This essay discusses the dialectical relationship between the concepts of democracy and citizenship, by relating to current debates that combine a transformation of the philosophical tradition and an evaluation of situations where the legal distinction between the citizen and the national is challenged. Starting with considerations on the semantic tensions of the Greek and Roman categories (politeia, demokratia, isonomia, ius civitatis), it discusses the aporias of democracy as a model or an ideology, which philosophers like Jacques Ranciere and Hannah Arendt allow us to overcome by defining democracy as a process of permanent antioligarchic insurrection rather than a stable regime. It is not the spread of democracy, therefore, that constitutes the primordial object of political theory, but the democratization of democracy itself, especially in the form of the elimination of its internal exclusions. This theory is illustrated and further refined by referring to debates about class and race discrimination, violent struggles for recognition affecting republican institutions, nomadic or diasporic forms of citizenship, and the relationship between social and political rights.
