Neoliberalism Has Created New System of Dual Citizenship for the Poor and the 1%

By Bill Fletcher Jr.

In a lecture at Harvard during my freshman year, a professor—who may have been Martin Peretz—offered an insight that left a profound impact upon me. “Citizen,” the professor noted, was a unique and quite revolutionary concept. Different from many other terms, e.g., “comrade,” the notion of citizen implied a specific relationship between an individual and the polity. It specifically suggested a role for the individual within a state system in which said individual was a participant/actor rather than an observer.

Since the resurrection of the concept of “citizen,” in the context of the French Revolution, the term along with “citizenship” has been contested terrain.(1) There is no universally accepted criteria as to how one becomes a citizen of a nation-state. Countries differ greatly on whether being born in a particular territory is sufficient for such definition; under what conditions one can apply to become a citizen; how and under what circumstances can one’s children become citizens? These questions are not answered the same way in any number of Earth’s nation-states.