A post-Marshallian conception of global social citizenship

EU Citizenship and Social Rights

Histoire Sociale Social History, 2000

The concept of nation is usually understood to include all people within the respective boundaries, and the concept of state to treat all equally. From an analytical perspective, however, these concepts are not mutually reinforcing or even complementary, but contradictory. Political practice and power relationships exclude particular groups because of ethno-culture, religion, gender, class, or "race". Who belongs, struggles for belonging, or is excluded is a matter of negotiation in power relationships. Non-territorial peoples, diasporic peoples, settled groups who became minorities in larger political entities, working-class men and women, and those regarded as socially inferior have gained admission to national belonging and equal rights only late, or are still struggling for inclusion. An international symposium, "Recasting European and Canadian History: National Con-sciousness, Migration, Multicultural Lives", brought together scholars from twelve European states and two North American ones to reconsider approaches to migration and the interaction of many cultures in the European past and present. A selection of papers dealing with inclusion in and exclusion from nation-states is presented here.

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.

A methodological premise on the content of globality: the general order of the society is corporate by his "net of negotiations," by his discourse/ social exchange; the frame of such negotiations is developed (it is cause and caused) by the technological systems. The net of the social processes is leavened, today, of different forms of "sovereignty", of different contents of the "power" (normal and recurrent phenomenon in the west society with the diffusion of new means of production) that works like control on the interaction macroprocesses/ social negotiations. In this sense there are, among the others, two peculiars considerations: first ,globality,in effect,consists in the diffusion of a technical setting geared to the technological/economic macrosystems; second, this process of ordering bestows on her the structure of general system of the local nets on which she acts. In reality, the apparent inevitability of the macroprocesses, in this technique,suffers of quite a lot necessity of adaptation to the characteristics of the local nets, that see, even, enhanced their capability of interaction using the carriers and the forms of exchange of the same global processes. The problem is all in the substantial difference among local net and local aggregate: an inferring distinction not by a separate observations but only by the social exchange code of the local area,through the capabilities/ abilities that the social actors of the area have to put themselves in conditions of reciprocity, of feedback,of movement respect their personal nets. In substance,to build a local net means to put in order the equilibrium of interaction and exchange of the subjective nets extending the effects of opportunity and development;to govern the local net means "to check,to balance for guarantee" the interaction among his complex and the general processes. Just this function of balancing among local and global delineates the technical passage from government, from the upright intervention, contained and canalized, to the governance, to the coordination of the individual and institutional, public and private processes, coaching collective based actions on the cooperation among the different subjects. Governance in effect, is formatted by the general relations net that includes whether the institutional actions, whether the formalities of interaction among public institutions, private organisms, collective movements, up to the same social actors that, in this process of continual feedback, are constituted like subjects of citizen. The objective content of citizenship, then, is definited by the "ability" of consistence (subjective motivations, shared representations.) that characterize the identity of the subject and by the "capability" of autonomy and movement that he realizes in the own social surrounding (formative capability, techniques, financial.). But there is an other passage:the reality appears us, then, like a system of interactions/ relations, corporate from other nets, his distributions of weights determines the difference among actor and subject. The individual is characterized for a substantial difficulty to govern the complexity of his relations: he possesses all the informative data from his nets, but he is not in degree, alone, to develop the adequate logic to categorize and govern this kit of experiences.

2002

Signo y Pensamiento, 2012

"In order to understand the relationship between communication, citizenship and rights it is necessary to analyse three fields separately: the political communication field, the social communication field and the cultural communication field. This research has developed a concept of communicative citizenship, a model and methodological tools to create a comprehensive and integrative approach to the relationship between communication, citizenship and rights, and overcome this gap. The project includes the analysis of socio communicative regimes in an armed conflictcontext (Colombia), a multicultural context focusing on migrants’ political action (United Kingdom), and a society where Governmental control affects communicative and political rights (Italy). To describe,analyse and understand how these conditions affect the human rights field and how it is possible to claim for justice, equality and freedom from a communicative perspective, are the final aims of this research."

Journal of Political Philosophy, 2012

BA (Hons) Dissertation, 2022

COVID-19 transformed the social world in every way, from the macro elements such as national policy priorities to micro aspects such as domestic relationships. These changes were enforced to varying degrees, across the globe, by rulers upon their subjects (and objects). The pandemic therefore served to reveal the relationship that everyone in a community holds with their rulers; from democracy to dictatorship, republic to royalty, social contract theory has been appealed to in periodicals and journals, in a bid to explain varying reactions from populaces of the world to their government’s decisions. However, it appears to be taken for granted that this Enlightenment attempt at understanding citizenship, was just as fanatical as that which it had usurped, a faith in the Divine Right of Kings; Western philosophy instead placed this blind faith in abstract rights that were universal of ‘Man’. Throughout Western history, the social contract has been constructed along racial and gendered lines, with recent attempts to extend rights to minorities and women – whilst failing to question the fundamentals that underpin a ‘Racial’ and ‘Sexual’ contract. The pandemic has unveiled this façade of an all-encompassing abstract theory of citizenship as not fit for purpose, and to survive it must undergo thorough epistemological deconstruction. Otherwise, it must make way for modern materialist tendencies that forge values out of the prior-oppressed groups from the ground-up.