Rethinking public space and citizenship in post-national times: Hannah Arendt and the “right to have right”

Making extensive reference to the brilliant arguments put forward by Hannah Arendt on the decline of the Nation-State and the “end of the Rights of Man”, the paper focuses on the need to rethink public space and citizenship beyond the boundaries of the Nation-State in increasingly multicultural societies, creating forms of citizenship splitting the principle of national belonging from the recognition of everyone's “right to have rights”, just as a member of the human species. The articulated contemporary debate on the relationship between multiculturalism, citizenship and democracy seems then structured around the need to translate concretely into a new formula the ideal type of the political form in Hannah Arendt, “isonomy”, consisting in the conquest of equality before the common law of actors which are and remain substantially different. An application of this concept can be related to the construction of the European "public sphere" by a shift from "ethnos" to "demos".