Deliberating Publics of Citizens:

Postnational citizenship amidst global public spheres

Stacy Smith

DRAFT -please do not circulate or cite*

Introduction:

The years bridging the turn from the 20th to the 21st century have been characterized by forces of globalization: the flow of people and capital and environmental pollutants across national borders poses implications for all aspects of society. In the realm of politics and political theory, questions of rights, sovereignty, and citizenship take center stage. Migrations of people across borders due to economic patterns of global capitalism and political contexts driving refugees and asylum seekers to other states raise thorny questions surrounding the derivation of citizenship rights and status and institutional mechanisms for realizing commitments to universal human rights.

Moreover, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, political actors and scholars alike have expressed widespread interest in democracy and civil society. Democracy is viewed by many, across ideological spectrums, as the end of history in terms of governmental forms; democracy is viewed by some as necessary for and by others as an antidote to the forces of global capitalism. And civil society, that sphere apart from the state and, usually, the economy, is commonly viewed as integral to democratic governance. Strong and vibrant civil societies make democracy possible; weak civil societies tend to be connected to authoritarian regimes. While many associations of civil society form within nation states, the context of globalization also entails associations that form across national borders. Consequently, the public sphere, or the sphere of civil society that consists of people, associations, and organizations engaged in debate and discussion about issues of common concern, also transcends static political borders of states. Thus, according to political theorist Nancy Fraser, it is even “commonplace nowadays to speak of ‘transnational public spheres’” (Fraser, TPS, 1).

In this essay, I map the terrain of political theoretical issues surrounding citizenship education that arise in the contemporary context of globalization. In the first section I describe the “withering” of the nation state as the primary political unit and the increasingly associational nature of the international political arena. I then discuss implications of this decentering of the nation state for questions of political sovereignty and national citizenship and make the case for the importance of public sphere theory as the normative core of the concept of civil society. In the next section I draw upon a Habermasian strand of deliberative democratic theory to develop a theory of citizenship that emphasizes the central role of the public sphere, including the relationship between participation in voluntary associations and civil publics along side formal political publics (i.e. states). I argue that deliberative publics of citizens have the capacity to generate collective identities and solidarities based upon democratic participation in communities of fate, versus membership in national groups, and to influence policy making in both state and international arenas. Finally, in the last section, I bring these theoretical considerations to bear on practical implications for citizenship education. I conclude by recommending a complementary model of cosmopolitan, deliberative citizenship education that emphasizes the relationship between the state and the pluralistic public spheres of civil society. According to this model, the task of democratic citizenship education is to provide young people with opportunities to deliberately practice public ways of being that allow publics of citizens to flourish and impact formal political processes, within the nation state and beyond. I make some specific recommendations regarding the organization of schooling and curriculum that are particular to public education in the United States.

The Withering of the Nation State and The Rise of Civil Society

According to Carlos Alberto Torres, “the question facing us in the process of increased globalization is whether the nation-state and citizenship are withering away.” In Torres’ view, the two concepts—citizenship and the nation state—are necessarily linked because “citizenship has always been associated with the constitution and operation of the modern nation-state” (Torres, AERJ, 2002, 373). In this section I argue that while the nation state is indeed being eclipsed by other forms of political organization, the concept of citizenship should not simultaneously fade away. Rather citizenship should be recast in terms of the changing face of formal political sovereignty, on one hand, and the role of citizenship within the multiple public spheres of global civil societies, on the other.

The economic and political realities of globalization, in particular the movement of people as laborers and political subjects across national borders, brings to the fore questions of national collective identity, membership rights, and citizenship status in new and acute ways.[1] Within this context, the question of the locus of rights claims is central: rights are granted by nations as political sovereigns, and claimed by citizens of those states. Yet human rights, which transcend national borders, are also claimed by persons and endorsed by national and international organizations. This tension between national sovereignty and universal human rights leads Nuhoglu Soysal to conclude in Limits of Citizenship that the nation-state’s scope of action is constrained such that:

the state is no longer an autonomous and independent organization closed over a nationally defined population. Instead, we have a system of constitutionally interconnected states with a multiplicity of membership. [Hence]…the logic of personhood supersedes the logic of national citizenship, [and] individual rights and obligations, which were historically located in the nation-state, have increasingly moved to an universalistic plane, transcending the boundaries of particular nation-states. (164-65; cited in Torres, AERJ, 373)

According to Torres, Nuhoglu Soysal’s analysis of the limits of citizenship has implications at three levels. At the first level of citizenship, notions of identity and rights are decoupled. The second level includes politics of identity and multiculturalism. Here, the emergence of membership in the polity is ‘multiple in the sense of spanning local, regional, and global identities, and accommodates intersecting complexes or rights, duties, and loyalties” (Nuhoglu Soysal, 166). The third level is comprised of cosmopolitan democracies, which emerge from the importance of the international system for the attainment of democracy worldwide. Such a system is relatively divorced in its origins and constitutive dynamics from codes of the nation-states (Torres, AERJ, 373).

While some political theorists respond to the withering of the nation state with a call to reconstitute its strength, I find such a response empirically unworkable and normatively misguided.[2] In my view, the erosion of the centrality of the nation state necessitates attention to two related phenomena: 1) the rise of other formal political organizations. Such organizations include what Nuhoglu Soysal refers to above as the interconnection of states, in terms of international and transnational political organizations (such as the United Nations and the European Union), as well as the potential creation of world-level sovereign powers; and 2) the relationship between these formal political institutions and the public spheres of civil society. Hence, I draw upon the work of Nuhoglu Soysal, David Held, and deliberative democratic theorists such as Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser to meld a conception of postnational citizenship that is both cosmopolitan and deliberative.

Although I proceed according to the assumption that the nation state is withering in the context of globalization, I warn against a concurrent withering of the notion of citizenship itself. Allowing the fate of citizenship to be linked to the notion of the nation state will result in a further eclipse of public life in the face of encroaching private spheres of the social, in the form of mass society, and the economic realm, in the form of mass capitalism. The nation state we may be able to do without, but proponents of democracy and the public sphere, as the sphere of freedom and political action in concert, must view citizenship in terms of political identities and participatory capacities that democracy cannot do without. Thus, citizenship needs to be recast, set apart from the nation state, and newly theorized in terms of emerging transnational and perhaps global political structures, as well as the public spheres of civil society.

Postnational Citizenship and Civil Society

The withering of the nation state sets the stage for the importance of building new theories of citizenship commensurate with new realities of globalization. The conception of citizenship that I develop in this essay emphasizes democracy and situates citizenship in relationship to democratic ideals, in both the formal political realm and the public sphere of civil society—in national, transnational and global contexts. In this section I lay out the contours of a postnational citizenship that is both cosmopolitan and deliberative by taking up two key lines of inquiry: first, the question of the locus of citizenship in terms of the relationship between civil society and formal political arenas and second, the question of transnational public spheres.

If the nation state is withering, and citizenship has traditionally been cast in terms of an individual’s political status as a member of the nation state, how should this concept be reformulated in the context of democracy in a global era? A response to this question entails not only empirical claims about salient global trends, but conceptual definitions of politics, and normative claims surrounding democracy and public life. All of these layers of analysis are tied up in contemporary explanations of the realm of “civil society.” The concept of civil society has garnered widespread attention in recent years for a number of reasons, among them the rise of emerging democratic governments in Eastern Europe—and related questions surrounding how to create broader social reforms that will support a political culture necessary for democracy to flourish—as well as the work of normative political theorists such as John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas, (particularly the 1989 English translation of Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). The sheer breadth and scope of scholarly inquiry has itself produced what Edwards and Foley refer to as conceptual confusion and definitional fuzziness in terms of “civil society” as an analytic concept (Foley and Edwards, in American Behavioral Scientist, 1998). Yet, this fuzziness can be avoided by drawing upon a normative theory of civil society, particularly one that emphasizes both the legitimating and epistemic functions of citizenship within the public sphere (McAfee, in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2004).

A postnational theory of citizenship, commensurate with the emergence of a multiplistic sense of political membership—which Soysal described above as ‘multiple in the sense of spanning local, regional, and global identities, and accommodate[ing] intersecting complexes or rights, duties, and loyalties” (Soysal, 166)—requires new ways of thinking about collective identity, sources of rights and obligations, and relationships between and across civil and political realms. Within this emerging theoretical context, civil society is highlighted for close attention because it is a realm that contains and reflects such multiplicity, while at the same time demonstrating the potentials for fluid and dynamic forms of solidarity and political participation.

Cosmopolitan Democracy

In his work on cosmopolitan democracy in a global era, David Held argues that the revitalization of democratic politics is both desirable and possible, but poses a daunting challenge. Held sets out a normative case for the core principle of democratic autonomy and offers a conception of cosmopolitan democracy based upon autonomy, and grounded in model with specific institutional structures at both the nation state and international levels that acknowledge networks and emphasize deliberation. Held justifies his model for cosmopolitan democracy by arguing that “in a world of intensifying regional and global relations, with marked overlapping ‘communities of fate,’ the principle of autonomy requires entrenchment in regional and global networks as well as in national and local politics (Held, Models of Democracy, 1996, 358).

It is important to note that in Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy, the role of the nation state is not eclipsed by broader global networks. Rather, the nation state, as well as local political units, are situated within a wide array of political structures and associational networks that reside within and across national, transnational, and global arenas of participation. The nation state is one among many relevant sites of politics, and in my view citizenship, rather than the primary or sole site for political action or citizenship status. And Held emphasizes that his model does not suggest that international and global spheres are, nor should become, the locus of attention for democratic theory or practice. He asserts:

If the history and practice of democracy have until now been centered on the idea of locality and place (the city-republic, the community, the nation), is it likely that in the future democracy will be centered exclusively on the international or global domain, if it is to be centered anywhere at all? To draw this conclusion is, I think, to misunderstand the nature of contemporary globalization and the argument being developed here. Globalization is, to borrow a phrase, ‘a dialectical process’: ‘local transformation is as much a part of globalization as the lateral extension of social connections across time and space’ (Giddens, 1990, 64). New demands are made for regional and local autonomy as groups find themselves buffeted by global forces and by inappropriate or ineffective political regimes. Although these circumstances are clearly fraught with danger, and the risk of an intensification of sectarian politics, they also portend a new possibility: the recovery of an intensive and participatory democracy at local levels as a complement to the deliberative assemblies of the wider global order. That is, they portend a political order of democratic associations, cities, and nations as well of regions and global networks (my emphases). In such an order, the principle of autonomy would be entrenched in diverse sites of power and across diverse spatial domains. (Held, 356-57)

It is precisely this possibility for the revitalization of localized, deliberative, democratic participation that I seek to elaborate in this essay. Sharing Held’s commitments to autonomy, cosmopolitanism, deliberation and associational networks, I now turn to deliberative democratic theory to explicate the relationship between the associations and networks of civil society and formal democratic politics within state or international institutions. Like Held, these deliberative theorists assert that citizenship within the public sphere of civil society is not a replacement for formal politics. In order words, they are not advocating a collapsing of state/civil society boundaries. Rather, they lay out the ways in which participation in the institutions of civil society—especially in the form of deliberative, public communication—both creates the political culture that supports democratic political institutions and forms public opinion that allows political representatives to make good policy decisions.