5 - Democratic iterations: the local, the national, and the global

Summary

Should we view the disaggregation of citizenship and the end of the unitary model with dismay? Are these developments indicators of the “devaluation” of citizenship, a trend toward “lean citizenship” (Thaa 2001), insofar as one no longer need be a citizen to have access to some coveted social rights? Or are these developments indicators of a new sense of global justice and harbingers of new modalities of political agency, heralding perhaps cosmopolitan citizenship?

This chapter begins by examining the ambivalences of disaggregated citizenship. Returning to the paradox of democratic legitimacy outlined in chapter 1, I argue that democratic rule has been based on various constitutive illusions such as the homogeneity of the people and territorial self-sufficiency. The challenge today is to reconfigure democratic voice without resorting to these illusions. To concretize what such a reconfiguration of democratic voice may entail, I discuss three cases of “jurisgenerative politics” in which challenges arising in interpreting “the rights of others” initiate self-reflexive transformations on the part of the polity involved.

The ambivalent potential of disaggregated citizenship

The European Union reproduces at the supranational level the internal tensions that have accompanied the birth of modern nation-states, while also showing their evolution along a different path. The modern nation-state fused together the culturally homogenizing and identitarian understandings of the citizenry with more democratic and pluralist variants, through processes of contestation, struggle, and cooperation as well as cooptation.