The many strands of citizenship

Many of my father’s friends were republicans of the non-military persuasion. Their political philosophy had complex roots. These included Irish nationalism, though they were leery of militarism and blood-sacrifice homoeroticism. There was also a strong strain of anti-imperialism and it was not confined to Britain. But the most abiding proved to be the pure radical republicanism of the French Jacobins.

They spoke of ‘the republic’ not as a football team or a brand name, but as an idea, a concept, a philosophical, political and social framework that housed a set of principles and values and a way of doing things that reflected those principles and values.
Central to this idea was the citizen, the fundamental building block of the republic. Indeed, usually in a spirit of banter and irony, they frequently greeted each other as ‘Citizen’. ‘Good morning, Citizen Hog’, they would say.
I remembered their endless discourse over these recent weeks as we contemplated the ‘citizenship referendum’. And I was struck by a paradox. We spent much more time talking about the referendum itself and the pros and cons of the proposal, and about a whole plethora of other issues as well, from Irish missionary imperialism to perceived racism, than we did to debating the idea of citizenship.
Of course, the nature of ‘citizenship’ is contested. The Irish educationalist Helen Keogh (not the PD politician) surveyed the literature on the subject and came up with ‘a veritable A-V of citizenship’.
A whistlestop tour of these various categories would include active citizenship, biological citizenship, comprehensive citizenship, corporate citizenship, cultural citizenship, dialogic citizenship, social citizenship, and virtual citizenship.
And there’s more. I am particularly taken with the possibilities of post-national and post-nationalist citizenship.
So, what did the recent debate tell us of our understanding of citizenship? What, for example, is revealed by the term ‘citizenship tourism’?
It suggests that ‘citizenship’ merely implies status, entitlement and licence, in the sense that a passport facilitates movement and settlement in Europe.
Well, if a person came to Ireland just for a passport, she or he would not deserve the title ‘citizen’ as my father’s generation understood and tried to practice the term. Surely ‘passport tourism’ would be more accurate?
On the other hand, many green-hooped died-in-the-wool Irish wouldn’t be rated by that old generation either, because the essence of ‘citizenship’ as they understood it is participation in the social, economic, cultural and political life of the community and the state, and many of us don’t participate.
Yes, it’s true that many people live in areas or circumstances that generate cynicism about participation. But in a citizen’s republic, change comes through the ballot box and their disengagement facilitates the perpetuation of the very conditions that alienate them in the first place.
The recent debate suggests that citizenship in post-modern Ireland has become a narrow, ballot-box and rights-based affair, not a principled and participatory process that pervades one’s public and private life alike.
Active citizenship and passive citizenship may reflect two philosophical/political traditions, one essentially Protestant, the other essentially Catholic, and particularly what is called ‘liberation theology’.
In turn, these echo in two general models of citizenship, the rights/entitlement model and the duty/responsibility model. The former is much more vigorously championed in Ireland than the latter. At almost every level, we hear much more about rights and entitlements than we do of duties and responsibilities.
This throws up a number of paradoxes evident in the recent referendum debate. The first is that many in Irish public life who have celebrated the emergence of ‘post-Catholic’ Ireland argued for what is essentially a Catholic interpretation of citizenship.
The irony is that the general social and economic model they favour is essentially Protestant, as found in Denmark and Sweden. It is a matter for historians to explain the degree to which radical Catholic thinking has colonised Irish left wing thought in the last fifteen years.
The second paradox is that those who favour Berlin over Boston in social and economic models appear to favour Boston over Berlin when it comes to birth rights.
It was a bit startling to hear many who would speak derisively of America’s role in the world speak so glowingly of its ‘inclusive’ approach to citizenship birthrights. Likewise, proponents of the amendment, which some saw as introducing a German ‘blood-line’ approach, included those who nest us with Boston rather than Berlin in other ways.
Finally, there’s a third paradox. It is the correlation between French-style Jacobin republicanism as was once espoused in Ireland and Protestant civic responsibility. Those unionists who are now preparing to march to celebrate their victories over papism cannot see this is a tragedy and one powerfully illustrated in Richard Hamilton’s great diptych The Citizen, The Subject.
We’ll come back at all this again…