Academic Intelligence beyond the Sovereign Consensus: Inter-ethnic Politics of Equality Breaking the Securitisation of Time under National Sovereignty

Abstract

The present paper analyses the securitisation of time by national sovereignties and the challenges posed to this nationalised time by ethnic minorities in two countries, i.e. Romania and Turkey. The argument builds on an understanding of sovereignty as inseparable from the modern subjectivity discoursing it and the spatial and temporal coordinates of this subjectivity. It employs the Heideggerian theorisation of the modern sovereign subjectivity to explain, with an appeal to Derrida, how this subjectivity produces its private temporality in terms of its own presentpresence. In the same, Heideggerian tradition of thought, the paper then theorises national sovereignty as an onomastic exercise placing the private temporality of the sovereign subjectivity, its conception of past and future, under the name of the nation. The author elaborates on Giorgio Agamben’s view of sovereignty as state of exception and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of naming in order to explicate how the national, sovereign subjectivity authors in this way its own realm, its own normality and the exceptions from that normality. This amounts to the production of the consensus of national sovereignty expressed in the policies of the modern state. The result, in the account by Jacques Rancière and Erin Manning, excludes politics contesting the sovereign consensus, which in an onomastically nationalised political life excludes, in fact, the non-national inside, i.e. the ethnic minorities and their alternative predication of political life. The author illustrates how the production of the nationalised temporality has emerged in Romania and Turkey and also how the most numerous minorities there, Hungarian and Kurdish respectively, have started challenging the consensus of national sovereignty. Since Romania has already become EU Member State and Turkey is currently a candidate to EU membership, the research also sheds a new light on the possibility of post-national politics in Europe under the aegis of the Union.