their presence in the community raises pressing questions about the practice of citizenship within, including questions about precisely how far the rights and status of citizenship can, and should, be understood to extend. Attending to alienage serves to underscore the continuing salience - and the continuing intractability - of liberal status and rights questions in citizenship theory, their current unfashionability notwithstanding.