Democratic theory and democratization in contemporary Brazil and beyond 1

Introduction

This article aims to rethink democracy at a theoretical level, drawing its inspiration from recent developments in Latin America and above all Brazil. I shall start with a conceptual discussion and from this proceed to empirically assess what I have called elsewhere the Latin American ‘molecular democratic revolution’ (Domingues 2008). This is a revolution that has unfolded since the 1970s, although more recently this long cycle of social change has been drawing to a close. This does not of course mean that democratic issues and challenges are not very much at stake in contemporary Latin America – as much as they are elsewhere. In fact, when I resume the theoretical discussion towards the end of the article this will become clearer. While democratic theory will be discussed in relation to some of its main contemporary versions, I shall mobilize a larger body of literature, which is not only Latin American, but also Indian, expressing the particular nature of the historical experience of these societies. Finally, it is important to stress that domination, in its several guises, will be an important element of the following discussion, taken as the opposite of democracy and against which the latter is posed and develops.

My main arguments are the following: First, that democracy is a process and not merely based on procedures. Second, democratizing processes can bring sovereignty to the people, although the state remains to a great extent sovereign and external to society – though it is indeed also a social relation which incorporates societal agents and exercises power over them, in different ways. These include not only state sovereignty but also discipline and ‘bio-power’, as suggested by Foucault, whose views are not, however, conceptually capable of focusing on democratizing processes themselves. Although this article tends to side with universalistic perspectives on democracy, it recognizes and thematizes the particularities associated with state interventions in social life.

Democracy and seriality

In his book on democracy, Habermas defines, somewhat surprisingly, the democratic constitutional state (Rechtsstaat) as based on the ‘bureaucratic exercise of legal domination (Herrschaft)’. According to him, ‘the state becomes necessary as a sanctioning, organizing and executive power (Gewalt), since the law must be implemented’. It is not merely the legal form that ‘legitimates political domination’, but its connection to ‘law legitimately produced’ (Habermas 1992: 168–70). This conception involves an effort to substitute for elitist theories of democracy a ‘discursive’, communicative, and more democratic model. The progressive abandonment in Habermas’s work of the idea of the ‘colonization’ of the life-world by self-steered systems, a process in which law could operate as a ‘medium’ of colonization (Habermas 1981, vol. 2: 458, 536–9), results in a more benign theory of democracy. While the state continues to be seen as a self-regulated system steered by power (sided by the economy, steered by money), the life-world, by contrast, comes to be represented by civil society, a site of solidarity, through communicative action and meaningful interaction. The latter is discursively mediated via public spheres, allowing for a ‘deliberative politics’ that yields (legally) binding norms, based on ‘subjective freedom’ (historically and intersubjectively produced).

In its ideal form, universalistic democratic values should result from the process. But this requires a notion of the ‘democratic constitutional state’, in which ‘communicative power’ is totally differentiated from ‘political power’ and ‘administrative power’. In short, this is a theory in which the state itself is not regarded as the centre of society. Democracy, for Habermas, needs to be conceptualized beyond both the elitist theory of power groups elected by quasi-irrational citizens and the pluralist notion of democracy as (fixed) interests freely expressed (Habermas 1992: esp. 359ff).

Habermas’s definition of democracy contrasts with, but also harks back directly to, Weber’s (1980 [1921–2]) types of domination, especially the rational-legal one. Despite this, in his recent assessment of the predicament of democracy in the European Union, Habermas (2011) appears to have begun to doubt such a straightforward sort of development (with some room for what we will later discuss as de-democratization). He has also made a curious appeal directly to European politicians, which seems to imply that they may be regarded as distinct from self-steered and self-referential systems of administrative and political rationality. Nonetheless, thus far, these concerns seem to have remained somewhat inconsequential for Habermas’s theoretical perspective.

Cohen and Arato (1992) expand historically on the divisions at the heart of democratic theory and stress the threefold character of social life (market, state, civil society), the role of associations and social movements, and the self-limiting character of the latter (which should not aim at taking over ‘political society’). Participation and even civil disobedience are crucial in their proposal, but the constitutional role of law and the limits it imposes on all members of society (a liberal normative value) is also central to their vision. More recently, Alexander (2006) has produced yet another version of the ‘civil sphere’, introducing a binary opposition between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’, the former related to what we cherish in civil society, which is the site of solidarity, universalism and individualism.

In Habermas’s writings (1990: 150–9; 1992: 632–59), the procedures for the construction of democracy are intimately connected to universalist ‘constitutional patriotism’, a concept whose origins lie in the German repudiation of the types of ethnic nationalism which culminated in Nazism. This is to some extent also Anderson’s (1998: mainly chs 1, 17) perspective, which stresses ‘unbounded seriality’ (infinity and freer) and the integrative, universalizing force of nationalism (wherein the former may be played out within certain limits), against the spreading particularism of recent times, with its repetitive, rigid, finite, ‘bounded seriality’, and its identity politics, often in the guise of ethnicity.

In stark contrast, Chatterjee (2004: esp. 36–8) introduces (so as to speak about popular politics in ‘most of the world’) the opposition between the politics of ‘civil society’, in a more traditional sense of being legally and formally established, and the politics of ‘political society’. The latter is a sphere whereupon governments – or governmentality practices – implement policies which have to reckon with illegal and informal practices carried out by populations. These populations become the target of particular (that is, ‘bounded’ versus universal, ‘unbounded’) perspectives, in the service of global capital, while at the same time struggle to affirm their own desires and needs. The ‘classical idea of popular sovereignty’, expressed in equal citizenship, produced the homogeneous construct of the nation; the activities of governmentality required multiple, cross-cutting and shifting classifications of the population as targets of multiple policies, producing a heterogeneous construct of the social. The concept of governmentality would allow us to go beyond the concepts of ‘rulers’ and ‘ruled’. For Chatterjee, democracy in India has, in an ambiguous way, developed from the complicated dynamics of that ‘political society’ and its heterogeneous character and particular relation to the state. Chatterjee seemingly takes for granted, in India at least as much as in the West, the constitutional features of democracy, although this ‘modern capitalist democracy’, he curiously affirms, pertains only to the latter. He does not openly pay heed here directly to the Hindutva movement and parties (Hindu radical and exclusionary nationalism), but this regrettable development in Indian politics is in fact one of the key underlying targets of his criticism of homogenizing modernity, which remains in the background of his argument since he attributes that homogenizing tendency solely to capitalism (Chatterjee 1998 [1994]: 228–31). ²

Although Gramsci’s influence on Chatterjee (2008) remains evident, he draws upon Foucault and also explicitly argues against Anderson’s preference for universalism. The latter has to do with a rejection of homogenizing nationalism, in favour of particularism and to some extent informality. It involves recognizing the heterogeneous character of the social spaces where democratic political life is meant to take place (as against the homogeneous and homogenizing space of capital). This is where the oeuvre of Foucault is relevant, especially his late work, where he outlines three forms of the modern exercise of power (or ‘domination’ as he sometimes defines it), these being the ‘sovereign’, the ‘disciplinary’ and the ‘bio-political’ (esp. 1997 [1976]: 23–4, 30–6, 215–25; 2009 [1977–8]: 3ff, 68, 106–13, 352ff; 2004 [1978–9]: 16–25, 30ff, 65ff, 77ff, 196–8, 210, 299ff). Sovereignty descends from the problematic of the legitimacy of royal power in the West and was, in the 18th century, translated into the rights of the citizen. In Foucault’s view, this kind of power was transferred to the state and ended up masking the workings of disciplinary power, that is, those deployed upon the individual, around specific knowledges, across the whole of society. Bio-politics, which he sometimes called governmentality, dealt with populations and the ‘regulation’ of life, providing for a sort of revival of the state in the face of disciplinary power. While the second leads to a ‘normalized society’, the third is connected to it through the same notion of a ‘norm’. These forms are productive, not merely ‘repressive’. If initially Foucault saw sovereignty, discipline and bio-politics as successive historical forms, eventually he regarded them as more general mechanisms that could be combined over time, and broadened also the notion of bio-politics, which was then seen as encompassing all domains of social life. However, Foucault seems not ever to have been capable of appreciating (on a theoretical level) the crucial, if somewhat restricted, role of popular sovereignty within modernity and democratic developments more particularly.

It is against the background of these theoretical debates that I want to discuss democracy in Latin America, in particular in Brazil during the last few decades. I set out in this article to reject Habermas’s idea that democracy equals domination. Democracy exists, and can only survive, against domination, even if we cannot today envisage forms of democracy that could do away with the latter – after all, we are speaking of the state, controlled by political and bureaucratic collectivities, separated from the citizenry and based on a hierarchical apparatus and ‘command’ (Befehl). Moreover, the state in modern societies is closely intertwined with capitalism and its ruling classes. It is true that these are competitive political systems, but huge and multilayered organizational and oligarchic machines remain in place at several institutional levels. Many commentators in Latin America have pointed to the problems faced by democracy in the region (contrary, for example, to what is suggested in Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñan 2005). I shall not address these problems, but rather hope to provide a broader and more optimistic view of the issue. After all, democracy has been blooming rather than eroding in this region – problems and limitations notwithstanding. In any case, as the long debate around dualism in Latin America has shown, such a dichotomy between the state and civil society, and between the political and civil ‘societies’, cannot be accepted, unless something like Alexander’s binary view of a ‘sacred-profane’ divide is adopted. In order to achieve my goals here, I shall draw upon ideas I have developed in general terms, as well as in relation to Latin America. This necessarily involves introducing a pair of concepts, ‘instituting’ and ‘instituted’ citizenship, plus a third: ‘real abstractions’. In addition, I draw a fourfold picture of the modern imaginary as based on freedom, equality, solidarity, and responsibility, which, I argue, appear both connected to, and at odds with, domination, inequality, fragmentation, selfishness, and irresponsibility (Domingues 2006, 2008).

It is true that in many respects and throughout many countries, democracy is a fragile achievement. In this fragility, tension is by no means negative, and (which we shall explore later on) sometimes has a strong part to play. That is, between what Eisenstadt (1999: esp. ch. 2) calls ‘constitutional’ and ‘participatory’ aspects of democracy, or what Castoriadis (1975: 138ff, 493ff; 1999: 119) defined as democracy’s two main aspects: the power of the demos – rooted in the autonomy of agents – and its self-limitation – through a nomos. With this in mind, perhaps a more interesting solution could be thereby achieved for the dilemmas presented by opposing the views of Habermas and his associates, on the one hand, and Foucault’s and Chatterjee’s, on the other, which are in fact one-sided.

Democratizing tendencies in Latin America: Advances, limits and problems

O’Donnell’s (1994, 1996) criticism of existing liberal democracies in Latin America is well-known. He emphasizes their ‘delegative’ aspect – that is, the election of powerful leaders as providing a blank cheque – and the particularistic traits of much of these polities, in which clientelism stood out. The lack of accountability of power-holders vis-à-vis society is also underlined. While recognizing advances throughout Latin America, others have been critical of countries where governments are forced out of power by popular protest, supposedly without respect for constitutional provisions (Mainwaring and Hagopian 2005: 1–2) (something which, by the way, happens when such governments do not stand by their promises). Roniger (2005) also stresses what he sees as ‘neo-populism’ and ‘neo-clientelism’, along with the persistence of violence and the non-enforcement of basic civil rights, as perhaps leading to an erosion of trust in democracy (see also Méndez et al. 2003 [1997]).

‘Populism’ was originally a problematic conceptual construction and today is too vague to be conceptually useful. Germani (1965 – see also Domingues and Maneiro 2005) proposed the classic formulation of this concept, with ‘elites’ manipulating ‘available’ masses which had not been integrated by the political system in the process of transition from ‘adscriptive’ to modern society. Since then it has become basically a term of abuse, rather than a concept proper (and that transition is obviously over). The sole exception is Laclau’s (2005) most recent formulation which sees populism as necessarily conflictive and based on dichotomies, dissolving thus any specificity of the concept.

Strong versions of presidentialism are indeed to be found in the region, as well as ‘delegative democracy’, and problems of institutionalization and demagoguery linger on – with ‘progressive’ governments assuming sometimes authoritarian or at least demobilizing perspectives, let alone Hugo Chávez’s progressive ‘Caesarism’, which is necessarily activated from the top down. Yet the notion of populism today seems to represent more of a hindrance to, than a possibility of, theoretical advance. Clientelism, on the other hand, has been indeed a recurrent feature of politics in the whole region (on Argentina and Mexico see Auyero 2001; Fox 1997). The same is true regarding the lack of enforcement of civil citizenship by a still ‘despotic’ state which often treats its populations as ‘subjects’ and possesses relatively reduced ‘infra-structural power’, that is, cannot govern much of society through its institutions (Mann 2004). Social rights have had an even worse fate in Latin America. They were implemented in a limited sense during the period of the developmentalist state and corporatism but, when democratization proceeded from the 1980s onwards, the neoliberal creed left little room for social rights (Barrientos 2004). Things have not significantly changed since then, improvements on and the broadening of social policies notwithstanding.

Although sounding rather pessimistic, Roniger (2005) has pointed out that lesser trust in democracy may simply mean that it is consolidated but that citizens are not too pleased with its outcomes. After all, citizens seem dissatisfied all over the world, especially due to neoliberal reforms (cf. Hagopian 2005: 321–4). Roniger also points out a number of changes that have been leading, despite the lack of resources for many popular groups to participate fully in politics, to new forms of participation, and a perspective of democracy beyond the ‘elitist’ conceptions of politics that were prominent during the military dictatorships of the region and their aftermath in the 1980s–1990s. While ‘minimalist’ in some people’s eyes, these new experiences have entailed mass participation, public control and deliberation, as discussions about a pluralizing and widening public sphere suggest (Avritzer 2002; Avritzer and Costa 2005 [2004]). They have also been accompanied by the piecemeal consolidation, opening up and sometimes pluralization of judicial systems (Peruzzoti 1998; Domingues 2008: ch. 1; Santos 2010), with rights and citizenship becoming key issues in the last decades (Delamata 2010).

As I have argued elsewhere (Domingues 2008), despite the persistence of clientelism and strong forms of presidentialism, the restrictions to the exercise of rights and a highly concentrated private mass media that is programmatically oriented to neoliberalism, democracy has never been stronger in Latin America. Democracies in this region have undergone a true ‘molecular revolution’, and this is despite an ongoing ‘transformist’ project carried out by neoliberalism (a project that envisages minimal democracy). Together the democratic molecular revolution and the neoliberal transformist project configure two competing ‘modernizing moves’. It is this clash of political projects that has been shaping the region in the last decades (Domingues 2008: ch. 3). The telos of the modern imaginary, having at its centre equal freedom, solidarity and responsibility, has been translated into widespread social mobilization, leading to a change of ruling political groups and the re-establishment, change, and consolidation of democratic institutions.

Waves of popular mobilization come and go in Latin America, much as elsewhere. The last, long wave, which may be dated from the late 1970s, is on the wane in most, though not all (such as Chile and its stalled transition to democracy), of these countries. Their legacy is indubitable, though, and new waves are bound to unfold in the next decades. Constitutionalization has also developed, implying stronger legal cover for the state and greater legitimation, as well as further recognition of rights and increasing flexibility of formerly more rigid juridical codes, with a tendency for advances in legal systems and the rule of law. The state framework has by and large become more adaptive and responsive to the increasing complexity of the present phase of modernity (Domingues 2008: ch. 1). Constitutions have been consistently universalist, even though the collective rights of indigenous peoples and sometimes also of black populations have found their way into these new democratic texts. There are arguments, however, over how to judge both the extent and utility of the modernizing moves of active and self-constructed collective subjectivities in the shape of ‘bounded serialities’. Some view these qualifications of the dominant universalist pitch and intent of the modern constitutions as a negative limitation, and which should be eventually overcome in order to move beyond the national/liberal state (Dávalos 2005; Rodríguez Garavito 2012; Bautista et al. 2012).

It should be added that democracy has recently developed most strongly in Latin America precisely in those places where a conjunction between social movements of all sorts have managed, either directly or indirectly, to effect changes in institutions and practices. That is, in Latin America democracy seems most vibrant where social movements have attempted to directly or indirectly impact political systems rather than remaining aloof and trying to attain an illusion of absolute autonomy from the state (Adel Mirza 2006; Svampa 2008; Pereira da Silva 2010). Of course, there is the risk of playing into the hands of governments and even of governmentality, especially in Latin America's nation-states, where clientelism remains an ever present danger, or of at least losing strength by merely quietly supporting left-wing administrations. But new networks, of actual and greater collaboration, among movements, and between them and actual democratic governments, may also follow from this. Indeed, there is a strong relationship between democratization and progressive social movements in the region. It has been precisely in countries such as Mexico and Colombia, where there has been less democratization by means of these ‘progressive’ forces, that violence and social strife have predominated. While in others societies, such as Chile or Peru, it could be argued that the transition towards democratization has been more limited and social movements have struggled to push progressive politics forward. Needless to say, ruling collectivities have sometimes kept control of the state; at other times they have been replaced by other collectivities. Electoral competition operates now throughout Latin America and has partly refashioned the systems of political-bureaucratic domination. Capitalist, male and white collectivities have only partly been displaced from their power positions within and outside the state (Domingues 2008: ch. 1).

Peronism, Varguism and the peculiarities of the Mexican state, as well as the relations between the peasantry and the state after the Bolivian 1952 revolution – in short, corporatism in general – provided most of the disciplinary schemes applied to the working classes in Latin America. This sometimes involved coupling state action with some sort of private Fordism – or other types of ideology – and perhaps drawing upon the remnants of neo-Thomist colonial state ideologies. These disciplinary schemes have not, however, received a synthetic-analytical treatment in the subcontinent, while ‘bio-power’ seems to find its main expressions in focused social schemes, vis-à-vis social provisions and new policies derived originally from compensatory programmes connected to ‘adjustment policies’ (cf. Domingues 2008: chs 1, 3). The element of domination present in such schemes has been largely overlooked by researchers. And, while I for one consider its advancements absolutely decisive, citizenship has been frequently taken up in a very a-critical manner as the solution for all of the region’s problems (for instance, in O’Donnell et al. 2004).

The Brazilian trajectory

Brazil unfolded during the 20th century a process of ‘conservative modernization’, stemming from an agreement between landlords and the industrial bourgeoisie which engendered, in the long run, industrialization, the end of personal forms of domination and the establishment of a ‘poliarchy’ (cf. Dahl 1971). It was basically completed with the transition from the military dictatorship (which was its last, authoritarian, but also industrializing, manifestation) to a civilian government, indirectly elected in 1985 and in 1988 the promulgation of a new, progressive constitution. An expansion and pluralization of the public sphere was a feature of the process. The following elections consolidated the new democracy, with all its virtues and problems (Domingues 2003 [2002]; Costa 2002; Weyland 2005).

Popular participation has been real enough, and this in the face of all the restrictions posed by deep inequalities and the lack of recognition of large sectors of the population, as well as the extreme concentration of the private means of communication, the remaining power of regional landed oligarchies and authoritarian enclaves within the state. That democratic ‘molecular revolution’ has been going on at least until recently (though the long wave of social mobilization which set on in the 1970s has long dissolved), the Workers’ Party represented, originally at least once again, a new form of combining social movements and institutional politics in a large network. Its ascension to power has represented a partial break with the concomitant ‘transformist’ neoliberal policies that previous governments implemented (Vianna 1997; Domingues 2008: chs 1, 3). Brazil shared that wider pattern of transition to democracy with other Latin American countries: the formal transfer of sovereignty back to its citizens, in the traditional mould pointed out by classical liberal or ‘elitist’ conceptions (e.g. the classic liberal discussion about the transition to democracy) as well as including elements pointed out by innovative discussions about civil society (e.g. Habermasian perspectives).

The ‘despotic’ character of much of the Brazilian state remains, however, and systems of domination operate crudely in some areas. Police forces treat crime and the popular classes often either carelessly or else very ruthlessly; civil rights are not protected in this regard (although the property component surely is!). Business men, especially finance-based formerly, more connected to industry now, as well as agribusiness groups, seconded by unions and several social movements under the Luis Inácio Lula da Silva government, have a decisive influence on state polices. On the other hand, poverty remains also a problem overall, which has been targeted since the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government in the mid-1990s via programmes derived from compensatory policies supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (Bird) along with their ‘structural adjustment’ programmes. They grew into cash transfer programmes, eventually leading to the ‘Bolsa Família’ (the ‘Family Grant’ programme), implemented by the Lula government. This programme reached more than 12 million families in 2009 during his government and with his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, it encompassed more than 13 million people by 2011.

While initially one could see those policies clearly as a means of ‘administering’ rather than eliminating poverty (Lautier 2004), the Bolsa Família has become something whose definition is highly difficult – an issue which is all the more curious that while few academic studies have investigated its actual workings, it has become a major paradigm for social policy in Latin America (for a general review, see Kerstenetzky 2009). The programme dispenses small sums of cash to households with very low income, as a targeted policy aiming to prevent the poorest of the poor from starving and ideally helping them out of the situation of destitution, with two ‘conditionalities’: health follow-ups and schooling for their children. Is it basically a clientelist programme, whereby the Lula government gained support amongst the poor, and would have given him his re-election in 2006 (helping also Roussef in 2010), or is it a clean programme based on technical criteria and non-political interference, almost bringing to bear a rights-based philosophy (Hunter and Power 2007; Hilgers 2008; Singer 2012)? Is it a rather modern policy and in the long run bound to become a minimum citizen income, even though it may now clash with other cash transfer programmes (Lautier 2006–7; Domingues 2008: ch. 1)? Is it an economic strategy that helps to strengthen the internal market for basic goods, a sort of Keynesianism of the poor, or merely a way to tackle pragmatically the huge debt the whole of Brazilian society has with its poorest sectors, at a very low cost (Barros et al. 2006; Domingues 2012b)?

Martínez (2003: 46–7) once observed, probably drawing upon Castoriadis’s (1975) concept of the ‘magmatic imaginary’, that Peronism in Argentina could mean anything through its successive shifts. While this is not exclusively Latin American (politics in particular and human life in general are constitutionally articulated by such a magmatic fluctuation of meaning), the often less than ideologically sharp policies of progressive parties in power in the subcontinent since the mid-20th century may take this quite far. To some extent this is what happens with the Bolsa Família programme, entailing also that its future direction is not settled. I think it has a component of clientelism, which is, however, distant from the ‘thick’ sort which implies benefits directly for votes as well as from the ‘client-patron’ relationships that until recently were overwhelming in Latin America, with very particularistic sorts of trust connection (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984; Roniger 2004). It is distant even from the ‘thin’ version of clientelism, in which such relations are much looser and the ‘client’ is virtually totally autonomous to take electoral decisions.

‘Bureaucratic clientelism’ is how I have named this state of affairs (Domingues 2008: 19). We are not by any means speaking of a right, although indeed many would be inclined to push the programme in this direction and this may well happen in the future. This cannot be read in the present, though, since it is a benefit dispensed from the top down, as conditioned social policy (namely, deep poverty level and regulated behaviour), with no constitutional moorings (though it is enshrined in basic Congress legislation), involving some sort of loose political allegiance and dependence. Given the circumstances, the programme has enormous merits. Of course it is not by any means irrational for the ‘masses’ to support it electorally: it does contribute seriously to the reduction of deep poverty (Domingues 2012b). Moreover, it has worked as a means to develop some aspects of the internal market. Finally, despite the goal of regulating behaviour at a basic level, it does not make any further distinction between what would be the ‘deserving poor’ and those who might not deserve to be included in the programme, even though many remain outside its reach, mainly due to lack of resources and administrative issues, as well as, above all, its non-universalist design. Here is the focused and particularistic character of the programme, which implies a ‘collective subjectivity that is sharply bounded seriality – the very large and passive bounded seriality of the very poor. This is statistically and econometrically established, although local committees have an important role to play on the ground. ³

Modern concepts of citizenship were born in the West, via civil rights, originally as a means to secure both the life of individuals and their entitlement to and security of property, the basis of capitalism and modern social classes. Political rights were regarded as a means to control the state, a new entity formed by the general contract of citizens, who thereby passed sovereignty over to it. Universalistic equal freedom was supposed in this definition, especially vis-à-vis personal dislocation within a national territory and the possibility of enacting contracts. But the poor – by and large simply the working classes – were put in a much more problematic position from very early on with respect to political rights. The bourgeoisie did not receive such rights without struggle (and dangerous alliances with the proletariat at times, but with compromises of course with landed upper classes being part of the process too). Social rights were introduced to correct for the exclusion of the working classes from the benefits of modernity, of the market economy, and their inclusion in social life in a way such that freedom could be actually enjoyed. If sometimes there were pre-emptive moves on the part of the state in relation to the working classes in this regard and there were some bio-political concerns underpinning the creation of the European welfare states, such rights were usually harshly and even fiercely fought for, in a protracted process. The contrast between today’s situation even in Europe with that of the 1960s–1970s should alert us to this. In principle social rights tended to be seen also as universal, although the problem of particularism crept in from the very beginning and ‘corporatist’ systems created other problems as well. Rights implied what I have termed ‘real abstractions’, insofar as individual citizens, in their universality and lack of specific qualities, were entitled as such to them; with, in addition, the very structure of social life becoming to a great extent determined by their establishment. They implied also the ‘instituting’ element of citizenship, even though, upon being conquered, such rights become what may be termed ‘instituted’ citizenship, along with the surrendering of sovereignty to the state, which faces henceforth passive citizens. This is aggravated by the fact that social rights were dispensed in good measure by bureaucratic bodies (Domingues 2006: chs 2-4).

In Latin America, civil citizenship has been seen in too benign a manner, as if domination and inequality, via capitalist property and labour relations, were not introduced precisely by them since the 19th-century constitutions; and as if political citizenship, with the formal (and ideological to be sure) surrendering of sovereignty, has not legitimated the existence of a system of state domination that even such authors as Habermas are bound to acknowledge (let alone Marx and Weber, Poulantzas, Foucault and Mann) (Domingues 2008: chs 1, 3). In Brazil, the 1988 constitution embraced precisely such a universalistic view of rights, in all its dimensions. If they were not all brought to fruition, some can reasonably claim that the text has laid down a ‘programme’ for Brazilian society (Ridenti et al. 2008). Thus, it was mainly an unbounded seriality that underlay the 1988 constitution (collective provisions for a few specific groups notwithstanding). It is exactly with such a core national universalism that the Bolsa Família and its bounded seriality, with its bio-politics and faint disciplinary purposes (via conditionalities), has actually made a caesura, despite claims that in the future it may imply a basic citizen – unbounded seriality – income. It should be added that entrepreneurialism – a key element of neoliberal thought (see for instance Foucault 2004 [1978–9]: 155, 181, 232), to which the Workers’ Party’s governments have been trying to lend a pragmatic, loose and arguable ‘progressive’ turn – has been proposed as a way out of the Bolsa Família programme in terms of the future sustainability of the popular sectors serviced by it. ⁴

A further issue must be discussed here. Chatterjee speaks of the ‘politics of the governed’ as something that implies a high level of activity of its bearers, not passivity. Indeed, we find that in Brazil too, for instance and perhaps foremost (in fact similarly in some part to what he narrates in India), the grave problems of illegal settlements in the cities, the Brazilian favelas. They have been an area of concern, of disciplinary and bio-political power, of the state (with its experts and now often through non-governmental organizations – NGOs). To be sure there are in this regard many limitations as to concrete policies that can be used to govern these areas (probably the same as in India too), since informal ties are so strong and escape the state’s purview. Sometimes attention is given to them without immediate collective action by their dwellers, but there is a long history of peaceful mobilization and the creation of representative associations, as well as of rioting, plus actual warfare between drug-dealers and between them and the police, for instance in the slums of Rio de Janeiro (see Valadares 2005). Bounded seriality implies activity in this respect. But this is not the case of the Bolsa Família programme, in which bounded seriality means passivity – except when the time to vote comes, which is surely not inconsequential at all – without the universalism and the rights concept of ‘instituted citizenship’.

It is true that bounded serialities are to some extent inevitable, they have remained so at least since social citizenship entered the scene, insofar as it hardly allows for a consistent and thorough universalism. Moreover, the problems of the colonization of social life by bureaucratic bodies which have been so central to the welfare state force us to face this fact (cf. Habermas 1981). It is also true that the heterogeneity of social life and the plurality of identities of collective subjectivities have increased tremendously in the present, third phase of modernity. This includes a more heterogeneous social space-time as well, beyond the possibilities that market and state once enjoyed to homogenize the social fabric – a phenomenon that pertains both to the centre and to the peripheries and semiperipheries of global modernity (Domingues 2006, 2008, 2012a). But we must ask ourselves the question: does that mean that we have to replicate it in the institutional arrangements of social policy or can we not also pursue some sort of universalistic perspective, while we endeavour to lend new meaning to civil citizenship and reinvigorate political citizenship? Shortcomings notwithstanding, it is within the imaginary of modernity, with its universalizing claims to equal freedom, solidarity and responsibility, against domination, inequality and fragmentation (plus a broader view of responsibility beyond neoliberal egoism), that Latin America has been advancing in the last decades. Citizenship is in a good measure instituted. The activity of citizens is, however, needed to make it larger as well as to prevent it from decaying into the unimpeded sovereign state of political ruling groups and the bureaucracy.

Each region within global modernity has its own civilizational roots and it is obvious that those of India differ markedly from Latin America’s (Domingues 2012a). However, these issues conjure up more than regional questions. Even though one can affirm that the state is becoming tougher and more violent in India, as well as penetrating society more deeply (due in some part to the latter’s demands for state activism in several areas), we may singularize the original accommodating instance of the centre to a plurality of demands from other sectors in society, as typical of that South Asian country (Kaviraj 2003, 2005; Eisenstadt 2003). This feature has led to a kind of particularism (via either the seriality of refashioned castes or of more circumscribed issues), although the universalism of the Indian 1949 constitution is still plain to see (notwithstanding already ingrained particularistic provisions in deprived sectors, especially lower castes and so-called tribal populations). We can perhaps contrast it to the more universalist modern Latin American imaginary, although the region thus far has mostly not been a place of sharp ideological divisions (in contradistinction to fierce social and political struggles) and has had in many periods as state ideology the integration of all within the nation. Nonetheless, the issue of heterogeneity is today inescapable in both subcontinents, inasmuch as the demand of universalism and popular sovereignty assumes a systematic form, beyond ritual inconsequential explosions (Chakrabarty 2007). Besides, those who take part in formal citizenship for political rights, and demand civil and at times social rights, are the same (daily travelling from one dimension to the other) who partake of informal ties and may become, one way or another, more or less passively or actively, the target of focused policies.

Conclusion: Back to theory, back to democracy

Chatterjee intends his contribution, in a Foucauldian vein, to depart from discussions about ruler and ruled, instead closing in on those who govern and those who are governed. I do not want to go into semantic disputes. Suffice it to say that I cannot see much difference in this formulation, since those who govern do so because they rule, and those who are governed are in turn ruled. Rule is possible in a complex society only insofar as those on top can govern, shaping the subjectivity and patterns of life of those below, via ‘infra-structural’ power, that is, in a more sophisticated and subtle way than the use of sheer ‘despotic’ power.

But while the power of corporations and capitalism by and large (or of whites and males) remains at the societal level formidable, and emancipation cannot be complete if they are not radically tackled, the state is a site of power – and struggle – that remains exceedingly important in contemporary modernity. It is still to a great extent the centre of political life, contrary to Habermas’s quasi-Luhmannian position, in which the public sphere and civil society would dislocate it somehow, decreasing its relevance. I can see no empirical evidence of that. Nor can I accept Chatterjee’s stress on ‘community’ and particularism, at the expense of rights and demands for a more radical transformation of state, since his perspective falls short of a necessary project of democratization of the state and of its links with society. Although democratization is a fact with deep significance in Latin America, and in this the strengthening and pluralization of the public sphere has played a vital role, it is in another direction that the decentring of the state has occurred. International organizations – such as the IMF and the Bird, as well as of course powerful central governments and ‘risk assessment agencies’ – have systematically bypassed democratically carried out discussion, as we can witness in the case for instance of Latin America – recent checks to that notwithstanding (Domingues 2008: ch. 2; Domingues 2012a: Parts II, IV).

We do need the rule of law, we need instituted citizenship; we need serialities of unbounded and bounded character (it goes without saying, especially the former) that are enshrined either in constitutional or infra-constitutional law as well as in bureaucratic provisions, hopefully beyond any form of clientelism, thick, thin, or bureaucratic. In other words, we need the state and its apparatuses since we do not know how to get rid of it any more than we know how to get rid of capitalism (although more recently we have apparently trusted that we can do away with racism and patriarchy). But if we can think of the state to some extent as representing – through law, public officials and politicians – the will of the people, we must be aware of the fact that once sovereignty is passed over to them, the seed of domination is unavoidably sown. Indeed, it is actually sown every day and germinates. But we can neither just choose resistance nor expect informal politics or the extra-institutional aspects of politics to lead the way towards greater democracy. The politics of sovereignty still has a central role to play, against domination. It is obvious that India is not Latin America and that it would be far-fetched and abusive to pass judgement here on its politics – although we cannot take lightly either its constitutional tradition or the strength democracy has continuously showed there.

The fact is that the piecemeal democratic development of Latin America has included both dimensions of politics Chatterjee has described as those of civil and of political society. However, that the issue of particularism versus universalism is not so simple to solve is tellingly expressed, on the one hand, by the rise of chauvinist Hindutva in India and, on the other, by democratizing ethnic claims all over Latin America. Can nationalism, in a more encompassing, and abstract way, reconcile and overcome these two possibilities of development? That is unlikely and compromises must somehow be reached, as India has indeed systematically tried to do since its independence, whereas in Latin America, pace corporatism, only more recently has this issue fully come to the fore.

The state must be re-colonized by society, in order to make it more representative of the people’s will, of the popular coalitions that may change the face of contemporary modernity away from neoliberalism, fragmentation, administration of poverty as well as from radical instances of ethnic and religious politics. This is the moment of instituting – in this regard also participatory – democracy, however it may envisage itself as self-limiting in the sense of guaranteeing freedom for everyone to debate and disagree, by and large upholding the rule of law – the moment of constitutional democracy, with its instituted elements of citizenship. Of course, radical ethnicity militates precisely against this self-limitation and the equal freedom that democracy in some part presupposes and should produce, whatever institutional mechanisms and substantive outcomes it must mobilize for that. In any case, civil disobedience should be seen as a legitimate mode of politics even in well-established constitutional democracies and that there should be no reason for social movements to sustain any ‘legal fetishism’, thus on occasion combining legal and illegal moves (in principle peaceful if we live in a democracy) to achieve its goals (Santos 2007: 97–8). But we must bear in mind also that there should be no reason either for social movements to limit their range of options to ‘civil society’ in the Habermasian tradition, as if politics proper were the preserve of a specific ‘elite’ or that they could become polluted and so their life-world. Latin America has had indeed a tradition of going beyond that, either in the corporatist system of the 1930s–1960s or today, in the networked relations between social movements, parties and state (as seen above and in Domingues 2007: ch. 6). ⁵

This is how we may think of a process of democratization in a dynamic and process-politics sense; not merely formal and procedural, such as demanded by Tilly (2007). Moreover, de-democratization (despite formal institutions in many cases) is always a threat that lurks in every country, as Europe, for instance, much for Habermas’s (2011) chagrin and perplexity, evinces today (let alone its problems in the US). But we must also go beyond Tilly’s own conception, since he tended to view the state as absolutely external to society. This is only partly true and, insofar as democratization is to be achieved, democratic ‘crystallizations’, in terms of law, institutions and personnel, must be introduced by societal forces (making concrete hence the elements of instituted citizenship). ⁶ In many cases, in particular when there is no immediate prospect of altering the functioning of the state, the vision of democratizing it via ‘community’ and local experiments has recently had a central place in some critical approaches. But these communitarian, social entrepreneurial, mutualist, and localist projects are not enough to achieve a real democratic breakthrough and in themselves do not necessarily mean a challenge to authoritarian state bureaucracies and ruling political collectivities. Neither do they put in check the power of finance capital and the polarized patterns of global capital accumulation which have been overwhelming since the 1980s, with their own crystallizations in terms of state legislation, institutions and personnel (see Domingues 2012a: esp. Part IV).

Instituting citizenship remains the key issue for democratic life, with the activity of collective subjectivities, their concreteness and their modernizing moves, of a more universalistic or more particularistic inspiration, as against domination, reification and passivity. Democracy blooms or wilts depending on the dynamic of instituting citizenship, although it is not enough in itself. Nor does it actually do away with self-referential ruling political groups (so-called ‘elites’). ‘Poliarchic’ institutions of course have an important role to play in the exercise of instituting citizenship, allowing for free rational discussion (hence the constitution and widening of public spheres) as well as for political participation and the broadening of political franchise. Defensive modernizing moves in the sense of maintaining aspects of democracy in the face of powerful state collective subjectivities depend to a great extent on both instituted and instituting citizenship, as do moves that intend to go beyond the present state of democracy. This is the way, I think, that present day liberal democracy can live up to, once challenged and transformed, its own pristine proposals and freedom. It still offers the opportunity to resist domination and processes of de-democratization. This is the way that global critical theory can remain critical, realist and engaged with democracy. This is true both as to the central countries and as to the periphery and the semiperiphery, since these are issues that, with peculiarities and specific characteristics, concern the situation of democracy in all the highly complex societies of the third phase of modernity.