Denizenship and its Discontents

Denizens work, pay taxes, engage in an array of fundamental social and political relationships and are subject to and significantly affected by the laws of their countries of residency. Thus, their autonomy and flourishing fundamentally interdepend with the self-government and wellbeing of their domestic communities. While nation-states have gradually extended more rights to denizens that were formerly exclusively attached to formal citizenship, denizens are still largely excluded from the majority of political decisions that govern their lives. The central question of this dissertation is whether this exclusion is legitimate. The author addresses this question in two parts. The first part is dedicated to understanding what denizenship is and how it interrelates with the wider modern paradigm of citizenship and migration. By applying a legal and historic-empirical, as well as normative-analytical approach, the author shows that although there are differences in denizenship rights, the concept functions in a surprisingly uniform manner across all Western democratic nation-states. Secondly, she argues that denizenship disrupts the traditional dichotomy of foreigners and citizens and hence common norms of representative democracy and citizenship. Thirdly, she proposes that the current paradigm of citizenship and immigration is entrenched in a cosmopolitan nationalism. The second part seeks to critically systematize the most prominent arguments proposing denizen enfranchisement, shows that none of them offer a convincing solution, and suggests a more viable alternative, an amended version of Rainer Bauböcks All Citizen Stakeholders Principle. Güley concludes that this principle could serve to correct several problematic implications of the cosmopolitan-nationalist paradigm of citizenship and immigration and can be a crucial step towards more legitimate liberal-democratic societies – with an affirmative, moral cosmopolitan notion of denizenship at its heart.