Citizenship and the community of value: exclusion, tolerance, failure

Modern states portray themselves not as arbitrary collections of people hung together by a common legal status but as communities of value, comprised of Good Citizens who share common ideals and (exemplary) patterns of behaviour. The community of value sometimes, but not always, overlaps with ‘the nation’. This paper will explore how the community of value is defined from the outside by ‘the foreigner’ i.e. by exclusion of non-citizens, but also from the inside by the failure of ‘failed citizens’, such as the criminal, the benefit dependent, the prostitute etc. Failed citizens and non-citizens are urged to strongly differentiate themselves from each other (immigrants are not criminals, benefit claimants are not foreigners etc). Those who do so may be tolerated citizens. I will argue that both are new expressions of the undeserving poor and that much can be learned by using the same lens to analyse both, and by examining the Good Citizen who is often imagined as beyond political critique.