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Article Excerpt
The citizenship concept is not absent from UN discourse. However, the use of the term is limited to a conception of citizenship systematically associated to the state; terms such as supranational citizenship or UN citizenship are not part of the usual UN vocabulary. Does that mean that the UN is not "making citizenship" at all? The answer seems obviously positive. Considering the history of the European Union and work on European citizenship, this article demonstrates that such a response may be too hasty. Through the analysis of two institution-building processes--the creation of supranational criminal courts and the opening of UN policymaking processes--it is argued here that just as the European Union was making citizenship well before the Maastricht Treaty explicitly mentioned "European citizenship," the United Nations is beginning to engage a process of citizenizaship," KEYWORDS: United Nations, citizenship regime, International Criminal Court, policymaking processes, European Union.
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The terms supranational citizenship or UN citizenship are not part of United Nations vocabulary. The use of the concept in UN discourse is limited to a definition of citizenship bounded by state borders. (1) Must we therefore conclude that the UN is not "making citizenship" at all? The answer seems obviously to be yes. This response may, however, be too hasty. The history of the European Union (EU) and work on European citizenship suggest the need for empirical exploration. The aim of this article is to open the way for such an examination.
Attractive as the idea of supranational citizenship is to some, others consider it an illegitimate dilution of the citizenship concept. "World citizenship on this view does not exist in the modern world because the requisite conditions--culture, identity, institutions do not exist." (2) Skeptics insist that one of the main conditions for supranational citizenship is democracy. Without supranational democracy there can be no supranational citizenship. This article rejects this essentialist perspective and adopts the position that the relationship between democracy and citizenship is less conditional than mutually constitutive. (3) By addressing the issue of citizenship and the UN, it does not try to assess whether the UN is democratic or not, but sheds on the debate a different light--a "citizenship light"--that helps us to understand how the originally intergovernmental nature of the UN system has been progressively altered toward a new governing model. It indirectly contributes to the ongoing debate on global democracy and global governance. (4)
The conception of citizenship used here is broad and dynamic. Citizenship is defined as a double relation--among citizens and between citizens and a political entity characterized by rights, access to institutions, and belonging to a political community. (5) The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, it demonstrates that contemporary debates on supranational citizenship are too circumscribed, focusing too much on the locus of citizenship. The second part focuses, both empirically and theoretically, on the precedent provided by the EU and its supranational citizenship. Using the lessons of the EU's history, it develops an analytical conceptualization appropriate for the analysis of institutional change and citizenship building in the UN context. Finally, the analysis identifies the emergence of elements of a UN citizenship regime, one often neglected by mainstream theories of supranational citizenship. The analysis shows that just as the European Union was making citizenship well before 1993 when the Maastricht Treaty explicitly mentioned "European citizenship," the United Nations is beginning to engage a process of citizenization.
The Locus of Citizenship
Contemporary literature on supranational citizenship is dominated by a major issue: the locus of citizenship. (6) Arguing for the progressive "denationalization" of citizenship, the advocates of supranational citizenship most often place it in opposition to national citizenship. (7) Whether taking a legal perspective (works on international human rights regime), (8) a global civil society viewpoint, (9) or a cosmopolitan solidarity perspective, (10) authors seek to demonstrate that citizenship is, or should be, more and more supranational and consequently less and less national. "Cosmopolitans seek to understand the scope for rights, participation and belonging beyond the nation-state, whereas liberal nationalists defend the national model." (11) This is not a very constructive debate.
Such polarization follows from the narrow conception of citizenship used. Citizenship is defined as an exclusive link between individuals and one political authority. However, drawing on national or supranational examples, many other analysts demonstrate that citizenship can be multiple. Examining citizenship in a multinational framework (such as Canada or several European countries), scholars describe citizenship as a multiple rather than exclusive relationship. (12) At the supranational level, scholars in the lineage of Hedley Bull have suggested a conception of "a transnational citizenry with multiple political allegiances." (13)
A significant number of theorists of European integration and EU citizenship have also sought to move beyond any narrow and exclusive perspective on citizenship. Rejecting the notion that the national and supranational are by essence in competition, this literature contextually identifies the institutional frameworks that organize citizenship. (14) Treating them as complementary, it proposes notions such as "hybridity" (15) or "multiple citizenship." (16) "What is certain is that the European Community now provides a framework that coexists with those of its Member States, through which nationals of those Member States can claim certain right." (17) Being the most developed supranational institutional setting, the EU provides a fruitful precedent for moving beyond the current polarization and grasping the issue of supranational citizenship.
Lessons from Citizenship Building in the European Union
The Maastricht Treaty (1993) marked the first time "European citizenship" gained official status as such. But scholars have found signs of European citizenship practices from the first years of the European construction. (18) These practices carried other names than citizenship and involved policies regarding, for example, education, a common passport, and free movement of persons. But they can be put together, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, to reveal a process of citizenship building.
Such studies demonstrate that citizenship-building initiatives can be undertaken by a political entity even if its institutional discourse or legal framework does not explicitly use the term. Therefore, the absence of any citizenship vocabulary in the UN discourse is not a sufficient indicator that citizenship practices do not exist in the UN. Whether the UN is "making citizenship" or not remains an empirical question that needs further exploration.
Approaches developed to analyze the emergence of European citizenship also provide theoretical tools for analyzing possible citizenship building by the UN. Creation of citizenship by a supranational entity such as the European Union raised numerous debates about the scope of the concept. As early as 1997, Antje Wiener, through her reconstruction of the "interrelated stories of citizenship policy and institution-building" in the European case, proposed the idea of "citizenship practice" and advocated moving beyond the content of rights and formal criteria to take into account informal criteria. (19) The European experience thus reminds us that the analysis of the citizenship issue in the UN institutional framework cannot be confined to the realm of international human rights or the establishment of an international human rights regime. Citizenship involves much more than basic human rights. This broader definition of citizenship underpins the concept of "citizenship regime" developed by Jane Jenson and Susan Phillips in the Canadian context and applied by Jane Jenson to the European case. (20) That analytical tool corresponds to an enlarged conception of citizenship. A citizenship regime has four dimensions: conditions for belonging to a political community, thereby contributing to its boundary definition; rights and duties, the recognition of which may also shape the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion of a political community; a responsibility mix that allocates citizenship-related responsibilities to different institutional sectors; (21) and democratic rules of the game for a political entity--that is, the mechanisms giving access to the institutions and legitimating modes of participation in civic life and public debates as well as types of claims making.
Beyond the issue of scope is that of process. Europeanists have stressed that citizenship is a dynamic construction, its building being an ongoing process. (22) Individuals become citizens through one or several processes of citizenship creation. "Questions of citizenship can only be posed in terms of process and access. We are not 'citizens,' but we can 'become citizens.'" (23) This creation of citizenship can usefully be understood as "citizenization." (24) The citizenization process involves the progressive building of a relationship between citizens and a political entity and among citizens themselves.
Finally, studies of how EU citizenship was constructed have shed light on the mutually constitutive relationship between citizenization and institution building. They thereby complemented works in historical sociology that document the place of citizenship in the formation of the institutions of the modern state. "Understood in a socio-historical sense the process of institution-building means making routines, practices, norms, rules and procedures which contribute to establish a distinguishable practice of citizenship." (25) Both constitutive of and constituted by the process of institution-building, citizenship presents a dynamic nature. As institutions change, citizenization may occur and the citizenship regime gains a different content.
Grasping the relationship between institution building and citizenization implies analyzing change in institution-building processes. Defined as "making of routines, practices, norms, rules and procedures," this process of change entails two main ideal types: radical change and incremental change. Radical change refers to major transformations or critical junctures, such...
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