TPM Reader JH says my idea of citizenship is archaic and may be in conflict with the modern principles of human rights …
I write as a practicing academic sociologist, specializing in urban studies, globalization, urban planning and politics, and migration. I have been an avid, daily reader of TPM for years, but never before commented. Re: your post this morning about the NYC proposal to expand voting rights in local elections to non-citizens, I’d just like to make three quick points.
1. Many European cities have extended voting rights in local elections to non-citizens who meet a residency requirement (typically 5 years or 7 years). In some cases, this has been an accepted practice for more than two decades. One good place to learn more about this is Yasemin Soysal’s book The Limits of Citizenship. It’s not clear to me that this practice has had much of a negative effect on social solidarity in those places.
2. New York’s proposal is about what we might call *urban* citizenship, yet your post refers to citizenship at a national level: the problem of dual passport holders, with which country people’s allegiances lie, the cultural-political-moral commitment to the American political community, etc. Rather than focusing on the split between people who might hold two separate national allegiances, it might be better to talk about the split that would occur in the citizenship rights held by New York residents versus those granted to people in Des Moines. In other words, the real story here might be the rise of differential citizenship rights accorded to people within the United States based on where they live.
3. You write of your belief in what you call “thick citizenship.” But your preference for such a thick citizenship appears to conflict with core principles of human rights. A large part of what social scientists consider citizenship rights – for example, many of the things Americans consider “their” civil rights, or perhaps the right to an education – countries are duty- and treaty-bound to protect for all individuals in the national space, whether or not they are formal citizens. To the extent that one believes in the concept of human rights, most of what we have historically called citizenship rights should be afforded to people not on the basis of their membership in this or that national polity, but simply because they are human. What then happens to the political project of crafting a thick citizenship? Little is left for that citizenship to include other than the vote and the right to run for office. That, I suspect, is not really a thick citizenship at all.
