I expressed the need to find a common definition of democracy because I find that this issue is strictly tied up to citizenship.
I started from a simple (but not banal) definition perhaps because it can be easily shared and with the awareness that, together, we would add meshes to the net.
Your mesh of the net, Juan Carlos, is the idea of people.
This idea in Italy, historically, coincides with the idea of Nation: una d’arme, di lingua, d’altare/di memorie, di sangue e di cor that is what Alessandro Manzoni wrote in 1948.
From an ideological point of view, such an idea of nation contains the whole Italian process of unification, with the rowdy exception of the events that happened in the Italian district named Carso, during fascism, and, more recently, within the Lega Nord (a political movement and party that in these years have developed in the Po-valley district).
The idea of people, in its territorial meaning, was adopted by the Italian Constitutional Chart in 1947, i.e. citizens are those who live within the boundaries of the State, as under art. 3: tutti i cittadini hanno pari dignità sociale e sono eguali davanti alla legge, senza distinzione di sesso, di razza, di lingua, di religione, di opinioni politiche, di condizioni personali e sociali .
In principle this statement gave way to a multiethnic, antiracist and multicultural idea of people but on the other side it leaves open the question of the requirements for citizenship. To me thinking the European citizenship as linked to territoriality is inevitable but I don’t mean it linked to blood and land, but to culture, mediation and sharing of objectives, projects of life, values, within the mutual respect for diversity.
Dino Renato Nardelli