Do South Africans Exist?. Ivor Chipkin
a citizen (the bearer of rights in a specific community), he/she is necessarily distinguished from other citizens. In other words, something happens to make his/her rights admissible in this or that community and not in others. Our second difficulty arises when we ask if these rights apply to the mad and the mentally handicapped. Living apart and judged incapable of autonomously expressing their opinions, such people are said only to have partial political rights. Combined, we might conclude with Marie Gaille that: ‘This makes one suspect that citizenship is not granted to this or that individual on the basis of the rights of man, but, rather, as a status, conferred according to relative criteria’ (p. 23; my translation).
To take this point further, we can firstly say that if citizenship is a status and not a right, then it implies that duties and obligations issue not from nature, but from the political community itself. Even when judged a feature of birth, citizenship only reveals itself in relations between people and the state. Rights only appear in the light of the sovereign law; hence the disassociation possible between the ‘natural rights of Man’ and the civic and especially political rights of the citizen. To the extent, therefore, that rights are conferred by the law, they can be granted in degrees, and they are susceptible to political claims by those who do not enjoy them. Citizenship is thus produced in the relations between individuals or collectivities and the state. What is at stake in defining the limits of the political community, therefore, is the measure according to which rights are conferred and distributed in the polis. This brings us to the particular form of the nation.
Secondly, citizenship is contingent on a particular culture – what can be called a quality of population – which distinguishes one community of citizens from another. In other words, a nation is a community of citizens with a common imagined culture.
Understood in this way, the question is not whether the nation is modern or not. More apt is to ask: When does modernity start? Does it begin with the American and French Revolutions? For those historians for whom the first nation is that of England, modernity starts two hundred years earlier. Leah Greenfeld, for example, argues that in England as early as the sixteenth century, the term ‘nation’ became synonymous with ‘the people’ to mean the bearer of sovereignty (Greenfeld, 1992: 7). This is what was at stake in the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. By the time of the accession of Charles I in 1625, the principle that political sovereignty resided with Parliament, as representative of the nation, had long been established. Charles reasserted the divine right of kings in a context where this right was long deemed to have passed to the nation. The documents of Parliament, states Greenfeld, ‘are characterized by an unequivocally nationalist position in the interpretation of the polity, which was this time unambiguously defined as a nation’ (p. 40). This language was most clear in the documents of 1649 that abolished the House of Lords, abolished kingship, established a republic (which was called a Commonwealth) and established a court to try Charles I. The law providing for the prosecution of the king claimed that he,
not content with those many encroachments which his predecessors had made upon the people in their rights and freedoms, has had a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation … [and] levied and maintained a cruel war in the land against Parliament and Kingdom (cited in Greenfeld, 1992: 41).
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