Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the Exclusiveness of the Demos

Abstract

Three distinct components of the citizenship principle have been identified in the literature: a political principle of democracy, a juridical status of legal personhood and a form of membership and political identity. The modern paradigm of citizenship was based on the assumption that these components would neatly map onto one another on the terrain of the democratic welfare state. Globalization, new forms of transnational migration, the partial disaggregation of state sovereignty and the development of human rights regimes have rendered this model anachronistic. Only if the various elements of the citizenship principle are disaggregated and reinstitutionalized on independent levels of governance, some national, some supranational, will the exclusiveness constitutive of the ideal of citizenship be tempered with the demands of justice.