Introduction and Response by Engin Isin and comments by Pauline Stoltz, Koen Slootmaeckers, Jo Shaw, and Jelena Vasiljević and Igor Štiks
INTRODUCTION
Why citizenship as an apparatus of government?
Engin Isin, (Professor Emeritus of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London)
Let me provide some background and context to this book, which presents a critical theory of citizenship. Readers may know that I’ve been writing about citizenship for nearly 35 years, straddling the tumultuous twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
We have witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet empire-state and the fall of the Berlin Wall and forever wars by the US empire-state to expand its militarism across the world. This expansion also created markets for the US-led financial and technological capitalism and affected China as a rival empire-state with its client states.
We have also witnessed the emergence of international movements making claims for anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist rights for workers, women, migrants, refugees, indigenous and queer peoples, and other species and beings than humans.
These three developments – militarism, imperialism, and capitalism – on the one hand, and international movements for human and non-human rights on the other – were undoubtedly related and intertwined in complex ways.
These developments generated intense interest and debate on rights in general and citizenship and human rights, and led to the emergence of an international human rights law. This body of international human rights law became the most significant challenge to national citizenship rights laws. The United Nations increasingly became the primary platform for articulating and enacting numerous declarations to protect and implement broadly two kinds of rights that international movements mobilised.
There is an immense body of scholarship on human rights and citizenship rights, tracing the former as fundamental, inherent and inalienable rights, meaning they belong to every human being simply by virtue of being human, regardless of identities like nationality, ethnicity, religion, or social class (Moyn 2010). These principles were at least ostensibly already enacted through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) whose origins are traced to The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), Declaration of Independence of the United States of America (1783), and indeed The Bill of Rights 1689: An Act declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject.
To put it simply, what we have witnessed in the last 35 years was the articulation and enactment of citizenship rights such as civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights as human rights. The women’s rights, indigenous rights, gender rights, right to education, rights to language, rights of children and so on were also articulated and enacted as human rights. Although these rights roughly correspond to the expansion of citizenship rights, their scope, authority, and legitimacy were also expanded from national to international bodies of law. These rights have been enacted through two mechanisms that together constitute international human rights law.
The first mechanism is universal instruments such as covenants, treaties, and conventions: The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976) and The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976).
Those familiar with the classics of citizenship literature will recognise that these rights are what a British sociologist, T.H. Marshall ([1950] 1992), considered as modern citizenship rights developed from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century.
The second mechanism is regional charters that supplement and complement national and international human rights law by protecting and promoting human rights in specific areas of the world. There are key regional human rights instruments which have established human rights law: the European Convention on Human Rights for Europe (1953); the American Convention on Human Rights for the Americas (1978), and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights for Africa (1986).
The question that many scholars asked: what remains the substantive difference between human and citizenship rights (see Isin and Turner 2010)? The juridico-legal convergence since 1948 and especially since 1989 makes it difficult now to conceptually differentiate human and citizenship rights.
Yet, there is a practical difference, which involves implementation and enforcement: international covenants, conventions, treaties and charters develop principles and encourage or coerce states first to sign up to them and then to implement and enforce them.
So, it seems that a regime of rights has emerged under the banner ‘human rights’ and developed various ‘rights’ by which to govern citizens in sovereign states, but without the corresponding force of law.
If the sovereign state is the source of authority and legitimacy that produces the force of law protecting the rights of citizens, then what is the source of authority and legitimacy for human rights? So far, international movements have articulated the legitimacy of human rights, but not their authority or the force of law that enacts them.
These questions about human rights and citizenship rights have been asked for nearly two centuries precisely because international human rights cannot be protected or implemented unless guaranteed by national laws (Isin 2013). Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burke, and Karl Marx in the nineteenth century (Waldron 1987), and Hannah Arendt ([1948] 1951) in the twentieth century, reflected on the contradiction between human and citizenship rights. And in the last 35 years, Jean-François Lyotard (1993), Giorgio Agamben (1998), Jacques Derrida (2001), Jacques Rancière (2004), Slavoj Žižek (2005), and Étienne Balibar (2007), each in their own way, responded to Arendt.
All together they not only questioned what was meant by the distinction between human rights and citizenship rights but also the source of their authority and legitimacy.
The answers to these questions are paradoxical and give rise to various, if not conflicting interpretations. Does it declare that ‘human’ belongs to international law and ‘citizen’ to national law? Does it declare that ‘citizen’ possesses inalienable rights simply because they are ‘human’? Does it declare that the rights of ‘citizen’ are ‘political’ and those of ‘human’ ‘natural’?
The paradox is that, without the force of law, human rights laws remain unenforceable and yet the most exposed are those without the protection of the state. To put it differently, to qualify as being human one needs first to be a citizen of a state.
We might think that the last 35 years have shown this paradox time and again. Many international movements remain as fragmented and disconnected movements; each locked in a national citizenship regime unable to defend and protect these rights as human rights.
Just to mention a few examples.
Consider displaced and stateless peoples. There are nearly 125 million forcibly displaced peoples across the world whose human rights are not upheld. There are between 10 and 15 million stateless people who are technically left outside the scope of human rights. Why human rights could not protect the rights of Palestinian people in Gaza despite that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem) is illegal under international law as affirmed most powerfully by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and endorsed through resolutions by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA)?
Consider gender rights. Despite international movements, trans peoples’ rights remain as precarious as ever subject to sovereign state laws. Similarly, despite or against international movements, women’s rights also remain as precarious as ever whether in Iran or the United States.
Consider environmental rights of peoples and ecosystems. Again, despite or against international ecological movements, the rights of animals and other non-human species and beings remain as precarious as ever.
These are clearly the challenging questions that have arisen in the last 35 years. But I draw two conclusions to highlight why the current state of human rights and citizenship rights – or rather their paradoxical relationship – has become even more challenging.
First, it should be recognised that international human rights law became an agenda of a liberal, cultural imperialism to impose a particular image of law across the world. Wars have been waged, and foreign policies have been implemented in its name. Yet, states, or more accurately, the US empire-state and its client-states have continually upended international human rights law as they pretend to have defended it and continually and selectively breached it. The consequence of this is that the US empire-state and its client-states have not only lost their legitimacy to uphold or protect human rights but have become their most flagrant violators.
Second, we are now facing a condition which is called anthropocene when we are not only making rights claims about humans but also non-humans as the co-inhabitants of the earth. What anthropocene does is to decentre humans as the dominant species of the earth.
To put this conclusion emphatically, we now find ourselves in a situation whether it is a question of the rights of animals, children, gays, indigenous peoples, lesbians, migrants, minorities, mothers, mountains, paupers, plants, prisoners, protesters, refugees, rivers, robots, slaves, transgender peoples, trees, women, or workers and whether the rights of these subjects are recognised, protected or guaranteed by national laws, international laws, supranational laws, or human rights laws and indeed whether these rights should be conceived as citizenship rights at all.
These are the challenging questions of the twenty-first century for international movements for rights. To address them it is necessary to rethink citizenship as an institution at least in the last 2,500 years if not 6,000 years when first polities such as cities, states, and empires were born, to determine its historical and geographical continuities and discontinuities, and evaluate its possibilities and impossibilities. This is what the book attempts to do.
Although its analysis is historical it is not a history book. It develops a concept of citizenship with a robust method of analysis by laying out how the language of citizenship both remained the same yet changed, its contradictions, its places in social and political life, and the senses in which it has been inhabited. It names this concept ‘citizenship as an apparatus of government’ and it shows how it functions by partitioning, individuating, and aggregating peoples and the struggles for domination and emancipation that proceed from it. And rights are relational components of this apparatus of government and integral elements of these struggles.
The book concludes by returning to the question of the anthropocene, asking whether we are witnessing the emergence of a planetary citizenship as an apparatus of government. This question poses a predicament for intraspecies and interspecies solidarities, if we accept that our species has now had the decisive impact on this shared habitat. The planetary imaginary is not solely about humanity but encompasses planet earth as the common habitat of all planetary species. Can an imaginary of planetary citizenship, as a transversal movement, coalesce the international movements discussed earlier into an effective force against militarism, imperialism, and capitalism? Can the claims to citizenship rights transform international movements into planetary movements?
These are the questions that both inspired me to develop and present a concept of citizenship and to identify the challenges that international movements face.
The book is based on my collaboration with numerous colleagues, online and offline, near and far on studying citizenship as it brings together my experience and knowledge together and presents a concept of citizenship.
Please find the list of references here.