Alterity, Otherness, and Foreignness in Communitarianism: Internal Belonging and Intercommunal Relations.

This article examines how communitarianism deals with alterity, otherness, and foreignness both within the community and beyond its boundaries. Communitarian thought has emphasized the role of shared histories, practices, and relationships in the formation of identity. Yet communities do not exist in isolation. They encounter foreigners, minorities, neighboring societies, religious groups, Indigenous peoples, migrant populations, states, and other communities. These encounters may lead to recognition and cooperation, but they may also produce hierarchy, assimilation, exclusion, paternalism, or conflict.The article distinguishes among three related concepts. Alterity refers to the irreducible difference of the other. Otherness concerns the social and political processes through which difference is interpreted as inferiority, danger, or deviation. Foreignness describes a position of exteriority or incomplete belonging, whether occupied by an individual, a group, or another community. The discussion brings together debates that are often treated separately: the communitarian critique of the abstract subject, the ethics of alterity, the politics of recognition, the problem of membership, and the analysis of internal and external exclusion. Its central contribution is a double test of communitarian legitimacy. Internally, a community must organize belonging without subordinating difference. Externally, it must relate to outsiders and other communities without turning difference into domination, assimilation, or exclusion.The article therefore proposes a relational and intercommunal account of communitarianism. A community should be judged not only by the solidarity it creates among its members, but also by the way it recognizes, includes, and responds to those who remain foreign, different, or only partially included.