“Citizenship identity between the the particularism of the national community and the the universality of its liberal values: the characteristics of the democratic school.”
Stathis Balias
Pages
Abstract
Liberal democracy developed in parallel with the emergence of the nation-state, which allowed freedom and solidarity among its members and, by extension, political unity, while the model of citizenship and distributed rights were determined by national identity. This led to liberal democracy being permeated by a fundamental contradiction between the universality of its liberal values and the particularism of the national community, within which it developed historically. This contradiction highlights the question of whether it is possible – in the conditions of modern multicultural societies – to create the conditions that will allow the synthesis of liberal universal values with the values of national identity in the context of a democratic society, while ensuring its unity.
The democratic school is also faced with the dilemmas of universality or particularism, individual freedoms or – anti-liberal – communal ethics, teaching civil liberty (personal identity) or the cultivation of discipline in an established moral community (collective identity). The key question here is whether the democratic school can promote a sense of citizenship founded on universal values and simultaneously cultivate a common political morality, within which it will be able to reconcile the universal with the national values.
On a theoretical level, a possible answer to these questions is a republican form of political culture, and a corresponding sense of citizenship, cultivated in the democratic school, which brings together civil liberties / identities in the framework of a democratic ethos, understood as the product of an interaction between citizens, without discrimination in the distribution of rights and freedoms. Such democratic ethics cannot give priority to any identity and must harmonize, in conditions of equality, civil liberties with the interests of the – national – community “through continuously imperilled and revisable compositions.”