Transcript

There has been much talk recently coming from leading European heads of state that multiculturalism has failed and that there is a need for better integration of citizens and non-citizens. In your work you do not make use of terms such as ‘integration’ but speak instead of citizenship and in particular of activist citizenship. Why this choice of words and what is its importance?

The problem with the dominant idea of citizenship is that it is seen as membership. Once you understand citizenship as membership you begin to think about who is included and who is excluded. Those who are included exercise their rights and fulfil their duties and those who are excluded are prohibited from such rights. While social and cultural clubs may work this way, modern countries involve much more complex transactions and movements to be captured by this membership understanding of citizenship. People are actually or virtually much more connected than being a member of territorially sealed country. People also benefit from a much more complex set of rights ranging from civil, political, and social to sexual, ecological, cultural, and human rights that are not necessarily tied to where they reside or work let alone were born. When we shift our focus from membership to actually what people do to claim these rights, this complexity begins to make sense. Acts of citizenship is a way of thinking about citizenship not only as membership but also as claiming rights regardless of one’s membership.

What is the important then of bringing into focus of marginal groups or non-citizens for citizenships?

When we shift our focus to acts of citizenship we realize the question of apathy and lack of participation that are often lamented is not actually the case for those whose rights are not taken for granted. These people often find themselves in situations that existing citizenship regimes don’t take into account. Perhaps the most visible version of this situation was indicated by the suffragettes or blacks. Being ‘excluded’ from civil, political, and social rights for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both suffragettes and black gained the rights that they didn’t have by claiming equality as well as difference. We may well remember that throughout the nineteenth century poor people we also not entitled to certain civil, political and social rights. If you didn’t have property or property with certain value, for example, you could not vote or run for office. But by claiming the rights that they didn’t have the poor also obtained civil, political, and social rights. All these struggles were not waged without acts of citizenship.

So, this is about making visible the negotiations and struggles that surround citizenship. But how does this link to Europe? Or better, why are we looking at these in terms of European citizenship?

Europe as a project is a test case for the future of citizenship. Being born of the ashes of the atrocities of the twentieth century, it provided a promise, a vision of belonging and togetherness to different peoples whose citizenship were conceived in narrow and nationalist terms. The EU citizenship regime as a derivative regime in many ways betrays this original vision since it makes citizenship dependent on being a national in the first place. But the EU is only one body, though a very important one, amongst many other European institutions such as the Council of Europe (CoE). These broader institutions keep alive a vision of Europe as open and experimental. We see this vision being enacted by those who make claims to these institutions. That’s why we insist on calling their enactments as acts of citizenship and them as citizens.