|
|
|
Email this citationCIAO DATE: 12/99
Neither Gentleman nor Citizens: First World Models and Third Wave Products
January 1998
Institute for Latin American and Iberian Studies at Columbia University
Abstract
The “durability” of Third Wave democracies is no longer the disquieting source of concern it once was. Democratic collapse has become the exception rather than the rule. Yet assessed in terms of democratic deepening, the performance of Third Wave democracies has been poor. Observers continue to identify obstacles to improved performance—from politicians’ perverse incentive-structures to socio-economic control by closed elite circles. This essay argues, however, that we frequently overlook the more profound and intractable obstacle to the deepening of democracy: a broad indifference in many Third Wave democracies to the socio-political formation of citizenship and the cultural composition of the “citizen.” The hardened political identities that “distort” new democracies, for example, are placed in bold relief by the absence of the citizen as a countervailing force. The essay suggests that inquiries into the microfoundational soundness of Third Wave democracies should focus on the degree of institutionalization of citizenship and self-conscious empowerment of the citizen. Finally, we must ground analysis of the institutionalized practice of citizenship and civic identity-formation in socio-historical and cultural fields of possibility. “Traditional” identities endure in cultures that efface the citizen, and thus inhibit the minimal but reciprocal equality that comes from universal membership in a civic body. The socio-political institutionalization of citizenship and the cultural formation of the citizen—perhaps the most difficult challenges confronting Third Wave democracies today—are also the most basic. This essay invokes a variation on a classic warning to scholars and policymakers who would avoid these challenges: no civic microfoundations, no true democracy.
Success occasionally breeds its own failures. Foundational and second-cycle elections—once the improbable goal of anti-authoritarians—have already been held throughout most of Eastern Europe and Latin America. The “durability” of Third Wave democracies, once an object of concern, is now a source of surprise: democratic collapse, thus far, remains the exception rather than the rule. And yet, in a taxonomic turn, scholarly research on democratic consolidation has generated, to borrow from Collier and Levitsky, a long list of disheartening “adjectives” for Third Wave democracies. A small sample from this list—“immature,” “impotent,” and “sick”—illustrates the sense of disenchantment in the air. 1
Investigations into the causes of democratic immaturity, impotence, and sickness have produced, broadly speaking, three types of explanations. The first emphasizes the constraints imposed by “traditional power structures”—meaning the control of vital socio-economic resources and the perpetuation of old practices of discipline and allegiance, say, clientelism, by “closed circles” of elites (usually held together by familial ties). 2 The second puts the accent on institutional factors—from (institutional) legacies that shape actors’ new (institutional) choices in perverse ways, to the pacted creation of "reserve domains" for authoritarian actors in post-authoritarian regimes. 3 Finally, the third type of explanation concentrates on civil society—particularly the promises inherent in “new” social movements, the latters’ evanescent quality in post-transitional settings, and the cultural rigidities that support authoritarian legacies. 4
In the first two types of accounts, structures of one kind or another are given pride of place, while socio-cultural shifts and political contingency figure prominently in the third. In none is the democratic citizen problematized. Where the concept of citizenry is even mentioned, it is in connection to “broader” concerns and forces such as globalization. 5
But polities, like economic systems and philosophical constructs, are grounded in microfoundations; at least in theory, democratic regimes ultimately rest on citizenries aware and in possession of their rights and duties. In practice, moreover, the microfoundational soundness of Third Wave democracies remains a crucial question—whether we choose to deposit our hopes for deep democratic consolidation either in “rational” (as opposed to perverse) incentive-structures, or in “open” (as opposed to closed) elites. Any self-serving politician understands that if voters conceive of themselves as clients, not democratic citizens, then he must act like a patron. And there is little chance that traditional elites will “open up” if they can barely acknowledge the humanity of “subaltern” classes and racial groups, let alone accept the full implications of a set of universal claims and responsibilities.
Indeed, the viability of a progressive vision centered on a strong civil society depends critically on the recognition that the patron, the supremacist, and the subaltern, all endure in cultures which, without need of directives from a retrograde central brain, privilege certain identities and eclipse others. Put more directly, such “traditional” identities endure in cultures which, both by means as obvious as stereotyping and as subtle as historiographic lapses, efface the citizen, and thus inhibit the minimal but reciprocal equality that comes from true universal membership in a civic body.
Where is the Third Wave Citizen?
Studies of the socio-historical development of citizenship and the cultural formation of the citizen in Third Wave democracies are rare. Three possible, interrelated reasons for this paucity come to mind. First: scholarship, like charity, begins at home. And sometimes, it stays there for a long while. The modern concept of citizenship is the product of complex, protracted processes that began in 17th-century England and have continued to the present day in Europe and the United States. Indeed, the nature, scope, and permanence of citizens’ social rights are even now being renegotiated in the advanced industrial democracies. The upshot of all this is that scholarly attention has been absorbed by the victories, trials, and changing conditions of First World citizenship. 6
The justifiably close attention paid to Europe and the United States, however, need not entail scholarly neglect of citizenship formation and transformation in Third Wave democracies. After all, while Western scholarship on citizenship stayed at home, Western models of state-citizen engagement have typically followed a product-cycle pattern of export and “refinement” abroad. Countries that had nothing to do with the development of those models have tried to apply them, sometimes with exquisite intensity. Just recall classical liberalism (in 19th century Chile), social democracy (in early 1970’s Chile), and neo-liberalism (in Pinochet’s Chile).
Heightened imitation, by Chileans or anyone else, poses no inherent problem. But it does become problematic if the state overwhelms “civil society” —- sometimes in the course of implementing anti-statist models—because citizens qua citizens fail to materialize. Indeed, it is then that the rampant degradation that attends gross violations of human rights is most likely to occur, either under the steady hand of a military regime, or in the fervor of “civil” wars. Put in the form of a positive analogy: if it makes intuitive sense that, on the international plane, democracies would be reluctant to engage each other in war, then it is at least equally plausible that on the domestic plane, self-aware members of a civic community would be reluctant to deploy violence against their fellows.
The second possible reason for the relative obscurity of the Third Wave citizen, and related to the product-cycle pattern of state-citizenry regimes, is the generalized notion that innovations travel well. On this logic, one need not be Alexander Graham Bell to use a telephone, or Thomas Edison to use a lightbulb. If you get the wiring right and banish superstition from the village, people will communicate and illuminate effectively. Electoral-representative institutions are among the political analogues of the telephone and the lightbulb. Though European in genesis and historical in their development, electoral-representative institutions are also recognized for the inventions that they are. Representative institutions, for example, combine norms and practices that are themselves hybrids of classical political philosophy, medieval traditions, republican and liberal ideologies, critical political struggles, and last but not least, elite innovation in the face of national-scale politics and socio-economic diversification. 7
If perceived primarily as inventions, electoral and representative institutions may also be seen as ever-ready for extensive “borrowing” by democratizing countries. Democratic institutional performance, to be sure, may prove deficient in particular instances. But typically, analysts will say that such deficiencies are due to poor local choices from among the available democratic models, local “deformities” in the system of incentives, and/or local constraints imposed by traditional actors on textbook institutional machineries. The former cases call for institutional tinkering, perhaps even re-tooling; the latter for patience, since the new institutions presumably will foster novel practices that will rearrange power relations and displace home-grown traditions, eventually.
Local political actors, however, may not perceive deformed democratic institutions as being in need of correction. After all, these “deformities” are spontaneous redesigns—that is, they are new institutional hybrids which, though pernicious, hold their own appeal for powerful “deformers.” Furthermore, it is illogical to expect new democratic institutions to uproot the very traditions that strangle them. Thus, the assumption that institutions can be built more easily and quickly than self-aware citizens is disputable at best. Even Dankwart Rustow, who argued that the spread of democratic institutions requires only that “the vast majority of citizens” harbor no doubt as “to which political community they belong to,” 8 assumed the prior existence of both citizens and community.
This last point brings us to the third possible reason for the dearth of scholarly inquiry into the sources and conditions of Third Wave citizenship. Third Wave domestic elites themselves have maintained a conceptual, and at times ideological, silence on the question of citizenship and democratic community. Under state socialism, Eastern Europe banished citizens’ political and civil rights from the realm. In Latin America, the record is also discouraging. If one were for a moment to conceptualize deep democratization as including a radical shift in discursive formations, then Latin American democratization has been rather shallow. Elites and popular bases alike have generally understood regime transitions as the redistribution of power that takes place against a background of accumulated localist, partisan, and class apprehensions.
Similarly, the region’s recurrent debates have been about social order, political authority, and economic redistribution (themselves thematic indicators of a fractured community). The closest one can find to a unifying identity in Latin American history is the one implicit in the notion of “fraternity”—19th century civil wars, for example, were seen as “fratricidal” clashes “caused” either by the “anarchical” enemies of familial integrity or the abuses of “tyrannical” paternal leaders. If anything, texts dating back to the formative “national” period (the first half of the nineteenth century) are replete with references to a most peculiar notion of popular sovereignty. As Francois-Xavier Guerra has succinctly put it: “According to Spanish-American elites, the true people had not yet been born.” From the perspective of socio-political elites, the “true people” had to be forged by aristocratic governments whose enlightened policies would gradually create acceptable replacements for the “urban riffraff” and the “ignorant peasants.” 9
By end of century, however, these elites had merely managed to expand their own circles. And they had succeeded at creating civic cultures which, confined to the clubs and associations formed by proud “sons” of this or that city, could not withstand the great socio-economic and political transformations in store.
Those transformations, ranging from the emergence of significant labor movements in the first decades of the twentieth century to the ascendance of populist governance, help account for the fact that the region’s political elites are no longer exclusively drawn from the upper classes; no longer unabashedly “parochial;” and, above all, no longer dare speak openly of urban riffraff and ignorant peasants. But another fact remains: elites have failed to develop a shared discourse centered on an identity at once equalizing and uplifting, like that of citizen. Review the pronouncements of the region’s political leaders, and you will find frequent mention of the “state,” “popular sectors,” and even the “constitution” but few allusions to the citizen.
This vacuum of consciousness is perhaps the most profound challenge facing human rights organizations in most Third Wave democracies today. For even as these organizations fight legal battles on behalf of the abused and promote political awareness among the disempowered, they come up against the reality that the abused, the disempowered, and, just as importantly, the abusers, the mighty, and most everyone in between, are all connected by a missing link: civic self-conception.
Great Marshalls and Grand Visions
In 1873, Alfred Marshall, the founder of neoclassical economics, declared:
The question is not whether all men will ultimately be equal—that they certainly will not—but whether progress may not go on steadily, if slowly, 'til, by occupation, at least, every man is a gentleman. 10
This was nothing less than a civilizing project, the successful implementation of which required that the members of the working classes “steadily develop independence and a manly respect for themselves and therefore a courteous respect for others.” It mattered, furthermore, that the working classes
steadily accept the private and public duties of a citizen; steadily increasing their grasp of the truth that they are men, and not producing machines ... [thus] steadily becoming gentlemen. 11
Thus conceived, as the other famous Marshall observed, the civilizing project flowed from an “economic calculation” and put the emphasis squarely on the duties of citizens. In contrast to Alfred Marshall, T.H. Marshall understood citizenship as a universal status entailing both rights and duties, with the emphasis on rights. Moreover, T.H. Marshall based his view not on a forward-looking economic calculation, but on a socio-historical investigation of the processes of economic and political differentiation underlying capitalist development. Such processes—T.H. Marshall’s argument goes—both loosened “bundles” of medieval rights and duties, and engendered the social classes, as well as the state’s judicial, legislative, and social services, that at different stages pressed for, and enlarged the rights and duties of, modern citizenship. 12
On the eve of the twenty-first century, as in the waning middle ages, bundles of rights and duties are being undone and reconfigured—this time under pressure from a consensus of opinion which holds that structural fiscal limitations demand realistic social policy. Thus, in the advanced industrial democracies, social “rights” are implicitly reshaped through the explicit restructuring of social programs. Simultaneously, in Eastern Europe, the (roundly celebrated) tendency toward citizens’ repossession of their civil and political rights is matched by a tendency (initially seen as inevitable and increasingly seen as unjust) toward dispossession of their social rights. 13
None of this, however, is either linear or inexorable. As elections become routinized, insecure voters in the East and poorly-clothed and ill-fed voters in the South have begun to ask: is this all there is? And in the academy itself, as previously mentioned, Third Wave democracies are routinely characterized as fundamentally lacking in one or another respect.
Virtual Realities and Absentee Citizens
The rights and duties of citizens may be specified in formal constitutions, but self-aware citizens often remain detached from the discursive and practical activities of the public sphere. In Latin America, traumatic episodes—starting in the early post-colonial period—have failed to evoke meditations on the nature of citizenship, or even ideological representations of the citizen, either as an archetypical or contextualized identity. Instead, “fratricidal” wars in 19th century Central America and dirty wars in 20th century Southern Cone countries have often been seen as aberrations to be “forgotten” in the name of national reconciliation. Hence the primacy of pacts and repeated calls for amnesty.
In the Central American case at least, amnesty was taken quite literally; that is, it was conceived as self-inflicted collective “amnesia.” But erasures, now as then, create empty spaces. At the discursive level, these spaces have typically been filled by official stories and partisan rival accounts. Like the self-serving history of the Conquest crafted at the end of the sixteenth century by Spain’s royal cosmographer, these stories and accounts are astute, often bold combinations of euphemisms, omissions, and exaggerations designed to establish once and for all that the way things were is the only way they could have been.
To prevent uncontested control by an official story, groups such as Memoria Activa, or Active Memory, have formed in Argentina. But Memoria Activa notwithstanding, an accommodation between a pragmatic civilian government and a weakened military has been forged—based partly on executive pardons of officers and, more generally, on an informal official policy of letting by-gones be by-gones. In post-authoritarian Chile, where general anxiety for national reconciliation has accumulated without benefit of a discursive field in which to “cultivate” effective conciliatory practices, competing “truths” have confused and burdened the average individual (as ethical being). 14 The result in both countries has been a failure to establish among elites and public alike some core truth around which to build rival accounts of the past.
A core truth would be, at least in the context of this essay, a non-negotiable normative agreement that settles old disputes (and precludes new ones) about key civic issues associated with a great historical trauma. One core truth about the American Civil War, for example, is slavery’s evil. No scholarly or even popular interpretation of that war can resonate with a mainstream audience unless it leaves this truth untouched.
Core truths, put more generally, foment silence because they are morally unassailable. This, however, is precisely the kind of silence that eludes Argentina; and it is the very opposite of the silence that threatens to fall over Chile. In Chile, there has been the predictable hush that reigns among self-protecting violators. But there is also the prudential quiet and determined moderation of democrats who, on critical reflection, became cognizant of the ways that their own competitive practices had once polarized their polity, creating favorable opportunities for authoritarian actors. 15
This was a good lesson to learn—up to a point. On the surface, Chilean democracy is “virtually” consolidated; underneath, however, the unintended convergence of self-protection and self-censorship threatens to inculcate a pernicious “habit” in Chile’s democratic “heart,” to paraphrase Tocqueville. Should this habit take hold, it would be no less than a kind of “pacted forgetting” or “pacted dissimulation” (as opposed to the establishment of an irrevocable, normatively robust agreement on a “core truth”).
Though unplanned, pacted forgetting and dissimulation can cause systematic damage to any democracy in ways that may be difficult to detect but not hard to imagine. They may undermine democratic quality in the long-term, for example, by fostering contempt and cynicism. Moreover, they may invite political instability. That is to say, there is always the possibility that a party to the pact, say, General Pinochet, will act opportunistically, and formally articulate a self-serving story aimed at shaping future generations’ understanding of the past. A spiral of counterbids is likely to follow, thus introducing eruption where there was silence, and disarray where there was convergence.
In the meantime, the citizen, whose rights have been thoroughly violated, remains an absentee identity. This has grave implications for democratic deepening. First, neglect of the invisible is bound to seem “natural,” thus relieving the state in an almost seamless way of the task of enforcing either the rights or duties of the citizen. Not surprisingly, then, as Larry Diamond has shown, the effective expression and protection of political rights and civil liberties actually deteriorated between 1987 and 1994 in Latin America as a whole. 16
Second, this “naturalness” is self-reproducing. The absence of the citizen as an historically-contextualized identity, for example, obscures past home-grown civic cultures—however narrow in scope or mimetic in form these might have been. Mutualist associations, Athenian style oratorical forums, and dignified urbanism were all part of late nineteenth century Latin American city life among elites. But such historical precedents have been lost to contemporary generations. Finally, as universalizing sentiment is dissipated in the void left by a non-existent civic culture, the energies of political leaders tend to concentrate on keenly adversarial projects.
Perpetually in the grip of fear—fear of societal violence, economic anarchy, authoritarian restoration, and unbroken electoral dominance by a popular rival—politicians are constantly concerned with power relations among the branches of the national government, between the center and the regions and localities, and finally between social classes and among racial and ethnic groups. Politics itself comes to mean the contestation and deployment of coercive, symbolic, and material capabilities by one group against another. This struggle, in turn, indirectly shapes state capacity. At one extreme, keen adversarialism produces a self-strangulating state like Nicaragua. At the other, it produces a Bonapartist presidency in Argentina. If the past is any guide, neither will prove sustainable. As we have seen, the ultimate irony is that this “us versus them” quality of Latin American politics is in good part the consequence of past attempts at national reconciliation.
Reconciliation and Glimmers of Hope
Real national reconciliation requires not only Argentines and Chileans but Latin Americans in general to problematize in practice the citizen that scholars must problematize in study. Three related reasons justify a new approach to national reconciliation based on the primacy of the citizen. First, societies lacking a well-articulated civic discourse tend to generate aggregated, vertical identities — “los líderes” (leaders) and “el pueblo” (the people). Second, these identities are mutually-distancing: they retain their coherence only as long as they remain at arm’s length. And third, their distancing power has a reflexive effect. Central American socio-economic elites, for example, when referring to themselves intra muros as “nosotros,” do so in solidaristic dread of “them.” The them, of course, are the “loud” marketwomen and the “plaintive” campesinos, the “taciturn” mechanics and the “reckless” taxidrivers, all of whom, in their quotidian self-descriptions, reveal something quite remarkable: even el pueblo talks about el pueblo as an aggregation of nobodies. 17
The eclipse of the citizen, the opacity of her political and civil rights, and the state’s limited capacity for enforcement have been destabilizing democracies in the region since long before the Third Wave. Embedded in ubiquitous vertical dependencies in the economy and polity, “leaders” incessantly seek control of peak positions; “the people,” fragmented in sentiment, forge alliances with competing elites; and competition overall provokes disruptions in the very system of dependencies that make up the “informal” polity. Where formal institutions impede either informal competition or stabilization—and in the absence of the normative constraints that a self-aware citizenry can impose on political conduct—the governance capacity of democratic regimes is often eroded by politics itself.
The point here is this: a citizenry that has been evicted from the realm of the imaginable cannot impose civic normative constraints on the possible. Hence elites’ expectations of intractable excesses from the “masses” that already loom so large in the imagination. Dread of mass mobilization is even mirrored in the extant democratization literature. Everywhere in the academy, pro-democratic Machiavellis have counseled caution and pragmatism during regime transitions; 18 and have pointed time and again to the destabilizing potential of "the masses" in consolidating democracies. 19
But we would do well to remember that a mass of citizens is not a mob; and citizen activism is not a riot. A citizenry inclined to engage in collective action can be salutary for democracy. So rather than subscribe to the “myth of moderation,” to use Nancy Bermeo’s apt phrase, 20 perhaps we ought to bring the citizen back in as we revise our understanding of political mobilization to keep up with changing conditions. Consider the 1997 race for Mexico City’s regency. The most striking novelty in this competitive process was CuauhtJmoc Cárdenas’ differentiation strategy. As PRD candidate, he managed to outshine both his PAN and PRI rivals by drawing on the discourse of a non-governmental organization, the Movimiento Ciudadano por la Democratización. Specifically, Cárdenas created the campaign theme of ciudadanización.
Difficult to translate, the term hints at a vision of city governance in which citizens, as proprietors of the public space, are obliged to join forces with their accountable government in the fight against institutionalized graft, common criminality, and urban degradation. The accent, it should be noted, is on mutual obligations, as opposed to Alfred Marshall’s emphasis on citizen duties and T.H. Marshall’s stress on rights. Moreover, underlying the notion of mutual obligations in the Mexican case was an unspecified sense of shared civic correctness. Hence the subsequent public outcry and relentless media criticism prompted by Cárdenas’ first blunder: a preannounced intent to appoint his transition team (of which his own son was a member) to official posts in his new administration.
Latin American voters have learned to live with nepotism as one more face of public corruption. But when political elites have mobilized those same voters by invoking a mutually-binding normative agreement, civic sensibilities are bound to be offended. Distinct notions of public correctness, of course, are shaped by citizenries’ particular histories and structural contexts. In Hungary, for example, citizens are increasingly turning to self-organization in the face of what they perceive as the unfair allocation of economic restructuring costs. 21 In Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Ecuador, “independent citizens’ groups are increasingly drawing attention to government corruption” and demanding accountability. 22
The good news is that civic demands need not stand in mechanical relation to state capacity. Demand may create its own supply and vice versa. For example, politically-motivated experimentation with anti-poverty funds—in the context of economic restructuring and social dislocation—emerged in the 1980’s in Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Poland. Results, in turn, varied according to civic self-awareness, empowerment, and skills at the local and regional levels. 23
Such variations in types and outcomes of state society engagement are perhaps best understood with reference to the socio-historical processes reconstructed by T.H. Marshall—if only by way of contrast. Conceivably, our understanding might even be improved by challenging received notions—derivative of Marshall’s view—about the relationship between class and citizenship. Recent scholarship, for example, suggests that citizenship does not eliminate class inequality—not even in advanced industrial democracies. Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that citizenship actually generates inequity. 24 And other still insist that Marshall made a “mistake;” political and civil rights are indeed fundamental, but not redistributive social rights. Instead, the latter belong to the purview of “political compromise and bargaining.” 25
There are other good “negative” uses of Marshall’s approach. The objection, for example, may be raised that Marshall misconstrued rather than reconstructed the formation of modern citizenship. The sociologist Margaret Somers, for one, has argued persuasively that citizenship did not emerge as a status consisting of universal rights and duties conferred by the state. Somers’ evidence points instead to social and political citizenship not as a status but as a set of practices that emerged simultaneously with modern national labor laws and civil rights. There was, moreover, no national uniformity, as described by Marshall, but rather regional variations which resulted from the interaction between the national legal sphere and regional political geographies and cultures. Finally, citizenship development was tied not to particular emerging social classes, but to political action, the source of which was identity—in turn shaped by political participation and discourse in non-state public spheres, community associations, and the family. 26
Steps have already been taken toward rethinking various interpretations of democracy—from the Dahlsian to the Schumpeterian—in a Third Wave context. 27 It is now time to use the extant literature as a starting point for a self-conscious and sustained effort to understand the historical-cultural and political processes of citizenship development in Third Wave democracies. Hybrid approaches appear to be a particularly promising option. An example from Brazil illustrates the potential usefulness of blending, say, Marshall and Somers. In 1934, the Brazilian state made primary education compulsory for children between the ages of seven and fourteen. The law of the land opened up the possibility for universal primary education. But since that point, it is local political action, regional identities and ideologies, and federal governmental capacity that have actually determined both the numbers of students who get through school and the quality of their schooling. 28
Conclusion
If political development lent itself to rational design, then democratic consolidation might proceed according to the sage axiom of “first things first.” But in development, as Alexander Gershenkron saw so clearly with respect to industrialization, sometimes first things come last, or perhaps not at all. Late-comers bent on catching up with the leaders must “do it all” at once—and in their own way—relying on functional equivalents that can, at times, prove a greater curse than “backwardness” itself.
Deep democratic consolidation has come about as the result of complex, protracted processes in the advanced democracies. These processes, moreover, may have a crucial specificity to them. “No bourgeois, no democracy,” declared Barrington Moore. Dwelling on leading democracies’ own difficulties, however, will not spare Third Wave laggards from the expectation that they must do it all—if not at once, then certainly under the pressure of frustrated dreams, and in a globalized context rife with demonstration effects that provoke impatient cravings. The socio-political institutionalization of citizenship and the cultural formation of the self-aware citizen are perhaps the most difficult challenges confronting Third Wave democracies; they are also the most basic. To avoid them is to foster neither societies of gentlemen nor republics of empowered citizens. It is, instead, to invite a variation on a classic warning: no civic microfoundations, no true democracy.
Endnotes
*: The author would like to acknowledge that this essay benefited from insightful comments by the members of the workshop on authoritarian legacies, sponsored by Columbia University's Institute for Latin American and Iberian Studies (October 1997). She is especially indebted to Paloma Aguilar, Nancy Bermeo, Atilio Borón, Paola Cesarini, Margaret Crahan, Frances Hagopian, Edward Malefakis, Leonardo Morlino, Katie Roberts Hite, Gianfranco Pasquino, and Anthony Pereira. Finally, the author thanks Rut Dialit, Alina Rocha Menochal, and Anna Seleny for their insights on Argentina, Mexico, and Eastern Europe, respectively. Back.
Note 1: David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” in World Politics, Vol. 49, No.3, April 1994 Back.
Note 2: Frances Hagopian, “Traditional Power Structures and Democratic Governance in Latin America,” in Jorge Domínguez and Abraham Lowenthal, eds., Constructing Democratic Governance: Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990’s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Part II, p.68. Back.
Note 3: Barbara Geddes, “Initiation of New Democratic Institutions in Eastern Europe and Latin America,” in Arend Lijphart and Carlos Waisman, eds., Institutional Design in New Democracies, Eastern Europe and Latin America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996); and J. Samuel Valenzuela, “Democratic Consolidation in Post-Transitional Settings: Notion, Process, and Facilitating Conditions,” in Scott Mainwaring et al., eds., Issues in Democratic Consolidation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). Back.
Note 4: See for example, Scott Mainwaring and Eduardo Viola, “New Social Movements, Political Culture, and Democracy: Brazil and Argentina in the 1980’s,” in Telos Vol.17, No.61, Fall of 1984. Back.
Note 5: Liszt Vieira, Ciudadania e globalizaçao (Rio De Janeiro: Editora Record, 1997). See also Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos, Ciudadania e Justicia (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Campus Ltda., 1979). Back.
Note 6: Among these, scholars have found most compelling: the advancement of social entitlements during the post-war period; disparities along this vector among established democracies; the civil rights struggles of American blacks in the 1960’s, and the (not unrelated) construction of the Great Society; the fiscal crisis of the state in the '70’s and subsequent critiques and curtailment of the various welfare nets in the 80’s and 90’s; and the range of dilemmas raised by heavy immigration to France and Germany, as well as England and the United States, in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Back.
Note 7: Robert Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Back.
Note 8: John Waterbury, “Fortuitous By-Products,” in Comparative Politics, Volume 29, No.3, April 1997, p.384. Emphasis added. Back.
Note 9: Francois-Xavier Guerra, “Spanish-American Representation,” in Journal of Latin American Studies, Volume 26, Part I, February 1994, p.11. Back.
Note 10: Cited in T.H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p.74. Back.
Note 12: Ibid. The property-owning landed gentry—Marshall argued further—championed civil rights in eighteenth century England. Civil rights, in turn, allowed for the creation of labor markets by rendering the individual “mobile.” Moreover, by empowering laborers to “compete” for wages, such rights also eliminated the notion of the individual as deserving and in need of social protection. From there, the industrial middle classes took up the fight for political citizenship in the nineteenth century; and in the twentieth, the laboring classes became the force behind social entitlements Back.
Note 13: Zsuzsa Ferge, “Social citizenship in the new democracies. The difficulties in reviving citizens’ rights in Hungary,” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 20, No 1, March 1996. Back.
Note 14: Elizabeth Lira Kornfeld, “Y a los ojos se me asomará la vida que viví,” in IV Concurso Nacional de Ensayo (Santiago: Corporación de Reparación y Reconciliación, 1996). Back.
Note 15: Nancy Bermeo, “Democracy and the Lessons of Dictatorship,” in Comparative Politics, April 1992. Back.
Note 16: Cited in Michael Shifter, “Tensions and Trade-Offs in Latin America,” In Journal of Democracy 8.2 (1997), pp.114-128. Back.
Note 17: There was a time, of course, in Latin American politics, when distance-collapsing identities were the norm, even in a markedly hierarchical context. Charismatic caudillos—Cárdenas, Vargas, Perú, Somoza García—forged bonds of loyalty and broke bread with “their men.” Others, like Bolívar, Carrera, and Sandino even led their men in battle. Caudillismo survives today in highly attenuated form, as demonstrated quietly by Salinas de Gortari, sternly by Fujimori, stiffly by General Ortega, and with flair by Menem. But in the end, neither classical caudillismo nor its modern variants can serve as functional equivalents for the broadly encompassing respect that obtains among citizens who recognize themselves as peers.
Identity-formation, to be sure, is de facto problematized even in advanced industrial democracies. One has only to think of American politicians’ periodic scramble for the allegiance of a presumably resentful “middle class,” and of voters deriding their own representatives to the nation’s capital as “insiders” of a corrupt, foreign world. Established democracies even have their own brand of mutually-distancing identities and practices. Parisian avenues regularly serve as a stage for confrontations between the “state” and protesting “students” and striking “unions.” But at the base of these republics, there is a self-conscious citizenry. In the United States, this citizenry is formally protected by a bill of rights that figures prominently in popular culture (T.V. cops, after chasing thieves and murderers, proceed to read them their Mirandas). Conversely, United States citizens are compelled to fulfill their obligations by high-profile state institutions like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Back.
Note 18: Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and War,” in Foreign Affairs, volume 74 No.3, May/June 1995, pp.95-97. Back.
Note 19: Nancy Bermeo, “The Myth of Moderation,” in Comparative Politics, Volume 29, No.3, April 1997, pp.306-307. Back.
Note 20: Nancy Bermeo, “The Myth of Moderation,” in Comparative Politics, Volume 29, No.3, April 1997. Back.
Note 21: Zsuzsa Ferge, “Social citizenship in the new democracies. The difficulties in reviving citizens’ rights in Hungary,” in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 20, No 1, March 1996. Back.
Note 22: Shifter, op cit. pp.114-128. Back.
Note 23: Jonathan Fox, “The difficult transition from clientelism to citizenship: lessons from Mexico,” in World Politics, January 1994, Vol. 46, No. 2. Back.
Note 24: Martin Bulmer and Anthony Rees, eds., Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T.H. Marshall, reviewed by Evelyn Nakano Glenn, in Contemporary Sociology, Vol.26, No.4, July 1997, pp.460-62. Back.
Note 25: Jytte Klausen, “Social Rights Advocacy and State Building, T.H. Marshall in the Hands of Social Reformers,” in World Politics, Volume 47, No.2, january 1995. Back.
Note 26: Somers, Margaret, “Citizenship and the place of the public sphere: law, community, and political culture in the transition to democracy.” in American Sociological Review, Oct. 1993 v58 n5 p.587 (34). Back.
Note 27: Evelyne Huber, Dietrich Rueschmeyer and John Stephens, “The Paradoxes of Contemporary Democracy: Formal, Participatory, and Social Democracy,” in Comparative Politics, Volume 29, No.3, April 1997; and Francisco Weffort, Qual Democracia? (Sao Paulo: Companhia Das Letras, 1992). Back.
Note 28: Schooling the multitudes,” The Economist, October 18th, 1998, p.38. Back.
