Citizenship

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CITIZENSHIP

definition of citizenship
the role of revolution
liberalism
inequality and citizenship
citizenry and state authority
conclusion
bibliography

The concept of citizenship claims a venerable intellectual tradition. The lived history of modern citizenship, however, was born in conflict and revolution. In June 1789, when the French Estates-General reseated itself—not as the three estates of the land but as the National Assembly—and proclaimed that it would not disband until it had written a constitution for the French nation, the delegates in Versailles had declared themselves citizens. Their right to form a new government, a new covenant between themselves, stemmed from universalist principles of natural law and freedoms inherent in their humanity. In making revolution, Abbé Emmanuel Sieyés explained, the people reclaimed their sovereignty from absolutist monarchy and set forth to remake state power in their own image. By placing popular sovereignty at the center of the exercise of power, this profound transformation of political personae from subjects of royal power to self-actualized citizenry stirred hopes and fears that shaped politics and state boundaries for the next century.

definition of citizenship

The French Revolution of 1789 may have fused popular sovereignty and nationhood as powerful philosophical abstractions, but what did it mean when men and women addressed each other as citoyens and citoyennes? Scholars have helpfully distinguished between seventeenth-century natural law arguments, which that established the discourse of rights protecting individual liberties from state incursions, from the older tradition drawn from Athenian civic republicanism that emphasized individual virtue along with the duties and obligations of belonging. While analytically important in understanding political discourse, most working models of participatory government mix the two, balancing the negative expressions of rights (the delimitations of state power) with positive assertions of membership (also conceived of as rights) that name the entitlements and responsibilities of inclusion.

In the juncture of events during the French Revolution, however, the process of limiting royal power also exposed unbridgeable disputes over the purposes of good government and the nature of representation, particularly as they addressed popular participation and the welfare of the people. Thus when Louis XVI withdrew his grudging support of constitutional monarchy and appealed ineffectively to royalists within and outside French borders, the pressures of maintaining the Revolution through internal dissension and external war turned principled disagreements into factional struggles that toppled and led to the convening of many forms of government. Between 1791 and 1815, there were a total of four constitutions, each of which radically restructured the relationship between executive and legislative power and redefined the practical meaning of participation and self-governance.

the role of revolution

Although the Revolution gathered many critics, it also enjoyed avid defenders. From the constitutional monarchy of 1789 to the Jacobin republic of 1792, to emergency wartime rule by the Committee of Public Safety, to the oligarchy of the Directory, and finally to the charismatic authoritarian plebiscite democracy of Napoleon I—each phase of revolutionary development reached across state boundaries to inspire different groups of sympathizers in neighboring territories and across the Channel. Thus when the concert of old European monarchical empires aligned to defeat the French Republic in 1792 and later in 1815 to restore the balance of power among themselves, they quickly realized that the threat to their social and political order was internal as well as external. Although the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) was supposed to have reestablished autocratic power, in fact, Europe's absolutist rulers mostly understood that old regimes could not be restored without some concessions to participatory government. Balancing their fear of revolution against their anxieties over power sharing, entrenched aristocratic elites made selective accommodations to the upper echelons of non-noble property owners. Hence even in the symbolically freighted restoration of the Bourbons to the French crown, Louis XVIII governed with a charter (the Charter of 1814) that placed constitutional limits on his power and provided an elected chamber, albeit with a highly restrictive franchise that excluded 90 percent of the adult population.

In Great Britain after 1820, the ascendancy of moderate Tories and Whigs pushed through electoral changes resulting in the Reform Act of 1832, which doubled the number of voters among householders and modified the dominance of the landed gentry. Constitutional movements in the southern German states met with equally positive responses. By the early 1820s, the duchies of Nassau and Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach and the kingdoms of Bavaria, Baden, and W?rttemberg had given themselves written constitutions based on compromises between the old aristocratic order, the crown, and new principles of bourgeois society. Reforms within Prussia had begun before 1815, and even though the constitutional movements associated with Heinrich Friedrich vom Stein and Karl August von Hardenberg failed, reformers succeeded in bringing the bureaucratic state under the rule of law and instituted some safeguards for civil liberties.

Could these autocratic states and limited monarchies have met the participatory desires of its haute bourgeoisie and middle classes without conceding the primacy of their power base and monarchical principles? Each locality, of course, offered its own story, but pragmatic compromises were often eclipsed by the recent memory of revolution. By their example, revolutionaries in France had forever cast aside any belief that patient supplication to sovereign rulers was the only route for attaining political change. Moreover the intellectual culture of the Revolution had drawn conceptual links between various liberal demands, creating a coherent program for change. Hence when liberals thought of themselves as citizens in the post-Revolutionary era, the systemic incompatibility between theories of popular sovereignty and theories of monarchical authority (particularly those of absolutist hereditary rule) reminded them that they lived at odds with the basic political tenets of their society. In such a context, annoyances moved easily to principled opposition.

liberalism

This revolutionary potential built into liberal aspirations was enhanced by the possibilities of radical alliances. In Paris during the summer of 1830, for example, the more strident agitation of craftsmen, journeymen, university students, and journalists joined with the protest of liberal elites against press censorship and royal usurpations of the Charter of 1814. Their collective power was demonstrated at the barricades when, after only a few days of bloodshed, Charles X abdicated. In the German states, the French Revolution of 1830 reactivated liberal movements that had turned in solace to romantic quests for a pan-German community through spiritual reform and self-improvement (in such associations such as the Turn-Vereins and Burschenshaften). In Munich, Göttingen, Hanover, and Frankfurt, as in Paris, bourgeois and middle-class militants combined with artisans, workers, students, and journalists to organize festivals and political banquets. In the spirit of civil disobedience, they offered toasts, made incendiary speeches, and sang the "Marseillaise."

In the 1830s, state authorities everywhere in central Europe crushed the flowering of rebelliousness before the new popular alliance could be tested. Despite the evident potentials of their combined forces, bourgeois liberalism and radical democracy were fundamentally not alike. They appealed to different conceptions of society and politics. And although they both held that the citizen was sovereign, they differed on who could be a citizen. Within a liberal worldview, only those individuals who were legally free to enter into contracts as self-possessing agents could participate in public life. Conceiving the civic realm as growing out of associational life, self-government among equals meant the setting of common rules as part of the broader protection of individual freedoms. By contrast, radicals often invoked an almost literal understanding of the common body as the basis of collective life, leading to very different descriptions of the bonds between citizens, of mutual obligation, and of equality. Against the barriers established by property qualifications, artisans and the laboring poor claimed that their skills or their labor constituted property. In so doing, they joined other groups who also challenged the liberal definition of the autonomous individual handed down from seventeenth-century theorists, which conceived of personhood not only as inseparable from landed and productive wealth but also in terms of proprietary rights in others: wives, children, servants, and slaves. Thus not surprisingly, the discourses of slave emancipation and feminism shared a common appeal to self-possession as the natural precondition for self-determination and civic participation as equals.

inequality and citizenship

In other respects, however, the deeper challenge faced by these disenfranchised groups against persisting distinctions between "active" and "passive" citizens first introduced in the French Constitution of 1791 centered on the difficult task of redefining "civic virtue." Here the "disqualifications" represented by race and sex take different forms. During the French Revolution and throughout much of the nineteenth century, the exclusion of women from active citizenship as creatures inherently incapable of justice or dispassionate reason was part of the process of defining the public realm as an expression of bourgeois masculinity. Hence, the "impairments" of femaleness named were multiple and contradictory—setting the vindication of feminine capacity and moral rectitude in the following century in often opposing directions. Through the century, feminists maintained their critique of liberal individualism, although the women mobilizing for change demanded both special laws and services that addressed their specific conditions and contributions as women and argued for the irrelevance of bodily distinctions in sharing the rights and entitlements granted to men. Ironically, the long-awaited recognition of women's "worthiness" for citizenship finally came in the twentieth century as the liberal model of citizenry underwent radical transformation at the initiative of state authority.

Contrary to expectations, given the inability to fully integrate citizens of non-European descent in the Europe of the early twenty-first century, racial equality in citizenship was not an empty promise in the French Revolution. The National Assembly recognized and defended the claims of the few colonial mulatto and free black men who fully qualified for the franchise. The more consequential issue came with abolition. In both French and British colonies, the claims and entitlements of former slaves exposed the contradictions of the liberal legacy. Although the course of emancipation took very different routes in the two empires (slavery was abolished in French colonies in 1794, reinstated in 1802, and abolished again in 1848; British abolition was accomplished in 1833), both the French and British colonial administrations framed the question of citizenship for freedmen and -women fully within the problem of managing a potentially disorderly labor force. For abolitionists, the central questions of inclusion and belonging stalled around questions of "worthiness." Discussions of freedom were thus redirected to the questions of tutelage. There, the long probation of blacks became inextricably entwined with congenital interpretations of bodily differences in European science and politics. What might have begun as the prejudices of class centered on the impossibility of those who must labor to claim civic virtue became the indelible disqualifications of phenotype.

These enduring problems of sexism and racism have recast assessments of radical movements for direct democracy in the first half of the nineteenth century. Scholars have mostly interpreted these political programs in light of the social discontents behind protest (poverty, subsistence crises, unemployment), but as the masses mobilized by the People's Charter (1838) in Britain demonstrated, their radical democratic vision did not come primarily from workplace or marketplace struggles (despite the many close connections to Owenite socialism). Rather, the Chartists formulated a populist theory of justice as part of the broader agitation led by the middle classes against the Corn Laws and for extending the franchise. Out of a shared political arena, the Chartists articulated a vision of citizenship distinct from their liberal counterparts. On the Continent, although radical artisans, journeymen, and the laboring poor were influenced by various schools of socialist thought (Saint-Simonians, Fourierists, Louis Blanc, and later Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon), in France and the German-speaking states where guild traditions were strong, models for participatory democracy often spoke the language of the corporatist tradition mixed with the universalist language of freedom and rights from the French Revolution. Nonetheless, the solidarities of working men typically demanded honor and recognition as men—despite the fact that working women also fought for universal suffrage (before upper-class women mobilized for the equal franchise), salaried elected representatives, and collective responsibility for the livelihood of the poor. Working women readily mounted to the barricades to demand price maximums on subsistence goods and national workshops to redress unemployment in female-dominated trades. Similarly, although socialist rhetoric was internationalist, working men organized within national political boundaries and conceived of politics from within national traditions. Support for abolition (especially among the Chartists) and fleeting expressions of solidarity aside, few nineteenth-century radicals thought systemically about the possible connections and commonalities between colonial subjects and the European poor. Yet from the perspective of political economy, the theory of wage labor as free labor was conceived at the point at which colonial and metropolitan economies joined.

citizenry and state authority

Despite the limits of masculinist and nationalist blinders, class-based analysis and alliances remain significant in comprehending the revolutions that swept across the continent again in 1848. The near victories but ultimate defeats of liberalism and republicanism brought out the familiar refrain that the bourgeoisie had preferred to compromise with autocratic power rather than to risk threats from below. Whether one believed that the temporary triumph of antidemocratic forces was the result of betrayal or cowardice, certainly the arrest and deportation of radicals marked a dramatic setback for all populist causes. At midcentury, European politics was dominated by the territorial conquests and limited wars of German and Italian unification. But looking beyond the changing European balance of power to the domestic policies of empire/nation building, one sees that revolution and popular sovereignty still preoccupied the politics of reaction. For example, the new constitution for the German Empire granted universal male suffrage but negated the power of the vote by denying any real decision-making power to the federal representative body. While the Reichstag nominally held the purse strings, the crown retained its independence because the military and the foreign office remained constitutionally under the control of the emperor and his chancellor. But even such structural guarantees were not enough. The preservation of the old landed and military elites ultimately depended on Otto von Bismarck's ability to manage the new sources of social power emerging from a rapidly industrializing empire. Here, the German chancellor's innovations both transformed the nature of autocracy and remade civil society. While the empire prohibited the independent self-organization of industrialists, middle-class professionals, workers, peasants, Catholics, and others, Bismarck wooed each group with specially targeted benefits. The results were often unexpected. For example, the much more politically conservative German Empire was far ahead of Britain and France in providing state-sponsored insurance and old-age pensions for the working classes. But, at the same time, the German Social Democratic Party, the largest socialist party in Europe, was outlawed.

By recognizing that citizens had claims on the state, modern autocratic states further shifted the power relations between state and citizenry in favor of state authority—not only through repression or usurpations but also by ascribing new responsibilities to itself and cultivating new clients. While such expansions of state power may seem unremarkable within an existing autocratic structure, parallel patterns—those emerging in late Victorian Britain and the French Third Republic as parliamentary politics stabilized through the disciplining practices of new political parties—are noteworthy. By the early twentieth century, the prevailing wisdom in the competitive system of European nation-states was that their very modernity rested on an effective compromise between enlightened statecraft from above and populist nationalism from below. To the degree that bureaucratic organizations needed popular mandates to effectively harness the nation's productive and reproductive power, to build military might, and to garner international respect, citizens as entitled subjects of state power also gained many benefits through public resources. As the sociologist T. H. Marshall would later theorize in the middle of the twentieth century, but that European states had already begun to put into practice decades earlier, a comprehensive population policy covering health, education, housing, and old age attached to the entitlements of citizenship promoted new understandings of social progress and equality. But such policies also empowered bureaucracies as the guarantors of rights and entitlements. While the rules therein were open to legislative and procedural change, the expansion of state power was unmistakable. Even in moments of popular protest and discontent, the state remained the object of petition and the source of recognition.

conclusion

Taking the century-long view then, one is tempted to ask: Is the history of citizenship between 1789 and 1914 the story of its containment and management? Ideologically, "the people" have become indispensable. But once their consent has been mobilized, they become marginal to the everyday tasks of governing. Could the much-touted final triumph of liberalism in the parliamentary democracies of western Europe at the end of the century be said to be the result of the conscious demobilization of citizenry through the routinization of politics? While popular sovereignty may be both the victim as well as the spark that ignited the anguished transformation of political power from absolutist monarchies to modern nation-states, the evocative power of citizenship even as abstract principle has continued to mobilize hope. In the twentieth century when centralized power has collapsed in wartime and other severe political crises, such as between 1917 through the mid-1920s and immediately after 1945, citizens in neighborhoods, union halls, and even soldiers' barracks have readily claimed collective self-rule. In the early twenty-first century, as new groups bring their aspirations for inclusion and belonging, the utopian appeal of the concept of citizenship invites mobilizations fueled by desires that are difficult to extinguish. There thus remains an "unruly" promise in the vision of citizenship first announced in eighteenth-century revolutions that seems always to exceed the limits of received politics.

See alsoMinorities; Nationalism.