Politics and Cosmopolitanism in a Global Age by Sudarsan Padmanabhan & Sonika Gupta

Author:Sudarsan Padmanabhan & Sonika Gupta [Padmanabhan, Sudarsan & Gupta, Sonika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, History & Theory, Social Science, General
ISBN: 9781138822405
Google: 1ZTdoAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 22481319
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

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1 Cited here with permission from the author.

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Diasporas, Cosmopolitanism and Post-territorial Citizenship

Francesco Ragazzi

Citizenship has undergone dramatic changes over the past forty years. The conception and practice of citizenship based on mutually exclusive, territorial homogeneous states has come under severe attack. Contrary to the wishes of states, codified in international agreements in the 1930s, and reaffirmed until the European Convention on Nationality of 1997, dual citizenship has been sharply on the rise. Amid a sample of fifteen countries, fewer than 5 per cent allowed dual citizenship in 1959; this figure is now about 50 per cent (Sejersen 2008: 531). According to a larger study, in 2009,out of 189 countries, only 53 (28 per cent) did not accept any form of dual citizenship (Blatter et al. 2009: 10). This phenomenon is only one of the indicators of the progressive institutionalization of transnational communities, diasporas, or what could be broadly defined as transnational forms of identification and belonging. From the standpoint of citizenship, there is increasing evidence that citizenries are more and more overlapping, ever less constrained by state-defined territorial limits.

These developments do not go without questioning some of the most fundamental assumptions of the Westphalian project of the territorial state, as well as the liberal theories of representative politics on which modern democratic regimes are premised. More precisely, transformations, such as the tolerance towards dual citizenship, the possibility of obtaining citizenship abroad or voting and being represented as a constituency abroad, challenge the traditional assumptions of a match between identities, borders, and social and political orders (Albert et al. 2001). They assume and enact the conception that the ‘domestic’ is not necessarily within the borders of the nation state, but can in fact be a ‘domestic abroad’ (Varadarajan 2010).

What is the meaning of these transformations, and what have been the main interpretations of it? over the past twenty years, ‘globalization’ as a distinct economic and social phenomenon, has carried with it the hopes of a political order that would overcome the traditional frontiers of the nation state. The end of the Cold War has in particular generated a renewed interest in ideas of cosmopolitanism and brought into existence a vibrant interdisciplinary field of study concerned precisely with the possibility of thinking citizenship beyond the territorial state. And so it is not surprising that diaspora policies have been interpreted within this framework.

The aim of this essay is however to question this optimist reading of diaspora policies. I will contend that if cosmopolitanists are right in finding in these developments the emergence of political spaces beyond the territorial state, it is however a mistake to conflate them with manifestations of progressive or cosmopolitan politics. It is indeed important to distinguish the post-territorial nature of diasporic practices of citizenship — what I term post-territorial citizenship — with the misleading, normatively charged assumption that they are necessarily a form of cosmopolitan resistance to an exclusionary or repressive order. In fact, most of the time, the opposite is true: diasporic citizenship has been ethnicized from the onset

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