Beyond Either-Or: Identitarian Modes of Belonging in Nation States and the World

Citizenship used to be conceptualised in regard to a holistic inclusion in a nation state. However, globalisation and the digital information economy are forging closer ties between people all over the world. In addition, problems are being revealed that can no longer be solved at the national level, but only globally. Thus, there is a need for "globally thinking people" (Wintersteiner et al. 2015: 5) who take the One World as a reference. Yet, the idea of world citizenship was vehemently rejected. On the one hand with the argument that there was no world state and that citizenship without institutional influence was not citizenship. In addition, the world would be too big for people to be able to grasp and to provide a sense of belonging and identity. Therefore, the nation would be the greatest possible scope for political influence and the goal of civic education would have to be 'good' patriotism (cf. Rorty 1994). This is contrasted by approaches that claim that (ethically-morally, but also structurally-materially) the individual identity transcends geographical or political boundaries. Therefore responsibilities and rights would arise from belonging to the group of humanity. The goal of civic education must be to raise awareness of global problems and "engage and assume active roles, both locally and globally" (UNESCO 2014: 15). With regard to action, this concept is mainly 'glocal', while the national level is neglected. The paper aims to overcome the incompatibility of the two approaches. It begins by examining the extent to which identity and state and citizenship need and can be fundamentally rethought. The SDGs, which refer both, to "societes" as well as "global citizenship", serve as a current political reference. How can both categories be constructively thought together? First, the simultaneity of several territorial affiliations is discussed, since the spatial reference is a presupposed but little discussed constitutional element of citizenship. Second, the idea of functionally differenciated citizenship will be discussed. This is not primarily based on spaces but on topics and can thus be activated on every political stage. This form of citizenship would draw its identity primarily from moral, not territorial, sources and thus complement the (national) holistic integration with a (global) functionally differentiated one. The result would be that citizenship could and would have to be thought in the plural and thus - similar to identity concepts - would become more open and arrangeable. The relationship between space, morality and engagement could be re-conceptualized in a more permeable way.