ABSTRACT
The concept of “citizenship”, here examined with reference to the European Constitution, is connected with “Nation” and is generally understood in terms of identity-difference. Citizenship is also connected with “community”, understood in terms of closed community rather than as “open community”, “open society”. It is also connected with “work community”. Hospitality towards migrants is subordinate to employment in terms of work, no differently from Nazi Gemeinschaft. Umberto Eco in the 1990s signalled “migration” as a major problem for the EU, as distinguished from “emigration/immigration”. “Migration” interrogates “human rights”, which, as Emmanuel Levinas observes, are the “rights of identity” to the exclusion of the “rights of others”. Citizenship calls for social planning from the EU, free from the “ideo-logic” of profit, self-interest, functionality. Crucial to global humanity, the question of citizenship wherever national identity prevails calls for investigation by practitioners of semiotics, specifically “global semiotics”, oriented in the sense of “semioethics”. Identity is the question of alterity; the question of citizenship is the question of how to respond to the other and for the other, how to account to the other and for the other. The chapter draws on Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination in discussing identity.
