Peter J. Spiro (Temple University – James E. Beasley School of Law), The End of Citizenship As We Have Known It, Rutgers L. Rev. (forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Working from Linda Bosniak’s canonical framing of citizenship, this essay rebalances the four perspectives of legal status, rights, political activity, and collective identity in light of recent developments. The essay argues that citizenship as rights, political activity, and collective identity is now in a state of freefall. While these three elements are dissipating, the salience of citizenship as legal status has magnified. This is not a normatively neutral adjustment. Rights, political activity, and collective identity have supplied a virtuous tripod for the institution. It was only on this tripod that citizenship’s valence as legal status has been morally sustainable. It is the legal status of citizenship that centers citizenship’s formalism, which has no essential normative content. Status also highlights the binary nature of citizenship status. Some people have it, some people do not. So long as privileges attach to the status, citizenship translates into inequality. That inequality has been tolerable so long as its virtuous functions remained in place. Once they are gone, citizenship loses its normativity.
The essay then turns to the development of citizenship alternatives. As citizenship on the domestic front faced new challenges, some sketched the possibility of transnational substitutes as a byproduct of globalization. Although transnational and non-state venues may present citizenship-type attributes over the longer run, any such shift will be tectonic. Transnational developments have been a stressor on citizenship within the state, disrupting the dimensions of rights, politics, and identity. But those global spheres have not developed to carry the weight of an institution that was itself centuries in the making. In the meantime, we are left with a kind of citizenship interregnum, a scary prospect against the scary challenges that the world faces now on so many fronts.
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