(Page 9 of 18) - On peoples and constitutions, sovereignty and citizenship authored by Williams, Melissa.

the activities and functions of self-rule, through participation in constitution-making and
in (at least some of) the institutions established by the constitution (e). The status of
membership in this political community brings with it the rights of such participation (c).
The principal virtue of citizenship is active participation in the activities of self-rule,
constrained by a commitment to the common good (f).

In contrasting this conception of citizenship with emerging conceptions of citizenship
sketched above – global, transnational, postnational, environmental, diasporic, etc. – two
elements stand out as especially divergent: (b) the boundaries of community within which
the exercise of citizenship takes place and (e) the activity of citizenship as participation in
self-rule understood as constitution-making for a sovereign people. The initial point of
observation is purely negative: these new conceptions of citizenship do not presuppose
territorial boundaries (though perhaps we might decide that the forms of community they
do imagine may still warrant using the term “people”). Neither do they conceive of the
activity of citizenship as aimed at realizing self-rule through the holus-bolus of
sovereignty and constitution-making. Rather, most often they seek to resist the power of
dominant actors to make decisions that affect others’ fundamental interests without
having to take those interests into account.

Is it possible to articulate a single conception of citizenship that covers both these new
forms of political engagement and our opening story of peoples and constitutions? If so,
such a conception would have to articulate an account of (b) the boundaries of
community and (e) the functions or activities of citizenship that excludes neither modern
republicanism nor conceptions of global, postnational, transnational, or diasporic
citizenship, the points on which the two visions diverge most markedly.

Let’s begin, then, by unpacking the conception of the boundaries of community that is
implicit in newly emerging ideas of citizenship. For simplicity’s sake, while
acknowledging the important differences among global, cosmopolitan, transnational,
postnational, environmental, and diasporic conceptions of citizenship, let’s bundle them
together with a single label, say, “citizenships of globalization.” What can we say, in
general, about how these ideas of citizenship conceptualize the human relationships
within which individuals seek to assert political agency aimed at a common good?

First and foremost, the citizenships of globalization stress relations of interdependence
that exceed the boundaries of the territorial states. Many emphasize relations of
interdependence that arise from global capitalism, the flows of finance, capital, consumer
goods and services that elude the regulatory control of the state. Some emphasize the
environmental impact of industrial production, energy and water consumption: pollution,
climate change, natural resource depletion, etc. Some stress international migration and
its impact upon both countries of emigration and countries of immigration, as well as the
formation of new forms of cultural and political community that stretch across space.
Transnational social movements of women, indigenous peoples, labor, sexual minorities

Thus we can see them as seeking freedom in the form of non-domination, in Philip Pettit’s terms. See

Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), pp. 21-26.