Abstract
In the preceding chapter, I suggested that thick notions of bonding (common national myths, memories, and long-shared past) are not likely to be effective building blocks of democratic cooperation today. Such bonds provide a potential mechanism for fixing and naturalizing differences, facilitating relationships of domination, and promoting notions of belonging inconsistent with democratic choice.1 Instead, the promise of democratic social cooperation in the twenty-first century rests on assumptions about the multiple and fluid identities of individuals and groups exercised in overlapping and soft bordered polities. Continuing this argument, I return to the decoupling of political association from national identity and propose a different model of social choice in which the bonds linking citizens are thin ones based on a common present and a near future and the different experiences of cooperation, expectations of right treatment, and understandings of power that citizens bring to collective action.
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Notes
“We may agree with Miller’s claim that trust among citizens is important. But it remains an open question whether nationalism is the only source of trust, whether it indeed is such a source at all—and whether what Miller proposes is actually nationalism.” Andreas Follesdal, “The Future Soul of Europe: Nationalism or Just Patriotism? A Critique of David Miller’s Defence of Nationality,” Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 4 (2000): 504. Nenad Miscevic also poses this same question. Nationalism and Beyond: Introducing Moral Debate about Values (Budapest: CEU Press, 2001), 109–121.
The meaning of the term “nation” according to Jurgen Habermas “changed from designating a pre-political entity to something that was supposed to play a constitutive role in defining political identity of the citizen within a democratic polity. In the final instance, the manner in which national identity determines citizenship can in fact be reversed. Thus, the gist of Ernest Renan’s famous saying, ‘the existence of a nation is…a daily plebiscite,’ is already directed against nationalism.” “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,” in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 258. See also Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community, trans. Jeffrey Flynn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 111.
Andreas Behnke, “Citizenship, Nationhood, and the Production of Political Space,” Citizenship Studies 1, no. 2 (1997): 253–255.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, ed. and trans. G.D.H. Cole (London: Dent, 1973), 175–176.
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 46–47.
Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 31–63.
Joseph H. Carens, “Immigration, Democracy, and Citizenship,” Political Theory Workshop, University of Chicago, 2005, 1, <http://ptw.uchicago.edu/carens01.pdf> (accessed 29 May 2007).
Joseph H. Carens, “On Belonging: What We Owe People Who Stay,” Boston Review of Books (Summer 2005), <http://www.bostonreview.net/BR30.3/carens.html> (accessed 29 May 2007). Carens is talking about people who have already entered a country in this particular argument. But, as we shall revisit in the next chapter, restrictions on entry have a way of creating or exacerbating lines of division within national borders and of increasing the vulnerability of those who are “different.”
Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (New York: Routledge, 2000).
See Rainer Baubock, ed., Migration and Citizenship: Membership Rights in International Migration (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1994); and the European Union Web site: <http://ec.europa.eu/citizenship/index_ en.html> (accessed 20 March 2007).
See Carol C. Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Gould addresses the challenges of democratizing globalization and expanding democratic participation in cross-border contexts. She provides an excellent discussion of some of the main proponents of different notions of global or cosmopolitan democracy (such as David Held, Daniele Archibugi, Richard Falk, and Thomas Pogge), 159–216.
David Held, “Democratic Accountability and Political Effectiveness from a Cosmopolitan Perspective,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (2004): 368; see, for example, John S. Dryzek, “Transnational Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1999): 30–51; Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Daphne Josselin and William Wallace, eds., Non-State Actors in World Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Charles R. Beitz, “International Liberalism and Distributive Justice: A Survey of Recent Thought,” World Politics 51, no. 2 (1999): 291; see also Kok-Chor Tan, Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 135–202.
Craig Calhoun, “Social Solidarity as a Problem for Cosmopolitan Democracy,” in Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 285–302; and “Constitutional Patriotism and the Public Sphere: Interests, Identity, and Solidarity in the Integration of Europe,” in Global Justice: Transnational Politics, ed. Pablo De Greiff and Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 275–312.
See Timothy Garten Ash on the former Yugoslavia in 1999: “A few people have grown rich, mainly war profiteers, gangsters and politicians—the three being sometimes hard to distinguish.” “Cry the Dismembered Country,” The New York Review of Books 46, no. 1 (14 January 1999); Miscevic, Nationalism and Beyond, 113; and Brunkhorst, Solidarity, 116.
Tan, Justice without Borders, 90, 135–162. See, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), 209–228.
John Schwarzmantel, “Community as Communication: Jean-Luc Nancy and ‘Being-in-Common,’ ” Political Studies 55, no. 2 (June 2007): 463.
On an “institutional turn” in political theory, see Veit Bader, “Associative Democracy and Minorities within Minorities,” in Equality, Rights, and Diversity, ed. Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 319–339.
David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 9.
Follesdal, “Future Soul of Europe,” 510; see also Simon Caney, Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 174–175.
This “priority” for conationals also undermines democratic commitments to justice based on equal concern and respect or, in Henry Shue’s terms, basic rights to security and subsistence. See Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and US Foreign Policy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 131–152, 173–180. See also Robert E. Goodin, “What Is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen?” Ethics 98, no. 4 (1988): 663–686.
See, for example, Marcia Grimes, “Organizing Consent: The Role of Procedural Fairness in Political Trust and Compliance,” European Journal of Political Research 45, no.2 (March 2006): 285–315.
Russell Hardin, “Democracy and Collective Bads,” in Democracy’s Edges, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 63–83.
On secession, see Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103, no. 1 (October 1992): 48–75; Allen Buchanan, “Democracy and Secession,” in National Self-Determination and Secession, ed. Margaret Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 14–33; Caney, Justice beyond Borders, 153–156.
Philippe C. Schmitter and Alexander H. Trechsel, The Future of Democracy in Europe: Trends, Analyses and Reforms, Green Paper for the Council of Europe (Strasburg: Secretary General of the Council of Europe), 58–59.
Andreas Follesdal, “Subsidiarity and Democratic Deliberation,” ARENA Working Paper WP 99/21, 1999, <http://www.arena.uio.no/publications/wp99_21.htm> (accessed 7 June 2006); “Subsidiarity,” Journal of Political Philosophy 6, no. 2 (1998): 231–259.
Follesdal, “Subsidiarity and Democratic Deliberation”; Grainne de Burca, “Reappraising Subsidiarity’s Significance after Amsterdam,” Harvard Jean Monnet Working Paper no. 7/99, 1999, <http://www.jeanmonnetprogram.org/papers/99/990701.html> (accessed 7 June 2006).
Thorsten Benner, Wolfgang H. Reinicke, and Jan Martin Witte, “Multisectoral Networks in Global Governance: Towards a Pluralistic System of Accountability,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 191–210.
See Dryzek, “Transnational Democracy” 30–51; Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders; and Peter Evans, “Fighting Marginalization with Transnational Networks: Counter-Hegemonic Globalization,” Contemporary Sociology 29, no. 1 (January 2000): 230–241.
Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998).
Alison Brysk, ed., Globalization and Human Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
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© 2008 Julie Mostov
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Mostov, J. (2008). Democratic Polities: Thin Bonds and Soft Borders. In: Soft Borders. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612440_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612440_5
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