Roots, Not Participation: Attitudes Towards Citizenship Among ´Transnationals’

The processes of globalisation result in increasing interconnectedness and complexisation of the whole system and lifeworld, but also in increasing individual freedom to trespass borders among individuals. This has led social scientists to a quest for new and more appropriate units of analysis, claiming methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002; Beck & Sznaider, 2006)) to be out of date and the boundaries of nation states inexorably eroded. One of the concepts challenged, is citizenship – something that has through its development become thoroughly intertwined with the unit of a nation-state (Tilly, 1995). What happens to citizenship once individual lifestyles become increasingly trans-border, and the nation-state no longer possesses the ultimate authority over its people, is the question addressed in this paper. Various new forms of citizenship have been articulated in response to the critique of methodological nationalism, such as postnational or denationalized citizenship (Sassen, 2002; Soysal, 1994) or transnational citizenship (Fox, 2005; Johnston, 2001), social citizenship (Bauböck, 1998) or denizenship (Castles & Davidson, 2000); up to building a cosmopolitan democracy (Carter, 2001) or a demoicracy (Bohman, 2009), only to mention a few. In our paper we will investigate the credibility of such strategies from the vantage point of the migrants themselves as well as that of the ‘ideal typical’ or ‘classical’ conceptualization of citizenship. Firstly, an analytical overview of citizenship’s components and manifestations, are outlined. This is followed by an analysis of changes that the various post-national conceptions of citizenship reflect. In the second half, these claims are tested on the empirical findings of transnational individuals’ attitudes toward citizenship, political agency and loyalty to states. The central finding or argument of this article is that although social practices of individuals become extensively transnational, their citizenship follows the same path only to an extent. An interesting combination of formal relationship to the state and a societal relationship to the political community evolves, featuring a divided, rather than a transformed citizenship. However, the pessimism of the ‘erosionist’ discourse of citizenship is also articulated in this article: transnationalization rather seems to be reinforcing the erosion rather than constructing a new foundation for civic initiative and affiliation.