Janine Brodie

Meso‐discourses, state forms and the gendering of liberal‐democratic citizenship

This article builds upon Michel Foucaults fleeting observation that ‘the state consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations’ and that ‘a revolution is a different type of codification of these same relations’ (Held et al., 1983, pp. 312–3). Specifically, the article uses the case of Canada to argue that distinct state forms rest on particular meso‐discourses which inform a logic of governance, historical configurations of the public and private and gendered citizenships. The meso‐discourses of separate spheres, liberal progressivism and performativity (the logics of governance for the laissez‐faire state, the Keynesian welfare state and the neo‐liberal state, respectively) have coded and recoded gendered citizenships, thereby providing women and men with differential access to the public sphere and to citizenship claims. The neo‐liberal states meso‐discourse of performativity is especially challenging for women and all equity‐seeking groups because it prescribes the ascendency of ma...

We are all equal now Contemporary gender politics in Canada

This article examines the Canadian case, focusing on the ways in which the political rationalities that have informed the Canadian variants of post-war social liberalism and neoliberalism have opened and then closed spaces for the articulation and institutionalization of gender-based equality claims-making. The article recounts how the Canadian welfare state underwrote a unique gender equality infrastructure inside the state and a thick field of gender organizations in civil society and later how this potent political and symbolic node of social liberalism became a critical field of contestation for those promoting neoliberal political rationalities. The article describes a protracted war of position in which the gendered politics and identities of the 20th century have been displaced and marginalized, but not fully consumed by neoliberal idioms, representations and policy interventions.

Introduction: globalization and citizenship beyond the national state

For more than a decade, academics and policy-makers have pondered the consequences of globalization for national states and for the future of foundational institutions of democratic governance such as citizenship. Although globalization has been imagined in a variety of competing ways, there is general consensus that the cornerstones of modern governance, especially the symmetries forged largely in the past two centuries between national states, national territory, and national citizenship rights, have been progressively fractured by transnational networks, flows, and identities. Globalization is commonly linked to the erosion of the capacity of national states to exercise sovereignty over domestic policy and territorial boundaries or to buffer its citizens from an increasing predatory and unpredictable international political economy. Disillusioned assessments of the future of the national state and citizenship rights are widely held among interested publics and policy networks but the degree of fatalism implied by the diagnosis is linked to different conceptions of globalization itself. At one end of the spectrum are those who maintain that there is nothing especially new about the contemporary era and that the advance of globalization ultimately depends on the power and approval of national states themselves. At the other end of the spectrum are those who understand globalization as a transformative epoch, involving the reordering of modern frameworks of human organization and action, including national citizenship and previous experience with the national state as a primary container of political power and collective action (Held et al., 1999, p. 10). Extreme versions of this latter viewpoint, sometimes termed the ‘strong globalization thesis’, represent national states as being reduced to a zombie-like presence, living yet dead (Beck, 2000, p. 27), as ‘unnatural’, even impossible units in a global economy (Ohmae, 1995, p. 5). Others, while recognizing the unbundling of the modernist links between the national state, territory, and citizens, view globalization less deterministically as a complex and multilayered process that invites us to rethink the scope and content of contemporary citizenship rights both within and beyond the national state. The contributions to this special issue of Citizenship Studies understand globalization, although differently, as a contested term and as a set of interactions whose uncertain parameters are historically unique and still unfolding. At Janine Brodie, Canada Research Chair (Political Economy and Social Governance), Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, T6G 2H4; e-mail: janine.brodie@ualberta.ca

Globalization, In/Security, and the Paradoxes of the Social

The concept of the social draws together many of the core themes of this collection, especially human insecurity, the diminished provision of public goods, and the sustainability of social reproduction in an era of intensifying globalization.1 Globalization is a contested term perhaps best understood as a set of interactions whose uncertain parameters are, in many respects, historically unique and still unfolding. At a minimum, the many dimensions of contemporary globalization can be subsumed under two related processes — globality, the irreversible forces, many technological, that are breaking down barriers of time, space, and nation and fashioning the planet into a global community, and globalism, a contestable political posture that promotes a transnational worldview, philosophy of governance and institutional structures (Beck 2000: 1–3, 11–15). The prevailing version, neo-liberal globalism, prioritizes economic growth and market logics over all other goals and institutions of governance. With varying degrees of coercion, neo-liberal globalism seeks to enforce privatization, trade liberalization, the deregulation of capital, and the erosion of the public sector and of democratic control on all national polities.

From Social Security to Public Safety: Security Discourses and Canadian Citizenship

This article explores the development of security discourses and, in particular, what I term the citizen–state security bargain in Canada since Confederation. The analysis focuses on how various security discourses have lent legitimacy to the state and helped to fashion a sense of national community and citizen identity. A historical tracking of Speeches from the Throne illustrates the ways in which the mid-twentieth-century enunciation of the citizen–state bargain as social security has been progressively surpassed and circumscribed by individualized pronouncements of public safety.

The ‘Free Trade’ Election*

From the beginning of the 1988 federal campaign, media pundits and political scientists alike proclaimed that this election was unique in Canadian electoral history. The only possible historical parallel is the 1911 election when Lauriers Liberals and their partial free-trade package were so roundly rejected everywhere except in the West.

Income Inequality and the Future of Global Governance

For more than three decades, the contours of global governance have been shaped relentlessly by the imperatives and outright failures of neoliberalism. The analytic utility of this latter term has been broadly debated, not the least because neoliberal governance, on both national and global scales, has been inventive, shifting and increasingly detached from the maxims of neo-classical economic theory that initially gave this governing experiment scientific legitimacy and guarded it from political contestation. From its conception, the neoliberal project has been grounded in the foundational claim that ‘there is no alternative’ to its prescriptions for market-friendly limited government, privatization, deregulation and financial liberalization on a global scale. Critics of neoliberal governance responded that these governing ideas were socially and environmentally unsustainable and that financial deregulation, which tied the global economy together with invisible threads of wagering, greed and vulnerability, was a ticking time-bomb (Bakker and Gill 2003, Brodie 2007). This reorientation in governance, nonetheless, was embraced and propagated by the most influential international financial institutions and global policy networks, the most powerful economic regions and national states and, eventually, whether by coercion or acquiescence, all but a handful of marginalized states.

Elusive equalities and the Great Recession: restoration, retrenchment and redistribution

The 2008 global financial meltdown, commonly called the ‘Great Recession’, was the most serious crisis in capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a fundamental repudiation of neoliberal governing assumptions. This paper focuses on the contexts that informed two governmental responses to this economic crisis — restoration and retrenchment through public austerity. It explains that these responses were contingent, experimental, inequitable and, in the end, unsuccessful. Restoration and retrenchment, however, were entirely consistent with previous neoliberal crisis-responses and the abiding ambitions of this governing project. As the economic crisis crawled into the second half of a decade, the idea of inequality was increasingly identified as an underlying cause of crisis and its amelioration as a necessary part of rebuilding economies and communities in a post-crisis era. The paper tracks the case for the revival of equality politics and policies in the early twenty-first century.