CITIZENSHIP
Broadly speaking, there have been two main politico-philosophical schools of citizenship: the liberal and civic republican traditions.3 The foundations of the liberal tradition of citizenship can be found in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), as well as in the US Bill of Rights (1789) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). This tradition holds at its core the values of individual liberty—conceived of as “negative freedom,” or the freedom to do what one likes as long as it does not impede others’ right to do the same—and the right to property. Participation of the citizenry in the running of society is largely through voting and the payment of taxes. This liberal notion of citizenship was reformulated in the mid-twentieth century in T. H. Marshall’s seminal work Citizenship and Social Class.4 While maintaining a focus on the individual, he incorporated the idea of “social rights” as being crucial to citizenship in addition to civil and political rights. As those before him had, he saw the state as bestowing these rights on those it governs. He contended that the provision of rights had expanded progressively from civil to political to social rights.
In contrast to the liberal tradition, the civic republican tradition highlights the collective rather than the individual. Its roots can be traced back further than those of the liberal tradition, to Aristotle and the Athenian city-state.5 While both traditions conceive of the individual as preexistent to and choosing to enter into society, in the liberal tradition the individual then has minimal responsibilities, and political engagement occurs through representation. In the civic republican tradition, by contrast, direct political participation is vital; as Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson put it, this is a tradition “based on popular wisdom” through the active engagement of all in the creation and upholding of laws.6
In the twentieth century, communitarianism emerged as a “cousin” of civic republicanism, and its followers further developed arguments about the importance of community and the collective in order to challenge the individualistic focus of liberal interpretations of citizenship.7 Crucially, communitarians, perhaps most notably Michael Sandel, call into question the liberal notion that the individual is “unencumbered”—that is, rational, autonomous, and self-sufficient.8 Rather, they argue, the individual is very much “encumbered” by community because, as Alison Assiter writes, humans are “social beings.”9 Thus our actions as citizens are influenced by our relationships to our community and cannot be separated from them (in other words, the individual is not preexistent to society). While considered to offer valuable contributions regarding how we might better comprehend citizenship, communitarianism has not been without its critics.10 Indeed, both the broadly liberal and broadly civic republican traditions and their offshoots have been strongly critiqued from a variety of theoretical perspectives, not least a feminist one.
The feminist critique of both liberal and civic republican traditions of citizenship is founded on an analysis of who the citizen is supposed to be. Feminist interrogations of this question expose the answer to be, as Ruth Lister explains, “a definitely male citizen, and a white heterosexual, non-disabled one at that” under the “universalist cloak of the abstract, disembodied individual.”11 The supposedly universal, gender-neutral citizen is in fact profoundly gendered because of the classic binary created between public and private spheres, whereby the rational and abstract is associated with the public sphere and masculinity and the emotional and embodied with the private sphere and femininity.12 The citizen acts in the public sphere and so must be rational, capable of abstraction, and therefore masculine.13 Moreover, as those working in the communitarian tradition had identified, this rational, autonomous citizen fits within a highly individualistic concept of citizenship. While a communitarian perspective did attempt to overcome the individualistic approach of liberal citizenship and, to a lesser extent, civic republicanism, feminist theorists such as Iris Young criticized communitarianism for its reification of the idea of community and therefore its failure to admit difference.14
More recent understandings of citizenship, such as Ruth Lister’s, have highlighted the fluidity and multiplicity of identity and group belonging while maintaining the ideal of universal rights for all.15 Through a focus on agency, she proposes a synthesis of the liberal and civic republican traditions:
Citizenship as participation [civic republican tradition] represents an expression of human agency in the political arena, broadly defined; citizenship as rights [liberal tradition] enables people to act as agents. Moreover, citizenship rights are not fixed. They remain the object of political struggles to defend, reinterpret and extend them. Who is involved in these struggles, where they are placed in the political hierarchy and the political power and influence they can yield will help to determine the outcomes. Citizenship thus emerges as a dynamic concept in which process and outcome stand in a dialectical relationship to each other.16
Thus, Lister is advocating an understanding of citizenship as both “being” and “doing,” as a status and a practice. Furthermore, she argues that citizenship occurs on multiple levels, blurring the perceived gap between public and private and giving prominence to the idea that the experience of citizenship is not limited to state-level interactions but also includes participation in more “informal” arenas, such as collective participation in community organizations. As Luin Goldring indicates, Lister is also highly aware of the impact of social identities, such as gender, on the ability of individuals to act at different levels.17
Iterations of Citizenship in Latin America
In the Latin American context, Bryan Roberts, though not writing from an overtly feminist standpoint, has taken a similar approach. He understands citizenship as “always negotiated[,] since by their participation citizens can change their rights and obligations and, equally, governing elites may seek to limit or influence these changes as a means of consolidating their power.”18 Roberts traces the history of citizenship in Latin America back to the aftermath of the wars of independence, a period that saw the adoption of liberal constitutions in many Latin American countries, often directly modeled on those of the United States or France. He argues, however, that following these liberal beginnings, “the evolution of citizenship in Latin America is not linear, nor did the extension of one set of rights, whether civil, political or social, necessarily entail the extension of others.”19 He is also cognizant of the different ways in which citizenship in Latin America is and has been experienced according to gender and ethnic identities, and he emphasizes particularly the significant exclusions suffered by indigenous populations. Thus, Roberts disrupts Marshall’s argument regarding the linear way in which the provision of citizenship rights expanded, in addition to arguing for an understanding of citizenship much more akin to Lister’s.20
Indeed, Roberts argues that in the majority of Latin American countries, from the 1940s to the 1970s social rights were the first “set” of rights to be extended to the population in a relatively comprehensive fashion, although there were still significant gaps in provision. He suggests that this reflected the priorities of both the growing urban poor, for whom education, health, and other social welfare provisions were of obvious importance, and the state and the elite, with whom the developmentalist theories of the time, with their emphasis on health and education as the keys to development, resonated strongly. Moreover, the expansion of social rights represented a way for the state and elite to quell and co-opt potential discontent from the working classes. Bolivia arguably fits within this assessment to a considerable degree, and Chile to a lesser extent (as Roberts acknowledges).