PROYECTO CULTURAL (T ejiendo una historia a través

In the most conventional sense citizenship is defined as a formal status given to members of a political community usually conceived of as the nation-state (Kymlicka and Norman 1994; Turner 2009). This status is typically defined in terms of rights and obligations thus guaranteeing, in theory, formal equality amongst citizens – or “equality of status,” as Eckert (2011) calls it. The main emphasis of this politico-legal view of citizenship has been on the capacity of the state to grant entitlements and protection to its members. However, as many have argued, the formal recognition of political membership cannot guarantee political participation or equality under the law. This is T. H. Marshall’s point of departure in his classic work on citizenship.

T. H. Marshall (1994) focused on the content of citizenship, that is, on the set of rights that citizenship entails. Marshall’s study began by focusing on the relationship between the formal rights of citizenship and social inequality. Considering the case of Great Britain, Marshall proposed to divide citizenship into three components: civil; political; and social. Civil rights are those that guarantee equal protection under the law. These are the rights “necessary for individual freedom” and include “freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to

justice” (1994, 173). Such rights are guaranteed by the court system. Political rights guarantee individuals the ability to vote and participate in political life. Social rights are those that provide social protection for those who are marginalized in society. According to Marshall, social rights include “the whole range from the right to a modicum of

economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” (1994, 173). These rights are guaranteed by the educational system and public services. Marshall’s work is useful because it reminds us that political rights alone, or those which are often associated with mainstream understandings of citizenship, do not guarantee meaningful participation by all citizens , or as full members, of a given political community. Furthermore, Marhsall argued that rights also entail a “public duty” to exercise some of those rights (1994, 174). In his discussion on elementary education, for example, Marshall argued that, “the duty to improve and civilize oneself is therefore a social duty, and not merely a personal one, because the social health of a society depends upon the civilization of its members” (1994, 175). He also listed paid work as a central responsibility of citizens. Finally, in contexts of great social inequality, Marhall’s account of citizenship is attractive. He suggested, for example, that the “equality implicit” in the concept of citizenship undermines social inequality (1994, 175).11

Marshall’s work, however, can be criticized on many grounds. Marshall’s notion that social citizenship can diminish inequality and reduce class conflict did not materialize as he initially suggested (Schild 2000). In a recent analysis of T. H. Marshall’s contribution to the study of citizenship, Bryan Turner (2009) highlights four weaknesses. First, Marhall did not provide an account of the mechanisms that permitted the extension of citizenship. Rather, Marshall’s take on citizenship relied on an evolutionary framework. In doing this, Marshall often ignored the role of working-class struggles, for example, in

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Marshall’s account of citizenship is based on the experience of Great Britain and describes a historical trajectory that evolves from civil (18th century) to political (19th c.) and social (20th c.) rights. In the context of Latin America, some authors have shown that the recognition of social rights has often taken place in the absence of political and civil ones (Jelin 2003). For a critique of Jelin’s take on Marshall’s model, see Schild (2000).

the expansion of social citizenship. The second criticism is that Marshall relied on a “uniform and coherent concept” and ignored different historical contexts outside Europe (2009, 69). Third, Marshall’s account of citizenship did not establish connections

between ethnic and racial divisions and national citizenship. As Turner suggests, Marshall’s theory was “as blind to race and ethnicity as it was to culture” (2009, 69). Others have highlighted the gender bias in Marshall’s account of citizenship, particularly as the preferred place to claim entitlements is the “masculine world of work” (Young 1995; Schild 2000; Lister 2003). Finally, Marshall’s approach had “little or nothing to say about duties and obligations” and so it assumed the presence of “relatively passive” citizens protected by the state from the uncertainties of capitalism (Turner 2009, 69). In the unequal context of Latin America, the debate on citizenship has highlighted the profound gap that exists between formally recognized rights and citizenship in practice (Rosaldo 1990; Alvarez et al. 1998; Schild 2000; Jelin 2003). Corrigan and Sayer (1985), writing about a different context, have reminded us that those who are socially

marginalized face additional challenges when it comes to the exercise of citizenship rights in their everyday life:

“For the materially subordinated […] this is also their limitation: not just in the negative sense of their ideality [of rights], their unrealizability, for most peoples most of the time […], but in the strongly positive sense that construction of social identity […] actively denies the possibility of expressing the real experience of difference, of material subordination, politically, as anything other than ‘personal’ and ‘private’ misfortune (Corrigan and Sayer 1985, 187).

Marshall’s trilogy assumes a progressive evolution of one set of rights giving way to the next set and so on. In practice, however, regions like Latin America show that this evolution has not taken place and, in some cases, an “involution” has, in fact, taken place in the recent period producing in practice a regression of rights once acquired by social sectors. Moreover, in other cases there have been recent attempts to recognize collective rights as a means of overcoming the ostensible limitations of individual rights. The wave

of legal recognition of indigenous rights through Latin America since the 1980s discussed above is an illustration. These rights have been granted to groups by virtue of their

cultural difference (Yashar 2005).