The transformation of community

The nation-state is based on two kinds of community: a community of citizenship concerning the relations between citizens and the state (including political, social, and economic rights and obligations); and a community of sentiment, meaning a common language and a common cultural and histor­ical identity based on literature, myths, symbols, music, art, and so on.

Let us look at the community of citizens first. One major development in this area is that civil and other rights are no longer being granted solely by the sovereign state. At the global level, a set of universal human rights has been defined; in some regional contexts, close co-operation has led to common rights for citizens of different countries.

The most important regional case is the EU. A Union citizenship was established with the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. Citizens of the EU have rights to employment, residence, and social security in all member states. Full political rights is long-term goal; at present citizens can vote and run as candidates in local and European elections.

At the same time, guestworkers come into the EU from non-member states; they do not have citizenship in the host countries, but they still make claims on the social and political system. Yosemin Soysal has studied guestworkers in Germany; they ‘participate in the educational system, welfare schemes, and labour markets. They join trade unions, take part in politics through collective bargaining and associational activity, and some­times vote in local elections. They exercise rights and duties with respect to the host polity and the state’ (Soysal 1994: 2). Soysal sees in this a transformation of citizenship towards a ‘postnational membership’ based on universal human rights rather than on the national rights flowing from shared national citizenship and a national community of sentiment.

In other words, the process indicates a break-up between citizenship rights on the one hand and the cultural-historic community of sentiment on the other. In earlier historical processes of nation-state formation, these two elements were woven closely together. One further challenge to the community of citizens concerns what one scholar calls the practice of ‘citizenship without moorings’ (Rosenau 1997: 282).

The various aspects of globalization, including much improved possibilities for interaction and communication between people on a world scale, provide the means for people to address such global issues in a transna­tional dialogue between concerned individuals (rather than between defined groups of national citizens). The ability to visibly affect the global agenda and to help change the course of events puts traditional, national political leadership as well as citizen loyalty and support much more into question than earlier. Citizens ‘are thus more ready to rethink the collectiv­ities with which they identify and to redefine the balance between their own and society’s interest’ (Rosenau 1997: 286).

In sum, a number of different forces are at work to transform the coherent ‘community of citizens’ as it existed in context of the nation-states. What about the emotional attachment to the nation? It is clear that the ‘national community of sentiment’ must also be expected to change in the new context of more intense transnational relations.

Anthony Giddens argues that self-identity is becoming ‘a reflexively organized endeavour’ (Giddens 1991: 5). Individuals no longer ‘rest content with an identity that is simply handed down, inherited, or built on a traditional status. A person’s identity has in large part to be discovered, constructed, actively sustained’ (Giddens 1994: 82).

When identity is something that has to be actively created and sustained by individuals, the attachment to the national ‘community of sentiment’ can no longer be taken for granted. What - if anything - may be comple­menting or even replacing the attachment to that national community? One possibility is that a collective identity ‘above’ the nation is emerging. This ‘Western civic identity is a consensus around a set of norms and principles, most importantly political democracy, constitutional government, individual rights, private property-based economic systems, and toleration of diversity in non-civic areas of ethnicity and religion’ (Deudney and Ikenberry 1999: 193; see also Linklater 1998).

Such a Western civic identity need not replace the national ‘community of sentiment’; it may co-exist with it. The question is whether such identi­ties pertain mainly to well-educated elites and less to other groups. Manuel Castells argues that groups exposed to negative effects of globalization and transnational network will tend to take on a ‘resistance identity: generated by those actors that are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination, thus building trenches of resistance and survival on the basis of principles different from, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of society’ (Castells 1998: 8). There a regional movements that vie for secession, or at least for a substantial increase in regional autonomy; there are nationalistic movements stressing a very exclusive definition of national identity, and there are local community movements and religious or ethnic movements.

How should these changes be understood in terms of the larger debate about state transformation? ‘Retreat’ scholars argue that with the transfor­mation of nationhood the state is weakened because the link between the state and its people is being diluted; loyalties are projected in new direc­tions and additional sources of citizenship emerge. State-centric scholars argue that nationhood remains strong both in the ‘community of citizens’ aspect and the ‘community of sentiment’ aspects.

State-centrists have a point. the nation is not under pressure in the sense that national communities are being replaced by other types of community. But that does not mean everything is the same as before. The content of nationhood itself is being transformed to incorporate new aspects. In other words, national identities increasingly contain elements that are suprana­tional and also local. A clear commitment to European co-operation is progressively more a part of the national identities of the people of EU-member states. At the same time, local identities grow stronger. The long run result of these processes remains uncertain. But at the present time, these transfor­mations of community do not appear to weaken the state because they do not severely dilute national identity affiliations.