SoLiXG:Ethnos-Demos-Xenos
Ethnos, Demos, Xenos
Modern conceptions of popular sovereignty understand the decision-making power of a state as being founded upon the will of the people. If »the people« are the constituting subjects of sovereignty, the question that arises is: What and who are »the people«? In the long tradition of thinking about the subjects of sovereignty, a foundational opposition has emerged. On one hand, membership to a sovereign collective can be assured through genealogy, in this case meaning kinship or inherited tradition. On the other, membership can be governed by the relationship of individuals to public administration and law, linked to the territory of a state.
Philosopher Étienne Balibar summarizes these two understandings of »the people« as »...ethnos, the 'people' as an imagined community of membership and filiation, and demos, the 'people' as the collective subject of representation, decision making, and rights.«(1). Such an opposition should not suggest that these conceptions are mutually exclusive. Instead, definitions of »the people« oscillate between these two notions. The oscillation is revealed, for example, when the slogans of protesters in the GDR, "We are the people", was turned into "We are a people" after reunification, shifting a demotic understanding of the people into an ethnic one (2). A similar slippage is also visible in the anxieties about citizenship in Germany, where conservative politicians have made attempts to delineate belonging not along legal status, but along the first names of individuals. Such instances underscore that the idea of the demos is haunted by the figure of ethnos.
The terms ethnos and demos, while not all-encompassing, are helpful in describing the logics of belonging - be it through legal rule or through cultural kinship - and as a result also the logics of exclusion, subjugation or exploitation. As state power is reconfigured in terms of »Digital Sovereignty«, and as the categories of territory and population shift on the basis of new planetary infrastructures (3), it is our task to investigate if and how these notions of sovereign subjects and the logics of their constitution change alongside.
(1) Balibar, Étienne. 2004. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton: Univ. Press, p. 21.
(2) Balibar, Étienne. 2014. “Demos/Ethnos/Laos.” in Dictionary of untranslatables: a philosophical lexicon, edited by B. Cassin, S. Rendall, and E. S. Apter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 201.
(3) Bratton, Benjamin H. 2015. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Second definition