Human Rights as Political Imaginary by José Julián López

Author:José Julián López
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The Supersession of National Citizenship

Ins ofar as national citizenship has been conceptualized as membership in a political community territorially defined by the nation-state, the conceptualization of human rights as an extension of citizenship is frequently conjoined with an account of the erosion of state capacity arising from globalizing forces, or from the displacement of political sovereignty from the national to some postnational site. Thus although above, Shafir and Brysk rest the bulk of the explanatory burden on the notion of expansion, elsewhere Brysk has equally argued that “human rights provide a multifaceted ethos of connection, protection and entitlement that substitutes for the increasingly hazy promise of citizenship in an era of shifting identities and weakening states” (2013, 14). In other words, the other side of the coin of citizenship’s expansion is the national state’s inability to pull the levers that ensure the provision of rights. For instance, to take one example in the realm of cultural rights, Bryan Turner argues that “national citizenship was produced by the growth of nation-states in the nineteenth century (and citizenship involves territorially circumscribed set of rights), but cultural identities are now increasingly transnational and diverse” (2006, 46).

In Chap. 3, I analysed a number of normative sociological justifications of human rights that were rooted in the notion that only human rights could provide global citizens with the leverage to seek security and well-being in the maelstrom of economic, migratory, political, and military conflicts that define the contemporary globalized era. For the scholars analysed in Chap. 3, amongst others, the supersession of national citizenship rights by human rights is understood as being necessitated by the transnational origins of the processes that threaten the rights previously secured, in patch work patterns to be sure, through national citizenship.

However, another explanatory possibility for conceptualizing the supersession of national citizenship by postnational human rights is associated with the displacement of sovereignty from a national to a postnational locus. For instance, David Levy and Natan Sznaider argue that despite the tendency of many scholars to associate the development of human rights with the erosion of state sovereignty, it is better understood as a partial denationalization of the legitimacy of the nation-state , which is reconfiguring the very nature of sovereignty itself (2006, 2010).

Le vy and Sznaider draw particular attention to the ongoing contemporary pattern of national attempts to come to terms with their violent pasts. Be they through apologies, inquiries, truth and reconciliation commissions, and/or efforts at reconstructing history and historical memory, “national-building practices based on violence and war-like conduct are being recast as illegitimate practices of human rights violations and ethnic cleansing” (2006, 658). The broader significance of this “post-heroic statehood ” (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 658) is that the legitimacy of the contemporary state is no longer exclusively secured through a contract with the nation, but increasingly depends on the latter’s adherence to “nation-transcending human right ideals” (2006, 659).

This is particularly salient in the context of historical memory . Whereas, historical memory was once stitched to a narrative of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.