SISIN17.QXD 4/3/2002 6:43 PM Page 277 17 Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship SASKIA SASSEN Most of the scholarship on citizenship has the international human rights regime. The claimed a necessary connection to the second is the emergence of multiple actors, national state. The transformations afoot groups and communities partly strengthened today raise questions about this proposition by these transformations in the state and in so far as they significantly alter those increasingly unwilling to automatically conditions which in the past fed that articu- identify with a nation as represented by the lation between citizenship and the national state. The growth of the Internet and linked state. If this is indeed the case, then we need technologies has facilitated and often to ask whether national conceptions of enabled the formation of cross-border citizenship deserve the presumptions of networks among individuals and groups with legitimacy and primacy that they are almost shared interests that may be highly speciali- always granted. This chapter interrogates zed, as in professional networks, or involve the validity of this presumption and in so particularized political projects, as in human doing underlines the historicity of both the rights and environmental struggles. This has institution of citizenship and that of national engendered or strengthened alternative state sovereignty. It is becoming evident notions of community of membership. today that far from being unitary, the insti- These new experiences and orientations of tution of citizenship has multiple dimen- citizenship may not necessarily be new; in sions, only some of which might be some cases they may well be the result of inextricably linked to the national state. This long gestations or features that were there chapter discusses the rapidly growing litera- since the beginning of the formation of ture that is documenting and conceptualiz- citizenship as a national institution, but are ing these issues, with particular attention to only now evident because enabled by post-national conceptions of citizenship. current developments. The context for this possible transforma- One of the implications of these develop- tion is defined by two major, partly inter- ments is the possibility of post-national connected conditions. One is the change in forms of citizenship (Soysal, 1994; the position and institutional features of Jacobson, 1996; Feldblum, 1998; see multi- national states since the 1980s resulting ple chapters in Isin, 2000). The emphasis in from various forms of globalization. These this formulation is on the emergence of range from economic privatization and locations for citizenship outside the con- deregulation to the increased prominence of fines of the national state. The European SISIN17.QXD 4/3/2002 6:43 PM Page 278 278 Part Four Forms passport is, perhaps, the most formalized of (Sassen, 1996, 2002) I have conceptualized these. But the emergence of a reinvigorated these trends as a denationalizing of particu- cosmopolitanism (Turner, 2000; Nussbaum, lar aspects of citizenship to be distinguished 1998) and of a proliferation of transnation- from post-national developments. I return to alisms (M. Smith and Guarnizo, 1998; this in a later section. R. Smith, 1997; Basch et al., 1994) have been key sources for notions of post-national citizenship. As Bosniak (2000) has put it, CITIZENSHIP AND NATIONALITY there is a reasonable case to be made that the experiences and practices associated with citizenship do, in variable degrees, have In its narrowest definition citizenship locations that exceed the boundaries of the describes the legal relationship between the territorial nation-state. Whether it is the individual and the polity. This relation can organization of formal status, the protection in principle assume many forms, in good of rights, citizenship practices, or the part depending on the definition of the experience of collective identities and soli- polity. In Europe this definition of the polity darities, the nation-state is not the exclusive was originally the city, both in ancient and site for their enactment. It remains by far the in medieval times. But the configuration of most important site, but the transformations a polity reached its most developed form in in its exclusivity signal a possibly important the national state, making it eventually a new dynamic. dominant form worldwide. It is the evolu- A second dynamic is becoming evident tion of polities along the lines of state which, while sharing aspects with post- formation that gave citizenship in the West national citizenship, is usefully distin- its full institutionalized and formalized guished from it in that it concerns specific character and that made nationality a key transformations inside the national state component of citizenship. which directly and indirectly alter specific Today the terms citizenship and nationality aspects of the institution of citizenship. both refer to the national state. In a technical These transformations are not predicated legal sense, while essentially the same necessarily on a relocating of citizenship concept, each term reflects a different legal components outside the national state, as is framework. Both identify the legal status of key to conceptions of post-national citizen- an individual in terms of state membership. ship. Changes in the law of nationality But citizenship is largely confined to the entailing a shift from purely formal to effec- national dimension, while nationality refers to tive nationality, and enabling legislation the international legal dimension in the allowing national courts to use international context of an interstate system. The legal instruments, are two instances that capture status entails the specifics of whom the state some of these transformations inside the recognizes as a citizen and the formal basis national state. More encompassing changes, for the rights and responsibilities of the captured in notions of privatization and individual in relation to the state. International shrinking welfare states, signal a shift in the law affirms that each state may determine relationship of citizens to the state. These who will be considered a citizen of that state.1 and other developments all point to impacts Domestic laws about who is a citizen vary on citizenship that take place inside formal significantly across states and so do the defini- institutions of the national state. It is useful tions of what it entails to be a citizen (see to distinguish this second dynamic of trans- various chapters in this volume). Even within formation inside the national state because Europe, let alone worldwide, there are marked most of the scholarship on these issues is differences in how citizenship is articulated about post-national citizenship and has and hence how non-citizens are defined. either overlooked these trends or interpreted To understand the nature of the transfor- them as post-national. In my own work mations we seek to capture through terms SISIN17.QXD 4/3/2002 6:43 PM Page 279 Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship 279 such as post-national and denationalized after wars or the imposition of a new nation- citizenship it is helpful to situate the nation- state on an underlying older one (Marrus, alizing of citizenship. The shift of citizen- 1985). There were no international accords ship into a national state institution and on dual nationality, a sharp contrast with the away from one centred in cities and civil 1990s, which have seen a proliferation of society was part of a larger dynamic of such accords. This negative perception of change. Key institutional orders began to dual nationality continued into the first half scale at the national level: warfare, indus- of the twentieth century and well into the trial development, educational and cultural 1960s. The main effort by the international institutions. These were all at the heart of system was to root out the causes of dual the formation and strengthening of the nationality by means of multilateral codifi- national state as the key political community cation of the law on the subject (Rubenstein, and crucial to the socialization of indivi- and Adler, 2000). duals into national citizenship. It is in this The major transformations over the last context that nationality becomes a central two decades have once again brought condi- constitutive element of the institution of tions for a change in the institution of citizenship in a way that it was not in the citizenship and its relation to nationality, medieval cities described by Weber. and they have brought about changes in the The evolution of the meaning of national- legal content of nationality. It is probably ity captures some of these transformations. the case that the particular form of the Historically, nationality is linked to the bond institution of citizenship centred on exclu- of allegiance of the individual to the sover- sive allegiance reached its high point in the eign. It dates from the European state system twentieth century and has, over the last even in some of its earliest elementary forms decade, begun to incorporate formal and and describes the inherent and permanent non-formal qualifications that contribute to bond of the subject to the sovereign. ‘No dilute that particular formalization. The man may abjure his country.’ Traditionally development in international law of nation- this bond was seen as insoluble or at least ality has moved to more flexible forms. The exclusive. But while the bond of insoluble long-lasting resistance to dual or multiple allegiance was defensible in times of limited nationality is shifting towards a selective individual mobility, it became difficult in the acceptance. According to some legal scholars face of large-scale migration which was part (Rubenstein, and Adler, 2000), in the future of the new forms of industrial development. dual and multiple nationality will become Insoluble was gradually replaced by exclu- the norm. Today more people than ever sive, hence singular but changeable, alle- before hold dual nationality (Spiro, 1997).