Equal Citizenship & Global Inequality: Is Reconciliation Possible?

There’s a tension at the heart of much moral thinking about citizenship. The tension concerns how those committed to the value of social and political equality ought to regard citizenship as a political ideal and as a social institution. In this post, I describe this tension, and discuss whether and how it might be resolved.

Since its inception, modern citizenship has been closely intertwined with equality. Emerging from the French Revolution, ‘citizenship’ supplanted the “essentially inegalitarian” society of the ancien régime, where one’s rights “depended on the social category to which one belonged.” Members of the second estate, the nobility, stood in one relation to the King of France, with one set of rights and privileges; members of the third estate stood in a quite different relation, with limited rights and privileges. In place of the feudal system, the institution of citizenship promised to forge a society of equals. That promise was marred by citizenship’s gendered and racial exclusions, though neither exclusion went unchallenged.

The great innovation of the Revolution, at least in aspiration, was, then, to create a society in which there was only one form of political membership, a single “abstract status, characterized by equality of citizens before the law”. This vision, imperfectly fulfilled, remains an attractive one. It thus remains no surprise that the struggle for equal citizenship continues to be central to contemporary egalitarian social movements, such as the American Civil Rights Movement to the movement for citizenship for undocumented Americans, as citizenship is a key marker of social and political equality.

Viewed domestically, then, citizenship appears as an at least aspirationally egalitarian status: one that, as I argue elsewhere, affirms, in a distinctively transparent fashion, the equal social status of each citizen by bestowing on each the same core rights and entitlements. Thus, while the equality at which citizenship aims might be better realized by, for example, making citizenship more inclusive, on this conception, the status of citizenship is an essential, positive feature of social and political life. It is a significant moral and social achievement.

Yet, there is a different way to view citizenship–not from the inside of a single society, but from the outside. Citizenship isn’t just a domestic institution; it is also an integral part of a global system of states characterized by deep spatial inequalities. Viewed globally, citizenship appears in a different light. As Joseph Carens provocatively argues,

In many ways, citizenship in Western democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal class privilege – an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances. To be born a citizen of a rich state in Europe or North America is like being born into the nobility in the Middle Ages….To be born a citizen of a poor country in Asia or Africa is like being born into the peasantry…Like feudal birthright privileges, contemporary social arrangements not only grant great advantages on the basis of birth but also entrench these advantages by legally restricting mobility, making it extremely difficult for those born into a socially disadvantaged position to overcome that disadvantage, no matter how talented they are or how hard they work.

Ayelet Shachar thus describes modern citizenship as a kind of a “birthright lottery”, which determines core aspects of one’s lives on the basis of the accident of birth. The consequences are stark. Economist Brank Milanovic has quantified lottery’s winnings by measuring what he calls the “citizenship premium”: just by being born in the United States rather than in Congo, a person would multiply her income by 93 times.

Yet, the inequality here isn’t just about economic distribution; it also comes with inequalities in rights. Kochenov and Lindeboom measure this via their Quality of Nationality Index, which provides a comprehensive ranking of each citizenship in terms of its internal value (economic opportunities, human development, and peace and stability) and the external value (including the number and quality of visa-free travel and…settlement destinations). Under a global mobility regime in which one’s citizenship shapes one’s ability to move and so whether one can exit one's (potentially oppressive) state, citizenship determines one's access to core rights and freedoms in the same way being born into the peasantry or nobility once did. Citizens, then, are hierarchically structured people’s status and opportunity in global social space, a fact that becomes all too apparent within the context of international mobility.

Thus, on the one hand, citizenship appears as a status integral to the maintenance of a society of equals domestically, while, on the other hand, citizenship seems essential to the preservation of a kind of unjust global hierarchy, a kind of citizenship apartheid or feudal privilege. How, then, should those who care about the idea of equality respond to this tension with regard to citizenship? Conceptually speaking, three different options seem open: apology, abolition, and reform.

Citizenship apologists respond that these global-egalitarian critiques of citizenship are misplaced. Citizenship is morally defensible, in short, because global equality does not matter in the way domestic equality does. While this position has been most common among political philosophers, it fails to take seriously the significance of equality as arequirement of global justice, and fails to genuinely contend with the perspectives of those who constitute the victims of citizenship–those who lose out on the birthright lottery.

Abolitionists, in contrast, resolve the tension the other way. They argue that egalitarian defenses are naive. Citizenship is indefensible because its egalitarian promise is undermined by its inegalitarian global roles. Citizenship ought to be abolished. As Dimitry Kochenov, the chief exponent of the abolitionist position puts it,

Given citizenship’s repugnant functions…, the next step from citizenship is not ‘replacing it.’ The next step from citizenship is no citizenship. Slavery, sexism, and racism cannot aspire to be “replaced” …Their functions are outright incompatible with the core values we hold dear. The same is true of citizenship.

This approach might seem radical, and indeed it is. However, at least according to one interpretation, Kochenov’s vision is more practical than one might think. Abolishing citizenship need not mean that we must do away with states and rights. Rather, it may simply mean that we should reorganize social relations on the basis of residence and that states should cease to police their borders with nationality based visa restrictions. Instead of arbitrarily assigning people a citizenship based on the accident of birth or the bloodline of one’s parents, people should be free to choose their place of residence and all who establish residence should be entitled to core legal protections.

Philosopher Ana Tanasoca expresses a similar idea, “each of the rights currently associated with citizenship is distributed completely independently of one another and never bundled up in the form of citizenship.” Were we to do this, citizenship as a legal category would “disappear”. This is, in some ways, a philosophically appealing vision. Yet, it is not clear whether we should, on reflection, endorse it.

To begin, the significant egalitarian critiques of citizenship target citizenship’s what we might call citizenship’s external function–the role citizenship plays globally–while the egalitarian defenses of citizenship depend on its internal functions–the role citizenship plays domestically. Yet, defending citizenship’s internal functions does not necessitate endorsing its external functions. It is conceptually possible to affirm citizenship while rejecting the state’s power to exclude people from its borders, for example. So, defenders of reforming citizenship might advocate for reforming citizenship, rather than abolishing it.

Moreover, some of citizenship’s internal functions are morally and politically important. Most notably, its egalitarian function of instantiating equality among those who live together in a single society is a function we have reason to defend. Abolishing citizenship would thus leave these functions unfulfilled. A system of disaggregated rights awarded to people based on residency is, for example, potentially compatible with quite significant inequalities in rights. Such inequalities threaten to undermine our ability to see one another as social equals. We risk returning, as it were, to a kind of modern ancien régime.

If, however, the abolitionist accepts this point, and argues instead that all residents should have equal rights, then it seems they have not argued for eliminating citizenship at all. Rather, they have argued for reforming it: instituting a form of social membership based solely on residency. But it is not clear that this is more desirable than alternative ways of allocating membership, which are not purely residency based.

Thus, the abolitionist position seems to face a dilemma: either the abolitionist alternative fails to realize the internal functions of citizenship, or the core insights of the abolitionist position can be adopted to reform citizenship without abolishing it altogether.

For these reasons, I favor a reformist response to the tension identified above. Reformists accept that egalitarian critiques of citizenship’s inegalitarian role in the contemporary world are valid. However, they contend that citizenship can be reformed to mitigate its globally inegalitarian roles while preserving its domestically egalitarian functions.

But what might an egalitarian-reformist proposal entail? In addition to opening up citizenship to all residents, at least after a limited waiting period, citizenship regimes can be reformed to be made more compatible with egalitarian commitments through the following kinds of measures.

First, a measure of global distribution is in order. As Ayletet Schachar argues, citizenship confers unearned benefits that are akin to inherited wealth; but inheritance taxes are generally easy to justify. Thus, the benefits of citizenship can be taxed and redistributed to help rectify” global wealth inequality and fund global redistribution of opportunity.

Second, and unequivocally, we need a world that allows greater freedom of mobility. More open borders would lead to a higher level of global equality, by allowing people to escape spatial inequalities–although there is some debate here about whether a strong right to freedom of movement is necessary for achieving this goal.

Finally, more speculatively, we might level-up the status of those who have low quality citizenship under the current regime. This could be done by instituting a robust form of global citizenship, institutionally backed by rights guarantees, although there are serious obstacles to designing and instituting such a status.

While there is something of an open question whether these measures would jointly suffice to resolve the tension between equal citizenship and global inequality, there is little doubt they would go a considerable distance towards doing so. Without such measures, we are, at best, floating on islands of equality, to which we police access, in a sea of injustice, in which we are often deeply complicit. Such a stance may be politically expedient, but, in a globalized world, it makes a mockery of the value of equality.