Rethinking Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: Critical Encounters with Feminist, Multicultural and Transnational Citizenship

Abstract

Since the 1960s social movements and the intensification of flows of migration and of global interconnectedness have fundamentally challenged the political and theoretical assumptions of citizenship.¹ Disadvantaged and minoritized groups have made claims for economic, political and social equality that would take into account different experiences and practices. Women, members of racialized and minoritized groups, lesbians and gay men ‘still feel excluded from the “common culture”, despite possessing common rights of citizenship’ (Kymlicka and Norman, 1994:370). Feminists have pressed for the engendering of citizenship, critiquing the universal male concept, and arguing for the recognition of difference (e.g. Lister, 2003 [1997]; Yuval-Davis and Werbner, 1999a; Siim and Squires, 2008; Halsaa, Roseneil and Sümer, 2011). ‘Denizens’² have demanded rights of belonging and participation without a passport of the country of residence (Hammar, 1990; Soysal, 1994), and ‘transnational migrants’ have challenged the boundaries of political communities by living in more than one nation-state and acting across borders (Glick Schiller, Basch and Szanton-Blanc, 1992). Furthermore, the relationship between national territories and the sovereignty of the political communities of nation-states — the political container of notionally equal citizens — has been increasingly challenged by liberalized financial markets, deterritorialized legal regulations as well as by cross-border struggles of grassroots movements.