RSS feed for Enacting European Citizenship (ENACT)

Introduction

The Open University — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

The term European citizenship triggers an immediate association with the European Union, its member states, and people who are citizens of those states. This course develops another way of thinking about European citizenship, whereby European citizenship need not be granted by the state, limited to the territory within the EU borders, or acted out by people who are already citizens.

The module features interviews with Engin Isin, Mike Saward, Jef Huysmans, Claudia Aradau and Vicki Squire who were some of the researchers of the ENACT project. Rutvica Andrijasevic conducts the interview with Engin Isin, who in turn conducts the other interviews.

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Learning outcomes

The Open University — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

After studying this course, you should be able to:

demonstrate a familiarity with the most recent scholarship on European citizenship and in particular with the concepts of ‘acts of citizenship’ and ‘activist citizenship’
explain why European citizenship is said to be ‘derivative’ citizenship
discuss the limits around thinking of citizenship as a status, and of thinking of citizenship from the perspective of those who already hold it
understand how citizenship can be seen differently by asking ‘how do people do citizenship?’ rather than ‘who is the citizen?’
elaborate on the ways in which those who do not hold EU citizenship can act as a European citizen.

1 Acts of citizenship

The Open University — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

At the core of this course is the argument that European citizenship is not necessarily limited to its formal legal status. We will explore how people who are not formal citizens of the European Union (EU), and those who are citizens but on the margins of institutionalised politics, can challenge dominant understandings and practices of European citizenship.

In order to understand the idea that one can ‘act out’, or enact, European citizenship without formally being an EU citizen, we need to turn first to the concept of EU citizenship as commonly understood by scholars and policy-makers. In legal terms, it is often said that the EU citizenship is a derivative citizenship: one cannot be an EU citizen without first being a citizen of an EU member state. The EU cannot by itself grant citizenship rights. As citizens of the EU are first and foremost members of an EU member state, EU citizenship is aimed at achieving a common set of rights, and fostering inclusiveness and a sense of belonging across the European Union. It is a vehicle for developing a common European identity and values.

EU governing bodies such as the European Commission (EC) and the European Parliament (EP) have long promoted active citizen participation in the EU’s political life and sought to strengthen communication between citizens and the EU institutions, especially since the EU is perceived to suffer from a ‘democratic deficit’. This effort is evident, for example, in the Lisbon Treaty (2009), which states that: ‘Every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union. Decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen’ (Article 10). This debate over active citizenship focuses of the decline of voting rates democratic participation and efforts to increase citizens’ participation. An example of such measures is European Citizens Initiative (ECI), launched by the EC in 2010 with the aim of enhancing participatory democracy in the Union. The ECI presents itself as:

‘… the first transnational instrument of participatory democracy in world history. It is considered to be one of the major innovations of the Treaty of Lisbon and enables one million EU citizens to call directly on the European Commission to propose legislation of interest to them in an area of EU competence.’

(http://www.citizens-initiative.eu/)

Non-EU bodies such as the Council of Europe (CoE) also stress the importance of active citizenship. CoE is an international organisation in Strasbourg which comprises 47 countries of Europe. It was set up to promote democracy and protect human rights and the rule of law in Europe. CoE enforces the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) through the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). It also works with the EU bodies such as the EU Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship and the European Court of Human Rights.

The ECI may prove, in time, to be a stimulus for active democratic participation in the EU. But there may be more to the question of participation than devices like the ECI can offer. In particular, there are multiple other ways in which groups of both citizens and non-citizens (both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the EU) mobilise and claim European citizenship and in the process, ‘constitute’ or enact themselves as citizens by claiming rights. We use the term ‘constitute’ here to indicate a sociological process through which subjects become citizens in both political and legal terms.

Against this background, the concept of acts of citizenship starts from the idea that citizenship is a dynamic process and that people can constitute themselves as citizens via claims to rights, regardless of their existing citizenship status. Instead of starting from the question of ‘Who is a citizen?’, we ask ‘What makes citizens?’ Although Kurdish people, for example, may not be citizens of the European Union, by exercising their rights to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, they actively constitute themselves as European citizens in the broader sense of that term. This is an important theoretical and political move: from viewing citizenship as a solely legal or formal membership of a state, to interpreting it as contingent and contested.

Let’s look at another example to clarify these points. In 2005, representatives of sex workers and their supporters met in Brussels for a European Conference on Sex work, Human Rights, Labour and Migration. They also presented three documents to the EP: the Declaration on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe, the Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto and the Recommendations for the policy makers. Further, they also organised a demonstration. If we focus on the people involved in these actions, we see that they are a mixture of migrants, regular and irregular, Third Country Nationals (i.e., non-citizens of member states residing in the EU), and EU member states citizens. Because of their nationality, status, or type of work they perform, these groups often find themselves in situations where their ‘citizenship’ is called into question. However, if we put that momentarily aside and look at what they did in Brussels, we can see that their actions are all forms of active political engagement and participation to articulate and claim rights.

What does this concretely mean in terms of EU citizenship? If we look at EU citizenship from the perspective of active citizenship outlined above, then the question that follows is

‘What can the European Union do to facilitate the production of (active) European citizens?’ The concept of acts of citizenship opens up another possibility in relation to EU citizenship as it does not focus on ‘who’ but on ‘what’, namely of what people do. The question then becomes ‘How do subjects, through their actions, constitute themselves as European citizens?’ Asking this question prompts investigators to examine existing and emerging claims and practices amongst both citizens and non-citizens (third country nationals, refugees, illegal aliens) – claims and practices through which they act as European citizens. It also prompts consideration of state practices that deprive them from doing so. Often, we see that subjects that are not citizens act as citizens: they constitute themselves as those with the right to have rights and articulate claims accordingly. We can see this, for example, in the case when irregular migrants and asylum seekers organise against being detained and deported and claim the right to stay in the country.

The key issue then is not to think the ‘doer’ prior to the ‘deed’ but rather to examine the process and the acts through which new actors emerge. The focus is on ‘acts’ rather than actors so as not to prejudge to whom the right to have rights may be due. This approach to citizenship is what we might call ‘activist’ citizenship. Activist citizenship differs from active citizenship. Active citizenship addresses formal citizens and urges them to engage in a range of activities such as voting or running for office to increase political participation (a kind of ‘script’ for already existing citizens to act on an existing set of rights). Activist citizenship, by contrast, brings into focus groups who are not necessarily recognized in law as citizens and studies their claims that challenge the content and boundaries of European citizenship.

Consider two examples. An EU national claiming her right to pension benefits in the Netherlands, where she has recently moved for work after having worked in the UK for 15 years, is engaging in active citizenship in the sense that he/she is exercising rights that already exist. By contrast, we consider a third-country national (TCN) doing sex work in France who has joined the above mentioned manifestations for sex workers rights in Brussels and is claiming the right to move and work freely in the EU as engaged in activist citizenship, in the sense that she is making claims to rights that she does not already have. This notion of a right one does not have can come about in two ways. First, it may mean that a group of individuals may activate or mobilise an existing law that they are currently inhibited from enjoying. Second, they may claim that they should be entitled to it given that others are. If a group such as sex workers are denied making of either of these two types of claims we can say that they are denied their right to citizenship. Similarly, TCNs may have residency rights that may lead to citizenship status.

The idea that non-citizens can act as citizens and can have a say in matters of European citizenship is a puzzling one. In the video clip below, Engin Isin explains in more detail the concepts of acts of citizenship and activist citizenship and their importance in understanding citizenship in contemporary Europe.

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Engin Isin

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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.

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Let us examine in more detail at acts of citizenship. In the next section, we look into four examples both inside and outside of the EU.

2 Claims to citizenship

The Open University — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

In the previous section we have discussed the difference between active and activist citizenship. Engin Isin introduced the idea that European citizenship can be enacted by citizens and non-citizens alike. We also heard that European citizenship is negotiated both inside and outside the EU. How does this work? How is EU citizenship negotiated by non-citizens inside and outside the EU? Let us look at four different examples.

Sex workers
Courts
Claims from outside the EU’s borders – Turkey
Claims by women’s NGOs

2.1 Sex workers

The Open University — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

First, let us take you to Brussels. On 15 and 16 October 2005, 200 delegates from 28 countries around Europe gathered in Brussels to take part in an event to advocate sex workers rights. Over the two days, delegates took part in the European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour and Migration during which they discussed and worked on two documents, a Declaration on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe and the Sex Workers in Europe Manifesto. On the 17 October, they presented the Declaration and a set of Recommendations on sex work for policy makers in the European Parliament (EP), where they were invited by Monica Frassoni, an Italian MEP. The declaration was endorsed by the Italian MEP, Vittorio Agnoletto. The session at the EP was followed of by a manifestation in the streets of Brussels, where the delegates displayed red umbrellas which since then have become the symbol used at various marches to make visible sex workers’ presence and demands.

The declaration, the manifesto and the recommendations are the result of a six-month long consultation process among sex workers and allies across Europe. The process was set in place in order to gather information on what issues and concerns are the most pressing for sex workers. The declaration contains thirdly articles, it is structured in twelve different sections covering issues such as life, liberty and security, privacy and family life, freedom of movement, and work and working conditions, just to give a few examples. It is a unique document of this sort that works with existing formal rights in order to bring attention to the violations of sex workers rights. At the same time, it also functions as a legal tool that enables sex workers to claim rights to which they are entitled under existing United Nations, International Labour Organisation and EU treaties and conventions.

The manifesto is a slightly different type of document from the declaration. It formulates a series of demands for rights that exist in a restricted form or do not exist as yet in international law. In that sense, it represents a ‘utopian’ moment as it makes claims to the rights of freedom of movement, residency, and labour that are not ratified by EU states such as the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families. For example, under the heading ‘the right to travel, to migrate, and seek asylum’ the document states the following demand:

‘We demand that all people have the right to move within and between countries for personal and financial reason, including seeking gainful employment and residence in the area of their choice’.

Finally, the recommendations target the EU policy makers and suggest ways in which to promote major inclusion of sex workers in the society, reduce the stigma surrounding sex work, and make sex workers less vulnerable to labour exploitation or other forms of violence. Taken together, the declaration, the manifesto and the recommendations are interventions that make an important intellectual and political contribution to current debates on sex work, labour rights, and migration in Europe.

Please read the following excerpts from ‘Unexpected Citizens: Sex Work, Mobility, Europe’ by Rutvica Andrijasevic, Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, and Vicki Squire.

The full text of the report is available here.

Unexpected Citizens: Sex Work, Mobility, Europe

Activity 1

Reflect on the following points and make notes.

A collective subject is not already there. Individuals and groups have various interests and rights and are positioned differently in the society depending on their gender, race, class and nationality. These categories separate various groups and allocate them different rights. When individuals belonging to those groups practice those rights, they engage in active citizenship.
As the excerpt above shows, there is another way of ‘doing’ citizenship. This is by challenging the existing social categories and the regimes of rights attached to those. To do so is an arduous political process of working on acknowledging and levelling differences between those groups in order to facilitate coming together on a new collective subject.
This new collective subject does not fit into the existing categories of our dominant way of understanding citizenship as membership. It is comprised of people with different rights claiming the rights that they are entitled to but also the rights they are not entitled to because of being stigmatised as sex workers or discriminated as non-EU nationals. It is by giving life to this new collective subject and by claiming rights that exceed the institutionally allocated rights that they challenge the European citizenship regime and engage in activist citizenship.

Let us discuss some of these issues with Claudia Aradau.

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Interview with Claudia Aradau

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The idea in this interview is to cover the main issue of the constitution of collective political subject as a process and as linked to/emerging out of social movements vs focus on individual in liberal democracies.

Often when we read about citizenship and rights, we understand them to be about the rights of the individual citizens. You, however, in your work on sex workers and their mobilisations that we read earlier stress the collective aspect of rights. Why is the collective aspect important?

There is a liberal idea of rights as that of those pertaining to an individual men who owns himself and property. This idea has been heavily criticised, however. Yet, rather than rejecting the idea of rights from the start, it is important, it seems to me, to see how rights are conquered in struggle. Rights are contested, claimed, challenged, verified, enacted, brought to life in many different ways. Collective mobilisation is often at the heart of the struggle of rights. You can see that clearly in demonstrations that invent new rights or claim rights that are not there. For instance, in October 2005, sex workers from 28 countries in Europe gathered in Brussels to claim their rights to mobility, work, and political participation. The collective aspect was extremely important, as the collective subject was carefully thought of to avoid it being dismissed as minoritarian or particular. Sex workers in Brussels did that by bringing together very different categories of people: migrants, regular and irregular, women and men, EU citizens and other citizens from different countries of Europe, sex workers themselves and activists. Their collective mobilisation could thus not be equated to a particular category and a particular interest, which could be dismissed as being destructive of another particular interest.

Is this process of coming together and mobilising important? Seems you are talking here about something that is more than plain socialising?

Mobilisation does emerge out of social relations, common experiences of invisibility and injustice. It draws on particular social relations, while being more than plain socialising. It may be useful to think about how social relations are also changing and in tension: on the one hand, you can have socialising based on belonging to a group, a closed-knit community, family and so on; on the other, modern capitalist societies entail other forms of sociality, which emerge out of interactions with strangers, often mediated by monetary exchanges. These are in tension and can trigger their own forms of injustice. But political mobilisation and the constitution of collective subjects as citizens implies that both are surpassed in a sense. Rights claims ultimately address anybody, not just a particular group. Coming together is also not about money-mediated exchanges but about solidarity-mediated exchanges. Political mobilisation needs the support of social relations but at the same time challenges it by addressing everybody: the rights that sex workers’ claim are not just for themselves, they are ultimately for everybody.

Does this mean then that the difference between citizens and non-citizens becomes irrelevant? Don’t you find this problematic when non-citizens in the EU are extremely vulnerable to repressive state measures such as detention and deportations and this all exactly because they are not-citizens?

This is not to deny that non-citizens experience many forms of injustice and that these injustices are more acute than those experienced by citizens. At the same time, this is an unstable distinction and a distinction which is not just external, but also internal to the very notion of citizenship. Let’s take the Roma in Europe for instance. The Roma from Eastern Europe are now European citizens. Nonetheless their rights as European citizens have been largely non-existent. Since 2004, Romanian Roma have been continually deported from EU states – Germany, France, Italy – even if this has been euphemistically called ‘voluntary repatriation’ and has passed more or less unnoticed for quite some time. Citizens can often be treated as non-citizens, while non-citizens can have citizen privileges (think for instance of the mobility of business people compared to that of other migrants, often coming from the same country). Political mobilisation makes visible these rather complex injustices and challenges them by reclaiming citizenship for those who are ultimately treated as non-citizens. In so doing, they do not only expand citizenship to include some particular categories, but they redefine what it means to be a citizen. In brief, this is not about who is and who isn’t a citizen, but about acting as if a citizen to contest given boundaries.

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2.2 Courts

The Open University — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

Inside the EU, European citizenship is not contested and negotiated solely on the street and via mobilisations. It is also negotiated in the courts. In this section we will examine one court in particular – this is the European Court of Justice (ECJ). ECJ was set up in 1952 and it is based in Luxembourg. Its role is to make sure that member states apply EU legislation consistently in all EU countries. The ECJ has the power to settle legal disputes between EU member states, EU institutions, businesses and individuals.

What interests us here is the role ECJ plays in shaping EU citizenship as a legal status and the relationship between ECJ and EU member states with respect to citizenship. Do the EU member states and the ECJ interpret EU citizenship the same way? Or are there situations in which there is a tension between ECJ and individual member states in deciding who is entitled to EU citizenship?

We will look into these issues in the excerpt below. The excerpt focuses on the Council Directive 2004/38 on the right of citizens of the Union and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States. The right to move freely refers to the right of the EU nationals to move from one Member State to the other and while doing so to enjoy equal treatment and non-discrimination. Freedom of movement is indeed one of the pivots of EU citizenship. The right of EU citizens with a non-EU partner to move and to permanent residency has been put into question by a number of member states who were not willing to allow entry or residency rights to non-EU partners and family members of EU nationals. The reasons member states provided for this were immigration concerns. Directive 2004/38 makes an intervention into this field. Please read the text and note down the key points of the Metock ruling, in particular what the national legislator position was and what the ECJ position was in the matter. What did the ECJ rule?

The complete text from Carrera, S. and Atgen, A. (2009) ‘Implementing of Directive 2004/38. A Proliferation of Different Forms of Citizenship?’ can be found here.

Implementing of Directive 2004/38. A Proliferation of Different Forms of Citizenship?

Activity 2

Reflect on the following points and make notes.

The scope and content of EU citizenship is negotiated in different sites: on the streets as well as in the courts. ECJ is a site of such negotiations hence the scope of European citizenship is not always already established but it emerges out of lengthy disputations between various actors, in case of the Metock ruling, between the ECJ and EU member states.
In the context where EU law has primacy over national law, ECJ’s ruling is an act that affirms ECJ’s refusal for members states’ narrow interpretation of the Directive 2004/38 and member states’ interests to preserve national discretion regarding citizenship rights for non-nationals.
It is in this light that we can consider the Metock ruling as an act of citizenship on the part of the ECJ as it stands for ECJ’s resistance against the member states nationality legislation and affirmation of a more inclusive model of citizenship than traditional national-based model.

Let us discuss some of these issues with Jef Huysmans.

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Interview with Jef Huysmans

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The idea here is to cover the questions Who is seen and heard as a political actor in the EU? and What counts as a legitimate political action?

The material we discussed so far raised the issue of who is and who is not seen and heard as a political actor in the EU. Sex workers, irregular migrants, LGBT people, and Roma are not seen as political actors or at least legitimate actors as citizens. Why is this so?

There is a difference between being formally a European citizen and being a politically visible or audible actor: nationals of member states, whether Roma, Flemish, sex worker, student, plumber, are citizens who can be active. They can vote, they can go to the ombudsman, they can move across the internal borders within the limits of the free movement regulations, etc.

Yet, institutional and other constraints on how one can effectively – as different from formally – express a point of view in the EU are multiple. There might hardly be any media interest in the issues raised. If there is high media interest, as for example in some cases of irregular immigrants protesting, then they might be presented as people who should not be allowed to speak since they are not really citizens in the formal sense or because they are presented as criminals or victims who need caring for rather than people with things to say about exclusions, discriminations, violence, injustice as is often the case with sex workers.

Institutionally the European Court of Justice plays an important role to give voice to injustice. Focus on legal processes at the EU level means that mobilising through conferences, demonstrations etc. needs to be broken down into a particular individual case. It takes the collective grievance out of the picture, hence the political statement is translated into legal stake of an individual’s rights.

Some groups are not well worked into the institutions: e.g. they have no contacts with political parties who will take up their case. The farmers usually succeed well in getting their voice heard but they are not only numerous and spectacular when demonstrating they also have well tuned in spokespersons and have strong contacts with particular political parties and governments. Here the idea is to highlight who is seen and heard as political actor and why and how sexuality, gender etc play into this invisibility and inaudibility. Also how issues around labour and the market logic are fundamental to EU citizenship; to highlight then why each of this groups is not seen or heard in terms of political actors/or as citizens

Does their not being seen or heard as political actors have to do with the mode in which they participate in the society? Let me ask this differently, is there a mode in which people are supposed to partake in politics and if so, how?

It is not just the mode of participating. It is also the institutional and political framing of the issue. Let’s return to the example of the sex workers and start with the importance of the institutional and political framing of the issue:

1. They were holding their conference in the European Parliament. They were given access because of working with an MEP. Yet, the attendance of MEPs was extremely low. They were present but not very visible or audible in a way. Why is that since their conference, demonstration, manifesto all nicely fit the idea of citizens actively and democratically (they did not use violence, they followed legitimate processes of voicing opinion, etc.) engaging the European Union as a political institution?

2. Sex workers where caught between criminal activity and being victims of trafficking. As victims they need caring for, therapy etc. to take them out of sex work rather than a framework protecting them from violence and abuse during their work. Victimhood draws in charity or paternalistic caring for. They are not seen as subjects with a claim to the right to hold rights or with projects that they actively pursue not only as individuals but as a collective group – a vision of what sex work should be …

If their practice is seen as criminal then they enter the criminal justice framework and are seen as an issue problem of public security rather than as a legitimate practice that needs to be politically heard, as a practice with the right to hold rights …

3. Sex work is controversial and some feminists oppose recognition of sex work as a legitimate form of labour. A group of Swedish MEPs tried on these grounds to block the event in the European Parliament. The more general point is that some issues are kept of the political agenda because the politicians oppose them or are uncomfortable with them.

4. The sex workers also challenged the citizenship notion of the EU by including immigrants from beyond the EU. This makes them an ambivalent political collectivity since only a number of them are formally European citizens. Challenges the institutional definition of who can be a citizen by emphasising that they all work in the EU despite some being irregular immigrants, some being from outside the EU and some being European citizens does not help with being recognised as a legitimate presence in the institutions.

The mode of participating is of course also important. But the sex workers did largely participate through what are generally recognised as proper channels for politically expressing a point of view. An example of a not recognised mode of political expression is migrants entering the EU not through the recognised channels, e.g. with visa, but by simply making the journey via land, sea or air. These so-called illegal immigrants, are now often framed as partly economic immigrants with no formal right to be on the EU territory, or as victims of traffickers. But moving in numbers to the EU is not seen as a political action. It is illegitimate practice that needs policing, even with the military intervening.

There are thus different modes of mobilising, some mobilisation is seen as legitimate and/or political while other is seen as non-political. For examples, farmers have staged violent protest which were not necessarily seen as legitimate expression of grievances but where nevertheless taken to be political. Some of the reasons I have already hinted at: spokesperson and farmer organisations being tied in with political parties. Irregular migrants however do not often succeed in gaining political voice.

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2.3 Claims from outside the EU’s borders – Turkey

The Open University — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

As we have mentioned earlier, acts of European citizenship need not take place inside the EU but can also take place outside its borders. Turkey is a good example here. To illustrate how acting out takes place in the courts in this case, let us take you to Turkey and let us examine this in case via Kurdish citizens.

In the following excerpt, we are looking at how Kurdish citizens of Turkey enact themselves as European by making claims to rights via the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). While reading the text, please note down the ways in which Kurdish citizens engage with the idea of both being European and of European citizenship.

The excerpt is from B. Isyar, Keyman, F. and B. Rumelili (2008), ‘Kurdish Acts of European Citizenship’, pp. 17-22, which can be found in its entirely here.

Kurdish Acts of European Citizenship

Activity 3

Reflect on the following points and make notes.

Acts of European citizenship need not be oriented towards the attainment of European Union citizenship or membership. For one to enact oneself as European, one need not be expressing a demand to be part of the European Union. On the contrary, one can enact oneself as a European citizen even by criticising, or expressing the wish to transform the Union. We have seen various examples of this throughout the report, such as when Kurdish citizens who are not satisfied with EU policies demand a different EU; this demand constitutes their act of European citizenship.
Belonging to Europe or being a European citizen has to be understood as a process of becoming. Although none of the members of the groups we mentioned are formal citizens of Europe, they all make demands as Europeans. At the moment they make these demands (irrespective of whether their demands are realised or not) they enact themselves as Europeans.
This implies that the various political subjectivities whose stability, universality, and givenness we often take for granted need to be rigorously questioned from two angles. First, we need to examine what kind of power relations construct these as given, a-temporal, and hence unchanging. Second, we need to interrogate the manner in which such subjectivities are enacted. This way, we can point to the challenges, constitution, modifications, and incessant transformations these subjectivities go through as they are enacted anew.
‘In the field of citizenship studies we need to begin interrogating not the granting of rights by institutions to already existing citizens, but the demanding of rights by subjects who enact themselves as citizens. It is such work that will help us reconceptualise citizenship, and understand its historical, temporal, and contestable nature’ (Isyar, Keyman, Rumelili 2008: 32).

Let us discuss some of these issues with Vicki Squire.

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Interview with Vicki Squire

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The idea for this interview is to demonstrate how the ideas above link to the issues of EU’s borders and territory.

The idea that EU citizenship is enacted by non-EU citizens who live outside of the EU, is fascinating but also puzzling. If non-citizens exact EU citizenship in Turkey, why at all call it European citizenship? Why don’t we call it Turkish citizenship?

This is a very interesting question, and in some senses one might call some of the claims of Kurds in Turkey in terms of Turkish citizenship. However, what is most interesting about research carried out by the scholars on the Enact project is that it shows how citizenship exceeds national boundaries. The national frame of reference does not suffice to understand people’s claims to rights, because they happen at several overlapping levels. For example, Kurds in Turkey actually work on Turkish citizenship by making appeals to European norms, and in this regard one cannot understand their claims simply in terms of the ‘relationship’ between individual and the state. This is also important when it comes to questions of European citizenship, because it shows that Europe and its institutions are more than those of the European Union. The Council of Europe, for example, enables Turkish citizens bring their claims within the framework of Human Rights and exercise what we call a ‘European citizenship’. The Council of Europe is not a European Union institution, but it still plays an important role here in the constitution of European citizenship by those who enact citizenship through claiming rights at the European level.

Let me clarify this – if Kurdish citizens or women’s NGOs in Turkey already participate in the debate on EU citizenship why is there such a controversy if Turkey should or not join the EU? Are we looking at this situation from a different perspective when we focus on acts of citizenship?

It is important to distinguish here between the European Union and Europe, and also to distinguish between institutionalised and critical enactments of European citizenship. The negotiation between Turkey and the EU regarding accession is an institutionalised process that largely occurs through state actors. However, the claiming of rights by Turkish citizens can bring to bear a more disruptive dimension to European citizenship that rejects the confinement of Europe to the Member States of European Union, while also troubling the assumption that accession will simply foster the inclusion of Turkish citizens. As the wider research across the Enact project demonstrates, even within the European Union significant contestations occur regarding the limitations of EU citizenship (the mobilizations of Roma and sex workers, for example, entail a challenge to such limitations). In this regard, an analysis focusing on acts of citizenship is not simply about the participation of actors whose status is already settled within a pre-existing political sphere. Rather it is about the very re-constitution of politics and citizenship through struggles that trouble existing maps of Europe.

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2.4 Claims by women’s NGOs

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After having looked at claims to European citizenship by Kurdish nationals in Turkey via the ECtHRs, let us now look at claims to European citizenship via other means. We will be discussing here the case of four women’s NGOs in Turkey and their claims of citizenship. These are the following. The Association for Supporting and Training Women Candidates, KADER. KADER is the only association in Turkey which works to encourage women to participate in the decision making bodies, such as parliament, local administration or syndicates. The second group is Women Entrepreneurs Association, KAGİDER. It was founded in 2002, as a sister association of Turkish Industrialists’ and Businessmen’s Association with the mission of developing women’s entrepreneurship and status in economic and social life. Third associations is a feminist association called Women’s Center, KAMER. It was founded as a support centre for women experiencing violence in Diyarbakır, a city in south-eastern Anatolia, in 1997. Over the years it expanded its activities to 23 provinces of Eastern and South-eastern Anatolia, both to districts and villages. Finally, the Capital City Women’s Platform. It is an independent Islamist woman’s organisation in Turkey founded in 1995. The Platform focuses on gender issues. The members’ work is concerned with issues such gender-based discrimination, gender equality, social and economic problems of women are all within the scope of the Platform.

The following excerpt is from Kanci, T., Bayraktar, D., Rumelili, B., and F. Keyman (2010) ‘Women in Turkey and their Acts of European Citizenship’ pp 26-33, which can be found here.

While reading, please note the modes in which Turkish women act out European citizenship and the type of demands they advance.

Women in Turkey and their Acts of European Citizenship

Activity 4

Reflect on the following points and make notes.

Turkish women do not formally hold the EU citizenship status. Nonetheless, they act out European citizenship by claiming the rights to women’s political participation, equality, freedom from violence and discrimination among others granted by the EU.
These claims have a double effect. First, they use the EU framework as a leverage to broaden the scope of women’s rights in Turkey. Second, the claims do not take the EU framework for granted but engage in enlarging EU gender based frameworks as well.
In doing so they challenge politically EU citizenship’s scope and content and, at the same time, participate in the making of European citizenship as citizens.

3 Conclusions: reshaping European citizenship

The Open University — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

In the previous section, we have discussed the ways in which European citizenship is enacted by non-citizens, on the streets and in the courts, and both inside and outside the EU territory. We have been able to observe how people ‘do’ citizenship by looking at how citizenship is enacted ‘on the ground’ rather than solely by EU institution or states. By having done so, we have been able to see that citizenship is dynamic and it is contended. Instead of being simply a status, different groups organise and mobilise in order to demand citizenship rights or to challenge the existing instituted regimes of rights. It is precisely through these contestations and negotiations that EU citizenship is made and remade. Moreover, it is in this process and through claiming rights that new citizens emerge and partake in making of European citizenship.

When we look at the citizenship from the perspective of acts of citizenship as we have done in this module, we are left with a number of questions as our old convictions about citizenship no longer hold. If, non-citizens as for example Kurdish citizens in Turkey are key to the making of European citizenship, where do the borders of the EU begin and end? Why still talk of citizenship if non-citizens ‘do’ citizenship too? What are the policy implications of acts of citizenship perspective on citizenship? How can mobilisation and contestation be part of democratic politics? Aren’t they the exact opposite of democracy?

Let us discuss some of these issues with Mike Saward.

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The idea to cover in this interview is about policy implications that arise of AoC and how they impact on the EU citizenship and European citizenship. The guiding thread is the question of democracy.

We have just finished speaking about remapping Europe and redrawing the boundaries of who is a citizens and who is not. If non-citizens are enacting themselves as European citizens, where does this leave those who already are European citizens? To put this different, acts of citizenship focuses on rupturing of established citizenship scripts. What are the implications of this for activist citizenship?

The idea here is to repeat again the notion of active and activist citizenship and explain them shortly (again). And raise the issue that activist citizenship can also be seen as an extension of active citizenship and explain why.

Could we then say that there are two aspects of European citizenship that we always need to take into consideration and that these are its legal and its political dimensions?

Here the idea is to show, by referring to the 4 cases, how both political and legal need to be taken in consideration as ‘acts of citizenship’ in some cases shape the legal status (as with the European Court of Justice), and in others challenge politically EU’s citizenship scope and content (such as those by Kurds and sex workers).

What are the policy implications of looking at citizenship from the perspective of acts of citizenship?

The idea here to convey is that claims to European citizenship and rights are enacted in a range of unexpected and unconventional ways, as well as through the courts. This is an ineradicable part of the development of European citizenship.

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References

The Open University — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 23:00:00 GMT

Andrijasevic, Rutvica, Aradau Claudia, Huysmans Jef and Squire Vicki ‘Unexpected Citizens: Sex Work, Mobility, Europe’ The full text of the report is available at http://www.enacting-citizenship.eu/ index.php/ sections/ deliverables_item/ 398/

B. Isyar, Keyman, F. and B. Rumelili (2008), ‘Kurdish Acts of European Citizenship’, pp. 17-22 http://www.enacting-citizenship.eu/ index.php/ sections/ deliverables_item/ 288/

Kanci, T., Bayraktar, D., Rumelili, B., and F. Keyman (2010) ‘Women in Turkey and their Acts of European Citizenship’ pp 26-33 http://www.enacting-citizenship.eu/ index.php/ sections/ deliverables_item/ 416/

Carrera, S. and Atgen, A. (2009) ‘Implementing of Directive 2004/38. A Proliferation of Different Forms of Citizenship?’ http://www.enacting-citizenship.eu/ index.php/ sections/ deliverables_item/ 338/

Acknowledgements

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Cover image: Nicolas Raymond in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence.

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Introduction

Learning outcomes

1 Acts of citizenship

Transcript: Engin Isin

2 Claims to citizenship

2.1 Sex workers

Activity 1

Transcript: Interview with Claudia Aradau

2.2 Courts

Activity 2

Transcript: Interview with Jef Huysmans

2.3 Claims from outside the EU’s borders – Turkey

Activity 3

Transcript: Interview with Vicki Squire

2.4 Claims by women’s NGOs

Activity 4

3 Conclusions: reshaping European citizenship

Transcript: Interview with Mike Saward

Keep on learning

Study another free course

Take your studies further

What’s new from OpenLearn?

References

Further reading

Acknowledgements