Relational Approach to Citizenship: Assessing Migrant Transnationalism and Integration

Substantive citizenship – i.e. the democratic norms, dispositions and activities of an individual in relation to the state and the political community – is often used as a perspective for analyzing civic integration and political transnationalism. At the same time, citizenship scholarship traditionally (e.g. Marshall 1992, Heater 1999, Delanty 2000) derives its normatives from the Western (European) tradition – e.g. the liberal, republican and communitarian philosophies that have been developed primarily for the context of the nation state. This paper analyses the opportunities for implementing a relational approach to studying citizenship and its normatives in the context of migrant transnationalism and integration. There are several layers of relationism: the relation of the broader migratory setting and contemporary constructions of migration (e.g. Xiang 2015) and the relations of core citizens, immigrants and emigrants in constructing full and semi-citizens, aliens and other categories. While especially in the latter case the relational look on citizenship in itself is nothing new (see e.g. Somers 1994), there is much in contemporary contexts and modalities of transnationalism to elaborate. The main emphasis is on the transnationalism constituted by East-West migration in Europe, which mostly constitutes a relatively proximate migratory space, but more often than not, different understandings of citizenship norms and practices between the sending and receiving country. This paper also builds on the perspectives of the theory of constitution (Emirbayer 1997) and contestation in social fields (Bourdieu 1979, 2003) in order to devise an approach that enables to take a more contextualised perspective to (a) study the modalities and qualifiers of transnational citizenship, (b) surpass the erosionist/expansionist divide in political transnationalism studies (Kivisto & Faist 2003), (c) overcome the depoliticisation discourse in much of transnationalism and civic integration studies (see e.g. Crouch et al 2003, Fawcett et al 2017), (d) look at how do the different transnational spaces (Erdal & Oeppen 2013) constitute migrant integration, and (e) develop an analytical framework to study the normative discourses of citizenship in the context of transnationalism.