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Supranational citizenship
Supranational citizenship
Supranational citizenship
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Supranational citizenship

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Can we conceptualise a kind of citizenship that need not be of a nation-state, but might be of a variety of political frameworks? Bringing together political theory with debates about European integration, international relations and the changing nature of citizenship, this book, available at last in paperback, offers a coherent and innovative theorisation of a citizenship independent of any specific form of political organisation. It relates that conception of citizenship to topical issues of the European Union: democracy and legitimate authority; non-national political community; and the nature of the supranational constitution.

The author argues that citizenship should no longer be seen as a status of privileged membership, but instead as an institutional role enabling individuals’ capacities to shape the context of their lives and promote the freedom and well-being of others. In doing so, she draws on and develops ideas found in the work of the philosopher Alan Gewirth.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 18, 2013
ISBN9781847794840
Supranational citizenship
Author

Lynn Dobson

Lynn Dobson lectures in Political Theory and EU/International Politics at the University of Edinburgh

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    Supranational citizenship - Lynn Dobson

    Introduction

    Supra-                              

    above, beyond, in addition (to)

    (Oxford English Dictionary)

    Within recent memory the prospect of EU citizenship would have struck most observers as wildly speculative, and the idea of it unintelligible. The very concept of modern citizenship was so inextricably linked with that of the nation-state as to appear meaningless when decoupled from it. That nation states were the only possible repositories of citizens’ political attention, activity, and allegiance seemed self-evident. Ideas of global or supranational citizenship were, consequently, vacuous – at best, rhetorical. Besides, an intergovernmental trade regime like the EEC was not the kind of arrangement of which citizenship might ever be an appropriate status. In 1974 Raymond Aron, speculating on the possibility of citizenship in the European Community, asked the question ‘Is multinational citizenship possible?’ and answered with a resounding no: ‘There are no such animals as European citizens. There are only French, German, or Italian citizens.’¹ He was proved wrong in the space of two decades. In 1992 the Maastricht Treaty concluded by the European Union’s then twelve member states formally established, for their nationals, the automatic status of citizen of the EU, and invested the status with a limited number of political and civil rights.² Though filtered through member state nationality, the relationship with the EU’s political institutions for those who pass through the filter is formally direct.

    Since Aron wrote, it has become clear that people’s lives are increasingly being affected by events and decisions in arenas of activity larger than the nation-state.³ As Waldron has observed, we have come to depend upon political, economic, and social structures going far beyond the communities of our original or primary affiliation⁴ and are no longer self-sufficient individually or collectively but instead indebted, not just to our locales, regions, and nation-states, but also to the larger contexts that, in turn, sustain them.⁵ As systems of governance beyond the nation-state extend the scale and scope of their decision-making capacities, they have more pervasive and far-reaching effects on the circumstances within which individual lives are lived. However, the democratisation of these arenas has not kept pace with their expanding functions and responsibilities, and concerns have arisen in recent years about their political legitimacy. Moreover, at these levels of political organisation there may be an inherent tension between system effectiveness and citizen participation, posing an unavoidable dilemma for citizens, political elites, and theorists alike.⁶ The relationship of persons to these rule-making structures therefore poses a number of provocative questions.⁷ Whether such frameworks ought to be more democratic, what democracy might mean in relation to them, and whether they could be democratised, are all formidable problems, and controversial too. Nevertheless, it appears perverse to continue to assume that the mix of executive latitude and permissive acquiescence of subject populations that has been characteristic of intergovernmental associations will continue to suffice.

    These problems are most strikingly manifest in the European Union, the world’s most advanced project of regional integration⁸ and transnational rulemaking. As the depth, scope, and reach of activities and rule-making taking place at, or mediated through, the EU level of organisation, continue to grow, questions of its democratic authority, of the kind conventionally asked of states rather than of intergovernmental associations, have begun to be explored.⁹

    The EU’s reach into domestic political contexts is considered by most informed observers¹⁰ to be wide-ranging and pervasive and, as their larger environment, the EU has provoked and conditioned adaptive processes within member states.¹¹ An examination of twenty-eight policy issue arenas in which all decisions were taken at national level in 1950 found that, in the year 2000, in none of them were decisions taken solely at national level; in fewer than a quarter were decisions clearly made mostly at national level, while in over a quarter decisions were clearly made mostly or wholly at EU level.¹² EU level decision-making now takes place in policy domains considered the last redoubt in modern notions of state sovereignty – defence, borders, money supply, citizenship itself. Since 2000, member states (except the UK, Sweden and Denmark) have integrated their economic and monetary policies and adopted a common currency. The EU has begun to develop a common foreign and security policy incorporating common defence capabilities,¹³ as well as a common internal security policy which includes a body (Europol) for shared intelligence-gathering and coordination, and a European arrest warrant.¹⁴

    Deepening integration has resulted not only from the activities of the political organs of the Union but also from the decisions of the European Court of Justice, which has ‘managed to transform the Treaty of Rome … into a constitution [and] thereby laid the legal foundation for an integrated European economy and polity’.¹⁵ A number of legal doctrines have recast the relationship between individuals and EU institutions in normative terms. The legal doctrine of direct effect (decided by a case¹⁶ described as ‘a defining moment … comparable to Marbury v Madison in the constitutional history of the United States’)¹⁷ means that EU law affects individuals directly: national legislation is not required to give it effect. EU law is therefore distinct from international law, and individuals are primary subjects of the EU’s legal order. The doctrine of supremacy means that EU legislation takes primacy over the domestic laws of member states.¹⁸ The doctrine of pre-emption through which ‘national competence to make policy in a wide range of functional areas has been entirely pre-empted by supranational competence’¹⁹ means that member states may not act in those policy areas even where the EU has not yet done so. The doctrine of state financial liability imposes on states financial liabilities in respect of persons who have suffered economic damage as a result of the state’s ‘manifest and serious failure’ to implement its obligations under the Treaty.²⁰

    Though composed of formally autonomous states, operationally the EU is largely federal.²¹ In many respects the EU institutions now stand to individuals in a relation similar, if not equivalent, to that of their domestic states. One commentator argues that integration has proceeded so far that the EU now faces ‘dilemmas’: in how it conceives the relation between markets and democratic political structures, in its external relations, and in its social policy.²² These issues were addressed by the Constitutional Treaty,²³ prepared by a seventeen-month Convention under the leadership of Giscard d’Estaing, a former President of France, and signed by member states in October 2004, but rejected in referendums by the voters of France and the Netherlands in May 2005.²⁴ That Treaty was but the latest in a (leisurely) constitutional moment documented by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (adopted December 2000, and incorporated into the Constitutional Treaty as the equivalent of a constitutional Bill of Rights),²⁵ agenda-setting speeches by leading politicians,²⁶ the Commission’s White Paper on Governance, and the growing academic interest in and literature on constitutionalisation, democratic principle and process in the EU, and potentials for citizenship. Despite its recent setback, the Constitutional Treaty will be with us for a long time to come, in spirit if not in text. The problems it attempted to resolve (not least how to make a Union of more than twenty-five members, with institutions originally designed for six, work) have not gone away.

    The explicit constitutionalising of the Union is seen by its supporters and detractors alike as delivering a qualitatively different kind of Union altogether – a Union taking on some of the resonances of a single political community. Constitutional change lays bare underlying controversies of political order, bringing to the fore large and complex questions about justice, order, stability, cohesion, and the balances to be struck between them. The solutions arrived at allocate and redistribute powers and capacities, competences, and values, and in the EU will mould and inform its social, political, and moral order. An eventual EU Constitution will shape, then, the relations between persons, and also the relations holding between persons and their common political institutions. The populations of the EU’s member states are truly ‘participants in a vast and far-ranging political, economic, and cultural experiment’.²⁷

    Citizenship and democratic authority

    Citizenship is the nexus of interpersonal relations on the one hand and individual–institutional relations on the other. It is the essence of democratic authority in modern polities claiming to be liberal democracies (as used here, a category including social democracies). Where citizenship is absent or ineffectual, persons are subjects, not citizens: the objects of political power, not the sources of political authority. If modern liberal democracy is the aspiration or benchmark, the quality of its citizenship is a good test of the authority of a political unit. As we will see in Chapter 3, the initiative and consensus to create a formal EU citizenship was developed explicitly in the context of a general agreement among member states that the EU lacked democratic legitimacy, and as a response to that lack.²⁸ An effective citizenship is crucial to the normative standing of its institutions and their activities. The same holds, in a more qualified way, with respect to many other international frameworks of political authority. They are not directly addressed in this work. However, the theoretical argument it will advance is, in principle, applicable to systems of governance other than the EU. I present a theoretical account of citizenship and its relation to political authority that is independent of organisational forms, ‘national’ or ‘international’, and discuss the EU as a specific institutional framework in the light of that account.

    EU citizenship: the nature of the problem

    The formal establishment of EU citizenship is a historical accident. Regardless of that, its development in the context of major institutional and constitutional change and under circumstances of significant normative uncertainty highlights issues of democratic authority and moral justification. Conceptions of political order bring one face to face with issues of political identity, political affect and political capacity, and notions of citizenship draw on and condense larger understandings of justice and sociality. As Kymlicka and Norman remark, ‘the concept of citizenship seems to integrate the demands of justice and community membership’.²⁹ The concept of citizenship as traditionally understood assumes a single, national, order of justice and community membership. For a supranational, culturally and institutionally disaggregated order, however, we lack ‘an image of an ideal citizenship against which achievement can be measured and towards which aspiration can be directed’, in Marshall’s words.³⁰

    One gloss on EU citizenship goes like this: despite extensions of competences and the federal nature of the EU’s operations, it is still a confederal association. Loyalties and attachments remain, therefore, where they have always been – with the component units. All that is required for the continued working of a superstructure of just and stable institutions is an instrumental, reciprocating relationship between those component parts. Clearly, the limits of the Monnet method of integration have been reached,³¹ but on the other hand, there is ‘no demos’.³² Instead the EU has multiple nation-state demoi, and they can arrive at a working agreement by way of inter-elite accommodation. This is the view we might expect to be held by, for example, consociationalists and liberal-intergovernmentalists.³³

    Against this are a number of reasons for thinking the hope of addressing current issues of EU integration without an overall normative theory, including supranational citizenship, to be futile. A position such as that adumbrated above overestimates both national homogeneity and international heterogeneity, failing to recognise that identities, interests, and value commitments are cross-cutting not only within state boundaries but across them too. It may also essentialise national identities, consequently supposing them eternal; and fail to see the extent to which they are complex and situational, and in constant development and adaptation. Also, experience shows that the interest-maximising postulated by intergovernmentalists and consociationalists cannot substitute for affect. Mere toleration and reciprocity are simply not enough of a social bond to keep parties hanging together when the going gets rough, as it inevitably does get from time to time in any relationship of long or indefinite duration. As Wayne Norman argues, federalist political arrangements and citizenship that are no more than a political marriage of convenience built around a common instrumentality of interests are unsustainable in the long run. Instead some shared moral commitment is needed, as counterweight to the inevitable temptations to defect in response to shorter-term pressures parties will face.³⁴ The difficulties between anglophone and Québécois Canada are instructive here. Both parties found it possible to forge instrumental compromises, but their very instrumentality meant the compacts did not succeed in accommodating francophones on terms able to ‘engage their hearts and respect their dignity’.³⁵ And, as theorists have cogently argued, the workings of international associations even beyond regional conglomerations such as the EU increasingly require an independent normative grounding, including some (albeit thin) conception of a global political identity.³⁶

    The vision of citizenship needed in the EU, I will argue, is one focused on the formative possibilities of political rights, and the potentials for persons’ political agency in the EU’s specific social and institutional context of ‘not only multiple layers of community affiliation but also increasingly dispersed and differentiated modes of governance’.³⁷ Citizenship of the EU is supplementary to and conditional upon member state nationality and, therefore, member state citizenship. How multiple citizenships at different levels might fit together is one half of the central problem of EU citizenship. The other half is how citizenship at EU level might be made substantive and consequential, so that it is not merely a passive status awarding a minimal schedule of liberal rights – or, as might with some justice be alleged of EU citizenship, a status adding no extra value to the rights-holding most of its inhabitants already enjoyed. In short, institutional capacity and facilitative social relations are the two tests facing a worthwhile and plausible version of EU citizenship. EU citizenship matters to the freedom, well-being, and the political agency of individuals, and so bears crucially on the ultimate order of primary goods. It is essential to the moral justification of political power – institutionalised and legitimated as political authority – and thus to the EU’s standing as a political project. Citizenship, it will be argued, is a project of political justification.

    Method: normative political theory

    The political philosophical concepts relevant to citizenship in the EU (including the concept of citizenship itself) are all normative concepts. To prevent misunderstanding, let me clarify what normative theorists mean when they say a concept or a theory is a normative concept or a normative theory. To say a concept is a normative concept is not to say (or not principally to say) that it deals with norms. Normative concepts are not concepts that take norms as their objects of enquiry – rather they are concepts intrinsically asserting moral content. The concepts to be discussed in this book are normative concepts, meaning they are moral in two ways. First, they bear on the interests of others as well as on agents’ self-interests.³⁸ Secondly, they are not descriptive, but make claims: ‘they command, oblige, recommend, or guide’; they ‘tell us what to think, what to like, what to say, what to do, and what to be’.³⁹ A normative theory, similarly, is not a theory about norms but a theory of norms. It is not a positive theory taking norms as its object, as a social scientist might, for example, use positive theory to investigate how or why elites adopt certain norms. Instead, a normative theory will in general be one supplying the practical resources for motivating and for evaluating action, while also containing accounts of the meaning and content, field of application, and sources, of its concepts.⁴⁰ It should tell us what we must or must not, may or may not, do, and why. It will assert moral imperatives providing (putative) reasons for action as well as grounds for the attribution of praise and blame, reward and punishment, and evaluations of worth.⁴¹ It is about what ought to be, not what is: about ‘values’, not ‘facts’.

    Normative theory, then, supplies a framework within which salient questions about action oriented to valued purposes can be posed, and answers attempted.⁴² It allows us to select prime values, rank them, and balance or adjudicate them, all from grounded positions able to offer reasons. Through it, we may hope to arrive at a reasoned view as to which considerations should count, and how to weigh them. And we must proceed from such normative theories if we are to adequately identify, analyse, clarify and evaluate both normative problems and the ranges of alternative responses to them. Without the systematicity and rigour of such theories we would be left, in discussing both the EU and EU citizenship, where we mostly are now: trading intuitions and expressing (emotivist) preferences.

    With regard to the relationship between normative (‘ideal’) theory and the analysis and assessment of political phenomena in the non-ideal real world, Moravcsik has argued that an applied evaluation of normative concepts must be pragmatically viable, and this means that it must be based on ‘an empirical evaluation of the extent to which [the relevant philosophical ideals] can best be approximated under the constraints imposed by the second-best world of the specific case in question’.⁴³ For example, we should not assess the democratic quality of non-state political frameworks like the EU by comparing them with (the requirements specified by) an ideal philosophical theory, because this kind of analysis is utopian and unhelpful.⁴⁴ Instead, we should see whether they approximate existing democratic systems⁴⁵, because these will show us what can realistically be hoped for under real-world constraints.

    Lest the book you are now about to read be consigned too hastily to the dustbin of utopianism, perhaps I had better enter the lists to challenge this claim. There is no doubt that there are theoretical and methodological difficulties in moving from ideal theory to ‘real-world’ analysis. How, and how far, empirical desiderata should constrain theory, are debatable matters, and I do not claim to have arrived at the answers in this work. But Moravcsik’s recommendation that we assess putative instantiations of an ideal (or ideals) not against the specifications of ideal theory, but against existing cases that instantiate the ideals, is no solution. Without comparing those existing cases themselves against ideal theory, we could have no way in principle of knowing that they really did instantiate the ideals that we are interested in. Further, we have no warrant to assume that where a real-world case departs from what ideal theory specifies as the first-best solution it has nonetheless secured the second-best solution, under real-world constraints or otherwise. And we could only assess whether whatever solution it had secured was indeed the second-best of all possible alternatives by again consulting ideal theory.

    In the real world there is such a thing, I think, as institutional capture of terms that allude to widely valued ideals (like ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’). Incremental change can make our characterisations of political phenomena gradually less accurate, and the meanings of terms we have affixed to them – like ‘democratic’ – can imperceptibly become ever more remote from the original ideals they are (still) intended to express. It surely behoves us as analysts not to take the objects of our enquiry at their own estimation.

    One final remark on this matter: the degree to which assessment must be constructed in the light of practicability considerations surely depends on what type of assessment it is and what its purpose is. This current work is a work of political philosophy not intended to provide policy guidance but aiming nonetheless to construct a coherent account of political relations and possibility that is not frivolous. Whatever might be said about moral philosophy in general, normative political theory is the exercise of practical reason – or praxis, to adopt another idiom.⁴⁶ It thinks about the existential characteristics of lives lived in ‘real time’, lives that are ineliminably individual but lived in collective contexts, and how those relations might be defensibly construed and managed. It shows which of our actual norms and commitments can survive scrutiny and which are merely arbitrary.⁴⁷ It also asks how things ought to be, rather than taking for granted how they now are. But it does so with some knowledge of how things now are, and with some understanding of the constraints on their being otherwise. If reason is to be practical it should avoid the Scylla of utopia and the Charybdis of the status quo, and search for what is normatively ambitious within those constraints that are truly unalterable. In propounding what ought or ought not to be, it must bear in mind the limits on possibilities – but without creative stint in imagining the fullest range, and extending the limits, of those possibilities.

    As the subtitle to an inaugural lecture given by one EU commentator has it, the European Union is ‘in search of a political philosophy’.⁴⁸ This work offers one, in the hope of encouraging more. It aims to set out a normative theory of supranational citizenship linked intrinsically to the justification of political authority, and explore it in the particular case of the EU. It enquires whether, from first principles, there is a coherent, consistent, and grounded normative theoretical account of supranational citizenship to be given, and, believing there is, sets it out. Beginning from agency, it postulates citizenship as the necessary basis of any defensible political organisation.

    While remaining in touch with the institutional realities of the EU, this theoretical work is not at all EU-specific. On the contrary, the conception elaborated here is a novel idea of citizenship in its own right, quite abstracted from considerations of location, and is intended to engage theorists and analysts of citizenship in general. Those whose interests lie in international affairs will see that this account of citizenship is capable of wider application to other systems of non-state political authority. Tracing some implications of the theory through a particular concrete political setting will help, it is hoped, to indicate and illustrate where the pressure points in justification and democratisation are in a non-state framework of political authority, and illustrate some approaches to tackling them. For better or worse the EU is deemed the exemplar of international integration, and general lessons may perhaps be learned both from its successes and its failures in resolving practical difficulties, and also from scholars’ successes and failures in theorising them. Supranational Citizenship argues that any citizenship capable of practical realisation and effect is necessarily part of a discrete institutional framework, but the level of political organisation at which that framework is pitched – national, regional, or global – need not enter the conception itself. On the other hand, the grounding values of such a citizenship will have to be capable of commanding universal support. Any plausible account of supranational citizenship will need sufficient abstractness and de-contextualisation to enable its escape from the cage of nation-state assumptions, while maintaining a tight link with bounded institutions. Most observers agree that a conception of EU citizenship needs to be other than ‘national’ and ‘cosmopolitan’, but perhaps cannot eschew either entirely. ‘Supra’, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, means ‘above, beyond, in addition to’. Happily, the rubric ‘supranational citizenship’ neatly captures the different facets and the conceptual ambiguities of citizenship of the EU.

    The philosophy of Alan Gewirth

    My approach to the problem of supranational citizenship draws on and extends the moral philosophy of Alan Gewirth,⁴⁹ with which most of this book’s readers are likely to be unfamiliar. Many may have limited acquaintance with normative political theory in general, and of those who do happen to be blessed with interest and proficiency in political theory, some perhaps will be more at home with Continental, rather than Anglophone, traditions of social and moral thought. Accordingly a short introduction to Gewirth and his oeuvre may be helpful.

    Situating Gewirth

    Alan Gewirth died at the age of ninety-one in May 2004. At the time of his death he was the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he had spent his career after undergraduate and doctoral study at Columbia University. The author of well over 100 articles and several books on moral and political philosophy, Gewirth was also the subject of over 150 articles, several books, doctoral dissertations, and conferences; received a number of illustrious prizes, fellowships, and awards; sat on many editorial boards; held visiting appointments at the Universities of Harvard, Michigan, John Hopkins, and California; held presidencies of both the American Philosophical Association (western division) and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At his death he was engaged in writing a book to be called Human Rights and Global Justice.⁵⁰

    Gewirth’s philosophical influences – Descartes, Kant, Marx, Aristotle, Marsilius of Padua, Spinoza – ensured his philosophical engagement was rooted in enduring and universal concerns, and from the 1980s onwards increasingly addressed themes in international normative political theory. His work is noted for its uncompromising rationalism and foundationalism, and for its scrupulous scholarship and painstaking rigour. Political theorists generally first encounter Gewirth’s writings in the literature on human rights, but it would be a mistake to see Gewirth as a philosopher who sometimes wrote on rights. Rather, his philosophy was a theory of rights, or perhaps we should say that rights were at the foundation and the centre of his moral and political philosophy. Indeed, when referring to his own work, he referred to it as ‘the theory of human rights’.

    To Gewirth’s mind, politics was a branch of, or nested within, morality.⁵¹ This does not reveal too rosy or high-minded a view of politics, but insists that politics needs something outside of itself by which it may be evaluated, and in particular that any justifications political phenomena appeal to must necessarily be moral justifications at root. So one point he makes is that politics is not immune from normative enquiry and normative critique. But he also makes the point that politics gets its rationale from morality. It is not just that political institutions (say) may be tested against normative criteria supplied by a theory of morality, but also that a theory of morality determines what kinds of institutions may and may not be created and sustained, and what they then may or may not do: so the relationship of morality to politics is determinative as well as evaluative and critical. Further, his work demonstrates that not only do politics need morality but that morality needs politics: the two are separable but symbiotic.

    Gewirth’s philosophy is far from fully deductive. Certainly it proscribes some specific actions (torture, for example) and certainly it prescribes some specific actions (fair trials, for example). But what can be specified in this way as forbidden or as mandatory comprises a small set of determinate points within the universe of possibilities, and about the rest the theory is either indeterminate or under-determining. Outside of the fixed points of the prohibited and the compulsory lies a vast zone of permissibility. Moreover, even the more determinate principles admit a margin of appreciation, allowing the possibility that any one of a number of putative actions and measures may conform to it. For instance, though the right to freedom mandates the principle that people must have effective opportunities to consent and dissent to political decisions, no particular set of arrangements is implied. A wide array of mechanisms may be compatible with the principle, and are therefore permissible within the terms of the theory, so long as their adoption has itself met the test of public consent. Indeed, the theory must itself incorporate this kind of freedom, given its assertion of freedom as a foundational value.

    For a political theorist it is not overtaxing to see Gewirth as a liberal individualist. That his theory is liberal could be argued from its stress on freedom and rationality; that it is individualist in a strong sense is evident throughout, in its adherence to both methodological and ethical individualism

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