This book is part of a larger project aimed at “de-provincializing” Alexander’s civil sphere theory (CST). It takes CST out of its initial instantiation, very explicitly rooted in the US experience, and, faithful to its universalistic ambition, applies it to other world settings. The goal is twofold: to use civil sphere theory productively to address its relevance in different societal and national settings, proving that its scope is not restricted to the United States (or to the world’s most stable liberal democracies); but secondly, not simply to employ the theory but to advance it. Regarding the latter, from the outset, Alexander and those sympathetic to his intentions consider CST to be an ongoing project with an unfinished agenda (Sciortino, Reference Sciortino2007; Kivisto Reference Kivisto2007). Part of our task is thus to distill the lessons derived from these case studies that point to future theoretical work.
This is done with the recognition that Latin America constitutes a broad and not altogether precise group of nations. In its most expansive expression, Latin America amounts to every nation in the Western Hemisphere other than Canada and the United States. In a more delimited understanding of which nations count as “Latin” American, the term is used to refer to those nations whose colonial histories were defined by the two empire builders located on the Iberian Peninsula – Spain and Portugal. Whether by design or not, the seven countries examined herein are all Iberian American nations. This makes them interesting tests for CST, as their discourses of membership and solidarity are rooted in cultural traditions – not least the national imaginations of the creole pioneers celebrated by Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1983) – that are surely distinctive and diverse in comparison to those of the United States and Canada.
Every Empirical Application is an Interpretation
Exploring the significance of CST outside of North America is a project initiated by Alexander himself, with his essay analyzing the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt in Reference Alexander2011, which he conceptualized as a battle among contesting forces bringing to bear cultural power in attempting to gain the upper hand in shaping collective representations. In this battle, both the regime and the protesters framed their actions and motives according to symbolic codes remarkably similar to those identified in The Civil Sphere (Alexander Reference Alexander2006).
This book, like those that will follow, is meant to go further along this road, exploring in a more systematic way the varieties of civil spheres in various parts of the world. It is unlikely such explorations will leave CST unscathed. Each collective work on a given area brings, and will bring, to light inevitably not only a number of empirical challenges, but also different emphases concerning the CST framework itself. Any empirical application, as Alexander has always stressed in his theoretical work, is actually a revision and a reinterpretation. We evaluate a theoretical framework not only in the light of our empirical findings but also our theoretical concerns.
Our starting point is consequently to look at what dimensions of CST are taken as crucial by the authors of the chapters, and which ones are made latent or placed in the background. It is obvious that the main concern of nearly all authors is the relationship between civil solidarity and political democracy. A significant element, from the point of view of a broader development of CST, is precisely the endemic emphasis in the chapters on the connection between the dynamics of the civil sphere and the development of democratization (or de-democratization) processes. This will consequently comprise the core of our comments.
It is equally important, however, to pay attention to the dogs that do not bark. It is evident that some topics that loom large in The Civil Sphere do not find their way into the collection. The more obvious to our eyes is the issue of competing modes of incorporation of marginalized groups. While some chapters are clearly concerned with the civil repair of long-standing inequalities, they pay only marginal attention to the issue of social difference (with the important exception of a chapter on gender). Modes of incorporation are a key feature of CST, which has proved fruitful in refreshing the ever-pressing study of ethnic, racial, and religious incorporation (Alexander Reference Alexander2013; Kivisto Reference Kivisto2012; Sciortino Reference Sciortino, Alexander, Jacobs and Smith2012). It is interesting – and intriguing – to note that none of the authors has felt the need to appropriate this topic, a fact that we take is connected not to the lack of material, but rather to theoretical priorities and, most importantly, to the kind of intellectual dialogues the authors participate in. Equally intriguing is the (relative) lack of attention to the connections between the highlighted cleavages in the definition of societal membership and conditions of extreme socioeconomic inequality, despite the fact that it could help to make sense both of the enduring strength of the revolutionary code in Latin America and of the frequent othering of the poor as a dangerous class of disqualified members.
It is also important to listen to what some dogs seem only to whisper. In several chapters, there is an important, and potentially innovative, change in the vision of the civil sphere itself. In Alexander’s original formulation, the civil sphere is relatively unified and consistent. Its discourse of membership is, although endemically encroached by ascriptive traditions and noncivil sectoral interests, unitary. Even radical opponents share the same code and fight within it, inverting the same polarities to indict their opponents (and vice versa). In some of the chapters reviewed herein, on the contrary, the civil sphere is often presented as internally contested. Other competing discourses of membership and solidarity constantly challenge it. Several chapters thus endorse Carlo Tognato’s innovation of positing not a single discursive structure concerning membership, in which opponents use the same codes with inverted polarities, but rather a set of membership discourses, in which a civil discourse stands in contrast to, and sometimes besieged by, other normative visions of the good social life. Tognato, followed by other colleagues, identifies both hacienda and militant revolutionary discourses not as external encroachments on a shared civil sphere, but as alternative symbolic structures. The question is: Can a civil sphere actually have multiple codes, each one embedded in traditions defined by highly diversified understandings of what “civil” means? What is the relationship between the civil as a universalizing sphere of collective membership and the civil as a specific liberal discourse competing with different social understandings? The chapters pave the way for the discussion of a key tenet of CST, and we expect it to trigger some important debates in the near future.
The Civil Sphere as a Universal Phenomenon
All the chapters in this volume explore, in different ways, the CST claim that a distinctive feature of the civil sphere – as a differentiated sphere of universalizing common membership – is a universal social phenomenon. The chapters converge on the finding that, even in repressive or highly fragmented societies, the codes of the civil sphere are immanent to a variety of societal dynamics. They resonate with Farhad Khosrokhavar’s argument that, except for very extreme forms of political atomization and oppression, some form of the civil sphere operates even in highly authoritarian societies, even though at times (such as the aftermath of the Arab Spring in Egypt), it persists solely or largely in the subjectivity of citizens rather than objectively in institutional manifestations (Khosrokhavar Reference Khosrokhavar, Kivisto and Sciortino2015).
Alexander, in the first two of his “Nine Thesis on The Civil Sphere” has similarly argued that the civil sphere “is not exclusively modern,” although he has also stressed the difference between primordial forms of solidarity and more universalizing ones – the latter associated with modern and modernizing societies (Alexander Reference Alexander, Kivisto and Sciortino2015: 172–173). Whereas in the first thesis, he locates the civil sphere in relationship to modernity, in his second thesis, “the civil sphere can be partial,” he locates it in reference to democracy (Alexander Reference Alexander, Kivisto and Sciortino2015: 173–174). His stance is a simple one: civil spheres can exist in nondemocratic (or partially democratic) societies, but not fully. Taken together, the argument is that a civil sphere with sufficient cultural power to advance a universalistic form of solidarity, justice predicated on a commitment to the sacredness of the individual, and a mode of incorporation based on the recognition of difference is only possible in a modern democratic society. The achievement of such a civil sphere is always partial, historically contingent, and an ongoing, ever-reconstituted achievement. Real-existing democracies are in constant need of civil repair. No society is, nor will any ever be, fully modern. Likewise, no society is or will ever become anything resembling a pure democracy.
The cases analyze in detail how the working of a civil sphere can be traced and documented across Latin America, producing a varied set of consequences for the democratization (and de-democratization) processes recorded in the continent. They do so in terms of two interconnected continua: traditional/modern and authoritarian/democratic. Such distinctions are hardly new: they have been at core of the thinking of modernization theorists such as Walt Whitman Rostow, Lucien Pye, Daniel Lerner, and Gabriel Almond. Civil Sphere Theory scholars, however, approach the same questions with a radically different set of tools. They do not have any trace of the modernization theorists’ delusion of having discovered a teleological social science model, a “universal, general syndrome that changes the same lives of people in the same way in all regions of the globe,” bringing democracy as an inevitable outcome (Latham Reference Latham2000:53). Civil Sphere Theory, moreover, does not see Western liberal democratic societies as models to be imitated or benchmarks to be adopted. Even they are local instantiations of a more abstract, analytically autonomous, cultural pattern that can be found, in different forms and ways, in other forms of societies.
Given such a stance, coming to terms with the particularities of democracy and the salience of civil society in Latin America, as the case studies herein attest, requires being able to locate the present in terms of the region’s deep history, a history that has shaped distinctive (and perhaps multiple) discourses that come to characterize and frame participation in the civil sphere.
Varieties of Political Regimes
As we have noted at the outset, a distinctive feature of the chapters, within the background of the existing CST literature, is their strong focus on the connections between the civil sphere and democracy. They adopt CST mainly to analyze the impact of particular political regimes on the workings not only of the civil sphere, but also of civil society more broadly (and vice versa). Here it may be useful to read them having in mind the large variations in the degree of democratic arrangements among the selected case studies. Two widely-used metrics that provide global comparisons reveal perspectives on the democratic prospects in Latin America generally and the seven case-study nations in particular. They offer, if approached critically, a means for deriving comparisons within the case-study nations.
The oldest of such reports, produced annually since the 1970s by Freedom House, seeks to measure the freedom status of individual citizens based on the level of existing political rights and civil liberties as they are defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Each country is ranked as free, partly free, or not free. In terms of freedom status, three of the case-study nations have been ranked as free: Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Colombia and Mexico have been ranked as partly free, while Cuba and Venezuela have been deemed not free. Turning to press freedom, a separate index, Chile is the only case-study nation to be ranked as free. In three nations, press freedom is partly free – Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia – while the remaining three – Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela – are considered to be not free (Puddington and Roylance Reference Puddington and Roylance2017: 20–24).
The Economist Intelligence Unit launched its Democracy Index in 2006. It contends that such an index offers a thick, in contrast to Freedom House’s thin, understanding of democracy. The Democracy Index classifies nation states as full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, or authoritarian regimes. Adding to the issues that factor into Freedom House’s index, the Democracy Index explores governmental functioning, judicial independence, the rule of law predicated on adequate checks and balances, and – particularly germane to exploration of the civil sphere – an assessment of whether the political culture of the nation is supportive of or undermines democracy (The Economist Intelligence Unit 2017). According to the report, little more than 10 percent of current nation states may be judged full democracies. Slightly less than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in either full or flawed democracies (The Economist Intelligence Unit 2017: 3).
Uruguay is the only Latin American country that makes the list of full democracies. In fact, with Canada, it is only one of two nations in the Western Hemisphere so categorized. Five of the seven case-study nations are located in the flawed democracy list; in rank order from highest to lowest rankings within the category are Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Venezuela is considered a hybrid regime, while Cuba is classed authoritarian. The report observes how Latin America remains the most democratic region of the developing world, albeit the region’s average score has continued to decline in recent years: “The region has relatively strong democratic fundamentals – including comparatively high scores for electoral process and pluralism and civil liberties – but the full consolidation of democracy in the region continues to be held back by issues regarding political effectiveness and culture” (The Economist Intelligence Unit 2017: 39).
Applying Civil Sphere Theory to Latin America
The value of these case studies for advancing the civil sphere as a theoretical project rests in part on the fact that five of the seven nations examined are democracies, however flawed and fragile they might be. If Khosrokhavar has tried to distinguish different types of authoritarian regimes (as older distinctions between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes similarly sought to do), the chapters collected here show the importance of similarly distinguishing really-existing democracies along a continuum involving degrees of robustness and embeddedness of democratic culture, institutions, performative practices, and rituals.
We may now return to the issue of how these cases contribute to clarify the ways in which civil sphere theory has a capacity to expand understanding of the cultural dynamics that work for or against democratization. We start with the two nations that reside at the opposite sides of the authoritarian/democratic spectrum: Cuba and Chile.
Attempting to Carve Out Space for the Civil Sphere in an Authoritarian Society
Cuba, which from the moment it excised itself from the repressive and corrupt Batista dictatorship in 1959, was caught in the tentacles of the Cold War. Siding with the Soviet Union, the Castro regime modeled itself both politically and economically on its powerful benefactor, creating an authoritarian state apparatus and a centralized command economy. To solidify its control of the island nation, it squeezed the existing civil sphere. Just as it clamped down on any efforts to promote economic markets, so it clamped down on autonomous organizations that might be perceived as challenging or criticizing the regime.
Liliana Martínez Pérez’s chapter captures a moment in which change leading to a more democratic future appears to be a possibility. The long decline and death of Fidel Castro in 2017 signifies the beginning of the end of the revolutionary generation. That an attempt to construct space for a civil sphere has been initiated in the blogosphere reflects the penetration of new media technologies even in a place that has been more isolated than other Latin American nations. La Joven Cuba represents an effort to reframe the inherited revolutionary discourse that strenuously defended Cuban communism and the militancy associated with permanent revolution in a more civil direction. In doing so, as the evidence presented by Martínez Pérez reveals, a tension exists between defending the revolution and engaging in a critique of it and of its long-term consequences. The persistent calls for the continuation of “militant self-censorship,” combined with the censorship exhibited by the government, reveals the tenuous and fragile state of civil society in contemporary Cuba, and illustrates the significance of a struggle over discursive codes in attempting to forge a civil culture. It also highlights the fact that a democracy movement, if it is to succeed, must acquire both political and cultural power.
Democratic Ritual Enacted in a Flawed but Currently Stable Democracy
The Chilean case study can be viewed as the “normal” functioning of the civil sphere in a flawed democracy (ranked 34 in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s list, sandwiched between Taiwan and Belgium). Chilean media operate with a degree of relative autonomy quite different from Cuba. M. Angélica Thumala’s study addresses the relationship between democracy and capitalism, a perennial topic in the social sciences.
Thumala’s study of two price-fixing business scandals, in the pharmaceutical and paper industries, may be appreciated in light of the fact that Chile is characterized not only by relatively low levels of political participation, the lowest level of trust in other people among OECD nations (OECD 2011), but also by low levels of corruption (Transparency International 2017) and high levels of commitment to and trust in democratic institutions (Corral Reference Corral2011: 9).
Thumala analyzes a clear case of civil repair: once media reporting on price-fixing took hold among a critical mass of the public, citizens demanded redress in the court of public opinion. And in so doing, both media and citizens engaged in what Alexander (Reference Alexander and Alexander2003: 155–177) called – in his own case study of the Watergate scandal – a “democratic ritual,” a ritual in which the colluders were successfully defined as polluted while the members of the public were seen as rights-bearing citizens who had been abused by uncivil actors and in the name of fairness, expected redress. The degree to which they succeeded is a reflection of the capacity of two crucial civil sphere institutions – the media and regulatory organizations – to be efficacious in the performance of their duties. The longer-term outcome – still to be determined – can be expected to involve a continuing struggle to tame capitalism sufficiently to prevent it from exacerbating its inherent tendencies to generate unacceptably high levels of inequality and the political disempowerment of those lacking economic power. Here the question is whether the civil sphere is sufficiently robust to ensure that this movement back and forth occurs within democratic parameters.
Democratic Ritual Stymied
Nelson Arteaga and Javier Arzuaga’s chronicling of a political scandal in Mexico also constitutes a case, albeit sui generis, of civil repair. It does so in the context of a nation that after seven decades of rule by the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has given way to a political opening for a multiparty political system, with more limited success in the concomitant democratization of that system. The authors point to the fact that “in Mexico, free and competitive elections, independent newspapers, and intellectuals who lead informed criticism of the government support the operation of a civil sphere.” Mexico and Chile are similar in some respects. Mexico ranks third from the bottom among OECD nations in terms of levels of interpersonal trust, thus paralleling Chile on this measure (OECD 2011), while also being on the higher end in terms of trust in basic governmental institutions (Corral Reference Corral2011).
However, there are significant differences, as well. Corruption is a far more serious problem compared to Chile. Mexico is also more violent, as measured by homicide rates. Mexico is also considered one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, something that has a clear impact on the dynamics of its civil sphere. Mexico, thus, would appear to be a prime example of a Latin American nation in which, as Magaly Sanchez (Reference Sanchez2006) describes it, “insecurity and violence” constitute a “new power relation.”
It is in this context that the analyzed scandal over a luxury home acquired by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto played out. It did so without, it appears, insecurity on the part of the critics or the use of violence by those accused of polluting the civil sphere. In some respects, it was like a soap opera, with Angélica Rivera, Nieto’s wife and a former soap opera actress, in one of the lead roles. At one level, this scandal points to a functioning civil sphere. A minority of the electorate elected Nieto, and criticism by his opponents was considered legitimate. Independent journalists uncovered the story and the media presented it to the public, where it led to considerable debate. At the same time, Arteaga and Arzuaga show how the public debate over the scandal, including whether or not it ought to be viewed as a scandal, was caught between two competing discourses: that of the binary codes of a democratic civil sphere and that of a patrimonial society predicated on traditional ideas of hierarchy and order. They think the presence of such competing discourses contributes to explain why the “White House” scandal was a draw, in which neither the defenders of patrimonial codes nor those advocating for a civil code succeeded in getting the upper hand. Thus, the authors are quite correct to characterize the Mexican civil sphere as both real and partial.
Civil Repair and Progress
The preceding two case studies represent examples of attempts aimed at the sort of civil repair that corrects an uncivil aberration, fixing it but not fundamentally changing the civil sphere in a progressive direction. In contrast, María Luengo’s study of attempts to combat endemic violence against women in Argentina describes a type of civil repair that, if it succeeds, results in a civil sphere that redefines societal solidarity in a more egalitarian and just way. Argentina is, after Chile, the most democratic nation among these seven case studies. It also shares with Chile a history of military rule. What distinguishes Argentina from its neighbor to the west is a long history of populism dating to the nineteenth century, but having its greatest and most lasting impact during the rise and fall of Juan Perón. As in any populist vision, Perón portrayed opponents as “unpatriotic” and as “enemies of the people” (Horowitz Reference Horowitz and Conniff2012: 22–23). Perónism was predicated on, to borrow the language of Carl Schmitt (Reference Schmitt and Schwab1996 [1932]), “the concept of the political” that pitted friends against enemies. The result is a polarized political system and society, one that can make difficult the functioning of a democracy based not on friends and enemies but on opponents one is expected to engage, by alternatingly challenging and cooperating in an ongoing performance of politics predicated on mutual respect.
Luengo, however, shows how even within strongly polarized societies, there are possibilities for substantial civil activism, endorsing the codes of the civil sphere. The campaign she analyzes fought against the murder of women that occurred with a certain impunity reflective of a patriarchal culture. Characterizing such murders as “femicides,” activists polluted the notion that these were crimes of passion that, though unfortunate, were inevitable. On the contrary, they linked such violence to the discredited human rights abuses of the military junta that were now widely described as acts of genocide.
The movement, working across the political spectrum, sought to rearticulate cultural codes about the place of women in Argentinian society. It thereby sought to strip away the ideological trappings of patriarchy – the “macho culture” that the movement condemned – that justified the subjugation and marginalization of women in the civil sphere. A new cultural script was introduced that depicted women no longer as isolated victims, but as citizens who were to be viewed as autonomous actors in all realms of life – including the family – as democratic coequals.
This campaign ignited in 2015, which means that it is too early to determine how the struggle between civil and uncivil codes will end up, but it reflects the capacity of forces of civility to successfully interject the debate into civil sphere discourse. The open question here is whether such a civil movement, challenging a deep-seated patriarchal understanding, can succeed in a context marked by such strong political polarization.
The Vital Center I: Reclaiming It
Alexander (Reference Alexander2016: 79) concludes a recent article by asking, “Is there a vital center?” The idea of a vital center derives explicitly from a book by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Reference Schlesinger1998 [1949]), writing with communism and fascism in mind, which sought to assess the challenges of extreme polarization on both the left and the right in the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War II. He was convinced that a functioning pluralist democracy required a rational, civil center left competing with an equally rational and civil center right, with both sides concerned about the threat posed by illiberal extremism. Subsequent defenders of liberal democracy share a conviction that only when the center holds, is it possible to conceive of a shared understanding of the good society (Alexander Reference Alexander2016: 79; see also Bellah, et al. Reference Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler and Tipton1991 and Gorski Reference Gorski2017). It is with the idea of the significance of a vital center for the civil sphere that we turn to two cases characterized by extreme polarization.
The first case is contained in Carlo Tognato’s analysis of civil life in a Colombian university – a microcosm of a society that has confronted intense violent conflict pitting left-wing guerilla groups, in particular the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the state, right-wing paramilitaries, and drug cartels against each other, which began over a half century ago. Over time, the boundary separating the university from the political sphere was breached, resulting in the intrusion of political partisanship into the realm of scholarship and teaching. The result was that whereas in the past, efforts to advance democratic civil discourse in the university (and elsewhere) confronted the deeply traditional and organicist worldview embraced in a culturally embedded hacienda discourse, it now had an additional discursive challenger, the militant revolutionary (akin to the situation in Cuba except that there, after the revolution, this discourse precluded alternatives from entering the civil sphere for decades).
Both of the noncivil discourses advanced competing authoritarian visions pitting friends against enemies, and justified recourse to violence. The peace accord with FARC in November 2016 has now created an opening for advocates of democratic civility, the emergence of one of the preconditions for a project of establishing a vital center. Tognato, however, is careful to stress how difficult seizing such opportunities will be.
The Vital Center II: Losing It
If the trend line in Columbia has been moving toward the establishment of a vital center, in neighboring Venezuela, the movement has been in precisely the opposite direction, leading to a degradation of democracy. Celso Villegas’s analysis of the current stalemate between anti-Chávez and pro-Chávez forces focuses on the discursive battle over what it means to be middle class and whether members of that class are to be viewed as political allies or opponents. He traces the shifting significance attached to the middle class from 1958 (the Punto Fijo period) until today, showing how the debate on the role of the middle classes closely mirrored the radically changing political climate in the country. Villegas documents how the competing depictions of the middle class are actually a way of drawing the lines regarding who constitutes the “people.” In the civil code, although with much blatant ideology, the entire citizenry constitutes the people, from the shantytown poor to the wealthiest oligarchs. In contrast, Chávez’s leftist populism differentiates between the popular classes and the capitalist classes, the former constituting the victimized people and the latter the exploitative elite. The issue becomes one of knowing how to classify members of the middle class into either of these categories – the pure or the polluted.
Villegas shows that Venezuela contains a civil sphere, now a highly polarized one, but one where an intense struggle for cultural power is underway that is reflected in part in competing collective representations of the middle class.
Civility and the Civil Sphere
The importance of classification struggles is also key to Mayumi Shimizu’s exploration into the role of the police in the boundary work differentiating civility from uncivility. Shimizu describes the routine differentiation of urban dwellers into virtuous insiders (located in the center of society) versus ostracized outsiders (consigned to the periphery), as an anticivil act of classification. Doing so, Shimizu advances a nuanced, interaction-level, analysis of the ways in which the civil sphere operates in mundane, everyday settings.
The chapter contributes to explaining the seeming paradox of a country, Brazil, which is ranked as a relatively benign flawed democracy, two decades of military juntas notwithstanding. This is commonly explained by the fact, as Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter (Reference Guillermo and Schmitter1986:22) write, that the Brazilian generals opted to “rule largely by distorting rather than by disbanding the basic institutions of political democracy.” When they returned to the barracks, the institutional framework for a democracy did not have to be reinvented. Shimizu makes clear, however, how the legacy of the junta period endures in several key areas, including police violence.
Regulatory institutions in CST are one of the fundamental types of institutions necessary for the civil sphere to function. Shimizu, by treating the police as a regulatory institution, makes clear that such institutions are part of the political sphere, thereby raising two questions: 1. how to understand the boundaries between the political and civil spheres, and 2. how those boundaries are to be mapped onto particular societal institutions. While she does not attempt to resolve the theoretical question, she succeeds in casting a spotlight on it. One step in wrestling with these questions is to reconnect her discussion of civility to the issue of civil discourse in the civil sphere. To the extent that discourse is informed by a democratic civil code, the citizenry and not the police are the ultimate arbiters in determining whose motives are to be construed as civil or anticivil, including not only criminals, but also the police, and (as the political scandal sweeping Brazil at present reveals) the political leadership stratum.
Citizenship and the Civil Sphere
Unlike the other case studies, Trevor Stack’s ethnographic study of the residents of a neighborhood in the medium-sized Mexican city of Zamora does not address scandals, polarization, or categorization. Rather, he is concerned with the everyday, taken-for-granted routines of his subjects and their understanding of their place in their society. Doing so, Stack addresses one of the curious features of the original formulation of CST: although its concerns regarding the democratic prospect are the same as those animating contemporary theorizing about citizenship, Alexander has not positioned his analysis in relationship to those theoretical currents (Kivisto Reference Kivisto2007: 113; Sciortino Reference Sciortino2007: 510).
When Stack asked people what they meant by citizenship, they frequently asserted that it meant “living in society,” which on the surface appears to be a rather vacuous characterization. However, when he pursued the topic further, it became clear that what they meant was that being a citizen involved more than merely being connected to the state. Stack’s informants pointed to an understanding of citizenship that transcended the state, also locating it squarely in the civil sphere. As a mode of social identity, it is inclusive, recognizing that everyone in their nation is “living in society” and that thus, presumably, rights are to be guaranteed to all.
While Arteaga and Arzuaga depict a discursive struggle pitting a civil code against a patrimonial one, Stack contends that a civil code – “civil sociality” is his term – competes with two codes, or “moral frameworks,” both of which have been at various historical moments sponsored by the state: liberalism and corporate nationalism. Stack does not develop in any detail the specifics of these codes, but the one thing that is very clear is that both discourses place a premium on the centrality of the state and thus, to the extent that one or both are successful, they facilitate a blurring of the boundaries between state and nonstate sectors in a manner that undercuts the potential relative autonomy of the civil sphere. The degree to which civil discourse has succeeded in displacing these uncivil codes is difficult to ascertain from Stack’s description, but it would appear to have made substantial inroads.
Lessons for the CST Project
As case studies making use of CST, at times critiquing elements of it or going beyond it, the chapters in this book are expected to advance CST not through explicit theoretical revisions but rather through opening up for scrutiny issues and concerns that can point to directions for furthering the theoretical project.
With this in mind, we conclude by pointing to three areas calling for further theoretical reflection. First, there is a need to further specify the relationship between spheres and institutions, a topic relevant to the issues of boundaries raised in four of the case studies. Put simply, spheres and institutions do not neatly map onto each other. Thus, the university (Tognato’s focus) is not simply an instantiation of the educational sphere. While it is primarily located in the educational sphere, it is also interpenetrated by other spheres, including the political, the economic, and the civil. Thus, future theoretical work addressing boundaries must also ipso facto inquire into the ways in which institutions serve simultaneously as the loci for functional differentiation based on their manifest purpose while also representing sites for the intrusion of other spheres seeking to work through the institution for more latent purposes.
Second, reflecting a concern found not only in the case studies, but beyond them to contemporary nations confronting “the populist explosion” (Judis Reference Judis2016; see also Müller Reference Müller2016), or for other nations characterized by other forms of extreme polarization, the significance of a vital center to civil sphere functioning bears further development. Democracy requires, and a vital center provides, a sense of a shared national identity and some fundamental agreement about what the common good entails to permit political opponents to engage in “working the binaries” (Alexander Reference Alexander2010: 89–110) in rational and civil ways. But what happens to the civil sphere if the vital center erodes and opponents become enemies? And, from the other side of the coin, what happens if the civil sphere is insufficiently democratic, if its deficits undermine it (Brysk Reference Brysk2000)?
Finally, related to an aspect of contemporary citizenship theorizing, these chapters contribute to introducing into CST the issue of center and periphery. Shimizu uses this term without reference to the classic essay by Edward Shils (Reference Shils1975), but turning to Shils can be instructive. His understanding of the center dovetails with Schlesinger’s description of the vital center, but rather than being concerned with societal polarization, introducing the idea of a center counterpoised to a periphery facilitates analytic consideration of the impact of inequality and marginalization on the civil sphere. Thus, in a world characterized at present by widespread global migration, the binary citizen/alien has acquired greater salience than was true a half century ago (Bosniak Reference Bosniak2006), while in every existing nation-state containing oppressed minority groups, the matter of dividing the citizenry into those construed as full citizens versus second-class citizens is a division of longstanding with implications for the capacity of such groups to be received as equals in the civil sphere (see e.g., Glenn Reference Glenn2002).
