Douglas Klusmeyer

Citizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Practices

The forms, policies, and practices of citizenship are changing rapidly around the globe, and the meaning of these changes is the subject of deep dispute. Citizenship Today brings together leading experts in their field to define the core issues at stake in the citizenship debates. The first section investigates central trends in national citizenship policy that govern access to citizenship, the rights of aliens, and plural nationality. The following section explores how forms of citizenship and their practice are, can, and should be located within broader institutional structures. The third section examines different conceptions of citizenship as developed in the official policies of governments, the scholarly literature, and the practice of immigrants and the final part looks at the future for citizenship policy. Contributors include Rainer Baubock (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Linda Bosniak (Rutgers University School of Law, Camden), Francis Mading Deng (Brookings Institute), Adrian Favell (University of Sussex, UK), Richard Thompson Ford (Stanford University), Vicki C. Jackson (Georgetown University Law Center), Paul Johnston (Citizenship Project), Christian Joppke (European University Institute, Florence), Karen Knop (University of Toronto), Micheline Labelle (Universite du Quebec a Montreal), Daniel Salee (Concordia University, Montreal), and Patrick Weil (University of Paris 1, Sorbonne)

Hannah Arendt’s Critical Realism: Power, Justice, and Responsibility

By the end of World War II, Hannah Arendt recognized that the emergence of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia had introduced state-organized terror and mass murder on a scale that defied comprehension. The “actions” of these totalitarian regimes, she observed, “have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards of moral judgment.”1 From his study of the twentieth century’s experience with such phenomena, the historian Eric Weitz has recently observed: “Genocides stand at the center of our contemporary crisis.”2 His work joins those by many others, including Zygmunt Bauman, Norman Naimark, and Omer Bartov, who have been exploring “the crucial relationship between war, genocide, and modern identity.”3 In the examples used to explore this relationship, the Holocaust remains the central point of reference. Philosophers, such as Susan Neiman and Richard Bernstein, have identified Auschwitz as the exemplar of “evil” in the modern era and one that has created a watershed in the history of western moral thought.4

Death of the Statesman as Tragic Hero: Hans Morgenthau on the Vietnam War

In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946), Hans Morgenthau celebrated the noble role of the statesman, whose tragic destiny entailed accepting the agonizing moral burden of committing lesser evils as the inescapable price for securing the greater good. In this elitist vision, the statesman is primarily accountable to personal conscience rather than to the poorly informed, undisciplined judgment of any democratic electorate. In focusing on the statesmans pivotal role, Morgenthau glossed over the ways the New Deal and the Second World War had transformed the institutional context within which American presidents made foreign policy. As he shifted his attention to American policy toward Vietnam in the late 1950s and the 1960s, however, his view of presidential leadership and the executive branch changed significantly. Morgenthau came to see the growth of the national security state and the unaccountable exercise of executive power as a twin threat to the foundations of republican government. His critique emphasized the pathologies of policymaking insulated within this state apparatus. He learned that one problem with the lesser-evil approach is that the moral distinctions on which it is predicated are relative and contingent in practice: that which was once proscribed from the policymakers toolbox can readily become the prescribed instrument after the justifying precedent has been established.

Vietnam Writings and the National Security State

This chapter examines Morgenthau’s growing opposition to the Vietnam War as part of his broader criticisms of the national security state and the threats it posed to republican constitutional order. In advancing its case for the relevance of Morgenthau’s insights today, the chapter begins by situating several of Morgenthau’s views within contemporary scholarship on the national security state. The next two sections focus on his general critique of American policy in the Vietnam War and the perceived pathologies in the policymaking process. The fourth section shows how Morgenthau’s views converged with Noam Chomsky in several important respects. The fifth section examines his concern over the decline of the ethic of responsibility among policymakers. The final section examines his criticisms of Henry Kissinger’s conduct as statesman.