Historical Dilemmas of Democracy and Their Contemporary Relevance for Citizenship.

This essay discusses the dialectical relationship between the concepts of “democracy” and “citizenship,” by relating to current debates which combine a transformation of the philosophical tradition and an evaluation of situations where the legal distinction between the “citizen” and the “national” is challenged. Starting with considerations on the semantic tensions of the “Greek” and “Roman” categories (politeia, demokratia, isonomia, ius civitatis), it discusses the aporias of “democracy” as a model or an ideology, which philosophers like Jacques Ranciere and Hannah Arendt allow us to overcome by defining democracy as a process of permanent anti-oligarchic “insurrection” rather than a stable regime. It is not the spread of democracy, therefore, that constitutes the primordial object of political theory, but the “democratization of democracy” itself, especially in the form of the elimination of its internal exclusions. This theory is illustrated and further refined by referring to debates about class and race discrimination, violent struggles for recognition affecting republican institutions, “nomadic” or “diasporic” forms of citizenship, and the relationship between social and political rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]