Global Citizenship and Empire

Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, ed. S. Ben-Porath and R. Smith (University of Pennsylvania Press), 2013

Clev. St. L. Rev., 2004

Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation, 2018

This paper investigates the postnational model of citizenship and contemporary challenges to postnational citizenship in the era of globalization whose nature is ambivalent and also includes fragmentation. Although the postnational concept of citizenship is based on the recognition of multiple identities, it does not necessarily represent the postmodern definition of citizenship, because, if this were the case, it would have to be based on the postmodern idea of decentred subjects, or fluid self. Unlike the postmodern citizenship, it is possible to imagine postnational citizenship that includes different identities, but perceives each of them as homogeneous. Economic and political dimensions of globalization and Europeanization coexist with resurgence of nationalism. The perception of paradox of nationalism in global era is further intensified by its European context as it was expected that the European Union overcomes nationalist discourses.

2009

The theme of this lecture is the current crisis of global citizenship and democratic responses to it. 1 The crisis is that citizens are unable to exercise effectively their civic 'response-abilities' in response to four major global problems. The global problems are: (1) the ecological and climate change crisis; (2) the imperial problem of inequality, exploitation and poverty of the Global South; (3) the problem of global wars and militarization; and (4) the problem of distrust and disrespect for different civilizations and peoples. These global problems are interconnected. The processes of modernisation, industrialisation, western expansion, exploitation of the world's resources and economic globalisation that are the cause of the ecological crisis are also the major cause of the inequalities between the global north and south. The primary purpose of the huge global military empire of the United States is to protect and expand the very processes of economic globalisation that are 1 This lecture was given at the Goethe University Frankfurt/Main under the auspices of the

This paper investigates the postnational model of citizenship and contemporary challenges to postnational citizenship in the era of globalization whose nature is ambivalent and also includes fragmentation. Although the postnational concept of citizenship is based on the recognition of multiple identities, it does not necessarily represent the postmodern definition of citizenship, because, if this were the case, it would have to be based on the postmodern idea of decentred subjects, or fluid self. Unlike the postmodern citizenship, it is possible to imagine postnational citizenship that includes different identities, but perceives each of them as homogeneous. Economic and political dimensions of globalization and Europeanization coexist with resurgence of nationalism. The perception of paradox of nationalism in global era is further intensified by its European context as it was expected that the European Union overcomes nationalist discourses.

Globality denotes the development of society on a universal scale. Society is no longer contained by the nation state and social solidarity in the Durkheimian sense becomes global rather than national. This development intensifies the ethical challenge of modernity: the development of a cosmopolitan conception of the human subject. This paper asks what this ethical challenge demands both of us as individual citizens and of the states to which we belong. A cosmopolitan conception of the human subject is one that abstracts from group-based differences of identity in specifying what it is to be a person. Whether people get to be persons depends on the action of the state in providing a constitutional framework of right. It depends also on individuals becoming both willing and able to be self-determining persons who can recognise their fellows as persons. The development of a cosmopolitan conception of right is hindered by profound ambivalence about the modern project of self-determination and the demands it makes of us. It is hindered also by the lack of a secular account of the human subject and by conceptions of human rights that follow upon an onto-theological conception of the human subject. These are anti-statist in orientation and share this in common with laissez-faire economic globalism. Cosmopolitan right depends on both persons and states understanding what it would mean to re-conceive the res publica such that states are oriented as public authorities within a constitutionally governed interstate order.