American citizenship: The quest for inclusion

Book reviews American Citizenship: E6e Quest for Inclusion, Judith N. Shklar, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991, 101 pp. Citizenship is a concept that is central to political theory, but it has not been considered widely in the geographical literature (see Smith, 1989, and Marston, 1990, for notable exceptions). For geographers who analyze American politics, American Citizen&p is a useful place to begin. This volume stems from Shklar’s Tanner Lectures in Human Values at the University of Utah. As such, this book is a polemic in which Shklar grapples with the question of how Americans have lived with the contradiction between beliefs in political equality and the systematic exclusion of social groups from citizenship since the country’s inception. Shklar argues that Americans’ experiences with chattel slavery have indelibly shaped the way they think about citizenship and what it means to be an American citizen. In the Introduction, Shklar characterizes citizenship as a matter of social standing on two bases: the right to vote (but not thepractice of it) and the right to be paid a wage to ensure economic independence. She argues that despite the lofty ideals represented in the Declaration of Independence, certain groups of people were refused these rights. Chattel slavery denied both these rights; it ‘stood at the opposite pole from full citizenship and so deftned it The value of citizenship was derived primarily from its denial to slaves, to some white men, and to all women’ (p. 16). As such, comparison to the standing of slaves has been central to debates over the extension of citizenship. The remainder of the book examines the theoretical and historical development of citizenship in the US in terms of the debates over the extension of the vote and the right to earn. Shklar builds a persuasive case that major expansions of US citizenship (to colonists, white males without property, black freedmen, and women) were opposed by those who had the vote but who feared a loss of public standing by virtue of being identified with groups that they believed to be morally and economically inferior. Conversely, proponents of expansion argued that the denial of the vote reduced them to the level of slaves. In the debates over expansion, the modern citizen came to be defined not in terms of virtue, but in Jacksonian terms of independence, self-improvement, and

567

the ability to defend one’s interest. Beliefs in the dignity of work, the right to receive a wage for one’s work, and the public obligation to work are part of the ideology that standing as a citizen is gained through work. The American model of a citizen thus was not based on virtue, property rights or military service, but on voting and earning. That the rights to work and economic independence are not equally attained (as demonstrated by racist and sexist labor practices) and are not guaranteed by the right to vote contributes to the ‘stress of inherited inequalities in a society committed to political equality and to the principles of inclusion’ (p. 101). In arguing that citizenship is created and cannot be separated from its historical and political setting (p. 8), Shklar is ambiguous as to what citizenship actually is in any setting. For example, citizenship is variously defined as public standing and as struggle; at other times, citizenship is equated with political and social rights. While her point that citizenship is dynamic is laudable, the argument would have been more clear if she had differentiated her notions of citizenship as struggle for public recognition from the rights or ‘emblems’ of citizenship, such as the vote, and from the meanings OY implications of being a citizen. Indeed, Shklar argues that citizenship is defined by what it is not (p. 16). In such a sweeping argument as she makes, clarity and consistency in terminology are critical. Because it is unclear which definition Shklar uses, other scholars may have difficulty building on her very important theoretical insights. It is worth noting, however, that this ambiguity in defining citizenship is common in the literature on citizenship. Geographers can contribute to attempts such as Shklar’s to demonstrate the importance of understanding citizenship as a dynamic concept that is socially created. To Shklar’s statements that citizenship must be considered in dynamic social space and that ‘political theorists who ignore the best current history and political science cannot expect to have anything very significant to contribute’ (p. 9), we argue that geographical space should also be considered. For example, Shklar herself hints at the importance of the frontier and regional tensions in extending the rights of citizenship, but fails to consider seriously its meaning. Responding to labor shortages (both waged and domestic), Western states and territories granted suffrage to aliens and to women despite restrictions in the

Book revieu

568

US Constitution. Although the vote and economic opportunities were often rescinded later, their early exercise in the West played a role in national suffrage movements and in the extension of the rights of citizenship. Even within the West, the breakdown of the gendered division of labor in public and private spaces was critical in expanding the economic and political freedoms of frontier women. Regional tensions between the North and South regarding slavery and the conditions of labor also were critical in the Civil War and the extension of voting rights to freedmen. Finally, in an era of capital mobility and changing spatial divisions of labor, we note that the opportunities to earn are being restructured at the local, regional and national levels. It is in this context that Pennsylvania’s early adoption of ‘workfare’ to replace welfare can be understood. Shklar points to workfare as an example of attempts to ensure that the unemployed and the poor maintain some standard of civic conduct (p. 98) and concludes that debates over workfare are fundamentally about the obligations of citizenship in the IJnited States. We would note, however, that the opportunities to fulfill those obligations are structured not only by race and gender (as Shkktr argues), but spatially as well. As such, processes of uneven development might be as critical to the opportunity structure of citizenship as are racism and sexism, Thus, analyses of citizenship should be considered in the context of dynamic social and geographical spaces. In sum, American Citizensbzp is an incisive, provocative and clearly-written analysis of the nature of citizenship through US histoq. It provides a useful basis on which geographers and political scientists can build a dialogue on the dynamic nature and implications of citizenship. Lynn A. Staeheli and Meghan S. Cope Department

of Geograplp

University of Colorado

at Boulder

References MARSTON, S. (1990). Who are ‘the people’?. gender, citizenship, and the making of the American nation. Environment and Planning D. Socie& and spnce 8, 449-458 SMITH, S. (1989). Society, space and citizenship: a human geography for the ‘new times’? Transactiorts of the Institute of British Geographer.$NS 14, 144-156.

Bases Abroad:

i%e

Global

Foreign

Military

Presence, Robert E. Harkavy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, a SIPRI book, 389~~. With the apparent end of the Cold War and the signing of major nuclear and conventional arms agreements, it is easy to forget about the thousands of military installations maintained worldwide, mostly by the US, the countries of the former Soviet IJnion, France and the UK. Harkavy, an American political scientist, has written a book documenting the amazing variety and complexity of the global networks maintained by these powers, although most of the details and discussion are devoted to the US for reasons of data availability and the dominant position of the US in foreign military presence. The result is a major compendium of the situation in the late 1980s. The book is not analytical in attempting to understand why certain countries ‘host’ the bases of another state; instead, it ‘concentrates on description and enumeration of the thousands of facilities, bases, and other forms of FMP (foreign military presence) provided for the most part by the superpowers’ (p. 230). Only in the final chapter does the author attempt to correlate FMP with other interstate relations and then only looks at formal alliances and treaties, foreign and military aid and arms sales. The book’s value lies in its collection of a vast amount of data from a variety of scattered sources. Forty tables and 14 figures summarize the discussion and illustrate clearly the global nature of the distributions. The book is organized in 10 chapters. After an introduction, which provides no more than a cursoq review of three periods of ‘access diplomacy’ since 1919, Harkavy lists 10 kinds of FMP (airfields, naval, ground forces, missiles, space, communications, intelligence and command, environmental monitoring, research and testing, and logistic). Each is then sub-divided into conventional and nuclear arenas. The rest of the book is devoted to a catalogue of the facilities that each country maintained abroad (in 1988) according to type (naval facilities in one chapter, research and environmental facilities in another, etc). The book is replete with acronyms and abbreviations and Harkavy provides a very useful glossary of these at the outset. He assumes a familiarity with the language and mindsets of the respective military establishments and the techniques of modern warfare. A typical chapter