Migrants, Minorities, Belongings and Citizenship. Glocalization and ...

The dimensions that Glocalmig focuses on are:
Dimension 1: Belongings and identities
Throughout the historical processes of state formation and nation building in Europe,
citizenship evolved from being the legitimizing aspect of states’ sovereignty and political
organization to serving as a tool of collective identity promotion. When successful, this
led to a conception of citizenship as a belonging mode. To the existing ethnic and
religious forms of belonging and their essentialized spaces, these processes added the
national mode of belonging and the national spaces of interaction. However, the
collective identities based on such a conception of citizenship have not necessarily
expressed the existing diversities within societies, something which prompted alternative
modes of belonging within these structures of imagined or constructed uniformity. The
national mode of belonging entered a symbiotic coexistence with the minority modes of
belonging – e.g. religious, ethnic, territorial, ideological, etc. Each of these essentialized
modes of belonging created their own spheres, spaces, and modes of meaning,
interaction, and participation – and their combinations and permutations- both within and
beyond the frames of the nation states. Essentialized modes of belonging are singular
forms of ethnic, religious or diasporic belongings.
The forms of belonging reaching beyond the boundaries of nation states and beyond
territories led to the emergence of new spaces of meaning and interaction - transnational
spaces. These values serve as a basis for mobilization against the belonging frames of
national states. The transnational spaces accommodate cross-border political movements
based on common values that are against national belongings and boundaries. They
represent cross-border social/political organizations, exclusive of territorialized modes of
belonging. The transnational space is, thus, different from the versions of “transnational
politics” where the traditional national references of meaning persist and constitute the
basis for political action. Transnational spaces are also different from the diasporic spaces
that relate to physically de-territorialized singular belongings. They are about people –
and their actions and interactions – that are also psychically de-territorialized. The
transnational space is a macro-space comprising transnational organizations and
associations with non-spatial expressions and de-territorialized symbolisms. This
symbolism relates to the misalignments between citizenship and belongings,
participation, and voice deficits in national and supranational contexts.
Conceptualized as a gradually growing process of merging of markets and politics within
and beyond the boundaries of nation states (as predicted by Jean Monnet), globalization
has further affected, not to say diminished, national states’ normative, instrumental, and
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