Description
Citizenship is commonly presumed to be emancipatory. However, the same enlightenment theories of citizenship which were newly defining ordinary Europeans as rights-holders were also providing justification for colonial projects overseas, defining people out of rights. Today’s citizenships’ logics emerged out of that colonial past and out of the period of decolonisation that followed, as did the landscape of entities that are today recognised as citizenship-granting States. To a certain extent, the same colonial logics of citizenship continue to play out today (and I have presented this in more detail elsewhere). However, in this paper I want to draw attention instead to what I refer to as ‘banal citizenism’ and its neo-colonial implications. I suggest that banal citizenism refers to the implicit presumption of Modern citizenship as the only form of political relationship that can be recognised between an individual and a state. One implication of this is that anything other than citizenship is presumed merely to be a lack of a relationship. This also means that any progressive projects need to be conceived through this language and logic of citizenship. Elsewhere, I have defended the recognition for example of the substantive relationship of ‘noncitizenship’. In this paper I will go into more detail about the function of banal citizenism.
