Abstract
The status of citizenship and the rights extended to non-citizens are among the most contentious and hotly debated political issues in numerous Western polities. Some scholars, most notably Seyla Benhabib, have deemed the contemporary changes a ‘disaggregation of rights claims’, in which the interplay between ideals of particularism and universalism lead to an ‘unbundling’ of civil, political and social rights with formal national membership. Yet this theoretical framing harbors deficiencies that complicate our understanding of the contemporary politics of immigration. In this article, I critically examine this account to show both its theoretical shortcomings and the incomplete explanations to which these deficiencies lead. In particular, I focus on the case of the 2006 protests in response to restrictionist immigration reform in the United States. Furthermore, I suggest ways in which an agonistic pluralist approach to citizenship and immigration issues provides us with a richer account of the political negotiations under way, as well as a means to re-conceptualize democratic voice and, at least in part, to begin democratically legitimating borders and access to political membership.
Immigration and citizenship rank among the most salient issues in contemporary polities. If we consider membership in a political community to be the ‘primary social good’ from which all other goods flow (such as welfare benefits, life opportunities, political voice), the consequentiality of citizenship within a stable, prosperous state becomes clear (Walzer, 1983, p. 29). Understanding ongoing changes in the status of citizenship as well as the rights granted by the political community is of the utmost scholarly importance. This is particularly so as many societies engage in frenzied debates over the understanding of ‘citizen’ and ‘alien’ in an era of global mass migration, with vulnerable migrants, refugees and asylees thrust into an anxiety-laden state of political limbo.
Since T. H. Marshall's formulation of citizenship, scholars have frequently conceptualized citizenship as a combination of civil, political and social rights and entitlements. However, Seyla Benhabib and others argue that we are witnessing a ‘disaggregation of citizenship rights’ in which the civil, political and social rights associated with membership are increasingly ‘unbundled’ from one another (Benhabib, 2002; 2003; 2005). 1 Many claim that these dimensions of citizenship are increasingly ‘delinked’ from territorial boundaries altogether, in the form of human rights norms and transnational political engagement (Ong, 2006; Williams, 2007). Throughout the world, ‘proto-citizenship’ rights can now be exercised at both local and supranational levels by an array of actors – long-term residents, denizens, refugees or those with multiple memberships (Benhabib, 2006, p. 172).
In this article I challenge this account, arguing that it subtly affirms rigid distinctions between particularist parochial exclusion and universalist attitudes of openness. This simplifies the political struggles fought by diverse actors, falsely positing linear and inevitable transitions from the former particularism to latter universalism. A closer examination reveals significant attempts to ‘rebundle’ citizenship rights and linkages between claim making and national membership. Furthermore, disaggregation fictively constructs an evolutionary account of the evaporation of particularism, underemphasizing political agency in the contemporary politics of migration.
Thus far, Benhabib has focused largely on the European Union, where she argues that this ‘effect has proceeded most intensively’ (Benhabib, 2006, p. 46). Here, I examine disaggregation in light of the politics of immigration in the United States. 2 As a self-styled ‘nation of immigrants’, American citizenship draws legitimacy from ideals of universal personhood and individual rights rooted in ‘self-evident truths’ of individual equality. Such attitudes would seem to support the broad extension of rights to non-members posited by the disaggregation thesis. Yet inclusion and openness are often embedded within particularistic conceptions of community and belonging, manifested in periodic swings towards nativism and restrictionism. Furthermore, even Benhabib notes that the ‘irony’ of current citizenship practices in the United States is that while certain social rights and benefits have been forthcoming for aliens, ‘the transition to political rights and the privileges of membership remains blocked or is made extremely difficult’ (Benhabib, 2003, p. 422). Contrary to a gradual transition from closure to openness, the trajectory of citizenship and membership in the US exhibits non-linear dimensions – a precarious and tense negotiation drawing emphatically opposed normative principles into paradoxical coexistence and codependence.
I suggest understanding these changes through the lens of ‘agonistic pluralism’, as articulated by scholars such as William E. Connolly, Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig. The agonistic framework unsettles the dichotomy of ‘openness’ and ‘closure’, the implicit assumptions of linearity and inevitability, and it exposes the uneven trajectory of ‘unbundling’ and ‘re-bundling’. Additionally, agonistic pluralism offers practical insights enabling us to rethink the extension of political voice and provide modern polities with a means to legitimate democratically their national boundaries. At a time when the question of how to ‘deal with’ immigration constitutes a foremost political concern, fostering a debate laden with destructive simplifications, such insights are essential.
Critiquing the Disaggregation Thesis
The disaggregation thesis is appealing, suggesting a global cosmo-politics that alleviates suffering of the disadvantaged, empowers the oppressed and protects the universal rights of individuals as human beings, rather than those with the proper national membership. Yet the way in which this thesis has been framed raises numerous concerns. It affirms and upholds a problematic binary between the ‘particular’ and ‘universal’ normative foundations of citizenship, conflates a normative account of the need for citizenship to be ‘disaggregated’ with the suggestion that this process is under way, while failing to examine ways in which ‘disaggregation’ and ‘unbundling’ are never unidimensional. In this section, I articulate each of these concerns in turn.
I should also note before proceeding that the critique here stretches beyond Benhabib's disaggregation thesis to cosmopolitan political conceptions more generally, particularly those of scholars examining ‘global civil society’ such as Daniele Archibugi, David Held, Andrew Linklater and Anthony McGrew. Here as well the ‘old’ form of democratic political organization is understood to be one of particularism, in which rights claims, identity and democratic legitimacy are lodged within the traditional moral and political boundaries of the Westphalian nation state (Archibugi, 2008; Benhabib, 2006, p. 45; Linklater, 1998, pp. 2-5, ch. 1). The ‘new’ form is said to be one of an overarching universalist order which ‘widens’ the boundaries of our political communities, and embeds democratic practice at all levels within universal equality and concern for persons, rather than collectivities.
To characterize this proposal as ‘replacing the state’ with a new supranational entity would be a caricature of most variants of the cosmopolitan ideal. Held, for example, states that this political order is as much about ‘the recovery of an intensive participatory and deliberative democracy at local levels’ as it is the creation of wider global democratic assemblies (Held, 2006, pp. 308-9). This suggests that localized democratic engagement is to be embedded within a much broader political and normative framework – that is, the particular becomes a small, constitutive part of the universal, rather than a competing mode of organization. Although there are certainly fruitful paths to be pursued in examining the larger cosmopolitan ethico-political framework through the lens of agonistic pluralism, space does not permit me to engage them here. Instead, I limit my analysis to Benhabib's focus upon contemporary political membership and community, which flows from this larger cosmopolitan orientation.
I turn first to the ‘particularist—universalist’ binary employed within the disaggregation framework. Drawing upon Schmitt, Benhabib situates citizenship in the negotiation between two conflicting principles: universalist notions of hospitality towards persons and particularistic conceptions of the political community which delineate the extension of rights and benefits to members, and construct membership in terms of shared fate, memory and moral sympathies. 3 Unlike Schmitt, Benhabib neither privileges the unity of the particular over liberal principles of personhood nor sees these ideals as paradoxically incompatible. Rather, she argues, ‘these two commitments can be used to limit one another, …. they can be renegotiated, rearticulated, and resignified’ through a process of ‘democratic iteration’ (Benhabib, 2004, p. 19).
Through this process, novel democratic voices ‘[change] established understandings in a polity and [transform] authoritative precedents’ (Benhabib, 2004, p. 19). The closure of the demos is set against universalist human equality, the former being appropriated and re-articulated in dynamic democratic settings. Although Benhabib admits these principles are never ‘fully resolved’, democratic iterations foster new modalities of action and empowerment for those outside the traditional bounds of sovereign political communities (Benhabib, 2006, p. 35). Furthermore, the gradual codification of universal rights of autonomy and hospitality in transnational laws and institutions increases the resources available for individuals. Benhabib writes: ‘the availability of cosmopolitan norms … increases the threshold of justification to which formerly exclusionary practices are now submitted’.
While she concedes that ‘exclusions take place’, she states that ‘the threshold for justifying them is now higher’ (Benhabib, 2006, p. 71).
However, the false purity of the categories ‘particular’ and ‘universal’ muddles our understanding of established political communities, those struggling to redefine notions of belonging within those communities and the ways in which they interact. These categories inhabit one another, rather than being separate entities. By Benhabib's account we are led to expect a world of ‘concrete’ particularistic communities seeking closure, while necessarily ‘abstract’ non-citizens push for openness and inclusion. This dichotomy obscures the ways in which the demos constructs membership by employing ‘universal’ ideas and commitments. Furthermore, it assigns those outside the political community a deracinated existence rooted in abstract principles absent concrete identities. In actuality, they constitute a demos of sorts, albeit one embedded differently within the political community.
By framing the debate in this way, Benhabib's binarism implicitly upholds and legitimizes reductive conceptualizations that characterize current debates within the politics of migration – threats of ‘outsiders’ dismantling the apparatus of citizenship for ‘members’ and overly neat notions of the bonds and attachments shared with fellow citizens. Paradoxically, this dampens democratic outlets for social change in struggles over citizenship, identity and membership – energies that Benhabib extols. Re-articulation of legal and political personhood forces the realization that ‘the universal is never really as we imagine it: truly unconditional, context-transcending, and unmarked by particularity and politics’ (Honig, 2001, p. 116).
This questionable dichotomy also produces problematic assertions regarding the future trajectory of political membership. Benhabib presents disaggregation as an ‘inescapable aspect of contemporary globalization’ (Benhabib, 2005, p. 13). Elsewhere, she suggests that the political transformation fostered by disaggregation produces a ‘dialectic of rights and identities [in which] both the identities involved and the very meaning of rights-claims are reappropriated, resignified, and imbued with new and different meaning’ (Benhabib, 2006, p. 67). Yet all of this implies inevitability ill equipped to explain the vacillating nature of these changes in the United States and elsewhere. Furthermore, it risks removing individual agency from the process by which changes occur. We cannot attribute such shifts to the relentless forward march of a process as complex and multidimensional as globalization, nor can the expansion of rights claims and re-articulation of identity be explained in dialectical fashion. Instead, scholars of migration and membership must remain attentive to instances of ‘re-bundling’ occurring in rights and benefits, the precarious oscillation between extension and retraction of membership's constitutive parts, as well as the persistent denial of formal political rights to outsiders.
Lastly, the language of disaggregation suggests a unidimensionality to changes in citizenship which blinds us to the ways in which developments cast as disaggregation harbor elements of ‘re-aggregation’ – changes in membership that solidify the state as the locus of rights, benefits and collective identity. While the extension of (some) social benefits to non-citizens in the mid- to late-twentieth century is noteworthy, this is not simply a gradual transformation of state-based citizenship, but also its endurance. Will Kymlicka notes that the disaggregation of citizenship rights can often exist as a tool for ‘avoiding the granting of full and equal citizenship’ (Kymlicka, 2006, p.138). The fragmentation of citizenship may in fact be rooted in attempts to offset demands for full membership and affirm the state-membership paradigm, while making residency attractive enough to keep charges of ‘second-class’ status at bay.
Novel venues for rights claims and modes of transnational political engagement do provide empowerment and a means of ‘talking back to the state’. Yet ‘talking back’ does not necessarily result in the state ‘hearing’ the claims of non-citizens. One cannot deny that non-citizens have engaged in numerous democratic struggles, making the state attentive to their needs and demands for equality, vocalizing their narrative in remarkable ways, inflecting debates regarding immigration and citizenship with testimonial as to what they feel they represent to society. Yet those who destabilize the ‘wholeness’ of the state are often politically marginalized as well. At the very least, such contention faces a more circuitous route into the self-legislation of the political community, often channeled through advocates and allies. Interpreting these modalities as the logical, inevitable unfolding of a less particularistic world where universalistic rights prevail underemphasizes the costs incurred by choosing to make one's political voice heard indirectly.
Empowerment of individuals who reside within the polity but lack formal political membership remains first and foremost about ‘diversifying the forums where immigrants' stories can be told and heard, and where the infrasensible energies of these narratives can be released’ (Apostolidis, 2008). This requires the construction of multiple spaces for non-citizen testimonial and narrative, in addition to their formalization through social movements, global governance and international law. Such spaces can only be conceptualized and instantiated if we shed the disaggregative theoretical apparatus through which extension of non-citizen voice is understood in ways that gloss over its fragility and uncertainty. In the pages that follow, through exploring the politics of immigration in the United States, I suggest agonistic pluralism as a means to both understand the changing shape of membership and to unlock the latent democratic energies and empowering political possibilities that these political actors can propel into existence.
Disaggregating Disaggregation: The Case of the United States
Encapsulating the narrative of citizenship and membership in the United States concisely is a challenge. 4 Popular attitudes towards migration and newcomers have always been mixed, as immigrants bring both ‘renewed appreciation of our own regime whose virtues are so great that they draw immigrants to join us’ and a fear that they will ‘consume our welfare benefits, dilute our common heritage, fragment our politics, [and] undermine our democratic culture’ (Honig, 2001, p. 46). Immigrants assuage doubts, reaffirming that one's country is ‘choice-worthy’ through their active display of consent. Yet their presence also fosters fears of being overrun by those who are distinct and different. In this section, I utilize Benhabib's own method of analyzing ‘democratic iterations’ advanced by unlikely political subjects, examining protest activities that grew out of American attempts at comprehensive immigration reform in 2006. 5 This analysis highlights the problematic nature of the disaggregation framework for understanding developments in membership and migration politics in the American case.
At the outset, however, we must understand the political context in which this recent mobilization of non-citizens resides. The debate over the contours of the political community, and its manifestation in terms of immigration policy, are significantly shaped by economic considerations, with an emphasis on sustainability of the welfare state and the forceful assertion of a need to restrict economic opportunities to members. The proposed economic effects of immigration, particularly those of non-citizens ‘taking’ various benefits from formally recognized and natural-born citizens, have been crucial in propelling recent restrictionist policy. In the 1980s and early 1990s, visibility of immigrant populations led political partisans to apply this characterization to undocumented (and often documented) aliens, portraying them as ‘parasitic … drains on the economy’ (Inda, 2006, p. 107). Public opinion research analyzing this period documents increasingly negative perceptions of immigration held by the American public, rooted largely in its perceived economic impacts (Espenshade and Calhoun, 1993; Espenshade and Hempstead, 1996; Harwood, 1983; 1986).
In the wake of 9/11, this discourse was linked to notions of immigration as a security threat, further radicalizing American debates on the issue. The ‘threat’ now perceived is not simply of diminishing prosperity, but physical vulnerability. This discontent even led to the formation of citizen militias in the early 2000s, intent on supplementing the manpower of US federal authorities, manning armed patrols of the Mexican—American border (ADL, 2008; Aslam, 2008). For these groups, the gravity of the threat to the political community was such that it could no longer simply be delegated to bureaucratic state and federal authorities. Responsibility for the maintenance, policing and control of territorial boundaries became dispersed in their eyes, the duty of each individual citizen. For groups such as these we can no longer be content to respect and have reverence for the law; we must embody it. In such settings, where the citizen is now supposed to represent and exude the law, the non-citizen is more easily cast as the exemplar of lawlessness.
Institutional restructuring in the wake of 9/11 also reflected discursive shifts towards migration as a security threat. In March 2003 the agency formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was folded into the massive new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the tense, uncertain environment that has prevailed post-9/11, nearly every new strategy of immigration control has been linked to the language of security (Kerwin, 2005, p. 751). As Jonathan Inda notes, ‘with every illegal entrant potentially a terrorist, [migrants] have been cast even more deeply into a realm of abjection where punitive measures carried out in the name of protecting the well-being of the social body are deemed all the more legitimate’ (Inda, 2006, p. 121). The establishment of the DHS would also see the INS broken into three new and separate federal agencies dedicated strictly to immigration: Customs and Border Protection (CBP), United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). All of these agencies saw massive increases in funding and manpower in the securitized post-9/11 climate, justified through language concerning ‘threats’, ‘danger’, ‘vigilance’ and ‘protection’.
In this environment, Congress set its sights on comprehensive immigration reform, seeking to expand and further formalize many of the measures that had become practice since 9/11. In late 2005, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) offered the first proposal, the ‘Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005’, or simply HR.4437. HR.4437 sought massive changes in the enforcement of immigration laws, including enhancements in land and maritime border security and further expansion of deportable crimes classified as ‘aggravated felonies’, including simply being present in the United States without documents. Additionally, new provisions criminalized assistance of undocumented aliens, potentially implicating immigrant assistance and advocacy organizations in felony activity. Lastly, numerous provisions decreased the discretion afforded to immigration judges and alien access to due process (Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, 2005). The bill passed the House in mid-December 2005.
Immigration advocacy organizations would characterize this as ‘the harshest immigration legislation in history’, swiftly ‘rammed’ through the House in a state of ‘panic’ (Immigration Legal Resource Center, 2005). An amended version of the bill, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 or S.2611, was debated in the Senate. It softened some of the harshest enforcement provisions, opening pathways to permanent legal status on the basis of employment, military service or academic achievement (Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, 2006). Even with these revisions, the bill remained a strikingly restrictionist, enforcement-oriented piece of legislation.
Unexpectedly, widespread grass-roots protest began to occur in response to these proposals in the spring of 2006, incorporating untold numbers of immigrants, both documented and undocumented. This is noteworthy given that the hostile political climate in the US has traditionally had a chilling effect on popular mobilization of non-citizens (Johnston, 2001, p. 264). The ever-looming threat of deportation or other legal complications tends to prevent aliens from engaging politically (Walzer, 1983, p. 58). Nevertheless, massive popular protest occurred in over 160 cities, involving anywhere between 3.5 million to 5.1 million individuals, stretching beyond traditional immigrant-rich areas like Chicago and Los Angeles (Manzano et al., 2007, p. 736). The size and unexpectedness of these protests led to their characterization as ‘a moment of revelation – a display of communities whose concerns and desires had been previously hidden and unknown’ (Beltran, 2009, p. 596).
With protest ongoing, compromise versions of the legislation stalled within the Senate. Lawmakers from both parties clashed over whether the emphasis of the legislation should be enforcement or a path to legal residency for the United States' roughly 12 million undocumented aliens (Chaddock and Bowers, 2007; Swarns, 2006). Fearful of appearing either xenophobic or soft on an issue defined in securitized terms, American lawmakers struggled to strike a balance as the issue ascended into the national spotlight. It is difficult to estimate the effect that this unprecedented mobilization of migrants, ethnic lobbies and their allies had on the Senate floor. Nevertheless, the second session of the 109th Congress would end with what was perhaps the most restrictionist immigration legislation of the contemporary era expiring due to stalemate.
These unexpected demonstrations offered a resounding response to the construction of immigrants as parasitic and threatening forces within American society, often framed by immigrants themselves. Particularly telling are two of the most popular slogans utilized during these demonstrations: ‘We are America’ and ‘Today we March, Tomorrow we Vote’ (Manzano et al., 2007, pp. 738-9). In the former, the protesters exposed gaps between the legitimizing myth of the United States as a nation of immigrants and the prevailing discourse of immigrants as parasitic security threats. The latter slogan, ‘Today we March, Tomorrow we Vote’ symbolizes the growing importance of migrant voting blocs in local and national elections and the saliency of the immigration issue for them. Yet beyond this mere assertion of their growing political power, there is the broader claim that political voice matters to these individuals, despite their varying proximities to formal membership. Migrants recognize the fragility of marginal gains within civil and economic spheres of citizenship without the additional extension of formal political voice. In this sense, the offer of any rights opens up the space to mobilize for further extension.
However, the conclusions to which we are led by the disaggregative framework risk mischaracterization of the political dynamics at play. We might be tempted to view this outburst of democratic energy as a dialectical re-articulation of contemporary membership within the United States. Set against more traditional notions of citizenship, the 2006 immigrant rallies and demonstrations might be cast as a universalist counter-response to notions of exclusivity and closure associated with the state-based paradigm of political membership. Building upon gains made within other categories of citizenship in previous decades, we would witness traditionally ‘docile’ political subjects shedding their status as non-political entities through public empowerment and diverse modalities of engagement in the public sphere, ‘talking back’ to a state they increasingly identify as also belonging to them.
However, in this case as in others, disaggregation imparts certainty and order into a significantly more ambiguous set of developments. Let us consider why the proposed 2006 immigration legislation provoked the outcry it did among immigrant communities. The period leading up to the 2006 push for reform was not one of growing parity between citizens and non-citizens, as questioning the status of non-citizens offered opportunistic ways to mobilize public support and relieve fiscal pressures in states with high immigrant concentrations. State legislation and referenda in particular, such as California's Proposition 187, became a venue for such restrictionism (Joppke, 2001, pp. 43-54). Although it would later stall in federal courts, Proposition 187 barred undocumented aliens' access to nearly all social benefits including public education and non-emergency medical care. Furthermore, judicial rejection of state-level referenda did not prevent the exclusion of all non-citizens from virtually every federal cash-assistance program under the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, including those that their contributions helped fund (Singer, 2004, pp. 21-2.)
In addition to curtailing non-citizen participation in what is already a comparatively paltry system of social benefits, parallel immigration reform legislation in 1996 significantly constrained the civil rights of non-citizens. The Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA, 1996) introduced many new measures in the enforcement and adjudication of immigration laws. Particularly noteworthy are: (1) considerable expansion and retroactive definition of deportable offenses, now including petty offenses like shoplifting; (2) its authorization of immigration officers to conduct ‘summary screenings’ in the field, yielding entry and exit decisions without any form of judicial review; and (3) its interventions in the field of immigration law, replacing a discretionary system with one in which ‘mandatory detention and deportation’ were frequently the only options available to immigration judges (Families for Freedom, 2008, p. 9).
After 1996, these powers provided foundations for surges in enforcement and deportation as immigration increasingly became ‘securitized’. Thus we cannot simply view the eruption of non-citizen voices in 2006 as emerging in a positive fashion, buttressed by the growing parity of non-citizens with citizens as disaggregation progressively unfolded. This seems to be the natural direction in which Benhabib's account would lead. Rather, this iteration should be understood as a negative reaction to pervasive fear and uncertainty within immigrant communities, born out of a growing sense that disengaging politically at this juncture would leave them with ‘nothing left to lose’.
Equally problematic is the disaggregative suggestion of a dichotomy between the particularism of the democratic community and the universalism of the non-citizen protesters. Inclusive discourses figured prominently in the protest, as many of the immigrant activists sought to re-frame the immigration issue according to ideals of universal dignity, justice and human rights (Beltran, 2009, p. 605). However, to focus only upon this misses the insular and parochial tendencies of the protesters, visible in decisions to wave flags of their countries of origin, and audible in re-appropriation of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in the Spanish-language ‘Nuestro Himno’, or ‘Our Anthem’ (Beltran, 2009, p. 611). Such paradoxical actions simultaneously deny and strengthen the state as the locus of belonging and membership. Additionally, these diverse strategies and underlying frameworks suggest that the struggle for definition of identity and community occurs not only within contests between ‘member’ and ‘non-member’, but within the groups pushing for immigrant rights expansion, exposing a schism within the immigrant rights ‘movement’ itself. Participants struggled over whether to employ the universalist language of basic human rights, utilize more particularistic language of integration and (already) belonging, or to celebrate and demand recognition of the distinct national identities that preceded migrants' entry into the United States. Of the three, only the first strategy pushes us towards the greater openness and universality of which Benhabib so often speaks. Thus, demands occurring at the level of street protests ought not to obscure the internal processes of self-definition occurring in less visible settings, as migrants struggle to articulate what they believe they represent to society.
Similarly, in adopting the universalist—particularist framework, we risk overlooking the different dimensions of civil society within the United States that can be effectively characterized by neither. How might we explain ‘sanctuary movements’, advocating universal hospitality and welcome for non-citizens both on the basis of Christian principles as well as their sense that the United States is a uniquely constructed haven, a ‘nation of immigrants’? Or those restrictionists who favor inclusion and express admiration for those who follow a ‘legal’ route to entry in the United States, while offering stinging indictments of the ‘border hoppers’ who enter illegally? Key protagonists within this controversy exhibit simultaneously universalist and particularist characteristics. We cannot dichotomize the identities and actors involved in this way without misinterpreting their viewpoints, identities and concerns. Such interpretations affirm simplified conceptions of deracinated sojourners seeking affirmation as outsiders in the codification of openness and hospitality. These are set against conceptions of the demos as a venue for provincial exclusion, ignoring the blend of normative commitments to be found in any political community. It is more promising to think of this not as a relationship between the ‘outsider’ and the demos, but many demoi engaged in an open-ended struggle for affirmation and recognition in democratic settings, to the limited extent that spaces for cross-demoi engagement currently exist. Additionally, it becomes clear that what migrants and other non-citizens represent to society is not immediately clear even to those who self-identify as such. Thus we also witness intra-demoi negotiation of what these groups mean to the community itself, an aspect largely absent from the disaggregative account.
Lastly, in claiming citizenship's disaggregation to be ‘unavoidably’ driven by structural factors, Benhabib risks minimizing democratic agency, albeit in complex and subtle ways. In the case of the United States, the protesters challenging contemporary immigration enforcement techniques do so for diverse reasons based upon unique individual experiences. Yet encapsulating them within the conceptual language of disaggregation embeds them within a unidimensional ‘logic’ of inclusion and opening. The ability of at-risk populations such as non-citizens to protect and expand their legal and political standing is by no means preordained. It rests upon the ability of those who reside within society yet lack formal political voice to craft spaces where their narratives and experiences are assigned weight in the course of policy making. To appropriate Rancière, it requires a new ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Benhabib, 2004, pp. 12-3). These groups inaugurate a setting in which ‘they make themselves visible as speaking subjects where previously the dominating classes only perceived the noise of the alienated or rebelling individuals and they make the object of their recrimination visible as worthy objects of dialogue’ (Deranty, 2003, p. 9). The account above suggests that this is already under way. However, within the disaggregative framework, this complex challenge risks being sunk under dubious structural transformations of contemporary global politics – waning Westphalian sovereignty, growing multiplicity of political identities and an increasingly robust system of international human rights protections. While these dimensions should be explored, the complexities that disaggregation potentially overlooks suggest that a new approach to these issues is needed.
Agonistic Democratic Theory and American Citizenship
Agonistic pluralism, or agonism, understands conflictual engagement, coercion and exclusion as enduring conditions of our collective lives. Most variants of agonism avoid ‘celebrat[ing] a world without points of stabilization’, as we find in postmodern conceptions of politics, yet agonism recognizes the ‘perpetuity’ of political contestation (Honig, 1993, p. 15). Agonism calls upon us to engage and re-engage these moments in pluralized, contentious democratic settings, allowing a multiplicity of voices to engage in the struggle for hegemony (Goi, 2005, p. 60). Unlike traditional ‘interest group pluralism’, which assumes fixed, pre-political identities, the radical pluralism of the agonistic approach views the identities we bring to political contestation as ‘inessential and intrinsically relational … constituted and transformed through political practice’ (Wenman, 2003b, p. 61).
An agonistic approach ‘refus[es] to equate concern for human dignity with a quest for rational consensus’ or overarching agreement on political principles (Connolly, 2002, p. x). Yet agonism does not seek limitless contestation, without a moment of closure. Connolly notes that boundaries and closure are ‘indispensable’, providing the ‘preconditions of identity, individual agency, and collective action’ (Connolly, 1994, p. 19). Yet boundaries always accomplish this at the expense of other possibilities. Agonists critique the treatment of exclusion as apolitical, devoid of a decisionistic moment in which a ‘we—they’ distinction is politically created. To act as if these moments of exclusion can be transcended is to misconceive the democratic project. By such accounts, Honig writes,
the problem of democratic theory is how to find the right match between a people and its law, a state and its institutions. Obstacles are met and overcome, eventually the right match is made and the newlywed couple is sent on its way to try and live happily ever after (Honig, 2001, p. 109).
The reality is that such tensions are never truly ‘overcome’, or to appropriate Honig's metaphor, the newly-weds are never completely in marital bliss with one another.
To the extent that one can attribute a ‘foundation’ to an explicitly anti-foundationalist theoretical framework, it is that those subject to the coercive power of the state ought to exercise political voice in the formulation and deployment of that coercion. Andrew Schaap writes that all agonists share ‘a principled desire to leave more up to politics in the sense that citizens should be free to contest the terms of public life and the conditions of their political association’ (Schaap, 2006, p. 257). No democratic outcome can ever be considered ‘closed’; ‘it will always be open … to an element of non-consensus … to reciprocal question and answer, demand and response, and negotiation’ (Goi, 2005, pp.61-2; Tully, 1999, pp.167-8).
Agonistic democrats advance a ‘risky’ strategy of democratic revitalization. Displacing agreement or stability introduces the threat of violence and fragmentation. For agonistic democrats, this is the nature of radically inclusive political spaces. When we are no longer threatened by the precarious nature of democratic engagement, the political may have become vacuous, absent competing forces that provide its substance (Mouffe, 1999, p. 51). Agonists are not blind to the threats that this conception of the political introduces. Accordingly, these theorists place conditions upon the type of engagement that occurs within agonistic democratic spaces. For one group of theorists, this takes the form of ‘agonistic respect’, an attitude by which ‘each party comes to appreciate the extent to which its self-definition is bound up with the Other and the degree to which the comparative projections of both are contestable’ (Connolly, 1993, p. 382; Tully, 1999, p. 174). 6 While Connolly notes that we should avoid suppressing tension in the name of ‘tranquility’, ‘harmony’ or ‘agency’, he admits that agonistic democratic spaces cannot endure dogmatic fundamentalisms that attempt to impose their monistic vision on other segments of the order (Connolly, 1993, p. 384; 1994, p. 38). Similarly, Mouffe dispenses with notions of the common good, but retains a thin notion of ‘commonality’, in which divergent parties face off as adversaries who share a ‘common symbolic space’ rather than ‘enemies’ who seek to eliminate one another violently (Mouffe, 1993, p. 82; 2000, p. 13). In such a conception, the notion of the ‘enemy’ does not disappear. Instead, ‘it is displaced and remains pertinent with respect to those who do not accept the democratic “rules of the game” and who thereby exclude themselves from the political community’ (Mouffe, 1993, p. 4).
The agonistic conceptual frame brings into focus key elements of the contemporary politics of migration and citizenship that the disaggregative approach neglects. 7 First, an agonistic approach enables richer understanding of political agents engaged in this debate, moving away from rigid binaries such as ‘universal’ and ‘particular’. Second, agonism demands attentive consideration of spaces whereby we pluralize democratic engagement and promote the political agency of unlikely subjects such as non-citizens. Lastly, agonism recognizes that exclusion is unavoidable in the constitution of any political community, yet provides radically inclusive frameworks by which to legitimate and continuously renegotiate the terms of exclusion.
Agonism and American Citizenship: Beyond Universalism and Particularism
Agonism dispenses with the idea that modern political membership is grounded in the incremental ascendancy of the universal over the particular, abnegating such stylized categories altogether. This is not to deny that the discourse of disaggregation captures elements of political changes currently under way. However, it does so with perverse secondary effects which neutralize elements of disturbance, ambiguity and disorientation that inhabit this normative opposition. By contrast, agonism seeks to uncover the ‘moments of incoherence that mark moral and political orders’ and ‘radicalize their unsettling possibilities’ (Honig, 1993, p. 208). In the popular discourse around citizenship in the US, fragmentation and loss of unity are often invoked. Benhabib explicitly rejects such notions when she critiques Rawls' ‘holistic understanding of peoples each of whom is supposed to be defined by … a set of clearly identifiable values and mores’, an idea she claims ‘belongs to the infancy of the social sciences’ (Benhabib, 2004, p. 80). Yet disaggregation subtly affirms such fictions in conceptualizing citizenship as the negotiation between discrete categories of the universal and particular. This binarism seeks closure, and covertly supports a politics in which each perspective ‘takes itself to be the true identity deserving hegemony’, lacking appreciation of the aspects of contestability and undecidability packed within liberal democratic citizenship (Connolly, 2002, p. 172). Benhabib's approach re-anchors rather than pluralizes the debate, artificially subduing the identities involved such that their democratic iterations are no longer marked by contingency and contradiction.
Once we dispense with this framework, new possibilities open up for understanding the politics of migration. The aspects of inevitability and claims of creeping parity of citizen and non-citizen become more questionable. Admittedly, this makes the narrative of the contemporary politics of migration more complex, yet it offers a way out of zero-sum logics that tend to ‘essentialize’ the multidimensional identities currently being negotiated and constructed in the politics of migration. Yet the goal is not simply to better understand the issue. In addition, such steps create the discursive space whereby the narratives of the actors involved, particularly non-citizens, can be heard. In short, if the stories, slogans, images and events currently overtaking our streets and our television sets are to have any effect on us, we must first cultivate the ethos of receptivity that allows us truly to listen to and interpret them. Abandoning the universalist—particularist framework, which dilutes and dulls these narratives, is a necessary precondition for such receptivity to emerge.
One might ask what types of political space would serve the agonistic impulse towards pluralization and receptivity and what settings provide the institutional embodiment of agonistic politics. In part, activism and civic engagement by non-citizens on a vital issue such as the construction of the political community already constitute such a space, exploding existing understandings of who ‘counts’ within democracy, enlarging our conception of who is qualified to make claims upon the larger democratic community.
Yet, as the subsequent lack of legislative movement on activists' concerns suggests, there exists currently a chasm between the claims voiced in these emergent and spontaneous settings and in more tangible realms of policy and law. In short, there is a gap between law and the society which that legal apparatus attempts to administer and oversee. In such instances, the administrative realm of law must evolve to meet the more amorphous nature of its subjects. However, the difficulty we face in this instance is how to consolidate the narratives and discursive strategies of these unlikely political actors into our policy discussions in ways that do not force conformity to prefabricated political identities and retain the more destabilizing qualities they currently possess; as Honig states, those aspects ‘which resist or exceed the closure of identity’ (Honig, 1996, p. 258). If we take the democratic demands of such actors seriously, our method should not be the typical path of civic integration; the point is not simply to create more citizens, but rather enlarge our notion of who ought to be able to make democratic demands beyond the traditional confines of citizenship.
Institutionally embedded agonistic spaces for non-citizen political voices could be achieved by constructing venues for contestation alongside existing political institutions, characterized by inclusion, contestability and with some connections to existing decision-making structures (Goi, 2005). These could consist of open-ended political fora – attempts to convert what is largely a monologue of street-level protest by political actors seeking recognition into a dialogue of mutually opposed forces. The reader here will find a clear parallel with suggestions found within deliberative conceptions of democratic engagement. Yet agonistic spaces for debate and exchange are shaped not by the goal of an elusive consensus or a mutually shared pool of justificatory arguments, but rather the simple goal of sharing different narratives and testimonies, particularly those heretofore alien and strange to us. Additionally, these settings would be formed not simply by traditional liberal democratic civic virtues such as interest-driven competition or discursive reason giving. Rather, such exchanges would embody ‘new forms of civic virtue grounded in “ethical” strategies – of compassion, forgiveness, and self-critique’ with participation made conditional upon attitudes of agonistic respect, non-violence and non-domination (Keenan, 2003, p. 29). Such settings presuppose the cultivation of agonistic virtues within society at large, which suggests the necessity of an agonistic theory of democratic education. A thumbnail sketch of how such virtues could emerge within the population more generally is provided in the following section.
Agonism and American Citizenship: Re-conceptualizing Citizenship and Political Voice
The existing framework of national citizenship in the United States does not require that any justification be made to those marginalized by its territorial borders. Nor does any liberal democracy set about justifying and legitimating its migration and citizenship policies to non-members of the political community. Yet non-citizens live and work alongside full citizens, often paying into national systems of social entitlement and partaking in our health and education systems. Additionally, migrants perform an invaluable role in reaffirming the ‘choice-worthiness’ of democratic polities. The fact that immigrants live among us and contribute to the culture, politics and economic well-being of our societies suggests that the degree of democratic legitimation owed to them is both substantial and consequential for the legitimacy of the state itself.
From an agonistic perspective, the legitimacy of political systems is rooted in radical pluralism and the exercise of popular sovereignty. Our current framework of exclusion absent any democratic legitimation would need to be reconsidered. As Honig suggests, this means providing democratic spaces for those ‘outside the circle of who “counts” [and who] cannot make claims within the existing frames of claim making’ (Honig, 2001, p. 101). While this would not rule out the exercise of power against political outsiders, it would offer an opportunity to engage those ‘whose contending identity gives definition to contingencies in one's own way of being’ (Connolly, 2002, p. 179).
In the contemporary United States, these instances of rupture and discontinuity, manifested in the 2006 pro-immigration protests and vociferous debates over immigration, constitute a moment of possibility. Specifically, this issue in the United States ‘poses a strategic opportunity for activating political-cultural projects involving immigrants that would realize this unusual potential for cultivating experiences of identity's contingency’ (Apostolidis, 2008). This need not mean a complete overhaul of contemporary American political institutions or the existing model of democratic claims making, as I highlight above. Nor would it necessitate a cosmopolitan post-territorial politics in which the nation remains only as an instrumental institutional shell. As Honig notes, the solution to these types of issue may be one of simultaneous ‘de-nationalization’ and ‘re-nationalization’. Rather than dismantling national attachments, singled out by Benhabib and others as the source of non-citizens' suffering, the solution may lie in the pluralization of our objects of attachment, fostered through an attitude of ‘passionate ambivalence’ towards the modern political community. Notions of membership would become imbued with a sense of the ‘terror of belonging, the hope and betrayal that come with the inextricable intertwining of people in one another's lives across lines of difference and power’ (Honig, 2001, pp. 119-21).
Critics such as John Dryzek (2005) argue that agonistic democratic spaces risk ‘freezing’ competing identities, particularly in divided societies. Yet recent debates regarding immigration and citizenship in the United States, as well as the conceptual frames flowing from the disaggregation thesis, seem to suggest the opposite. The negative identifications thrust upon non-citizens are not stable. The danger is that ‘in the absence of resistance to them, they could be stabilized’ (Honig, 1993, p. 15). The agonistic conception applied to the politics of migration would require activists of all stripes to engage politically with ‘openness’ while retaining a ‘willingness to question what counts as reasonable speech’ (Schaap, 2006, p. 269). To the extent that agonistic venues for contestation characterized by contestability, equality, receptivity to difference and less restrictive constraints upon democratic engagement remain underdeveloped or non-existent, we cannot expect the discourse in this debate to be consistent with pluralistic or democratic values.
Yet in order to take advantage of this ‘moment of possibility’ and draw new democratic voices into the register of legitimacy, there must first be an evolution in the attitudes and values that we harbor as political actors. In short, we need a theory of democratic education that can introduce, sustain and support the values that are embedded within the agonistic attitude toward democracy. This is a set of virtues that agonistic pluralism provides, particularly the work of Connolly and Honig, calling upon us to foster agonistic respect, critical responsiveness and appreciation of the role that contending identities play in affirming individual and societal conceptions of self-worth, justice and obligation. How to cultivate such virtues remains under-specified within existing literature, where sometimes vague articulations of this process have led numerous commentators to suggest that agonists such as Connolly operate with an ‘anarchist streak’ (Newman, 2008, p.238; Wenman, 2008, p. 163). In recent work, Connolly suggests that we must ‘inspire’ those rejecting these values, while accepting a need for coercion against militant fundamentalists (Connolly, 2005, p.35). In addition, commitment to deep pluralism is said to emerge organically from surprising, unlikely sources: ‘neighborhood life, associational meetings, TV dramas, surprising conversions by friends … new events or movements … an expansive appreciation of history’ (Connolly, 2005, p. 4).
Connolly is in many senses correct here. The emergence of what Hannah Arendt deemed an ‘enlarged mentality’ throughout history is not only the manifestation of concrete social movements, engaged in strategies to restructure our political order. Such changes are also born out of innocuous moments. Conversations with friends, a gripping novel, an arresting image of suffering – all can act upon our senses in ways that are hardly intelligible to us within the moment. Yet to reduce the inauguration of values of receptivity and deep respect for difference to only these moments is not only incomplete; it borders on irresponsible. 8 The concrete institutional manifestation of how we might foster such values remains under-specified. As history has made tragically clear, exposure to difference, despite our best hopes and intentions, is not enough to embed within us a celebratory appreciation of difference.
Thankfully, however, we have within many societies a model upon which to build. The liberal model of multiculturalism and toleration of difference is now firmly embedded within our laws, political institutions, educational system and societal discourse more generally. The agonistic virtues of respect, contestability and appreciation for the Other's role in exposing the contingency of our own identities constitutes a much more demanding societal project and one that explicitly distances itself from tolerance (Connolly, 2005, p. 123). Yet the mechanisms by which we transmit and nurture such values can be the same. We ought to conceive of agonism as a decentralized educational project which employs the resources of not only systems of civic education, but our own individual participation, and formal codification in the laws and regulations of society's most consequential settings – the political realm, the workplace, schools and universities, and our associational life in civic organizations. The disaggregative conception of belonging and community critically engaged within this article constitutes the type of thinking from which we move forward. If we operate with the deep binaries of ‘inside/outside’, ‘member/non-member’, which disaggregation perversely upholds, exposure to difference will likely produce a range of values spanning simple indifference to toxic malice for those who are and remain what we are not. Yet if we fold the values of pluralization and agonistic respect, in piecemeal and incremental fashion, into our everyday settings, our orientation towards difference just may evolve. 9 The argument presented here is largely a normative argument for why this ought to be done with regard to questions of migration and membership. Yet this argument argues that, more concretely, controversies in migration and membership constitute a moment of possibility by which we can usher such attitudinal changes into our everyday politics. Liberal multiculturalism offers a practical model to follow, even if we aim to surpass and exceed this model in the orientation towards difference that we seek to inspire.
Agonism and American Citizenship: Towards Radically Democratic Political Boundaries
Lastly, agonism offers a more adequate means to legitimate exclusion from the political community. Democratically defensible borders have long been lacunae for the legitimacy of liberal democratic polities. Traditional modes of membership simply lack means to democratically justify their borders to all of those affected – specifically, non-citizens. Here, Honig's articulation of simultaneous ‘de-nationalization’ and ‘re-nationalization’ provides a middle line between ‘cold’ cosmopolitanism, where the state persists in instrumental form only, and nationalism, driven by dubious assertions of unity and shared experience. Either form of ‘pure’ political order, exclusivity or universality, is ill equipped to deal with the contemporary complexities of immigration.
Agonism explicitly rejects ‘pluralism without boundaries’ or a ‘politics which simply dismantles the territorial state’ (Connolly, 1994, p. 31). Mouffe goes so far as to argue that conceptions of the political that claim to be rooted in the fundamental equality of humanity, ‘far from being a sign of political maturity [are] the symptom of a void that can endanger democracy’ (Mouffe, 1993, p. 5). The void to which Mouffe refers is the failure to acknowledge that existing modes of order always supplant other possibilities (Mouffe, 2007). This forces us to pay attention to the ‘constitutive outside’ of the prevailing order, the acts of exclusion that enable the political to exist.
Yet while agonistic conceptions accept that exclusion must occur, this is coupled with an embrace of ‘interruptions’ posed by those who destabilize our notions of what citizenship represents, and enable new ethical realizations and insights. At the root of this is the assertion that ‘no social agent should be able to claim any mastery of the foundation of society’ (Mouffe, 2000, p. 21, emphasis in original). The broad sense of inclusion, and emphasis on re-articulation of our political foundations, would prevent the ossification of political identity and foster awareness of and receptivity to hitherto excluded and marginalized actors. Yet it may also exclude those who are not willing to incorporate contestability and agonistic respect into their political engagement, albeit subject to further contestation and re-articulation. For these actors, exclusion from political contestation remains a viable option. Such an orientation confers the ability to set frontiers, determine boundaries and exclude, yet does so in ways that do not reify that exclusion and require the continuous re-interrogation of its legitimacy.
Furthermore, problematizing expansive conceptions of ‘unity’ extends not only to the political community as such. Pluralization, in an agonistic vein, flows also to those emergent groups existing at the margins of political community. By this token, we question those who forcefully impose a conception of that which is universally held among ‘outsiders’ as well. We question the conception that ‘challengers’ to the existing order are a ‘unified front’, and seek to expose the veins of discontinuity that flow through these actors as well. Returning to the idea of ‘receptivity’ articulated above, these insights expose elements of classed, gendered, socio-economic and other marginalizing hegemonic impulses which inhabit even the most emancipatory of movements. Thus, agonistic insights apply equally to the intra-demoi articulation of identity, membership and shared experience.
Conclusion
The overarching goal here has been to shift thinking about citizenship away from the disaggregative conception that operates with problematic assumptions which uphold the inaccurate and counterproductive essentialization of identity while foreclosing the potentially constructive engagement of difference. In this sense, the 2006 protests in the United States demonstrate how this perspective fails adequately to capture the changes in migration and membership currently under way. The agonistic alternative presented here is offered as a theoretical and practical way forward on this difficult issue: a means to adequately channel energies that outstrip existing methods of categorization at the level of the state, confront deficiencies in political voice and develop democratically legitimate methods of exclusion while remaining open to revision and re-articulation.
In closing, it is important to note that this conception resides within the realm of the ‘perhaps’, the word that ‘loudly proclaims a lack of certainty now and quietly suggests improved prospects for … tomorrow’ (Connolly, 2002, p.221). An agonistic approach to the membership, and democracy generally, is less about providing a set of expected outcomes – a set of predictions. A commitment to radical democracy involves trust in democratic actors to arrive at their own outcomes, in settings characterized by a radical form of equality and mutual respect. Thus an agonistic approach to any divisive issue would be overstepping its bounds if it dared say what sorts of concrete policies should emerge from this particular form of democratic process. This is more of a challenge to rethink our conceptions of boundaries, identity and the foundations of our political communities. Agonism imaginatively confronts the legitimacy of existing categorizations of who matters and who is worthy of democratic voice. It evinces hope that radically inclusive democratic institutions can foster receptivity to those identities and modes of political engagement that strike us as alien, strange or even abhorrent. Such strategies can only attempt to alter the political landscape by cultivating a willingness to engage the agonistic political imaginary and create, sustain and valorize a ‘politics of the perhaps’.
Footnotes
1
See, for instance, Bosniak, 2001; Cohen, 1999; Jacobson, 1996; Sassen, 2002; Shachar, 2009; Soysal, 1994. In this article, I focus primarily on the disaggregation thesis articulated by Seyla Benhabib, both for analytical clarity and the far-reaching impact she has had on the scholarship examining citizenship, cosmopolitanism and international ethics.
2
In so doing, this article extends the discussion of disaggregation beyond what has tended to be its central focus – legal and institutional changes within the European Union. Will Kymlicka, Bonnie Honig and Jeremy Waldron engage Benhabib's claims with regard to Europe in the volume Another Cosmopolitanism. Yet Benhabib's claims extend beyond Europe, asserting that disaggregation is global in scope. Scholarly debate has yet systematically to examine disaggregation in other cases, such as the United States.
3
Nor is this division limited to Benhabib. Numerous contemporary theorists employ some variant of this conceptual framing: see Abizadeh, 2008; Benhabib, 2003; 2004; 2005; 2007; Bosniak, 2001; 2006; Brubaker, 1992; Cohen, 1999; Mouffe, 1996; 1999; 2000; Soysal, 1994; Whelan, 1988; Williams, 2007.
4
Numerous full-length works have taken up American citizenship in greater detail than is possible here. For particularly insightful works in this vein, see Bosniak, 2006; Daniels, 2002; Fry, 2007; Higham, 2002; Hing, 2004; King, 2000; Neuman, 1996; Ngai, 2004; Pickus, 2005; Shklar, 1991; Smith, 1997; Tichenor, 2002; Wong, 2006; Zolberg, 2006.
5
For instance, in The Rights of Others and Another Cosmopolitanism, Benhabib focuses on two such iterations: l'ffaire du folard, which shook France in the mid-1990s, and recent changes in voting laws within the EU that allow non-citizen residents to vote in local and European elections.
6
See Connolly, 1995; 2002; 2004; Tully, 1999.
7
Although there are fundamental theoretical variations and divides in recent agonistic democratic theory, I do not engage them here, focusing on points of shared agreement and what such theories bring to discussions of citizenship. For helpful discussions of these divergences, see Deveaux, 1999; Fossen, 2008; Schaap, 2006, pp. 262-72; Shinko, 2008, pp. 480-8; Wenman, 2003a; Glover, forthcoming.
8
This is a tendency noted by Thiele in revewing Identity/Difference where he critiques Connolly's tendency to ‘flee the human condition and the hard choices of politics by means of literary fabrication coupled with a flippant iconoclasm and rootlessness’ (Thiele, 1992, p.778). While I feel that Thiele overstates the case, I agree that Connolly veers towards intangibility in his discussions of how actually to begin implementing the variant of ‘deep pluralism’.
9
This larger, more complex question of the implementation and consolidation of agonistic virtues into actually existing political spaces is one with which agonistic thinkers have only just begun to grapple. For promising offerings in this regard, see Goi, 2005; Honig, 2007; 
, ch. 3.