The Markers of Citizenship: Identity in a Liberal Democracy.

As much as people idealize the notion of the public square-- the public sphere articulated by Jurgen Habermas-- access to public sphere is controlled by the state. Participatory democracy is messy. This messiness is an anathema to the state since the purpose of governmental states is to efficiently control its sovereign public. Habermas also articulated the problematic relationship of the universal principles of citizenship to the particular claims of specific political communities (1992). It is this public that this paper addresses--the multiethnic body of people that comprise political communities (the states) and how to, in this post-modern age, balance the specific claims of states on citizenship. As Bhiku Parekh (1999) puts it: the role of the modern state is to reconcile the demands of (national) unity and diversity.This paper look at the idealized concepts of citizenship as articulated by equality and participation in the modern state as it shows that the state controls, via public policy and law, access to full citizenship. The result is that "citizenship" is in crisis. This is evident with the uprisings in the banlieus of Paris, the murder of van Gogh in the Netherlands, the war on terror, the debate on same sex marriage, the on-going Palestinian and Israeli conflict, not to mention the affects of globalization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]