Isabel Maria Estrada

Local Associationalism and the path to a Post-National understanding of social relations in Europe.

(The role of and State in the Project for a Radical )

We will start this paper from the assumption that a new model of society must be set in place - a society of deeper and wider democratic participation for all its members.

What distinctive features should that society have? First of all, it should be a society willing to engage itself in a serious process of self-criticism about all its instituted boundaries as practices of exclusion, questioning itself on the moral validity of their existence(1). Such a society therefore would have to be defined as a living space of wide-open and intensive dialogue between all its members, relying on the authentic practice of rights of communication and participation. The idea that everybody has always something to teach and something to learn, having no place for a priori certainties, would be the only unquestioned thought. As a result, all moral positions should have equal opportunities to show themselves to each other, and this would guarantee that all practices of exclusion were fully and equally evaluated in their moral pertinence.

And it would certainly be a more sharing and a more inclusive society. More sharing, because the exercise of rights of participation and communication enables us to know each other better, hence enables - by the use of our imagination and memory of previous own experiences - the capacity to understand the pain and desires of other people. More inclusive, because the sentiment of solidarity resulting from those intersubjective experiences allows us to better accept plurality and diversity. Besides, the very use of rights of communication and participation requires to be democratically valid the inclusion of all those potentially interested in its results. Thus, inclusion is not only a condition, but also a consequence of truly democratic participation.

In a society of this nature, to be a citizen would mean to be an active agent in its construction, thanks to the full use of these fundamental rights. At the same time, the intensive, open and democratic use of such rights would turn citizenship into an articulating entity of collective plurality and individual integrity. In other words, citizenship would become synonym of a political identity detached from the concept of national membership because based upon the admission of individuals and groups on the grounds of common rights of democratic participation. Considering that in our societies this set of fundamental rights are embraced by the sphere of political rights, the argument for a project of radical democratic participation can only be compatible with the argument for the widening of all political rights to all fully residing members of any society. The distinction between citizen and non-citizen would then be absolutely meaningless, because in the light of this project both would be citizens, as both would share the same capacity of using fundamental political rights (whether it was by suffrage or by political and civic association). Simultaneously, the only acceptable separation between a citizen and a non-citizen would be the one resulting from the latter's decision to remain outside of such a social and political engagement.

These are the basics of a post-national citizenship proposal - a citizenship democratically valid because grounded on principles of full communication and participation, above and beyond any national membership's constraints.

The major difference between the traditional model and the post-national model of citizenship lays on the fact that in the second one the individual is identified as member of a political association (the respublica), and not of a national or ethnic community. And because it has no particular national, ethnical or cultural content, the respublica reveals a non-essentialist nature that makes it compatible with the presence of each individual's collective and personal identity, and also compatible with his/her real actions for the accomplishment of various interpretations of the common good(2).

Taking this ideal project as one we would like helping societies to build for the sake of all people's rights and democratic values, it is understandable our curiosity about the European Community project of a Union Citizenship, since it appears to be the only one with a post-national potential so far conceived. In this context it is reasonable to ask how close is the project of a European Citizenship of making immigrants into active subjects of a renewed social contract?

For fifteen countries in Europe, citizenship must be thought close to a wider space, that of the EU. It is thus fundamental to question if and how the project of a Union Citizenship (UC) has been contributing for a post-national understanding of the concept. In other words, what treatment and what place does the EU keep for its immigrants in its redefinition as a more inclusive and reliable space?

These questions are undeniably linked to another one about the meaning of Europe itself, the one we think it has now and the one we would like it to have in the future. The idea of Europe follows the history of its continent and that of the World, being therefore made of ruptures, reinvention and restlessness. Assuming the idea of Europe as one that renews itself along the way, it is perfectly reasonable that a new idea of Europe will come out in the future. And considering as valid the democratic renewal project we have been arguing for, it seems obvious that the future European identity should be based on a shared culture of common solidarity among all its members. But, such a culture is only viable if backed-up by another one: a culture of full participation, lived as close as possible to the model of the ideal situation of speech described by Habermas, and as close as possible to the pre-conditions of an intercultural dialogue as defined by Santos(3)

(The truth is without participation there is no Solidarity, only parochial solidarities, imprisoned in their small spaces of action, running the risk of revealing themselves as mutually aggressive and destructive). Secondly, from all the possible fields of participation, the political field remains as the privileged one by which men and women guarantee the capacity to participate in the decision-making processes potentially affecting their lives.(4) As a result, (although not discarding the democratic potentialities of participation in other spheres of social action), political participation should be taken as central in the definition of a new European identity. A political participation yet shaped by a post-national character, assuming that only such a model would protect the plurality of all possible participants.

However, the European scenario now being modelled doesn't seem to be getting close to such an ideal. The Treaty of Maastricht has brought the concept of European citizenship, act of undeniable symbolic weight, for it was as postulating the existence of a popular sovereignty at least common to all citizens of the member-states, hence disconnected from national constraints. But, a closer look to this promising picture and one finds several imperfections and doubts as far as its democratic features are concerned.

First, not only the amount of rights granted to the European citizens is small, but also too far from efficient establishment and protection. Second, and far the most important in our present analysis, the new space of participation has been conceived as an open space only for the already citizens of the member-states, excluding third-countries's resident communities from its (at least theoretical) virtues. In our minds, that space should be open to those communities too, because only by accomplishing the inclusion of all its different groups, and returning to the rights of participation their true status of rights and not privileges of a certain European elite, would the Union Citizenship reveal a true post- national nature. Yet, when we look to the European Law as a reliable source of the political wills and institutional practices of the European actors, we easily realise that third countries's nationals are still very far from acquiring the status of full European members.

Let's take for instance, the kind of distinctness given to the immigration policies. Obviously, it is not the interest in those policies per se that gives proofs of the kind of relationship that Europe has with its third-countries's nationals, but the terms in which that interest is revealed and the chosen actors to perform it. The fact that immigration policies are still mainly a State's matter; the fact that these policies are still the basis of the relationship between states, immigrants and the EU are in our point of view reasonable indicators of how in the light of a Union Citizenship, the national paradigm of citizenship built upon multiple exclusions is still being protected and even implemented.

It is undeniable that the continuing of the intergovernmental approach to immigration issues reveals the strength of the states in a traditionally dear terrain of their sovereign power, but it also reveals the lack of political will of the EU itself. And if in the case of states one can understand their attitude considering the historical meaning they have been building about themselves, in the case of the EU its inefficiency cannot be excusable only on the basis of the particular wills of each of its member-states. An entity such as the EU is more than a mere sum of states and sovereignties; it is above all a unique institutional entity that exceeds national assertions and lays its essence on a transnational and even supranational relationship with the people it gathers. Having this in mind, one would expect that this relationship could also be by its initiative a post- national one. Nonetheless, its action on this matter has been quite disappointing, insecure and ambiguous.

The main causes of this ambiguity are far too complex to be here fully exposed. Still, one point must be underlined: the utilitarian character of its action and thought. This character, in many ways fed by the continuous absence of a tradition of institutional democratic accountability - is quite obvious in the selection of decisions and behaviours, often guided by the Union's position in the international capitalist system. Well, it seems that an institution whose interest in the development of certain processes is merely instrumental cannot be taken as a source of credibility and reliability for the continuing of those processes. Therefore, when the Union talks about Union citizenship as a fundamental means for the accomplishment of the principle of free circulation, one can't help seeing, on the one hand, an interest shaped by the ambition of an economic project that demands for its attainment such principle without showing similar concern for the attainment of the well-being of all European people; and, on the other hand, an interest shaped by a dangerous notion of contingency. This means that only insofar as the European economic project demands the Union citizenship, can this one have some certainty about its development. It seems then the Union's commitment in recreating democracy depends highly on whether it is appropriate or not to its economic project, fact that could help us to understand why its capitalist dimension is so well developed in contrast with its political and social dimension.

We can conclude that the concept of Union citizenship is still rooted in a national paradigm, which leads to an obvious unsuitableness to the real cultural and social ground. It leads also to its affiliation to a certain restrict idea of what is Europe and what is to be a European. Indeed, in the reinvention of a citizenship model shaped by a post- national philosophy, the Union could have in its citizenship a very promising instrument. Yet, it has been showing a conservative essence that turns the words of Percy Lehning irrefutably real: "... when we talk about of excluding others, the Union as Union tries to keep a very clear boundary between members and the rest of the world"(5). Even the negocial spaces adopted for the treatment of the citizenship of the member-states' nationals and the third-countries' nationals is a good indicator of such truth. While the first find treatment at a supranational level, (articles 8 to 8-E of the European Union Treaty granted a common understanding of the European Citizenship to all EU members), the second are comprehended by the intergovernmental sphere, precisely the one that has better promoted the resistant forces to a post-national citizenship model.

· Civil society: the fundamental key to a more authentic view of democratic participation.

We are here defending the utopia of a high-intensity democracy(6)

- what others have been calling model of . A high-intensity democratic model is a society-ruling model where communication and participation are not privilege but true rights for all human groups without exception.

Analysing the Union space, we have just concluded that, although possessing a project of citizenship that could be developed in a post-national sense, and despite being a space with a transnational and even supranational vocation, that has not been the chosen path. A post-national citizenship implies the settlement of a new social contract of a more embracing and plural nature, quality not yet assumed by this Union citizenship. On the contrary, it seems closer to a neo-nationalist model which, taking the exclusion rules typical to the national models, looms out to invent new boundaries between new conceptual spaces: the space of the nationals of the member-states vs. the space of the nationals of third-countries(7). But, if that space that seems to be the ideal one fails in the achievement of a post- national model, what other spaces could make it successfully? The answer lays (but does not run out) on the development of local spaces and civil society. This statement raises several questions, among which is to know to what extent in a basically local record can cohesion and solidarity be reached in order to embrace the entire European Union space. First of all, it is important to note that the argument for the democratic potentialities of the local space does not suggest the denial of the European space nor of the national space democratic viability.

Second, the argument for the democratic potential of local space relies on the assumption that democracy gets better if different democratic institutions are admitted, functioning at different spatial scales, without making the apologia of any one in particular. There is no unique valid institutionality for the making of democracy. (Actually, democratic legitimacy as a basic principle of social organisation can only be valid insofar as it does not presuppose any democratic formula in particular.) Civil society at a local dimension appears as indispensable to the development of a post-national citizenship, due precisely to its exceptional capacity to create a plurality of free associations that enable groups and persons to a full and free participation in the setting of their social relations. In fact, the plurality of associational forms, more than a characteristic, is an imperative of a civil society's integrity, considering that to fasten on a certain institutional rigidity would be to deny its very own essence: voluntary, dynamic, creative, open. Civil society must therefore correspond to a necessarily plural space regarding its associations, creative regarding its functioning forms, inclusive regarding the admission of individuals and groups, and democratic regarding their kind of participation (free and voluntary).

Having this definition in mind, a society which knows how to conciliate its political sphere (on which a has been set) with its civil society sphere (set on forms of democratic participation generated mainly at a local level closer to groups and individuals), will be a society closer to the achievement of a high-intensity democracy as far as the level of inclusion of its members is concerned.

But, there are two conditions without which one cannot guarantee neither the viability of this society's plan or the quality of its democracy. The first condition says that political rights must be granted to all members of a society politically organised by a State. The second condition says that the articulating and co-ordinating presence of the State is fundamental in order to prevent civil society from possible less democratic features that it might contain.

a) The organisation of a strong civil society implies the public recognition of the right to political and civic association to all individuals.

Being the right to associate an eminently political one and being the political rights still exclusive to the citizen status, that means any person who has not been admitted to the citizen's sphere set by a State cannot enjoy political rights such as the right of free political association. In the post-national proposal, however, every mature rational person should possess the right to political participation, whether by the right to vote, or by the right to free association. It is important to underline the inseparability of these two rights, since that the right of association is not enough to complete the capacity of participating in a society. When looking at the immigrants, for instance, one realises the right to associate is almost useless if not followed by a) the right to participate in the public sphere by means of suffrage, since it is there where the main decision-making processes occur; and b) by the right to political association in order to enable more than a passive role in the public sphere.

b) Civil society presupposes not only the existence of democratic institutions, but has been historically quite important for the democratisation of the representative democracy itself.

The existence of a State that organises and runs the legal, military and administrative apparatus means obviously the existence of limitations to popular sovereignty. But, thanks to civil society, regional and local structures contribute to the enforcement not only of direct participation in the public sphere, but also of democracy in general, since it conditions the representative institutions to be necessarily more receptive to a dialogue with other democratic institutionalities, hence to be themselves more democratic in their functioning. But, democracy is more than a regime by which citizens control governments. It is necessary that a society democratically organised by a state, be itself a democratic space as far as its social relations are concerned. That only seems possible if the state is able to assume the role of a co-ordenating system of civil society's behaviours.

Not only we're stating that civil society might not be democratic in itself, as we are also introducing a new element to our proposal: State doesn't have to be civil society's public enemy.

Regarding the first statement, there is an obvious anti-democratic risk now being run by civil society. That risk derives, among other things, from the increasing importance of the market principle, and from the very nature of civil society's organising principle- the community principle. The explanation to this lays on what has been called the crisis of the vertical political obligation principle. The crisis of this principle has lead to the neo- liberalist idea that only the private sphere can accomplish the well-being, substituting the State in its failed promotion of non-mercantilist relations. This current idea relies on the false assumption that private sphere equals market and therefore civil society is only another way to name the market run by citizens. However, neither does civil society mean market, nor does the market dry out the entire private sphere. Civil society is instead a place for both private and public relations, since individuals are simultaneously engaged in private relations ruled by the community principle (e.g. family & friends), and by the market principle (mercantilist relations), as also in public relations such as the ones typical to free associations(8). The antinomy between State and civil society (less state, more civil society and vice-versa), as Giuseppe di Palma stresses is then a false antinomy: 'a mere slogan without connotations'.(9)

Nevertheless, the idea that civil society and market are indeed synonyms has been widely spread by the neo-liberalist thought, dwelling in there many of the anti-democratic dangers now being faced by our societies. Those anti-democratic dangers reefer to the increasing difficulty in creating non-mercantilist relations due to the hegemony of mercantilist principles. In other words, the equalisation of civil society to market has been creating a sort of progressive illegitimacy of all relations that do not obey to the mercantilist logic. However, a society that limits itself to the reproduction of mercantilist logic and that turns its citizens into mere consumers of its private goods and services, is no longer a civil society in the true sense of the word, but instead a place for the trading of its own citizenship, a place where only buyers are survivors. That is the essence of this social fascism we are about to live in many places: the discrimination between individuals on the basis of their consumption performances in the marketplace. Still, the risk of giving too much anti-democratic features to our society derives not only from the market principle's overestimation, but also from the very nature of civil society's guiding principle: the community principle. In fact, the 'public sphere' of a civil society constituted by the associational voluntarism does not grant by itself the existence of democracy, because, although its horizontal obligation principle recognises values identical to the vertical obligation principle that defines citizenship, it also has other features(10) such as the non-recognition of the principle of reciprocity of rights and duties, or the principle of equality of treatment(11).

Considering all this, the only way to keep civil society safe from a pure mercantilist reading, and to assure that solidarity resulting from horizontal relations might be equally distributed by all, is to take an already existing institution - the State - as a democratic system of co-ordination to the actions of civil society. What consequently distinguishes this conception from a liberal or a neoliberal conception of the state, is that in the arguing for a more democratic society, the state is not dismissed and the traditional separation made between private and public spheres no longer makes sense. In this new conception, civil society doesn't come out as a hayekian market with a spontaneous order capable of self-regulation, but as an order jointly recreated with the State's participation. The liberal fear of a by nature predatory, authoritarian and bureaucratic state is here faced with the fact that: a) the separation of public from private sphere (corresponding the first to state and the second to civil society) is after all a false question since civil society too has its own public sphere; and b) that vicious separation is only an obstacle to the conception of mutual accountability structures between society and the state. In other words, the standing for a separation of civil society and state as if they were natural enemies equals the standing for a reproduction of the anti-democratic genes that civil society holds, as well as this continuous unaccountability of the state towards the social anti-democratic processes now happening. The state cannot then be dismissed. It must be challenged to change its relation with society, not to cease it for good. It is therefore a question of arguing for de despolitisation of State in its traditional reading, but by means of a repolitisation possible by this new conception.

In this proposal, the State is not thought as the programming centre of all society's actions, but only their imagined centre of co-ordination meant to assure their democraticity. To this renewed concept of state the Portuguese Sociologist Santos has called Experimental State.(12)

One of the strongest points of this proposal resides in the fact that the state and its traditional representative institutions do not run out in the public sphere the formulas to achieve democracy, equality, justice and different conceptions of the well-being. On the contrary, the state emerges as an articulator of a whole set of democratic agents, both from the traditional representative democracy and from the local direct forms of democracy. At the same time, this co-ordinating presence of the State as a way to repolitizice its action, reveals to be indispensable to assure democratic legitimacy to the civil society's entities - for there is no sense in trying to democratise the state if simultaneously there is no democratisation for the non-state sphere. And only the convergence of these two processes - it seems - can guarantee the rebuilding of the public space of democratic deliberation.

Santos calls this the Experimental State, while Tony Wright calls it the clever State. The clever State is presented in terms of its ingenious capacity both in the continuous setting of new ways that help it to a better institutional performance, and new ways to better accomplish the democratic ideal of self-government and more direct participation of all in the decision-making processes.(13) But Santos' Experimental State is more than seeking new ways to improve democracy's quality; it is also about taking democratic values inside still quite deficient spaces in terms of democratic relations, such as home, community, or workplace. And how may that be done without damaging the integrity of those spaces? And wouldn't this proposal give too much power to the State jeopardising the sanctum that is individuality?

· Inventing the culture of democratic participation where it hardly exists.

There are already many examples as how individuals and civil society can go along quite well. Schools, neighbourhoods, factories are a few sites where one can find experiences of a new policy of democratic accountability. But what seems impossible to find are States highly committed to democratising social relations. Democracy should expand in a way to reach power anywhere it goes. But that can only happen if a state admits that its future political efficiency will depend much more on the continuous promotion of a culture of democratic participation and accountability of all its members. A state which admitted this would be a state aware of the fact that its legitimacy will be increasingly intertwined with the stimulus and co-ordination of vertical solidarities (accomplished by its public institutionality) with horizontal solidarities (placed in the public sphere of civil society).

The fact is the majority of states are still reluctant to admit the importance and urgency of refounding their legitimacy on the basis of a new relationship with their communities. They still bear their action on the contratualist idea of a vertical political obligation; while the principle of community is perceived only as a means to stimulate horizontal solidarities that might substitute its social responsibility, (that is, that might excuse it from its duty of treating the social problems derived from the capitalist system)(14).

But if this state's conservative attitude is quite an obstacle to the attainment of a radical democracy project, society's conservative attitudes are no less problematic. How then to stimulate in societies with a missing associational culture the people's interest in a deeper way of public participation? And how, in the invention of that absent culture, could we make the inclusion of subjects now living as non-citizens of national paradigms? The answer lays basically on this: the recreation of a sentiment of wide solidarity through an increasing consciousness of risk's communion.(15)

Solidarity is not natural, what is natural is selfishness stimulated by the need of survival. Individuals must therefore be inversely compelled to create solidarity and mutual help ties between them. To the habermasian theory, solidarity is the simple and unavoidable result of our personal identity's vulnerability, so much dependent it seems to be on the continuous establishment of communication processes with its environment in order to grant it internal cohesion. And since personal identity cannot be generated or nourished without the permanent (re)creation of collective identities, the individual is 'necessarily' lead to share experiences, desires, interests and fears. But, assuming that solidarity might result from a mere share of personal legacies, we still don't know why solidarity is as much difficult among equals as it is among strangers. In the case of solidarity among strangers, somehow the difficulty is understandable. After all, loyalty to different communities implies loyalty to different understandings about moral, justice, ethics - hence the difficult task of imagining to be in other's shoes. But why are things so difficult also among equals? Maybe it is because individuals can always be separated according to gender, social status, political preferences, religious beliefs, etc, even when they all belong to the same ethnic or even national group, all have the same colour and speak the same language. As a result, even in a highly homogeneous society such as the Portuguese society, there will always be territories of differentiation among people, and consequently there will always be a place for exclusion even among equals. That helps us to understand phenomena such as our 'welfare society', the way it functions as a social structure of solidarity, (in substitution to a welfare state never really set up), between members of a same family, working simultaneously as a highly excluding social structure for everybody else(16). Parallel to this, we can also state that homogenous societies aren't necessarily those with higher solidarity level.

The amount of constraints to solidarity even among equals can only mean that there must be something more complex than the mere personal need to engage into intersubjective relations in order to safeguard one's identity. It means also that solidarity isn't that rational, that is, resulting from the virtues of a critical and open dialogue. Taking this into account, two important questions raise as inevitable: a) How can we turn solidarity from an excluding and parochial exercise into a global attitude? b) How can we stimulate solidarity as a global attitude, knowing that solidarity doesn't result from mere communicational rationality, but also from communicational irrationality(17). Both questions try to find answer in what we have named as the sentiment of wide solidarity through an increasing consciousness of risk's communion. Every society in every time shows us their unique anxieties. Today, worries that are specific to our times and to our society make way to new common anxieties, such as the environmental destruction, the unemployment plague, physical and psychological violence, cultural and social exclusion, etc. But, these new anguishes can also turn into new gathering causes for individuals and groups, capable of creating solidarity enough to put an end to their common fears.

The share of anguish regarding Nature's destruction has been a paradigmatic example of a rational solidarity. That is, a solidarity where a wide-open dialogue reunites individuals regardless of their possible memberships. The transnational fight of the ecological movements is therefore also a transsexual, transsocial, transcultural and transcommunitarian fight. In the same way that the environmental degradation is a more and more common anxiety, unemployment too is becoming a common flaw to a continuously higher number of people, regardless of their colour, creed, social class, academic abilities, gender or nationality. Being an evil shared both by citizens and non- citizens, it is in this way also a potential ground for the development of a rational solidarity among them all. This rational solidarity is no more than the right to equal participation in the solving of a common problem. In other words, such solidarity presupposes a post-national citizenship as the only model where all persons will have equal rights of engagement in the treatment of their problems. It implies therefore a civil society doubly committed: a) Committed to pressure the political power in order to make it grant equal political rights of democratic participation to all its resident members. b) Committed to encourage free associationism as a privileged platform to achieve a stronger democracy among and for all individuals.

Considering this last point, Jeff Spinner says that institutions in civil society must be open to everybody if we really want a true and just citizenship(18). That has to mean the existence of associations where all members have been previously granted equal rights in order to join them.

It seems clear in this proposal that the development of free associationism is particularly advantageous in the appearing of a post-national solidarity, due exactly to its free nature. Only who wishes to be a member is a member of an association, while nationality may be a given feature by jus solis or jus sanguinis, religion by family imposition, race by mere genetic determinism. In this sense, an association is always potentially plural in its human composition and at least theoretically closer to democratic ideals. Marty Martin exposes this fundamental distinction between association and community, stressing the separation that must be done between the substantial sense of community and the non- substantial sense of association.(19) Community implies a materiality many times built on beliefs and ideologies, affections and consanguinity. That is why it is easier to be attained in small spaces such as family, friends' circle, church, tribe, neighbourhood, etc. Inversely, association is a wider and for that less definable political entity, allowing the presence of many a different person. As a result, the association is probably the best place to build a true bound between individuals and groups, without the danger of denying the singularity of the first or reducing everything to that.

In this perspective, the sacred value of individuality is not at stake. On the contrary, individuals are called to put their creativity at work. At the same time, in the association (whether it is local, regional or even of a national or transnational dimension) one need no such thing as a common background, because its non-essencialist nature guarantees a place for all previous memberships and grupal loyalties.

Although having no time to expand here on the most suitable spatial dimension to serve the democratic potentialities of free associationism, we would like to stress a few ideas why we consider the local level - articulated by a renewed state - as the best ground to start the project of a post-national citizenship and a post-national solidarity. Firstly, local associations share a deeper knowledge about the reality they deal with, even because many of their members are directly interested and affected by the results of their actions. Secondly, local initiatives have more chances of remaining loyal to their initial goals, contrarily to bigger and more complex organisations such as political parties which end up by giving more attention to their own institutional survival, rather than to their social mission. Thirdly, a local project doesn't have to be a petty, narrow-minded and parochial project. On the contrary, local projects can be the logical sequence of transmunicipal, or transregional initiatives aiming at the co-ordination of individual actions residing in different places, but sharing a common problem and also a common will to solve it. Besides, local doesn't refer only to space; it is also a condition. In that sense, because 'local' as condition repeats itself in so many other 'locals', the person taking a stand by joining an association will gradually awake to the fact that he or she is not the only one living the locality which is his or her colour, gender, nationality, situation in the market or in the labour place. In this manner, any project of an even small local association can be followed by a translocal potential, depending on the will of its members and on the indispensable legal and financial support from the states involved.

· Conclusion

From what has been said here a contradiction may seem to appear between the free open essence of post-national citizenship (thus closer to a universal dimension of the concept); and the arguing for the still valid concept of inclusion/exclusion.

Due to some of its characteristics, post-national citizenship runs the risk of being mixed up with the proposal of a global citizenship only marked by the limits of Humanity herself. But, appearance is quite deceiving. They are completely different proposals. Post- national citizenship does not deny membership as a good and as all goods it too is subjected to rules of redistribution. It is perfectly understandable that a society wishes to preserve its boundaries inside of which breaths its own identity. In that sense, its reliance on an axe of inclusions/exclusions is perfectly normal. Not only normal but also not necessarily bad. The question to be made must therefore focus on the effects resulting from the application of a certain policy of membership distribution and not on the mere existence of a policy of such nature. In other words, what sets the moral value of a certain policy of inclusion/exclusion; what must validate or denounce its continuity, it's the effect that it has upon those it excludes. From this point of view, it is important that boundaries as expressions of a certain policy of membership distribution be seen as flexible and negotiable entities. But we do not state their disappearance. That would mean to wish the very end of societies. Considering that a society is a complex system of relations, and considering that a system's identity relies on its boundary which individualises it from the outside world; a society that denied the concept of boundary would be sentencing itself to dilution into indefinable substance. The dilution of societies as systems into a giant and solitary system in the universal order, might seem a tempting thought for many, but for us sounds exactly the opposite of human nature. What is proper to human nature is the effort to find an identity and that is only achievable by reference to something outside it. That is not bad, but only natural. What makes more radical universalists criticise this posture is their frequent assumption that boundary is a bad thing per se, and their incapacity to recognise it as humanly inherent. However, as we have stressed, the concept of boundary doesn't have to be harmful to man. Citizenship too is a concept established on an axe of inclusion/exclusions and all we attempt is a critic to the principles and values beneath that axe - values that are responsible for the quality of the exclusions made. Thus the principle of validity of any exclusion should be that it may be consented by, not imposed to, negotiable, not dictated, flexible, not absolute.

As to the global citizenship proposal, we don't foresee its viability in any way and if its condition is to be utopian, we prefer then to choose the utopia that seems to fit better human nature and human anxieties. Like societies, concepts too are systems of meaning that only exist insofar as their boundaries of meaning distinguish them from other concepts. A concept that expands so widely that becomes diluted and contingent cannot do so without denying its own identity and its discursive validity. Our goal however has been to show citizenship precisely as a still worthy and distinct concept even if with a formal and a material identity that needs to be redefined in its theoretical and practical boundaries, in the light of greater democratic authenticity.

What then can be done to turn citizenship into a status where exclusions are discussed, accepted, even wanted, but not imposed? The first step is to dissociate its concept from the common idea of national or ethnical membership. These memberships rely on admission criteria carved by specific historical and cultural heritages very little receptive to the idea of negotiable status. The individual does not discuss his /her ethnical membership: he is or he isn't, and in that sense criteria of admission tend to be little democratic. Considering that admission criteria have historically been defined on the basis of nationality, and knowing that those national arguments do not necessarily stand on democratic rationality, it is clear why citizenship has not been able to set itself free from the condition of an undemocratic inclusion/exclusion status. However, there is no reason why it should go on attached to nationality, beginning with the fact that nation and citizenship are distinct concepts that only historical tracks have almost turn into synonyms. And once released from that artificial constraint, citizenship can and must define itself on grounds of truly democratic criteria.

The fight to be born is not for the destruction of the citizenship status, but for the replacement of the national model created and fed by the modern state, by a post- national model. In that new model, an individual right to admission doesn't derive from his/her nationality or any other grupal loyalty, but from his/her committed will in participating in the public making process of the society he/she is living in. Exclusion in this model is no longer an imposition rather a negotiable condition. Although with a democratic and free profile such a new citizenship is all but easy. It demands a much deeper engagement and interest in the several activities that daily contribute to better civil society's democratic performances. Actually, without such a commitment, the idea of post-nationality as we have been defining it, would be unbearable for it only makes sense in a highly communicative context. But, what we have just said rises at least one issue that demands to be clarified.

It seems to be a contradiction when we argue, on the one hand, about the free and non- essentialist nature of this citizenship, and on the other hand, about a commitment from the new citizen that he/she may not wish. But, contradiction is only apparent. The ways to show active public and civic interest do not run out with the partisan militancy, petition movements, and associational membership (even if desirable that a bit more of all this would appear in a citizen's life). A citizen's contribution to the enrichment of a community by his/her work, creations, opinions, continuous effort to be informed about the decision- making processes occurring in the political place, the workplace, the community place, etc..., a are also forms of participation. Artists, for example, are usually committed citizens (although unfairly known as the opposite to that) by their accurate sense to question, to criticise, to demand, to debate, to create... Post-national citizenship has everything to do with this behaviour. It doesn't have to be synonym of a moralizing civic republicanism that compels individuals to be virtuous Athenian public men. The essential in this project is that rights of participation and information may be disposed in such a manner that any citizen may use them whenever pertinent.

This reasoning may lead to the idea that a democracy so highly dependent on public free participation can not guarantee regular patterns of quality to its performance. Everything will depend on the individual's and group's final decisions. Indeed, and however difficult to accept, the truth is (as Jeff Spinner puts it) that state and society - particularly their dominant groups - can't impose their political values upon other groups. Still, they have the moral obligation to make those values equally accessible to all, because only in circumstances of equal access and discussion of values, can groups and persons decide freely about their acceptance or not of our liberal values. But, insofar as they all can openly and equally be informed, discuss, ponder and decide, they are already partially achieving a high intensity democratic model.

A final word to this. What is the relevance of this entire search for an emancipatory paradigm for the Portuguese society?

To begin with, a radical democracy with a post-national citizenship is nowhere available as a kit with instructions manual and a guaranty certificate. As many sociologists have proved, interpretations on democracy vary according to the underlying social relations of power. Radical democracy too must therefore be evaluated by each society because only each society can define how, when, in which places and by whom may it be started. It is consequently a process to be built step by step in different spheres of a society. In this way, a post-national experience does not have to mobilise the entire society at once; or to hurl it to storming reforms. It all can start with local initiatives, both in what refers to space and to the universe of relationships affected. And the more human relations are affected by this paradigm of new democratic ability and emancipation, the more societies will come closer to a deep global revolution.

To begin a post-national process requires undoubtedly the gathering of many factors. a) The capacity of a state and its society to evaluate the spaces where a project of such nature could be set up. b) The capacity and political will to mobilise the human, material, financial and legal resources needed to backup the project. c) The sensitivity of state and society to simply contemplate the possibility and reasonability of a post-national adventure.

As far as the Portuguese society is concerned, the old question remains: is its civic culture sufficiently persuaded about the benefits of a better informed and more associational democracy? The fact is, if society and state are not prepared to accept and motivate a new set of democratic values and proceedings, it's useless to identify spaces and relations potentially requiring the emancipation derived from a post-national paradigm. Therefore, more important than to determine the post-national solutions to the problems of our society, is to initiate a progressive reeducation of mentalities, even if by partial, small and local projects. This means that the first step must be towards the instruction of our society in the values of a more participating and accountable democracy. For instance, one cannot create by law a culture of local associationalism where it doesn't exist. In the same way, one cannot expect politically active behaviours, or demanding and well informed public opinions, where prevails a traditionally paternalistic state, partially responsible for the absence of a culture of debate.

Under these circumstances, a radical democracy project will necessarily be a project for several generations to come. Yet, not impossible. As a start, those groups with an already successful experience in the promotion of an associational democracy have to make better and wider promotion of their actions amongst the local communities. For instance, by assuming a much more dynamic behaviour, able to catch the eye of our national and local media. Like labour unions, they too must gather and make their associational confederations, as to function as pressure groups in the political decision- making process. And pressure is fundamental not only to make the state mobilise financial resources, but also to make it set legal frames that can ease the creation and functioning of the associations.

The basic idea is that we can't expect the Portuguese State as it stands today to be the first actor to set the path for a radical democracy. Neither can we put such a burden on the shoulders of the poorest, the socially and/or politically excluded, as the ultra-puritan neoliberal argumentation intends to do (with its typical idea of self-survival). As for the dominant groups, well, they have learnt a long time ago how to mobilise and make pressure... but only in benefit of their own interests, which aren't exactly the most democratic ones.

Therefore, it must be those groups and associations, dominated but not socially and/or politically excluded, which will have to work for the democratic enforcement of our society and state, taking advantage of the resources they already possess. They are the entities holding a better position to instruct our state in the benefits of sharing power with civil society, as in the necessity of supporting its associational initiatives. Actually, this share of power between state and civil society is the only way, it seems, to avoid the corporate, exclusionary and anti-democratic moves typical to any civil society.

REFERENCES:

Archibugi, Daniele, Held, David, Kohler, Martin (eds.), Re-Imagining political Community, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998. Balakrishnan, Gopal (ed.), Mapping the Nation, published in association with New Left Review, Verso, London, 1996.

Cohen, Jean L., Arato, Andrew, Civil Society and Political Theory, Mit Press, Cambridge, 1992.

Follesdal, A, Koslowski, P., Heidelberg, Springer (eds.), Democracy and the European Union, 1998.

Hirst, Paul, From Statism to Pluralism, Democracy, Civil Society and Global Politics, UCL, London, 1997.

____, Khilnani, Sunil (eds.), Reinventing Democracy, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, 1996.

Joppke, Christian (ed), Challenge to the Nation - State: Immigration in Western Europe and the United States, Oxford Universit Press, Oxford, 1998.

Jordan, Bill, A New Social Contract? Why a New Social Contract will (probably) not happen, EUI Working Papers, RSC no 96/47, San Domenico, 1996.

Lehning, Percy B., Weale, Albert (eds.), Citizenship, Democracy and Justice in the New Europe, Routledge, London, 1997.

Linklater, Andrew, The Transformation of Political Community, Polity Press, Oxford, Cambridge, 1998.

Margalit, Avishai, The Decent Society, Harvard University Press, Massachussetts, 1996.

Marty, Martin E., The One and The Many - America's Struggle for the Common Good, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1997.

Mouffe, Chantal (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy- Pluralism, Citizenship, Community, Verso, London, 1995.

O'Leary, Síofra, Citizenship and Nationality Status in the New Europe, Sweet and Maxwell, London, 1998.

Pierré-Caps, Stéphane, A Multinação - O Futuro das Minorias na Europa Central e Oriental, 1995, trad. Armando Pereira da Silva, Instituto Piaget, 1997.

_____, European Citizenship: the options for reform, IPPR, London, 1996.

Rosas, Allan, Antola, Esko (ed.), A Citizen's Europe: in search of a new order, Sage, London, 1995.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, Toward a New Common Sense- Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatc Transition, Routledge, London, 1995.

____, "Participatory Budgeting in Porto Algre: Toward a Redistributive Democracy", Politics and Society, June 1998.

____, "A Reinvenção Solidária e Participativa do Estado", Centro de Estudos Sociais de Coimbra, Coimbra, 1998. ____, Reinventar a Democracia, Gradiva, Lisboa, 1998.

Spinner, Jeff, The Boundaries of Citizenship, Race, Ethicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1994.

Steenbergen, Bart van, The Condition of Citizenship, Sage, London, 1994.

Tratado da União Europeia, Tratado que institui a Comunidade Europeia, Luxemburgo, 1993.

Tratado de Amesterdão, Luxemburgo, 1997.

Wallerstein, Immanuel, After , The New Press, NY, 1995.

Walzer, Michael, Spheres of Justice, A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, NY, 1983.

1. i.

NOTES:

This is the vision of Jurgen Habermas who considers that all the exclusion practises that we are used to should be evaluated and if agreed, removed whenever its existence could be proved as being negative for the interests, well-being and identity of any of the constitutive groups of a certain society. (Habermas, in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, London, 1996). The problem of this exercise of self criticism is that it traps us in our own values and how is it possible to criticise a set of values using the same axiomatic frame that gave them to birth? That is why an intercultural dialogue is so important. Although utopian in its conception, it is the only valid path to a critical frame built upon all human axiomatic legacies, and not only upon our own axiomatic guidelines. Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues for this kind of dialogue and goes further in his proposal, establishing what he considers to be the "pre-conditions" of such an exercise and also its "diatopic hermeneutics". The pre-conditions are as fellows: a) all cultures are relative to each other and absolute for themselves, which sets the necessity of overcoming the traditional quarrel between universalism and cultural relativism; b) all cultures have their own concepts of human dignity, but not all of them conceive of it in terms of human rights.; c) all cultures are problematic and highly incomplete in their concept of human dignity; d) all cultures have different versions of human dignity, some wider than others, some with a circle of reciprocity and openness wider than others; e) everybody distributes people according to two major hierarchical principles: one principle stratifies homogeneous unities (principle of equality in the stratification of rich and poor), another principle stratifies different unities (principle of difference in the stratification of black and white). Taking these five pre-conditions into account, societies should be disposed to accept as universal values and principles only those which could grant the widest circle of human reciprocity. (See Santos, "Por uma concepção multicultural dos Direitos Humanos", Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, nº 48/Junho 97, "Identidades", CES, Coimbra, 1997. 2.

1 For further information on this subject, see Marty E. Martin, The One and the Many - America's Struggle for the Common Good, Harvard, 1997.

3. 2 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, nº 48/Junho 97, "Identidades", CES, Coimbra, 1997.

4. ii.

Santos treats in a remarkable way the condition of the principal spheres where human life takes place, from the perspective of the level of democratisation of their specific relations. In his book Towards a new Common Sense (1995), Santos identifies six major spaces of human relations, which are simultaneously six modes of production of basic powers. Each of those modes of power production has a seat in a particular sphere or structural space: home, workplace, marketplace, community place, citizenry place, world place. However, none of these fields acts alone, that means a high interactivity among them. The key to increase the democratic performances of the social relations of each field lays precisely on this great interaction. Now, we know that the citizenry field benefits greatly from this interaction, thanks to the total and embracing character of its main form of power (State domination), and its main form of Law (the State Law). Both State domination and State Law are 'cosmic forms', that is, capable of global action and effects, because they share the same temptation to judge themselves as the unique forms of power and law (phenomenon of self-reflexivity). This attitude has contributed to the atrophy of other forms of power and order, that's a fact. But it can also promote the democracy in traditionally less democratic places such as home and community. This is so because both state domination and law obey to some proceeding and legitimating rules recognised by people and meant to protect them from state arbitrariness. This means that State domination's and law's main field of action- citizenship - is more democratic (although not totally) than the other five. Thus, considering that state holds a cosmic form of power and law, it is consequently in a better position to affect the character of the other spaces, helping them to be more democratic. But, in a project of a radical democracy, the state is not supposed to impose its forms of sociability; it is inversely expected to ease the way to the necessary conditions that allow the credible experimentation of alternative sociabilities. It is not expected to dictate how families should treat their elder, their women and their children, but it is supposed to promote ideas, values and practices that may lead to greater human dignity at home. (Santos, 1995, pp.446-450, 483-4859).

5. 3 Lehning, Percy B., Citizenship, Democracy and Justice in the New Europe, 1997, p.184 (pp.175-199).

6. 4 Expression forged by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. References: Santos, "Participatory Budgeting in Porto Alegre: Toward a Redistributive Democracy", Politics and Society, June 1998; "A Reinvenção Solidária e Participativa do Estado", Centro de Estudos Sociais de Coimbra, Coimbra, 1998; Reinventar a Democracia, Gradiva, Lisboa, 1998.

7. iii. There is still another boundary that must be taken into account: the one between first class immigrants (those from the EFTA countries), second class immigrants (those from Southeast European countries) and third class immigrants (those from Third World countries).

8. iv.

To Habermas, civil society has both a private and a public sphere. In this manner, there are also two types of private/public dichotomy: between State and market, and another one inside civil society, which allows the distinction between two meanings about to privatise and to publicise. Thus, the State's intervention in the economic area doesn't have to correspond immediately to an invasion of the whole private sphere. And the retreat of State from the private sphere doesn't have to correspond to an expansion of the private economy; limits to private economy don't have to be exclusively the other side of a state's growth, and so forth. (Cohen, Arato, 1992).

9.

5 Palma, Giuseppe di, "Market, state, and citizenship in new .", in Midlarsky, Manus I. (ed), Inequality, Democracy and Economic Development, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 290

10.

6 Santos, B. S., Op. cit., CES, Coimbra, 1998, pp. 1-43.

11. v.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Pedro Hespanha alert us for the fact that despite all the good things in our typical 'sociedade-providência' - welfare society - it could never replace the state in its social responsibilities. That is so because welfare society doesn't distinguish so well as the State legitimate from illegitimate inequalities, it doesn't offer the same services that State can offer, and finally, it is hostile to citizenship and its rights because its relations are based upon sequences of unilateral acts of good-will. (Santos, Porto, 1993, pp.48-49). Besides all that, it tends to create social rigidity and puts the heavier costs of social well being traditionally on the shoulders of women.

12.

7 Santos, Op. cit., 1998, p. 62.

13.

8 Wright, Tony, "Reinventing Democracy?", in Paul Hirst, S. Khilnani, Reinventing Democracy, Cambridge, 1996, p.9.

14. vi. The presence of State is fundamental in all this process. We are still not sure about its exact role and much study on this has to be done. However, there are several reasons why states can't be dismissed from their social responsibility. First of all, the public sphere of civil society can't make it through without the state's help and the same goes to the private sphere. As Walzer puts it, families for instance need the state's help so that they may go to public schools and public hospitals. Minorities need help to fulfil their own educational programs; philanthropic associations need state so that they may be exempted from taxes and hence go on with their beneficence actions. This means the Sate must continue its social responsibility for the sake of civil society itself. (See M. Walzer, "The Civil Argument", in Mouffe, 1992, pp. 89-107). But the State's presence is important not only because of its material and financial support. Legal support too is very important. First, only state's law is to a certain level democratically conceived, thus, it holds the best position to give legal legitimacy to civil society's initiatives. (This means that states should ease, not difficult the legal creation and existence of free associations). Second, because of its democratic condition, it should also be taken as a procedural model to the organisation and functioning of free associations. Hence its presentation as a co-ordinating legal system in our democratic proposal.

15. vii. The bet on social movements founded on the common consciousness of sharing risks may well correspond to what Bill Jordan calls political bottom-up pressure, in opposition to political top-down pressure corresponding to a certain social engineering thought by power elites. (Bill Jordan, European Social Citizenship: why a new social contract will (probably) not happen, 1996, p1-19). The disadvantage of the political top- down pressure is that the consciousness of common risks information is very important but highly controlled in its flows and contends by the dominant groups. In another book, A Theory of Poverty and Social Exclusion, Jordan re-states on the other hand his conviction that by common fear of being affected by social exclusion, a society can generate a bottom-up movement for common solidarity.

***

16.

9 About the concept of welfare society see Pedro Hespanha, in Santos, Portugal: Um Retrato Singular, Porto, 1993.

17.

10 By communicational irrationality we mean basically this absence of an individual's capacity to negotiate his/her social and political membership in a dialogic context. That is the case of religious, ethnic or cultural memberships - It is true that religious, ethnic or cultural communication contributes to a religious, ethnic or cultural solidarity. But, it's not a very democratic communication, since admission is based upon aspects such as birth.

18. 11 Jeff Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship, Race, Ethicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State, Baltimore, 1994, p. 44.

19.

12 Marty, Martin E., The One and the Many - America's Struggle for the Common Good, Harvard, 1997, pp. 121-123.