Deliberating Publics of Citizens:
Postnational citizenship amidst global public spheres
Stacy Smith
DRAFT-please do not circulate or cite*
Introduction:
The years bridging the turn from the 20th to the 21st century have been
characterized by forces of globalization: the flow of people and capital and
environmental pollutants across national borders poses implications for all aspects
of society. In the realm of politics and political theory, questions of rights,
sovereignty, and citizenship take center stage. Migrations of people across
borders due to economic patterns of global capitalism and political contexts
driving refugees and asylum seekers to other states raise thorny questions
surrounding the derivation of citizenship rights and status and institutional
mechanisms for realizing commitments to universal human rights.
Moreover, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, political actors
and scholars alike have expressed widespread interest in democracy and civil
society. Democracy is viewed by many, across ideological spectrums, as the end
of history in terms of governmental forms; democracy is viewed by some as
necessary for and by others as an antidote to the forces of global capitalism. And
civil society, that sphere apart from the state and, usually, the economy, is
commonly viewed as integral to democratic governance. Strong and vibrant civil
societies make democracy possible; weak civil societies tend to be connected to
authoritarian regimes. While many associations of civil society form within
nation states, the context of globalization also entails associations that form across
national borders. Consequently, the public sphere, or the sphere of civil society
*This essay is forthcoming as a chapter in Citizenship Education in National, Trans-national and
Global Contexts (preliminary title) edited by Klas Roth and Nicholas Burbules, Sense Publishers.
that consists of people, associations, and organizations engaged in debate and
discussion about issues of common concern, also transcends static political
borders of states. Thus, according to political theorist Nancy Fraser, it is even
“commonplace nowadays to speak of ‘transnational public spheres’” (Fraser,
TPS, 1).
In this essay, I map the terrain of political theoretical issues surrounding
citizenship education that arise in the contemporary context of globalization. In
the first section I describe the “withering” of the nation state as the primary
political unit and the increasingly associational nature of the international political
arena. I then discuss implications of this decentering of the nation state for
questions of political sovereignty and national citizenship and make the case for
the importance of public sphere theory as the normative core of the concept of
civil society. In the next section I draw upon a Habermasian strand of deliberative
democratic theory to develop a theory of citizenship that emphasizes the central
role of the public sphere, including the relationship between participation in
voluntary associations and civil publics along side formal political publics (i.e.
states). I argue that deliberative publics of citizens have the capacity to generate
collective identities and solidarities based upon democratic participation in
communities of fate, versus membership in national groups, and to influence
policy making in both state and international arenas. Finally, in the last section, I
bring these theoretical considerations to bear on practical implications for
citizenship education. I conclude by recommending a complementary model of
cosmopolitan, deliberative citizenship education that emphasizes the relationship
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between the state and the pluralistic public spheres of civil society. According to
this model, the task of democratic citizenship education is to provide young
people with opportunities to deliberately practice public ways of being that allow
publics of citizens to flourish and impact formal political processes, within the
nation state and beyond. I make some specific recommendations regarding the
organization of schooling and curriculum that are particular to public education in
the United States.
The Withering of the Nation State and The Rise of Civil Society
According to Carlos Alberto Torres, “the question facing us in the process
of increased globalization is whether the nation-state and citizenship are withering
away.” In Torres’ view, the two concepts—citizenship and the nation state—are
necessarily linked because “citizenship has always been associated with the
constitution and operation of the modern nation-state” (Torres, AERJ, 2002, 373).
In this section I argue that while the nation state is indeed being eclipsed by other
forms of political organization, the concept of citizenship should not
simultaneously fade away. Rather citizenship should be recast in terms of the
changing face of formal political sovereignty, on one hand, and the role of
citizenship within the multiple public spheres of global civil societies, on the
other.
The economic and political realities of globalization, in particular the
movement of people as laborers and political subjects across national borders,
brings to the fore questions of national collective identity, membership rights, and
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citizenship status in new and acute ways.1 Within this context, the question of the
locus of rights claims is central: rights are granted by nations as political
sovereigns, and claimed by citizens of those states. Yet human rights, which
transcend national borders, are also claimed by persons and endorsed by national
and international organizations. This tension between national sovereignty and
universal human rights leads Nuhoglu Soysal to conclude in Limits of Citizenship
that the nation-state’s scope of action is constrained such that:
the state is no longer an autonomous and independent organization
closed over a nationally defined population. Instead, we have a
system of constitutionally interconnected states with a multiplicity
of membership. [Hence]…the logic of personhood supersedes the
logic of national citizenship, [and] individual rights and
obligations, which were historically located in the nation-state,
have increasingly moved to an universalistic plane, transcending
the boundaries of particular nation-states. (164-65; cited in Torres,
AERJ, 373)
According to Torres, Nuhoglu Soysal’s analysis of the limits of citizenship has
implications at three levels. At the first level of citizenship, notions of identity
and rights are decoupled. The second level includes politics of identity and
multiculturalism. Here, the emergence of membership in the polity is ‘multiple in
the sense of spanning local, regional, and global identities, and accommodates
intersecting complexes or rights, duties, and loyalties” (Nuhoglu Soysal, 166).
The third level is comprised of cosmopolitan democracies, which emerge from the
importance of the international system for the attainment of democracy
worldwide. Such a system is relatively divorced in its origins and constitutive
dynamics from codes of the nation-states (Torres, AERJ, 373).
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While some political theorists respond to the withering of the nation state
with a call to reconstitute its strength, I find such a response empirically
unworkable and normatively misguided.2 In my view, the erosion of the
centrality of the nation state necessitates attention to two related phenomena: 1)
the rise of other formal political organizations. Such organizations include what
Nuhoglu Soysal refers to above as the interconnection of states, in terms of
international and transnational political organizations (such as the United Nations
and the European Union), as well as the potential creation of world-level
sovereign powers; and 2) the relationship between these formal political
institutions and the public spheres of civil society. Hence, I draw upon the work
of Nuhoglu Soysal, David Held, and deliberative democratic theorists such as
Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser to meld a conception of postnational
citizenship that is both cosmopolitan and deliberative.
Although I proceed according to the assumption that the nation state is
withering in the context of globalization, I warn against a concurrent withering of
the notion of citizenship itself. Allowing the fate of citizenship to be linked to the
notion of the nation state will result in a further eclipse of public life in the face of
encroaching private spheres of the social, in the form of mass society, and the
economic realm, in the form of mass capitalism. The nation state we may be able
to do without, but proponents of democracy and the public sphere, as the sphere
of freedom and political action in concert, must view citizenship in terms of
political identities and participatory capacities that democracy cannot do without.
Thus, citizenship needs to be recast, set apart from the nation state, and newly
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theorized in terms of emerging transnational and perhaps global political
structures, as well as the public spheres of civil society.
Postnational Citizenship and Civil Society
The withering of the nation state sets the stage for the importance of
building new theories of citizenship commensurate with new realities of
globalization. The conception of citizenship that I develop in this essay
emphasizes democracy and situates citizenship in relationship to democratic
ideals, in both the formal political realm and the public sphere of civil society—in
national, transnational and global contexts. In this section I lay out the contours
of a postnational citizenship that is both cosmopolitan and deliberative by taking
up two key lines of inquiry: first, the question of the locus of citizenship in terms
of the relationship between civil society and formal political arenas and second,
the question of transnational public spheres.
If the nation state is withering, and citizenship has traditionally been cast
in terms of an individual’s political status as a member of the nation state, how
should this concept be reformulated in the context of democracy in a global era?
A response to this question entails not only empirical claims about salient global
trends, but conceptual definitions of politics, and normative claims surrounding
democracy and public life. All of these layers of analysis are tied up in
contemporary explanations of the realm of “civil society.” The concept of civil
society has garnered widespread attention in recent years for a number of reasons,
among them the rise of emerging democratic governments in Eastern Europe—
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and related questions surrounding how to create broader social reforms that will
support a political culture necessary for democracy to flourish—as well as the
work of normative political theorists such as John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas,
(particularly the 1989 English translation of Habermas’s The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere). The sheer breadth and scope of scholarly
inquiry has itself produced what Edwards and Foley refer to as conceptual
confusion and definitional fuzziness in terms of “civil society” as an analytic
concept (Foley and Edwards, in American Behavioral Scientist, 1998). Yet, this
fuzziness can be avoided by drawing upon a normative theory of civil society,
particularly one that emphasizes both the legitimating and epistemic functions of
citizenship within the public sphere (McAfee, in Philosophy and Social Criticism,
2004).
A postnational theory of citizenship, commensurate with the emergence of
a multiplistic sense of political membership—which Soysal described above as
‘multiple in the sense of spanning local, regional, and global identities, and
accommodate[ing] intersecting complexes or rights, duties, and loyalties” (Soysal,
166)—requires new ways of thinking about collective identity, sources of rights
and obligations, and relationships between and across civil and political realms.
Within this emerging theoretical context, civil society is highlighted for close
attention because it is a realm that contains and reflects such multiplicity, while at
the same time demonstrating the potentials for fluid and dynamic forms of
solidarity and political participation.
Cosmopolitan Democracy
7
In his work on cosmopolitan democracy in a global era, David Held
argues that the revitalization of democratic politics is both desirable and possible,
but poses a daunting challenge. Held sets out a normative case for the core
principle of democratic autonomy and offers a conception of cosmopolitan
democracy based upon autonomy, and grounded in model with specific
institutional structures at both the nation state and international levels that
acknowledge networks and emphasize deliberation. Held justifies his model for
cosmopolitan democracy by arguing that “in a world of intensifying regional and
global relations, with marked overlapping ‘communities of fate,’ the principle of
autonomy requires entrenchment in regional and global networks as well as in
national and local politics (Held, Models of Democracy, 1996, 358).
It is important to note that in Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy,
the role of the nation state is not eclipsed by broader global networks. Rather, the
nation state, as well as local political units, are situated within a wide array of
political structures and associational networks that reside within and across
national, transnational, and global arenas of participation. The nation state is one
among many relevant sites of politics, and in my view citizenship, rather than the
primary or sole site for political action or citizenship status. And Held emphasizes
that his model does not suggest that international and global spheres are, nor
should become, the locus of attention for democratic theory or practice. He
asserts:
If the history and practice of democracy have until now been
centered on the idea of locality and place (the city-republic, the
community, the nation), is it likely that in the future democracy
will be centered exclusively on the international or global domain,
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if it is to be centered anywhere at all? To draw this conclusion is, I
think, to misunderstand the nature of contemporary globalization
and the argument being developed here. Globalization is, to
borrow a phrase, ‘a dialectical process’: ‘local transformation is as
much a part of globalization as the lateral extension of social
connections across time and space’ (Giddens, 1990, 64). New
demands are made for regional and local autonomy as groups find
themselves buffeted by global forces and by inappropriate or
ineffective political regimes. Although these circumstances are
clearly fraught with danger, and the risk of an intensification of
sectarian politics, they also portend a new possibility: the recovery
of an intensive and participatory democracy at local levels as a
complement to the deliberative assemblies of the wider global
order. That is, they portend a political order of democratic
associations, cities, and nations as well of regions and global
networks (my emphases). In such an order, the principle of
autonomy would be entrenched in diverse sites of power and
across diverse spatial domains. (Held, 356-57)
It is precisely this possibility for the revitalization of localized, deliberative,
democratic participation that I seek to elaborate in this essay. Sharing Held’s
commitments to autonomy, cosmopolitanism, deliberation and associational
networks, I now turn to deliberative democratic theory to explicate the
relationship between the associations and networks of civil society and formal
democratic politics within state or international institutions. Like Held, these
deliberative theorists assert that citizenship within the public sphere of civil
society is not a replacement for formal politics. In order words, they are not
advocating a collapsing of state/civil society boundaries. Rather, they lay out the
ways in which participation in the institutions of civil society—especially in the
form of deliberative, public communication—both creates the political culture
that supports democratic political institutions and forms public opinion that allows
political representatives to make good policy decisions.
Citizenship as Civil and Political
9
In her recent explorations of political geography and political membership
in a global era, Seyla Benhabib argues for a more associational, reflexive
approach to collective identity formation that grounds the definition of citizenship
within the realm of civil society, rather than in the nation state. She suggests that
we analyze “the experiment of the modern nation-state” in terms of “the
formation of a democratic people with a specific history and culture [through] on
going reflexive transformation and experimentation with collective identity.”
This notion of collective identity then reconceptualizes the “so-called
contradiction between human rights and national sovereignty… as the inherently
conflictual aspects of reflexive collective identity formation in complex and
increasingly multicultural and multinational democracies (Benhabib, “Political
Geographies,” Social Research 2002, 560).
Moving beyond an emphasis on reflexive collective identity formation
within experimental, pluralistic nation states, Benhabib places the locus of this
process, the process of creating citizens, within the realm of civil society. She
argues:
We are more authentically members of a family, of a
neighborhood, of a religious community or of a social movement
than we are members of a state. While the modern nation-state
remains a possible structural expression of a democratic selfdetermination, the complexity of our social lives integrates us into
associations that lie above and below the level of the nation state.
These associations mediate the manner in which we relate to the
state. If we stop viewing the state as the privileged apex of
collective identity, but instead, along with Rawls, view it “as a
union of unions,” then citizenship should also be understood as a
form of collective identity mediated in and through the institutions
of civil society (my emphases). In the European context this means:
foreigners’ claims to citizenship in a political entity are established
not through some hierarchical decision from above, but because
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individuals show themselves worthy of membership in civil society
through the exercise of certain abilities and the fulfillment of
certain conditions. Civil citizenship should lead to political
citizenship. (Janoski, 1998; Benhabib, “Political Membership,”
Social Research 1999, 728)
Benhabib’s conception lays out dual aspects of citizenship—both civil and
political—and suggests a linear relationship between the two whereby worthy
participation in the institutions of civil society earn one the rights of political
citizenship granted by a national or transnational organization. While Benhabib’s
emphasis on civil citizenship is more fluid than traditional definitions that
constrain citizenship status to membership in the state, her emphasis on one’s
opportunity to earn status and rights of political citizenship retains more of a
liberal emphasis than Nuhoglu Soysal’s conception of postnational citizenship.
According to Nuhoglu Soysal, participation is not a choice, but an obligation:
“Postnational citizenship confers upon every person the right and duty of
participation in the authority structures and public life of polity, regardless of their
historical or cultural ties to that community” (Nuhoglu Soysal, LC, 3 in Torres,
371).
What these orientations share is a definition of citizenship that is not
confined to one’s status vis-à-vis the nation state, but also highlights participation
in the broader public life of the polity; that is, the institutions of civil society.
Thus, postnational citizenship does not turn away from the political authority of
the state, but rather elaborates a broader conception of politics that links the
public spheres of civil and political societies. Hence, the role of citizenship
within civil society, and the importance of citizen participation in the institutions
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of civil society for the democratic functioning of political institutions, is a key
locus of concern for deliberative democratic theory in a global era.
Civil society is important to deliberative democratic theory for two key
reasons: 1) civil society is the realm in which a democratic political culture sets
the stage for democratic political processes in the formal political sphere; and 2)
civil society is the realm in which public opinion is formed and potentially
mobilized in order to influence democratic decision making in the formal political
sphere. As Noelle McAfee explains:
Civil society is the network of all those nongovernmental
associations, both formal and informal, that bring people together: from
garden clubs to neighborhood associations, churches, labor unions, interest
groups, coffee klatches, bowling clubs….People do not necessarily act
politically in these associational groups but, through the interrelated
associations of civil society, people can develop the capacity to create and
articulate public will and direction, to address immediate concerns, and to
decide the legitimacy of their governments.
At best, civil societies foster an open, democratic culture that helps
set their political communities’ direction and hold their governments
accountable. … To the extent that civil society provides opportunities for
deliberation about public matters (my emphases), public opinion can form
and provide means by which to judge the state’s legitimacy. Public
opinion can also form about what direction policy ought to take.
(Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship, 2000, 83-84)
According to McAfee the public knowledge generated through deliberation serves
legitimating as well as epistemic functions. (HKC, 2000 and PK, 2004). Within
Habermas’s communicative theory, idea of the public sphere is both descriptive,
targeting conversations between individuals that highlight issues of common concern,
and normative, highlighting necessary conditions such as equal access, fair participation,
and consent.3 As Jean Cohen asserts: “The concept of the public sphere thus brings
together the normative and the empirical, the universal and the particular. It is, in my
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view, the normative core of the idea of civil society and the heart of any conception of
democracy. … I would defend an even stronger claim: the deliberative genesis and
justification of public policy in political and civil public spaces respectively are
constitutive of the modern form of democracy (Cohen, “American Civil Society Talk,”
1999, 59). If public sphere theory provides the normative core of modern democracy,
and modern democracy is cosmopolitan—that is grounded in associations and networks
that span local and global arenas, then the concept of the public sphere becomes
“transnationalized.” This empirical and theoretical development is both consistent with
and a challenge to the revitalization of democracy in a global era.
Transnational Public Spheres
A large theoretical tension underlies the conception of postnational, cosmopolitan
deliberative citizenship that I have laid out thus far. I have claimed that the concept of
civil society, particularly the public sphere of civil society, is pivotal to contemporary
democratic theory because of decreasing centrality of nation state amidst globalization.
Yet, Habermas’s theory of the public sphere depends upon a notion of the state as the
center of politics. Nancy Fraser explains:
Two ideas—the validity of public opinion and citizen
empowerment vis-à-vis the state—are essential to the concept of the
public sphere in democratic theory. Without them, the concept loses its
critical force and its political point….Yet these two features are not easily
associated with the discursive arenas that we today call “transnational
public spheres.” It is difficult to associate the notion of valid public
opinion with communicative arenas in which the interlocutors do not
constitute a political citizenry. And it is hard to associate the notion of
communicative power with discursive spaces that do correlate with
sovereign states. Thus, it is by no means clear what it means today to
speak of “transnational public spheres.” From the perspective of
democratic theory, at least, the phrase sounds a bit like an oxymoron.
Nevertheless, we should not rush to jettison the notion…such a notion is
indispensable, I think, to those of us who aim to reconstruct democratic
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theory in the current “postnational constellation.” But it will not be
sufficient to merely refer to such public spheres in a relatively casual
commonsense way, as if we already knew what they were. Rather, it will
be necessary to return to square one, to problematize public sphere
theory—and ultimately to reconstruct its conceptions of validity and
communicative power. (Fraser, “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere,”
2002, 1-2)
In response to the theoretical challenges that she has set forth, Fraser recommends two
general trajectories for overcoming what she calls “critical disjunctures and mismatches
of scale that threaten to undermine public sphere theory” (14). First, she calls for the
institutionalization of “new transnational public powers” that should be subject to
democratic control and capable of constraining transnational private power. Second, she
calls for the institutionalization of “elements of transnational/quasi-global citizenship.”
Such a model of citizenship is intended to generate “broad solidarities that “cross
divisions of language, ethnicity, religion, and nationality” and to construct “broadly
inclusive public spheres in which common interests can be created or discovered through
open democratic communication” (14-15). She argues that creating broad solidarities and
inclusive publics will require a realignment of relationships “among at least four distinct
kinds of community, which do not map onto one another today: 1) the imagined
community, or nation; 2) the political (or civic) community, or citizenry; 3) the
communications community, or public; and 4) the community of fate, or the set of
stakeholders affected by various developments (included here is “community of risk”)”
(15). Fraser stresses that these realignments will require institutional renovation and
encompass multiple publics that correspond to a multilevel, vertical structure of
sovereignty (in contrast to the vertical multiplicity of publics that she offered in her
earlier efforts to rethink Habermas’s conception of the public sphere) (15).
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In this section I have sketched current theoretical trajectories for an
approach to postnational citizenship that combines Held’s model of cosmopolitan
democracy with deliberative democratic theory’s emphasis on the public sphere as
the normative core of civil society. Within this conception of postnational
citizenship, democratic politics spans global communicative networks, thus the
associations of civil society, transnational public spheres, and world-level
sovereign powers are prominent sites for theoretical and empirical research. As
Held (1996), Fraser (2002) and others highlight, much of this work is in its
infancy. Theoretical and practical challenges abound; namely, for deliberative
theory, questions surrounding the creation and legitimization of transnational and
world level political organizations (bodies with political public authority) to
receive the communicative opinion- and will-formation that takes place in
multiple, global public spheres. Such questions are far from resolved.
Nevertheless, key areas of attention for citizenship education flow from the
theoretical considerations outlined thus far. For instance, themes of
cosmopolitanism, public deliberation and communication, and the relationship
between participation in the political public sphere of civil society and formal
political decision making require further explication. It is to these tasks that I turn
in the final sections of the essay.
Democratic Citizenship Education: Cultivating Publics of Citizens
As Held argues in offering his model for democratic autonomy and cosmopolitan
democracy: the jury is unquestionably out on whether such principles and structures will
become entrenched across borders. Yet, Held views his work as a political theorist in
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terms of advocacy; he offers a theoretical model in order “to help establish a new agenda
for political thought and deliberation.” Held contends that: “the explosion of interest in
democracy in recent times has all too often conceived of democracy in terms of liberal
democracy, assumed that democracy can only be applied to ‘governmental affairs’ (and
has no place in economic and social spheres), and presupposed that the nation-state is the
most appropriate locus for democracy.” He further maintains that questioning these
terms of reference, setting out a new agenda, and making the case “for the deepening and
extending of democracy within and between countries” are essential developments “if
democracy is to retain its relevance, efficaciousness and legitimacy in the centuries
ahead” (Held, 1996, 357-360).
It is in agreement with Held, and in this spirit, that I now seek to set out an agenda
for a cosmopolitan and deliberative conception of citizenship education in the global era.
If cosmopolitan democratic theory is in its infancy, as Held asserts, citizenship education
theory in this global milieu is embryonic. Yet, the ground is fertile for theory
development. McAfee points out that both the place of the “public” in public sphere
theory and the capacities and functions of citizenship” have received scant attention,
even by deliberative theorists of civil society (“Public Knowledge,” 149; Habermas,
Kristeva, and Citizenship, 94). In this section of the essay, then, I flush out broad
implications of necessary conditions for fostering democratic competence and a
democratic political culture by considering the relationship between educational projects
to revitalize political public spheres specifically, and civil society more generally. My
analysis seeks to promote theoretical developments in two complementary directions: I
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consider both the implications of democratic theory for citizenship education and the role
of education in recasting and revitalizing democratic politics and practices of citizenship.
Publics of Citizens
In order to frame a theory of democratic citizenship education commensurate with
the challenges posed by contemporary globalization I return to Nancy’s Fraser’s
recommendations for transnationalizing public spheres. You will recall that Fraser makes
two broad recommendations for rethinking and renovating the public sphere. First, she
calls for institutionalizing new transnational public powers. Second, she calls for
institutionalizing elements of transnational/quasi-global citizenship, generating broad
solidarities that cross identity-based divisions, and constructing broadly inclusive public
spheres in which common interests can be identified through democratic deliberation. In
order to institutionalize new forms of citizenship, generate broad solidarities, and
construct inclusive public spheres, she suggests that relations must be realigned among
four distinct kinds of community: the imagined community, or nation; the political (or
civic) community, or citizenry; the communications community, or public; and the
community of fate, or the set of stakeholders affected by various developments (Fraser,
2002, 15). Whereas Fraser suggests that these four kinds of community are distinct, and
do not map onto one another today, I suggest that the Habermasian strand of deliberative
democratic theory, which much of Fraser’s work on public sphere theory critiques and
extends, contains resources for bringing about the sorts of realignments that she
recommends.
These theoretical resources are developed in the recent work of political
philosopher and deliberative theorist Noelle McAfee. Like Fraser, McAfee grounds her
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work on the public sphere in a Habermasian conception; and like Habermas, she turns to
the tradition of North American philosophical pragmatism as central to the theory’s
normative precepts. McAfee draws upon the work of John Dewey, particularly The
Public and Its Problems, to elucidate a concept of the “public” commensurate with public
sphere theory as the normative core of civil society. In her work, public deliberation is
central to democratic theory for both is legitimating and epistemic functions (Public
Knowledge, 2004).
McAfee’s approach to the idea of the “public” is useful for contemporary public
sphere theory because it provides a fluid and dynamic conception of the public capable of
realigning traditional relations across communities and generating the broad solidarities
that Fraser calls for. Whereas Fraser’s work has emphasized multiple counter publics
within the public sphere, McAfee extends Habermas’s focus on social movements as
useful terrain for thinking about publics as dynamic forms of energy or “ways of being.”
She suggests that “instead of thinking about publics as static or passive entities, we could
think of them as forms of energy, made up of a multiplicity of diverse and finite people
seeking together to find a path forward. If public is a way of being [it is more akin to
electricity than a light bulb] (from David Mathews).” (PK, 153-54)
Like Dewey, McAfee grounds the public in face-to-face deliberations,
foregrounding the nuance and multiplicity of verbal communication or “winged words of
conversation in immediate intercourse” (Dewey, 1954 218 in PK 148). The Deweyian
model of public deliberation envisioned by McAfee is commensurate with the
experimental, reflexive approach to collective identity advocated by Benhabib as well as
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the generation of broad solidarities across communities of fate called for by Fraser. As
McAfee sees it:
…public talk makes possible a “fraternally shared experience” or
understanding of political phenomena that are perceived and felt by a
public. Dewey observes that when people inquire together about political
matters, they create more knowledge of these matters and of themselves as
a public (my emphases). This is not merely the result of aggregating their
bits of knowledge. Rather, it is the result of being able to weave together
the interconnections, dispersed consequences, multiple and sometimes
clashing aims that the public can conceive only when it talks together. As
the people talk together and begin to fathom the roots and effects of public
problems, they begin to form and identify themselves as a public, as actors
who might be able to channel and direct public action. (PK, 148)
This passage highlights the ways in which public deliberation generates two
forms of public knowledge: knowledge about specific issues and knowledge in
the form of a sense of collective identity as a public. This sense of collective
identity partners with a sense of solidarity, both of which are born from
addressing specific problems that arise in the context of shared communities of
fate. Yet generation of such publicness—in terms of a choate sense of identity and
useful public knowledge—does not come without challenges. The pluralism and
complexities that mark globalization are particularly thorny issues.
The first issue, pluralism, poses a challenge for public deliberation, and
the generation of public knowledge, because people must be able and willing to
talk across difference, in order to share their unique perspectives. According to
McAfee, this requires a “public way of being:”
The view that I am outlining calls for people to leave their enclaves and
join with unlike others. In addition to talking across class, race, and
religious lines, they need to become open to the many kinds of outlook that
proliferate beyond these categories. In other words, the multitude needs to
take up a public way of being, which is not that of a realm of friends but of
an arena of strangers who must try to see what these others see. We are
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often among strangers—in a shopping mall, at a street corner, or in an
airport –but not with the political imperative of comprehending how
consequences of common life affect these others in our midst. This is a
major challenge for contemporary politics: finding ways for, as Dewey said
in The Public and Its Problems (1954), the inchoate public to become
choate. (PK 146)
The second issue, complexity, is heightened by contemporary global scale.
For Dewey at the turn of the twentieth century, and for us at the turn of the twenty
first century, complexity often breeds disenchantment, and bewilderment, and
perhaps apathy. Dewey asserts that: “when problems become immense and their
consequences difficult to perceive, the problems begin to eclipse the public” and
observers lament indifference and apathy. “But apathy, Dewey noted, is best
understood as ‘testimony to the fact that the public is so bewildered that it cannot
find itself’” (Dewey, 1954, 123 in PK 147); the public is bombarded and inchoate.
According to McAfee, Dewey’s solution for helping the public become
choate amidst complexity is three-pronged and interconnected: 1) to find itself,
the public needs to fully fathom the consequences of human actions and the
origins of action; 2) to be able to make such connections, and make good political
judgments thereafter, the public needs increased intelligence—the kind of
intelligence needed to “judge the bearing of knowledge” (Dewey, 1954: 208-9);
and 3) to create this kind of intelligence, “Dewey calls for a ‘practical reformation of social conditions,’ namely people’s reconnection to their local
communities, where face-to-face intercourse can occur (Dewey, 1954: 211 in PK,
147-48). McAfee argues that this can occur, and is occurring, through public
political forums that emphasize voice in deliberation toward the creation of public
20
identities and public knowledge which will, in turn, inform sound public policy
(PK 149-150).
It is in these dynamic moves between and across public collective identity
formation, public deliberation about specific issues of common concern, and
public policy making that relationships are realigned between what Fraser refers
to as imagined, political, communications and communities of fate. Public of
citizens deliberate and direct communication flows toward relevant political
bodies. Within this conception of citizenship, citizenship is not conceived of as
simply a status, but rather as agency in the public sphere. Following Habermas,
McAfee highlights citizenship in terms of participation in social movements. She
explains that social movements in the public sphere of civil society are “examples
of new concerns brought to the agenda by the political periphery—the public of
citizens (my emphases) Citizens can act as sensors, experiencing new crises and,
via the public sphere, raising awareness of these crises as political problems”
(HKC, 93). But citizens must not only participate in consciousness raising, they
must also be able to generate public opinion regarding solutions and mobilize this
opinion to influence decisions within the political system. Habermas describes the
function of a deliberative public in the following manner:
The public sphere is a warning system with sensors that, though
unspecialized, are sensitive throughout society. From the perspective of
democratic theory, the public sphere must, in addition, amplify the
pressure of problems, that is, not only detect and identify problems but
also convincingly and influentially thematize them, furnish them with
possible solutions, and dramatize them in such a way that they are taken
up and dealt with by parliamentary complexes. Besides the “signal”
function, there must be effective problematization. The capacity of the
public sphere to solve problems on its own is limited. But this capacity
21
must be utilized to oversee the further treatment of problems that takes
place inside the political system. (Habermas 1996, 359 in HKC, 94-95)
Deliberation within and across public spheres simultaneously create these spheres as
discursive spaces and coalesces publics of citizens capable of generating the public
knowledge and opinion necessary for political will formation in the sphere and stage of
democratic policy formulation.
To summarize the arguments put forward in this section, whether we emphasize
Dewey’s language of publics or Habermas’s language of social movements, public
deliberation forms the public sphere of civil society, and gives rise to identities and
generates forms of public knowledge and opinion; none of these phenomena are confined
to state borders or strict distinctions between communities (as posited by Fraser). Public
deliberations have the potential make choate a sense of the public, as well as to bring
together the public intelligence to generate public knowledge that can inform policy
solutions. Strategic knowledge is then also necessary, in order to target generated public
opinion to appropriate political decision making bodies. These emphases on creating
deliberative publics of citizens suggests a number of tasks for democratic citizenship
education: cultivating in young people public ways of being, problem solving and
deliberative capacities, as well as the knowledge, understanding and skills to navigate
complexities of various levels of political organizations and to make strategic decisions
as to where opinion, knowledge, and action should be targeted.
Educating Publics of Citizens
While many traditional definitions of citizenship conceive of it as a political status
linked to one’s membership in a nation state, many traditional definitions of citizenship
22
education equate it with nationalist education and emphasize aspects such as teaching
patriotism and the specific history and cultural traditions of particular national groups.
Even approaches that do not equate citizenship with nationalist education, generally
highlight a state-centered political education: that is, the nation state is centered as the
primary locus of politics and emphases include teaching knowledge of rights, laws, and
decision making processes within the narrow context of the state.
The contemporary context of the global era demands that we move beyond these
traditional definitions and decouple citizenship from national education. Not only in the
United States, Canada and other large heterogeneous states, but also smaller nation states
committed to democratic principles facing increasing pluralism due to economic and
political migration.4
This move away from an emphasis on the nation state entails shifts of emphases
in citizenship education away from things like national identity, allegiance, and
patriotism to multiple roles and complex skills--such as collaborative problem solving
and deliberative capacities--necessary for participation in global civil society. While
state-centered education has its place, it must be moved from a primary to a
complementary role in a model of democratic citizenship education that situates the state
as one political form among many; a union among unions. Moreover, democratic
citizenship education must be conceived in terms of a broader political education for
democratic participation in national, transnational and global public spheres.
Two common themes are emphasized in much of the discourse surrounding
education for democracy in a global era: universal provision of education and human
rights education. While each of these are appropriate and important aspects of
23
democratic education, they are not sufficient in terms of thinking about revitalizing
democracy through participation in the public spheres of civil society. McAfee’s account
of the role of the public sphere in Habermas’s communicative theory and the concept of
the public in Dewey’s pragmatic philosophy suggest a sophisticated and nuanced
conception of citizenship capable of navigating the challenges of postnational,
cosmopolitan deliberative democracy. McAfee offers a Habermasian theory of
citizenship; one that he does not make explicit, but that she draws from the overall outline
of his political theory. According to her, the capacities and functions of citizenship
would include the following:





citizenship should be seen as an intersubjective enterprise; it cannot be carried
out by isolated individuals;
citizens have to create the space in which citizenship can occur; that is, they
have to move beyond their purely private networks and into more public ones,
in the process creating and maintaining civil society;
from within this civil society, citizens need to create discursive spaces in
which they address matters of common concern—that is, they need to create
the political public sphere;
effective citizenship calls for the ability to “ferret out, identify, and effectively
thematize latent problems of social integration” (Habermas 1996, 358);
citizens will need to engage in this opinion- and will-formation process
spontaneously, without the prompting of formal systems; otherwise channels
of communication would flow from center to periphery rather than the
deliberative-democrat way, from periphery to center; citizens should be able
to bring these issues to the attention of formal legislative bodies “in a way that
disrupts the latter’s routines” (Habermas 1996, 358) [McAfee, HKC, 95]
In emerging and existing democracies, in more and less pluralistic states,
citizenship education commensurate with such functions and capacities
necessitates attention to 1) the vibrancy, democratization and educative functions
of the institutions of civil society, as well as 2) the role of formal educational
institutions, namely schools, in terms of their institutional character and curricular
offerings.
24
The Practice of Citizenship in Institutions of Civil Society5
Democratic citizenship education takes place not only in schools, but also
throughout the institutions of civil society. It is within civil society that
democratic competence is practiced and that a democratic political culture is both
created and transmitted. As Held maintains in explaining the relationship
between his principle of democratic autonomy and his emphasis on the realm of
civil society:
If democratic life involves no more than a periodic vote, the locus of
people’s activities will be the ‘private’ realm of civil society and the scope
of their actions will depend largely on the resources they can command.
Few opportunities will exist for citizens to act as citizens, as participants
in public life. Democratic autonomy seeks to redress this state of affairs
by creating opportunities for people to establish themselves ‘in their
capacity of being citizens.’ (Arendt, On Revolution 1963, 256 in Held,
323-325)
Vibrant civil societies provide many opportunities for people, including young
people, to establish themselves in the capacity of citizenship in terms of
inculcating shared principles—or civic virtues—and providing opportunities to
develop concrete competencies. Jean Cohen argues that while participation in the
voluntary associations of civil society may cultivate civic virtue or build social
capital, neither of these functions are paramount to deliberative democracy. She
views participation in institutions of civil society in terms of building
communicative and democratic competencies—that is, political competencies that
play a role in the formation of public opinion. In her view, civil society is a
potential as practice grounds for democracy (Cohen, “Civil Society Talk”).6 The
potential of civil society is stressed here because democratic competencies can
only be generated by specific types of participation in specific forms of
25
associations; that is, institutions of civil society must be democratically organized
in order to breed democracy.
In order to cultivate democratic autonomy and competence, the institutions
of civil society, including schools, must be organized democratically. This is
necessary in order to promote the sort of political culture necessary for democracy
to flourish. Cohen and Arato assert this thesis in their well-known work Civil
Society and Political Theory:
…We build upon the thesis of one of the most important predecessors of
the pluralist approach, Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued that without
active participation on the part of citizens in egalitarian institutions and
civil associations, as well as in politically relevant organizations, there will
be no way to maintain the democratic character of political culture [my
emphasis] or of social and political institutions. Precisely because modern
civil society is based on egalitarian principles and universal inclusion,
experience in articulating the political will and in collective decision
making is crucial to the reproduction of democracy. (Cohen and Arato,
Civil Society and Political Theory, 19)7
The democratization of schools as institutions of civil society is a project
with many layers and much work to be accomplished. One area ripe for
consideration is the function and provision of public schooling. In the current
neoliberal context of global capitalism the economic and political functions of
schooling often serve the ends of social reproduction in accordance with existing
class-based in equalities. The contradictory potential of schools as liberatory
vehicles must also be pressed and fought for.
Moreover, questions surrounding the organization of schooling must be
examined. State-provided schooling, while potentially fulfilling a democratic
mandate for universal education, does not necessarily do so in ways consistent
with the decentering of the state and the democratization of civil society. State
26
provision of education, whereby schools are arms of the state and bureaucratic
structures and relationships reign, needs to be reconsidered in accordance with the
normative model of multiplistic public spheres developed in this essay.
Deliberative democratic theory offers principles such as subsidiarity and
associational governance, advocated by many radical and deliberative democrats,
that support alternative models of organization for public schooling—such as
public school choice and public charter schools.8
Another crucial element in terms of the democratization of schools as
mediating institutions of civil society is student voice. A key part of the
institutional renovation necessary in education, in order for democratic citizenship
education to be possible, is the inclusion of young people’s voices in structural
processes (planning, governance, etc.) as well as curricular and pedagogical
practices.
Conclusion
A postnational, cosmopolitan deliberative theory of citizenship and
citizenship education for a global era reconceives both politics and relationship
across communities in fluid and dynamic ways that traverse multiplistic public
spheres and levels of political organization. Politics is situated in state and
international political systems, but also in the informal processes of opinion
formation that arise in civil society and influence will formation in the political
sphere. As scholars continue to theorize relationships between citizen
involvement in voluntary associations and social movements -- civil publics --and
political bodies, as well as between civic engagement and political participation
27
and the role of communication in these processes, educators must be preparing
young people capable of public ways of being and competent in democratic
deliberation. The challenges faced by democracy in the context of globalization
require citizens who share commitments to democratic principles, are able to
function in an ever-changing, problem-based environments, and have
communicative and problem solving capacities.
While educators prepare young people to fulfill the multiple roles of
deliberative citizenship, they must also practice and exhibit these qualities
themselves. Democratic citizenship education in a global era is a daunting task.
Current trends in education in most existing democracies are better characterized
as neoliberal or neoconservative than as democratizing. Yet, as Torres argues,
“social movements have an increasingly powerful voice in arguing against
‘globalization without representation:’ when social movements press schools to
live up to their democratic purposes, the struggles alter the relationship of social
forces, exciting forces that can weaken capitalism’s social and political
hegemony” (Lois Wiener, “Schooling to Work,” in Aronowitz and Cutler, eds.
Post-work: The wages of cybernation. 1998, 194 cited in Torres, AERJ, 376). The
articulation and implementation of democratic citizenship education is itself a
social movement requiring public deliberation and opinion formation, and
exertion of pressure on political bodies in order to disrupt the current hegemony.
For democratic citizenship education to move from the periphery, where it now
sits, toward the center, we will need the “winged words” of educators as public
intellectuals and citizens to create publics through face-to-face deliberation,
28
accompanied by strategic action aimed toward political bodies spanning local,
national, and transnational arenas.
For fuller treatment of these issues see Kenichi Ohmae’s The End of the Nation State (1995) in
Torres, AERA 2002; Seyla Benhabib, “Citizens, Residents, and Aliens in a Changing World:
Political Membership in the Global Era,” Social Research Vol. 66, No. 3 (Fall 1999) and “Political
Geographies in a Global World: Arendtian Reflections” Social Research, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Summer
2002); and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal Limits of Citizenship (1994).
2
See, for example, David Miller “Bounded Citizenship” in Hutchings and Dannreuther, eds.
Cosmopolitan Citizenship. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
3
According to Habermas’s definition, which McAfee is drawing upon, “[The public sphere is] a
domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the
public sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in
every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public…Citizens act as a
public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion; thus with
the guarantee that they may assemble and unite freely, and express and publicize their opinions
freely…We speak of a political public sphere (as distinguished from a literary one, for instance)
when the public discussions concern objects connected with the practice of the state” (Habermas,
1989, 231 cited in HKC, 82).
4
Drawing upon Held’s model of cosmopolitan democracy, Osler and Starkey develop a model of
cosmopolitan citizenship that examines national citizenship in the U.K. in context of globalization. Their
empirical study highlights multiple identities and realities of discrimination and inequality as reasons for
viewing national citizenship in pluralistic democracies as too narrow. They recommend cosmopolitan
citizenship as more commensurate with young people’s experience of civic identity. Audrey Osler and
Hugh Starkey. Learning for Cosmopolitan Citizenship: theoretical debates and young people’s experiences.
Educational Review, Vol 55, No. 3, 2003.
5
Osler and Starkey’s UK study identifies specific local sites of learning citizenship beyond the
school as well as physical spaces that young people value as public spaces. Such empirical work
can be complemented with the philosophical and normative underpinnings provided by
deliberative democratic theory, particularly the ideas of discursive public spaces and concept of
the political public sphere as a site for learning citizenship.
6
Cohen makes this argument as a response to, and in disagreement with, Robert Putnam’s use of
the concepts of civil society and social capital in his well known research on decline of civic
engagement in the U.S. See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of
American Community. NY: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
7
Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992. This commitment to the democratization of civil society is shared by a number of other
theorists, although formulated a bit differently by each. See, for instance, Joshua Cohen and Joel
Rogers applying ideal norms of deliberation within what Habermas would consider “informal”
political spheres in Associations and Democracy. NY: Verso, 1995; Anthony Giddens on
“democratizing democracy” in Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1994; Carol Gould’s argument for the democratization of social
and cultural institutions in Rethinking Democracy. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988; and
David Held on democratic autonomy and civil society in Models of Democracy.
8
For further discussion of the principles of subsidiarity and associative democracy see Jean Cohen
and Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers. For an argument linking these principles with public school
choice, particularly in the form of charter schooling in the U.S., see Stacy Smith, Democratic
Potential of Charter Schools. NY: Peter Lang, 2001.
1
29
Deliberating Publics of Citizens:
Postnational citizenship amidst global public spheres
Stacy Smith
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