CHAPTER VIII
THE PRINCIPLE OF CITIZENSHIP AND
PLURALISM IN IDENTITY
MILAN PODUNAVAC
DECLINE AND RISE OF INTEREST IN CITIZENSHIP
In the famous chapter entitled "Decline of the Nation-state: End of Man" in Origins of Totalitarianism, Hana Arendt claims that there is one universal human right, namely, "the right to have rights", "the right of citizenship". Approaching the problem of stateless people and minorities who had no governments to represent and fully protect their rights, and who are forced to live under the condition of absolute lawlessness, she described that condition in the modern state as a new form of despotism: "the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man".
1 Another great political writer, J. Shklar, rightly noted that "there is no notion more central in politics than citizenship, and non more variable in history, or contended in theory".2 The principle of citizenship is the basic institution of the modern state, and it is the more important as the modern state has been assigning rights and duties largely along the line of citizens/non-citizens. The principle of citizenship could be described as a kind of social contract which determines how the citizens are structurally related to state authority. The first status in every modern constitution is reserved for the status of citizenship. As R. Dahrendorf pointed out, the rule of citizens over non-citizens, the members over strangers, is probably the most common form of tyranny in human history. The political ideal of modern citizenship — citizenship for everyone, and everyone the same qua citizen — has played an emancipatory role in modern political society.
3Ever since the bourgeoisie challenged aristocratic privileges by claiming equal political rights for citizens as such, women, workers, Jews, blacks, and others have pressed for inclusion in that citizenship status. Modern political theory asserted the equal moral worth of all persons, and social movements of the oppressed took this seriously as implying the inclusion of all persons in full citizenship status under the equal protection of law.
For a long time, however, the concept of citizenship has not played an independent normative role in modern political theory. In the post-war orthodoxy of most political theory the two fundamental normative concepts were democracy and justice. Democracy has been the normative setting for evaluating procedures; justice the normative point for evaluating outcomes. As noted, the concept of citizenship did not play an independent normative role. If it was discussed at all, it was usually seen as derivative of justice and democracy, that is, the citizen is someone who has democratic rights and claims justice. This explains why almost twenty years ago Herman van Gunsteren stated that the "concept of citizenship has gone out of fashion among political thinkers". At the same time , Marshal’s historical thesis of the successive development of civil, political and social rights within modern state was identified as "the end of history of citizenship" (Stenbergen).
Although, Marshall’s all-encompassing definition of citizenship was followed by a certain lull in research into the topic, as a recent survey done by W. Kymlicka and W. Norman confirmed, this assertion is now seen to have been somewhat premature. Against this trend, the late 1980s and early 1990s have witnessed a powerful explosion of interest in the concept of citizenship among political theorists. Citizenship has become "the buzz word among thinkers on all points of the political spectrum" (D. Heater). There is increasing support and evidence from different points of political theory for the view that citizenship must play an independent normative role in political theory and that promotion of civic responsibility is an urgent aim of democratic policy. As Kymlicka and Norman pointed out in an extended survey article on recent work on citizenship theory (Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory) there are a few motivating forces for renewed interest in citizenship among political theorists: the first is related to present trends in political philosophy; the second, to the demands that are being made within political programmes; and, the third, to fundamental "structural uncertainties or more precisely, to the political crises of the nation state as the basic unit of modern political, social and cultural organization.
With the regard to the first point, the specific reason for the sudden and unexpected explosion of the academic debate is seen as a "natural evolution in the political discourse because the concept of citizenship seems to integrate the demand of justice and community membership, the central concepts of political philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s respectively. Citizenship is intimately linked to the ideas of individual entitlements, on the one hand, and of attachment to a particular community, on the other. Thus it may help to clarify what is really at stake in the debate between liberals and communitarians".
4 Citizenship is the basic reference point of political identity; it is the basic institution in the modern state and the strongest unifying force in a pluralistic and divided political society. The principle of citizenship answers to the political imperative of what draws a body of citizens together into a coherent and stable organized political community and keeps that allegiance.
5Citizenship is political identity par excellence; and by emphasizing the political virtues of the responsible conciliation of conflicting interests, citizenship helps to tame the divisive passions of other identities. . . . It differs from others in two important regards. In the first place, as so many political theorists in the liberal tradition have emphasized the exercise of citizenship is crucial for the development of individual moral maturity. . . . The second particular feature of citizen-identity is the way in which it overlays the other social identities the individual inevitably feels.
Consequently, the idea of citizenship has played a prominent role in recent philosophical work.
COMMUNITARIANISM AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
Within such theoretical dispute, communitarians concentrate mainly upon the membership element within citizenship. Citizenship is first of all identity, an expression of one’s membership in a political community; citizenship status is built upon a particularly intense solidarity between the individual and the community or society in question. Accordingly, communitarians criticize liberalism for the reducing citizenship to a mere legal status and the rights that the individual holds against the state. In contrast, it seeks to reestablish the lost connection between ethics and politics by understanding citizenship as "political identity created through identification with the res publica".
6 Accordingly in the light of communitarian critique liberal society is seen as a fragmentation in practice; in contrast the community is the home of coherence, connection and narrative capacity. M. Sandel ask whether a community of those who put justice first can ever be more than a community of strangers.On the exact opposite, the liberal response lays less emphasis upon social solidarity and more upon a universalist approach. Accordingly, citizenship is the legal status defined by a set of rights and responsibilities. The recognition of equal entitlements, rather than particular antecedent moral values, binds together the actors (citizens) within the constructed political community.
Ch. Taylor has described these two competing concepts of citizenship as follows:
7One (model) focuses mainly on individual rights and equal treatment, as well as on governmental performance which takes account of citizen’s preferences. This is what has to be secured. Citizen capacity consists mainly in the power to retrieve these rights — equal treatment — as well as to influence the effective decision-makers. . . . These institutions have entirely instrumental significance. . . . No value is put on participation in the rule for its own sake. . . . The other model, by contrast, defines participation in self-rule as the essence of freedom, as part of what must be secured. This is . . . an essential component of citizen capacity. . . . Full participation in self-rule is seen as being able, at least part of the time, to have some part in the forming of a rule consensus, with which one can identify along with others. To rule and be ruled in turn means that at least some of the time governors can be "us" and not always "them".
This powerful resurgence of interest in the concept of citizenship has been strongly influenced by recent political events, particularly in countries in Central and Eastern Europe. As communism lost faith, social resistance to its dogmatic and historically baseless claims turned the transition in Eastern Europe into a true revolution of citizenship underscored by an extraordinary mobilization of civic identities and expectations (G. di Palma). Thereby the revolution of 1989 demonstrated that "the institutions of constitutional freedom are only worth as much as the population makes of them, and this would be a population accustomed to political freedom and well versed in adopting the we-perspective of active self-determination".
8 Thus, both communitarians and liberals have been motivated to stress the active role of the individual citizen.On the other side, the different kind of political crisis which clearly demonstrates the "structural uncertainties" of the modern national-state could be identified as central to an understanding of why the problem of citizenship is silent in our day. Ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe, redefinition of national states in the heart of Europe, dislocating shifts of identity: all these tendencies have raised deep questions about what binds citizens together into a shared political community. As Ronald Beiner helpfully summaries:
As regards the issue of national identity the basic problem . . . is that national citizenship is being simultaneously undermined by not only globalizing pressures, but also localizing pressures.
But these two opposing challenges are by no means unrelated. In fact, particularistic identities assert themselves most forcefully just when globalist tendencies present real threats to such identities. It is no accident, for instance, that nationalism rises up again in Europe simultaneously with the movement toward European integration. Nationalism is typically a reaction to the feeling of threatened identity, and nothing is more threatening in this respect than global integration. . . . This is what I refer to elsewhere The New Right as the dialectic of globalism and localism.
9It is not surprising, then, that such enthusiasm for citizenship arises from the full spectrum of political life. Firstly, such recent and significant challenge to the post-war orthodoxy in the theory of citizenship has emerged among a group of thinkers characterized as the "new right". Drawing upon Hayek’s premise that the market offers the individual the most efficient means of individual expression and liberty, this line of thinking does not value citizenship for its own sake. Accordingly, we are citizens only because we demand goods that require public provision. The citizen is, to put it cruelly , a rational consumer of public goods, and citizen behavior is the economic market as paradigm of political rationality. This libertarian conception of citizenship is challenged within neo-conservative strategy (the "new right") itself.
The shift and new-found enthusiasm of conservatives for the idea of citizenship arises from the belated recognition that the individualism associated with the free market is not a sufficient basis on which to hold society together. As D. Miller states:
10If the role of state is cut back and each person encouraged to behave as self-sufficient individual, two problems arise. One is that people cease to take an interest in the welfare of those around them in the local community . . . the other is that individualism may take the form of criminal activity. . . . What is needed in both cases, conservatives will argue, is reassertion of moral values and social responsibility, and the citizen is portrayed as the person who sticks to the rules of the economic game, while carrying out charitable work in his or her local community.
On the other side, for left-oriented political thinkers, the rediscovery of citizenship has coincided with the gradual dissolution of the working class as a potential basis for the social-democratic politics. If it is no longer possible to appeal to the interest of a unified working class to defend redistributive economic policies, or to provisions of social welfare, then some other basis is needed. Once again, citizenship is the obvious candidate: economically our positions may be increasingly divergent, but we are all citizens and as such we are entitled to provision by the state of minimum income, health care and so forth. By and large it is possible to say that the ideal of citizenship has driven the emancipatory movement of modern political life. It is an essential part of divergent political strategies.
UNIVERSAL CONCERNS AND CIVIL SOCIETY
Modern political debate generally assumed that citizenship implies universality in the sense that citizenship status transcends particularity and difference. Accordingly, whatever the social and group difference among citizens; whatever their inequalities of wealth, status and power in everyday activities in civil society, citizenship gives everyone the same status in political power. Our personal life and commitments may be very different, but we are all equally citizens and it is as citizens that we advance claims in the public realm and assess the claims made by others. Citizenship seemed to have become an undisputed monolith (Preuss) within modern societies: a fixed structures both defining the individual membership within modern state and guaranteeing that same individual’s central position within the political and social life of the nation.
More and more, however, begin to theorists reflect on the many-layered crises that are rendering such a concept of citizenship ever more problematic. I limit myself to highlighting only some challenges to the concept of citizenship in modern political societies. Since space in this study is limited, I shall concentrate on three such challenges: the first is what Michael Walzer called "the civil society argument"; another is what might be called "radical pluralism" (Young); and the last could be denoted as the post-modernist challenge.
It is a common idea that in Eastern and Central European societies the reconstruction of civil society was accepted as a precondition of political reforms. There is no more important topic in contemporary politics than the character and chances of civil society (J.A. Hall). But the concept itself is rather vague, albeit negatively it is easy to recognize societies which do not have it. Following Hall’s approach two elements can be offered as starting points for a definition of civil society: the first is the presence of strong and autonomous social groups, able to balance the excessive concentration of political power; the second is the connotation of civility and "civic virtue". Civil society endorses social diversity, together with a differentiated view of the self (identity).
Discours on civil society was reinvented in the works of Michnik, Kuron, Havel, Vajda, Kis, Bunce, Goluboviƒ and Pavlovic. It was described as a "gift that was received from East" (Arato) and accepted by the western political theorists (Arato, Koen, Keane, Cardoso, Weffort, O’Donell, Lefort, Habermas, Offe, etc.), as a framework within which one could thematize the struggles radically to reform Soviet style state socialism, the transition from the bureaucratic authoritarianism in the South, and the efforts of new types of movements to democratize the existing democracies of the West. Accordingly, civil society is denoted as the basic form of East-European self-understanding and the kind of discourse which not only helps to describe at least some of the transition from the Soviet type systems, but also provides a perspective from which an immanent critique at all these processes can and should be undertaken.
11 The important lesson was that societies of East and Central Europe could be radically transformed only within determined limits.The project of "self-limiting revolution" had as a goal construction from below and a long term defense of a highly articulated, organized, autonomous and moblizable civil society. Thus, the civil society perspective definitely broke not only with etatism, but with the aura of revolution as well. Antipolitical politics here were intended to defeat, exclude or marginalize "political politics". In this strategy civil society appears as an alternative to the state which is assumed to be unchangeable and hostile. Accordingly, the focus shifted from counter productive direct political challenge to molding autonomous institutions independent of the state. The result was the elaboration of the myth of civil society as the Achiles heel of any totalitarian regime. That approach was, as I mentioned, one of antipolitics, and that discourse was the language of morality.
This strategy was expressed in a few formulas: the first postulate, expressed by Havel, was living in the truth; the second postulate was the value of self-organization; and, the third element was respect for law, "the conspicuous exercise of law" in the terms of the Hungarian political writer Janos Kis. Leaving the political power unchallenged and focusing on the establishing the free social space independent from state, such civil society strategy gradually developed a split between political power and social life. It was rightly noted that the peaceful revolutions of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe were carried on in the name of "civil society" and that such a "velvet revolution" was followed by an extraordinary mobilization of civic identities and expectations. Another basic idea was that active involvement in an autonomous civil society composed of a multitude of associations separate and opposed to the sphere of state represents a superior form of citizenship as compared with citizenship in the state. According to such a conception the "good life" can only be lived in the civil society as a realm of fragmentation and struggle, but also of authentic solidarity.
Such radical redirecting of thought led to re-examining the origins of citizenship in ancient Greece and pre-imperial Rome. According to such interpretation pre-nation (pre-modern) citizenship ("high citizenship", "first citizenship") is based upon the political organization of the classical city-state where a "select group of autonomous individuals . . . interacted to create rules of practical reason for a given community" (Klingsberg). At same time, in this theoretical stream, the character of the modern state with its anonymity, its bureaucratic remoteness and imperviousness to democratic agency is not a vehicle of citizenship, but a bar to genuinely democratic citizenship. Citizenship, then, must be localized (R. Beiner).
Civil society authors are largely concerned with the attempt to recreate more fluid relationship between citizen and state, so that each individual citizen might once again contribute a more personal contribution within national policy. As Vaclav Havel argues, introducing the notion of civism in the public debate with Vaclav Klaus:
12I feel that the creation of civil society is the primary task of our time. . . . Citizens must shoulder their responsibility for social development. Civil society is a social space that fosters the feeling of solidarity between people and love for one’s community. There are various minority needs that a representative democracy cannot in its present form safeguard. Civil society encourages ordinary people to participate in government, thereby strengthening relations between citizens and their state. . . . As a result, every citizen receives the opportunity to participate in public affairs. Collective activism not only improves pride; it also nurtures such positive traits as "love thy neighbor". In a stable democracy it is possible to work for the public benefit. By doing what the state normally does they take on some responsibility of their own.
Civil society compels associate members to think about the common good, beyond their own conceptions of good life.
This kind of argument has a lot of force, but also its limits. The moral civil society suffered blows from all sides. As Central and Eastern European societies emerged the myth of civil society as a united antipolitical force was one of the first causalities of postcommunist era. The existence of civil society as resistance was dependant on the existence of a hostile state that offered no hope for compromise. But, as soon as this state disappeared, the civil society that opposed it also disintegrated. Two different projects that mainly characterized the transition of 1989, namely, the establishment of an elite-pluralistic system of party competition and of liberal economy tended to demobilize civil society; first by reducing its influence directly or indirectly to narrow channels, second, by reducing civil society to economic society.
I argue that such an argument is not only bad democratic theory, but also bad democratic politics. A robust civil society with the capacity to generate political alternatives and to monitor government can help start the transition and help consolidate and deepen democracy. The associational life of civil society as "setting of settings" can be a corrective to all other accounts of the good life, rather than an autonomous strategy that stands alongside them. It challenges its singularity, but has no singularity of its own. As Michael Walzer argues:
13Here is the paradox of the civil society argument. Citizenship is one of many roles that members play, but the state itself is unlike all other associations. It both frames civil society and occupies space within it. It fixes the boundary conditions and the basic rules of all associational activity, including political activity. It compels association members to think about the common good, beyond their own conception of the good life. Even the failed totalitarianism of, say, the Polish communist state had this much impact upon the Solidarity union. It determined that Solidarity was a Polish union, focused on economic arrangement and labour policy within the borders of Poland. Hence citizenship (i.e., political, state-centered citizenship) has a certain practical preeminence among all our actual and possible membership.
To sum up: citizenship is one form of identity and it differs from others in two very important regards. First, the exercise of citizenship is crucial for the development of the individual moral maturity, namely, the citizen is someone who has political freedom and responsibility. Second a particular feature of citizen-identity is the way in which it overlays the other social identities which the individual inevitably feels; citizenship helps to tame the divisive passions of other identities.
A more radical version of the same type of argument is made by theorists like Iris Marion Young in the name of group identity. Young offers a "politics of difference" as an alternative that seemingly implies a specific institutional modification of the universalistic conception of citizenship. "Identity" is a much used word in this line of thinking. Following the Taylor’s thesis (The Politics of Recognition) on the historically emergent need for the recognition of identity, the main type of argument is that across a wide range of contemporary social struggles — from the movements of ethnic groups to feminism — can be found the demand to have the distinctive characteristic of one’s group acknowledged. This demand comes in conflict with the older universalistic conception of citizenship that have based the notion of rights on what is common among human beings. New questions come from a large set of issues surrounding the meaning of citizenship in liberal democracies, particularly, what values and virtues must citizens share as a minimum, how much diversity is optimal, etc. As I pointed out nowadays it often appears that the liberals have been outflanked on the issue of diversity. In this "radical pluralism argument" the cultural fragmentation of citizenship is seen not as a danger, but as a positive advantage. She argues that the universality of citizenship in the sense of inclusion and participation for everyone, stands in tension with the other meaning of universality embedded in modern political ideas: universality as generality and universality as equal treatment. Thus, the idea of citizenship as expressing a general will tending to enforce a homogeneity in practice excludes groups judged not capable of adopting the general point of view. Secondly, according to such a approach, where differences in capacities, culture, and values exist among groups but some are privileged, strict adherence to a principle of equal treatment tends to perpetuate oppression and disadvantage.
14The attempt to realize an ideal of universal citizenship that finds the public embodying generality as opposed to particularity, commonness versus difference, will tend to exclude or put at a disadvantage some groups, even when they have formally equal citizenship status. . . . Different social groups have different needs, cultures, histories, experiences, and perceptions of social relations which influence their interpretation of the meaning and consequences of policy proposals and influence the form of their reasoning.
An increasing number of theorists, who might be called "cultural pluralists" argue that citizenship must take account of these differences. Accordingly, these groups can be integrated into a common culture only if we adopt a notion of "differentiated citizenship". This means that members of certain groups could be incorporated into the political community not only as individuals but also through groups, and their rights would depend, in part, on their group membership. We would add that this concept of citizenship poses a serious challenge to the prevailing conception of citizenship. Critics of such a conception of citizenship worry that the idea of differentiated citizenship will negate citizenship status as a device which cultivates a sense of community and a common sense of purpose.
The basic post-modernist idea is that what we have known from the tradition of modernity involves what we might call a "hegemonic function" which suppresses particularistic identities; its universalism is merely a cover for an imperialist particularism. Contrary to such a conception we would add: if we are right in criticizing the idea of localizing and pluralizing citizenship, then we ought to be disturbed by the claim of post-modern social and political theory that all reality is local, plural, fragmentary, episodic and infinitely rearrangeable (Beiner).
Faculty of Political Science
University of Belgrade
NOTES
1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1967), p. 237.
2. Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship. The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 1.
3. Iris Marion Young, "Polity and Group Difference. A Critique of the Ideal of universal Citizenship," in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (New York: State University of New York Press), p. 175.
4. Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, "Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory," Ethics 104 (Januar 1994), pp. 352-381.
5. Derek Heater, Citizenship: The Civic Ideal in the World History, Politics and Education (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 183-184.
6. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), p. 227.
7. Charles Tylor, "The Liberal-Communitarian Debate," in Liberalism and Moral Life, ed. N. Rosenblum (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 178.
8. Jürgen Habermas, "Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflection on the Future of Europe," Praxis International (1992), vol. 12, pp. 1-19.
9. Ronald Beiner, "Why Citizenship Constitutes a Theoretical Problem in the Last Decade of Twentieth Century," in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner, ibid., p. 3.
10. David Miller, "Citizenship and Pluralism," Political Studies (1995), XLIII, 432-450.
11. Andrew Arato, Revolution, Civil Society and Democracy: Paradoxes in the Recent Transition in Eastern Europe, Cornell Project On Comparative Institutional Analysis, Center for International Studies (Ithaca: Cornell University), pp. 148-53.
12. "Rival Visions: Vaclav Havel & Vaclav Klaus, with Commentary by Peter Pithart," Journal of Democracy (1994), pp. 12-23.
13. Michael Walzer, "The Civil Society Argument," in Dimensions of Radical Democracy, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1992), p. 98.
14. Iris Marion Young, ibid., pp. 182-183.