By Peter Kivisto

Peter Kivisto ([email protected]) is the Richard Swanson Professor of Social Thought and chair of sociology at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL.  The Academy of Finland has named him a Finland Distinguished Professor at the University of Turku, 2009-12.

The recent “citizenship turn” in the social sciences has yielded a vast and rapidly growing body of literature that is sufficiently diverse in scope to make it difficult to assess the field as a whole.  Based on a thematic division that this author and a colleague employed in a recent book, this essay will divide that literature into four analytically distinct though often empirically overlapping categories or discourses: inclusion, withdrawal, erosion, and expansion.  After a brief general overview of citizenship studies today, this essay will define these categories and briefly discuss what can be considered to be the most important recent work in each of them.

What Is Citizenship?  This title to one of Derek Heater’s books raises the fundamental question.  At one level, it can be answered fairly easily.  To be a citizen is to be recognized as a legitimate member of a polity; citizenship speaks to a sense of belonging.  In the modern world, the polity in question refers to the nation-state as it has been shaped by the Westphalian system.  Conceived as a type of membership, citizenship constitutes a form of social closure, whereby citizens are defined as insiders while noncitizens (variously called aliens, foreigners, or denizens) are outsiders.  With membership comes a package of obligations and rights that vary somewhat from polity to polity, but to a large extent are the same.  Thus, in terms of obligations, citizens are expected to obey the laws of the land, pay their taxes, and, perhaps, engage in some sort of civic duty such as serving in the military or some alternative form of public service.  Likewise with rights, which involve the institutionalized protection of various freedoms of thought and action, including the ability to participate in civic and political life.

A number of informative overviews of citizenship have been produced, including Heater’s A Brief History of Citizenship, which traces its development from the Greek and Roman experiences through the medieval period and the emergence of modern democracies in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, up to the contemporary period.  Richard Bellamy’s Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction offers an even more concise overview of the topic.  J. M. Barbalet’s Citizenship: Rights, Struggle, and Class Inequality concentrates on treating rights as the results of democratic struggles in a highly contested political terrain.  April Carter’s The Political Theory of Global Citizenship makes a case for cosmopolitan world citizenship, her argument being rooted in her understanding of the evolution of citizenship from 1500 to the present.

While sensitive to history, Thomas Janoski’s Citizenship and Civil Society: A Framework of Rights and Obligations in Liberal, Traditional, and Social Democratic Regimes is an effort to offer a conceptual map intended to be useful in structuring comparative work on citizenship.  Two other books also seek to ground citizenship studies in theory: Bryan Turner’s edited collection Citizenship and Social Theory is attuned to both classical theory and to recent developments, while Gerard Delanty’s Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, Politics traces the emergence of cosmopolitan citizenship in a world increasingly defined by globalization.

Another recent book, Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices, an edited collection by T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Douglas Klusmeyer, provides perhaps the best panoramic empirical overview of citizenship policies in comparative perspective.  While the emphasis of the collection is on the practices of nation-states, the volume also includes considerations of citizenship at the city, regional, and trans-state levels.  Editors Turner, Engin Isin, and Peter Nyers have recently produced Citizenship between Past and Future, a more theoretically oriented edited collection that explores citizenship from the vantages of identity, engagement, and rights.

Since the publication of the seminal work by British theorist T. H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore, Citizenship and Social Class, citizenship studies scholars have operated with the assumption that the evolution of the modern nation-state has led to the institutionalization of three types of rights: civil, political, and social.  Civil rights refer to freedom of religious and political expression, the right to own property, and the right to justice.  Political rights permit citizens to actively participate in the political process via voting, petitioning, running for elective office, and so forth.  Finally, social rights, which Marshall thought emerged last, involve the right to a level of economic welfare and security essential for a bedrock standard of living that makes the other two rights meaningful.

Social rights become possible with the emergence of the welfare state.  Marshall was aware of the fact that modern democratic polities developed at the same time that industrial capitalism took off, and understood that the two were deeply intertwined.  In his view, capitalism both was enormously productive and caused unacceptably high levels of inequality.  Thus, the task of the welfare state was to reduce inequality to an acceptable level, via a process he called “class abatement.”  Contemporary citizenship studies is deeply indebted to Marshall, and a survey of the literature will quickly convince readers that his work has had a profound impact on shaping much of the discourse, though not all of it.  Indeed, there is a small but significant body of work devoted to exegetical examinations of Marshall’s contributions to the field, the most important of which is Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T. H. Marshall, edited by Martin Bulmer and Anthony Rees.  Similarly, some works build quite explicitly on the Marshallian tradition, including Bryan Turner’s Citizenship and Capitalism.

THE TURN TO CITIZENSHIP
At the outset, it is important to realize that citizenship was once a neglected topic in the social sciences.  This is no longer the case.  On the contrary, scholars are in the midst of a two-decade-old efflorescence of interest in this subject, which has resulted in a huge and ever-increasing output of books, dissertations, and journal articles.  The interest in the topic can be seen in the creation during the last decade of the journal Citizenship Studies, edited since its creation by Bryan Turner.  It is likewise apparent in the Handbook of Citizenship Studies, edited by Isin and Turner, a volume that affords a panoramic overview of the state of citizenship studies at the dawn of the present century.

One indication of the contemporary salience of citizenship is the proliferation of adjectives used to capture something of the presumed novelty of its contemporary manifestations.  It is when turning to the capacious character of much work on citizenship that one realizes that simple answers to Heater’s above-noted question become more problematic.  Some recent work stresses the expansiveness of citizenship, moving beyond the nation-state.  This includes Richard Falk’s essay “The Making of Global Citizenship,” contained in a valuable collection edited by Dutch sociologist Bart van Steenbergen, The Condition of Citizenship.  This international perspective also includes Derek Heater’s World Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Thinking and Its Opponents; the late philosopher Iris Marion Young’s “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship,” an essay that appeared in Ronald Beiner’s Theorizing Citizenship; Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal’s analysis of postnational membership in her widely discussed work, Limits of Citizenship; and discussions of transnational citizenship in Rainer Bauböck’s Transnational Citizenship and Étienne Balibar’s We, the People of Europe?

Other authors focus on citizenship as a mode of solidarity.  This includes a collection titled Cosmopolitan Citizenship, edited by Kimberly Hutchings and Roland Dannreuther, and Will Kymlicka’s pathbreaking Multicultural Citizenship.  Still other scholars emphasize the multifaceted character of citizenship.  This can be seen, for example, in Aihwa Ong’s concept of Flexible Citizenship, Ken Plummer’s Intimate Citizenship, and Ruth Lister’s understanding of feminist citizenship in her book Citizenship.  Yet another perspective is offered by Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Ramona S. MacNeal in Digital Citizenship: The Internet, Society, and Participation, which examines the impact and implications of computer-mediated communication on civic engagement.

To illustrate the multiplicity of terms used to depict citizenship today, an examination of Engin Isin and Patricia Wood’s Citizenship and Identity is instructive.  The authors describe citizenship as multifaceted, being at once modern, diasporic, aboriginal, sexual, cosmopolitan, ecological, cultural, and radical.  Isin and Wood are not alone in thinking that citizenship is vital, malleable, in many ways novel, and inherently complex.  On the other hand, there are those who have a far less sanguine assessment of the condition and the potential future of citizenship.  From this perspective, citizenship is being threatened and devalued by one of a variety of perceived forces that are seen as undermining its salience.  There are, in short, a number of discourses at play in the current fascination with citizenship, and it is quite evident that these discourses tend to be rather self-contained, immune from the challenges posed by counterdiscourses.

FOUR DISCOURSES
Recently, Thomas Faist and I undertook an effort to survey this literature with an eye to discerning recurring thematic foci.  We thought this was an essential starting point for any efforts aimed at generating a meta-discourse.  In Citizenship: Discourse, Theory, and Transnational Prospects, we identified four broad themes that in our estimation could be used to locate most if not all of the recent work on citizenship: inclusion, withdrawal, erosion, and expansion.  We realized that not all works cited below fit neatly into one particular theme; nonetheless, it proved to be remarkably useful in locating a vast majority of the recent work on this subject.  After a brief definition of each of these themes, this essay will identify what we consider to be among the most important works in each of them published since the mid-1980s, devoting particular attention to identifying books published since 2000.

Inclusion
“Inclusion” refers in part to the fact that in the age of modern democracies, certainly since the eighteenth century, there have been efforts to effect social closure in defining who is to be considered part of the people capable of self-governance.  No sooner had the new middle classes managed to achieve political power at the expense of the old antidemocratic regimes than they sought to limit who would be included within the ranks of the citizenry.  As Judith Shklar put it in her insightful American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion, “Like their enfranchised predecessors, they too now did not want to admit others to citizenship.”  Three powerful barriers were erected to prevent a majority of the inhabitants of the newly democratic states from becoming first-class citizens: class, race, and gender.  As a theme in citizenship studies, inclusion involves work that has focused on the ways that these barriers have been overcome—to the extent that they have been overcome.

Class was the first barrier to be breached.  In western Europe and North America, workers had to a large extent won the right to vote in the nineteenth century and, with the birth of trade unions, found a source of collective power that allowed them to enter the political process, not as equals, but with some reasonable chance of having an impact.  A good summary of the United States case can be found in labor historian David Montgomery’s Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century.  Race and gender proved to be more enduring obstacles to inclusion.  Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor is one of the best synthetic accounts of the struggle for the inclusion of women and people of color.

If the focus of Montgomery, Glenn, and the substantial literature that parallels these works is on the social struggles involved in the quest for inclusion, two recent books focus instead on the role of policy makers in moving from ethnic to nonethnic understandings and legal definitions of citizenship: Andreas Fahrmeir’s Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept and Christian Joppke’s Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State.

These policy changes have had a profound impact on immigration and naturalization policies, a topic of increasing interest in recent years.  One of the most useful guides for understanding the citizenship/migration nexus is Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson’s Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging.  Many immigrant-receiving nations prefer to bring temporary guest workers into their country, rather than opening their doors to future citizens.  One of the issues increasingly raised since the publication of Tomas Hammar’s Democracy and the Nation-State: Aliens, Denizens, and Citizens in a World of International Migration is whether citizenship brings with it rights that trump those available to aliens and, especially, denizens (defined as noncitizen permanent residents).  Although during the last decade of the past century this appeared to be an open question, the general consensus today is that citizenship offers individuals rights and protections not available to noncitizens.  That being said, Ron Hayduk’s intriguing Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States contends that there is both past and current evidence of granting noncitizens voting rights and even the right to hold elective office.

But part of the decision-making process of immigrants contemplating naturalization involves the extent to which they identify with their land of settlement.  Those who perceive it to be a welcoming nation have been more inclined to become more involved in political and civic life than those who see the host society as hostile to them.  Pontus Odmalm’s Migration Policies and Political Participation, a comparative study of five major European countries, provides empirical support for this relationship.

Unfortunately, there has been relatively little research that has looked explicitly at the ways that states either encourage or discourage immigrants to identify with the polity and the society at large.  The most intriguing study to date on this topic is sociologist Irene Bloemraad’s Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada, which found that immigrants and refugees in Canada had higher naturalization rates than did those in the neighbor to the south.  Given that her focus was on two specific groups—Portuguese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees—this book must be seen as suggestive rather than definitive, but it does constitute an important starting place for future research.

Little work has been done recently on what happens to emigrants.  The one book that stands as an exception to this general neglect is Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation, edited by historians Nancy L. Green and François Weil.  Taken as a whole, the collection offers a historical and comparative framework for making sense of the implications of emigration on a person’s legal and political status.

Inclusion also refers to the modes of incorporation employed in particular nation-states.  In The Civil Sphere, social theorist Jeffrey Alexander identifies three modes of incorporation in his highly original and provocative rethinking of civil society theory.  He contends that the first two, assimilation and ethnic hyphenation, have since the nineteenth century characterized the two primary ways newcomers have entered the public sphere.  A third mode emerged only recently, during the latter part of the past century: multiculturalism.  Alexander’s understanding of multiculturalism builds on a recent body of substantive work.

Given that Canada was the first liberal democracy to establish an official state-sanctioned multicultural policy, it is not surprising that Canadian theorists have played a particularly significant role in shaping thinking about multiculturalism, with the work of Charles Taylor and his former student Will Kymlicka being of singular importance.  Taylor’s most important contribution is in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, a book that contains an essay by Taylor and commentaries by Jürgen Habermas, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Amy Gutmann, Steven Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf.  Among Kymlicka’s most influential works are Multicultural Citizenship; Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship; and most recently his analysis of the global diffusion of multiculturalism as policy in Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity.

British political theorist Bhikhu Parekh has had a major impact on multicultural discourse in the United Kingdom, but is somewhat less well-known in North America.  Nonetheless, his two primary contributions to multicultural discourse can be profitably read in conjunction with the work of Taylor and Kymlicka.  These include his first book on the topic, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, and his most recent work, A New Politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World.  Influenced by Parekh but staking out his own position on multiculturalism is British sociologist Tariq Modood, whose Multiculturalism offers an especially concise and compelling brief on behalf of multiculturalism at a moment when it is under attack in Europe and elsewhere.  Modood’s earlier work, Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain, represents an especially valuable analysis of the challenges that the presence of Muslim immigrants in Europe poses for successful multicultural practices.  It is complemented by Secularism, Religion, and Multicultural Citizenship, a book Modood recently coedited with Geoffrey Brahm Levey.  In similar yet distinctive ways, these works are among the most sophisticated arguments in support of multiculturalism.

Critics of multiculturalism abound, but most of this work is highly polemical and both theoretically and empirically problematic.  A significant exception to this is Brian Barry’s Culture and Equality.  While Barry is a feisty writer, he has produced what remains the most important intellectual challenge to multiculturalism, an argument shaped by the author’s effort to remain faithful to the thought of John Stuart Mill.  Two creative efforts to wrestle with some of the problems that critics, including Barry, associate with multiculturalism while defending it can be found in Seyla Benhabib’s The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era and Anne Phillips’s Multiculturalism without Culture.  Christian Joppke and Ewa Morawska’s edited collection Toward Assimilation and Citizenship: Immigrants in Liberal Nation-States takes a different approach, tracing out what the editors see as a reaction against multiculturalism by various host society publics and policy makers alike.

Withdrawal
In Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Duties in a Liberal State, William Galston identified four distinct civic virtues, which he defined as general, social, economic, and political.  The last noted is relevant to the theme of “withdrawal.”  By political virtue, Galston means that a person reveals an ability to respect the rights of others, possesses the knowledge necessary to evaluate the performance of political leaders, and provides evidence of a willingness to participate in political discourse.  Withdrawal refers to a situation in which citizens neither make the effort to become informed about the central issues of the day in order to arrive at reasoned assessments of those issues, nor exhibit a willingness to become involved in political and, more broadly, civic life.

Dating to Tocqueville, a lengthy tradition of social commentary involves a recurring concern with the real or potential withdrawal of the citizenry from participation in the public sphere.  During the past quarter century, two books arguing that withdrawal has become increasingly problematic managed to attract large audiences, not only within the social sciences, but also with the educated public.  The first book was deeply indebted to the Tocquevillian tradition and, in fact, sought to revisit Democracy in America 150 years after its original publication.  This was Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, by Robert Bellah and a group of younger scholars (Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton).  Their argument was that public engagement was being jeopardized by an excessive form of individualism that served to undermine the nation’s historic civic commitments, rooted in both republican and biblical traditions.  In The Good Society, a sequel to Habits of the Heart, the authors attempted to articulate a new vision for civic involvement, in effect adapting an approach John Dewey had advocated decades earlier to contemporary circumstances.  Michael Schudson’s The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life provides an insightful, historically rich complement to the work of Bellah and his colleagues.

More recently, a different take on the problem has made use of the idea of social capital rather than concentrating on the negative consequences of individualism.  The key person promoting this approach is Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam.  He contends that social capital is a factor contributing to cooperation and trust, both of which are prerequisites for civic participation.  In Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, Putnam first used the idea of social capital in an effort to account for the fact that civic-mindedness was characteristic of the north of Italy, but was a feature sorely lacking in the south of that country.  This set the stage for his next book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which received an enormous amount of attention both inside and outside the academy.  Putnam contends that Americans are less willing to participate in civic life today than was the case in the aftermath of World War II.  His conclusion is to a large extent supported in Harvard colleague Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civil Life.  On the other hand, Jason Kaufman questions Putnam’s theory in For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity, which emphasizes the darker side of the voluntary organizations of which Putnam is so enamored.  In an edited follow-up, Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society, Putnam assembled a group of scholars who attempted to assess whether the “bowling alone” thesis was applicable to other liberal democratic nation-states, arriving at somewhat mixed conclusions.

Since the publication over two decades ago of his book Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, political theorist Benjamin Barber has sought to articulate diagnoses of the problem of withdrawal and to offer prescriptions that would raise the level and quality of participation and thus strengthen democracy.  This single-minded purpose can be found in his works such as An Aristocracy of Everyone, A Passion for Democracy: American Essays, and A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong.  In his most recent work, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, Barber offers a complex account of the ways that capitalism has undermined citizenship.  His argument addresses the unintended negative consequences of the end of the Protestant ethic and, borrowing from Freudian thought, he contends that modern consumerism has created a psyche incapable of nurturing and sustaining the desire to be a rational and committed citizen.

Offering a rather different account for why contemporary democracy in the United States is threatened, political theorist Sheldon Wolin stresses the impact of antidemocratic ideology from the right wing, the deleterious influence of big money, and with it the enormous impact of capitalism on the ability of a democracy to deliver on the ideals of promoting genuine equality and justice for all.  At the same time, at the end of Democracy, Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Wolin expresses his concern that the assault on democracy has resulted in people becoming increasingly indifferent.  Nothing can change, he contends, without people changing, “sloughing off their political passivity, and, instead, acquiring some of the characteristics of a demos” (p. 289).

Erosion
Marshall’s thesis contended that the rights attached to citizenship expanded in number from one to three, with the implicit understanding that they became more robust over time.  The welfare state was viewed as the instantiation of this expansion.  It should not be entirely surprising, therefore, that when the modern welfare state came under increasing attack, beginning with the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, a body of scholarship emerged with a thematic core focused on the assault on social rights.  The central premise of what became known as neoliberalism has been that government bureaucracies had proven to be ineffectual in addressing the poverty and other social problems that were the inevitable consequences of capitalist economies.

The solution to such problems, neoliberals argued, was the unfettered market rather than the welfare state and, to that end, when in power they sought to rein in their respective welfare states.  It was an attempt, as political scientist Philip Green contends in Equality and Democracy, to turn Marshall on his head.  In Citizenship, Markets, and the State, Colin Crouch, Klaus Eder, and Damian Tambini have argued that during the past three decades, “the triumph of the market over citizenship has become the most important feature of social politics” (p. 11).  While this was politically more successful in the Anglo-American world, it had an impact even in those nations with the most expansive welfare states.  Focusing specifically on the implications of this shift on migration policies, Carl-Ulrik Schierup, Peo Hansen, and Stephen Castles offer a comparative portrait of western Europe in Migration, Citizenship, and the European Welfare State, paying particular attention to Britain, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.

In Rethinking Citizenship: Welfare, Ideology, and Change in Modern Society, Maurice Roche explores the implications of this ideological shift for the ways we conceptualize citizenship, particularly if and how social rights are to be factored into the understanding of what it means to be a citizen.  In more practical policy terms, one of the ways that neoliberals sought to roll back the existing welfare state was by contracting to private vendors for services heretofore seen as falling under the purview of the public sector, including the running of prisons and “public” schools.  Pauline Rosenau’s edited book Public-Private Policy Partnerships presents readers with revealing examples of this process.

In Transformation of the Welfare State: The Silent Surrender of Public Responsibility, University of California social policy analyst Neil Gilbert contends that the social democratic ideal has increasingly been supplanted by the neoliberal emphasis on the “enabling state.”  Universal access gives way to selective access, while publicly provided benefits are replaced by private provision tied to work.  A problem with his book is that it fails to address head on the fact that during the era of neoliberalism, levels of inequality have risen.  With a particular emphasis on Britain, Ruth Lister concentrates on this reality in Poverty, her effort to make a case for viewing the poor in terms of human rights, which in turn is linked to citizenship.  Margaret Somers offers a more explicit critique of neoliberalism’s ideology, which, in Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights, she succinctly characterizes as “romancing the market” and “reviling the state.”  The uncivil implications of this are evident, especially in her critique of the George W. Bush administration’s response to the human tragedy in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Finally, in his richly detailed analysis of the shift in welfare policies in the United States since the Nixon administration, Michael B. Katz in The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State provides a convincing case that the magic of the market and the war on dependency have had negative consequences for the poor and for the level of inequality.

While each of these books offers a critique of neoliberalism, they do so from somewhat different political vantages, ranging from the center-left (Gilbert) to those who are located further to the left.  They are not inclined to share the view offered by Kathryn Dean in Capitalism and Citizenship, which considers the relationship between the two “the impossible partnership.”  In her contribution to this topic, Dean calls for a novel version of citizenship that encourages new forms of sociability that at once recognize the enduring impact of the nation-state while simultaneously reaching beyond this boundary to the larger world in an effort to recapture lost rights and to yield new ones.

Expansion
This leads to the final theme under consideration: expansion.  While the preceding themes take as their unit of analysis the nation-state, the idea of expansion suggests that people need to move beyond this geographic container to reconceptualize citizenship.  One line of thought builds on globalization theory.  This approach is evident in John Hoffman’s Citizenship beyond the State, which explores the possibility of a stateless citizenship.  It can be seen in John Keane’s Global Civil Society? which analyzes the institutionalization of civil society organizations on a global stage since the end of World War II and ponders whether this institutionalization might serve as the basis for a new, trans-state system.  Nigel Dower advances a similar, less philosophical, and more practically oriented thesis in An Introduction to Global Citizenship.

Global citizenship operates at the level of aspiration rather than actualization.  In contrast, two other developments that have generated an increased amount of attention display growing significance on citizenship.  The first of these is dual citizenship.  The second is nested citizenship, which refers to the fact that citizens of the twenty-seven member states of the European Union are simultaneously citizens of the European Union and their respective member states.

Turning first to dual citizenship, the initial point to emphasize is that this phenomenon has increased dramatically during the latter part of the past century, with the trend continuing to the present.  An ever-increasing number of nation-states, for a range of reasons, have come to accept, or at least tolerate, dual citizenship.  On the face of it, this is a surprising trend, because in the not-too-distant past, it was widely assumed that citizenship and political loyalty to sovereign states were indivisible.  Indeed, from the Bancroft Treaties of the nineteenth century to the 1930 Hague Convention concerning Certain Questions Relating to Conflict of Nationality Laws, the international consensus was that individuals should have one, and only one, national identity—and, it might be added, that nobody ought to be stateless.

This consensus has unraveled as an increasing number of states permit dual nationality, even for individuals who acquire citizenship status via naturalization.  Sending nations have increasingly encouraged dual citizenship as a way of maintaining ties to their émigré communities and, with ties, the continuing flow of remittances.  For their part, a growing number of receiving nations have concluded that it was a mistake to view dual loyalties as a threat, and many of these nations permit dual nationality, albeit often with restrictions.  Stanley Renshon, a critic of dual citizenship, reports in One America? Political Leadership, National Identity, and the Dilemmas of Diversity that at the dawn of the twenty-first century, there were ninety-three nations that permitted dual citizenship.  Peter Spiro is another scholar who views dual citizenship in a negative light.  In Beyond Citizenship: American Identity after Globalization, he treats it as one, though not the only, reason that citizenship has, in his estimation, become devalued in the United States, with rights and obligations becoming increasingly trivialized.

The fact of the matter is that scholars are only beginning to understand the implications of the expansion of dual citizenship.  Polemical accounts can be found that uncritically counter the concerns of scholars such as Renshon and Spiro.  However, far more useful are studies that look at the subject dispassionately and with an appreciation of the ambiguous and uncertain character of dual nationality.  Several edited collections represent some of the most important sources for thoughtful and nuanced accounts.  Among the most valuable volumes published since the beginning of the new century are the following, listed from the oldest to the most recent: Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil’s Dual Nationality, Social Rights, and Federal Citizenship in the U.S. and Europe: The Reinvention of Citizenship; David A. Martin and Kay Hailbronner’s Rights and Duties of Dual Nationals: Evolution and Prospects; editor Thomas Faist’s Dual Citizenship in Europe: From Nationhood to Societal Integration; and Thomas Faist and Peter Kivisto’s edited collection Dual Citizenship in Global Perspective: From Unitary to Multiple Citizenship.

What does it mean to simultaneously be a citizen of Europe and of a nation-state in Europe?  This is the question that those investigating what has come to be known as “nested citizenship” are exploring.  What does it mean to be a citizen of Scotland, the United Kingdom, and the European Union?  The image of nesting conjures up Russian dolls, with smaller dolls contained inside larger and larger dolls.  Among the most insightful works addressing the significance of the European Union for what citizenship may come to mean for its 400 million residents are Elizabeth Meehan’s Citizenship and the European Community, Juan Delgado-Moreira’s Multicultural Citizenship of the European Union, and the recent edited collection by Thomas Faist and Andreas Ette, The Europeanization of National Policies and Politics of Immigration: Between Autonomy and the European Union.  As with work on dual citizenship, scholarly work on nested citizenship remains in an early stage of development, where much of the work to date raises as many as or more questions than it answers.

CONCLUSION
The four themes discussed above—inclusion, withdrawal, erosion, and expansion—reflect the focuses of contemporary discourses on citizenship.  The renewal of interest in citizenship is evident in the voluminous literature that has been produced on the topic during the past quarter century.  It is fair to say that citizenship has become one of the pivotal contested concepts in the contemporary social sciences and in political practice.  The literature reviewed herein constitutes the tip of the iceberg.

But more than that, these books should be seen for what they are: constituting especially valuable contributions to one, but only infrequently to more than one, of this essay’s themes.  While delving further into each of the themes is essential if scholarly understanding is to progress, more critical at the moment is the need to begin to bring each of these discrete discourses into fruitful engagement with the other themes, for only when that is undertaken is it possible to provide an overarching analysis of the condition of and the prospects for citizenship.

WORKS CITED
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Balibar, Étienne.  We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, tr. by James Swenson.  English ed.  Princeton, 2004.

Barbalet, J. M.  Citizenship: Rights, Struggle, and Class Inequality.  Minnesota, 1988.

Barber, Benjamin R.  Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole.  W.W. Norton, 2007.

____.  A Passion for Democracy: American Essays.  1st pbk. ed.  Princeton, 2000 (hardcover ed., CH, Jan’99, 36-3025).

____.  A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong. Hill and Wang, 1998 (CH, Apr’99, 36-4748).

____.  An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America.  Oxford, 1994.

____.  Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age.  California, 1984 (CH, Dec’84).

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