Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development

The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship

Manuel Balán, Françoise Montambeault, Manuel Balán, Françoise Montambeault

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780268106607
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America: The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship contains original essays by a diverse group of leading and emerging scholars from North America, Europe, and Latin America. The book speaks to wide-ranging debates on democracy, the left, and citizenship in Latin America. What were the effects of a decade and a half of left and center-left governments? The central purpose of this book is to evaluate both the positive and negative effects of the Left turn on state-society relations and inclusion.

Promises of social inclusion and the expansion of citizenship rights were paramount to the center-left discourses upon the factions' arrival to power in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This book is a first step in understanding to what extent these initial promises were or were not fulfilled, and why. In analyzing these issues, the authors demonstrate that these years yield both signs of progress in some areas and the deepening of historical problems in others. The contributors to this book reveal variation among and within countries, and across policy and issue areas such as democratic institution reforms, human rights, minorities' rights, environmental questions, and violence. This focus on issues rather than countries distinguishes the book from other recent volumes on the left in Latin America, and the book will speak to a broad and multi-dimensional audience, both inside and outside the academic world.

Contributors: Manuel Balán, Françoise Montambeault, Philip Oxhorn, Maxwell A. Cameron, Kenneth M. Roberts, Nathalia Sandoval-Rojas, Daniel M. Brinks, Benjamin Goldfrank, Roberta Rice, Elizabeth Jelin, Celina Van Dembroucke, Nora Nagels, Merike Blofield, Jordi Díez, Eve Bratman, Gabriel Kessler, Olivier Dabène, Jared Abbott, Steve Levitsky

PART 1

Theoretical Questions

ONE

Widening and Deepening Citizenship from the Left?

A Relational and Issue-Based Comparative Approach

FRANÁOISE MONTAMBEAULT, MANUEL BALÇN, AND PHILIP OXHORN

Social, political, and economic inequalities have long been a defining feature of citizenship regimes in Latin America. Constructed on the premise of historically grounded social and political exclusion in the region, citizenship regimes changed dramatically under the neoliberal democratic regimes of the 1990s, as the backlash of economic austerity and ongoing democratic reforms contributed to the deepening of existing inequalities. If centuries of corporatism have resulted in what Oxhorn has called processes of controlled inclusion and “co-opted citizenship,” with the turn to neoliberalism and neopluralism in the 1980s, access to citizenship remained essentially unequal as it shifted to a “citizenship as consumption” model (Oxhorn 2011). In this context, the redefinition of the boundaries and scope of citizenship, including both its institutional manifestations and its participants, became an important struggle for social movements and civil society actors, as they fought for inclusion, social justice, and the deepening of democracy in the 1990s (Dagnino 1998). Across Latin America, the language of citizenship resonated among activists and left-leaning political actors and translated into the discourses and proposals of the so-called New Left parties emerging in the electoral arena. It is in this context that the Left turn began in the late 1990s, with high popular expectations for substantively reducing inequalities and for the recognition of marginalized groups and traditionally excluded sectors’ rights. Left turn governments thus came into power with the promise of deepening and widening citizenship regimes, for which a renewed relationship with traditionally excluded actors and civil society organizations was key. How have the governments of the Left turn performed in their efforts to deliver on this promise?

The objective of this introductory chapter is to offer a conceptual lens for understanding the analyses presented in this book and interpreting the range and scope of the legacies of the Left turn on citizenship in Latin America. However, because it is both theoretically contested and politically constructed, citizenship is not an easy concept to grapple with. Looking back at the way citizenship has been historically constructed and theoretically understood in Latin America, we argue that earlier approaches are inherently limited as they only provide a partial (and often overly optimistic) assessment of what citizenship means in practice, including its multiple layers and spaces. As Jelin emphasized, “Citizenship as well as rights are forever undergoing the process of construction and transformation” (1996, 104). And the interactions between groups in state and society at multiple levels are key to this process. It is of course through the definition and extension of formal rights that citizenship is defined; yet it is the everyday practices of an active citizenry that shape the extent and depth of citizenship regimes.

The implication is that in order to understand the breadth and depth of citizenship under the Left turn, it is not sufficient to look only at the nature of citizenship rights. We must also analyze who is included and who is not in citizenship regimes. We need to look at the level of inclusion, which is defined by formal access to these rights (the existence of institutional and social mechanisms for participation in the definition and exercise of these rights) and the population’s sense of belonging to a community anchored in both collective and intersectional identities (collectively defined by their members and recognized as such). Throughout the volume, we thus propose a novel comparative approach to thinking about the ways the left has contributed to defining and redefining citizenship in Latin America. The book’s first section looks at the boundaries of citizenship regimes through the lens of rights and formal rules established through policies or constitutional provisions. In the second section, the volume analyzes the practice of citizenship, as shaped at least partly by the changes and continuities in formal rules but also by social struggles. Looking at these aspects of citizenship regimes from a relational and intersectional perspective, we can disaggregate our empirical analysis of citizenship and develop both cross-country comparisons and comparisons of the different sectors of institutional and policy reforms adopted (or not) under the left in specific countries.

(RE)DEFINING CITIZENSHIP IN LATIN AMERICA

Citizenship has been a widely deployed concept in the literature on Latin America, particularly to understand the struggles of disadvantaged groups within society and their relation to the state; these define the nature of their incorporation in (or exclusion from) the processes of state formation and democratization during crucial moments in Latin American history. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, citizenship is a deeply contested concept in the social sciences. In Latin America alone, the notion of citizenship has been employed in significantly different ways over time. This raises important questions. Are existing conceptions of citizenship even relevant today? If so, which ones? Are they useful for understanding the legacies of the left in Latin America? We contend that, when defined appropriately, the concept of citizenship remains an insightful lens through which to understand Latin American state-society relations. To realize this potential, it is essential to redefine the concept to account for the fact not only that citizenship is relational but also that the historical development of citizenship has been uneven in the region, both across and within countries.

Most of the early literature on citizenship in Latin America has its origins in the work of T. H. Marshall, who delivered in his seminal 1949 Cambridge University Marshall Lecture one of the most influential speeches on the historical development of citizenship rights. For Marshall, citizenship is a status granted to all citizens that entails three categories of rights (Marshall 1964): civil rights, political rights, and social rights. By definition, citizenship is national, and the rights associated with it are guaranteed by a set of institutions (courts, parliaments, and social policies). According to him, the historical sequence for the acquisition of such rights (and the development of their associated institutions) in Britain (and more generally in Western Europe) has been quite linear over the course of three centuries. Civil rights were recognized in the eighteenth century, granting all free men the rights to justice, to work, and freedom of the press, among others. Political rights followed in the nineteenth century, as the right to vote became universal among male adults. Citizenship rights were then extended to the social realm with the development of welfare regimes in the twentieth century. For Marshall, citizenship was not only characterized by the (relative) universalism of the rights it created and granted, but also by its impact on social classes and social inequalities. In fact, according to Marshall, citizenship, as a status granted by the state, is functional by its very nature: it provides citizens with equal status in the face of material inequalities inherent to modern capitalist societies.

Although the Marshall-inspired perspective of rights has been dominant in the Latin American literature, it has not been exempt of criticism, mainly for being functionalist and reductionist in scope. First, for many critics, Marshall’s functionalist teleology of rights based on the British case did not consider the fact that the acquisition of citizenship rights by citizens is not simply granted by the state and thus, for most societies, is far from linear. This has had an impact on the interaction between citizenship rights and inequalities, limiting social inclusion. In Latin America, for example, political rights came before basic civil rights were effectively guaranteed and universally granted (Oxhorn 2003). The transitions to democracy of the 1980s contributed to the expansion of political rights in Latin America and brought elected officials to power after years of authoritarianism. However, democracy did not imply democratic citizenship in a context characterized by socioeconomic inequalities and cultural pluralism (Hagopian 2007). In the 1990s, the new democratically elected Latin American governments did not focus on the extension and widening of citizenship rights. Quite to the contrary, during this decade, the various types of rights were unevenly distributed among different sectors of the population, leading to what Holston and Caldeira (1998) have called the emergence of “disjunctive” democracy. Although universal suffrage was no longer questioned, the depth of political rights was threatened by the so-called delegative democracies of the 1990s (O’Donnell 1994), where accountability mechanisms were weak and did not allow citizens to actively and meaningfully participate in democratic governance processes. Moreover, in the context of a weak rule of law (Méndez, O’Donnell, and Pinheiro 1999), evidenced by frequent cases of corrupt police forces, police misconduct, inefficient justice systems, and inaccessible courts, Latin Americans did not enjoy full access to civil rights. Social rights and welfare policies also remained limited and were under threat in the neoliberal era, which was characterized by the retreat of the state from the provision of social services. This trend coexisted with a persistent gender gap, rising economic inequalities, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. In practice, then, democratically elected governments maintained the “modern-day identification of citizenship with rights and entitlements [that] underlies a version of citizenship that is ‘passive’ and ‘thin’; and where citizens are denied the opportunity to exercise civic responsibility, a low intensity citizenship results” (Hagopian 2007, 28). If the idea of assessing citizenship as rights remained valid for some, the functionalist nature of Marshall’s teleological logic did not hold, as Latin America’s recent history has shown.

Second, the Marshallian conception of citizenship rights was also criticized for being incomplete, as it did not account for the heterogeneity inherent to societies and the citizenry’s mobilized identities, such as gender, religion, and ethnicity, to name only a few (Beiner 1995; Tilly 1995; Turner 1997). For Marshall’s critics, citizenship is not restricted to civil, political, and social rights, as the case of Latin America’s complex social history dramatically exemplifies. For example, it became evident in the 1970s that not only were civil, social, and political rights in jeopardy, but basic human rights were also highly restricted under authoritarian governments throughout the region, threatening any meaningful sense of citizenship for the vast majority (Jelin 1996). More recently, the expansion of demands from Indigenous groups has challenged the classic conception of rights, emphasizing the importance of cultural rights (Yashar 2005). This became clear in the 1990s, when Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements emerged with identity claims and demands for recognition and collective rights that went beyond the ethnocentric package of citizenship rights described by Marshall. Latin American democracies seemed plagued by what Hagopian has called the problem of “thin” citizenship, where “citizens do not participate fully in political life, [because] in many cases they are denied basic citizenship rights, and many, especially ethnic and racial minorities, are excluded from membership in national political communities” (2007, 21). Similarly, in the period following the transitions to democracy, as Yashar (2005) noted, neoliberal citizenship regimes not only reduced social expenditures and contributed to further dismantling social rights granted under the corporatist state but also denied collective and cultural rights. For many groups, including Indigenous, Afro-descendants, LGTBQ groups, women, and other minorities, cultural rights and “differentiated” citizenship was simply nonexistent in much of the region, resulting in a lack of access to full citizenship status.

In the late twentieth century, we saw the development of novel approaches to the study of citizenship in Latin America, which took stock of the aforementioned critiques and attempted to better understand the variation in citizenship models over time and across countries. Moving from a rights-based approach to a relational approach linked to the social construction of citizenship (and identities), these approaches focus on the relationships between the state and society and among society members, networks, and groups. For them, citizenship is not just a given bundle of rights universally granted by the state to those who possess the status of citizens, as defined by the formal rights entrenched in constitutions, laws, and institutions, as Marshall’s conception entailed. For scholars like Yashar and Oxhorn, this approach has proven too narrow to assess the variation in citizens’ capacity to effectively exercise their citizenship rights. Rights are an essential component of citizenship, but their breadth and depth are better defined by who is included, who is excluded, and why. Yashar insists that while the content of rights granted to citizens is an important dimension of the definition of citizenship, there are two other dimensions to what she calls citizenship regimes that are just as important: who has political membership to the community (belonging) and how interest intermediation is structured (access) (Yashar 2007).¹ Citizenship regimes thus vary according to the institutions and mechanisms that guarantee access to those rights, as well as the relational processes through which state actors and members of the political community are defined, interact, and struggle to demand access to those rights (Oxhorn 2003). As such, citizenship is the product of the struggle of social actors tied by their multiple identities and organized in groups and networks that demand access to this status (Tilly 1995). In other words, as Oxhorn puts it, citizenship is socially constructed.

Following this logic, scholars have shown that citizenship has traditionally been limited or granted through controlled-inclusion processes in Latin America (Oxhorn 2007), which set up and anchor patterns of social exclusion and partial incorporation that despite some changes end up enduring over time. Citizenship regimes thus remained exclusionary for most of the region’s history.

In the 1980s, transitions to democratic rule raised expectations for extended and more inclusive citizenship regimes. However, as we have noted, these expectations fell short in the 1990s, and deeper conceptions of democratic citizenship emerged through social demands and social movements’ struggles for inclusion, participation, and recognition. These demands came with a new conception of citizenship, one that in most cases recognized the importance of formal rights² but that stressed the importance of the lived experiences of citizens, including their struggles, and effective and active participation in the definition of the content and boundaries of inclusive citizenship. In Isin’s words, the emphasis should be on norms, practices, meanings and identities as “citizenship must also be defined as a social process through which individuals and social groups engage in claiming, expanding, or losing rights” (2000, 8), a process in which citizens are being engaged politically and that produces differentiated citizenships, based on localized social struggles and practices that he calls acts of citizenship (Isin 2008). In Latin America, the idea of an active citizenry became the core of the public discourse on democracy and inclusion, where “the building of a new citizenship was to be seen as reaching far beyond the acquisition of legal rights, requiring the constitution of active social subjects, defining what they consider to be their rights, and struggling for their recognition” (Dagnino 2006, 19).

This new conception of citizenship also led to a radical and participatory political proposal that was championed by emerging and reemerging left-leaning political parties in their discourses and promises, as analyzed in the following section. While the general frustration with the limits of political democracy in its “Third Wave” reincarnation meant that even conservative parties had to pay lip service to the importance of new mechanisms for citizen participation, such as the participatory budgeting processes implemented by Brazil’s new-leftist Workers’ Party beginning in the late 1980s (Oxhorn 2004), this participatory, constructivist dimension of citizenship was arguably the key distinguishing feature of leftist policy proposals since the turn of the century. This was true of both its more radical variants (e.g., Hugo Chávez in Venezuela) and its more moderate ones (e.g., Lula in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile).

The institutional and structural implications of adopting this type of citizenship regime also suggest that progress toward its effective implementation is a logical comparative lens for understanding the legacies of the left across ...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART 1: THEORETICAL QUESTIONS
• PART 2: DEEPENING DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS
• PART 3: THE MULTIPLE STRUGGLES FOR INCLUSIVE CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS
• PART 4: CONCLUSIONS
• List of Contributors
• Index