Citizenship and Identity – Engin Isin and Patricia K Wood (1999)

1-2
In some ways a direct challenge to the liberal democratic institutions that sustained it, cultural politics
has emerged in the past 20 years as a force for the recognition of both identity and difference.
“Venturing beyond the liberal and communitarian views that lament the decline of the public sphere
and active citizenship, cultural politics forced a relentless pluralization of taste, identity, politics and
being in the world and opened up new and vital spaces for politics (C. Connolly, 1993; W.E. Connolly,
1995). Lacking – indeed shunning – a center or party, the cultural politics of recognition sometimes
culminated in progressive politics of inclusion and sometimes in regressive politics of exclusion. But,
overall, its diversity, plurality, nomadism and culturaism surprised and confused those both on the left
and the right (Foweraker and Landman, 1997).”
2
Amongst advocates of cultural politics, however, there is disagreement as to the extent of the
redistributive and equalizing potential of cultural politics. “To put it simply, the political question (or
perhaps anxiety) of our times is whether cultural politics can form an effective resistance ot injustice,
inequality domination and oppression engendered by advanced capitalism and institutionalized by
neoliberalism… To some, cultural politics is too fragmented, incoherent and ‘merely cultural’ – that is,
too far removed from the economic realm – to mount such resistance… To others, the fragmentation,
incoherence and symbolism of cultural politics are precisely its political strengths. They believe that
groups suffer injustices and inequalities on the basis of unequal and unfair distribution not only of
economic capital but also of symbolic, social and cultural capital.”
“This book addresses citizenship and identity as two different windows on the same questions: what
conceptual tools are available to define a deep concept of citizenship that can recognize group rights;
and what happens when we take group-differentiated or multilayered citizenship seriously under
advanced capitalism?”
3
It is a commonplace view that citizenship and identity are incompatible and incommensurable
attachments, and thus are irreconcilable political forces. This arises from a specific conception of each:
“citizenship as universal and identity as particular”. The fear is that there is a parochial quality to identity
that negates the possibilities of an inclusive and responsive notion of citizenship, which is typically seen
as more abstract (See Friedman 1989; Littleton 1996; Morely and Robins 1995; Heater 1990).
4
“This book takes a different tack. We approach the relationship between citizenship and identity from a
perspective that sees modern citizenship not only as a legal and political membership in a nation-state
but also as an articulating principle for the recognition of group rights…Rather than regarding citizenship
and identity as antinomic principles, we recognize the rise of new identities and claims for group rights
as a challenge to the modern interpretation of universal citizenship, which is itself a form of group
identity.”
“Citizenship can be described as both a set of practices (cultural, symbolic and economic) and a bundle
of rights and duties (civil, political and social) that define an individual’s membership in a polity. It is
important to recognize both aspects of citizenship – as practice and as status – while also recognizing
that without the latter modern individuals cannot hold civil, political and social rights. In the same vein
many rights often first arise as practices and then become embodied in law as status – while also
recognizing that without the latter modern individuals cannot hold civil, political and social rights.
Citizenship is therefore neither a purely sociological concept nor purely a legal concept but a relationship
between the two… While, then, citizenship can be defined as a legal and political status, from a
sociological point of view, it can be defined as competent membership in a polity, thus emphasizing the
constitutive aspect of citizenship (Turner, 1994b).”
4-5
Since the late eighteenth century, the nation state has become the predominant polity the world over –
and while its composition of rights and practices may vary, as an institution it is near ubiquitous.
5
“It is very important to recognize that the status and practice of citizenship emerged in specific places in
response to specific struggles and conflicts. It is a contested and contingent field that allowed for the
mediation of conflict, redistribution of wealth and recognition of various individual and group rights
throughout history. The fact that it eventually became universal should be interpreted not as ‘natural’
but rather as contingent and political.”
6
Though citizenship has a long history of contestation and transformation – so that assuming a
fundamental historical continuity in the substance of rights and practices is problematic – these
transformations are especially tied to periods of social transformation or upheaval. Thus today, the
sense of a fundamentally changed world signaled by the idea of post-modernism (though the substance
of this change, be it of disembedding or fragmentation, is widely contested) has led to a linked re-
interrogation and contestation over ideas of citizenship.
8
There is a notable gap between the philosophical doctrine of liberalism and the actual legal and political
practice in modern democracies (Frazer and Lacey 1993; Oldfield 1990). Indeed, the literature on
governmentality interprets liberalism in the real world as a practice articulated through various
technologies of government – whose net result does not quite resemble liberalism as conceived and
engaged with philosophically (Barry, Osborne and Rose 1996; Burchell Gordon and Miller 1991).
10
While liberalism, communitarianism and civic republicanism “struggle for a new conception of
citizenship that resolves the tension between universalism and particularism, there is also an ostensibly
radical view of democracy that sees such a tension as constitutive of the democratic process. Among
these commentators Mouffe (1993) has been prominent. She argues that a radical democratic
conception of citizenship ‘can only be adequately formulated within a problematic that conceives of the
social agent not as a unitary subject but as the articulation of an ensemble of subject positions,
constructed within specific discourses and always precariously and temporarily sutured at the
intersection of those subject positions’. She advocates developing a non-essentialist conception of the
subject and regarding identity as identification with groups rather than as essential properties of the
subject (Mouffe, 1993: 71; 1996).” In Mouffe’s conception, then, political community must be focused
on justice, equality and community in a way which is responsive to emergent political demands.
“According to Mouffe, ‘The question at stake is to make our belonging to different communities of
values, language, culture and others compatible with our common belonging to a political community
whose rules we have to accept’ (1995: 34).”
“Mouffe contends that exclusive concern with individual rights cannot provide guidance for the exercise
of those rights. In other words, ‘The limitation of democracy to a mere set of neutral procedure, the
transformation of citizens into political consumers, and the liberal insistence on a supposed ‘neutrality’
of the state have emptied politics of all its substance. It is reduced to economic and stripped of all its
ethical components’ (Mouffe 1996: 22).”
11
Viewing identity as multiply constituted “Mouffe rightly does not see group rights in conflict with
citizenship. Rather, radical democratic citizens depend on a collective form of identification among the
democratic demands found in a variety of movements: women, workers, black, gay and ecological as
well as other oppositional movements. Her conception of citizenship aims to construct a ‘we’, a chain of
equivalence among various demands to articulate them through the principle of democratic equivalence
without eliminating difference (Mouffe 1995: 38).”
Thus, drawing on Oakeshott’s (1975) distinction between univesitas and societas, she argues that we can
conceive of polities as held together by common purpose, or by common interest – and advocates for
the former. Common purpose allows for a singular social teleology, while common interest recognizes
and works with different purposive associations, while constituting a broader polity in terms of their
intersecting interests and implications.
12
Based on this, Mouffe advocates for a polity that values conflict and antagonism. “In this view,
individuals would not be construed as peacefully pushing their interests, but would be engaging each
other over the meaning and definition of their common interests. The object of politics would be the
association itself. There will never be a homogenous unity in such an association since there will always
be a need for a constitutive other (1992: 235)
Thus, in Mouffe’s conception, citizenship is neither simply one identity amongst many (as in liberalism)
nor a predominant set of rules (as within communitarianism), but “‘an articulating principle that affects
the different subject positions of the social agent.. while allowing for a plurality of specific allegiences
and for the respect of individual liberty.’ (1992: 235).”
“We part with Mouffe, however, because she ultimately conflates citizenship and identity. While she
aims to develop a conception of radical citizenship that is not unitary, she eventually succumbs to a
conception where citizenship becomes a master political identity.”
13
“This conflation between citizenship and identity takes Mouffe back to the ‘political liberalism’ of Rawls
(1996), where a sharp distinction is drawn between citizenship as political identity and other identities
attachments and loyalties.” In casting the salience of group identities – themselves formed through the
historical inculcation of particular dispositions - as difference to be effaced in light of an overarching
citizenship, Mouffe is ultimately unable to treat identity and difference as a resource.
14
While the question of identity is not new, Bauman (1996) rightly argues that it is distinctive in the
modern era. There are three factors here: firstly in that debates over the distribution of wealth and
power have been complicated by struggles over the specific exclusion and possibilities for inclusion of
different identity groups; secondly that everyday life has become increasingly aestheticized, with
consumption becoming an important constitutive aspect of identity formation; and third that the shift to
a post-industrial economy has meant that he production of images, sounds, experiences and knowledge
has gained primacy over the production of material commodities.”
14-15
If the first wave of identity politics focused on identifying identities constructed as categories of
disadvantage so as to dismantle this socially-constructed disadvantage, the second wave became about
positively recognizing the differences between groups and society as a whole. However, a third wave
can be identified which articulates a set of strategies which simultaneously aims to affirm identities and
to transcend them (Lister 1997a; Voet 1998; hall and Du Gay 1996; Rajchman 1995).
16
For Hall (1996) who puts the emphasis on the processual nature of identity, “Individual and group
‘identities about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of
ecoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from’, so much as what we might
become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves’ (4).
This is neither an active nor a passive conception of identity. To Hall, ‘Identities are… points of
temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us’ (5-6).”
16-17
“While Hall has been crucial in developing non-essentialist views of identity, his view of multiple subjects
and the construction of identity leave open the gap in understanding why groups feel so strongly about
their identities and invoke essentialist notions in their struggle for recognition. As Calhoun (1994a: 14-
16) argued, such social construtivism can become exclusionary when every effort of group identification
is criticized for essentialism.”
17-18
To address some of the limitations in essentialist and constructivist approaches to identity, four key
concepts presented here: the concept of difference describes the constitutive relationship of negativity
that subordinate groups have to super-ordinated groups, rendering dominant identities inherently
unstable as they must necessarily incorporate their negation if they are to define themselves; the
concept of fragmentation sees lived identity as a fragmentary and often contradictory unity; the concept
of hybridity captures border existences, or subaltern identities, existing or moving between two
competing identities; and finally the concept of diaspora which is closely related to the idea of border-
crossing, but with a more cross-time inflection.
19
“While it is important to recognize that identification is not a simple process, it is also important that
‘identity formation’ through which individuals incorporate certain characteristics and values is a process
involving relatively durable attachments, obligations and promises. Thus, it is inadequate to focus on
one aspect (fluidity and multiplicity) of identity at the expense of the other (solidity and relative
permanence).”
“Many scholars argue for a concept of citizenship broader than an juridical and legal status but these
arguments do not change the basic fact that ultimately citizenship allows or disallows civil, political and
social rights and obligations in a polity. Such arguments for active citizenship or deep citizenship are
concerned with deepening the scope of citizenship but they nevertheless presuppose that the status of
citizenship already exists.”
Usefully, “Identity is a concept that presupposes a dialogical recognition of the other; it is a relational
concept. But it is also a concept that presupposes identification in the sense that individuals recognize
attributes or properties in each other that are constructed as identical, or at least similar. These
properties, then, are used as an index of individual position and disposition. Identity is therefore not so
much of uniqueness or distinction as of resemblance and repetition (Jenkins, 1996). By contrast, an
individual is a distinct assemblage of identities. Thus, individuality should be kept distinct from identity.”
20
Against those who charge that the particularism of identity politics cuts against a vital universalism
within citizenship, an important first step is the recognition that despite claims to universalism,
citizenship has never been expanded to all members of any polity – and for those to whom it is
extended, it is often articulated in stratified ways. The fact is that by defining a specific set of rights and
duties, citizenship cannot ever be wholly inclusive. A principle of recognizing group difference is a way
to perpetually mitigate against the closures of citizenship, by empowering groups to mobilize and come
together in blocks to struggle for rights. Such a value of ongoing conflict (or agonism) emerges from
formulations of post-modern or radical democracy (W.E. Connolly, 1988, 1991; Hatab, 1995; Mouffe,
1992c, 1993; Trend, 1996).
21
The formulation of citizenship ultimately developed here is “a richer and multilayered conception of
citizenship understood as an ensemble of different forms of belonging rather than a universal or unitary
conception”.
22
Various modes of radical democratic citizenship are expounded here, including “the political, civil, social,
economic, diasporic, cultural, sexual and ecological.”
“Being a radical citizen cannot merely be associated with being a member of the nation state and
nationality as master identity. Rather, the identity of a postmodern citizen is an ensemble of these
different forms of citizenship understood as competent membership in various value-spheres or fields
such as the sexual or ecological.”

Chapter 2 – Modern Citizenship: Civil, Political and Social

27-28
Marshall’s history of citizenship in Britain is not just an evolutionary account of the move from civil to
political to social rights, but an interrogation as to how modern citizenship, which increasingly purported
equality, and contemporary capitalism, which increasingly fostered inequality, were able to develop in
historical parallel. He accounts for this by tracing the separation of class as social order or status from
class as economic standing – the latter of which modern citizenship in fact facilitated. Civil and political
rights together cast each (adult male) citizen as an agent of economic struggle. “Civil citizenship made
class differentiation less vulnerable to attack by eliminating its less defensively consequence (20-21).”
And social citizenship likewise raised the basic social standard making capitalism more palatable.
29
Indeed, despite the rise of social rights based on a growing interest in equality and social justice, the rise
of real incomes, the development of mass production which brought the working class into the realm of
mass consumption, and the threat to the whole capitalist system that the extension of political rights to
working classes posed, the ultimate outcome of these ambivalent drivers was to make citizenship
architect of a new class inequality. This occurred by means of social services reproducing their target
populations as homogenous and differentiated from other groups. Education prepared certain
populations with certain skills and for certain paths, which mapped onto particular class distinctions.
“The important conclusion to his argument is that ‘through education in its relation with occupational
structure, citizenship operates as an instrument of social stratification’ (39).”
30
Criticisms of Marshall can broadly be grouped under three approaches: That he neglected the role of
struggle for citizenship rights (Giddens 1982: 171) and the linked role of class interests and conflict in
shaping citizenship in the first place (Bottomore 1992); that his linear sequence of rights ignores the
actual circuitous way in which rights emerged (Brinbaum 1997); that he saw class as the only form of
inequality, ignoring others such as gender and ethnicity (Turner 1986).
Taken together, what these suggest is that Marshall’s sociological question as to whether there was an
inherent conflict between citizenship and class needs to be expanded to ask whether there is an
inherent conflict between citizenship and different forms of identity.
31
Notably, Marshall’s later work (1981) showed a recognition both of the fact that rights were
instrumental in forming subjects – as he argued that civil rights possessed a particular value in shaping
political dispositions within citizens, which would perpetuate independently of the rights-grinding state.
Moreover, he seemed to advance an understanding of power where recognition was essential to the
realization of claims made – and in this way, acknowledge the importance of identity.
32
Isaiah Berlin (1969), in his famous ‘two conceptions of liberty’, also articulated a third conception of
liberty – though this is less well remarked. He noted that a lack of freedom could come not only from
constraint, or a lack of his ability (his negative and positive liberty) but from a lack of recognition (of
one’s sense of self, desires, needs, co-presence, statements etc.) – and he suggested that demands for
recognition could be a demands for liberty in a third sense, as they were about the assertion of self and
agency.
33
Berlin criticized the liberal tradition, especially Mill, for not understanding the desire for group
recognition. Berlin was convinced that unless this form of liberty is recognized it would be impossible to
understand why individuals belonging to certain groups accept the curtailment of their individual
liberties but still feel enjoyment of group liberties (1969: 158-159).”
Subsequent liberals have largely ignored this challenge. “Will Kymlicka’s problem, for example, of how
to impose liberal principles on illiberal groups becomes redundant if one recognizes, as Berlin did, the
legitimacy of group rights.”
Interestingly, the history by which the state and the rights of individual and group identities were
dichotomized has not been traced. Drawing on the work of Otto Gierke, who argued that modernity is
built on the obliteration of the idea of group rights, we can see this dichotomization as a condition for
the rise of capitalism – a claim which would add salience to Berlin’s defence of group rights.
34
Tracing group rights throughout history, he argued that “group rights played a significant role in
formation of individual identities and that the latter would have been inconceivable without the former.
In other words, Gierke refuted the idea that the individual existed before or independent of the group to
which he or she belonged.” For Gierke, groups were as real as individual identities – and they were
socially and morally constructed through the intersubjective process of mutual recognition. Indeed, he
argued that up to the modern era, group rights– from those of guilds to leagues, cities – remained a
central aspect of political life in Europe. “Since no sovereign was able to impose a unity, politics was a
battle of an ‘inexhaustible combination’ of identities.” Hence he traced a transition from a principle of
group rights to a principle of sovereignty, and herein from subjects constituted within the public sphere
to subjects only constituted within private law.
35
The significant point that emerges from Gierke’s work is that modernity never ‘solved’ the riddle of
group rights and identity, but simply attempted to suppress multiplicity within a master identity. By not
wholly suppressing multiplicity, but subsuming it, the nation-state was able to impose certain limits on
these multiplicities and to subordinate them – making it hegemonic in Balibar’s sense (1995).
36
Despite some criticism, Gierke has been widely overlooked. In sum here, “Gierke can be critically
appropriated by suggesting that boundaries and the existence of groups are always social struggles of
recognition and rights. In modernity, since public law does not recognize group rights, these struggles
take the form of battles over the existence and identity of such groups.”
37
Bourdieu argues that the most difficult theoretical problem with the existence of a group is that it is
itself an instrument of struggle. This is a crucial insight and highlights many conceptual problems that
persist in literature on the existence of groups. In a playful move Bourdieu calls the attempts to
represent groups symbolically as ‘classification struggles’ (Bourdieu 1984, 1987: 3).” In this conception
classification struggles (the struggle for the functioning and recognition of certain groups within society)
and class struggles (the individual and group struggle over material interests), reinforce and shape each
other. From here, recognizing that groups are never discretely bounded objective phenomena yet that
they are also not purely subjective constructs, Bourdieu (1987) differentiates between theoretical
groups and practical groups – with the former produced through classification struggles and the latter
through political organization and mobilization. Any homology between the two is likewise a product of
practical political action. Being able to empirically classify a group, then, does not suffice to account for
whether they will act as such – this requires practical action which creates a similar set of dispositions.
38
“In the reality of the social world, in the everyday experiences of individuals, there are no
straightforward class boundaries. The institutionalization of a permanent organization capable of
representing different groups tends to create more durable recognizable and visible group boundaries.
The individual struggles of everyday life become political struggles through a presentation of self in
imposing a particular representation through permanent organizations. The ultimate aim of such
struggles in modernity has been to control the state institutions.”
Because groups must be publicly objectified to be recognized, identification with a group involves both
empowerment and recognition as well as dispossession (as others or the group itself comes to
represent, and act on behalf of, individual members).
39
The dispositions that make up Bourdieu’s concept of habitus are, importantly, always oriented towards
practical functions. The fact that he focuses on ways of acting on the world allows him to move beyond
the subjectivist/objectivist impasse by focusing on identity as emerging in practical relation to the world.
“Since habitus is a system of durable dispositions it can be seen as a presence of the past that tends to
perpetuate itself with continuity and regularity. It is this regularity that objectivism records without
being able to account for it (54). It is also this regularity that leads advocates of groups to essentialize
and naturalize habitus.”
41
For Bourdieu “Capital is embodied power and it does not exist except in relation to a field (Bourdieu and
Wacquant, 1992: 101).” Hence habitus and capital are linked, as it is the practical dispositions of others
towards specific markers of value which create capital.
Here, different groups possess different relations to, and have different usages of, different forms of
capital, and based on these relations will orient themselves towards the preservation of the distribution
of (particular forms of capital) or else towards the subversion of the current distribution.
This perspective, wherein groups have different relations towards the distribution of different forms of
capital prevents a simplistic notion of social justice as simply redistributing wealth status and power.
Young’s suggestion (1990) that we rethink social justice in terms of oppression and domination
(respectively constraint on self-development and constraint on self-determination), is based on this
foundation. From here a concept of justice emerges that looks not only at distribution of resources but
at the institutional conditions necessary for the development and exercise of individual capacities and
group rights (1990: 39).
42
Young argues that to understand the concept of structural oppression created by a well-intentioned
liberal society, rather than just looking at outright domination, we require a more robust conception of
social groups than political or social theory has thus far developed – especially in their adherence to
statistical classifications. Existing models, within the predominant methodological individualism, only see
individuals as constituting social groups not social groups as also constituting individuals.
43
This argument builds on, and ties into, Young’s earlier work where she argues that “As long as
differences exist within a society with certain privileged groups, adherence to the principle of equal
treatment tends to perpetuate oppression. The inclusion of everyone requires special rights attending to
group differences to undermine oppression. The ideal of a general will excludes. Democracy requires
genuine public discussion which requires enabling policies for groups to be heard. This suppression of
the ‘other’ has been supported by the traditional association with the public as general and the private
as particular.”
44
Fraser (1997a), seeing to connect Young’s emphasis on recognition to a focus on redistribution argues
that both stances of identity politics – either an indiscriminate anti-essentialism which rejects all
collective identity as repressive fiction, or an undiscriminating multiculturalism which celebrates all
collective differences as worthy of recognition – share a collective failure to connect the cultural politics
of identity and difference to the social politics of justice and equality.”
44-45
Collectively, Gierke and Bourdieu can address the need identified by Fraser – Bourdieu in arguing the
case for group rights, and Gierke in de-naturalizing their historical exclusion.

Ch 5 – Cosmopolitan Citizenship: Contested Sovereignties

Section on – Urban Citizenship: Rights to the City
97
Durkheim (1992) famously argued that the modern nation would be unable to survive without an order
of meaningful solidarity amongst its subjects, and that the state was too remote from individuals, and its
connections to superficial to provide sufficient socialization towards this end. For Durkheim, the only
groups which historically seemed to fulfill such needs were regional groups (cities, villages, towns etc,
organized as self-governing municipalities) and professional groups. He saw the former as no longer able
to command such loyalty and the latter as ascendant.
98
Though much about this proved true, “What Durkheim could not see was that the city would emerge as
a place not of loyalty but where the new professions organized themselves and their markets. The global
city is different from the modern city in that its power does not derive from its corporate status within
state law. Rather, it is a node within a network of cities across the world that organizes markets for
professional expertise and services.”
“Recently, Soja (1992, 1997), Gottdiener (1991) and Fishman (1995) have argued that the concentric
urban form of the twentieth-century metropolis with its bedroom suburbs and office-dominated central
business district has been superseded by a polycentric, multinucleated urban form where several
centres or ‘edge cities’ combine to form a vast, sprawling urban region. This urban form is neither a
megalopolis, in the sense of obliterating the distinction between the city and countryside and extending
to combine several metropolises, nor a metropolis, in the sense of having a well-defined centre around
which the metropolitan economic, cultural and social life of the nation revolves (Isin 1996a, 1996b).
Rather, the new urban form is fragmented and disjointed, which symbolizes the contradictory global
flows that brought it into being.”
99
“space is a constitutive object of group struggle. Harvey (1994) illustrated well that spatial practices –
how individuals and groups overcome, appropriate and dominate space – are a crucial aspect of
accumulation of different forms of capital and a reproduction of class relations.”
100-101
Unlike the aristocracy which owned land, or bourgeoisie which possessed economic capital, the new
global managerial elite determine inclusion based on forms of cultural capital, such as accreditation,
expertise, competence, knowledge and skills, which are highly mobile goods. “With this new shift, the
new professional-managerial groups have become less concerned about their national interests and
turned their back on the nation-state: they display cosmopolitan tendencies. The rise of neoliberalism as
a dominant ideology can be seen as a consequence of the increasing secession of the new professional-
managerial groups from the nation (Reich 1992) and their shift to a global outlook (Perkin 1996).”
101
While the global city is replete with contexts wherein this new professional class simultaneously creates
products of knowledge while also inculcating shared practical dispositions, “non-professional groups are
neither active producers of these products nor participants in their use. Rather, the citizen is increasingly
constituted only as a consumer, who makes choices among these knowledge products. Various
professionals, journalists, intellectuals and academics in turn offer their paid services to excluded groups
to make these choices and to help them become conscientious opinion consumers. As Bourdieu (1991b)
observed, various marginal groups are caught in a spiral: while the social world becomes less accessible
as a sphere of power, they become increasingly more dependent upon the professionals and their
language to interpret that very social world which is slipping out from under them.”
102
In turn, as the gap in wealth and influence widens between the new professional-managerial elite and
marginal groups, a greater need arises for the former to govern the latter – in moving away from co-
negotiation, the actions of the marginal become not only less predictable, but inherently oppositional as
they are necessarily now oriented towards different ends and values, save for the intervention of
governance.
103
With wealth, status and power gained through acquiring professional legitimacy and resources, in ways
which may often erode the democratic sphere, this new professional class tends to be more loyal to
their occupation than to abstract notions of the state or public.
102-103
Moreover, “By virtue of its mastery of discourse, the new professionals shift the primary locus of power
and debate from the parliaments to the as public sphere to other forums: the mass media, events,
symposia and other spectacles (Brint, 1994; Hannerz, 1996; Macdonald, 1995). Unlike the parliamentary
assemblies, these new assemblages are not open to the modern citizenry except as passive spectators.
In other words, the shift of power in the global age is from the modern public sphere centered on state
assemblies to a new sphere dominated by consumption, production and exchange of knowledge
centered on professional assemblages, the majority of which takes place in global cities. In other words,
at present ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ means less a membership in a global polity than a membership in
the new professions that qualify one to deliberate and participate in its assemblages. The new symbol of
politics and citizenship is neither the agora nor the council chamber nor the commons: it has become
the convention centre.”