Rather than present formal papers at the Saint Petersburg meeting, Peter Sahlins, David Bell, and Michel Giraud, representatives of the research team France and the French Atlantic World Since the Seventeenth Century, propose five working questions about citizenship that will be discussed generally in the two roundtables, within the theoretical framework of the collaborative research network, and specifically as relevant to different world regions.

What is meant by "citizenship"? The term is variously understood, both within a large scholarly literature and in everyday usage, in at least three ways. First, it can be considered as a general, legal membership category, an inclusive grouping of all those who are not "foreigners." This is a definition of citizenship as legal belonging, as nationality. Second, citizenship is considered a bundle of rights—political, social, and even cultural—exercised by certain members of a polity. Such a political definition assumes that citizens are democratic participants in the business of governing, exercising political rights of participation. Finally, where the nation-state prevails, citizens are considered (and consider themselves) members of a national community who share the moral and cultural frames of social belonging within a national state, and to whom are attributed its benefits.¹ In all three cases, but perhaps most dramatically in the third definition, the relation between official models and vernacular practices generates enormous slippage, debate, and contestation over the extent to which the political order should or should not be aligned with ethnic or cultural allegiance. Such slippage within the intersecting definitions can be articulated within five categorical questions: about modernity, identity, color, movement, and territory. 1. Modernity. The passage of the citizen between the traditional and the modern worlds has long been conceived, at least among Anglo-Saxon scholars, as a tripartite movement, following the work of sociologist T.H. Marshall in the late 1940s.² From "civil" citizenship in the eighteenth century, founded on the concept of civil rights, the category broadened to the "political" citizenship of democratic participation in the nineteenth century; finally, the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of "social" citizenship, founded on entitlements from welfare states that functioned to gloss class divisions. In the 1990s, sociologists and historians revived and critiqued Marshall's work, but have largely left the rights-based, "developmentalist" approach intact. In France and the French Atlantic, the model is instantly complicated and contradicted by the experience of revolutionary events (1789, 1848) that, in their anti-slavery dimensions, posed the question of citizenship, but that were never fully resolved, neither during the Third Republic nor even in the central transition of French state-building that created overseas departments of the ex-colonies in the Caribbean in 1946. More generally, the historical and vernacular practices of citizenship beyond the European core, including in its ex-colonies, and especially in other multi-national, multi-ethnic, or multi-racial polities, often fails to corroborate the model: "modern" citizenship practices rarely entail the neat sequential addition of bundles of distinct rights. On the one hand, it is complicated by the distinction between official discourses and vernacular practices. On the other hand, the classical model presumes a telos of modernity where such "rights" are inevitably cumulative. How can this model be modified, especially in non-European contexts, to describe the appearance of modern citizenship in non-European contexts? Is there a distinctively "modern" citizenship, and is the "path to modernity" a universal one?

2. Identity. Citizenship is not just a status of rights and responsibilities; it is also an expression of membership in a political community. Some theorists, "cultural pluralists," demand recognition of a differentiated citizenship that challenges the unitary conception of a universal and abstract identity—as unmarked "citizens"—implicit within the model of a modern "nation-state." But politically-excluded groups (defined and defining themselves on the basis of race, ethnicity, or cultural identity) often claim distinctive and special rights of representation, self-government, or cultural autonomy against the official models of universality. The same can be true of women and the development of distinctive identities based on gender. In the conventional wisdom, such claims are seen to hinder the development of "national identity." Is cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity inevitably in conflict with unitary notions of citizenship associated with modern nation-state? How do vernacular identifications of belonging articulate with official models of universality?

3. Color. By expanding the range of European experience to include the colonies and post-colonial societies of the Caribbean and North Atlantic worlds, the French researchers are forced to confront the historical movement from slavery to citizenship. The French case draws attention both to the importance of abrupt, transitional and revolutionary moments, and to the continuing discrimination on the basis of race or "color" within the development of universalistic models of belonging and participation. Neither Russia, Southwestern China nor "Southeast Asia" seems to offer a comparable experience. Does the question of racial identity in post-slave societies—color and citizenship—have parallels in the struggles over citizenship in multi-ethnic polities? Are "ethnicity," "cultural identity," or "nationality" functionally equivalent to "color" in either official discourse or vernacular practices? In the case of the French Caribbean, it could be argued that "cultural identity" took over the place of "color" in claims towards citizenship. What might be the implications for a definition of citizenship? Does the introduction of an historically specific trajectory of "color" allow a specification of the distinctiveness of "race," "ethnicity," "cultural identity," and "nationality" as these concepts find articulation within the category of citizenship?

4. Movement. Scholarly work on citizenship often ignores the problems of immigration and movement more generally, just as official discourses elide the pressing social and political questions of how large populations of "foreigners" become citizens, and how citizens are identified as they move within a polity. Historically, citizenship is most dramatically enunciated at its symbolic boundaries, as a question of inclusion and exclusion in a membership category, with its attendant benefits and obligations. Close analyses of the legal and social mechanisms of incorporation are a fruitful site to consider the different dialectical relationships between official discourses and vernacular practices. How does the focus on migratory movements elsewhere, both of "foreigners" into and "citizens" within the polity, highlight the different dimensions of both state policy and local citizenship practice? These questions are particularly important for French colonies in North America and the Caribbean, where patterns of trade and migration have rarely respected legal boundaries, and where territories have repeatedly gone back and forth between European colonial powers, leaving citizenship and nationality ambiguous and much-contested matters for large sections of the population. How did states and social actors identify and regulate the boundaries of citizenship within the movement of people and the exchange of territories?

5. Territory. Official models of attributing citizenship in the historical context of conquest and annexation often diverge both from the vernacular practices of "subject" populations who find themselves incorporated or expelled from polities on the basis of political projects, and from international treaties imposed "from above." Under what conditions and how effectively is citizenship turned into a territorial dimension of state-building? What peripheral regions move from the status of colonies to dependencies to part of national territory, do peoples of these territories partake of a common, universal experience of citizenship? Or does citizenship become differentiated in distinct territorial settings? How do competing metropolitan and colonial powers divide and allocate territories between themselves, and, after doing so, how do they settle the often-ambiguous citizenship and nationality of peoples residing in those territories? How do differences of religion and language contribute to establishing divisions of peoples within common territories? Finally, how do relations between "center" and "periphery" find their specific articulation within the category of citizenship, both in its official and vernacular expressions?


Notes

1 For some reflections on these different and interlocking aspects of citizenship in France and elsewhere, see W. Kymlicka and W. Norman, "Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory," in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. R. Beiner (Albany 1995), 283-322.[Back to text.]

2 T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1950).[Back to text.]