Session 1: Citizenship – Critical Assessments

5th Global Conference

Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Jane Addams, Pragmatism and Rhetorical Citizenship in Multicultural Democracies
Robert Danisch
General Studies Unit, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

Hull-House, and the Settlement House movement more generally, is an instructive example in informal, socially oriented rhetorical education. Those that ran Hull-House and Settlement Houses across the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, saw their work as a precondition for citizenship in what Jane Addams called a “social democracy”. The function of Hull-House was to cope with the conditions of pluralism in American cities marked by an enormous influx if immigrant populations by training new immigrants for life as citizens within American democracy. Therefore, as historical example, Jane Addams’s work is a useful resource for the beginning of a new century that
must confront new challenges of pluralism and immigration. There are four questions about Addams’s work at Hull-House that this paper addresses: What called Hull-House into being, or, in other words, why the settlement house movement? What kind of civics education is offered there and how does this version of civics education embody a model of rhetorical citizenship? In what ways does this form of civics education and rhetorical citizenship ground a social democracy (and what’s unique about a social democracy)? What is the ongoing relevance of Addams as an exemplar of a specific version of political theory committed to the question of inclusion within pluralistic democracies? The first two questions are historical, the third is theoretical, and the fourth argumentative. Collectively, the answers to these questions demonstrate the ongoing usefulness of American pragmatism as a resource for thinking about life within large-scale, multicultural democracies. In addition, the answers to these questions point the way toward understanding the importance of a rhetorical education for participating in acts of citizenship and show how visions of citizenship and democratic participation change over time.

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Postmodern Liberal Conception of Citizenship
Sanja Ivic
Institute for European Studies, Belgrade, Serbia

The purpose of this inquiry is to show that the concept of “citizenship“ in modern liberal political thought is fixed and essentialist. This conception of citizenship is derived from Western metaphysics which establishes homogenous categories. Modern liberal idea of citizenship is derived from the notions of “freedom“ and “equality“ which are considered as absolute truths which are based on universalist conception of reason. These essentialist notions include a number of binary oppositions, such as: we/they, citizen/foreigner, self/other and so forth (where the first term is perceived as dominant because it is considered as derived from reason) which leaves room for excluding and marginalizing. However, with the development of information society, the new perspectives of citizenship arise. The citizenship can be viewed as a state of mind. It is not tied to borderlines or residence. In the following lines, the postmodern concept of citizenship which is not tied to fixed notions of borders, nations, culture and common heritage will be explored. In this way, the concept of citizenship would be considered as unbounded and constructed. It will embrace various identity possibilities. Thus in postmodern liberal thought, citizenship is perceived as contingent cultural (narrative) construct. This postmodern conception of citizenship requires a new of ethics of citizenship which will not be based on the modern liberal idea of priority of right over the good. A new ethics of citizenship will reject the idea of the “one size fits all“ ethics, and it will leave room for “empathy“ ( not only reason ) and different notions of good. In the following lines it will be explored whether there are some changes towards the postmodern conception of citizenship in the international legal discourse.

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Rethinking Citizenship in Agonistic Terms
Paulina Tambakaki
Department of Political Theory, University of Westminster, London United Kingdom

Citizenship used to be the central pillar of democratic politics, sedimenting unity and promoting the pursuit of the good common to all. Premised on a clear distinction between the members of the demos and the non members, citizenship was seen to embody democratic politics by assuring that the body politic decided and acted on its own affairs. Today, this role of citizenship as the vehicle for practicing democratic politics has come increasingly under challenge. Entwined with exclusive national and territorial practices that are now subject to questioning citizenship is criticised for being too limited as a means of furthering democratic politics. Could the concept survive these developments or does it need to be reconceptualised? Towards the objective of rethinking political participation the paper explores the agonistic conception of citizenship which recovers and develops from the writings of Chantal Mouffe in the early 1990s. It argues that as a constructed, precarious, and collective form of identification with the principles of liberty and equality for all, the agonistic conception not only overcomes the limitations of the liberal and civic republican accounts of citizenship (thus entwining pluralism with democratic unity) but also enables us to address the challenges presently posed to citizenship discourse. This argument proceeds along two sections. In the first section, the paper develops the agonistic conception of citizenship, and in the second section it shows how this concept is relevant within the contemporary context.