The Meaning(s) of Citizenship(s) in a Transnational Age: A Perspective from Below

Confronted with liberal and postnational challenges, state citizenship has been characterized as increasingly “light” (Joppke, 2010). This interpretation captures the liberal rights revolution and the logic of marked imperatives. However, it overlooks that governments fill “citizenship light’s” void in meaning by culturalizing discourses and practices. Citizenship rules, tests, ceremonies, study guides have been studied extensively – usually by privileging top-down, state-centred approaches. What has been neglected are perspectives from below, namely from prospective/new (dual) citizens navigating the systems of state citizenship: How do they act strategically to create opportunities for themselves and their families? What does “citizenship” mean to them; what – and which citizenships – do they refer to? Drawing on 35 interviews with new Canadian citizens, this paper addresses these questions. Sporting the highest naturalization rate of all OECD countries, Canada derives almost two thirds of its population growth from immigration. Nonetheless, recently, Canadian citizenship has been made harder to get and easier to lose (Winter, 2014). Many interviewees are highly educated, skilled, internationally connected, mobile, and often dual nationals. These are the people sought after for both economic and nation-building purposes. However, they also operate in a transnational* field. In this paper, the nation-state is theorized as a status-group, where social closure is characterized by economic AND social status. While immigration policies stipulate the material conditions of entry for prospective citizens, citizenship practices and discourses are best described as boundary work at the symbolic level. What is at stake in this paper, is NOT the boundary work of the nation state, but the meaning-making of those confronted by the former.*I use the term transnational (tbc) – rather than postnational – because a preliminary analysis shows that interviewees do not consider themselves to be living in a postnational world, but they do engage in transnational practices of citizenship.