ABSTRACT
My concern in this paper is to attempt to place the concept of community on a new foundation beyond communitarianism. The idea of community is central to a theory of citizenship, for citizenship implies in the most general sense membership of a political community. But the problem is that community has been tied to a particular discourse - the discourse of communitarianism - which reduces citizenship too much to an organic notion of cultural community. In other words, the discourses of citizenship and communit,y while being mutually bound up with each other, can involve a certain tension. In my view this tension is likely to increase when it comes to discussing issues such as post-national citizenship, in the sense of citizenship beyond the nation-state. How can the idea of community be made relevant to post-national citizenship?
