The Meanings of Citizenship

Abstract

It is no accident that this annual meeting is devoted to a grand advanced course in citizenship. As the twentieth century draws to a close, events conspire to demand that we be attentive to the meanings of citizenship. (So many historians responded so creatively to our invitation to explore those meanings that sessions on citizenship absorbed nearly two-thirds of the program.) The last great periods of attentiveness to citizenship in the United States occurred amid the massive immigration of the turn of the century and again in the late 1930s, when the flood of refugees from Nazi Germany challenged the residents of democracies to decide whom they would accept as fellow citizens. At the end of the Cold War, we again find ourselves in a time of extraordinary political fluidity. Is national citizenship, a concept that was invented in the era of the American and French revolutions, sufficiently resilient in a post-Cold War world? All over the globe individuals' rights as citizens are being recast. The status of citizen, which in stable times we tend to assume is permanent and fixed, has become contested, variable, fluid. Fluidity can mean advantage: Travelers holding the burgundy-colored European passport whisk through checkpoints; students in the European Union's Erasmus Project can wander across Europe as they pursue university degrees. We hear voices announcing that national citizenship will be a thing of the past; it's multinational citizenship that we need. But many elements of destabilized citizenships remain problematic. Ask the members of the United States Congress who voted for the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act how they have reconstructed the relationship between citizens and legal immigrants or, better yet, ask the citizen spouse of a legal immigrant.1 Ask the citizens of California who voted for Proposition 187, making radical changes in the relationship of citizens to undocumented aliens. Ask the citizens of Hong Kong. Two years ago, when we chose the theme of this meeting, we could not have predicted that the meanings of citizenship would be so destabilized.

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