Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Caught Between History and ImaginationVico's Ingenium for a Rhetorical Renovation of CitizenshipAlessandra Beasley Von BurgCitizenship is usually thought of as synonymous with nationality and the rights and duties associated with the people who live, work, and participate politically, socially, and economically within the borders of their nation-state. In this conception, the main criterion used to decide who is and who is not a citizen is nationality. As the nature of nation-state governance evolves and the acceleration of citizen mobility hastens interdependence, pressures for new definitions and paradigms of citizenship build. As Joseph Weiler argues, this pressure produces cognitive dissonance because "the traditional, classical vocabulary of citizenship is the vocabulary of the State, the Nation and Peoplehood" (qtd. in La Torre 1998, 1).1 The classical association of citizenship with nationality blocks our ability to grasp new, nonstatist conceptions of citizenship, even as postnational political visions take shape in institutions like the European Union (EU).2 In 1992, EU citizenship was established in the Treaty of Maastricht, which granted some additional rights to citizens of the member states in the same way that single nation-states grant their inhabitants special status as nationals, rights that are not nullified when citizens leave their home country to live and work in other member states.3 [End Page 26]The relationship between nationality and citizenship in the EU context is complicated by the fact that although Maastricht guidelines set postnational membership criteria for EU citizens, they also limit the scope of EU citizenship. In trying to reach beyond the nation while anchoring its very essence to the nation, EU citizenship remains limited as it relies on the traditional language of national membership to found its postnational concept of equality and inclusion for noncitizens. The contradictory elements of EU citizenship are exemplified in its current definition, which includes all member states' citizens and excludes millions who are living in Europe as third-country nationals (TCNs), defined as "any person who is not a citizen of one of the member states" of the EU but permanently and legally resides in one.4 The current debate over the status of legal, long-term TCNs challenges the relationship between citizenship and nationality, as advocates from EU institutions, national governments, nongovernmental organizations and academia argue that TCNs should be granted EU citizenship rather than be naturalized in the member states and push for a new, postnational mode of citizenship based on residency. Advocates for the inclusion of TCNs as EU citizens have to work with the limited vocabulary of national citizenship yet articulate a case for a new kind of citizenship divorced from nationality. They suggest that the EU should be viewed as a deliberative community, in which all long-term residents like TCNs are given an equal opportunity to practice citizenship. The deliberative community rationale is based on an idea of citizenship as performance with residents enacting citizenship by living together and deliberating with each other about common interests and concerns.5This reordering of the concept of community arising out of political practice calls for a full philosophical and rhetorical reimagining of the meaning of citizenship. The act of reimagining citizenship creates a new practice of citizenship and grounds citizenship in a philosophical context as well as a practical one. There is no better philosophical and rhetorical tradition to turn to for this purpose than that of Giambattista Vico. Vico, and to a larger extent the entire tradition of Italian humanism, has been overlooked in modern Western philosophy. Yet Vico embodies a seamless marriage of philosophy and rhetoric. Vico's philosophically grounded rhetoric provides the means in an investigation of EU citizenship as an innovative rhetorical practice beyond nationality, for understanding how new practices become persuasive through imaginative language, until citizens separate citizenship from nationality and accept residence and deliberative practices as legitimate criteria for citizenship. Vico argues that "every study method [End Page 27] may be said to be made up of three things: instruments, complementary aids, and aim envisaged" and notes that "the instruments presuppose and include a systematic, orderly manner of proceeding" (1990, 6). This essay proceeds in this fashion to reveal how a new vocabulary of citizenship...