This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.

Identity and citizenship, fundamental concepts for the shaping of modernity, are in crisis. The subjective and objective realities of which these concepts used to be an account have undergone gigantic transformations. Today, identity is much more plural and broader, and remains in permanent transformation. It has ceased to be absolute and has become partial and changing in the face of the patches of reality in which life takes place. Citizenship, for its part, has weakened. It can be said to have lost its defining contractual character, according to the continental European tradition, or its essence as a grantor of civil, political and social rights, according to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Instead, consumption has taken a central role as a defining element.

Identity and citizenship account for the possibilities, on the one hand, of the constitution of subjectivities suitable for life in common —in society— and, on the other, of the conformation of a structure of individual rights that guarantees the political life of a community, independently of the geographical extension it occupies. They are closely related. In fact, the possibility of the existence of citizenship depends on the proper shaping of identity. An authoritarian identity, for example, born of a socialisation that fosters it, will deny citizenship rights to those who are not part of the authoritarian group that sustains it.