Charles Tilly: Citizenship and Boundary Formation

I went to a second talk this week at the Center for European Studies, this time one given by Columbia University professor Charles Tilly called “Citizenship, Boundaries, and Exclusion.” Although my only contact with his work was a few essays assigned as reading (and my only contact with him being the odd fix of his printer or set up of a new computer in my capacity as a faculty support techie at Columbia a few years back), I see his name everywhere. He seems to have such a powerful command in such a wide range of disciplines, both as a scholar whose work is referred to, but also, as I learned today, as someone who can smoothly jump from consideration of the complexities of contemporary Kazakh politics, to talk about the detailed history of the Jewish community in Trieste, as well as his more well-trodden fields of early modern French history and sociological theory.

According to the introduction by another professor, Tilly’s work has recently tried to create a general theory of “boundary formation” and his talk introduced an argument which seems to be a part of it. His talk yesterday began with a story about the formation of the concept of citizenship in the Pyrenees Catalan speaking communities between Spain and France in the 17th century and then went to more general observations about the rise of citizenship within the context of national boundary formation. He based much of his historical discussion on two books by Peter Sahlins called Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees and another called Unnaturally French. His emphasis, which I think ties into his broader theory, was on the idea that the modern concept of citizenship formed as a byproduct, or the indirect result of an exclusionary move. In other words, it was not so much thanks to the definition of who was “French” but out of the gradual determination of who was “not French.” This is not, in and of itself, a very creative point. Many scholars of national identity and nationalism emphasize the role of “the Other” in the creation of a national Self. In using Sahlins’ example of the Pyrenees, however Tilly was good at tracing specifically how this worked in the legal domain of citizenship, long before, as he says, “The idea of ‘nation’ was hijacked by the French Revolution.”

While I don’t have time to trace (and have no confidence I can reproduce accurately) his 8 point argument during the talk, there was one prerequisite condition which I found of particular interest. He argued that one of the triggers which allowed this kind of definition of citizenship by exclusion was the modern transition from a “jurisdictional” regime of state control to one which was “territorial.” When he described this, I was immediately reminded of the argument in Thongchai Winichakul’s book Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Thongchai’s examination of the birth of Siam’s (Thailand) “geo-body” comes out of the clash between a traditional “jurisdictional” interpretation of state control—one in which each community is involved in complex, and potentially contradictory or overlapping social relations with political agents, and the modern British and French conception of “territorial” control based on clear geographic territorial markers which designate the physical boundaries of (and therefore the material body) of a nation.

I had imagined, up to this point, that Thongchai’s argument might only pack a punch in the case of pre-modern states outside of the “West” but Tilly was very clear in his claim that this same transition happened much later than I had imagined in the case of Europe as well. He cites, for example, the fact that the “territorial” boundaries which depended on clear and geographic markers weren’t completely fixed in the case of France and Spain until an 1868 treaty finally marked the territorial boundary with a row of stones. In early modern Europe, he argues, many areas were only beginning to make the shift from a jurisdictional conception of state control. Does anyone have any recommendations for books which specifically trace this kind of shift in the European case, either from Tilly’s own work or others who he might have been referring to? I want to get a better grip on the theories behind this as I go on with my own studies of East Asia.

Finally, I just want to mention that I was impressed at how completely his work was taken as having broad interdisciplinary value. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that they did not choose sociologists to comment on his paper. Instead, they brought one discussant in from Harvard’s Law School, and the other from the Kennedy school of Government, neither of whom had done anything directly related to this in their own work.