Throughout the history of social science, the concept of citizenship has not always been located at the centre of the discipline. Whilst social science has traditionally linked rights and duties with individual and collective identities (in the form of membership to a particular nation state), citizenship was most prominently set into focus by the British sociologist Thomas H. Marshall (1992) who, in his ground breaking essay on ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, reconstructed the emergence of modern citizenship as an evolutionary sequence unfolding throughout modernity. Through the institution of citizenship, the modern nation-state has, according to Marshall, managed to durably mediate the contradictory principles of equality and inequality under democratic capitalism.
The editors of these three volumes start with the idea that the modern institution of citizenship, so neatly portrayed by Marshall under conditions of fundamental societal transformations, is eroding or as Mackert himself (2017, Vol. 1, p. 99) argues, ‘no longer exists’. European integration is shifting the boundaries between the different levels of the EU’s political system. New patterns of spatial mobility – not only in terms of global migration, but also in terms of capital mobility – are reconfiguring national labour markets and thus affecting national social policy. In the wake of the banking crisis, political measures induced to ‘save the Euro’, have put into question the idea of the sovereign nation-state as the political basis for citizenship. With the figure of Marshall constantly lurking in the background, the articles contained within these three volumes aim at reimagining the sociology of citizenship for ‘post-Marshallian times’ (Mackert & Turner, 2017, Vol. 1, p. 10).
In the first volume, the editors have included contributions which address the notion of citizenship as seen through the lens of political economy. In the age of neoliberalisation, principles of market-based governance (‘Gesellschaftssteuerung’) have helped to erode the institutions of the nation-state which had embedded the market into society, especially during the ‘Trente Glorieuses’ of democratic capitalism. Against the backdrop of recent austerity measures imposed by the Troika, these articles point towards national governments’ declining democratic capacity. Especially interesting is Schmidt-Wellenburg’s approach which, in highlighting the professionalisation of public decision-making through experts, points to the elitist dimensions of European integration. Moreover, Mackert addresses the important topic of taxes, which has been extensively neglected within democratic theory scholarship, by drawing on the recent case of the ‘Panama Papers’.1
The contributions in the second volume are centred around ‘Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion’. With a focus on inequality, the articles compiled in this second volume highlight two important iniquities historically brought about through the institution of citizenship. Firstly, by setting limits on a particular community, citizenship has always gone along with the construction of ‘outsiders’, constituted by all non-citizens. Secondly, despite claims that citizenship is a universalistic institution, there have always been examples of citizenś rights being systematically violated. The contributions to this second volume work to demonstrate that, in the course of contemporary transformations, constellations of citizenship have been reconfigured in terms of both their spatial and symbolic order.
A central contribution of this second volume is in highlighting the diversity of future paths for citizenship, especially outside of the national framework. Whilst Seubert (2017, Vol. 2, p. 136) perceives EU citizenship as being ‘on a conflictual passage from a primarily market-oriented form of citizenship to social and political citizenship’, Pries and Bekassow (2017, Vol. 2, p. 131) argue in favour of ‘a European refugee citizenship.’ While the latter makes sense from an ethical standpoint, the implications of the former might not stand up to empirical scrutiny. The idea that, hitherto, European integration has centrally been driven by a process of market-making, does not necessarily aide one in determining the future of European citizenship.2
Finally, the contributions to the third volume address the topic of citizenship with a particular emphasis on ‘Struggle, Resistance and Violence’. Generally, the articles in this volume highlight – even more strongly than in the previous volumes – the dynamic and procedural character of citizenship. More specifically, the role of violence in conflicts is convincingly explored through an empirically grounded approach.
By placing the concept and the practices of citizenship at the centre of this work, the editors are readdressing a traditional question of macro-sociological reasoning, namely, how is societal cohesion maintained under conditions of ongoing social conflict? In order to answer this fundamental question, a common framework is established via continuous reference to (neoliberal) globalisation throughout the three volumes. While these articles are diverse in terms of their macroregional focus they are not balanced in terms of their coverage of the world, there remains a particular emphasis on the European context. For example, further inquiry into the dynamics of citizenship in authoritarian (e.g. China) or post-authoritarian (e.g. South Africa) regimes could have provided further insight into the topic. Moreover, the question of how gender as a social category relates to the rights and privileges derived from citizenship merited stronger attention. That being said, the selection of authors and topics demonstrates the editorś capacity to approach this broad and complex topic in its entirety, whilst also enabling the reader to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamics and contradictory character which citizenship is taking on in an age of global transformation.
In order to fully situate these three volumes within the contemporary debate on the contradictory nexus of capitalism and democracy, which has – in the German context – recently been set off by such authors as Wolfgang Streeck (2016) and Oliver Nachtwey (2018), the treatment of T.H. Marshalĺs work should have been completed through considering his concept of ‘Industrial Citizenship’. To completely model the way in which the nation-state mediates the ‘shotgun marriage’ (Streeck, 2016) of capitalism and democracy, Marshall refers to the mechanisms and standards of collective bargaining and labour rights. These mechanisms would later manifest themselves, especially in industrial societies, through institutions such as Germany’s collective labour laws (e.g. ‘Tarifautonomie’ and ‘Mitbestimmung’). This blind spot in the book is particularly surprising given that austerity measures, induced by the Troika, were predominantly aimed at demolishing the collective bargaining institutions of crisis countries, thus taking apart the institutions of industrial citizenship. Therefore, in order to determine the extent to which we are truly living in a post-Marshallian time, we need to place this concept of industrial citizenship at the heart of future work.
Notes
What makes this article particularly interesting is, that – different from other contributions – citizenship is conceptualised more as a set of duties, which citizens are obliged to fulfil, rather than a bundle of rights. Generally, however, the contributions focus on citizenship as an entitling status.
Similar implications can be found in Münch (vol. 2, page 1): ‘European citizenship in the zone of tension between a cosmopolitan outlook and historically rooted national solidarities’. We would do well, to relegate such arguments to the realm of functionalism.