Review article

GLOBALIZATION AND CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS

Milan Mesić ; Department of Sociology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Abstract

The article opens with an introduction to the key aspects of the globalization debates and their controversies, while it later deals with the crisis of the national model of citizenship. Since the 1990’s the debate is between the advocates of two conflicting theses. According to the first camp of authors, citizenship has proven resistant to the globalization changes in the economic, political and cultural sphere, and even capable of revival. On the other side, it has been argued that the identity of a person, as a member of a national community, was gradually separated from its human and civil rights. That led to the establishment of a ‘postnational model of membership’ – individual and group rights independent of citizenship. According to the second camp, the nation state was fundamentally transformed and it has become an instrument for implementation of the international conventions and norms of human rights understood as personal instead of citizenship rights. There are also attempts to reconcile the two standpoints. These authors recognize the challenges to the conventional national mode of citizenship, but argue that the processes of citizenship transformation are primarily an internal issue for the liberal democracies. Some authors try to step out of the narrow and exclusive conceptual frameworks of the nation state and postnational membership, attempting to explain the conflicting transformation processes of citizenship rights. There are also proposals for new concepts of citizenship – a multicultural and a supranational, for example – as a response to the challenges of globalization and international migration. Finally, postmodern writers talk about postmodern or a cosmopolitan citizenship that is not immediately tied to the nation-state.

Keywords

citizenship; rights; globalization; national state

Hrčak ID:

24870

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/24870

Publication date:

9.6.2008.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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