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n 47 CHAPTER 3 Reconceptualizing Citizenship Membership, Belonging, and the Politics of Racialization The major concern of the frameworks discussed in the previous chapter is the problematic of deep diversity of cultural groups that has characterized liberal democracies for at least the last forty years. Each approach formulates the issue and frames the challenge in different conceptual and analytic terms. But despite their differences, they all fall short of providing a satisfactory theoretical account of the relationship between social and political membership, and/or of incorporating the effect of the processes of racialization in their analyses of the divisions, cleavages, and conflicts that have been part of the formation of the United States and the politics that provide direction for its positions and policies. However, many of the same issues that these theorists engage have also been addressed by the recent literatures on citizenship. Interest in the issues of citizenship arose for some of the same reasons that gave rise to the theories of cultural difference that I have discussed. The latter focused more directly on questions having to do with how to theorize the nature of diversity than with its causes, and offered justifications for certain types of policies and politics that they believed followed from their conceptualizations. But with the exception of Kymlicka, these formulations do not address the linkage between diversity and citizenship. The theorists of citizenship are concerned with the defining 48 n Chapter Three parameters of political membership, but from a different frame of reference than the diversity theorists. The same kind of issues and challenges that diversity theorists engaged have led to a different set of questions about the nature of political standing within the political community, which have been explored so extensively in the last twenty years that there is now a field of citizenship studies.1 I have advanced the argument that the diversity approaches have limitations that make them inadequate theoretical guides for the study of the role of Latinos in the United States. In this chapter, I will offer a reformulation of the conception of citizenship as a way of overcoming those limitations. Before doing so, however, let me first review briefly the major theoretical approaches to the study of citizenship. While I will engage some of these throughout the book, a preliminary overview will help to locate my argument for the idea of associative citizenship within the broader literature. As a number of scholars have observed, there are many variations in these approaches, but for my purposes they can be thought of as falling into two major categories: modern/traditional and critical/radical. Modern/Traditional The works in the first category of approaches gravitate around debates regarding the significance and role of rights, obligations, responsibilities, and participation. This has been for some time the dominant framing of citizenship reflected in the works that have taken on “canonical” status in the field of political theory and are the predominant type of publications in the more established mainstream journals and scholarly presses. In Engin Isin’s view, there are three perspectives that fall into this category: liberalism, communitarianism, and civic republicanism (Isin and Wood 1999, 7). What is generally at issue in the debates between adherents of these positions is the question of which of the dimensions of citizenship just mentioned are fundamental, and/or what the relationships between them are or should be. Despite the claims of “strong” differences between these positions, they all assume the individual and her relationship to the community as the primary axis for establishing the boundaries and defining parameters of citizenship. LIBERALISM AND THE RIGHTS-BEARING INDIVIDUAL Liberalism has been the dominant ideological framework in the West since the eighteenth century. There are, as with other schools of thought, different versions of liberalism, but there are nevertheless some common themes that are basic to this conception of society and politics. As is well known, liberalism arose as part of the Reconceptualizing Citizenship n 49 transition to market-based societies and thus shared the emphasis on individualism, concern with state intrusion into the private lives of individuals, and an interest in establishing the state as guarantor of legal rights of persons. One version of the liberal conception of citizenship emphasized the rights to property and to enter into contracts. Delanty refers to this as the “bourgeois” conception (Delanty 2000, 13). Another version focused more on the republican aspects of citizenship connected with issues of democracy, and stressed civil and...

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