Citizenships 2/4

The notion of ‘citizenship’ has been analysed and debated in greater depth, and for much longer, in the French tradition than in the various traditions of the English-speaking world. And yet things appear to have changed over the last ten years or so. The growing number of immigrants and the security threats to Western societies have brought new notions and new debates to the fore. The question of ‘citizenship’ is being raised in both Europe and the United States. This is a way of asking, ‘Is he or she one of us?’, and of asking what requirements he or she must meet in order to become one of us. This approach is not fundamentally constructive, generous or positive because it is a response to the many fears we have already described, and to the difficulty of managing cultural and religious diversity despite the existence of a common legal framework. The early theoreticians of the social contract, such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Tocqueville (who was in fact more concerned with equality of social and political condition), did not share these preoccupations and were more interested in the legal basis of ‘belonging’, the preservation of equality and the use of the law to regulate interpersonal relations or the relations that had to be established between individuals and the State. Cultural homogeneity was taken for granted, and there were no grounds for thinking that either the letter or the spirit of the law would be broken. Their goal was to use the social contract in order to manage political powers in such a way as to limit the prerogatives of the State, to restrict the influence of the rich and powerful and to protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society.

The celebration and defence of democratic principles had a very positive effect and allowed European and then American societies to make the rule of law more effective. But, as we have already said, one insistent question had long been recurrent, and it was difficult to find a coherent, if not clear, answer to it. At the level of philosophical conceptions and basic rights was the idea of equality and the social contract something to be defended in the name of a certain idea of man (in which case everyone should benefit from it), or did it apply only to our society and its members, and did it imply that others must be excluded or simply ignored? The question is neither trivial nor new: like Athenian democracy, which was enjoyed by a minority at the expense of everyone else (and especially the foreigners known as ‘barbarians’), the ideal society described by Plato in The Republic appears to concern an elite. The contribution made by al-Fârâbi (ninth and tenth centuries), who was described by Ibn Rushd (Averroes) as ‘the second Aristotle’), reveals the same set of problems. In his reflections and propositions on the relationship between politics, philosophy and ethics, and especially in his The Perfect City, he asks what is to become of those who are not members of the virtuous or perfect city, or of those who, for one reason or another, cannot be regarded as full members? The positive principle of the rule of law and of equality between ‘us’ does not exhaust the question of justice for those who are described or represented as ‘them’. They are ‘others,’ barbarians and ‘foreigners’, but their number also includes individuals in our society whose status is despised, as was and is the case with India’s dalit (oppressed pariahs). The fact that we are democratic and fair when we are amongst our own does not necessarily mean that we cannot be autocratic colonists who treat others unfairly. The finest philosophies have not been able to avoid these contradictions, and history is full of examples of how attitudes towards the ‘other’ can be contradictory and of how others can be treated unfairly.

Although they are to a greater or lesser extent democratic and wealthy, our contemporary societies have by no means resolved these difficulties. The problems are piling up. ‘Citizen’ status, of course, supposedly gives everyone the same rights and the same obligations. The social contract is quite clear on this point, and members of society know their duties and prerogatives. But not everyone has the same status: residents have a different status from immigrants (whose status is, in most countries, defined in terms of temporal criteria such as ‘long-term’, ‘temporary’ or ‘seasonal’). The status of refugees is different again, as there is an indeterminate category of ‘illegal’ and ‘undocumented’. The law makes a distinction between them, and yet the principle of equality is by definition dependent on them. The disturbing, and highly embarrassing, thing is that such differences in status are used to justify differential treatment that can contradict the principle of respect for human dignity. The ways in which the law is interpreted and applied (rather than the letter of the law, though it can create problems in itself) legitimate unacceptable forms of treatment that completely contradict what we regard as fair when it comes to ‘us’ and our own people. ‘National preference’ can marginalize perfectly competent residents, and immigrants are sometimes treated despicably in many countries in the West, in Asian, all over Africa, and in oil-rich monarchies. Refugees and undocumented immigrants are criminalized and humiliated daily: they are exploited, arrested and sent back to their ‘countries of origin’, either individually or on mass charter flights. Can we, like the ancient philosophers who could both sing the praises of Athens and despise ‘foreigners’, simply enjoy our noble status as citizens and be so short-sighted as to despise the unenviable status of immigrant or illegal ‘barbarians’? When we accept these categories and labels, are we not creating, or accepting the existence of, new castes and defining status in terms of origins, colour and wealth? Does the existence of our protected democracies justify the fact that so many women and men are living in what amounts to slavery? Whilst our democracies are obviously not directly responsible ‘as such’, is not our silent acceptance of these hierarchies and this discriminatory treatment a moral failing in itself? That is what was being implied when the countries of Latin America protested about the European Union’s adoption of immigration laws and a ‘return directive’ that encouraged ‘voluntary repatriation’, and allowed undocumented immigrants to be imprisoned and minors to be deported. Amidst a deafening silence from Africa, and especially North African countries, the countries of Latin America denounced this ‘shameful directive’ and reminded Europeans that it is not so long ago that they migrated to America, where they were received a very different reception. They also argued that a direct link had to be established between migrations and human rights: human rights also applied to immigrants and refugees whose economic conditions, usually meaning poverty, forced them to look for a way out in order to survive. It is as though human rights had become a discourse and an instrument for the benefit of the rich, or a discourse that celebrated their ideals and a variable-geometry instrument for protecting their interests. That is how millions of men and women from South America to Asia see the idea of human rights; their living conditions are such that human rights are just wishful thinking.

We have to pursue the argument still further, as these categories are now being applied to citizens too. There are, it would appear, ‘citizens’ and ‘citizens’. On the one hand, there are those who were, in ways that can be either real, idealized or fantasized, involved in the original social contract, who share the same culture and who are, in terms of its collective psychology, full members of society. Those seem to be naturally entitled to the same rights. And then there are the ‘new citizens’, whose culture and religion are perceived as different. They may well be citizens, but they do not have the same status. They are still ‘them’. They come from outside and are a ‘minority’, even though the category of ‘minority citizenship’ does not exist in any legal sense. This is a psychological status: these ‘citizens’ still have to prove that they can integrate and can really be part of ‘us’ (even though many of them have been here for generations). We have thus created a new type of citizenship for those we do not entirely trust (or whom we openly distrust), and mere respect for the law is not in itself enough. Indeed, these ‘new’ citizens would be in the wrong to demand equal implementation of the law, as it is ‘natural’ for further demands to be made of those whose ‘integration’ and ‘loyalty’ has yet to be demonstrated. This is what the young Dutch sociologist Willem Schinkel calls ‘moral citizenship’. There is nothing legal, and not even anything formal, about it, but a sort of list is drawn up of what is expected of a citizens who are, in religious or cultural terms, ‘different’ before they can become ‘full citizens’. Society demands of them that they respect the law and learn the language, but goes beyond that and has no qualms about intruding into their private lives by asking about their customs, the way they dress, the way they educate their children and so on. This is rarely spelled out, and everything is very informal, but the informality of ‘moral citizenship’ or ‘psychological citizenship’ has very concrete implications for the individuals concerned. They are not really part of the collective psyche and can be subjected to a discrimination that does not really offend the ‘majority’. The fact that these new citizens have been here for generations and have succeed in integrating in legal and psychological terms should have put an end to talk of ‘integration’, but the reverse is true. After two, three or even four generations, ‘they’ are still ‘of immigrant stock’. It should perhaps be recalled – and this was the implicit message behind South America’s protests about Europe’s ‘immigration policy’ – that the only difference between immigrants, ‘new’ citizens and ‘native citizens’ is that the latter simply immigrated earlier. We are no longer talking about the law, but about psychology, informality, time and trust (in ourselves and others), and it would be a mistake to minimize the implications of this.