Cultural Citizenship in Political Theory

Judith Vega, Pieter Boele van Hensbroek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317977834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Cultural citizenship is a recently developed concept in discussions on multicultural society, the media society, consumerism, and political theory. It addresses the various ways in which citizenship is becoming mixed up with culture, either through globalisation processes (involving new cultural identities, immigrations, culture industries) or by increasingly life-style oriented types of action. In the face of these challenges, the good old notion of citizenship seems in need of some assistance.
This book takes a fresh look at cultural citizenship by exploring it from political-philosophical angles. It seeks to develop explicitly normative perspectives on the present debates around culture. What do the novel national and global constellations mean with respect to inclusion and exclusion, participation and marginalisation, political rights and 'mere' cultural practices? Moreover, this volume's authors aim to develop notions of cultural citizenship beyond the liberal political paradigm that associates it with 'cultural rights', 'cultural capital' or the 'consumer-citizen'. They engage the concept to re-think politics in both its meanings of citizenship practices and governance practices vis-à-vis citizens. The authors address a range of pertinent issues, exploring historical as well as present-day understandings, and theoretical as well as policy applications of the notion of cultural citizenship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Introduction

The agendas of cultural citizenship: A political-theoretical exercise

Judith Vega and Pieter Boele van Hensbroek

Department of Practical Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

Cultural citizenship has been receiving quite some attention for over a decade now. The concept has appeared in fields like migration studies, media studies, arts education, museology, cultural policy, and at times in general cultural studies and sociology.¹ One might even be tempted to speak of a new ‘cult on cit’, if one allows such American shorthand, but we will not be flippant. We think that the concept has elicited interesting debates, and has pertinent contributions to offer to the theory and practice of citizenship. This special issue will place the concept specifically within a political-philosophical context, which allows us to probe into a range of analytical as well as normative issues that the concept raises. The articles collected here elucidate how the concept fares in different political-philosophical milieus, among which the liberal, Marxist, Arendtian and (otherwise) republican ones.

In this introduction, we reconstruct a brief history of the intellectual discussions that led up to the current, explicit concept. We will identify several pertinent questions and tensions in the debates. We will furthermore argue our own angle, pleading a political-theoretical approach beyond the, according to us, too narrow conceptualisation of cultural citizenship that ensued from its elaboration in a liberal theoretical framework. We finally explain how such an angle is illustrated by the various contributions to this special issue.²

To talk about cultural citizenship means to articulate some kind of link between culture and citizenship. The concept thus broaches a very general problematic, as it is not too difficult to bring several such links to mind. But it also broaches a very specific problematic. It brings citizenship into a new area of concerns, compared to its classic conceptualisations – it infers that citizenship has other than merely political connotations. Such an extended meaning constitutes a challenge for political philosophy. How do we deal with an originally typical political concept as citizenship suddenly going cultural? It is not self-evident that this would be an easy endeavour. Brian Turner (2001, p. 12) was aware of this challenge when he wrote: ‘The absence of a robust tradition of political theory on culture and citizenship is problematic.’ The articles in this issue, however, beg to differ. They evidence the ways in which various political theories and philosophies have reflected on some conception of cultural citizenship, if not the concept, and explore a number of angles – both historical and contemporary ones.

What do the many conceivable links between culture and citizenship look like? From what debates and practices did the concept of cultural citizenship result? Let us survey the sundry options, as ‘cultural citizens’ actually appear in many guises. They may be citizens with ‘cultural’ claims on politics, like immigrants from non-western countries, women with headscarves, (other kinds of) feminists, gay rights activists, and so on. They may be citizens involved in the pluralisation and interculturalisation of the arts, attempting to increase social participation or community bonding. They may also be the citizens of the media society, glued to the television or the internet, or of consumerism, celebrating lifestyle over politics, or turning politics into a lifestyle. They, alternatively, appear in (e.g. feminist) criticisms of the classical citizen as an unembodied, ‘rational’ subject, who left subjectivity behind in order to become a universal citizen-being, and who is politically active only in a narrow meaning of politics. The critique takes issue with the unwarranted claim to universality of such subjects, blind to the always particular (‘cultural’) character of their politics. This last perspective is conceptually the most radical: when it comes to the crunch, everyone is a ‘cultural’ citizen.

Politics meets culture, one cannot avoid concluding, in present-day public and theoretical debates. Citizenship seems cloaked in culture. But as the examples above show, in what senses citizens are thought to have a ‘politico-cultural’ identity is far less clear. The often muddy debates of multiculturalism prove that the concept of culture has become framed in a directly political way. In many instances, they show that to inject ‘culture’ into discussions of politics and citizenship obfuscates more than it elucidates (see also Phillips 2007). Still, there are many respects in which the notion of cultural citizenship offers a specific and important angle for considering the various issues. We think this is especially the case when the generic civic dimensions of that notion are kept in view, and when we refrain from funnelling it into a mere ‘multicultural’ application.

Culture has become a new field of contestation both nationally and globally. To think about this field from the perspective of citizenship means choosing an explicitly normative perspective on these debates. We take this to be the main import of the concept of cultural citizenship. This does not mean that the concept as such necessarily implies a social ideal – it may well be seen as a descriptive or analytical tool with no substantive normative charge as such. The contributions to this special issue indeed take different views in that respect. For example, whereas Boele van Hensbroek proposes to use cultural citizenship as a normative activist notion, Vega discerns a descriptive and tautological concept which alerts to the ways in which citizenship is always co-defined by a cultural factor. Bhandar analyses it as an instrument for disciplining and normalising citizens in multicultural societies, while Stevenson sees it as arising from citizens’ contestations. These differences do not contradict our view of the fundamental normative thrust implied in the concept of cultural citizenship.³ To study culture from the political-theoretical concept of citizenship allows us to ask the normative political question: what do the novel national and global constellations in which ‘culture discourse’ functions mean with respect to inclusion and exclusion, participation and marginalisation? A crucial topic for reflection is whether and how cultural citizenship could and should provide an extension of the national category of citizenship to newcomers in the public sphere. And we note that this may concern various kinds of newcomers: they may for instance come from abroad, or from privatised sexual or lifestyle practices.⁴

The discussion of ‘cultural’ questions in political philosophy is not new – several of its traditions have addressed such questions. They have a prominent place in conservatism and communitarianism, from Carl Schmitt to Amitai Etzioni and Alasdair MacIntyre. They also form a core interest of continental critical theory, with philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse addressing the cultural transformations in industrial capitalist society, and its present-day representatives like Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser continuing that interest. It can be found, in certain respects, in classical Marxism (as argued by Vega, this issue), and was present in Antonio Gramsci’s discussions of hegemony. And it has been a concern of liberal political theory, both in its historical (John Stuart Mill) and contemporary varieties. In this introduction we restrict ourselves to ways in which a ‘cultural turn’ in political thought came about specifically in the last two decades; we discuss the – uneven – terrain of debates where the current interest in cultural citizenship germinated.

Citizenship as substantial practice – cultural capital or cultural difference?

In the early 1990s, two debates emerged that, in different ways, amended standing approaches to citizenship by drawing attention to the ‘substantial’ dimensions of citizenship – over and above its politico-legal status. While cultural citizenship had not already grown into an explicit concept, culture did become a key term for this endeavour, next to ‘identity’ and ‘subjectivity’. We see various moments of that ‘cultural turn’ in the debates on citizenship.

The first type of debate centred on citizens’ capacities for civic virtue, or, responsible civic action. The idea propelling this debate was that citizenship was poorly conceptualised as a mere legal status, and rather depended on the actual practicing of civic qualities or virtues, needing ‘cultural capital’. We find such interventions in work by Lolle Nauta (1992) and Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (1994).⁵ The latter two authors, for example, state ‘that the health and stability of a modern democracy depends, not only on the justice of its ‘basic structure’ but also on the qualities and attitudes of its citizens’ (pp. 352–353). They take care, meanwhile, to distinguish republican and liberal answers to such calls for citizens’ ‘virtue’, contending that the republicans overstated the issue of participation. Kymlicka and Norman place the call for a substantial citizenship within a discussion of how to reach a ‘common identity’ in increasingly pluralist, multinational or multicultural states. Nauta, too, alerts us to the fact that citizenship cannot just be a ‘status’ but is always also a practice. In that light, he distinguishes three different ‘cultural resources’ of modern citizenship: models of practicing rules that orient people’s actions. Next to the distinct and competing models of the market (economic interaction) and the forum (political or public interaction), he points out ‘identity-formation’ as a third context of citizens’ interactions. For it ‘hardly makes sense to inquire into the nature of public interaction and to neglect its subjects’ (Nauta 1992, p. 31) – as these subjects do not come from nowhere into modernity’s central arenas. ‘Crucial for identity-formation is a learning process where the individual acquires the ability to deal with the interests of other human beings in a non-violent way’ (p. 30). Proffering this idea, Nauta at once emphasises the problem of the unequal distribution of the cultural capital necessary to face modern society.

Second- or third-class citizens in the modern ‘welfare states’ are citizens who never had the opportunity of such an education and who are sometimes not even able to read a newspaper or understand a talkshow. Because of their lack of cultural capital, they can become easy victims of nationalism, racism or some other form of mass-manipulation. They are treated as the enemies of democracy, but in many cases democracy has been an adversary of theirs. (Nauta 1992, p. 31)

In this first strand of argumentation, a ‘cultural factor’ is judged to be pivotal for citizenship to be practised well, or even at all. Citizenship is related to culture in terms of the citizen’s ability to grasp and recognise his or her own as well as others’ interests. The theme is still being taken up, and now in the explicit terms of ‘cultural citizenship’, for instance, by Gerard Delanty (2002, 2007), who accentuates the meaning of cultural citizenship as a ‘learning process’. Nick Stevenson, in this issue, similarly focuses on learning. He reminds us that cultural theorist Raymond Williams’ ‘long revolution’ (1965) meant ‘the struggle for a learning and communicating society’ (Stevenson, p. 282, this issue).

A second strand of debate was initiated by Iris Marion Young, who in her Justice and the politics of difference (1990) elaborated the idea of ‘cultural politics’ or ‘politicising culture’ as an indispensable dimension of struggles for social justice. Her complaint was that theories of justice worked with an idea of egalitarian politics that was too abstract, in that it neglected the problem of social and cultural power and dominance. Her concept of cultural politics took a stand against what she called the ‘depoliticisation’ of struggles for justice and of public life. She pleaded to reclaim the meaning of difference – as a function of social relations rather than as a description of essential group features – in view of the actual social marginalisation of racial, gender, age- or ability-based groups. This second view of the ‘cultural substance’ of the practices of public life goes well beyond the general notion of the need for an active citizenship. It relates citizenship to a broad issue of dominance and marginalisation, and thus prefigures the later debates on identity politics, difference and multiculturalism. As Nauta’s quoted formulation testifies, his approach, as well as his earlier work (1987) on the ‘cultural factor’ in various social and neo-colonial relationships, actually joins a similar agenda.⁶

Neither strand in the early attention to culture and citizenship explicitly articulated the concept of ‘cultural citizenship’. But both argued for the substantive contents of citizenship, rather than its legalistic status – while not denying that the latter will generally frame the former. They cleared the way for the later conceptual formulations of a ‘cultural citizenship’ – and foreshadowed its various interpretations.⁷

Beyond a liberal cultural citizenship

A third strand in the debates on citizenship and culture that took off in the early 1990s came about with Charles Taylor’s long essay ‘Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”’ from 1992. In it, he critically assessed and amended established philosophical notions of equality and equal respect, surmising that in certain cases liberalism should be more hospitable to difference, i.e. claims for cultural distinctness. Still mostly preoccupied, despite its title, with the language wars in Canada, the essay was followed in 1995 by Kymlicka’s book on multicultural citizenship and minority rights. Between them, these titles procured a marked turn in the debate. Staging a concept sounding like cultural citizenship, ‘multicultural citizenship’, Kymlicka’s book applied it to one specific concern – the multicultural society (of the west) and cultural rights for minorities. Explicitly intending a ‘liberal theory’ of such rights, the book may be placed in the indeed liberal – and laudable – tradition of John Stuart Mill’s plea for minorities’ protection from majorities. It is also to be placed in a – somewhat different – liberal tradition concerned with a legalistic approach to issues of discrimination. Whereas the two strands discussed in the former section formulated rather ‘universal’ issues of the relation between culture and citizenship, this third one reduces it to one particular aspect, applying it to the cultural groups in multicultural societies.

We will not enter here into Taylor’s and Kymlicka’s works and the manifold discussions they elicited. Many a study of cultural citizenship indeed either builds on or critically relates to this work.⁸ In several of the following articles, the argument refers to Kymlicka’s book, as one landmark in the discussions relevant to cultural citizenship. We recognise its groundbreaking status, and merely want to mark our own interest in the potential of the concept of cultural citizenship as of a different flavour. We position the type of discussions we favour rather in the second strand of the initial discussions mentioned above, exemplified especially by Young. We take cultural citizenship to be a tool for addressing issues of cultural and social dominance rather than lack of rights. It may serve to keep on the agenda the very issue of difference as being conceptually (and socially) ascribed to some citizens rather than others. We would have the concept safeguard the study of the ‘broad’ political aspects of the ‘cultural factor’ in citizenship, and keep the normative political question as indicated above at the centre stage of the discussions on citizenship.

This special issue, then, aims to stretch the political-theoretical discussion of cultural citizenship beyond the narrow agenda of contemporary liberal discourse on that subject, and explores the substantive dimensions of citizenship beyond mere multicultural citizenship. This endeavour keeps with various other works that, on this account, have endeavoured a more self-reflexive approach to liberalism. In an incisive inquiry into contemporary political theory’s preoccupation with culture and difference, David Scott (2003, p. 96) offers a sceptical look at liberal theory’s attitude towards difference:

for thinkers such as Walzer, Kymlicka, Kukathas, Carens, and Taylor, what is at stake is rethinking liberal democracy – or, to put this another way, rethinking from the standpoint of liberal democracy. For them, in other words, the privileged status of liberal democracy is not itself in question. All that is required is a revaluation of difference so as to enhance the claims of this particular organization of modern political community. (emphasis in original)

He continues to plead for a more ‘genealogical’ account of the very concept of culture, an attention to ‘the terrain of culture-discourse as such’ (p. 105). This, he suggests, may atone for political theory’s self-acclaimed progressive ‘discovery’ of a constructivist, ‘hybrid’ and ‘internally divided’ approach to culture – over and against the ‘old’ political theories. For this may be merely one more historical way of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Introduction: The agendas of cultural citizenship A political-theoretical exercise—Judith Vega and Pieter Boele van Hensbroek
• 2. A neorepublican cultural citizenship Beyond Marxism and liberalism—Judith Vega
• 3. Cultural citizenship, education and democracy Redefining the good society—Nick Stevenson
• 4. Three cultural turns How multiculturalism, interactivity and interpassivity affect citizenship—Gijs van Oenen
• 5. Cultural citizenship and real politics The Dutch case—René Boomkens
• 6. Cultural citizenship as a normative notion for activist practices—Pieter Boele van Hensbroek
• 7. Cultural politics Disciplining citizenship—Davina Bhandar
• Index