MODERN STATE AND CITIZENSHIP IDENTITY
1.2. Citizenship as Modernization and the Methodological Problem
1.2. Citizenship as Modernization and the Methodological Problem
The critique and analysis of citizenship as modernization has been particularly paid attention by Bryan S. Turner who attempted to articulate a historically dynamic theory of citizenship in order to take citizenship theory out of Marshallian evolutionism and ethno-centricism.13 In his model, Turner compared different histories of citizenship in Europe on the basis of Barrington Moore’s analysis of different routes to modernization and at the end suggested a two-dimensional citizenship typology which contrasts the democratic citizenship models with authoritarian traditions. In creating this model, he had two specific points: First, he put excess emphasis on the role of the social forces in the development of citizenship rights. Secondly, he underlined the variations in the constitution of the public space parallel with the variations in the modernization trajectories.14 At the end, he regarded the historical emergence of strong public spaces with a tradition of active citizenry developed from below as in the French model. At the opposite side, a more pervasive private sphere was related with a passive citizenry imposed from above as in the German example. According to him, historically some other combinations are also possible such as an emphasis on a pervasive private space with an active citizenry as in the American case and a strong public space with a passive citizenry imposed from above as in the British case. Consequently, in Turner’s typology, the structural relationship between the public and private spheres and its cultural meaning in the
13 Bryan S. Turner, “Outline of a Theory of Citizenship” in Citizenship: Critical Concepts, ed. Bryan S.
Turner and Peter Hamilton (London: Routledge, 1994), 199-225.
14 Ibid., 203 and 220.
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form of active or passive citizenship are the essential elements to understand the relationship between totalitarianism and democracy.15
Concerning the subject of this study, however, Turner’s study is important from a different perspective. His analysis has extensively contributed to the question of “what kind of identity the citizenship identity is?” which is the main question of the theoretical part of this dissertation. His study presents fundamental insights to differentiate between the elements of modern citizenship identity which are the territorial, cultural and the political elements. In other words, this dissertation benefits from his general account of modern citizenship as the dominant public identity with a particular cultural element within a delimited territory.
There are two points in Turner’s study that this dissertation benefits from in articulating the elements of modern citizenship identity. The first one is his emphasis on the nature of modern citizenship as formed in a national context integral to the process of nation-building which entails the subordination of the ethnic, linguistic, religious and regional minorities and aboriginals.16 According to him, in order to break the Marshallian evolutionism, it is necessary to view the development of citizenship as a matter of (national) unification. In this respect, he gave the historical evolution of British citizenship as the example which according to him cannot be analyzed without making reference to the erosion of the cultural and political autonomy of Celtic identity. This point in Turner’s study overlaps with Brubaker’s conception of “national closure” which similarly refers to the cultural element in modern citizenship identity.17 In analyzing the fusion between the Turkish nationality
15 Ibid., 215-218.
16 Ibid., 205.
17 William Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1992), 27-29.
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and Turkish citizenship and the formation of a hegemonic “Turkishness” as the primary public identity during the formative years of the Turkish Republic, this is the general framework that the dissertation utilizes in the following parts.
Secondly, in Turner’s typology, the way the public space is organized within a nation-state around some shared values, modes of behavior and social understandings provides a particular character –active and passive forms of citizenship- to that identity which underlines the political boundaries of citizenship.18 He views citizenship as a membership to a particular political community with basic values of public life and a specific mode of social integration that feature the terms of the
“political” within a delimited territory. It refers to the political element which includes a set of institutions and values and a particular political disposition for the individual and for the collectivity. The development of the political dimension of modern Turkish citizenship will be analyzed within such framework of citizenship as a mode of integration and a centrally defined public-political disposition in the following pages.
The problem in Turner’s study is the excess emphasis on the role of the social forces in the development of a particular citizenship identity. This is first of all related with his assumption about the relative homogeneity of the societies that he studied:
France, England, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and the colonial America.
According to Turner, since those countries have no problems of aboriginality and ethnic complexity (except for the United States) the question of citizenship has been less complicated and can be studied with a society-centered – focusing on the demands of the social forces - approach. In other parts of the world where societies are more complicated with ethnic, religious and sectarian differences as in the Middle
18 Turner, “Outline,”218.
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East – including Turkey -, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, the formation of modern citizenship can be analyzed as the construction of a central-unitary identity from above rather than as a collection of socially demanded entitlements.19 This is an easily reversible assumption. In both historical and contemporary terms, each of these European societies have also submerged in the problems of ethnic, racial, linguistic, regional and gender discrimination and exclusion problems. In each of them, contemporary as well as historical demands for recognition and integration or disintegration have shaped the formation of democratic traditions and their specific citizenship conceptions.
Turner’s emphasis on the role of social forces is also related with his definition of citizenship. According to Turner, citizenship is a set of political, economic, juridical and cultural practices that define a person a competent member of society.20 However, there are problems in such a definition which includes all the processes leading to citizenship. The point is that citizenship rights and obligations exist when the state validates the legality of citizenship norms and takes steps to implement them.21 The essence of citizenship identity is that, it is a formal, political-legal identity given by the public authority which features the political bond between individual and the state.
Therefore, although Turner’s study is important to distinguish between the cultural and the political elements of modern citizenship identity, this dissertation relies on the point that contrary to Turner’s general approach, citizenship is a sphere of state action which defines and enforces citizenship rights and obligations. In this
19 Ibid., 221.
20 Turner, “Contemporary” in Citizenship and Social Theory, ed., B.S. Turner, 5.
21 Thomas Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society: A Framework of Rights and Obligations in Liberal, Traditional and Social Democratic Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),9-10.
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sense, citizenship theory should not be reduced to the theory of civil society. Civil society and citizenship are interrelated but different spheres. In citizenship, the state provides an identity and recognizes a cluster of rights and obligations to individuals who obtain this identity. In civil society, however, groups in concert or in opposition put pressure on the state to expand the scope of rights. Therefore, the actual citizenship rights reside in the state sphere. It is the state with the power of bureaucratic and political implementation, of official protection and of using legal sanctions that provide this basic identity to the individual.22
This critique underlines the point that whatever the development path of the citizenship rights, from above or below, citizenship is a state identity. In Turner’s typology this point is missing. According to him, strong social forces could expand citizenship rights through the process of political conflict while more passive forms of citizenship are created as a result of the political strategies of the dominant political elite. In this formulation it is implicitly stated that since the passive forms of citizenship develop under the dominant position of the state elite and the bureaucratic apparatus, a state-centric approach is more appropriate in such a context.
At this point, a clarification is necessary. In studying a particular citizenship identity, the issue is not to make a methodological preference – state-centered or society centered - in accordance with the basic character of the citizenship tradition of a particular society. For example, a relatively active conception of citizenship should not be necessarily studied with a society-centered approach since it focuses more on social forces. As a matter of fact in different social-historical contexts, the civil- societal forces and the state sources - the constitution, bureaucracy, procedures, laws, political and the discursive institutions of the modern statecraft are combined in
22 Ibid., 17-18.
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various ways in the formation of a particular citizenship identity. It is constructed through an extensive “politics of closure” which is carried out through the practical-political acts and various discursive practices of the modern state.
A particular citizenship identity is then, the result of an extensive politics of closure to which various social groups like property owners, men, whites, educated men, men of particular occupations, adults etc. took precedence to benefit from it.
This is the basic historical fact about modern citizenship that we should meet face to face.23 It is an identification with the central political authority, articulated within a
“politics of closure” which is carried out by that particular authority.
The comparative positions of the state and the social forces and the cultural variations in the formation of the public space should be analyzed first within the processes of external and internal closure, which goes hand in hand with the state formation. The peculiar formation of national citizenship identity as an identity, which belongs to the state sphere rather than to the civil society, necessitates such an analysis. In this respect, this study rests prioritizes the state as the unit of analysis and a state-centered perspective for the analysis of Turkish case which provides a specific example of modern citizenship as the construction of an official, public identity with a hegemonic cultural (national) component.
23 Stuart Hall, “Yurttaşlar ve Yurttaşlık” [ The Citizens and Citizenship] in Yeni Zamanlar: 1990’larda Politikanın Değişen Yüzü [New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in 1990’s] ed. S. Hall and D.
Held (İstanbul: Ayrıntı Yayınları,1995), 171.
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