Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

495Citizenship and National Identityof citizens finds its identity not in ethnic and cultural commonalitiesbut in the practice of citizens who actively exercise their rightsto participation and communication. At this juncture, the republicanstrand of citizenship completely parts company with the idea ofbelonging to a prepolitical community integrated on the basis ofdescent, shared tradition, and common language. Viewed fromthis end, the initial fusion of national consciousness with republicanconviction only functioned as a catalyst.The nationalism mediated by the works of historians and romanticwriters, hence by scholarship and literature, grounded a collectiveidentity that played a functional role for the notion of citizenshipthat originated in the French Revolution. In the melting pot ofnational consciousness, the ascriptive features of one's origin weretransformed into just so many results of a conscious appropriationof tradition. Ascribed nationality gave way to an achieved nationalism,that is, to a conscious product of one's own efforts. Thisnationalism was able to foster people's identification with a rolethat demanded a high degree of personal commitment, even to thepoint of self-sacrifice; in this respect, general conscription wassimply the flip side of civil rights. National consciousness andrepublican conviction in a sense proved themselves in the willingnessto fight and die for one's country. This explains the complementaryrelation that originally obtained between nationalism andrepublicanism: one became the vehicle for the emergence of theother.However, this social-psychological connection does not meanthat the two are linked at the conceptual level. National independenceand collective self-assertion against foreign nations can beunderstood as a collective form of freedom. This national freedomdoes not coincide with the genuinely political freedom that citizensenjoy within a country. For this reason, the modern understandingof this republican freedom can, at a later point, cut its umbilicallinks to the womb of the national consciousness of freedom thatoriginally gave it birth. The nation-state sustained a close connectionbetween "demos" and "ethos" only briefly.5 Citizenship wasnever conceptually tied to national identity.The concept of citizenship developed out of Rousseau's conceptof self-determination. "Popular sovereignty" was initially understoodas a delimitation or reversal of royal sovereignty and was