Post-National Citizenship

Discussion

Causes of Post-National Feeling

Saska Sassen:

"The context for this possible transformation is defined by two major, partly interconnected conditions. One is the change in the position and institutional features of national states since the 1980s resulting from various forms of globalization. These range from economic privatization and deregulation to the increased prominence of the international human rights regime. The second is the emergence of multiple actors, groups and communities partly strengthened by these transformations in the state and increasingly unwilling to automatically identify with a nation as represented by the state. The growth of the Internet and linked technologies has facilitated and often enabled the formation of cross-border networks among individuals and groups with shared interests that may be highly specialized, as in professional networks, or involve particularized political projects, as in human rights and environmental struggles. This has engendered or strengthened alternative notions of community of membership.

These new experiences and orientations of citizenship may not necessarily be new; in some cases they may well be the result of long gestations or features that were there since the beginning of the formation of citizenship as a national institution, but are only now evident because enabled by current developments."

(https://saskiasassen.com/PDFs/publications/Towards-post-national-and-denationalized-citizenship.pdf)

More information

• Article: Towards Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship. By SASKIA SASSEN.

URL = https://saskiasassen.com/PDFs/publications/Towards-post-national-and-denationalized-citizenship.pdf

"Most of the scholarship on citizenship has claimed a necessary connection to the national state. The transformations afoot today raise questions about this proposition in so far as they significantly alter those conditions which in the past fed that articulation between citizenship and the national state. If this is indeed the case, then we need to ask whether national conceptions of citizenship deserve the presumptions of legitimacy and primacy that they are almost always granted. This chapter interrogates the validity of this presumption and in so doing underlines the historicity of both the institution of citizenship and that of national state sovereignty. It is becoming evident today that far from being unitary, the institution of citizenship has multiple dimensions, only some of which might be inextricably linked to the national state. This chapter discusses the rapidly growing literature that is documenting and conceptualizing these issues, with particular attention to post-national conceptions of citizenship."

(https://saskiasassen.com/PDFs/publications/Towards-post-national-and-denationalized-citizenship.pdf)