3rd Global Conference
Friday 16th November - Sunday 18th November 2007
Salzburg, Austria
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Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 2: Fluid Boundaries of Citizenship
Chair: Pamela D. Ryan
Mobile Global Citizens
Luis Cabrera
Department of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Birmingham, United kingdom
Most work on global citizenship has focused on the attitudes or potential obligations of those within affluent states. This essay details how unauthorized immigrants to such regions as Western Europe and North America are in fact practicing a concrete and mostly ethically defensible form of trans-state citizenship. Further, in recent years, unauthorized immigrants on both continents have launched novel forms of “civil” rights movements, where aims include the familiar full inclusion in a bounded political community, but also a recognition of universal rights for those formally excluded from the community. These newly politicized immigrants are practicing a concrete global or trans-state citizenship that in many ways has outraced theoretical conceptions of broader citizenship. Such actions, and the new streams of immigration in general, can be viewed opportunities to identify and promote forms of trans-state citizen inclusion, rather than as threats to an ostensibly defensible nation-based form of citizenship. In addition, while a full open-borders approach may not be tenable in the near term, the practices of the new mobile global citizens can highlight ways in which aid and economic-integration regimes could be structured to treat those within less-affluent states more fully as partners in development. Qualitative data from field observations and interviews in the United States and Western Europe are used to add context on empirical trends noted, and to reinforce normative claims offered in the paper.
Thinking Postcolonial Difference: Colonial Memory and Citizenship in France
Noémi Michel* & Manuela Honegger**
* Department of Political Science, University of Geneva, Switzerland and ** Department of Political Science, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Our purpose in this essay is to claim for the necessity of thinking postcolonial France. However, we (a mixed-races woman and a white woman) do not wish to reconstitute a postcolonial theoretical framework here. We will rather concentrate on a specific point which we designate as postcolonial difference. By postcolonial difference we mean difference in term of race and ethnicity as a heritage of colonial history and the actual presence of colonial descendants. In the first part of this essay (at a descriptive-analytical level) we highlight the issues of postcolonial difference by examining the recent political debates over colonial memory and citizenship in France. How is postcolonial difference managed within these two social and political realities? In the second part of this essay (at an analytical-normative level) we formulate a normative argumentation mobilizing postcolonial difference. We consider that this concept provides potential solutions for the new challenges faced by the multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial French democracy.
Rethinking Citizenship and Belonging: Young People's Struggles for Political Engagement in the Fledgling Democracy of Post-War Guatemala
Natalie Djohari
University of Sussex, United Kingdom
This paper reflects on how a sense of belonging is created through an active process of establishing relationships and avenues for political interaction. I argue that to feel like an integrated citizen one needs to have a 'role' or sense of 'place' within society. In a fledgling democracy when much is still being negotiated, a belief that one's participation and contributions are not only heard but can make a difference is crucial to restoring trust in a once violent state. Within the post-conflict context of Guatemala, political action can therefore be the pivot around which new identities of belonging or exclusion are formed.
After years of silence and denials, a contemporary battle has been raging over what will be finally accepted as the nation's 'true' history. For a group of youths returning after the end of the36 years of civil war, the aim is to establish their disappeared parents, once labelled subversives and traitors by the repressive regime, as the true patriots and heroes of the country. In so doing they attempt to take up position at the centre of society, representing them selves as the rightful citizens of the emergent democracy and symbolically standing for all those who had previously been marginalised. But having spent years with the perception of the state as an 'enemy', their newfound participation and collaboration requires a new state/citizen relationship that challenges the very heart of their identity as 'children of the disappeared'. However, as ideas of citizenship, rights and belonging are renegotiated to bring the periphery increasingly to the centre, new forms of exclusion are also created. The second half of the paper therefore goes on to compare the case of another young returnee, whose negative experiences have led her to re-question her place within the emergent democracy.
De-nationalising Citizenship through the Emergence of European Citizenship Education Policies? A Comparative Case Study of France and England
Marion Girod
Groupe de Sociologie Politique Européenne (GSPE-PRISME), Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Strasbourg, France
This paper proposes to scrutinize the configuration of citizenship in three distinct spaces, combining a supranational focus with a cross-national stance: citizenship policies are (re)captured at the European level, and in two Member States, France and England. The objective is to understand whether, and to what extent, the boundaries, substance and sets of norms that have historically been associated with the project of education for (national) citizenship in France and England are challenged by the emergence of new bonds of citizenship institutionalized at the European levels. By doing so, the paper seeks to evaluate the capacity of European citizenship to represent a new source of inspiration for the construction of citizenship education policies in the two countries and, hence, to constitute a new political paradigm altering the historical links which have been existing (or not, in the case of England) between citizenship, school, and the (nation-)state. While the concept of citizenship has been (re)discovered within the French and English school communities over the last twenty years, which are the potential impacts exerted by EU citizenship policies on the boundaries of citizenship?
To address this question, citizenship policies are examined through a “horizontal” and a “vertical” axis of reflection. Whereas the former accounts for the logics of development of citizenship education at the European level (including the Council of Europe and EU institutions), the latter highlights the synchronic impacts of those European educational programmes on the “idioms” of citizenship in France and England. The demonstration uses here the result of a discursive inquiry undertaken in France and in England between 2002 and 2004 among the different networks of actors mobilizing for the project of citizenship education. On the basis of this material, the contribution, first, underlines the heterogeneous and fragmented aspect of the European agenda(s) for citizenship education, pointing at the intermixing of different sets of values – human rights education, multicultural education, education for diversity, post-national education… -. Second, it demonstrates that European citizenship fosters indirect and differentiated influences on the project of citizenship education in France and England. Indeed, it is possible to identify the emergence of some kind of post-national, global and multicultural elements through which citizenship education has been revisited in the two countries.