The dialectic and the tragedy of citizenship

Date

2008-03-01

Author

Yegen, Mesut

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

158
views

0
downloads

This essay aims to review the contemporary debate on citizenship with a focus on the present dilemma of the institution of citizenship between equality and difference. Citizenship today seems to have become stuck between a categorical commitment to either universalism or particularism. It is as if there is no alternative but to opt for either assimilation (national citizenship) or group fetishism (the end of citizenship). In this essay, however, I argue that citizenship today is not as helpless as it looks. I suggest that rethinking the categories of equality and universality may save modern citizenship from this dilemma between equality and difference. Perceiving equality as equality of differences and not homogenisation and pursuing a contingent notion of universality may, I argue, be of some use in coping with the dilemma in question.

Subject Keywords

Political Science and International Relations

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63458

Journal

EUROPEAN POLITICAL SCIENCE

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210149

Collections

Department of Sociology, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

The Impact of EU-based Populism on Turkey-EU Relations Alpan, Başak Zeynep (Informa UK Limited, 2019-10-02) The May 2019 EP elections once again highlighted the current cultural backlash throughout Europe against progressive values such as cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, which impacts on the 'future of Europe' debate, raising important questions for the evolution of Turkey-EU relations. Even though Turkey is no longer a hot topic in EU political parlance and public opinion, opposition to Turkish EU membership continues in the form of nativism, particularly with reference to the issues of immigration and Isl...
Understanding populist politics in Turkey: a hegemonic depth approach Yalvaç, Faruk (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2019-12-01) The aim of this article is to understand populism as a hegemonic project involving a struggle for power between different social forces. We take a critical realist approach in defining populism. This implies several things. We develop a new approach to understanding populist politics by taking neither a purely discursive (Laclau), nor a solely structural (Poulantzas), but a critical realist approach and analysing the three-way relationship between structural conditions, agency, and institutional framework. ...
The Otherness of Turkey in European Integration Ertuğrul, Kürşad; Akcalı Yılmaz, Öznur (Informa UK Limited, 2018-01-01) This paper discusses how Turkey's otherness to European identity, as represented by the European Union (EU), was turned into an asset during the beginning of the AKP rule. To the extent that the AKP represented the Islamic cultural other against both the secular establishment of Turkey and the EU, its promise to fulfill the Copenhagen political criteria and adopt EU norms and standards provided a possibility of a model' for the EU. This was the promise of a self-transforming cultural other becoming a part o...
Why Are Federal Arrangements not a Panacea for Containing Ethnic Nationalism? Lessons from the Post-Soviet Russian Experience Tanrısever, Oktay Fırat (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2009-12-01) Federal arrangements have been considered by some thinkers as a panacea for containing ethnic nationalism in the ethnically defined regions. This article challenges this view by arguing that federal institutions may enable ethnic nationalists in the ethnically defined regions to consolidate their power through the guarantees that they receive from the federal centre. Although the post-Soviet Russian leadership under Boris Yeltsin sought to use federalism as a tool for containing ethnic nationalism, Russia's...
A Historical Materialist Analysis of Turkish Foreign Policy: Class, State, and Hegemony Yalvaç, Faruk (Uluslararasi Iliskiler Dergisi, 2016-01-01) This article aims to develop a historical materialist analysis to analyse Turkish Foreign Policy (TFP) as part of what I refer to as critical foreign policy studies. The paper utilises a critical political economy approach to TFP based on the Gramscian concept of hegemony and extends it to analyse different foreign policy strategies as hegemonic projects developed by ruling capital classes to sustain their rule. The paper also presents the concept of hegemonic depth to resolve the antinomies involved in und...

Citation Formats

M. Yegen, “The dialectic and the tragedy of citizenship,” EUROPEAN POLITICAL SCIENCE, pp. 98–112, 2008, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63458.