glover 2010 radically rethinking citizenship

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Radically Rethinking Citizenship: Disaggregation,

Agonistic Pluralism and the Politics of

Immigration in the United Statespost_861 1..21

Robert W. Glover

James Madison University

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 contem-

porary 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 immigra-

tion. In this article, I critically examine this account to show both its theoretical shortcomings and the incompleteexplanations 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’ fromwhich 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 particu-

larly 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 distinctionsbetween particularist parochial exclusion and universalist attitudes of openness. This sim-

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00861.x

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plifies 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 politicalagency 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 uni-

versal 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 inperiodic 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 articu-lated 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 ‘unbun-

dling’ 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.

2 ROB ERT W. GLOVER


POLITICAL STUDIES: 2010



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 anddemocratic 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 cosmo-

politan 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 cosmo-

politan 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 empow-

erment for those outside the traditional bounds of sovereign political communities (Ben-

habib, 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’.

R A D I C A LLY R E T H I N K I NG C I T I Z E N S HI P 3





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 under-

standing 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 neces-

sarily ‘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 legitimizesreductive conceptualizations that characterize current debates within the politics of migra-

tion – 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 person-

hood 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 futuretrajectory 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-citizensin the mid- to late-twentieth century is noteworthy, this is not simply a gradual transfor-

mation of state-based citizenship, but also its endurance. Will Kymlicka notes that the

4 ROB ERT W. GLOVER





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 advo-cates 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 conceptu-

alized 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 utilizeBenhabib’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 com-munity, 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 federalauthorities. Responsibility for the maintenance, policing and control of territorial bound-

aries 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 Immi-

gration 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 poten-

tially 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 securitizedpost-9/11 climate, justified through language concerning ‘threats’, ‘danger’, ‘vigilance’ and

‘protection’.

6 ROB ERT W. GLOVER





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 immigrationlaws, 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 organiza-

tions 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 immigrationlegislation 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 Immigra-

tion 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 proposalsin 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 Congresswould 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 thelegitimizing 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 engagementin 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 Proposition187, 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 theWelfare 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 ImmigrantResponsibility Act (IIRIRA, 1996) introduced many new measures in the enforcement and

adjudication of immigration laws. Particularly noteworthy are: (1) considerable expansion

8 ROB ERT W. GLOVER





and retroactive definition of deportable offenses, now including petty offenses like shop-

lifting; (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 toimmigration 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 particu-

larism 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 paradoxi-

cal actions simultaneously deny and strengthen the state as the locus of belonging andmembership. 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 levelof 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 uni-

versal 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 thosewho 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 iden-

tities 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 blendof 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 structuralfactors, 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 experi-

ences. 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 domi-

nating 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 exclu-

sion as enduring conditions of our collective lives. Most variants of agonism avoid ‘cel-

ebrat[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, con-

tentious 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

10 ROB ERT W. GLOVER





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 politicalassociation’ (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 thecommon 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 renego-

tiate 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 possi-bilities’ (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 liberaldemocratic 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 theissue. 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 con-

ception 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 lawand 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 discus-

sions 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 beable 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, character-

ized 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 elusiveconsensus 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 condi-

tional 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. Athumbnail sketch of how such virtues could emerge within the population more generally

is provided in the following section.






Agonism and American Citizenship: Re-conceptualizing Citizenshipand 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 anyliberal 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 radicalpluralism 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, constitutea 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’ (Apos-

tolidis, 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 immi-

gration 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 thrustupon 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 demo-

cratic engagement remain underdeveloped or non-existent, we cannot expect the discoursein 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 tocultivate 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 conver-

sions 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 besthopes 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’, whichdisaggregation 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 demo-

cratically 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 canendanger 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, andemphasis on re-articulation of our political foundations, would prevent the ossification of

political identity and foster awareness of and receptivity to hitherto excluded and margin-






alized 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 continuousre-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 inhabiteven 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 poten-

tially constructive engagement of difference. In this sense, the 2006 protests in the UnitedStates 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 themembership, 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 imagina-

tively confronts the legitimacy of existing categorizations of who matters and who is

worthy of democratic voice. It evinces hope that radically inclusive democratic institutionscan 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’.

( Accepted : 5 February 2010)

About the Author

Robert W. Glover is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Justice Studies Department at James Madison

University. His current research addresses the contemporary politics of immigration and citizenship with a focus on

the issues of democratic legitimacy and non-citizen activism. He is currently at work on a book manuscript which

examines the immigration issue in the United States through the theoretical lens of agonistic pluralism. His other

research interests include democratic theory, critical security studies, international relations theory, comparative social

movements and transnational activism. His recent work has been featured in PS: Political Science and Politics and

Philosophy and Social Criticism.

Robert W. Glover, James Madison University, Department of Justice Studies, Moody Hall 213, MSC 1205, Harri-

sonburg,VA 22807, USA; email: [email protected]

Notes

1 See, for instance, Bosniak, 2001; Cohen, 1999; Jacobson, 1996; Sassen, 2002; Shachar, 2009; Soysal, 1994. In this article, I focusprimarily on the disaggregation thesis articulated by Seyla Benhabib,both for analytical clarity and the far-reaching impact she hashad 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 andinstitutional changes within the European Union.Will Kymlicka, Bonnie Honig and Jeremy Waldron engage Benhabib’s claimswith regard to Europe in the volume Another Cosmopolitanism. Yet Benhabib’s claims extend beyond Europe, asserting thatdisaggregation is global in scope. Scholarly debate has yet systematically to examine disaggregation in other cases, such as the UnitedStates.

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 insightfulworks 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 , whichshook France in the mid-1990s, and recent changes in voting laws within the EU that allow non-citizen residents to vote in localand 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 themhere, focusing on points of shared agreement and what such theories bring to discussions of citizenship. For helpful discussionsof 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 ag ree that Connolly veers towards intangibility in his discussionsof 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 politicalspaces is one with which agonistic thinkers have only just begun to grapple. For promising offerings in this regard, see Goi, 2005;Honig, 2007; 2009, ch. 3.

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