FORMS OF CITIZENSHIP:

Between (Multi)Cultural Citizenship and

Cosmopolitanism

Rezza Akbar
Department of Sociology
Faculty of Social and Political Sciences
The Eleventh of March University
(UNS)
 INTRODUCTION

• Cultural citizenship concerns the maintenance and development of cultural lineage via
education, custom, language, and religion, and the positive acknowledgement of difference
in and by the mainstream.

• It is a developing discourse, in response to the great waves of cross-class migration of the

past fifty years and an increasingly mobile middle class culture-industry workforce
generated by a new international division of cultural labor (NIDCL) that favors North over
South and capital over labor, as film and television production, computing, and sport go
global in search of locations, skills, and docile labor.
 THEORIZING CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

• There have been three key sites for theorizing cultural citizenship activity, each with strong
links to the public sphere. They emerged at the same time, but with seemingly minimal
interaction.

• First, since the late 1980s, Tony Bennett and colleagues in the cultural-policy studies
movement have focused on a guaranteed set of cultural competences that government should
give to its citizenry. Their primary interlocutor is the Australian federal government’s
cultural bureaucracy, and their admirers include others in search of influence beyond
affective protest (American Behavioral Scientist, 2000; Bennett, 1998; Miller, 1998).
 THEORIZING CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

• Second, Renato Rosaldo and colleagues in Californian, Texan, and New York Latino/a
studies of the same period look to a guaranteed set of rights for minorities. Their primary
interlocutor is Latino/a social movements, and their admirers include the Fresno Bee
newspaper (Rosaldo, 1997; Flores and Benmayor, 1997; Rodriguez and Gonzales, 1995).

• Finally, Will Kymlicka and fellow liberal political theorists seek a rapprochement between
collective minority cultures and individual majority culture. Their primary interlocutor is a
series of states dealing with ethnic minorities, and their admirers include the Wall Street
Journal (Kymlicka, 1995; Zachary, 2000).
 THEORIZING CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

• Where Rosaldo et al. seek to transform as well as to use citizenship for the purposes of their
own culture and others marginalized by the majority, Bennett and Kymlicka seek to utilize it
for a general purpose that takes account of minorities.

• For Rosaldo, US culture is distinguished by the Latino/a immigrant experience of

disenfranchisement. As such, culture substantively trumps formal universalism.

• Kymlicka thinks similarly. For Bennett, culture is a set of tools for living that are deployed
or not depending on their value for achieving specific purposes, rather than purely
expressive ends in themselves
 THEORIZING CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

• Rosaldo is critical of liberal government for its myths of the sovereign individual and
assumptions of a shared language and culture.

• Kymlicka endorses liberalism provided that it allows for real protection to minorities – as a
matter of justice and self-interest.

• Bennett endorses liberal government as a project of constituting, not drawing upon, the
liberal individual, and is agnostic about its humanist claims.
 THEORIZING CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

• Most proponents of cultural citizenship argue that identity is developed and secured through
a cultural context. On this reading, collective senses of self are more important than monadic
ones, and rights and responsibilities can be determined in accordance with cultural
membership rather than the individual.

• For some critics, this flexibility can be achieved through a doctrine of cultural rights. For
others, such as Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, it is a by-product of universal access to education, a
‘primary condition of free and equal citizen participation in public life’ (Rorty, 1995: 162).
 THEORIZING CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

• Rorty opposes public funding to sustain specific cultural norms of familial or religious
origin, calling instead for a curriculum designed to generate cosmopolitans who learn about
their country and its ‘global neighbors’ in a way that does not adjudicate between identities
as workers, believers, or other forms of life that exist alongside one’s culture of origin
(Rorty, 1995: 164).

• Her argument is a collectivist flipside to human-capital données about individuals

maximizing their utility through investment in skills. It reunites cultural citizenship with
liberalism. Each position is fundamentally concerned with efficient and effective social life
and naturalization requirements.
 POLITICS OF MULTICULTURALISM

• Modern societies are increasingly confronted with minority groups demanding recognition
of their identity, and accommodation of their cultural differences. This is often phrased as
the challenge of 'multiculturalism'. But the term 'multicultural' covers many different forms
of cultural pluralism, each of which raises its own challenges.

• There are a variety of ways in which minorities become incorporated into political
communities, from the conquest and colonization of previously self-governing societies to
the voluntary immigration of individuals and families. These differences in the mode of
incorporation affect the nature of minority groups, and the sort of relationship they desire
with the larger society
 POLITICS OF MULTICULTURALISM

• There are two broad patterns of cultural diversity. In the first case, cultural diversity arises
from the incorporation of previously self-governing, territorially concentrated cultures into a
larger state.

• These incorporated cultures, which is called as 'national minorities‘ by Will Kymlicka

(1995), typically wish to maintain themselves as distinct societies alongside the majority
culture, and demand various forms of autonomy or self-government to ensure their survival
as distinct societies.
 POLITICS OF MULTICULTURALISM

• In the second case, cultural diversity arises from individual and familial immigration. Such
immigrants often coalesce into loose associations which is called by Will Kymlicka as
'ethnic groups‘ (1995).

• They typically wish to integrate into the larger society, and to be accepted as full members of
it. While they often seek greater recognition of their ethnic identity, their aim is not to
become a separate and self-governing nation alongside the larger society, but to modify the
institutions and laws of the mainstream society to make them more accommodating of
cultural differences.
 MULTINATION STATES AND POLYETHNIC
STATES

• One source of cultural diversity is the coexistence within a given state of more than one
nation, where 'nation' means a historical community, more or less institutionally complete,
occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and culture.

• A 'nation' in this sociological sense is closely related to the idea of a 'people' or a 'culture'—
indeed, these concepts are often defined in terms of each other. A country which contains
more than one nation is, therefore, not a nation-state but a multination state, and the smaller
cultures form 'national minorities'.
 MULTINATION STATES AND POLYETHNIC
STATES

• The incorporation of different nations into a single state may be involuntary, as occurs when
one cultural community is invaded and conquered by another, or is ceded from one imperial
power to another, or when its homeland is overrun by colonizing settlers.

• But the formation of a multination state may also arise voluntarily, when different cultures
agree to form a federation for their mutual benefit.
 MULTINATION STATES AND POLYETHNIC
STATES

• Many Western democracies are multinational. For example, there are a number of national
minorities in the United States, including the American Indians, Puerto Ricans, the
descendants of Mexicans (Chicanos) living in the south-west when the United States
annexed Texas, New Mexico, and California after the Mexican War of 1846-8, native
Hawaiians, the Chamorros of Guam, and various other Pacific Islanders.

• These groups were all involuntarily incorporated into the United States, through conquest or
colonization
 MULTINATION STATES AND POLYETHNIC
STATES

• The second source of cultural pluralism is immigration. A country will exhibit cultural
pluralism if it accepts large numbers of individuals and families from other cultures as
immigrants, and allows them to maintain some of their ethnic particularity.

• Immigration is not only a 'New World' phenomenon. Many other countries also accept
immigrants, although not in the same magnitude as the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Since World War II, Britain and France have accepted immigrants from their former
colonies.
 MULTINATION STATES AND POLYETHNIC
STATES

• Obviously, a single country may be both multinational (as a result of the colonizing,
conquest, or confederation of national communities) and polyethnic (as a result of individual
and familial immigration).

• Those labels are less popular than the term 'multicultural'. But that term can be confusing,
precisely because it is ambiguous between multinational and polyethnic. Since 'multicultural'
invites this sort of confusion, Kymlicka (1995) used the terms 'multinational' and
'polyethnic' to refer to the two main forms of cultural pluralism.
 MULTINATION STATES AND POLYETHNIC
STATES

• Kymlicka uses culture (and 'multicultural') in a different sense. His focus will be on the sort
of 'multiculturalism' which arises from national and ethnic differences.

• Kymlicka defined 'a culture‘ as synonymous with 'a nation' or 'a people'—that is, as an
intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given
territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history.

• And a state is multicultural if its members either belong to different nations (a multination
state), or have emigrated from different nations (a polyethnic state), and if this fact is an
important aspect of personal identity and political life.
 MULTINATION STATES AND POLYETHNIC
STATES

• For Kymlicka, it it is important to distinguish national minorities (distinct and potentially

self-governing societies incorporated into a larger state) from ethnic groups (immigrants
who have left their national community to enter another society).

• We can distinguish both of these from what are often called 'new social movements'—that is,
associations and movements of gays, women, the poor, the disabled—who have been
marginalized within their own national society or ethnic group.
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• In modern discussions of human rights, we are presented with the claim that particular
cultures, communities, and ethnic traditions have a right to exist and a right to be protected
from decay, assimilation, and desuetude.

• It has brought a dream about cosmopolitanism or a cosmopolitan life, both socially and
politically. Imagining a world without nationalism, a world in which ethnicity is simply a
consumer taste, a world in which each individual simply and directly inhabits the whole, is
like imagining the melting pot in which all immigrant ethnicities vanish into the formation
of a new kind of individual.
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• In each case this produces an ideology especially attractive to some. It neglects the reasons
why many others need and reproduce ethnic or national distinctions.

• And, perhaps most importantly, it obscures the issues of inequality that make ethnically
unmarked national identities accessible mainly to elites and make being a comfortable
citizen of the world contingent on having the right passports, credit cards, and cultural
credentials.
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• Everyone belongs, though some people belong to some groups with more intensity and often
less choice than others belong to any. Such belonging matters not only as a subjective state
of mind – not only insofar as it feels either good or bad to individuals.

• It matters also as a feature of social organization. It joins people together in social relations
and informs their actions. Without it, the world would be a far more chaotic place
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• But – and this is the theme of my chapter – belonging is a problem for those who imagine a
more benign and cosmopolitan global order as an extension of liberal, individualist
democracy. It is a problem on the one hand because intense membership commitments and
claims to group. rights can threaten individual liberties.

• Liberal cosmopolitanism is prone to exaggerate the availability of universal citizenship not

marked by ethnicity or other asymmetrically available solidarities. However, some forms of
belonging may be crucial to the realization of the sorts of multilayered, multilateral polities
that might allow cosmopolitanism to flourish more as democracy than as empire.
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• Many advocates of liberal cosmopolitanism treat nationalism, religion, and at least strong
versions of ethnicity as the “bad others” to cosmopolitanism.

• They neglect social solidarity in favor of analyses framed in terms of individuals and the
universal, and they underestimate the implications of inequality – including the inequality
that empowers some to approach the world effectively as individuals, neglecting the social
bases of their own efficacy, while others are all too aware of the limits of their individual
capacity and are clearly in need of collective support in relation to the challenges the world
throws at them.
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• Among the instances of these problems is the overeager expectation that the world could
happily be remade through ethical, political, socio-psychological, and cultural orientations
that emphasize individual freedom and appropriations of the larger world while requiring no
strong commitment to intervening solidarities.

• This reveals a certain blindness in cosmopolitan theory, blindness toward the sociological
conditions for cosmopolitanism itself and toward the reasons why national, ethnic, and other
groups remain important to most of the world’s people.
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• As Craig Calhoun (2003) believed, cosmopolitanism – however attractive in some ways – is

compromised by its formulation in liberal individualist terms that block appreciation of the
importance of social solidarity. Another is the extent to which cosmopolitanism is
conceptualized as the absence of particularism rather than as a positive form of belonging.

• The elites of “poor” countries who participate in global civil society, multilateral agencies,
and transnational business corporations not only make money their compatriots can barely
imagine but make possible the cosmopolitan illusion held by elites from rich countries. This
is the illusion that their relationships with fellow cosmopolitans truly transcend nation and
culture and place. Cosmopolitan elites too often misrecognize transnational class formation
as the escape from belonging.
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• The point is not simply privilege. It is that a sense of connection to the world as a whole, and
of being a competent actor on the scale of “global citizenship,” is not merely a matter of the
absence of more local ties. It has its own material and social conditions. Moreover, the
cosmopolitan elites are hardly culture-free; they do not simply reflect the rational obligations
of humanity in the abstract.

• To some extent, the cosmopolitan elite culture is a product of Western dominance and the
kinds of intellectual orientations it has produced. It reflects “modernity,” which has its own
historical provenance
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• It is also a culture in which secularism seems natural and religion odd, and in which respect
for human rights is assumed but the notion of fundamental economic redistribution is radical
and controversial. This culture has many good qualities, as well as blind spots, but
nonetheless it is culture and not its absence.

• But like secularism, cosmopolitanism is a presence not an absence, an occupation of

particular positions in the world, not a view from nowhere or everywhere. All actually
existing cosmopolitanisms, to be more precise, reflect influences of social location and
cultural tradition.
 MINORITY CULTURES AND THE
COSMOPOLITAN ALTERNATIVE

• It is neither a freedom from culture nor a matter of pure individual choice, but a cultural
position constructed on particular social bases and a choice made possible by both that
culture and those bases. It is accordingly different from the transcendence of localism on
other cultural and social bases.

• Cosmopolitanism thus has particular rather than solely universal content, and its advocates
sometimes fail to recognize this. Moreover, the content and the misrecognition are connected
to social bases of relative privilege.