Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History.

• Author: Spiro, Peter J.
• Position: Review

CIVIC IDEALS: CONFLICTING VISIONS OF CITIZENSHIP IN U.S. HISTORY. By Rogers M. Smith.([dagger]) New Haven: Yale University Press. 1997. 719 pp. $35.00.

In this review, Professor Peter or. Spiro examines Roger M. Smith's recent work, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. Out of Smith's historical treatment, Spiro distills what he terms the American "citizenship dilemma." This dilemma arises, in Professor Spiro's view, from the inherent tension between inclusion and solidarity in forging a cohesive and vigorous national identity. As Smith demonstrates, morally-discredited traditions of exclusion provided an important source of cohesion in American history. Policies and acts of inclusion--while consistent with the rhetoric of civic myths--have diminished the state by weakening the bonds of national identity. In the modern world, Professor Spiro advances, the notion of inclusion is not sufficient to provide a basis for a unique American identity. In light of this, Professor Spiro argues that Smith and other liberal nationalists are misguided in assuming than America can be both strong and inclusive. Given the unacceptability of returning to previous exclusionary citizenship regimes, Professor Spiro questions the liberal-nationalist assumption that the nation will remain the focal point of rights and solidarities. He discusses a host of nonstate communities that have garnered individual loyalties and argues that the increasing prominence of such associations indicates the weakening of bonds of national identity. Professor Spiro concludes that the nation--while remaining an important force in American's lives--is likely to become less important in terms of associative identity than it has been in the past, and he sketches the normative challenges that will be posed by this new regime. As Peter Schuck has recently observed, "[c]itizenship is very much on America's collective mind."(1) This is in part a response to issues of formal status, which are back on the table for the first time since the turn of the last century. Birthright citizenship,(2) naturalization,(3) and the rights accorded resident aliens(4) have emerged points of contest after decades of quiescence.

But the resurgence is also explained by a more profound crisis in the nature of our national identity. What does America mean? What does it mean to be an American? These questions implicitly comprehend issues of formal status, at least in the contemporary context. America is defined at least in part by its citizens (hence the notion of "a people"); and to be American is defined at least in part by citizenship in the United States. Indeed, citizenship rules have important implications for the totality of American identity, and whether the status of being American also entails--or should entail, or can entail--shared values, traditions, and institutions.

Though he ties the work to development of law, it is the larger and intensely contested matter of national identity that drives Rogers Smith's formidable volume on the history of American citizenship. This work is first an intellectual history of how citizenship has been defined by the nation's elites. It comes as no surprise that this history is tainted by persistent restrictive and noninclusive strains, reflected in the legal exclusion of many from full rights of citizenship and others from citizenship altogether. But Smith's interpretive gloss on this material is what provokes: The tradition of exclusion was not only contrary to the civic myths on which the nation's greatness was supposed to have been founded, but was also an important source of cohesion necessary to fuel the nation's ambitions.

This gives rise to what I call the citizenship dilemma. On the one hand, exclusionary approaches have been morally and legally discredited.(5) On the other hand, inclusion waters down the strength of national identity. When nations no longer command definitional authority, they can ask less from their members, which in turn further diminishes the state. That is America's dilemma today.

This review first assesses Smith's narrative of our citizenship tradition. In light of its breadth and detail, this narrative is likely to emerge as a definitive historical treatment, and as such will present an important backdrop to current policy debates. The review then explores the implications of the tension between inclusion and solidarity, and the difficulty of accomplishing both. Smith properly rings the alarms against a return to citizenship rules based on race and other illegitimate criteria. But his efforts to have it both ways--that is, an America that is both strong and inclusive--may represent a misguided sentimentality for a nation that was once but is no longer exceptional.

Smith does not stand alone in his vision. A liberal nationalist school of American citizenship is now emerging around the twin precepts of inclusiveness and national vitality. Liberal nationalism counts a number of opinion writers(6) and important scholars in its midst, including Smith and other political scientists(7) in addition to many of the leading academics in the field of immigration law.(8) The widely-covered final report of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform also worked from liberal nationalist premises.(9)

Liberal nationalists have mobilized on citizenship law issues to defend inclusiveness against the neonativist calls for more restrictive citizenship rules,(10) But they work from the premise that the nation should remain the primary locus of rights and solidarities,(11) This review problematizes that premise, considering other possible platforms--including subnational jurisdictions, the new diasporas, transnational civil society, and other identity groupings--for the protection of rights and the pursuit of political self-realization. These nonstate communities are increasingly competing with the state for primary individual loyalties; their strength has both reflected and hastened a thinning-out of national ties. And perhaps that is not a bad thing. Perhaps it is time to accept an America that is inclusive but inevitably weak, one whose bonds are secondary to other forms of association. That, in any case, appears to be an increasingly accurate description of what America means and what it means to be American: less.

The dilution of national ties will not usher in some rosy dawn of free association. Just as nations have abused citizens and subordinated others, so non-national groups have the capacity to oppress and illegitimately exclude. The rise of non-national groups will invite difficult questions relating to membership. The answers may at least be informed by similar struggles in the realm of national citizenship. The transposition of analytical strategies from the public realm to the private presents a formidable challenge. The sooner we address that challenge, the better; so long as they remain exclusively focused on the state as the center of political being, political and legal theorists will neglect their role at the vanguard of institutional justice and change.

1. ASCRIPTIVE AMERICANISM AND THE MULTIPLE TRADITIONS THESIS

   Writing in 1982, historian Philip Gleason suggested that to be an American,

   a person did not have to be of any particular national, linguistic, religious, or ethnic background. All he had to do was to commit himself to the political ideology centered on the abstract ideals of liberty, equality, and republicanism. Thus the universalist ideological character of American nationality meant that it was open to anyone who willed to become an American.(12) Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals sets out methodically to destroy this thesis, that citizenship has historically been a matter of adopting the American creed of liberalism and nothing more.

   That undertaking is successful, if perhaps not especially challenging. Smith's account--comprised of more than 700 pages covering the subject only up to 1912--represents a detailed study of citizenship laws, judicial decisions, and the political, cultural, and scientific assumptions they reflected. Yet, as Smith himself elsewhere demonstrates, only a few facts are necessary to sustain the attack.(13) Even those who are not students of citizenship law are unlikely to be surprised to find that membership has not always been open to all who declare their republican faith.

   The most familiar element of this counter-story highlights the status of blacks in the American citizenship tradition. Black slaves, obviously, were not afforded citizenship in the Union. But it was the implications of slavery for the status of free blacks that was galling. Dred Scott found all blacks, free or slave, ineligible for national citizenship.(14) The immediate question was whether any black person was entitled to sue in federal court under Article III diversity jurisdiction, but more importantly the holding also deprived free blacks of the Article IV privileges and immunities that they would have otherwise enjoyed when they traveled to slave states.(15) The question of formal citizenship for blacks was, of course, settled by the Civil War and by the Fourteenth Amendment,(16) which, whatever its historical ambiguities, was clearly intended to extend citizenship to blacks.(17)

   But it is not only blacks who have been excluded from formal membership on the basis of race. Federal law long provided for the naturalization only of free white persons.(18) Although persons "of African naivity" were also made eligible for naturalization in the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment,(19) others were excluded. The naturalization bar on those neither white nor black was made explicit in statutory measures and judicial decisions denying eligibility to those of Chinese,(20) Japanese,(21) and South Asian(22) descent.(23) Not until 1952 were the vestiges of these racially restrictive measures removed from the naturalization statute.(24)

   Many Native Americans were also deprived of...