O sentido da nacionalidade e da cidadania no século XXI: uma perspectiva agonística para o Brasil

Abstract

The thinking of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau illuminates the analysis of the political function of nationality as a link between the State and the citizen, in the present day, in view of the impact of immigration in Brazil. They point to Pluralist Radical Democracy as a normative horizon, a strategic alternative of socialist orientation to Liberal Democracy. It is emphasized that immigration, which began at the end of the colonial era until the present, is established as an organic phenomenon, a Gramscian category. The impossibility of immigrants exercising citizenship due to their nationality establishes an organic crisis within the nation-state. The boundaries established between the place of the national and the place of the non-national materialize in antagonistic and non-agonistic relations between them, which favors domination, to the detriment of the construction of a Pluralist Democracy, according to the logic of the theory of hegemony, which promotes emancipation. The research work advances along this path of descriptive and normative orientation, focused on the current Brazilian reality, in which the exercise of citizenship will be analyzed as a power that occurs in the process of social subjectivation of the immigrant in the current process of Brazilian social ordering. The central theoretical basis is added to the political thought of Arendt, Foucault, and the historical thought of Hobsbawm, Marshall, Brubaker and Rogers, the latter for foundations borrowed from his concepts of a psychological-philosophical nature on personal power. The strategic concept of Prescriptive Place by Lara Junior is adopted in the design of the framework of subjectivation that constitutes the social. The final analysis contemplates the processes of subjectivation that are established between the places of the national and the non-national, as citizens in Brazil today, based on the thought of Ribeiro, Carvalho, Schwarcz, Fernandes and Fausto. The places of resistance in the face of Prescriptive Places based on social demands, a concept developed by Laclau, of immigrants, are also identified. The study points out that fragmentation and selectivity guide the process of establishing democratic social places for the national and non- national, but not according to nationality, but to the places they occupy as citizens, a product of a Brazilian discursive formation, described and analyzed, at the institutional, ideological and affective levels. This political context is portrayed by naming different places of subjectivation, such as the people-nation and the people-mass, occupied by the global citizen, the manual citizen and the unknown citizen. It is concluded that, nevertheless, the new immigration has given rise to a new place for the immigrant, who seems to subjectivate himself as a political and moral agent who contributes, through his demands and social practices, a transformative action of the Brazilian democratic order, towards emancipation, both for himself and for the Brazilian national, who occupies the place of the people-mass. Therefore, the citizenship of the non-national, a power that is exercised in this relationship with the national, is revealed in the place of resistance to which their social demands are dedicated, which is derived from freedom and not from the need to immigrate.