Representation and Citizenship

INTRODUCTION

RICHARD MARBACK

Concern with representation figures inescapably in the study of citizenship. From the initial formulations of a notion of citizenship in ancient Greece, in which citizens were persons charged with representing the interests of the city-state, concern about who and what gets represented, as well as how and why those people and things get represented, have been central in formulas describing the citizen’s relationship to a political community. From these ancient roots we have retained the view that a citizen is, at least in part, someone whose participation in such things as public deliberation, jury duty, and military service represents through those acts the interests of the larger community of which he or she is a member. For the ancient Athenians, as Aristotle tells us, such an ideal citizen, one who puts aside private interest for the sake of the public good, did not expect the concerns of the community as a whole to be representative of his individual interests. The Athenian citizen understood that, through his participation in public affairs, he represented not himself but the polis. He was in this sense an embodiment of public interests, his words and deeds figuring forth the larger interests of the political community to which he pledged himself. Plato gave this view of citizenship its most forceful expression in the Republic, where he described the education of the guardian class as an education in which the souls of the rulers are brought into alignment with the order of the state so that they could learn to embody in themselves the interests of the polis. Whatever fault we may find with Plato’s guardian class, we can recognize how the democratic aspirations of Athenian citizenship, surrendering self-interest for public good, evolved over time from the rule of Solon (ca. 640–559 BCE), who extended citizenship status beyond the ranks of the aristocracy, to that of Pericles (ca. 490–429 BCE), who democratized the appointment of archons by opening it to citizens other than the Athenian elite.

In one sense, then, significant developments in Athenian citizenship turned on expanding and encouraging more and more citizens to take on roles as representatives of community interests that largely displaced their individual interests. Subsequent elaborations of citizenship in terms of either ideals or experiences of representation came to turn as well on reformulating the relationship of citizens and their private interests to the interests of the polity as a whole. Significant in this regard, in the seventeenth century, the status of citizen came to be formulated as a guarantee of noninterference by the state in the citizen’s private affairs, a guarantee that, in the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century, sets the sovereignty of citizens as a measure of the legitimacy of governments. Such an understanding of citizens as possessing inalienable rights to their private property, rights the state is bound to protect, quickly finds elaboration in the idea of government as a means for representing the aggregation of property interests in collective political action. An important consequence that follows from understanding collective interests as an aggregation of individual interests is a reciprocal comprehension of individual citizens in terms of the political community as a whole. Where in ancient Athens the interests of the state become the interests of the citizen, here in the American and French revolutions the interests of citizens have become the interest of the state.

Since the seventeenth century the tension between citizens as representatives of the interests of the state and the state as representative of the interests of its citizens has found practical and theoretical elaborations in understandings and exercises of citizenship. Today, the concept of representation resonates widely within citizenship studies, and its generative ambiguity gives expression to many of the key issues of community membership, creating in this way a critical vocabulary through which those issues can be expressed. It is this vocabulary of representation that this volume addresses. Here I explore some of the resonances of representation in order to provide a context for the chapters that follow. To preview what follows, these chapters can be read as organized around two concerns with representation that do—but do not necessarily have to—pull against each other: the one aligned with appeals to foundations as these are engaged in Rogers Smith’s contribution to this volume, the other aligned with notions of multiculturalism as these are discussed in Will Kymlicka’s contribution to this volume. Taken together, the contributions of Smith and Kymlicka circumscribe issues of representation that the remaining chapters of this volume address.

I begin with the appeals to a political community’s origins, appeals that form the foundations for that community’s sense of shared values. In his contribution to this collection, Lincoln and Obama: Two Visions of Civic Union, Rogers Smith notes Obama’s appeals to Lincoln to make the case for both presidents sharing commitment to a tradition of American constitutionalism and to the union, but only insofar as they can be seen, on balance and over time, to be contributing to realizing the commitments of the Declaration of Independence, that all humanity should enjoy the basic liberties of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, including rights of free labor (32). Grounding bonds of citizenship on recognition of shared commitments to individual pursuits of happiness is unmistakably a matter of representation. As Smith makes clear, the successes of both Lincoln and Obama turn on their capacities for forging an image of America that fosters—to the degree possible—the collective commitments of the nation’s citizens, with the successes of Lincoln’s nineteenth-century natural rights liberalism and Obama’s modern democratic pragmatism turning on Lincoln’s insistence on certain moral absolutes over Obama’s hopes for consensual, deliberative, evolving multiculturalism (45). To put it in terms of representation, the political success of these two presidents reveals the essential tension through which citizens can come to recognize that their interests are represented within a larger representation of American constitutionalism. As Smith concludes, inclusive democratic unity may not always be the nation’s highest goal. . . . Leaders must sometimes try to speak, not primarily to Americans as they are, but to the better angels of their nature, if their nation is to be stirred to pursue forms of civic union more perfect than those achieved so far (46).

Of course the challenge to such an aspirational politics is not only the challenge of winning collective commitment, it is also the challenge of mobilizing that commitment to fashion an identity for those who count as citizens with a stake in their state’s vision of the common good that all share. Will Kymlicka addresses these concerns in his contribution to this volume, Trajectories of Multicultural Citizenship. In his essay Kymlicka traces narratives of the rise and fall of multiculturalism in order to propose a different narrative, one that finds hope for multicultural agendas. Where narratives of multiculturalism have faltered on a tolerance of differences that can perpetuate stereotypes, gloss over the complexity of cultural values, and ignore inequalities, narratives of, what Kymlicka calls, post-multiculturalists respond by prioritizing equality of political participation, economic opportunity, and human rights. Both the multiculturalists and the post-multiculturalists have their points. Both also, as Kymlicka argues, only tell half the story of multiculturalism in its more robust form:

In the past, it was often assumed that the only way to engage in this process of citizenization was to impose a single undifferentiated model of citizenship on all individuals. But the ideas and policies of multiculturalism that emerged from the 1960s start from the assumption that this complex history inevitably and appropriately generates group-differentiated ethnopolitical claims. The key to citizenization is not to suppress these differentiated claims, but to filter and frame them through the language of human rights, civil liberties, and democratic accountability. And this is what multiculturalist movements have aimed to do. (59)

Reading Kymlicka’s claim in terms of a dynamics of representation, we could say that human rights, civil liberties, and democratic accountability serve as guiding principles for states in which citizens justly represent and acknowledge within their political community the range of their individually held cultural values. This is not to say that any and all cultural values matter in a political community or that any and all values merit respect from a political community. It is instead to second Kymlicka in saying that the struggles for recognition of minorities and indigenous peoples are about restructuring state institutions, including redistributing political control over important public and natural resources (61). At their core, as Kymlicka makes clear with reference to the redistribution of political control, struggles for restructuring institutions so that they redistribute resources more fairly are struggles for political representation.

Another point made clear by Kymlicka’s appeal for the redistribution of political control is that decisions about inclusion and exclusion that are made in terms of representation have at their core concern about resources. Understandably, concerns with who gets what, concerns with access to such things as attention, benefits, obligations, power, rights, resources, and services, are among the primary concerns citizens have in their day-to-day affairs. The limits, both real and imagined, that constrain the availability of access to entitlements push questions of who gets what into deliberations about not only distribution but also representation. Debates over the availability of and access to health care resources, for example, ask people to delimit from all available medical care the kinds of access that do and do not constitute the basic health care all members of a community should have. When the costs are low, it is easier to find broad agreement on basic health care. Programs providing easy access to insulin for all diabetics are a good example of low-cost care for which broad public support could be more easily generated. As costs go up, and as medical resources become more scarce, it is easy to imagine agreement becoming more difficult. We should not be surprised, for example, to find less agreement over public funding for prohibitively expensive treatments, such as organ transplants, for complications arising from diabetes. Among the arguments citizens—as well as their legislative representatives—can have against public funding for such costly medical procedures, we often hear reference to age (he is too old) or lifestyle (she didn’t take enough care of her health) or even character (who is he to deserve this?) and obligation (why should I pay for her procedure?) as well as membership (he is not a citizen). Here we can see how the question who gets what? has become a question of who is what?, a question that asks people to stake their claims regarding entitlements and obligations in terms of representations of themselves that identify who they are for each other and to each other. To characterize in this way the relationship between access and identity is not to suggest that issues of allocation reduce to matters of representation; it is instead to draw attention to the fact that the daily concerns of citizens emerge and unfold through the dynamics of representation.

We begin to fathom the pervasive power that representations of citizenship have in our lives by focusing on the lived experience of claims to community membership and by considering how those claims of identity are presentations of the self as a person in the world who is asking for recognition. Appeals for recognition that make claims on a community’s resources, for example, are a person’s request for recognition as a citizen of a community. To gain recognition from others—to have them accept our representations of ourselves as fellow citizens—we must make our identities apparent to them. Our presentations of ourselves cannot be so idiosyncratic, so out of keeping with what others expect, as to be either invisible or indecipherable. In our presentations of ourselves we must to the degree necessary adopt representations that have already been established and that others find familiar enough. This is not to say that we are left to present ourselves only in the manner others expect, knowing within what our true nature really is. The dynamics of representation, of self-perception and social presentation, are not so easily reducible to the opposition of internal reality and external appearance. Who we perceive ourselves to be cannot but emerge and evolve through our interactions with others. With regards to our identities as citizens, those interactions are inescapably institutionalized, including everything from schooling, to commerce, to travel, and even international athletic competitions. Over the course of lives lived through institutionalized relationships we have the opportunity to reflect on ourselves and our interactions with others. In the process of our reflections we become aware of, and come to make choices about, who we perceive ourselves to be, who we perceive others to be, as well as how we want others to perceive us. We may all of us recognize ourselves as citizens of a given state at the same time that we surely do disagree in significant ways about what is entailed in counting someone as a citizen. Implications and issues following from awareness of the tension between, on the one hand, demands for and identification with a political community and, on the other hand, individual differences in experiences of identification are the central concern of this collection of essays.

To be clear, the concern is not one of creating institutions capable of aligning our identifications in ways that overcome our differences. Even when our relationships are structured by inclusive or forgiving institutions, the dynamic process of engagement through which others recognize us and we experience ourselves as perceived is a process as generative of misrecognition as it is of recognition. Failures of recognition, such as when we experience ourselves as either misunderstood by or inscrutable or invisible to others, are failures of association that can generate within us what W. E. B. Du Bois aptly termed double consciousness, an internal dissonance between how I perceive myself and what I experience as my reception by others. The damaging effects of double consciousness are particularly pernicious for those persons marginalized or excluded from meaningful participation in a community because they are perceived as so different that others cannot imagine them having a role in the life of a community. In their extreme forms, those persons come to imagine themselves as useless. Exclusions based on perceptions of differences such as those of ability, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation have been revealed again and again as arbitrary and illegitimate constraints on the participation of citizens. Despite serious problems within political communities of unjust exclusions that have been grounded in a politics of identity and difference, identity politics has still figured centrally as the means for many people who have experienced exclusion or marginalization to assert their civic membership.

We need only recall the successes of the American civil rights movement, the disabilities movement, and the women’s movement to remind ourselves of successes in enlarging the boundaries of citizenship. At the same time, responses of retrenchment to the greater inclusions won through identity politics caution us about the challenges posed by human diversity to our aspirations for inclusive communities.

From the fact that there is too often a mismatch between experiences of self and recognition of that self by others, Patchen Markell has argued for replacing a politics of identity with a politics of acknowledgment, a politics that does not confuse justice in relations of identity and difference with mutual transparency, or with security from risk, or with the overcoming of all experiences of alienation or even hostility in our relations with others (Markell 2003, 7). To use Markell’s terms, when others acknowledge our presence as fellow citizens we have not only affirmed a sense of ourselves in relation to those others, we have also thereby enmeshed ourselves in a community of shared concern. What we have not done is made ourselves transparent as members of a community and so available to each other in mutually agreed upon terms. Markell’s proposal for a politics of acknowledgment draws its virtue from the fact that the idealized politics of mutual identification are dissonant with human experience. As humans we never exist outside community and we typically experience ourselves as bound to multiple communities at any given moment in our lives—among them families, friends, fellow hobbyists, civic organizations, and political parties. We belong to and feel the pull of communities that draw on our connectedness to locations, kin, interests, and nationalities.

Interactions structured through overlapping communities, from the local to the global, cannot but shape us and our senses of ourselves. To paraphrase the African adage, we become who we are in our relationships with those persons we are closest to. The unfolding through time of identities, concerns, and communities is a constant process of making and remaking representations of self, one of which is representation of the self as citizen. This point has been made again and again across the theoretical and political spectrum, by communitarians such as Michael Sandel, liberals such as John Rawls, and Marxists such as Louis Althusser. While communitarians, liberals, and Marxists may dispute what it means for us to represent ourselves to each other as citizens, they are in general agreement that it is through representation, when people successfully acknowledge each other as fellow citizens, that those people make the strongest possible claims for their access to a community’s public entitlements.

We further confirm the intimate connection between representations of citizenship and distribution of resources by reflecting on the fact that denials of claims of a citizenship identity have long been used to exclude others who are identified as noncitizens from their access to the limited resources of public entitlements. While such exclusions may have their place in drawing the boundaries of a community’s shared concerns, they also raise questions about the justice of representations of citizenship, as when undocumented immigrants and their children are denied access to basic health benefits because they are not recognized as citizens. To children of undocumented immigrants who have lived their entire lives in a given country, the claim that they are not citizens and that they are therefore denied entitlements often contradicts their sense of themselves as members of that community. No doubt their struggles for citizenship and all its entitlements aspire to such tangible things as health care, but these are struggles carried on in the name of gaining acknowledgment as citizens.

Prominent examples such as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, or the struggle for civil rights in the United States, demonstrate that acquiring full citizenship status involves more than being able to claim inclusion on terms already established by a community. Successful struggles against exclusion and for inclusion entail revisions of representations through which the boundaries of a community are drawn and identity claims get made. While some revisions of representations of citizenship are quite dramatic—such as in the end of apartheid in South Africa—the absence of continuous revolution should not lull us into believing the process of transformation ever stops. Consider how in the half century since the height of the civil rights movement in the United States representations of citizenship have gotten entangled with concerns over entitlements in ways few would have then anticipated. Supreme Court decisions from Brown to Bakke to Grutter and Gratz have enabled remedies for the injustices of racial discrimination in access to schooling while over time narrowing the concern with discrimination to a matter of individual injury, thereby tipping the scales of justice away from concern for shared experiences of historically entrenched racial attitudes toward established meritocratic privilege. Similarly, in the Roberts’s Court’s recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal protections against racial discrimination in voting are characterized as outdated and unnecessary, a misrecognition and misrepresentation of the status of African Americans as citizens.

Retreat from affirmative action and from the Voting Rights Act signals an end point to