Globalization and Citizenship

Across much of the globe over the past decade two of the most powerful organising processes have been those of citizenship' and globalisation'. They have swept much else before them, reconstituting social and political life. In the case of citizenship, movements to demand rights of national citi-zenship have been enormously powerful in one continent after another. This demand for the rights of the citizen, and for the institutions of civil society, occurred most strikingly within former Eastern Europe. 1989 in many ways represents the year of the citizen, falling, as it does, some two hundred years after the subjects of Paris took to the streets in 1789, demanding themselves to be citizens (see Murdock 1992). Garton Ash argues that during the 1980s, across many diverse societies, people: 'wanted to be citizens, individual men and women with dignity and responsibility, with rights but also with duties, freely associating in civil society' (1990: 148).