Universität Leipzig, Institut für Politikwissenschaft
Sommersemester 2007, 8. Fachsemester

Aspects of citizenship
Essays on seven authors regarding problems
of group membership and xenophobia in Germany

von

Kalle Hübner

Contents

1. Saskia Sassen: Today′s Changed Relation to the National State... 3

2. Barbieri, William: Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights... 4

3. Barbara Cruikshank: Revolutions from Within: Self-Government and Self-Esteem / Paul du Gay: Organizing Identity... 6

4. Koopmans, Ruud, Olzak, Susan: Discursive Opportunities and the Evolution of Right-Wing Violence in Germany... 7

5. Weber, Beverly: Cloth on her Head, Constitution in Hand, Germany’s Headscarf debates and the cultural politics of difference... 9

6. Strategies Against Xenophobia... 10,
7. Literature... 14

1. Saskia Sassen: Today′s Changed Relation to the National State¹

Given its historically conditioned meaning, the institution of citizenship remains an incompletely theorized contract between state and its subject. Though highly formalized, citizenship responds to (micro-) changes such as shrinking welfare state, globalization, human rights regime, transnational identities, digitalization etc. without sacrificing its formal status. The author emphasizes the lengthening distance between citizen and state as a process shaped by such changes. She examines the institution of citizenship in context of today’s transformation dynamics in the law, in discursive practices and political subjectivities; whereas particularly emphasis is put on global cities as most evolved type of sites for transformations and larger systemic changes. To meet the complexity of this institution, her first steps in the process of examination is the debordering and deconstruction of citizenship: Referring to Bosniak four forms of transnationalized citizenship can be found, such as European identity through EUwide citizenship, transnational civil society arising out of cross-border affiliations, transnational social/political communities through transborder migration etc., which constitute new forms of citizenship identity across borders and showing up its incompleteness at the same time. Regarding the complexity of citizens as rightsbearing subjects, Sassen gives the proposition that citizenship is partly produced by the practices of the excluded, which gives rights to nonformalized actors and issues; even more as the national state itself contributed with expanding formal inclusions. Regarding the individual citizens, (formal) equality is seen as central to a modern institution of citizenship, though groups still face various exclusions from full participation / membership rights although bearing legal citizenship, as such rights are often conditioned by the position of different groups within the nation state. In this essay, the multiple interactions between legality and recognition is of special interest. In brief, Sassen compares a type of citizens who is unauthorized yet recognized (e.g. immigrants) and a formal citizen who is fully authorized yet not fully recognized (e.g. minoritized citizens). Sassen argues that undocumented citizens can gain a particular and special condition of citizenship, which shows that the multiple dimensions of citizenship engender strategies for legitimizing informal forms of membership. If undocumented residents often show active participation in civic activities and produce recognition and acceptance as members of a political community, the other extreme would be the case of formal citizens who are not fully recognized as such, for example minoritized or discriminated citizens, or, referring to latest developments, citizens who simply have lost the interest to take part in public life. Sassen introduces a very interesting moment, pointing out the importance of gender and referring to a study of LeBlanc: women’s identities (in this case Japanese housewives) are customarily seen as ones of a particularistic, nonpolitical actor. The parallel to immigrant women in the U.S. is introduced here: women, sometimes culturally specified as subordinate to their men, are more ‘invisible’ in terms of citizenship, even though they show greater participation when dealing with public and social services and handling the legal vulnerability of the household. Though immigrant women emerge as more forceful and visible actors than immigrant men, they become incorporated in more informal ways. The case of a citizen who functions as a political actor but is not recognized as such is a condition of growing importance, according to Sassen. As these dimensions of informal citizenship, citizenship practices and gender go beyond the mainstream categories for understanding citizenship in political life context, such subjects destabilize formal meanings and thereby illuminate the internal tensions as well as the development trends of the institution of citizenship.

2. Barbieri, William A. (1998): Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights²

How and why emerged the boundaries that have come to separate migrant worker families from the other German residents, leading to their marginalization? In “The Making of Boundaries” Barbieri approaches this question by examining the history of German membership regarding the ethnic group, state society and the German citizenry as well as the formation of the migrant worker minority in Germany after World War II. Barbieri argues that the universal values of Enlightenment led not to the establishment of a ‘nation’ like achieved during the French Revolution, but rather to the emphasis of the cultural aspects of nationhood. With the notion of “Volksgeist”, Hegel contributed to the concept of German nation as individualized organic entity, in which state was required as the expression of the organic spirit of the people, a higher ontological unit.

[...]

1 in: Sassen, Saskia: Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princetown, 2006.

2 Barbieri, William A.: Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights, Durham, 1998.