In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey discusses the past and future of citizenship with David Jacobson, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Florida (Tampa). They discuss the origins of the concept of citizenship in the ancient Near East a few thousand years ago and how kinship notions shape the debate on citizenship even in our own time. In their recent book Citizenship: The Third Revolution (Oxford UP, 2023), Jacobson and his co-author, Manlio Cinalli, turn to the experience of the medieval guilds as an alternative that may help rejuvenate the institution of citizenship today. The conversation closes with a discussion of Jacobson’s project on violence among the Vikings and how the monopolization of the legitimate means of violence contributes to the decline of violence in societies, as Norbert Elias argued that it did.

Transcript

John Torpey 

Around the world identity politics are slackening the ties that bind political communities and nationalist forces are reasserting the importance of such bonds. The crucial mechanism underlying those bonds is the institution of citizenship. Going back at least to Aristotle, citizenship, the experience of, as he described it, of ruling and being ruled, has been regarded in Western political thought as a bedrock institution. Yet it has come to be seen in recent years as a source of inequality and exclusion as much as the foundation of political equality. So what’s happening to citizenship? My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast with the Ralph Bunche institute that brings some scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. We’re fortunate to have with us today David Jacobson, who is professor of sociology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He’s a widely influential scholar of citizenship. His most recent book, with Manlio Cinalli of the University of Milan, is called Citizenship: The Third Revolution and was published by Oxford University Press, in September of last year. His previous book was called Virgins and Martyrs: Woman’s Status in Global Conflict, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2014. Professor Jacobson is also the author of among other works Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship, also by Johns Hopkins. He’s also authored a book called Place and Belonging in America. And that may seem more salient as an issue to somebody who was born in South Africa, as you’re no doubt hear in a moment. And he received his training at the Hebrew University in Israel, at the London School of Economics, he got his Master’s, and PhD from Princeton University. He’s currently working on an interdisciplinary study with colleagues at the University of Oslo, and NTNU, a study of Viking violence, and with collaborators at the University of South Florida, on a project on the trajectories of ESG, and its relationship to human rights. Thanks for joining us today. David Jacobson.

David Jacobson 

Thank you, John. Great pleasure to be here.

John Torpey 

Great to have you. So your first book, which is really what led us to a meeting a long time ago, your first book Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship, made an influential argument about what was called post nationalism, and the, “decline of citizenship” in recent years. And so for those who may not be familiar with these debates, perhaps you could begin by telling us what you think has been going on in the study and in the reality of citizenship during your career of now more than 30 years?

David Jacobson 

Well, that that book came out in 1996. And the 1990s, as we remember, was a period of great optimism, sadly distant now. There was this talk of the end of history, and the triumph of liberal democracy. It was also shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War. There was a heavy optimism about the role of human rights, which heavily, I’ll come to in a moment, impacted this notion of post national citizenship. This role of human rights in this period was understood both domestically and in principles justifying Western intervention. In, for example, the former Yugoslavia. It’s also the decade when globalization of course, is beginning to really take a hold both in its economic terms and in cultural terms and making its mark. And it’s in that context that shifts in citizenship are evident and begins to start shaping the debate on citizenship, the scholarly debate, but we see institutional and legal changes before that. And in fact, it’s before the 1990s that we see an inflection point when it comes to international human rights law. The foundations of which serves as the foundations of post national citizenship argument, and then an inflection point we can mock pretty closely and empirically from the 1970s. It’s kind of interesting as a long debate, of course. And when we look at international law, and particularly international human rights law, there’s the cynical argument that is kind of an organized hipocrisy of states and not in wink, without taking it seriously. And there are others who look at this as having independent normative effect. What’s interesting with human rights is I think something more subtle was going on, it begins to emerge many treaties from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in straight off to the wall to the many other treaties on migrants, on woman, on children, men, a variety of them myriad treaties, begin to build up in this immediate post war period. But where I think the organized hypocrisy argument really applies, because they’re not taken very seriously in any practical sense. But the infrastructure, the foundations, the regime of human rights has, in fact been put in place. And for various reasons in democracies from the 1970s, an important factor is the growth of of migrant populations in western democracies, courts begin to turn to these these human rights instruments. So it’s a more subtle relationship than pure organized hypocrisy, as it’s often called, or straightforward, normative effect, but the longer term effect yet is that citizenship begins to start responding, citizenship law and practices within the national context begin responding to this growing importance of the human human rights regime if I can put it that way. The asylum, the universal right to claim asylum, not necessarily get it, but to claim it, is an example of this, and has monumental effect that we’ve seen in dramatic ways today. But the longer term effect is dramatic also, in terms of person national citizenship, contributed to dual citizenship, no longer the sense that we could only have one national loyalty, the growing rights of non-citizens residents, the partial decoupling of nationality from the state. But the state remains critical and a lot of critics of the post national argument forget this aspect of it, they think it’s some kind of stateless global political movement. But in fact, in practice, the state remains critical, as it’s through the state, human rights may be advanced. So this post national turn had the promise of helping us among democracies to pivot to a more civic political system, less driven by the primordiallist elements of nation states and of identity politics. But the key… what many scholars of human rights, activists of human rights, didn’t pay enough attention to, if any, was some key vulnerabilities that have meant this post national turn has had significant vulnerabilities. It’s an unfinished revolution. And what drives these vulnerabilities is that human rights have been themselves driven primarily judicially. It’s been a kind of judicialization of politics, through the courts, through legal systems in making these claims, as opposed to going through what people conventionally conceive of as the democratic process. And so what we’ve witnessed is a kind of partial shift from the politics of consent to the politics of rights. It’s important to understand this shift because it really is at the basis of some underlying basis of some severe divisions we seeing in our democracies, and the growing role of judicial and administrative officials making decisions for the public, viewed as outside of democratic accountability, as given sustenance a sense of a democratic deficit. And as given the balance to populist movements that threacontly threatened civic politics. I want to touch on, and that hasn’t been addressed sufficiently in terms of thinking how we move human rights forward, I want to address a break, you’ve brought up, John, this notion of the decline of the citizenship, in the sense of citizenship has traditionally understood, and the number of factors driving this, one you mentioned, the growing inequalities, but also, we see other developments is this widely observed, and I’m quoting the legal scholar Peter Spiro who talked about “the mismatch between borders and the map, and the boundaries of the human community”, and what binds citizens together within the borders of nation states has become less clear. Due to, you know, among other things, extensive transnational ties, dual citizenships, and they’re like, what constitutes an authentic claim on the nation of an individual on the nation state is becoming less clear. But most importantly, the basis is of civic solidarity, whether within nation states, cross borders, but also cross sectional, as you know, not just ethnic say, is in question now. So, I’ll just end with one point that,  there’s some misunderstandings of the post national argument. When I mentioned the idea it was replacing the states, nothing, nothing of that sort was claimed or ever happened. But also, sometimes a conflation of human rights developments with multiculturalism, they actually distinct and different models can fit within human rights, which may not be multicultural. The relationship with multiculturalism is much more ambiguous. And it’s fascinating, if one goes through court cases across various democracies, not only Western, if you look in Japan and others, there’s been a distinct tension between multiculturalism and human rights norms, particularly when it’s come to woman and woman status. And so issues of female genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings, forced marriage, have invariably been shut down, almost invariably been shut down in courts across the democratic world as antithetical to human rights norms and courts in democracies have been consistently clear in the judgments in this regard.

John Torpey 

Well, that’s a fascinating tableau, and I guess what strikes me about it is the fact that it’s very much focused on recent developments, or was focused then on recent developments when the book came out in 1996, I guess. But now you’ve written another book called Citizenship: The Third Revolution, of course first of all, you have to explain to us what the first two revolutions were, but in any case what strikes me about the book is, compared to the previous book, how much of a long durée, kind of approach this is, and how you’re really taking a very long view of citizenship, in order, I guess, to rejuvenate the idea or the concept or the institution now, but so maybe you could tell us about what’s the argument of the book, what are the three revolutions we should be thinking about, etcetera?

Well, there’s a paradox at the foundation of this book. As you said, it’s on a very large canvas, we go back some 2000, well, 4500 years to 2500 BCE and the paradox is that if we look at human history, at least as Homo sapiens, all 300,000 years of it, kinship and blood ties have been the base, almost the dominant basis for organizing human association. So questions of rule, questions of who belongs in a community were determined overwhelmingly, by birth, and from hunter gatherers to tribes answers to the boundaries of community and of rule, came naturally, in a literal sense, presumed and unquestioned. People forget, you know, up to at least 11,000 years ago, the biggest communities out walking across this planet of ours, were maybe a few dozen people. By 4500, 5000 years ago, we are seeing enormous communities, you know, in the ancient Near East, possibly elsewhere, where we don’t have a historical record sufficiently to tell us but certainly in the ancient Near East, in places like Syria, in Babylonia and the like. And the paradox is that when we see the shift to large communities, something’s beginning to shift in terms of the idea of kinship as the soul bases of organizing humanity, organizing community. It’s within the ancient Near East, well before the Greeks and Romans, where we usually begin in the Classical Period 500 BCE, that these, what we can recognize as issues of citizenship begin to emerge in the records. There were these civilizations extending the ancient Near East over 1000s of years, and there were scores of them. And we’re familiar with the more familiar ones, like Syria, but these records of them asking questions very similar to ours, about you know, the status of what we’d call non-resident aliens, who belongs… importantly, they begin to use territoriality as defy to a ways of defining a community. Because pure kinship in the strictest sense, no longer works when you’re dealing with the scale of societies. But they still use the language of kinship. They talk of language such as if, to the Middle East to this very day, if people define themselves in this patrilineal way, I’m the son of so and so and down, it goes in a patrilineal society, patriarchal society. The language would shift to I’m the son of this land. And so the kinship element thread doesn’t disappear. And that’s important to understand this paradox, by the way, we see that shift from I’m the son of this father, to I’m the son of this land in classical India about 500 BCE, and there’s no record of them being influenced what happened in the ancient Near East previously. But what’s key, the paradox is, even though we begin to see this emergence of the idea of the inklings of what we can call citizenship, that if either two societies, kinship based societies, proffered these unchanging fixed attributes of family, tribe and status based on sex and age, a seed was being planted for a more labeled and flexible notion of individual roles. Citizenship had the seed of a promise of a new way of being in the world and could raise this question of who belongs and who rules could be answered in principle in very different ways now, if it was not tied to blood, but based on principles. The paradox is kinship, either in a literal sense, or in a metaphorical sense, never goes away. And at once the Civic project to this day, even in the Enlightenment, which does generate, you know, enormously important changes for Republicanism and such like, they still rely on notions of race begin to emerge. The principles that scholars talk about so much of ius sanguinus, ius soli , is about birth, birth on their land, birth on the soil, birth to this particular people or not, has these resonances of kinship. So it’s not to say great progress is not made, but we are always shackled, in terms of these elements of kinship. Unwinding that paradox as part of that book, and also looking at this historical background, but also as a basis of foundation, how do we move forward civically. Then you asked about the revolutions. The first is in the Near East, as I described, the second is in in the Middle Ages, particularly under Pope Gregory VII, the emergence of the idea of the corporation, not in a strict economic sense, but as an organization based on civic principles or for Pope Gregory, religious principles, rather than kinship begins to emerge. And it’s a very underappreciated moment in history, because it has a dramatic impact on the emergence of guilds, corporations of different kinds, Italian City Republics later on, it generates this modular model for the Dutch East India Company later on the nation state itself as this “corporate body”. The third is this unfinished revolution I referred to earlier, of The Human Rights post World War II, human rights revolution, and so we anti using those dynamics in order to, you know, look forward and how we deal with the challenges we have now.

John Torpey 

Right. Very interesting. So, I mean, one of the things about the book that, struck me, and I think is a central idea for you in the book, is the relevance of this thing called the guild to rejuvenating citizenship today. And since probably most people barely know what a guild really is, or was, and need to be reminded, maybe you could tell us a little bit about what the guild was? And obviously, this is part of Gregory’s reforms. But, how is it relevant to us today as a way of rejuvenating our civic lives?

David Jacobson 

So yeah, it’s, as I was saying, in terms of Pope Gregory, it is this, by the way, an extraordinary Pope and a number of changes. He, for example, introduces celibacy in the priesthood, and which we now look as a highly reactionary step. But it was also an attack on kinship and feudalism, actually, because you’d say, this is a footnote, I’ll get to the question in a moment, but because he was trying to control, he was trying to claw back the property of bishops and others back to the church. But to do that, he broke this thread of kinship of inheritance. In terms of more religious principles, his intentions were more narrow, more broadly in this sanctioning the cooperation and he struggled against secular authorities, and to support religious orders. But as I said, this is a keyhole moment that has quite dramatic effects. I mentioned some of them, but a lot of it again, the kind of paradoxes of of history play out, it’s this corporate idea of sets the ground, the seed in pot, sets the seed for Protestant dissenters who come later, for example. Crucially, what the guilds did is they, because we don’t really see them before the 11th century in Europe, we still see them in, in, in China in different forms, for example, but what the guilds do crucially is they merge economic interests in trades and crafts, together with mutual aid, shared identity and a broader political vision in their towns, and cities. So they had a critical civic role. The guilds, with an important exception, I’ll come to in a moment, they were civic groups, they came together on civic principles, they had charters, that civic goals, they crossed across Europe, particularly Western Europe. They had a political role. They had representatives on the town Council’s, citizenship in this medieval, late medieval period was contingent often on membership of the guild, you couldn’t become a citizen if you’re doing part of the guild, sometimes viceversa. So they were often the civil god of the towns, they played a critical role in the Italian City Republics and particularly in the famous ones we know: Siena, Florence, Venice. And their call was economic, in crafts and trades, but they had a critical role in shaping the politics of the place in which they were in. And so the members of the guild had this, their citizenship was imbued in the guild, and shaped not just the guild itself, but beyond the guild. They were a basis of association, with an important exception, I mentioned, of transcending kinship, and as a seed of pivotal, long term institutional developments. In that sense, also modular building blocks for civic societies on multiple scales. Now, the question is, why is this relevant that you were just asking, why is this relevant now? But before I get to that, there is a big exception to the Civic nature of the guilds, which the early writers, not that early on, in recent decades, tended to idealize the guilds and we do have to recognize there was severe discrimination, with a handful of exceptions across Europe, particularly against two groups: woman and Jews, and at local level, other guilds had their own prejudices. But within that there would be a lot of civic engagement, within those parameters, which, of course, are serious and severe, there would be the civic engagement. And so why is this relevant now? So we put forward a guild model adapted for the 21st century in the book, as a modular nucleus for more developed civic politic. This is not just a claim for kind of blueprint, kind of blue sky blueprint, because it’s a building on empirical developments they are not inevitably leading to guild, but show the promise for the grounds of a 21st century guild. One is that the corporate environment is increasingly propitious for guild model and the individual corporations, and they have been some even in in previous decades, that can point the way. What can be termed as second wave in human rights is increasingly evident in the corporate sector, and comes under the rubric of ESG, or environmental, social and corporate governance, we can use different labels, that what we can see, and I did a study with colleagues in Florida, where we looked at about 3600 US corporations and the adoption of ESG principles using MSCI data, one of the huge index funds, and there’s a clear pattern, I mean, a little bit kind of parallels what we see with human rights after World War II, that we see something of an inflection point in the mid 10s, you know, 2013s to 2016, kind of what I’ve called an on ramp to says we’ve seen the 1970s with human rights, where sufficient numbers of corporations are adopting sufficient numbers of ESG precepts to suggest we’ve seen a real trend. It’s not to say it’s inevitable, but we’ve seen a real trend. Now, together that we see an enormous level of laws being passed on local levels on state levels on national levels, global compacts, and things like slavery in the supply chain, environmental issues, and a shift in the language for example, to the idea of the stakeholder as opposed to the stockholder principles and stakeholders are not only those internal to a corporation, but secondary stakeholders, local communities those impacted environmentally, and strikingly in the last couple of years, the US Business Council, the most important business council of corporate America, has adopted this shift in the language to stakeholder from stockholder. They’ve been other factors like the digitization of the economy has made for much more transparency and the ability to critique corporations. This ESG, so to speak movement, is not a literal movement, does not promote guild model as such, but it provides the conditions for which guilds could be structured. There’s also another aspect important background here to understand why this is critical. One is to ask can this happen? how it may happen? but the other is why it’s critical for civic politics? We have to keep in mind that the cooperation has become so extraordinarily important in shaping people’s lives, and the world itself from the environment to human rights. And yet, as many of us many have observed, the ability of the state to regulate corporations has declined significantly. As one economist puts it, corporations I’m quoting him here “have scale and power that dwarfs the resources available to governments of most countries to regulate the societal impact of corporate activity”. To give you just one dating point of this, of the 100 largest world economic entities 69 are corporations rather than countries. The world’s 10 Top 10 corporations, which includes companies like Walmart, Shell Apple, have a combined revenue of more than the 180 “Chorus”. So in a chorus in quotation marks, countries put together and these countries include countries such as Ireland, Indonesia, Colombia, Greece, South Africa, Vietnam, and so the 21st century guild has a prescriptive model can pull on empirical developments, can help democratize corporations, but equally important provide a new pathway to revive citizenship while harnessing the corporate sector for civic goals. By the way, profit remains important. And you see this in the medieval guilds, there’s always this understanding to be viable, you have to be profitable. So it’s not a it’s not a return to say a socialist model as such. We’ve seen versions of this, for example, in Sweden, you’d have the labor sector, the the unions, the corporates, the corporate sector, and governments negotiating social compacts, but always with the knowledge these companies had to remain competitive early internationally. So the guild, the 21st century guild, we believe can provide an alternative pathway to political engagement, confronting the democratic distrust, the deficit, the shoring up legitimacy of the state. And we can see civic demands on corporations have been growing from stakeholders and the public, on issues from climate to punishing Russia for the invasion of Ukraine is one other point I’ll make about the guild both historically and thinking prescriptively, they were juridical democracies, the analogy to think about and by juridical democracies, they had certain judicial goals, civic goals around which people debate, when we think prescriptively think as an analog, and it’s talked about in the book, of the jury, you come together in a jury,  12 jurors, which by the way, it goes back to the Vikings, this idea of 12 jurors, and the judge gives a set of instructions. Yeah, is the Civic goal, let’s say criminal justice. Yeah, all the procedures you follow. Yeah, What constitutes fair evidence? Yes, what constitutes hearsay, etc, etc. and then the 12 jurors get together, driven by that goal and engage on it. So the fact, and we know this doesn’t work always, but in the in the main it works well, whether you are black, or white, rich or poor, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, is left at the door. And you have focused so it’s a way of getting that kind of engagement we are missing, missing in severe ways at this time.

John Torpey 

Right. So I mean, just this in the side, I recently sat through a jury trial, and I have to say, it was incredibly encouraging to me. I mean, in about 10 minutes, maybe less actually, we came to the conclusion that, the guy who was charged with the crime in question might have done it, but there was simply no evidence really, pointing to that conclusion. The prosecutor had done a very bad job, or it was a skein of bad jobs that, you know, made it impossible really to prosecute the guy. So, he made and everybody in the room, I thought, well, I’m going to say this, but who knows whether people will agree with this. Everybody agreed with it immediately. It was very, it was very heartening, I have to say, but in any case, we’re running thin on time. So I want to you mentioned the Vikings. And I mentioned in the introduction that you were doing some work on the Vikings. Maybe you could tell us in two to three minutes. You know what that’s all about?

Well, the Vikings facet it’s a project that started in a conversation. Jan Bill is the curator of the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, an eminent archaeologist, had in when I was in Oslo as a Fulbright Research Fellow. And after about 20 minutes, we decided to start this project. And, and Jan brought in two additional people. There’s Marianne Strand, an osteologist, and Suzy Nagel, who works on runestones. And the fascinating story with the Vikings is that there’s no written Viking of Scandinavia, there’s no written records. I’ll give the short version of this. So we needed a specific methodology in order to try to tell a story about the Vikings, in our case Viking violence, and we looked at what the way we did it is look at patterns of violence we see cutting across history. We drew on the sociologist Norbert Elias number of others. Elias his argument is more recently been reprised by Steven Pinker and that is as authority centralizes violence goes down. And so what we did is so there’s we wanted to see, and by the way, in terms of violence, the all kinds of fascinating patterns that got across the street that are worth investigation, and what we did in the Viking case, because there are no records, written records aside from the rune stones themselves, which are limited, obviously, in the text is we looked for indicators of violence. And what we did is Lisa, though as osteologist on the team, studies these Viking skeletons in Norway, we took a sample representative, sample of skeletons to look at the level of skeletal trauma. Then we used other studies in Denmark on skeletal trauma. Secondly, we looked at swords, and the Viking scaled with other weapons like axes but Swords is unambiguously about violence, and at the sheer numbers of swords in both Norway and in the region that is Norway and in the region that is Denmark. And for the centralizing state, we looked at the built environment at some point, the built environment gets so large walls, fortresses, etc, that the clan system cannot support it. You need a more centralized command and control. And we looked at runestones because rune stones have a lot of dedications. You know, I dedicate the stone to my son who died in the Great North war is a typical kind of thing. We looked at a lot of different data on the rune stones, including about women’s status, which was quite fascinating to us. And what we find is that there is an extraordinary level of trauma, of killing in Norway, 40% of people are dying a violent death. In Denmark, it’s 4 to 5%. That is high by modern standards, but not the highest, Honduras is about 7% for its male population today. So in swords, Denmark was probably estimated to be in this in the period 750 to 1050, about a third to a fifth of the population of Norway as a third of the population of Denmark. And yet there are 1000s of recovered swords in Norway, over 3000 from the Viking period. In Denmark, it’s less than 100 that we’ve recovered, people in Norway were going round heavily armed. In Denmark, they were usually carrying knives and for utility purposes. 50% of graves in Norway had swords and other weaponry, 1% in Denmark. What was going on, while the other indicators that we had a much more centralized, centralizing authority over their period, increasingly centralized, and the runestones show us a much more social hierarchy of a society. The Norwegian, for instance, are all about kin relationships, the Danish you had Lords and Ladies, you had thanes you have various ranks. So I could go at some length, but given the shortage of time, we could tell a story about the violence and so the quality of violence. In the case of the Norwegians, it was mostly on the cranium on the skull. It was interpersonal, there was various signs of people having skeletal trauma, but surviving the bone yield, and then others where they died. In Denmark, the trauma is lower, 4 to 5%. But it is all death. Why? Because it’s on the neck, it’s about beheadings and it’s about hangings. And that, again, is as points to official violence, what today we would call state violence. These were different societies. And that’s the one of the findings of this project because the Vikings Scandinavia is being dealt with it’s sociologically one space. Now, and this has reinforced that in recent couple of years of genetic studies, which show that the Norwegian Vikings had a distinct genetic profile, overlapping but distinct from the genetic profile of the dates.

John Torpey 

It’s a fascinating agenda. But I’m afraid we’re out of time. And I’m just going to have to encourage people to get the Citizenship: The Third Revolution book and to look at its analysis and the recommendations for how to kind of pull us back towards the citizenship agenda. And I don’t know if any of the Viking work is published yet, but I gather it will be coming out soon. And I encourage people to look at that as well.

There’s a preprint available, online.

John Torpey 

Yeah. Okay. All right. Great. Well, thanks very much. I want to thank David Jacobson for his insights about the past and future of citizenship and of, I suppose you could say of the state or at least centralization, the monopolization of legitimate means of violence, that very important idea. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance and I want to thank Duncan Mackay for giving us the right to use his song International Horizons for the theme music of the show. Look forward to have you with us for the next episode of International Horizons. Thanks very much.