Multilevel Citizenship

Papers are welcome to consider citizenship not only of the state but also of substate, suprastate, or nonstate political communities. The rise of citizenship of the European Union has raised expectations that other regional integration efforts may also result in meaningful supranational rights. At the same time, many states, particularly federal or multinational ones, face demands for special regional or group-based statuses that directly contradict the ideal of equality before the law. Similarly, some cities are starting to reassert the most common meaning of citizenship, until current forms of statehood crowded out alternatives: a citizen meant a member of a city (citizen descends from the French cité and before that, the Latin cīvitās, the community of citizens) entitled to the privileges and rights of that city. The comparative history of citizenship provides rich examples of multilevel citizenship in theory and practice, although such examples are today often forgotten or obscured by the dominant narrative of a single and homogeneous, territorial, state-based citizenship. Much of social science accepts that, because the world is divided into sovereign nation-states, social scientists should study and understand the world according to that division rather than questioning the category by examining the construction of and limits to the geopolitical structures themselves. In addition to the empirical claim that nation-states are the prime way to study what is “social” in social science, there is sometimes the normative claim that “the community of citizens is the ideal political order” or the related claim that attempts to create other forms of citizenship are misguided because only a shared national identity can motivate citizens to work together. This repeats one of the central tenets of nationalism: every nation should have sovereignty over a national territory, and sovereignty is pure and indivisible. Yet state sovereignty, nation-based citizenship, and other institutions both public and private are being destabilized and even transformed as a result of globalization, new technologies, and increased mobility. Papers on this panel consider political projects that are not necessarily tied to particular states but rather exist over, under, around, and through them.