Changing Citizenship: Room for Children?
Keele University, UK 28/5/00
Aims
This paper addresses three issues:
Index of Topics
Children as Citizens: Dignified Babies?
Standard Citizenship: Living in Abstraction?
Children, Citizenship and Anxiety
Social Change and Changing Citizenship
Introduction
A discussion of children and citizenship couldn’t be more timely in the UK. ‘Citizenship’ is, for example, appearing on the national curriculum for schools. Further, the case of ‘children’ continues to be pressed on by some quarters as the reductio ad absurdum of bids to alter the nature of our citizenship. Recently, some commentators have predicted that the incorporation of a European statement of human rights into UK legislation will lead to the wild and hazardous outcome of children being able to challenge school uniform regulations, or, worse, the current facilities enjoyed by schools to detain children without charge – detentions. But for all my fighting talk it is no clear ideology of children’s liberation that drives me today. We are not talking utopias.
Children’s citizenship is now getting onto the agenda of grown-up politics. This is not because of a popular acceptance of the goal of children’s liberation. Nor is it because policy-makers have bought into a utopian picture of children’s rights as a solution to all, children’s problems. Even the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child sustains a fascinating (and advised) ambivalence on these matters (Lee, 1999). Rather, I would suggest, the mainstreaming of the issue of children’s citizenship, to the extent that it is indeed occurring, is a side-effect of a widely perceived necessity to reformulate the ‘abstract diagram’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988)(see endnote ) of relations between States and populations. This necessity is currently being indexed through various hotly disputed terms such as ‘the third way’, ‘reflexive modernisation’ and ‘globalisation’. For the moment, let me note that this reformulation has something to do with the contemporary condition of the sociological division between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, the political division between ‘leaders’ and ‘led’, and the rise of what Castells (1998) calls the ‘network society’.
I am going to suggest that a familiar abstract diagram of citizenship that has long been assumed and deployed in academic, policy and everyday contexts, is reaching the end of its usefulness as a means of describing political and social problems to render them tractable. This abstract diagram draws so fully on notions of independence that it has given grounds for the exclusion of children, as a minority marked by dependency, from citizenship. As the conditions that allowed for the credibility and utility of this diagram are eroded, so the opportunity presents itself to re-think the term ‘citizenship’ in such a way as to include children.
The spirit of this piece is captured nicely by Anne Showstack Sassoon (2000) when she writes;
‘If intellectuals are increasingly ateware that they cannot spin utopias out of their heads, perhaps their vocation should be to concentrate on trying to ask the right questions of what is already happening before our eyes in order to understand the possibilities of what might be.’
(Showstack Sassoon, 2000: 57)
Let me start with two instances. After I have described these two instances, I will ask what they are instances of, whether they are instances of ‘citizenship’.
Two Instances
The first instance I have selected is Priscilla Alderson’s (2000) commentary on a BBC Radio 4 programme called ‘Tuning into Children’.
‘One BBC programme played a tape of Heather aged two…saying ‘no’ many times. The presenter commented that Heather could be in the Guinness Book of Records, and emphasised the patience needed by mothers and the huge demands made by children…the transcript in the book accompanying the programme omitted the end of the conversation…Heather said ‘no’ to all the comforting and ‘babying’ offers from her mother, of raisins, a cuddle and so on. She finally said ‘yes’ when her mother suggested a shared, more responsible activity ‘shall we go to the shops?
(Alderson, 2000: 54)
Priscilla’s conclusion is that toddlers don’t always want to be treated like babies, and that, if you listen, they are quite capable of telling you so. She is also suggesting (just as interesting this) that people acting as mother’s are quite capable of catching this, while people acting as radio producers, serving up an entertaining yet informative, grown-up and responsible version of childhood, are not. So, an issue of consultation.
The second instance is a web-site called ‘Young TransNet’. Here’s a sample page, the 'toolkit' page.
A device for gathering and circulating information, then. A device that bids to knit together the interests of educators and children with those of the sponsoring organisations. A network that is there for children to substantiate, to expand and to inhabit, one that opens itself to use as a counter to, or as a supplement to, the hierarchical and exclusively adult decision-making processes surrounding transport policy at local and national levels; decision-making processes that combine elements of representative democracy with elements of legitimated commercial interest.
Are these instances of citizenship?
In instance 1, it is clear that Heather was dependent on her mother to communicate with her in such a way as to allow for the expression, perhaps formulation, of her will. Likewise, in instance 2, children using Young TransNet are dependent on the website’s sponsoring bodies and on their teacher’s willingness to devote valuable computer-literacy time to TransNet, for the expression, perhaps formulation, of their views. These then can be instances of proper citizenship only so long as we are prepared to disregard the children’s lack of autonomy in the expression or formulation of their wills or views. To claim these as instances of citizenship would surely be to underestimate the extent to which children’s wills or of points of view may be manipulated, distorted, stolen by the mediating adults and technologies required. Better perhaps to consider, with tradition (Lee, 1998b), our two instances as training grounds for proper citizenship, proper citizenship being the independent exercise of political will under such conditions that that political will cannot be a stranger to itself. It is just this view of citizenship which I will now contest, not by asserting children’s capacities for autonomy and independence, but rather by pointing out the contemporary threats to the abstract diagram of the relations between States and populations that involves and supports an equation of citizenship and independence.
Children as Citizens: Dignified Babies?
The meeting of children and citizenship has long been seen as improbable. To take an extreme example, can we sensibly connect the words ‘dignity’ and ‘baby’? A ‘dignified baby’ is rather like an ‘embarrassed woodlouse’ (Stainton Rogers, pers.comm.).
The things children would be considered likely to do if granted citizenship – contest school uniform regulations for example – have an air, for some, of triviality and a faint whiff of chaos. The phrase ‘children’s citizenship’ marks an uncharted political future to be trivialised or feared. Why so? and why does the notion of children’s rights spawn such peculiarly intemperate emotional responses? What discourses of citizenship, and what relationships between those discourses and the daily practice of citizenship, allow for these strong feelings to arise around the issue of children’s citizenship?
Standard Citizenship: Living in Abstraction?
Liberal theories of citizenship are generally based on a model of a person as an autonomous individual – autonomous and independent. This individual is the bearer of ‘rights’ (hooray) and ‘responsibilities’ (yawn), respectively bestowed and assigned by some authority beyond the reach of this individual. Because of the existence of extra-social authority (the Rule of Law, the State) to undertake the balancing of rights and responsibilities, the autonomous individual, in order to be a citizen, has no fundamental need to communicate with any other person. A citizen is dependent on no-one and nothing but extra-social authority (the State, the Rule of Law) for their citizenship. All dependencies or communications such individuals may sustain amongst themselves are understood as accidental. It just so happens that some citizens are married men, while others are single women. These are the outlines of what I have called the abstract diagram of citizenship.
From a sociological perspective it is quite clear that the persons who carry their autonomy with them, who thus enjoy the cultural goods of dignity and freedom of speech to the full, do so not only thanks to some extra-social authority referent, but also thanks to more fundamental and banal, everyday dependencies. Those patterns of communication and dependency entered into by adults, which make up a portion of the social, may be contingent but they are certainly not to be considered accidental. ‘Free speech’ must be elicited, but can be denied. Likewise dignity must be respected, but can be besmirched.
Thus the independent individual citizen (the ideal adult) is a fiction (Lee 1998a). But we should not dismiss this image of the citizen just because its most obvious and visible expression comes in a body of questionable theoretical assumptions. It is vital to recognise that the abstractions of this model of the citizen as an ideal adult, an adult whose only dependency is on such blank figures (Hetherington and Lee, 2000) as ‘the Rule of Law’ or ‘the State’, is to be found in live discussions of citizenship just as much as in books. Thus, conversations about refugees often hinge on the determination of ‘their rights’ and ‘our responsibilities’- as in ‘what right do they have…?’ - or the determination of their desert of ‘rights’ in view of their failure to discharge their ‘responsibilities’ – as in the variously downright disgusting, shabbily opportunistic and highly principled attacks on refugee-criminals, refugee-beggars and refugee-mothers that we have recently been treated to. The key point here is that as we perform citizenship, we can find ourselves living in and through abstraction. This constrains our emotional responses to issues of citizenship to intemperate outbursts. The term ‘abstract diagram’ is intended to indicate the proximity of, and complicity between, the ‘lived’, ‘theoretical’ and ‘policy focussed’ dimensions of this form of citizenship.
I would suggest that with this abstract diagram of ‘citizenship’ there is a rather tight compact between official, serious discourse and daily performance. They meet on Question Time. This is why even in a rather sluggish representative democracy like our own with high levels of non-participation in elections, we are rapidly emotionally moved by issues of citizenship, often in quite intemperate way. The apparent danger of children’s rights is one example here. Another is the insistence of a truculent citizenry on its right to kill teenage home-invaders when the ‘Rule of Law’ is revealed as abstract, when external authority fails. Daddy’s not doing his job, so I am forced to do whatever I want: More bobbies on the beat please. This reaction, and the influence it may have had on local election results, is not to be understood as barbaric or atavistic. It is very modern and civilised, springing from the terms of a particular relation between the State and a population, a relation which leads us to expect to be unaffected by fellow citizens life problems.
Children, Citizenship and Anxiety
Ironically, the anxiety that might prevent us from treating children as citizens is that they will go on to perform citizenship just as adults sometimes do when living in abstraction. Children might find for example, in adult’s failings (and in the moment that they are affected by adult’s failings) grounds to opt out of the contract of citizenship – e.g. do whatever they want, divorce their parents, refuse to go to school. In other words, we expect children to be as intemperate as we sometimes are, and, perhaps, if they were part of our abstract diagram, they would be.
By being who they are, children also pose a more status-specific threat. With their dependencies more marked and noticeable than those of adults, (marked and noticed officially because of the predominance of economic factors in the public policy discourse of dependency), children remind us of the necessity of interaction and communication, in other words of our own dependency. They signal that living in abstraction is not enough to compose citizenship. Due to a combination of their sociological position as dependents, and due, oftentimes to their own conduct children blow the whistle on the abstract diagram of citizenship which otherwise makes such good sense. When a child interrupts the diligent homeworker you might hear something equivalent to ‘Go away, find something to do independently, I’m busy trying to be autonomous’.
Social Change: Changing Citizenship?
The ‘autonomous individual’ then, some grand historical error – a simple myth unsupported by ways of life? No. It is precisely the proximity and mutual confirmation of ‘abstract theory’, ‘abstract diagrams’ and ‘living in abstraction’ that draws my attention when thinking about children and citizenship. The abstract has so often been realised concretised, filled-in (never losing its dependence on under-definition) often with the result that children have been excluded from dignity, from freedom of speech, from patterns of consultation, from hierarchies of representation.
So what are the potential grounds for change here? I would suggest that the cluster of legal and political theoretical concepts that makes up the autonomous individual was only able to form the framework for discussion of practical problems of government and collective life so long as those problems presented themselves in the right way. The abstract diagram of citizenship could be realised, lived as real, only under specific sociological and economic conditions that allowed it to express a large number of people’s problems.
As long as a clear distinction between public and private spheres could be discerned (and this was an effect of gendered perspective as well as one of facts), so the practical problems of government could be addressed by sorting people into the categories ‘dependent’ (female, child) and ‘independent’ (male). UK strategies of welfare provision have traditionally followed on from this distinction.
Likewise, as long as a clear distinction between leaders and led could be maintained, so practical problems of regulating those allowed to be autonomous fitted well with an abstract conception of the person as an autonomous individual. UK strategies for managing employment and for negotiating with business have traditionally followed on from this.
But today, I would suggest, the public/private division no longer adequately names the practical problems faced by adult men and women. Thanks to women’s increasing participation in the formal labour market, and many sociologists research on this, the interdependencies of work and home can no longer be ignored and work and home activities may be addressed on the same balance sheet. We are currently witnessing the struggle to be born of ‘family-friendly’ employment policy.
Similarly, as ‘autonomy’ from States is successfully being claimed by private industry and business and other Information and Communication Technology based organisations, the degree that freedoms are in the gift of States diminishes, thus troubling the leader/led distinction. It has always been hard empirically to operationalise the distinction between leaders and led. ‘Who runs the country?’ has always been a difficult question to answer. Difficult, because it is naïve. When leaders tie their thinking to ‘globalisation’, these difficulties become overwhelming. Who runs the West Midlands?
Let's add to this a version of the Network Society thesis (Castells,1998). If, as I have suggested, children’s evident dependency has marked them as unfit for citizenship, then adults have been assumed to be independent, in other words in need of no mediation. Current developments in Information and Communications Technology change this picture a little.
Opening up the question of mediation. By offering new mediations it reveals the history of independence as a history of mediation, a history of the arrangement of mediations in such a way as to produce the image of unmediatedness (or self-presence) for some. The burden of cultural and economic exclusion carried by women and children of being mediated and dependent is now revealed as the result of contingencies rather than necessities. So the image of the male adult as independent is forced to change.
New patterns of mediation may actually offer children channels of participation that peel official discourse about citizenship and performances of citizenship apart from each other, breaking the complicities and thus workability of the abstract diagram. It is principally as an abstract voter that one has access to mediation by an elected representative. Perhaps less ritualised and time-constrained patterns of consultation might emerge with changes in the nature of communication.
Conclusion
A specific abstract diagram of citizenship can be identified. It ‘relates’ us to each other as mutually independent, and secures that non-relation of mutual independence with ‘blank figures’ of authority that are taken to lie outside the social (the State, the Rule of Law). Oddly, these figural, extra-social, guarantors of the political legibility of our living conditions are taken to be the source of our citizenship. At their most effective, their abstraction is hidden. But when their abstraction is revealed, our mutual dependency comes upon us as a surprise, yielding intemperate emotional responses akin to a collective startle reaction.
Children have faced a dual obstacle to incorporation into this abstract diagram. First, their dependencies, unlike those of standard adults, are a matter of public record and of private comment. Second, given their conduct, their insistence on communication and on relation, they are a living critique of our abstract diagram.
However, the pertinence and utility of the abstract diagram we have identified is under three kinds of challenge;
Erosion of sociological public/private division makes us ask whether there are any independent (male) standard adults at all!
Erosion of leader/led distinction makes us question any identification of, say, Whitehall with an extra-social and independent source of authority. As we try to fill in the blank figures we see how inadequate concrete political institutions are to an ideological image of them.
Existence of ICT and its networky, as opposed to hierarchical, mode of representation makes a distinction between theories of citizenship and lived practices of citizenship newly visible and opens this distinction as a space for us to inhabit.
These circumstances suggest to me that ‘citizenship’ is becoming open to re-definition and that the activities of children, their carers and mediators (technical and human) with regard to representation, dignity and consulation, what they might be considered to be doing with the word, may provide a key to the acceptance of dependency, sociality emotional continence and particularity in the performances of citizenship undertaken by us as academics, policy makers and regular people.
References
Alderson, P. (2000) Young Children’s Rights: Exploring Beliefs, Principles and Practice, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Castells, M. (1998) End of Millenium, Oxford:Blackwell
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press
Hetherington, K. and Lee, N.M. (2000) ‘Social Order and the Blank Figure’, Society and Space, 18: 169-184
Lee, N.M. (1998a) ‘Childhood and Self-Representation: The View from Technology’, Anthropology in Action, 5, 3: 13-21
Lee, N.M. (1998b) ‘Towards an Immature Sociology’, The Sociological Review, 46, 3: 458-482
Lee, N.M. (1999) ‘The Challenge of Childhood: Distributions of Childhood’s Ambiguity in Adult Institutions’, Childhood, 6,4: 455-474
Showstack Sassoon, A. (2000) Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect, London: Routledge
Notes
The relations between states and populations may of course be seen differently from the perspectives of academic-theorists, policy-maker-theorists and lay-theorists. The term ‘abstract diagram’ is used here to recognise the partiality of views, but also to raise our sensitivity to the possibility that at particular times and under particular arrangements, these different views may overlap to some extent. So I have used the term ‘abstract diagram’ here to name the views of citizenship that might be held in common amongst commentators despite their occupying different positions. The central suggestion of the paper is that one such ‘abstract diagram’ – a tight compact of such terms as the rule of law, representative democracy and rights and responsibilities is loosening as a result of social and technological change. The question of whether this is being replaced by another developing abstract diagram of citizenship is left open.
To disambiguate my usages of the term ‘abstract’: To the extent that elements of a picture of citizenship are readily seen from our range of positions, that element is a feature of the ‘abstract diagram’. Here the notion that such a diagram is abstract indicates its independence with regard to the position of the viewer. This usage of ‘abstract’ which is analytic in nature is to be distinguished from the rather critical use I have put the term ‘abstract’ to in other parts of the paper.