Responsible citizenship: A new approach Will Kymlicka1 Introduction Debates on responsible citizenship are as old as democracy itself. In every generation, people have fretted about whether citizens are able and willing to enact their citizenship in responsible ways. Some worry about the apparent decline of public-spiritedness amongst citizens, others that even public-spirited citizens lack meaningful opportunities to exercise their citizenship. Typically, the solution is to propose reforms (educational, social, economic or political) that will instil a greater sense of civic virtue amongst citizens or provide them greater spaces in which to be active and responsible. In this paper, I offer a different tack. Rather than starting with a static list of the desired virtues or sites of responsible citizenship, I suggest we should instead think about the dynamic and relational process of citizenisation. Building relations of democratic citizenship is a historical and social project. It requires a commitment by society to reorder social relationships on the basis of fundamental political values of freedom and democracy. To promote responsible citizenship in a meaningful and durable way, we need to better understand the nature of this social project of citizenisation, and why it is so often fragile and incomplete. The traditional debate on responsible citizenship Debates on responsible citizenship typically start from the assumption that the formal/legal status of citizenship is relatively unproblematic – we all know who citizens are – and the key question is how to ensure that people are able and willing to enact their citizenship in responsible ways. There is a perennial debate about responsible citizenship in this sense, which often takes the form of: • Devising a list of the relevant traits and dispositions of active and responsible citizens2 and their corresponding vices (selfishness, indifference, apathy, intolerance, dogmatism, short-sightedness) • Identifying the ‘seedbeds’ of responsible citizenship so defined – i.e. asking what role different institutions such as schools, media, churches, families, workplaces and NGOs play in fostering these dispositions • Identifying the ‘sites’ of responsible citizenship (political parties, media, NGOs, local community associations, unions) • Speculating about whether these seedbeds and sites of responsible citizenship are still functioning effectively. Some critics worry that the seedbeds are being eroded or corrupted and need to be renewed, others worry that the sites are narrowing, or are systematically biased against particular groups, and need to be rebuilt This conceptual framework underpins much contemporary academic research, public policy initiatives and NGO activity. A major focus of this work today concerns issues of ethnic and religious diversity in general, and migration in particular, which is seen as putting stress on the traditional supports of responsible citizenship.3 Citizenship is thought to be promoted by, amongst other things, strengthening citizenship education in schools, providing citizenship classes to immigrants, imposing new citizenship tests for naturalisation and holding citizenship ceremonies (Joppke, 2007). As this list makes clear, the focus of much of this anxiety is immigrants, their perceived lack of integration and the impact of their ‘otherness’ on the dispositions of responsible citizenship. The claim that immigration erodes social capital and civic virtue is empirically controversial.4 I want to set aside the empirical debates, however, and instead raise a deeper question about whether the traditional framework of dispositions, seedbeds and sites is the right way to think about responsible citizenship in the first place. Whether, indeed, it is adequate to the task of ‘respecting and understanding’ the diversity (to use Commonwealth terms) of the persons, social groups and contexts involved. Citizenisation: An alternative framework The traditional way of framing the debate is too narrow and overly static. Reducing citizenship to a set of traits and sites misses the dynamic and relational quality of democratic citizenship. We should instead think in terms of citizenisation, understood as both a historic process and a social project to create relations of democratic citizenship. Consider the case of ethnic diversity. Historically, relations between ethnic groups have often been defined in illiberal Commonwealth Governance 92 Handbook 2013/14
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