[PDI Working Paper No.10] Global Citizenship vs. National Citizenship Discussion: ‘World Risk Society’ and Variants of National Citizenship

Doo Jin Kim (Research Professor, Peace & Democracy Institute, Korea University)

 

 

 

* This paper was published at Jiam Workshop #5.

 

Abstract: 

Compared to traditional security, non-traditional security – human security (and health security) – is likely to have a far more fatal impact. Citizenship is given to members of the political community who have recognized boundaries as a ‘bounded concept’ that is closely related to the ‘national state’. Citizenship has dynamism and instability, but at the same time has a developmental ‘variability’. The mechanism of international movement of geographical space(spatiality) led to a new conceptualization of citizenship that challenged national citizenship based on the national state. As a result, it takes on tasks to be solved beyond the scope of national citizenship, and gradually requires ‘postnational’ citizenship.

The aspiration for global citizenship or cosmopolitanism has been mentioned from ancient Greece as a form of idealism of the Global Civil Democracy of the kind of Immanuel Kant, including the Hellenistic Stoics. Nevertheless, there is an inherent ‘limit’ to raising global citizenship to state-based social members.

Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been required to pay attention to the summoning of the (state) boundaries of the previous universal de-boundaryization of ‘re-territorialization’ and ‘reboundaryization’. The reason is due to the trigger of the tendency of “stagnation of globalization, return of the state, and strengthening of borders.” The threat of COVID-19 has emerged as an issue of international politics that surpasses the issue of traditional security beyond the world’s “critical point of geopolitics.”

In the Pandemic situation, Carl Schmidt’s re-recognition of the “natural state,” “fear,” and “state system” of “hops” presents a new perspective for the formation of national citizenship. Conversely, the acceleration of the formidable threat of pandemics has the potential(plausibility) to expose even the state to a lethargic anarchy – like Hobbs’ “natural state” in the absence of the state. The experience of the Pandemic’s “fear” situation is increasing the possibility of forming a collective identity according to the “foreign group exclusion mechanism” at the domestic or international level. As a result of this, the possibility of expressing a differentiated collective identity within the national state cannot be overlooked. In other words, when the unity of national citizenship is broken, it leaves the potential to be divided into ‘group instinctive citizenship’.