Barry Hindess

Divide and Rule The International Character of Modern Citizenship

Academic discussion of citizenship focuses primarily on the citizen in relation to the particular state of which s/he is a member. From this perspective the modern spread of citizenship, first in a few western states and then somewhat more generally, is usually regarded as a definite advance in human well-being, as turning what had once been the privileges of the few into the rights of the many. This paper aims, if not entirely to undermine, then at least to unsettle this celebration of citizenship. It suggests that an understanding of the impact of citizenship in the modern world must consider not just its role in bringing together members of particular sub-populations and promoting some of their interests, but also the effects of rendering the global population governable by dividing it into sub-populations consisting of the citizens of discrete, politically independent and competing states.

Neo-liberal Citizenship

The government of populations within states and the government of states themselves within the international arena are intimately connected. Thus, in order to understand the character of citizenship in the modern world, it is necessary to locate it as part of a supra-national governmental regime in which the system of states, international agencies and multinational corporations play a fundamental role. A brief history of the modern system of states is followed first by an account of liberalism as a project of government emerging within that system, and secondly by an examination of how twentieth-century changes in the system of states have impacted on that liberal project. Where the liberal government of non-Western populations was once predicated on a denial of citizenship it is now channelled through the promotion of citizenship in states that are themselves increasingly subject to the rigours of the market.

Citizenship in the international management of populations

Academic discussion of citizenship focuses primarily on the citizen in relation to the particular state of which he or she is a member. From this perspective, the modern spread of citizenship is usually regarded as a definite advance in human well-being, turning what had once been the privileges of the few into the rights of the many. This article argues that an understanding of the impact of citizenship in the modern world must consider not just its role in bringing together members of particular subpopulations and promoting some of their interests but also the effects of rendering the global population governable by dividing it into subpopulations consisting of the citizens of discrete, politically independent and competing states.

Liberalism, socialism and democracy: variations on a governmental theme

Liberalism is commonly understood as a political doctrine or ideology concerned with the maximization of individual liberty. However, following Foucaults work on governmentality, a different usage has been suggested, based on the idea of a liberal mode of government. I argue that the differences between these accounts of liberalism derive from a fundamental ambiguity in the liberal project, as a result of which the figure of a community of autonomous individuals appears on the one hand as given reality, serving to identify the character and the limits of legitimate government, while on the other it appears as yet to be realized positivity, serving to define the objective for a variety of governmental projects. This paper examines the implications of that ambiguity for the understanding first of liberalism as doctrine and second of its relationship to other contemporary doctrines - democracy, socialism and the neo-liberalism in particular. Since the figure of the community of autonomous persons considered...

Politics as Government: Michel Foucault's Analysis of Political Reason

This article considers Michel Foucaults work on the rationality of government and the practices in which it has been implemented. Specifically, it develops a critique of Foucaults analysis of political reason in relation to the governmental significance of electoral politics, to liberal commitments to the promotion of individual liberty, and to the focus on government within states to the neglect of the international system and the problem of sovereignty.

Citizenship for all

Peter Nyers has suggested that the title of this special issue, ‘What’s Left of Citizenship?’, can be interpreted in at least two ways. On the one hand, it is a question of what remains of citizenship after the securitization of political communities which followed, or was greatly reinforced by, 9/11. It is also, we might add, a question of what remains after the neo-liberal reforms of the latter part of the twentieth century. On the other hand, it is a question of what is to the left of the citizenship which has been fostered by these changes. What is there in the concept and the practices of citizenship which can serve as a vehicle for resisting, or at least for deploring, what citizenship has now become, and what scope does it provide for progressive alternatives? The papers included here have shown how securitization has served to normalize new techniques of control and surveillance; suggested that it establishes a new relationship between sovereignty and bio-power; offered a fresh and revealing perspective on securitization through comparison and contrast with an earlier regime of social security; and argued that the neo-liberal subject is itself predicated on a subject of a rather different kind, the neurotic subject, and that it is this subject which programs of securitization have directly targeted. There is much in these papers which is valuable and instructive, and not a lot which I would wish to dispute. Rather than engage directly with the detail of their arguments, then, my comments suggest another, complementary, perspective from which the contemporary condition of citizenship might be viewed. I can introduce this perspective by noting, first, that most academic writings on citizenship focus on developments in a small number of Western states or in the European Union, and these four papers offer no exception. This somewhat parochial focus is hardly surprising, given the weight of academic resources gathered together in these states. It is necessary and important that we examine conditions where we live, and sometimes that we campaign to change them. We should also recognize, however, that this concentration of resources itself reflects the privileged position of these states in the international order. It is all the more important, then, that these states should not appear as the unmarked terms in our discussion. We should take care not to treat what is happening to citizenship in the prosperous Western states, and still less in the English-language ones among them, as if these developments were somehow typical of the condition of citizenship in the world today, or represented its future. I note, secondly, that both interpretations of our organizing question, ‘What’s left of citizenship?’, rest on the positive valorization of a certain—unsecuritized,

The Empire of Uniformity and the Government of Subject Peoples

James Tullys Strange Multiplicity uses the example of indigenous minorities in the white settler colonies of North America to develop a remarkably powerful critique of liberal constitutionalisms rule of uniformity. In proclaiming the identity of all persons before the law, he insists, liberal constitutional arrangements commonly discriminate against indigenous and other minorities. While the force of this critique is undeniable, it nevertheless takes at face value one of the central claims of liberal consitutionalism, namely, its claim to be based on the rule of uniformity. Examination of liberal reflections on the government of subject peoples, most of whom were regarded as being, in Mills words, “not sufficiently advanced for representative government“, suggests a rather different picture. In place of the rule of uniformity we find a variety of alternatives but, most commonly, an insistence, first, that the government of such peoples should focus on their welfare and eventual improvement rather than on their liberty and, second, that they should be governed as far as possible through their own institutions and structures of authority. The result was a highly differentiated form of rule in which what were believed to be indigenous arrangements were adapted to the joint requirements of improvement and administrative convenience. Thus, what seems to be a powerful commitment to individual liberty on the part of liberal political reason should be seen as simply one element in a broader liberal perspective on the government of populations. At least as important in this perspective as the rule of uniformity is the presumption that some cultures are more advanced than others and a corresponding view of many cultural differences in historical and developmental terms.

'Culture', 'society'and the figure of man

The invocation of large-scale social unities - states, societies, empires, cultures, civilizations - is a long-established and pervasive practice among sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists and so on. This article examines the treatment of such unities as defined or held together by shared understandings and values, and as independent, boundary-maintaining social systems. We argue that both the ideational and the systemic presumptions at work here are dependent on what Foucault calls the figure of man: the first as an inescapable consequence of that figure, the second as a tempting, but by no means necessary, one. Our first major argument concerns the remarkable persistence of concepts, such as ‘culture’, which designate unities that are ideational in character. We use the case study of anthropology to suggest that this is a consequence of the constitutive role of the figure of man within the human sciences. Human scientists and others critical of the stress on sameness resulting from the concern with ideational unities - cultures, ideologies, discourses and so on - as shared across a population, will find it well-nigh impossible either to modify significantly or to jettison altogether such concepts; as long as they rely on some version of the figure of man, scholars are committed irrevocably to the use of these concepts. Our second major argument concerns the conception of society as a systemic unity, a conception which we see as reflecting the influence of the figure of man in the field of governmental reason. In this part of the article we follow Foucault’s argument that the liberal rationality of government leads to a view of social life as traversed by numerous self-regulating spheres of social interaction. However, we dispute his further suggestion that the concept of society itself, as designating a self-regulating sphere of this kind, can be seen as a product of the liberal critique of police.

Deficit by Design

This paper focuses on the distinguishing concern of the discourse of democratic deficit: namely, that there appear to be some striking discrepancies between democratic norms and institutional practice. I argue in this paper that the problem of democratic deficit is in fact the normal condition of the institutions of representative government. Indeed, early arguments in favour of representative government insist that it departs from and is superior to democracy itself. If representative government provides the predominant modern understanding of democracy, then democratic deficit is an integral part of its design.

Representation Ingrafted upon Democracy

This article aims to clarify issues in dispute between the ‘realist’ account of democracy and its deliberative and participatory democratic opponents. It argues that the classical fear of the corruption of government by the people has been a long‐standing feature of western discussions of democracy. The emergence of representative democracy has added a further set of concerns regarding the corruption of government by the private interests of politicians and bureaucrats. This fear of corruption itself rests on the belief that the proper purpose or telos of the government of a state is to serve the common interest. However, far from bringing the ‘realists’ and their ‘democratic’ critics together, this shared belief provides the central focus for their disagreements, with each perspective pursuing its own view of the most serious threats to good government.