Immigration, Islam, and the Politics of Belonging in France. Elaine R. Thomas
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an illiberal, exclusionary, or ethnocultural approach to membership in the nation. In reality, however, “the” illiberal or ethnocultural view of nationality is often an amalgam of the Culture and Descent views. There are also other alternatives to those views: the Contract and Monetized Contract models.
Contract: Citizenship as Equal Rights for Equal Duties, or a Rights-bearing Status Acquired by Virtue of Living Together Cooperatively
A different, equally significant, alternative to Culture or Descent conceptions of political membership is the idea of citizenship as a “contract” between the citizen and the state consisting of a set of duties toward or participation in the state or community balanced by a set of rights the citizen enjoys, guaranteed by the state. Citizenship in this case is conceived of as a Quit-type membership, based not on blood, culture, or convictions, but rather on active performance, whether participation in key activities or fulfillment of required tasks. This perspective can be readily illustrated by reference to contemporary British liberal thinking. According to Albert Weale, for example, “the concept of citizenship makes the question of identity the ground of rights and duties” (1991: 158). In other words, what rights and duties one has depends on whether one “is” British, Italian, Brazilian, or something else. Similarly, Hall and Held draw on the Contract perspective in characterizing citizenship as “a matter of right and entitlement” that “is two-sided: rights in, but also responsibilities towards, the community” (1989: 175). Reading Hall and Held as proponents of what I call the “Contract” view might appear to be unfair, since their view is not narrowly “contractarian,” but rather emphasizes civic participation. Such an emphasis is by no means at odds with the “Contract” perspective as defined here, however. Of the five conceptions of citizenship identified here, it is in fact the “Contract” view that places the greatest emphasis on active participation.
In this understanding, insofar as it emphasizes reciprocal rights and duties, citizenship is, surprisingly, not altogether different from a traditional feudal relationship, particularly as it linked lords and vassals within the more elite sociopolitical strata. Bloch notes that “reciprocity of unequal obligations” was the hallmark of “European vassalage” (1961: 158). In exchange for a fief, protection of person and property, and rendering of justice, the feudal vassal was normally obliged to perform military service, as well as participate in courts of law and consultative councils (219–24, 228).
Where democratic citizenship is envisioned according to this model, the reciprocity of obligations involved has increasingly been generalized to incorporate the masses of the population into what were originally aristocratic, or at least gentlemanly, roles. Alfred Marshall depicted the extension of the duties associated with citizenship as a progressive process that promised eventually to make “every man” into “a gentleman” (Marshall 1950: 4, 7–9). The same idea was reiterated by British Home Secretary Douglas Hurd in the following terms: “Public service may once have been the duty of an elite, but today it is the responsibility of all who have time and money to spare” (quoted in Heater 1990: 140).
As it was extended from the elite to commoners, the feudal “contract” increasingly became the same for all. From this perspective, citizenship generally appears a matter not simply of rights and duties, but of equal rights and equal duties. Hence T. H. Marshall’s famous definition of citizenship as “a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community,” who thereafter “are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed” (1950: 28–29).
There are actually two distinct variants of the Contract view: state-centered and society-centered, both of which figure significantly in current controversies about political membership. Besides obeying the law, the duties most often included in the state-centered version of the “rights for duties” contract are military service and voting. The place of voting in the state-centered Contract model sometimes figures as a duty of citizens, but is also often mentioned as one of the rights they receive.
In the society-centered version, the duties of the citizen, such as voluntary community service and charity work, are closer to those of members of the traditional upper class toward those below them. The medieval local lord, for instance, often was responsible for the commons and had such charitable duties as caring for babies abandoned on “his” lands, while later the local gentry in England were responsible for administering the Poor Laws. The ideal of citizenship thus came to be associated with the national and local roles of the English gentry during the Elizabethan period (Heater 1990: 27, 30). In the modern society-centered Contract vision, the worthy “citizen” may fight fires, keep up the parks, work with the homeless, and care for aging neighbors.
This vision of citizenship was asserted with particular clarity by British Conservative proponents of “active citizenship”—one element of Conservative reaction against the welfare state—during the late 1980s. Conservatives presented the “active citizen” as “the person who seeks out opportunities to succour the needy, protect the environment, administer schools and defend, through neighbourhood watch schemes, the local community against the depredations of the burgeoning criminal class” (Heater 1991: 141). While some criticized this understanding of citizenship as “essentially apolitical” (Oliver 1991: 165), others felt that the idea recaptured an important dimension of what being a “citizen” meant. For example, recalling an elderly neighbor he had known in Polingsford, Suffolk, Andrew Phillips praised the Conservative society-centered, service-oriented vision of citizenship for being attuned to traditional social virtues. Underlining the danger that a more political and less localist understanding of citizenship might dishonor such worthy people, Phillips described his neighbor as follows:
In 85 years she had only spent one night out of the village. Her sense of belonging to it was innate and complete. According to some notions, she was scarcely a citizen at all, never having played any part in civic affairs, yet, like millions of our countrymen even today, her diurnal partaking of the life of that village, her attachment to the little platoon of its inhabitants, made her an exemplary neighbour and, I would say, citizen. In our notions of the active citizen, therefore we must always allow honour to such people. There is a real danger that because the care they give so abundantly cannot be counted, it will not be held to count at all. (Phillips 1991: 545)
Phillips’s description of his neighbor reveals both a certain ambivalence about this understanding of citizenship and the potential, because of its localism, for it to shade into the idea of citizenship as a matter of cultural attachment. Thus, even while he defends this elderly woman’s entitlement to be counted as a “citizen,” Phillips admits that calling the sort of belonging she represents “citizenship” is apt to be controversial, and his own tendency is to revert to describing her as a “neighbor” instead. Ultimately, however, he defends her right to the title “citizen” because of the “care” she and people like her contribute to the community, thus suggesting that those who serve the community are thereby entitled to citizenship, an argument clearly in keeping with the society-centered Contract view. Earlier in that same passage, however, Phillips emphasizes his neighbor’s “innate and complete” “sense of belonging” and her “attachment” to her village’s inhabitants, drawing on the idea of citizenship as a matter of cultural attachment instead. The two conceptions begin to shade into one another here because it is the neighbor’s “attachment” to those around her that presumably motivates her generously to provide “care” and act as “an exemplary neighbor.” It is not entirely clear whether Phillips thinks it is the service or the attachment that entitles the neighbor to recognition as a citizen, but he ultimately says it is the “care” that should be “held to count.” In the end, then, like other defenders of “active citizenship,” Phillips appears to favor a contractual view involving an exchange of duties between the individual and the community; in exchange for “the care they give,” people like this neighbor are entitled to receive the “honor” of being “counted” as exemplary, “active” citizens.
Monetized Contract: Citizens as Material Contributors
Given changes in military organization, the decline in military service as a regular duty of all (or, more often, all male) citizens, and the ambiguity of voting’s status as a “duty” as opposed to a right, the activity-oriented “rights for duties” Contract, at least in its