Gáspár Miklós Tamás is the former director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Science, and currently holds a visiting professorship at the Central European University in Vienna and Budapest. He is the author of Kommunismus nach 1989 (Mandelbaum 2015), “On Post-Fascism” (2000, Boston Review) and “Telling the truth about class” (2006, Socialist Register), among many others, and writes regularly for numerous journals and newspapers.

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (Oxford 2012), co-author of The Meaning of Partisanship (Oxford 2016) and co-editor of Kant and Colonialism (Oxford 2014) as well as Migration in Political Theory (Oxford 2016). She writes regularly for the New Statesman, Guardian, Independent, and more.

The idea of citizenship has always maintained a delicate balance between its universalist aspirations and its restricted reality. The recent crisis of global capitalism and the rise of virulent nationalisms have put this balance to the test. Ethnic redefinitions in Eastern Europe (and recently, India) and projects of citizenship-for-sale for those who can afford it, further bruise the concept. To make sense of these dynamics requires rethinking the very framework in which citizenship exists: the nation-state.

Ever since the 2008 outbreak of the crisis, the national question has forcefully reasserted itself, not only among the usual suspects of the right, but within the left as well. By framing the nation-state as a shield against global capital, significant parts of the left continue to base their political programs on the exclusion of a significant part of the working class: refugees, migrants, stateless. By doing so, they essentially abandon the class question itself. When the left speaks of the working class but it actually means the German, English or French or whatever national working class, then it is not talking about class at all: class and nation, that is maybe the lesson of the 20. Century, do not go together.

In the context of the sharpening features of the capitalist crisis, of which the climate catastrophe is the most visible example, a discussion of the questions of citizenship, migration, nationalism and the state remains of utmost importance.