PolificcdGeography, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp.

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Comment
Citizenship: all or nothing?

J.
SUSAN SMITH

Department of Geography, Universityof Edinburgh, Drummond Street,

Edinburgh EH8 9XP, UK

The papers in this issue all help to link the geography of welfare restructuring to a growing
interest in the politics of identity. My aim in commenting on them is to assess whether, and
to what extent, the idea of citizenship can contribute to, or benefit from, this task. There
are two big questions. First, what is the meaning of the concept of citizenship, and how
useful is it for political geography? Second, assuming it has some analytical and normative
value, which of the many challenges in political theory and practice does the notion of
citizenship entitlement best help us to address?

The meaning of citizenship

The literature on citizenship often seems confusing because the concept means different
things to different people, not least because of the radical (and also conservative)
rethinking to which the idea of citizenship has recently been subject (Heater 1991; Roche
1992). Much of the ensuing debate is reflected in the papers comprising this volume. The
important thing to recognize is that terminological and conceptual differences in the use of
the idea of citizenship are not neutral: there is an ideological struggle for control over the
meaning of citizenship, and these meanings cannot be abstracted from the specific
(geographically differentiated) political contexts in which the terms of citizenship are
generated. There is, in short, a political geography of citizenship which is present at all
spatial scales from the international (as discussed by Kofman) to the personal (as
examined by Bell).
The key ideological struggle underpinning these political geographies surrounds a
tension between the language of rights and entitlements as examined by both Bell and
Kofman, and the language of obligations and altruism, which is associated with active
citizenship and the Citizen’s Charter, as critically discussed by both Kearns and Fyfe. While
the differences between the two perspectives (social democratic, on the one hand, and
neo-liberal on the other) seem obvious (and are elaborated by Lister [nd.]), my point is
that, as analysts, we need to emphasize these dilferences and ensure that our language
clarifies rather than obscures the distinctions. This is important because much of the
political rhetoric associated with the term-from all positions on the political
spectrum-has precisely the opposite function.
The papers collected in this issue thus urge us to recognize that political and intellectual
discussions of citizenship at the moment relate to three quite different concepts: the
 all or nothing?
Comment: citizenship: 191

guarantee of an entitlement to participate in society; the shift to individual and collective

‘self-provisioning’; and the associated cornmodification of public services. The papers
illustrate further not only that the last two ideas are quite distinct from the first, but also
that attempts to secure a universal right to participation usually prove incompatible with
attempts to meet citizenship entitlements via voluntary altruism or by way of the market. It
is politically convenient, therefore, but ultimately misleading, to clothe the last two ideas in
the language of citizenship, and academics might usefully take the lead in separating out
and clarifying these different and opposed concepts. The first idea-of citizenship as the
guarantee of an entitlement to participate, the idea most associated with the development
of welfare state societies-has, as Ignatieff (1989: 65) shows, been part of ‘a struggle to
transform the liberty conferred by legal rights into the freedoms guaranteed by shared
social entitlements’. There is a presupposition that a state-like body is required to secure
universal access to these entitlements. The second two ideas, however, contain the
argument that there are three equally viable ways in which the wealth, resources and
opportunities associated with citizenship entitlements may be dispensed in order to
enable people fully to participate in the life of a community.
The most effective distributive mechanism is held to be the market. This, however, is
only good for certain types of exchange. However much you need S20 worth of services,
you cannot have them for 510 worth of cash (unless you happen to be buying your council
house). Access to the goods dispensed through the market is thus constrained by income,
which is not necessarily related to effort, and can be depressed by the kind of bad fortune
that anyone might experience. Therefore, we generally agree that the market cannot be the
only means of guaranteeing an individual’s entitlements, and this is why the social
democratic vision is that ‘the modern capitalist economy positively require[s] the
citizenship of entitlement for its effecive functioning’ (Ignatieff, 1989: 65).
The neo-liberal perspective thus emphasizes the importance of at least one alternative to
the market. This is the voluntary sector, whose merits and drawbacks are discussed in
Kearns’s paper. The voluntary sector relies, in the best liberal traditions, on individual
altruism. This, of course, despite the rhetoric that surrounds and the faith that policy
makers invest in it, cannot be used to guarantee anyone a given level of welfare servicing.
What we are left with, then, is the sector that has traditionally defined and enforced
collective or social obligations-the state. Now, what becomes clear when reading these
four papers is that the reason why participation in society is not yet the same thing as
participation in a business community is because the idea of the social contract-for all its
faults and biases-penetrates beyond the commercial world, and acknowledges that there
are times when individuals simply cannot rely on themselves. Moreover, the reason
citizenship is about entitlements rather than charity is because, just as there are moments
when the personal resources of individuals are not adequate to meet their social needs, so
there are times when individuals cannot be relied on to provide for others voluntarily.
Citizenship entitlements therefore flow from the idea that there is a collective
responsibility for the individual’s needs which exists independently of mat individual’s
income or character. In short, ‘the history of the citizenship of entitlement is a history of
freedom, not primarily a history of compassion’ (Ignatieff, 1989: 72). And the appeal of the
idea to the political Centre and to the Left is that it makes a start in reconciling the
popularity of individualism with the imperative of social justice.
Kearns’s and Fyfe’s papers show clearly that there is little of this welfare ideal in the
rhetoric underpinning the neo-conservative notion of citizenship that is now in the public
gaze. The idea of ‘active citizenship’, for instance, insists that individuals have rights which
they may exercise only in return for fulfilling certain individual obligations. Kearns points
192 comment: citizw: all or nothing?

out that two of these sets of obligations relate to ‘caring’ at the level of the individual and to
the voluntary management of collectively enjoyed services. A third might relate to the
personal responsibilities associated with keeping safe, fit and well. What all this adds up to
is the discovery that active citizenship is a euphemism for self-provisioning-it is not a
mechanism for extending social entitlements, but one designed to replace social
obligations with voluntary altruism. The language of citizenship has been hijacked to the
principle of caring: the talk is about doing good, not about increasing those collective
obligations that make the extension of citizenship entitlements possible. Active citizenship
is about decreasing demand on a deliberately diminished public purse on the assumption
that those who have more resources as a consequence will share their good fortune at
times, and in spaces, of need. This is a fundamentally different conception of citizenship
from that embedded in the insurance principle that underpins the welfare ideal. The
language of compassion and caring is politically attractive and socially warming, but it
reduces entitlements to a matter of moral generosity when, constitutionally, it could (I
think should) be argued that they are a right.
What both Kearns and Fyfe show, then, is that active citizenship is a shift to
self-provisioning clothed in the language of obligation. It replaces entitlements with
charity, and it makes patronizing assumptions about the public’s inclination and ability
collectively and individually to maintain safety, health and welfare. Indeed, it entails the
misconception that the public do not already take these responsibilities seriously; and as
Bell’s paper shows, it uses this moral high ground to define just how responsible citizens
do (i.e. should) behave, and this-implicitly and explicitly-has the consequence of
curtailing some kinds of rights.
In return for fulfilling the obligations associated with active citizenship, people may,
under the neo-conservative model, expect certain standards of service from the public,
private and voluntary bodies concerned with providing collective goods. This is the
thinking behind the idea of a Citizen’s Charter, which claims to be about the more effective
use of public resources-about the de fmfo delivery of dejure entitlements. But, again,
what Fyfe’s paper shows us is that the Citizen’s Charter is really about the injection of
market principles into public services-services that were publicly funded in the first
place because provisioning via the market left needs unmet, and because charitable
provision undermined dignity. The Citizen’s Charter tells people what they should have
but, whereas the social democratic tradition argued that in order to secure this the market
had to be tempered by the state, the neo-liberal argument is that the route to success is to
remove the buffer of collective provisioning. The Citizen’s Charter is about quality control
on services that people pay for. Standards are maintained in theory because suppliers are
in competition for the consumer’s attention. This does not, however, guarantee any given
service being extended to any individual at the right place, at the right time or at an
affordable price.
In traditional and common usage, the idea of citizenship is associated with eligibility to
enjoy entitlements that are collectively recognized as legitimate (and therefore built into
the legal code, usually through the social contract), through ‘rights of access that are
enforceable. In practice the idea has been that these entitlement are, or should be,
sufficient to enable all eligible individuals to participate fully in the social, economic and
political life of their society. So, for me, the concept of citizenship entitlements adds
something to the concept of labour, work, business and enterprise, precisely because it is
about a collective effort-which may succed or fail, which may be realistic or futile,
achievable or Utopian-to provide individuals, irrespective of income, with the means to
participate in and shape the future of at least a part of society. Citizenship is not, in essence,
 co?nmenr:
citid@: all OT Twtbing? 193

about being in a community and deriving rights. It is about having the entitlements needed
to enable one to participate fully in the social, economic and political life of a society. This
meaning of citizenship is predicated on the existence of a state-like body and on a
social-contract-like agreement. Thought about in this way, the concept has analytical value
which, as Kofman shows, can be especially important in the anti-racist and feminist
critiques of the social contract (see also O’Connor, 1993; Orloff, 1993). It also has
normative value in that it can provide guidelines on what a society conducive to
participation should look like: it raises the possibility of regarding citizenship not simply as
something that is conferred or denied, but as something that is used strategically to secure
basic rights. Indeed, I think that much of the value of the papers in this issue is to force us
to think about the normative challenge that a reconstituted social democracy of citizenship
poses. How, for instance, do we determine what the entitlements owed to the public are?
How do we determine to whom they are available? How do we ensure that those eligible
to receive entitlements in theory can mobilize them in practice? These are all politically
contestable questions, but they will be easier to answer if we have a clear idea of the
difference between participating in society and living out an economy.

Applying the idea of citizenship

If we concentrate on the social democratic notion of citizenship, rather than on attempts to

redefine this in terms of neo-liberal and authoritarian values, then the papers collected
here suggest we face the following challenges:

1. finding a viable normative alternative to the neo-liberal model that recognizes the
importance of social obligations without undermining the integrity of the individual.
The problems of tackling this are best exemplified in Bell’s paper;
2. dealing with the fact that social rights are always the least formalized and most
ambiguous of the political constitution, and recognizing that such rights are negotiated
not only through time, but also over space. Space matters in the constitution of
citizenship and this has not been recognized sufficiently by the major theorists;
3. considering the extent to which the notion of citizenship might usefully be displaced by
a concept like Giddens’s ‘life politics’. Kofman’s paper-which emphasizes the
limitations of ideas about citizenship in the context of international politics and a global
economy-illustrates the importance of considering alternative visions of the struggle
for entitlements which currently clusters around the theme of citizenship. Certainly an
argument can be made either to broaden or to replace the concept to avoid its
margin&zing tendencies.

References

HFATER, D. (1991). Citizenship: a remarkable case of sudden interest. Parliu~ Ajjiiin 44, 140-156.
IGNATEFF,M. (1989). Citizenship and moral narcissism. The Politica’ Quartet@ 60,63-74.
LISTER,R (nd.). The Exclusiw Society. Citirensh@ and the Poor. London: Child Poverty Action Group.
O’CONNOR,J. S. (1993). Gender, cIass and citizenship in the comparative analysis of welfare state regimes:
theoretical and methodologicaI issues. BritishJournal of Sock&~ 44,501-518.
ORLOFF,A S. (1993). Gender and the social rights of citizenship. .kwicun Sockkgicul Review 58,303-32&X
ROCHE,M. (1992). Rethinking Cibd@. We&-e Ia!?ology and Change in Moabm Sociep. Cambridge: Polity
Press.