Citizenship Studies

ISSN: 1362-1025 (Print) 1469-3593 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccst20

Citizenship for all

Barry Hindess

To cite this article: Barry Hindess (2004) Citizenship for all, Citizenship Studies, 8:3, 305-315,
DOI: 10.1080/1362102042000257023

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 Citizenship Studies, Vol. 8, No. 3, September 2004, pp. 305–315

Citizenship for All

BARRY HINDESS

Peter Nyers has suggested that the title of this special issue, ‘What’s Left of
Citizenship?’, can be interpreted in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is a
question of what remains of citizenship after the securitization of political
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communities which followed, or was greatly reinforced by, 9/11. It is also, we

might add, a question of what remains after the neo-liberal reforms of the latter
part of the twentieth century. On the other hand, it is a question of what is to
the left of the citizenship which has been fostered by these changes. What is
there in the concept and the practices of citizenship which can serve as a vehicle
for resisting, or at least for deploring, what citizenship has now become, and
what scope does it provide for progressive alternatives?
The papers included here have shown how securitization has served to
normalize new techniques of control and surveillance; suggested that it estab-
lishes a new relationship between sovereignty and bio-power; offered a fresh and
revealing perspective on securitization through comparison and contrast with an
earlier regime of social security; and argued that the neo-liberal subject is itself
predicated on a subject of a rather different kind, the neurotic subject, and that
it is this subject which programs of securitization have directly targeted. There
is much in these papers which is valuable and instructive, and not a lot which
I would wish to dispute. Rather than engage directly with the detail of their
arguments, then, my comments suggest another, complementary, perspective
from which the contemporary condition of citizenship might be viewed.
I can introduce this perspective by noting, first, that most academic writings
on citizenship focus on developments in a small number of Western states or in
the European Union, and these four papers offer no exception. This somewhat
parochial focus is hardly surprising, given the weight of academic resources
gathered together in these states. It is necessary and important that we examine
conditions where we live, and sometimes that we campaign to change them. We
should also recognize, however, that this concentration of resources itself reflects
the privileged position of these states in the international order. It is all the more
important, then, that these states should not appear as the unmarked terms in our
discussion. We should take care not to treat what is happening to citizenship in
the prosperous Western states, and still less in the English-language ones among
them, as if these developments were somehow typical of the condition of
citizenship in the world today, or represented its future.
I note, secondly, that both interpretations of our organizing question, ‘What’s
left of citizenship?’, rest on the positive valorization of a certain—unsecuritized,
Barry Hindess, Department of Political Science, Australia National University, Canberra, Australia,
ACT 0200; e-mail: b.hindess@anu.edu.au

ISSN 1362-1025 Print; 1469-3593 Online/04/030305-11  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd 305
DOI: 10.1080/1362102042000257023
 Barry Hindess

pre-neo-liberal—understanding of citizenship, on the view that, suitably under-

stood, citizenship is clearly a good thing. My aim is to unsettle this valorization
by focusing, first, on the divisive or exclusive character of citizenship regimes,
and second, on the negative view of other ways of life which this valorization
of citizenship commonly suggests. I have discussed the first issue elsewhere and
will deal with it only briefly here. The second has a continuing relevance in the
international sphere, but it has a particular bearing on the condition of indige-
nous peoples in Canada and the United States (and, indeed, throughout the
Americas) and in Australia, where I now live (Helliwell and Hindess, 2002).
Before we turn to these issues, however, the first section of this paper distin-
guishes two very different ways in which the valorization of citizenship has
come to be associated with progressive politics: through the relatively modest,
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contextual view that the promotion of citizenship has often seemed like a good
idea in the circumstances, and through the more ambitious, universalistic view
that citizenship is a desirable end for all of humanity.

What’s So Great about Citizenship?

Wherever there have been citizens, the states or cities to which they belong have
governed populations and territories which included significant numbers of
non-citizens: the slaves, freedmen and resident aliens of the Greek polis, the
slaves and subject peoples of the early Roman empire, the serfs who escaped to
the cities of medieval Europe, and the legal and illegal migrants in contemporary
states. Within these states or cities, citizenship has been one amongst a number
of legal statuses and it has carried with it distinct advantages in terms of rights,
liberty, protection and, in many cases, a capacity to participate in the government
of the state or city concerned.1 Among the Greeks, politics was seen as an
activity which was confined to citizens, and sometimes to a small minority
among them, and a related view of politics can be found in later cases of
citizenship. However, as Engin Isin (2002) has shown, the line between citizen-
ship and various lesser statuses was always itself subject to struggle. This, of
course, suggests a broader view of politics than a focus on the conditions or the
conduct of citizens themselves would provide.
More importantly, at least for the purposes of this discussion, the history of
struggles over citizenship suggests a modest sense in which the forces pressing
for an expansion of citizenship can be described as progressive. They are
progressive, in this sense, because they are seen as leading to an improvement
in social conditions which is recognized as such by the people concerned. Even
when, as usually happened, the expansion of citizenship involved a correspond-
ing dilution of the privileges which the condition of citizenship entailed, it could
still be seen as improving the conditions of significant numbers of non-citizens.
More recent struggles within Western states, over the extension of the franchise,
rights for women, and the development of welfare states—the development, in
Marshall’s terms, of the social rights of citizenship—could also be seen as
progressive in this modest sense. So, too, could most of the struggles for
independence within the modern European empires. Since the modern European
empires distinguished between citizens and non-citizen subjects, movements
aiming to establish independent states of their own for subject peoples could also
be seen as seeking to secure the privileges of citizenship for these peoples.
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I want to suggest that the judgments sketched in the preceding paragraph

could all be seen as circumstantial, that is, as depending on the circumstances in
which citizenship seems to be on offer. They depend, most obviously, on the
existence of cities, states or empires in which the distinction between citizen and
subject plays an important governmental role or in which that distinction has a
definite popular appeal, as in much of modern Europe before the emergence of
almost universal franchise in the early twentieth century.
Yet to say that the judgment is circumstantial is also to suggest that there may
well be circumstances in which the decision could go the other way. It is not
difficult to find cases in which people appear to have preferred a way of life that
did not involve citizenship, or involved it only in a weaker form. Many Greeks
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of the classical period lived under Persian rule in Asia Minor, and, while there
were certainly some revolts against Persian rule, we have no reason to suppose
that they would all have preferred the citizenship enjoyed by those who lived in
the free cities.2 Many others lived in cities ruled by tyrants, cities in which the
self-governing aspect of citizenship was much reduced, and, in some cases at
least, the citizens had clearly chosen this option. Or again, in the later years of
the Western Roman Empire, whole communities of citizens opted for the
non-citizen alternative offered by the local barbarians. It is tempting to read this
last example as showing simply that the advantages of citizenship depend on the
presence of a state both willing and able to secure them. Yet it also shows that
many living on the fringes of the Empire or just outside it, and who had seen
what citizenship had to offer, nevertheless preferred a way of life which was not
organized around that institution.
In the early modern period, civic republicanism promoted the image of the
citizen as political activist and warrior, arguing that the liberty of the citizens
depends on the liberty of their city, and thus on the active involvement of
citizens in their own government and also, when required, in defense of the city
against outsiders. Yet, as Hobbes (1968, p. 266) reminds us, there is no reason
to suppose that the citizens of Luca, an Italian city which had LIBERTAS
emblazoned above its gates, found rule by their fellow citizens any less intrusive
than the authoritarian rule which prevailed in Constantinople. The implication is
that some might have preferred the security of the latter condition to the dubious
advantages of active citizenship. Many years later, according to his own speech
on the scaffold, Charles the First, King of England, was executed for taking the
view that while the liberty of the people was important, upholding that liberty
was his business, not theirs.3 There was clearly significant support for this view
among his subjects. Later still, when the French Revolution tried to export
citizenship to other parts of Europe, it met with popular support in some quarters
and popular opposition in others.
Throughout the history of the modern European empires there were persistent
reports of Europeans who deserted their own side and chose to live with the
natives. These continued well after the Europeans had begun to think of
themselves as citizens and the distinction between citizen and non-citizen subject
had become an important aspect of imperial government. In these cases,
individuals appear to have forsaken the joys of citizenship in favour of ways of
life in which the concept and practice of citizenship had no place. On the other
307
 Barry Hindess

side of the imperial divide, most of those who resisted the initial imposition of
European rule were not fighting for citizenship although, as I noted above, the
later independence movements could be seen as aiming to achieve states of their
own, and thus the privileges of citizenship within them, for subject peoples. Yet
even in Western states today, when the advantages of citizenship might seem to
have been well established, there are indigenous people who prefer their own
way of life to the supposed benefits of citizenship (Alfred, 1999)—as, of course,
there are in other parts of the world. There are also indigenous groups
campaigning, not unreasonably, to have things both ways, to be granted the
benefits of equal citizenship and to retain significant elements of their own way
of life.
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The judgments made in these cases, whether in favour of citizenship or against

it, can be readily understood in circumstantial terms, that is, as a matter of
people examining the options that seem to be available and choosing one or
another on the basis of what they have to offer. If we were to describe the choice
in favour of citizenship as progressive in the modest sense noted above—that is,
as representing an improvement in the eyes of the people concerned—then we
should also be willing to describe the contrary choice in similar terms. There is
nothing that is progressive, in this modest sense of the term, about citizenship
as such: it all depends on the circumstances.4
In practice, of course, citizenship has often been regarded as progressive in a
far more substantial sense. It has been seen, in the dreams of liberals and
socialists alike, as representing an important stage in the progress of humanity
towards the fullest realization of human capacities. Citizenship tends to be
represented here as a desirable condition for all of humanity, in principle if not
always just yet in practice, and also to be associated with civilization and
improvement. As a result, those who oppose the expansion of citizenship or who
fail to acknowledge its advantages tend to be seen as reactionary, aiming to
defend sectional interests against the greater good of humanity, or else as
insufficiently civilized to appreciate the benefits of citizenship, or both. This
more substantial view of the progressive character of citizenship clearly belongs
to a self-referential discourse of the civilized. It is the perception of those who
regard themselves both as superior to others who are not yet citizens and as
willing to admit these others to their privileged condition, at least in principle.
One of the clearest and most honest expressions of this perspective appears in
the account of nature’s secret plan for humanity set out in Immanual Kant’s Idea
for a Universal History (1970). Nature’s aim, he tells us, is to achieve the
eventual realization of man’s natural capacities by means of the progressive
establishment throughout the world of citizenship within constitutional states.
Kant’s argument here suggests that those of us who have achieved the status of
citizen should be seen not only as further advanced beyond the initial state of
nature than the rest of humanity, but also as most fully realizing our natural
human capacities.
This second, more substantial usage of the term ‘progressive’ is, of course, a
fairly recent development. Any reading of ancient and medieval struggles over
citizenship which presented them as progressive in this sense would have to be
seen as a retrospective construction. In the contemporary world, dominated by
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 Citizenship for All

the Western system of states and the discourses of civilization which it promotes,
it may be difficult for us to disentangle this universalistic view of the benefits
of citizenship from the more modest, circumstantial, view with which I began
this section. It is important to make the effort for, while this modest view seems
eminently defensible, the more substantial alternative has a great deal to answer
for. Both will often lead to the view that citizenship should be defended and
even expanded further but, as our discussion of the negative aspects of citizen-
ship will show, there will also be cases in which they lead to very different
conclusions.
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The Negative Side of Citizenship

Divide and Rule
The papers in this special issue have addressed the exclusive and divisive
character of citizenship in connection with securitization. They have focused, in
particular, on the way securitization leads to the representation of the non-citizen
not only as other, and thus as not enjoying the rights and privileges of
citizenship, but also as a serious potential threat. The divisive character of
citizenship has also been addressed, in rather different terms, in William
Walter’s discussion of migration and mobility. The problems associated with this
aspect of citizenship are widely acknowledged, and I need mention only a few
of them here (cf. Hindess, 2000a, 2002). Perhaps the most important point to
make is that while many of these problems can be observed within the practices
of individual states—as they are, for example, in most of the papers presented
here—they also reflect structural features of the modern system of states.
At this level, citizenship can be seen as part of a supra-national regime of
government, which operates in part by promoting the rule of territorial states
over populations, thereby dividing humanity into, on the one hand, the citizens
of diverse states and, on the other, small but significant minorities of migrants,
refugees and stateless persons. Citizenship operates here as a divisive practice,
separating the citizens of a state not only from the citizens of all other states but
also from the non-citizen residents who occupy a lesser status within the state
itself (Isin, 2002). The institution of citizenship requires each state, in effect, to
be particularly responsible for looking after its own citizens. This view promotes
a correspondingly exclusive sense of solidarity among the citizens themselves. In
the prosperous societies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe,
this sense of solidarity served both as one of the foundations for the development
of social security and as one of its principal objectives. It is tempting to suggest
that this sense of solidarity is central to what William Walters calls domopolitics,
a rationality of government focused on the image of the state as home. This, in
turn, suggests that domopolitics should be seen as an integral part of the
international citizenship regime.
The role of citizenship within this supra-national regime reflects the achieve-
ments of European imperialism in bringing the greater part of the world’s
territories and populations directly or indirectly within the remit of the European
states system. Racialized distinctions between citizen and non-citizen subject
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 Barry Hindess

played a fundamental part in the administration of the modern European empires,

at least in their later years (Mamdani, 1996). The subsequent spread of indepen-
dence effectively displaced these distinctions in favour of more complex, but no
less racialized, distinctions among and between the citizens of different states.
I’ll come back to this point. What should be noted here is that while the
achievement of independence dismantled one aspect of imperial rule—the
subordination of substantial non-European populations to rule by European states
while—it consolidated their incorporation within the states system itself. The
state, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note, is ‘the poisoned gift of national
liberation’ (2000, p. 135). We shall see that the position of post-colonial states
within the contemporary states system has important implications for our
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assessment of the progressive character of citizenship today.

This supra-national perspective also helps us to recognize that the government
of a state is not restricted to the activities of the state itself or to developments
within its borders. Government also appears in the organization of relations
between states. The rights of states to manage their own affairs, for example,
have always been heavily qualified (as rights commonly are) by a corresponding
set of responsibilities to what is often called the ‘international community’—that
is, to the overarching system of states to which they belong. This point gives a
very different twist to the standard Aristotelian view of the citizen as both ruler
and ruled. Not only are there important respects in which citizens are not the
collective rulers of the state to which they belong—as, in fact, has always been
the case—but, to the extent that they do rule, this serves to reinforce their
subordination to agencies and forces over which they have little real control.5
Moreover, as with other regimes of government which possess no controlling
centre—the workings of an established market or of civil society, for example—
some members of the modern system of states are clearly more equal than
others.
We can note, finally, that if each state is primarily responsible for looking
after its own this suggests that it does not have the same responsibility for
looking after others. Thus, while acknowledging that we may all have some
responsibilities towards the populations of other states, the modern system of
states treats these as being of secondary importance at best. It suggests to the rest
of the world that the people of states such as Afghanistan, Burundi or
Bangladesh should be regarded as having primary responsibility for their own
condition and that if their states fail them—especially if they fail them in a
manner which appears to threaten the interests of other states—then it may be
necessary for the international community to step in and sort them out. We might
also note that there is a remarkable denial of history and, indeed, of responsi-
bility at work in this perception.
These last two points alert us to a further sense in which citizenship can be
seen as divisive: it separates the citizens of prosperous Western states from
poorer citizens elsewhere. William Walters suggests in his concluding remarks
that domopolitics might be seen ‘not as that which comes first … but as itself a
reaction’, an attempt ‘to uphold a statist conception of citizenship in the face of
social forces that are tracing out other cultural and political possibilities’.
Perhaps. There are certainly some striking elements of reaction in the contem-
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 Citizenship for All

porary Western elaboration of domopolitics. Yet, as my earlier comment will

have indicated, I suspect that domopolitics itself has a longer history, stretching
back to the origins of the modern states system.
I noted earlier that the distinction between citizens and subjects played an
important part in the administration of the modern European empires. One of its
roles was precisely to facilitate the mobility of the former between the different
parts of the empire while severely restricting the mobility of the latter. Recent
efforts to ease the movements of their own citizens within the states of the
European Union, and of business people and the prosperous throughout much of
the world, seem to rest on a similar distinction between those for whom
inter-state mobility is to be enabled and even encouraged, within certain limits,
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and a substantially larger remainder for whom it is to be strictly controlled. This

last point returns us to the association between citizenship and civilization, and
thus to another negative side of citizenship.

Superiority and Difference

The cosmopolitan figures of the European enlightenment may have proclaimed
their commitment to humanity in general but they nevertheless shared a powerful
‘intellectual investment in the idea of a common European civilisation’
(O’Brien, 1997, p. 2). They rarely found any difficulty in combining their
universalistic understanding of citizenship with the view that much of humanity
was not yet—and in some cases might never be—ready for this condition. Yet
the attributes and capacities which were thought to so clearly distinguish citizens
from the rest of humanity were not seen as inhering in them as individuals.
Rather they were thought to be human qualities which were natural, and thus in
some sense universal, but also of a kind that had to be carefully nurtured and
cultivated. This view suggests that, without the discipline, education and support
provided by the institutions of civilized society, these qualities could not be
expected to properly develop. It suggests, in particular, that they are unlikely to
be well-developed among the inhabitants of less civilized societies or, for that
matter, among the less cultivated members of civilized societies themselves. The
Freudian view of civilization as repression, briefly cited in Engin Isin’s account
of the neurotic citizen, offers an interesting modern variation on this theme. It
suggests that those who are less civilized will also be less repressed and thus,
contrary to much anthropological evidence (for example, Helliwell, 2000), that
tribal peoples have a less developed capacity for self-control than the civilized
denizens of the modern West.
This elitist view of the citizen—as one who embodies qualities which are
thought to be natural (and therefore universal) and yet relatively uncommon—
has a distinguished history in Western political thought. Aristotle describes man
as ‘by nature a political animal’, by which he means ‘a member of a polis’:
And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state,
is either a bad man or above humanity, he is like the ‘Tribeless,
lawless, heartless one’ whom Homer denounces’. (1988, 1253a,
pp. 3–7)
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 Barry Hindess

The suggestion here is not simply that humans will naturally tend to form
themselves into groups. It is the more substantial claim that they will, over time,
form themselves into what would now be called societies, that is, into discrete
and relatively self-contained collectivities, each endowed with its own particular
customs and ways of life.
Nevertheless, while describing the polis as a natural collectivity in this sense,
Aristotle also presents it as a relatively unusual development. Not only, in his
view, had much of humanity not advanced beyond the lesser forms of human
collectivity, the family or the village, but many of those who had done so
belonged to states that were tyrannical and deformed. The polis, and the politics
which develops within and around it, is therefore seen not only as natural, but
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also as the product of a particular and distinctive history. Carl Schmitt’s

understanding of the political in terms of the distinction between friend and
enemy, which plays an important part in Benjamin Muller’s discussion of the
impact of securitization, is a variation on this Aristotelian association between
politics and the polis. The polis is a self-contained community, sufficing, in
Aristotle’s words, ‘for the purposes of life’ (1988, 1275b, pp. 19–22), and it is
this sense of boundedness that is required for the operation of Schmitt’s
friend–enemy distinction. Where boundaries are not so clear, as in much of
medieval Europe, it seems that the political cannot exist.
By the time of the European enlightenment, the relatively simple classical
distinctions between a true form of state and other, lesser, human collectivities
had been elaborated into complex and sophisticated schemas of conjectural or
theoretical history.6 The details of these various schemas need not concern us
here but they invariably saw humanity as moving from a condition of savagery
through various stages of barbarism to the civil or political societies of early
modern Europe, and they relied on a careful and refined form of speculation to
explain many of the steps within this progression. Immanual Kant’s Idea for a
Universal History provides a familiar and instructive example of this perspec-
tive.
Kant sets out to show that behind the apparently ‘senseless course of human
events’ it is nevertheless possible to identify a ‘purpose in nature’ (p. 42).
Nature’s secret plan, it seems, is to ensure that the history of humanity
eventually results in a world federation of constitutional republics, a condition in
which all men are citizens. In making this claim, Kant draws on the Aristotelian
views of nature as teleological and of man as a social animal. The latter suggests,
in particular, that man’s natural capacities cannot be fully developed in any one
individual without also being developed in others. Kant follows Aristotle not
only in identifying the natural capacities which most distinguish man from other
creatures as those of rationality and moral autonomy, but also in claiming that
these capacities can be properly developed only in an appropriate form of
political community. Where Aristotle sees the polis as providing the necessary
conditions for the proper development of human capacities, and therefore as the
highest form of human community, Kant sees the constitutional republic in
essentially similar terms. However, since the internal development of a consti-
tutional republic will be constrained, like that of a Greek polis, by its relation-
ships with other political unities, Kant takes the view that human capacities can
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be fully developed among the citizens of an individual republic only if it

inhabits a world of such republics. The fullest development of human capacities
thus requires a world in which all people are citizens. Kant’s point is
not that humanity has now reached this stage but rather that it was now
possible for enlightened individuals—such as Kant himself and the more
perceptive of his readers—to discern the general character of nature’s plan to
develop those capacities in the course of a long process of historical develop-
ment.
This historicist and elitist view of humanity was the common currency of
Western social and political thought, infecting even its most radical and
revolutionary varieties, throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth
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centuries, and it remains influential in many quarters today. If I have used the
work of Kant to represent this broader tendency in European thought, this is not
to suggest that his own writings were especially significant in the modern
development of citizenship. My point is simply to show that the apparent
universalism of citizenship discourse is entirely compatible with such histori-
cism. The elitist perception which it fosters of the relative incapacity of those
who do not already exercise the rights and duties of citizenship played an
important part in even the more enlightened practices of European imperial
administration, as it did, of course, in the administration of European populations
themselves. It clearly underlies the imperial distinctions noted earlier between
citizens and non-citizen subjects. The end of empire and the consequent
globalization of citizenship may have obliterated these particular distinctions but
they have hardly destroyed the elitist view of humanity on which they were
based.
We can see the continuing effects of this elitist view of humanity at two rather
different governmental levels. First, the perception that some societies
are considerably less advanced than others, and consequently that the individuals
who belong to them (and perhaps even their descendants in other parts of
the world) may not yet be fit to govern themselves, clearly plays a
significant part in the politics of all modern democracies, especially in the
treatment accorded to non-Western immigrants and indigenous peoples. Second,
the imperial project of governing and in certain respects improving the
character of subject peoples may no longer be pursued in its original guise but
it nevertheless informs the practices of Western states, working now through
a more remote set of instruments. Indirect rule within imperial possessions
has been superseded by an even less direct form of decentralized rule, in which
the citizens of post-colonial successor states are governed through sovereign
states of their own (Hindess, 2002). It is in these states that the destructive
impact of neo-liberalism on citizenship has been most severe. Democracy is
certainly an integral part of the good governance program promoted by the
World Bank and other development agencies. Yet ‘good governance’ also aims
to ensure that states’ freedom of action, and thus the ability of their citizens to
determine what their own states might do, is severely constrained by national
and international markets, credit-rating agencies and international financial
agencies.
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 Barry Hindess

Conclusion
I began this paper by drawing a distinction between two senses in which the
development and expansion of citizenship might be regarded as progressive:
circumstantial and universalistic. Citizenship is progressive in the first sense to
the extent that it delivers an improvement in conditions which is recognized as
such by the people concerned, and in the second because it is thought to be an
important stage in the development of humanity. These perspectives are not
always easy to disentangle, and much of the modern experience of citizenship,
first in Western states, and then more broadly through the achievement of
independence, might well be seen as progressive in both senses.
I went on the consider some of the negative aspects of citizenship, focusing
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first on its exclusive and divisive character and second on the elitist view of
humanity to which Western understandings, and Western practices, of citizen-
ship have been so closely associated. The problems with the former are well
known, while the latter is clearly related to the universalistic view of the
progressive character of citizenship. They are two sides of the one coin. If we
wish to avoid the elitism, as I think we should, then we must also steer clear of
the universalism on which it rests.
As for the more modest, circumstantial perspective, I have argued that if there
are circumstances in which we might judge citizenship to be progressive, there
will be others in which we should take a contrary view. Let me conclude by
suggesting that we keep both possibilities in mind when assessing the condition
of citizenship in the world today. Citizenship has always been a matter of being
governed, at least as much as it has been one of participating in the work of
governing. It is a matter today of being governed by one’s own state or city, and
by agencies and forces operating within it. It is also a matter of being governed
by agencies and forces acting at a supra-national level. This last condition clearly
inhibits the ability of states to manage their own affairs. I don’t want to suggest
that such constraint is necessarily a bad thing. My point, rather, is that the
character of the international governmental regime leaves far too much to be
desired. Not only are the international markets and the major international
agencies dominated by Western interests and concerns, but many of these
concerns are themselves structured by the elitist view of humanity outlined
above, and thus seem to provide a readily available licence for Western
intervention.
To make these points is not to deny that the globalization of citizenship has
elements which are progressive in the modest sense. In a world dominated by the
system of states, the condition of those who are without citizenship, or without
a state capable of securing its benefits, is hardly an attractive one. However, it
is to insist that, if we are concerned for the future of the modestly progressive
elements of citizenship in the world today, then we should treat the international
regime as a major target for reform. It is also to insist that the idea of citizenship
should be accorded no special privileges of the kind it receives, for example, in
the discourse of contemporary cosmopolitanism. I noted earlier that the cosmo-
politanism of the European enlightenment was a very superior affair, and I have
seen nothing to suggest that more recent variations on this theme have entirely
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escaped its underlying presumptuousness (cf. Bowden, 2003). Concern for the
welfare of humanity can be found in numerous cultural traditions, many of them
promoting solidarities that cut across the territorial boundaries of states. It is far
from clear that this concern is best pursued today primarily through the Western
idiom of citizenship.

Notes
1. Aristotle describes the citizen as someone who is ruler and ruled by turns. Yet we should be careful not
to see participation in government as the defining characteristic of Greek citizenship. Aristotle also insists
that the citizen ‘of necessity differs under each form of government; and our definition is best adapted to
the citizen of a democracy, but not necessarily to other states. For in some states the people are not
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acknowledged, nor have they any regular assembly, but only extra-ordinary ones’ (Aristotle, 1988, 1275b,
pp. 4–68).
2. Gore Vidal’s Creation (1981) offers a useful corrective to the now conventional celebration of the Greek
polis.
3. ‘For the People; and truly I desire their Liberty and Freedom as much as any Body; but I must tell you
that … ‘tis not for having a share in Government [Sirs] that is nothing pertaining to ‘em. A Subject and
a Sovereign are clear different things.’
4. David Scott has argued that ‘we have to give up the … presumption that liberalism and indeed democracy
(even a purportedly radical one) have any particular privilege among ways of organizing the political
forms of our collective lives’ (1966). His point applies equally well to citizenship itself.
5. There are many other reasons for this condition too, of course (Hindess, 2000b). The institutions of
representative government, for example, are clearly designed to ensure that citizens play a strictly
circumscribed role in the government of the state to which they belong.
6. Dugald Stewart (1980 [1793]) uses the term ‘conjectural history’ to refer especially to the work of Adam
Smith, but he clearly sees it as describing a more general movement in European thought.

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