Democratizing forces:

dutiful citizens, the civil sphere and post-hoc entitlement

Trevor Stack, University of Aberdeen

I will discuss in this papera recent exchange between Bryan Turner and Jeffrey Alexander in the pages of Citizenship Studies, as well as James Holston’s recent book Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (2008).Together with the work of those scholars, I will sketch out some findings ofthe fieldwork that I conducted in 2007 in the Mexican states of Michoacán and Jalisco.

Despite their differences, Alexander and Turner both share with Holston a broad concern with what might be called democratizing forces. I follow O’Donnell (1999)in distinguishing “polyarchy” – an expansion of political participation - from the “democratic” extension of “autonomous and responsible agency (and…the basic dignity and obligation of human respect that derive from this attribution…)”.[1]And I say “democratizing forces” because I agree, with all three scholars, that democratization (in that sense of the word) does not happen of its own accord, or necessarily as a result of electoral competition. As an example of a democratizing force, Holston notesthat in France and the United States “[p]rinciple collided with prejudice in pitched battles over the terms of incorporation into the polity and the distribution of rights to those admitted” (30). Alexander writes in a similar vein of “incorporating…outgroups into the core groups, so that there can be a more egalitarian distribution of resources or recognition” (190). They share, in other words, a desire to see people treat each other more equally and respectfully and to be treated as such – and for measures such as legal protection and socioeconomic redistribution to help ensure that.

Was citizenship a democratizing force? Alexander, Turner and Holstondiffer over whether citizenship could, potentially, democratize. By “citizenship”, all three mean, more or less, membership of a nation and/or relationship with a state. Holston reminds us that inequality, together with equality, has been written into citizenship everywhere; in other words, citizenship is not inherently egalitarian (20).[2]Alexander is also sceptical -citizenship could only democratize if it is subject to the institutionalised values of the civil sphere.Turner, by contrast, doubts that the civil sphere could really produce the kind of democratizing force that comes from a sense of entitlement as private individuals, which in turn comes from duty or service to the (national) community. The sense of being private individuals can also, Turner argues, bring about civil peace. He notes, however, that entitlement has been erodedby the decline of formal employment, for example.

Part of the difference is empirical: Turner focuses on the UK, Alexander on the US and Holston onBrazil, where he notes that inequality has historically been an accepted contour of citizenship and citizenship has lacked the democratizing force that it has had in the USA and France (30). Brazil has also seen an expansion of the informal sector, which for Turner (2001)would reduce obligations to the state and thus further blunt citizenship’s democratizing edge. However, Holston’s work on autoconstrução(literally, self-construction, applied specifically to the building of houses in urban peripheries) suggests a different set of democratizing forces.“Autoconstruction”producesits own brand of entitlement, which Holstonalso terms “citizenship”, albeit an urban sense of Brazilian citizenship.Moreover, while Alexander and Turner focus on the role of democratizing in restoring civil peace, Holston stresses the destabilising effects of democratising forces, including the violence of recent years in Brazil (271-313).In other words,democratizing forces can disturb as well as produce civil peace.

I will then make some observations from my own fieldwork in Mexico, a context that shares some characteristics with Brazil – such as widespread “informality” – but with some important differences, including the legacy of the Mexican Revolution and recent mass migration to the United States. My informants showed some sense of entitlement from duty to the nation-state, but it was differentiated and anyway attenuated, and also qualified by a sharp distinction between government and nation. I found some limited evidence of the institutionalization of civic values having a democratizing effect. Thirdly, I point to the legal limbo that is a norm of life, with highly ambivalent effects on democratisation.

I will conclude by noting that my Mexican informants used the term “citizenship” in a much broader way, suggesting that we think about citizenship in as broad a way as possible, however we decide to use the term. I argue, too, that the nation-state is not the only locus of democratic forces. Many of my informants felt more a connection – and contribution – to towns and cities. That could be particularizing rather than truly democratizing, although it could provide an alternative home to non-national citizens. Finally, I suggest, following Alexander(2006), that we rethink the relation of law to democratisation and citizenship.

Three sets of democratizing forces[3]

Entitlement through duty or service to the state as national community/polity

Turner mounts a spirited defence of the democratizing potential in citizenship, although he feels that potential has been weakened in recent years. Turner identifies “citizenship” with the sense of entitlement that stems from duty or service to the nation-state. It is clear that he has in mind the same context in which T.H. Marshall wrote –post-war Britain(Marshall and Bottomore 1992).

Turner (2001)has written that entitlement is being eroded because its ground in duty is being undermined. Not only is formal employment on the decline, but military service been reduced or eliminated in many states. The exception, for Turner, is reproductive duty - he notes the hundreds of extra rights and benefits that accrue to those who marry and especially who have children. Turner sides with those who see the recent controversies about gay marriage as evidence of the salience of marriage, heterosexual or otherwise, in contemporary society (196-8).

For Turner, it is not just that tax-paying etc. gives people a sense of entitlement as private individuals; it makes them feel like private individuals in the first place. That, in turn, is Turner’s recipe for civil peace: people learn to set aside the primordial identities that make, in his terms, for an “enclave society”. In other words, not only does duty to the state produce an expanded sense of entitlement and, in the process, discourage citizens from taking up antagonistic positions, but it also invests power in an agency that can intervene to protect citizens from anti-democratizing forces(2008).

Institutionalisation of civic values in the face of non-civil spheres such as government

Alexander understands the “civil sphere” as follows:

  • he identifies the civil with a set of values (while allowing for differences in those values), which he argues are historically well entrenched in the US. Being civil is, essentially, about behaving in a way not dictated by self-interest or by some kind of dogma (such as religion) or by loyalty to a particular community. It is about being autonomous, reasonable, open, trusting,critical and respecting of law, inclusion, equality, office and so on.
  • he does not divide society into civil and political society, but centres attention on the relationship of the civil with various non-civil spheres, including community, family, religion, market (which capitalism has made non-civil) and the state
  • he puts emphasis on the power or force of the civil sphere over non-civil spheres, including the state: the civil sphere must have purchase over the non-civil spheres rather than vice versa (it must not be colonised by state, market and so on)
  • the civil sphere achieves its power over non-civil spheres through “communicative institutions” (such as the media) and especially “regulative institutions”, which include voting, office and the law (including civil law over the economy)
  • regulative institutions need civil associations to enhancetheir power through such institutions by the solidarity of its associations – his examples are the NAACP and ACLU – but he stresses, against some of the literature on social capital, that the solidarity must be universalistic and not particularistic. This is why he labels “community” as non-civil, as I discuss below.
  • the civil sphere struggles, firstly, to incorporate those people who are construed as different and as such generally stigmatised and excluded, such as blacks and Jews; and secondly, to extend that incorporation by exerting force over the non-civil spheres, e.g. by getting education rights for blacks. Alexander sees multiculturalism as a way of “incorporating” people into the civil sphere without forcing them to “assimilate”.

In a critical review of The Civil Sphere, Turner complains that Alexander

neglects how the institutions of secular citizenship as a public institution connecting the private citizen to the state through such mechanisms as taxation and public service is a necessary brake upon the exclusionary solidaristic forces of the family, the tribe, the sect and the secret society (179).

It is true that Alexander says little about citizenship in the book – “citizens” and “citizenship” do not appear in his index. And in his reply to Turner’s review, Alexander asks: “Can we place our hopes for justice in an institution [citizenship] that… has so often been defined in such a circumscribed manner that it has suggested only membership in the state?” (185).His reluctance to use the term may well stem from that narrow scholarly usage – he would not want his civil sphere confused with membership of nation-states.[4]

Alexander also complains that “citizenship means nothing unless its putatively universalistic status can be forced upon the state by institutions outside” (188). Why “putatively universalistic”?

1. Turner doubts that Alexander’s civil sphere has the muscle to achieve civil peace – break down the exclusionary forces that created those enclaves. But Alexander remains confident (at least for the US) and confident that the civil sphere can overcome those “exclusionary forces”, while doubting that Turner’s state could deliver on that promise. Indeed, he sees important limits to state power. He argues, for example that:

States need to control the diversity of citizens; it is only the civil sphere that has the capacity for incorporating them, for bringing outgroups into the core groups, so that there can be a more egalitarian distribution of resources or recognition (190).[5]

In other words, the civil sphere can do things that states cannot.

2. Alexander doubts that the state, understood as government, would ever really act in that way, even if it could, unless it were compelled by a civil sphere.[6] He complains that Turner writes for an effective state and seems less concerned just how democratic that state is. By contrast, Alexander insists that the state be reigned in. Although noting that states always make non-civil “exceptions” in times of war, he argues that the US civil sphere has successfully limited those exceptions to times of war and even then worked to contain those wartime exceptions. For example:

The nature and limits of torture for military prisoners have…been intensely debated in the American civil sphere, and efforts have been mounted to curtail the conservative government’s violations of the Geneva Convention, culminating in Congressionally-supported legal guarantees (189).

3. Citizenship excludes as much as it includes. For example, should the US civil sphere be struggling to “incorporate” the large numbers of undocumented workers? Or to expel them?[7] And, as Holston insists, even when citizenship includes, it discriminates. He finds that Brazilian citizenship has been inclusive, historically, but only a formal sense, and there has been little drive to a “substantive distribution of rights”.It is notthat Brazilian citizenship does not deliver on its promise of equality – in Brazil it has never promised more than formal equality. US citizenship, by contrast, has been relatively exclusive but includes a greater “democratizing” drive towards substantive equality, as Alexander’s account bears witness (25-33).[8]

5. Alexander is sceptical of Turner’s claim that citizens as private individuals will achieve a great deal.Hence his stress on the power of associations, themselves working through communicate and regulative institutions. Moreover, like Asad, Alexander questions the secular move of putting nationality “above” other commitments such as community, religion and so on (191).[9]

6. While Turner writes of “the state” as a polity that, among other functions, lays down the law, Alexander wants to separate law from government. He writes:

[L]aw comes in different guises, and in this sense it is misleading to speak of “law” per se. Law often concerns itself with functional adaptation… with creating more efficient means of administration in order to allow actors more effectively to secure material goals or communities to promote their particular values. In modern societies, as Weber demonstrated, virtually every authoritative decision must eventually be articulated in a rational-legal form. But these noncivil purposes and effects do not exhaust what law is about… The aspiration toward which democratic law aims is a civil society. In fact, to the degree that the civil sphere gains authority and independence, obedience to law is seen not as subservience to authority, whether administrative or communal, but as commitment to rules that allow solidarity and autonomy… (152)

I will return to the question of law at the end of the paper.

Unsettling of hierarchy through post-hoc entitlement[10]

Holston arguesthat national citizenship everywhere deals in inequality as much as equality, but that in Brazilunlike in the USA and France, citizenship was never even supposed to democratize – to extend beyond equality before the law.

However, he ends the book by looking at the experiences of autoconstruction: the building of “illegal” settlements in urban peripheries. He argues that:

these experiences fuelled the irruption of an insurgent citizenship that destabilised the differentiated at the very sites that produced differentiation – political rights, landed property, residential illegality, misrule of law, and servility…. as the urban poor gained political rights, became property owners, made law an asset, and achieved a greater sense of personal competence through their urban practices (199).

While Taylor assumes the law and Alexander makes it into a pillar of his civic sphere, Holston argue that citizens go beyond the law in order to build (literally)a measure of autonomy, or indeed to survive. For example:

The very illegality of house lots in peripheries makes land accessible to those who cannot afford the higher sale or rental prices of legal residence. As significant, this residential illegality eventually prompts a confrontation with legal authorities in which residents generally succeed, after long and arduous struggle, in legalizing their precarious land claims. Illegal residence is, therefore, a common and ultimately reliable way for the urban working classes to gain access to land and housing and to turn their possession into property (207).

But why does Holston want to use the same term “citizenship” – which he still links to membership of the nation-state - for his “insurgent” forces? Firstly, I suspect, because he links the “insurgent” forces of urban settlement to Lula’s victory in 2002 (5-6). Secondly, by staking a claim for a place in the city, they arguably stake a claim for a place in the nation-state. Thirdly, theexperience of “illegality” pushes them back to national law, to “make law an asset”, even if simply to keep that law at bay (207).

Democratizing forces: some queries

Are these three sets of democratizing forces distinct from each other?

There are all kinds of overlap between the three forces that I have outlined, but the distinction between them may still be analytically useful. For example, Alexander and Turner’s argument are not mutually exclusive. Even if Alexander is right to stress the democratic force of the “civil sphere”, narrowly conceived, Turner could also be right to say that the entitlement that comes from service or contribution to the state can also generate a democratic force, although it is arguably non-civil and can also generate further inequality. And dutiful citizenship and the civil sphere surely meet in the idea of the public-spirited citizen, but Alexander would still distinguish between duty to a particular community from a broader, perhaps more cosmopolitan sense of duty. Alexander does not list duty as a civic virtue, presumably because duty or service implies subjection - to a particular authority or perhaps community or collectivity.[11]

Meanwhile, Holston argues that “autoconstruction” is distinguishable from (if not exclusive of) the institutionalisation of civic values and entitlement through duty to the nation-state. There may, of course, be civic values – and corresponding institutions - born of the experience of urban construction, but not necessarily. And Holston suggests that the experience produces a sense of entitlement not just in the city but in the Brazilian nation, but Turner’s notion of duty to the state clearly presumes that duty is consonant with law – as in paying taxes and military service.

Is the nation-state a privileged site of democratization?