Gerard Delanty

Citizenship as a learning process: disciplinary citizenship versus cultural citizenship

A relatively neglected dimension of citizenship is learning processes. A theory of learning is outlined, distinguishing between individual learning processes and collective ones. Linking learning to citizenship suggests a model of cultural citizenship, which entails mechanisms of translation whereby the different levels of learning are connected. In this article, the idea of cultural citizenship is conceived of in terms of learning processes and is defended against what will be called disciplinary citizenship in which learning is reduced to citizenship classes and formal membership of the polity.

The University in the Knowledge Society

The university has become the subject of much critical debate in the social sciences in recent years. While earlier interpretations, such as those of Weber (see Shils, 1973), Parsons (Parsons and Platt, 1973), Bourdieu (1988, 1996), emphasized the autonomy of the university within the context of a social theory of modernity, the recent appraisals are more critical and call into question the very coherence of the project of modernity in the postmodern and global age. Four debates can be identified. 1. The entrenched liberal critique, which can be called a cultural critique since it is primarily concerned with the university as a medium of cultural reproduction. The liberal idea of the university—associated with the positions of Allan Bloom (1987), who bemoans the attack on the traditional curriculum in the name of diversity, and Russell Jacoby (1987), who regrets the decline of the public intellectual who has disappeared from the university—on the whole looks backwards to the golden age of an earlier university. Despite the different positions within this broad stance that derives from the neo-humanist tradition, the tendency is to see the university in crisis because of the decline of the autonomy of culture, be it the culture of critique or, in its more conservative version, the traditional culture of the canon. 2. The postmodern thesis, associated with Lyotard (1984) and recently restated by Bill Readings (1996), announces the end of the university along with the end of the nation-state. It is claimed that knowledge has lost its emancipatory role and the very notion of universality, or even the very idea of a curriculum, is now impossible, given the fragmentation of knowledge, as in, for instance, the separation of teaching and research. 3. The reflexivity thesis, which is best associated with claims that there is a new mode of knowledge based on a more reflexive relationship between user and producer, offers a less dramatic theory but one nevertheless that announces the obsolescence of the university (Gibbons et al., 1984). As a Mode 2 paradigm around applied knowledge emerges, the university, which is caught up in the more hierarchical and disciplinary-based Mode 1 knowledge production, becomes, it is claimed, increasingly irrelevant to the postfordist economy. 4. The globalization thesis draws attention to the instrumentalization of the university as it embraces market values and information technology. According to various authors, the university is far from irrelevant to capitalism, as the previous thesis would claim, but is in fact fully integrated into it and, as a new manageralism takes over the university, there is a resulting loss of academic freedom (Curie and Newson, 1998; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 1997; Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). This thesis suggests that the university has become a major player in the global market and in information-based capitalism. What are we to make of these announcements of crisis and even of the decline of the university? I believe a more nuanced interpretation is possible.

Models of citizenship: Defining European identity and citizenship

Citizenship implies membership of a political community and is internally defined by rights, duties, participation, and identity. It has traditionally been subordinate to nationality, which defines the territorial limits of citizenship. In order to theorize forms of citizenship that go beyond the spatial domain of nationality, citizenship must be seen as multilayered, operating on the regional, national and supranational levels. European citizenship as postnational citizenship is compatible with other forms of citizenship and could become an important dimension to the integration of European society in the twenty first century. At the moment, however, the tendency is to define European citizenship in terms of, on the one hand, a formal and derivative citizenship based on rights and which is mostly supplementary to national citizenship and, on the other hand, a European supranationality defined by reference to an exclusivist conception of European cultural identity. This conception of European identity and citizenship neglects other possibilities which European integration offers.

Two conceptions of cultural citizenship: A review of recent literature on culture and citizenship

Citizenship in Diverse Societies Kymlicka, Will & Norman, Wayne, (eds) Oxford University Press, 2000 Pbk ISBN 0–19–829770‐X £15.99 pp. 444 (including: index, references, tables) Culture and Citizenship Stevenson, Nick(ed) Sage, 2001 Hbk ISBN: 0761955593 £55.00 Pbk ISBN: 0761955607 £15.99 pp. 216 (including: index, references, tables)

The Making of a Post-western Europe: a Civilizational Analysis

The enlargement of the European Union to include eventually Turkey and the former communist countries is a major challenge for our understanding of the meaning of Europe as a geopolitical, social and cultural space. It is also a question of the identity of Europe as one shaped by social or systemic integration. With the diminishing significance of national borders within the EU, the outer territorial frontier is also losing its significance and Europe will become more and more postwestern. It thus appears that the eastern frontier is more flexible than was previously thought. The EU is now at the decisive point of moving beyond postnationality to a transnational encounter with multiple civilizational forms. Enlargement is not just about getting bigger but is crucially a matter of cultural transformation and therefore it differs from all previous dynamics of Europeanization. Rather than tell the story of Europeanization exclusively as one of national histories and of closure, a civilizational analytic offers the possibility of multiple modernities and thus of a more appropriate theorization of the current situation.

The Idea of a Cosmopolitan Europe: On the Cultural Significance of Europeanization

The idea of a cosmopolitan Europe is defined against a ‘national Europe’, on the one side and on the other, ‘global Europe’ where an internationalist EU-led Europe plays a major role in the world. A cosmopolitan Europe is a more accurate designation of the emerging form of Europeanization as a mediated and emergent reality of the national and the global. It is possible to conceive of European identity as a cosmopolitan identity based on a cultural logic of self-transformation rather than as a supranational identity or an official EU identity that is in a relation of tension with national identities. As a cosmopolitan identity, European identity is a form of post-national self-understanding that expresses itself within, as much as beyond, national identities.

Identity, belonging and migration.

This volume addresses the question of migration in Europe. It is concerned with the extent to which racism and anti-immigration discourse has been to some extent normalised and ‘democratised’ in European and national political discourses. Mainstream political parties are espousing increasingly coercive policies and frequently attempting to legitimate such approaches via nationalist-populist slogans and coded forms of racism. Identity, Belonging and Migration shows that that liberalism is not enough to oppose the disparate and diffuse xenophobia and racism faced by many migrants today and calls for new conceptions of anti-racism within and beyond the state. The book is divided into three parts and organised around a theoretical framework for understanding migration, belonging, and exclusion, which is subsequently developed through discussions of state and structural discrimination as well as a series of thematic case studies. In drawing on a range of rich and original data, this timely volume makes an important contribution to discussions on migration in Europe.

Social Theory and European Transformation: Is there a European Society?

The concept ‘society’ in social theory has generally presupposed notions of cultural cohesion and social integration associated with national societies and the framework of modernity. This older idea of the social emerged out of the experience with institution-building associated with the rise of the nation-state and the transition from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’. The question whether European integration can articulate a conception of the social independent of national society is a major challenge for social theory. This paper explores changing conceptions of the social in recent social theory and applies some of these ideas to European integration. It is argued that we need to rethink our notion of society: instead of a ‘transition’ the kind of social change we are experiencing today is that of social ‘transformation’, a concept which suggests less the ‘end of the social’ than an emerging ‘network’ society based on knowledge. Thus instead of trying to reproduce on the supranational level a model that has reached its limits on the national level, European integration needs to give expression to the emerging power of knowledge. Rejecting the notion of the demos and the ethnos as inappropriate to European integration, the case is made for a discursive understanding of democracy and knowedge.

European Citizenship: A Critical Assessment

While the notion of a European citizenship in the sense of a formal mode of citizenship that is specific to the EU has a certain reality today, a significant development has been the Europeanization of national regimes. This has occurred under the impact of the broader context of the rise of cosmopolitan forms of citizenship. A historical contextualization of the transformation of citizenship in Europe points to two major traditions, the republican and the cosmopolitan. An analysis of the current situation suggests that both of these have become mutually implicated in each other, but the resulting situation has led to a deficit in the values of solidarity and social justice leading to a major crisis at the heart of the European project.

Models of european identity: reconciling universalism and particularism

Abstract The paper offers an analysis of the four main conceptions of European identity, which can be termed: moral universalism, post‐national universalism, cultural particularism and pragmatism. The first three of these models can be analysed in terms of an emphasis either on universalism or on particularism. In this paper it is argued that these three models suffer from an excessive concern with either ‘thin’ univeralistic conceptions of identity or with ‘thick’ particularistic identities and that the fourth possibility does not offer a satisfactory alternative. What is neglected in all four models is the potential for pluralisation that is expressed in an alternative model of European identity. The paper offers a defence of this in terms of a pluralised cosmopolitan European identity.