Email this article 
Hide
Show allEthics & Global Politics
The principle of constituted identities and the obligation to include
Rogers M. Smith*
Department of Political Science,University of Pennsylvania,USA
Abstract
Most analysts agree that democratic theorists have not offered a persuasive answer to the question of how the boundaries of a demos, a democratic people, should legitimately be defined. Some contend that boundaries should be maintained in ways that preserve sufficient sense of common identity to sustain support for redistributive policies. Many others endorse the ‘principle of all affected interests,’ but it has been widely criticized as unrealistically destructive of too many existing community boundaries. This essay argues for an alternative ‘principle of constituted identities.’ It holds that, subject to certain important qualifications, modern constitutional democracies, at least, are morally obligated to extend the option of full membership to all those whose identities have been substantially constituted through such regimes’ coercive policies.
Keywords:
civic boundaries;
principle of affected interests;
constitutional democracy;
stories of peoplehood;
cultural identity
*Correspondence to: Rogers M. Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania,Philadelphia, PA,USA,rogerss@sas.upenn.edu
Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2008, pp 139–153. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v1i1.1860
© 2008 . R M Smith. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The US Constitution was written behind closed doors by less than five dozen white Christian men who lacked explicit authorization to do so. It nonetheless begins, ‘We the People of the United States … do ordain and establish this Constitution.’ This history makes it reasonable to question how far the American Constitution was genuinely constituted by the American ‘people’—but it undeniably played a prominent role in constituting such a ‘people.’ It fostered senses of shared political identity in many persons, even as it operated to legitimate the subordination and exclusion of many more. Along with a host of others, I have previously sought to document and critique many of those subordinations and exclusions.1 But I have neither rejected the validity of all boundaries to political membership nor attempted a full response to the daunting question of what principles should guide the definition of those boundaries. Here I argue for a partial guide, a ‘principle of constituted identities.’
The argument is only for this principle as a ‘partial’ guide, because there are many prudential as well as principled concerns that may legitimately bear on decisions to include and exclude. In this space I do not attempt a comprehensive overview of all possible principles or an argument for how to make all such decisions. My claim is that, whatever other factors may properly inform these judgments, constitutional democracies have a potent ‘obligation to include’ that flows from a combination of their own ethical commitments and their past and present roles in constituting the identities of many persons whom they may not recognize as full citizens or as members at all. The defense of this obligation does not require rejection of any other arguments for inclusions, such as positions contending that certain inclusions are required by universal moral obligations of ‘mutual aid’ to all persons, or by duties to redress and repair specific historical injustices done to particular groups. At the same time, the specific obligation to include elaborated here does not rest on any such view.
The principle I advance is intended primarily as an alternative to two positions. The first is the argument of David Miller, Matthew Gibney, Stephen Macedo and others, who call for policing the bounds of memberships in constitutional democracies fairly strictly to avoid eroding the senses of mutual trust and reciprocal concern among citizens that they see as providing support for public assistance to the least advantaged members of these civic communities.2 The principle of constituted identities argues that many who are not legally recognized as full citizens in a constitutional democracy may be owed the opportunity to become citizens if they choose. Unless they decline this opportunity, their voices and their needs should be considered in redistributive policies along with those of disadvantaged persons who are already legally classified as citizens.3
The second alternative is what Robert Goodin has rightly discerned to be the leading, but widely criticized, answer in recent democratic theory to the problem of ‘constituting the demos’: the principle of ‘all affected interests.’4 Analysts deploying that principle tend to focus primarily on whether persons’ economic welfare, personal liberty and physical well-being, and political powers have been affected by a political community's governing laws, policies, and institutions.5 The principle of constituted identities, in contrast, focuses on whether persons’ senses of values, purposes, aspirations and affiliations have been shaped by a community's laws, policies, and institutions, in ways they did not choose (whether or not they would have done so, given a chance).
Some may on reflection argue that we should embrace both these principles simultaneously, and some might even argue that in the final analysis the categories of ‘affecting interests’ and ‘constituting identities’ overlap so extensively as to be indistinguishable. I believe instead that the principle of constituted identities points to significantly different inquiries that lead to more bounded and more broadly persuasive results. But here I undertake only the first step in making that case: laying out the alternative ‘constituted identities’ view.
My argument is that modern regimes that claim to endorse principles of constitutional democracy, such as the USA, are obligated to include as equal citizens all persons with identities that have in significant measure been constituted by the democracies’ coercively enforced governmental measures, should those persons wish to be citizens. By ‘identities’ I mean persons’ senses of their core personal values, purposes, aspirations, and affiliations, which may have political, economic, moral, religious, ethnic, aesthetic, and other dimensions. By ‘constituted’ I mean that a government's laws, policies, and institutions have required persons to be socialized in a certain range of experiences along some or all of these dimensions, while inhibiting them from being socialized in others—thereby making it difficult for them to conceive of values, purposes, aspirations, and affiliations differing from those which governmental policies have sponsored. Mandatory public education systems socialize in these ways, with greater or lesser success; and so do laws and governmental institutions that authorize or at least allow some forms of religious practice, aesthetic expression, economic pursuits, and marital and familial relationships, while prohibiting others.6 And by ‘coercively enforced,’ I mean that governments assert the right to fine, incarcerate, or deport those who disobey pertinent governmental laws, policies, and institutions, discouraging the formation of identities with the sorts of values, aspirations, and affiliations subject to penalty.
‘Coercively enforced’ sounds harsh, but this requirement should not be read as holding that the government laws, policies, and institutions in question are necessarily unjust. Coercion is sometimes required to achieve legitimate governmental purposes. This formula therefore includes obligations to many who have been coerced but to whom no reparations for injustices are owed. Most will indeed have benefited to a greater or lesser extent from, for example, mandatory education or public health programs. The formula does not, however, mandate obligations to all persons. Instead, the degree of this obligation is roughly proportional to the extent to which a constitutional democracy has constituted the identities of the persons in question. Those who have had been born and raised with their forms of education, religion, sexuality, marriage, reproduction, diet medicine, art, morals, economic pursuits, and their politics, among other matters, pervasively and coercively regulated by the governmental laws, policies, and institutions of a particular constitutional democracy have greater claims to full membership than their kinsmen residing in neighboring communities—even when those communities may have suffered from consensual but one-sided economic, political, and cultural relationships with the constitutional democracy over the years. In turn, insofar as those various relationships have in fact been coercively enforced, the latter persons and groups have stronger claims than those whose lives have been relatively untouched by the constitutional democracy's actions.
Even for those with strong claims, this obligation to include is qualified by two limits that stem from what may be required to sustain constitutional democracies in particular circumstances. The first limit is that constitutional democracies need not incorporate new members when doing so would create divisions severe enough to destroy the regime. Still, policies that seek to build support for inclusion over time remain obligatory. The second limit arises when adding new members would expand the constitutional democracy so greatly as to render it impossible for the regime's institutions to provide any real semblance of democratic self-governance. It is then obligatory for leaders to seek to devise and support institutional arrangements that can provide defensibly democratic constitutional governance of, by, and for an enlarged populace over time. Since most actual constitutional democracies, including the USA, have long histories of coercively structuring the identities of populations they have not accepted as equal citizens, these limits do not mean that obligations to include can be minimized. Instead, they set continuing tasks for democratic statesmanship in those regimes, tasks that are likely to endure for many generations.
SOURCE OF OBLIGATIONS TO INCLUDE
The obligation to be inclusive in these ways is not self-evident. A quarter of a century ago, Michael Walzer argued that in order to sustain ‘communities of character,’ members of democracies were entitled to determine for themselves who would be admitted to their ranks—so long as decisions were made by all members, including all long-time residents in the society, and so long as exclusionary decisions were consistent with the constraining moral principle of mutual aid.7 Somewhat similarly, I have argued that because humanity has not yet devised ways that people can flourish without being organized into particular political communities, and we may not be able to do so, we must give moral weight to things that seem necessary for particular political communities to survive. I have also suggested that all long-enduring societies must be held together in part by always contested but often overlapping ‘ethically constitutive stories.’ These are accounts that define membership in a particular community as ‘somehow intrinsic to who its members really are, because of traits that are imbued with ethical significance.’8 We must therefore give at least some moral weight to the desires of those in such communities to extend membership only to persons who share those characteristics, which may include linguistic, religious, cultural, and ethnic identities, as well as loyalty to certain political principles or ideologies, among other traits.
These ‘ethically constitutive stories’ almost always contain mythical elements proclaiming the transcendental worth of the political identities they valorize. But their mythical qualities should not be taken to mean they are somehow unreal, unimportant, or wholly undesirable. Such stories are not only sources of common identity which help to sustain communities and institutions that contribute to the well-being of many people. They also provided senses of meaning and purpose for many who embrace them. When deployed to structure membership rules, socializing institutions, and a range of policies, they provide content that contributes to the substance, significance, and prestige of the legally, politically, and socially recognized identities and statuses people possess.9
Crucially, they also play this role for many to whom a constitutional democracy may assign less than equal civic positions. To continue with the example of the USA: the American framers not only re-made themselves into citizens of a federal constitutional republic with much more centralized power than the league of states that the Articles of Confederation had created, thereby fostering deeper and richer senses of their American nationality. They also reconstituted the recognized political identities, allegiances, and obligations of their wives, sisters and daughters; their African-American slaves as well as resident free blacks; and persons belonging to or descended from the native tribes located on what the new American government regarded as US soil. Over time, the USA also coercively transformed the identities and statuses of territorial inhabitants in the Northwest and Louisiana Purchase territories; (former) Mexicans in the southwest, in ways that greatly shaped the development of Mexico as well as the USA; the indigenous peoples of Hawaii and Alaska; and the residents of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and other Spanish American war acquisitions, among others, in ways that many leaders justified via stories of America's religious and racial ‘manifest destiny’ or ‘civilizing mission.’ In response to aggression against it, the USA also occupied and literally reconstituted the political communities of Japan and Germany in the wake of World War II. In the modern era, with less blatant provocation, the USA has launched military interventions that have dramatically affected the statuses and identities of large numbers of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Iraqi citizens, and others. Many of those who more or less voluntarily assisted the USA then came to be labeled criminals, traitors, and enemies by the regimes the USA fought, in ways that profoundly altered their prospects.
The point about this history that I wish to stress is that coercive policies of the USA altered the educational, religious, medical, cultural, moral, economic and political institutions and practices shaping these groups’ identities, making the story of America, including its constitutional democratic principles, its policies allegedly implementing them, and its other ideologies and traditions, central if sometimes troubling components in the formation of the identities and values of most of these groups’ members. These policies helped constitute them as American men, American women, as African-Americans, as Native Americans, as American territorial and colonial inhabitants, as members of regimes with American-imposed constitutions and other institutions, as American allies with few prospects for security outside of US protection.
For present purposes, I will not consider whether any or all of these putatively beneficial forms of coercive regulation, much less the measures of exclusion, subordination, and military intervention and conquest, were necessary for America's constitutional democracy to be created or to survive. It is possibly true that the nation's distinctive development has been partly dependent on its coercively enforced support for commercial production and exchange economies, for mandatory mass civic education, for electoral provisions favoring a two-party system, and other features of American public policies. It is probably true that the Constitution would not have been enacted if its provisions had banned slavery, enfranchised women, and provided the option of full US citizenship to members of the native tribes and to free people of African descent. It is certainly true that the Japanese empire immediately threatened the survival of the USA in 1941; the Third Reich then did so as well; and perhaps vital American security interests were at stake in others of the wars listed above. If so, I do not dispute that a constitutional democracy is entitled to take actions necessary to its creation, preservation and perfection as a constitutional democracy, even some actions that may render it less perfectly constitutional and less democratic for a time. Although failures to include as equal citizens those who have strong claims to that status do represent constitutional failures, they do not necessarily render the broader enterprise of constitutional democratic governance a failure—unless those shortcomings are never addressed.
Why must at least some of these exclusions be deemed failures of constitutional democracy that need to be addressed? My argument proceeds in three steps.
First, with Walter Murphy, I reserve the term ‘constitutional democracy’ for political systems that do more than provide the rule of law and some system of representation. Constitutional democracies are founded on beliefs in ‘equal human dignity, defined to include a wide degree of individual liberty,’ so constitutionalism demands adherence to ‘principles that center on respect for human dignity and the obligations that flow from those principles.’10 These beliefs and principles comprise important parts of the ethically constitutive stories that help bind and guide all genuine constitutional democracies. To be sure, the accounts and specifications of equal human dignity and liberty that different members of a constitutional democracy endorse often vary, with some drawing on religious traditions, some on cultural, artistic, or philosophic ones; and the dominant accounts in different constitutional democracies vary as well. I have also argued that every long-enduring political society needs to add to these accounts more particular ethically constitutive stories that valorize membership in that distinctive community. Nonetheless, every constitutional democracy rests on an overlapping set of accounts endorsing the worth of all human lives and the value of extensive liberty, accounts that provide moral legitimation for its principles.11
Second, with Will Kymlicka, I agree that the existence of shared cultures and ‘cultural narratives’ are preconditions for persons to be capable of ‘meaningful’ choices, ‘intelligent judgments about how to lead’ their lives in ways they experience as valuable.12 The power to choose how to live is barren unless people have some notions of how they should live. Those notions are inevitably built upon, though they need not and should not be dictated by, the various cultural traditions that have helped to form (and re-form) their senses of their own identities, purposes, and worth. Those cultural traditions are always various, because no national government exercises sufficiently total control to define all the traditions to which those subject to its authority are extensively exposed, however much the government may try to do so. This reality means that persons’ capacities to choose include capacities to select which of the traditions that have shaped them they will most fully embrace; but it is difficult if not impossible for persons to choose to live according to traditions to which they have been minimally exposed. To be sure, some cultural traditions are hostile to commitments to equal individual dignity and liberty, so even constitutional democracies should sometimes restrain discriminatory and repressive conduct that those traditions deem proper, even mandatory. But the flip side of that coin is that constitutional democracies should also respect and facilitate ‘cultural narratives’ that support values of dignity and liberty, and they should strive to provide persons with meaningful opportunities to decide how to express and pursue those values in their personal and political lives.
And under some circumstances, these obligations acquire overwhelming weight. The final step of my argument is to connect my own claim, that all political societies are bound together by contesting but overlapping ethically constitutive stories which they need to some degree to sustain if they are to endure, with the points just made—that constitutional democracies rest on stories that promise to recognize and advance equal human dignity and liberty, and that persons cannot really lead free lives if the cultures and cultural narratives that provide the resources for their senses of identity, meaning, and purpose are not sustained. I contend that persons whose identities—whose values, purposes, aspirations and affiliations—have been significantly constituted by the coercive policies of a constitutional democracy may well find it impossible to lead lives of dignity and freedom if they are denied the option of equal membership in that democracy's political culture. Without this opportunity, they are denied access to the particular forms of political and cultural life that they may rightly see as providing their meaningful ‘context of choice.’ A constitutional democracy that professes to embody and express ethically constitutive stories valorizing its contributions to human dignity and liberty cannot ignore its responsibilities when it has coercively shaped human identities and statuses in ways that lead people to share those values, even as it has denied them the opportunities to realize them. Constitutional democracies are instead obligated to provide those opportunities to all they have coercively shaped in these ways, insofar as they can.
This means not only that all who have grown up as members of the constitutional democracy must have citizenship revocable only through their own consent, as the US Supreme Court has held.13 It also means that those who cannot tell themselves their own stories about who they are, what they value, and where they belong without drawing on the cultural narratives that the coercive policies of a constitutional democracy have made central to their lives—through political, economic, social and religious regulation, through education, even through conquest, enslavement, occupation, colonization, or simply provision of residence without equal political status—all such persons must be offered the chance to have roles in determining how those narratives are continued. Again, the extent of that obligation, and therefore the roles to which persons are entitled, will vary with the degree to which they have been coercively constituted. Those lines will admittedly be difficult to draw, though in cases of doubt, it seems proper to err on the side of inclusion by extending the option of full and equal citizenship. Still, there may be members of less extensively coerced and less pervasively socialized communities to whom it may be sufficient to offer the option of some sort of affiliation, alliance, or assistance that helps them to achieve significant political and cultural autonomy, rather than full membership.
And many, particularly those in conquered lands, may have no desire to accept equal citizenship in what they see as an oppressive regime. They should then be offered a range of alternatives, from complete separation to a variety of possible federated or associated statuses, structured to be consistent with constitutional democratic principles. They may reject such structuring as well; but my core claim here is that a constitutional democracy is obliged to offer those options. Otherwise, tales of violations of the commitments that the constitutional democracy has promised to respect and advance will make up much of those persons’ individual stories and of that constitutional democracy's collective story. Neither persons nor political societies constituted by such values can regard a life of violations of their own basic principles as expressive of human dignity, or as a life they would or should choose to live.14
LIMITS ON THE OBLIGATION TO INCLUDE
Neither, however, is a constitutional democracy obligated to destroy itself as a constitutional democracy in order to save itself; so there are limits to these obligations to include. On its face, at least, the argument made so far defines an obligation to include that is already more limited than Goodin's definition of the principle of ‘all affected interests.’ That principle holds that ideally, everyone should be enfranchised to help decide all issues that significantly affect their interests, which might well mean ‘giving virtually everyone everywhere a vote on virtually everything decided anywhere.’15 Although I am not seeking to refute that principle or the more realistic variations on it that Goodin discusses, the principle of constituted identities that I am defending is confined to those whose very identities have been substantially generated by a constitutional democracy, not to all whose interests are affected by its decisions. This obligation will often support the inclusion of many who are not currently recognized as citizens of a given constitutional democracy, but it does not plausibly extend to ‘virtually everyone everywhere.’16 The USA has, for example, coercively constituted the identities of residents of the Philippines more than it has those of Singapore, even though its policies and practices have arguably affected the interests of residents of Singapore as much as those of modern Filipinos.
And as noted at the outset, a number of recent writers have stressed one limit on inclusion that the preceding analysis compels me to reject, or at least to treat as inapplicable to the persons claiming inclusion on the grounds just sketched. David Miller, Matthew Gibney, and Stephen Macedo have all expressed concern that if constitutional democracies or republics add too many persons whom many citizens see as alien and unworthy, the result will be to undermine the senses of trust and concern that prompt voters to fund public assistance to their least advantaged fellow citizens.17 Many forms of distributive justice within a constitutional democracy thereby may be thwarted by excessive inclusiveness.
Although this is a legitimate concern, it is difficult to use it to justify exclusion of the persons I am discussing here: those with strong claims to membership based on the fact that the constitutional democracy has coercively provided much of the cultural ‘context of choice’ generating the identities, values and purposes those persons feel they must realize if they are to lead meaningful, free lives of human dignity. My argument is that by doing so much to ‘make’ these persons, constitutional democracies have already effectively made them members, to a greater or lesser degree; and democratic governments are obliged to recognize that reality and act accordingly. What does it mean to ‘act accordingly’? At a minimum, the legislative, executive, and judicial organs of the constitutional democracy should recognize their obligations to hear claims for full membership or more extensive recognition and aid advanced by persons so situated (via petitions, testimony at legislative and executive agency hearings, and litigation). A constitutional democracy's government should grant such claims, supplying full citizenship or other appropriate statuses, when honest examination shows them to be well-founded. In many cases, individuals may properly be judged already to have a place among the community's disadvantaged, deserving special consideration in policies of distributive justice, along with many of those legally recognized as citizens. Indeed, since they lack citizenship, they may be even more disadvantaged. Again because these obligations exist in rough proportion to the degree to which a constitutional democracy's coercive policies have constituted those persons’ identities, there may indeed be many with limited claims to membership who might legitimately be excluded if their presence would undermine support for just policies toward all existing members. Still, my view does not support the sharp boundaries drawn by these writers between the claims of those who are already legally recognized as citizens and many who are not.
My argument is also consistent with Michael Walzer's claim that political societies are entitled to limit inclusion considerably in order to main their distinctive ‘characters.’ But that limit has less bite in my analysis than in his, because I contend that the ‘characters,’ ‘cultural narratives,’ or ‘ethically constitutive stories’ of constitutional democracies, at least, include commitments to human dignity and liberty that require them to embrace as members all those whom they have coercively shaped in ways that make the pursuit of these values in those societies central to their lives. And again, the justice or injustice of that coercive shaping is not crucial to this obligation: the fact of coercive shaping alone, on the part of a regime committed to the principles of constitutional democracy, is enough to generate a duty to recognize that the stories of those shaped cannot be legitimately kept apart from the community that did so much to make them who they are, unless they decide they wish to live apart.
Still, limits remain, even for excluded persons with very strong claims to full and equal citizenship, like the members of conquered tribes or nations, slaves, disfranchised women, and residents of annexed territories and colonies. If those seeking to create a constitutional democracy face the choice, as the framers of the US Constitution arguably did, between failing to create any sort of approximation of a just system, or succeeding in devising a constitutional ‘democracy’ that does not include many whose identities it is profoundly shaping and will profoundly shape, it seems permissible to create a highly imperfect approximation of a just regime. But it then becomes an enduring duty of the leaders and citizens of that regime to make it more perfect, if their stories of devotion to the principles of constitutional democracy are not to be revealed as hypocritical fables. So long as inclusions continue to threaten the very survival of a constitutional democracy, they can be delayed; but the longer the delay, the stronger the obligation citizens have to find sustainable ways to achieve more just boundaries of membership.
On this view, for example, Abraham Lincoln was probably right to favor a gradualist approach to ending slavery, though not to suggest only the prospect of colonization for emancipated slaves. However, the legitimacy of gradualism did not mean that it was permissible to put the obligation to offer full membership to African Americans permanently on backburners of the nation's agenda, or to acquiesce to pressures to abandon that endeavor altogether. Thus Lincoln was also right to respond to southern secession by using coercive force to keep slaves within the Union; then to emancipate them; then to put them on the path to full citizenship, thereby sustaining the promise of inclusion to all whose identities, ideals, and aspirations had been profoundly constituted by the policies of America's putatively democratic regime.18
Similarly, America's constitutional democracy was obligated by its own ethically constitutive principles and its coercive policies eventually to enfranchise American women and to offer full and equal citizenship to members of the native tribes, to those residing on territories conquered in the Mexican American War, and to the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, Guam, and other Spanish American war acquisitions. Throughout the twentieth century, many Filipinos have in fact argued in American courts with much moral force, though with no legal success, that the occupation of their country by the USA in 1898 and its status as a US territory until 1946, with a ‘special relationship’ persisting thereafter, entitles them to US citizenship.19
Their example highlights the second limit to the obligation to include. It would admittedly have been a challenge to create new democratic institutions incorporating all Filipinos who wished to be US citizens directly into the civic body. Should the Philippines have simply become a non-contiguous state, as Hawaii and Alaska eventually did? Should it instead have sustained some sort of federated status, perhaps the ‘commonwealth’ status Puerto Rico possesses? Would either of those statuses really have been consistent with democratic self-governance in the Philippines and in the USA as a whole, or would they have amounted to new forms of colonial rule, as we who criticize Puerto Rico's current status contend?
The answers are not obvious, and that reality flags the further difficulties that may justify limits on the immediate inclusion as full citizens of all persons with identities and values extensively constituted by a particular constitutional democracy. In many cases, incorporating particular excluded groups requires devising new institutional structures so that all involved can see their membership as genuinely democratic. And as inclusions grow, every large-scale constitutional democracy will increasingly face the challenge of a ‘democratic deficit,’ as it encompasses populations and territories so vast that meaningful roles in governance seem logistically impossible for all but a small percentage of the citizenry.
Once again, a constitutional democracy is not obligated to adopt policies that would render it not a constitutional democracy. But once again, these difficulties cannot legitimately be treated as reasons to abandon altogether the project of finding appropriate forms of democratic civic inclusion for those who desire it and have legitimate claims to it. Instead, leaders and citizens must accept responsibility for working out defensibly democratic institutional arrangements, perhaps involving certain types of decentralization, federation, or considerably autonomous regional or local statuses, which can make inclusions consistent with the principles of constitutional democracy possible. Democratic theorists like David Held have explored such arrangements extensively in recent years, many inspired by the as yet highly imperfect example of the European Union.20 On the view of the obligations of constitutional democracies I advance here, members of most existing constitutional democracies need to do so as well, as part of efforts to consider how they can develop their systems into more perfect unions.21
SOME IMPLICATIONS
In that spirit, let me sketch what this obligation to include may imply for the USA in regard to some populations not currently treated as citizens, but who have nonetheless been extensively shaped by coercive American policies. I have already noted that post-World War II Japan and Germany operate under constitutions extensively written and imposed by their American conquerors, who also contributed to the restructuring of their educational, economic, and political systems in other important ways. Members of both countries have since modified their institutions and policies themselves, in ways not dictated by the USA, but it cannot be denied that all who have grown up in those societies have had their identities, values, and cultures extensively shaped by American coercion. Does this history mean that on my view, modern Japanese and German citizens should also be able to claim US citizenship if they wish to do so?
I do not reject this counter-intuitive possibility out of hand: if direct American domination of these nations had long continued, at some point their members would have been owed the option of full and equal inclusion. However, it matters that the coercion exercised by the USA came in response to acts and declarations of war initiated by these opponents, so that responsibility for their subsequent coercive transformation rests in part with themselves; and it matters more that these communities were and are more likely to achieve constitutional, democratic ways of life if they remained distinct from the USA. Offers of full American citizenship to them would probably be spurned as absurd, indeed offensive, by most, and they might also create severe internal conflicts with any who urged that the offers be taken up. Most Japanese and German citizens have been and are far more likely to embrace constitutional democracy when its principles and institutions are seen as means for their own national self-governance, rather than as their absorption into the USA.
A far more difficult case is contemporary Mexico—for the Mexican–American War dramatically reconstituted both countries, resulting in the shift of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, parts of Colorado, and (less directly) Texas to the USA. The US has since often intervened coercively in Mexico's political system and it has enforced policies that have greatly shaped the development of the Mexican economy. Has American coercion shaped most Mexicans’ identities and statuses so extensively that they can claim to be American citizens? Alternatively, have Mexico's own coercive policies, many of which have affected US citizens, done so extensively and pervasively enough for Americans to claim Mexican citizenship? Though the evidence needs to be examined in detail, I believe the answer to both questions is ‘probably not.’ But I do think that America's long and largely one-sided history of deeply constitutive coercions justifies giving Mexicans special access to American citizenship, ahead of the residents of the many countries less affected by American policies, and in ways that should justify comparative leniency toward undocumented Mexican immigrants. I doubt that Mexico's coercive impact on US citizens has been sufficient to warrant symmetrical obligations.
I also think the USA has special obligations to grant refugee status and, perhaps in some cases, citizenship to those Iraqis, Afghans, and others whose existence in their home countries has been disrupted, often made virtually impossible, by American military intervention and by their perceived roles as American allies. After much criticism for failing to grant even refugee status to displaced Iraqis, the US announced in February, 2007 that it would facilitate their entry; but it is still aiming to admit only roughly 12,000 in the next year from a country in which an estimated four million people have been displaced since the US invasion.22 Most of those four million, to be sure, would prefer to return to a peaceful and stable Iraq, and hopeful ones have begun to do so. However, those Iraqis who have long acted in good faith as US allies, who have good reason to believe that their lives in Iraq have been made untenable there by America's intervention, and who wish to become US citizens, have a strong case for inclusion within the US. The USA probably has not played so central a role in constituting their identities for so long a time as in the other examples I have listed. But because its coercive policies have effectively deprived them of the political identities and personal lives they would otherwise have had, it does have an obligation to aid them, certainly as refugees and perhaps, if their allied roles have been extensive and consequential, as citizens.
These latter claims, and indeed much of the foregoing, are legitimately controversial, and further reflection might indicate that American obligations are different, lesser or even greater than I have suggested here. At a minimum, I hope this discussion will convince readers that when we consider the legitimate civic boundaries of constitutional democracies, we must consider the issues of whether they have included as full and equal citizens all persons that their own principles obligate them to include. We must ask whether they are obligated to offer membership to all those who have become who they are because, to a considerable degree, the coercive policies of a constitutional democracy have made them so. When we do so, I think we must conclude that, contrary to current practices, the presumptive answer to that question must be yes.
Notes
1Rogers M. Smith (1997) Civic ideals: conflicting visions of citizenship in US. history. New Haven, Yale University Press.
2David Miller (1995) On nationality. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 73–80, 90–98; Matthew J. Gibney (2004) The ethics and politics of asylum: liberal democracy and the response to refugees. New York, Cambridge University Press, 69–76; Stephen Macedo (2007) The moral dilemma of US immigration policy: open borders versus social justice? in: Carol M. Swain (Ed.), Debating immigration. New York, Cambridge University Press, 76–81.
3A constitutional democracy that makes rapid access to citizenship readily available to such groups may reasonably confine the franchise to those who choose to take up their opportunities for full formal membership. But as I will discuss, its legislatures, pertinent executive agencies, and courts should understand themselves to be obliged to hear the sorts of claims to inclusion I am defending here in appropriate ways and to craft policies responsive to the needs of such claimants when their positions are well-founded.
4Robert E. Goodin (2007) Enfranchising all affected interests, and its alternatives, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 35, 40, 49–51. Robert A. Dahl has suggested resolving ‘the problem of inclusion’ in part by the apparently similar criterion that ‘the demos should include all adults subject to the binding collective decisions of the association.’ But though Dahl has long argued that the ‘principle of affected interests’ is ‘not a bad principle to start with’ in deciding inclusion questions, he has offered his principle focused on ‘binding collective decisions’ specifically as a guide to who among those living within a democratic unit should be part of its enfranchised, self-governing demos—not as a guide to what the membership boundaries of that democratic unit should be. Robert A. Dahl (1970, 1990) After the revolution? Authority in a good society (rev edn). New Haven, Yale University Press, 51; Robert A. Dahl (1989) Democracy and its critics. New Haven, Yale University Press, 120, 146–147. More recently, Dahl has been explicit that he sees the principle of full and equal political rights for all adults who are affected by binding laws as applying to adults who are already ‘permanently residing in the country and subject to its laws’ (Robert A. Dahl (1998) On democracy. New Haven, Yale University Press, 86).
5See e.g. the examples discussed by Goodin (2007) 49–50, 52–53, 57, 62–63, 66–67.
6In the USA, for example, mandatory education systems include extensive exposure to values of democracy and science, while public school teachers cannot advocate theocracy. Religious, expressive, economic and associational rights are robust, but even so, religious practices involving certain kinds of ritual human mutilation; forms of expression and employment that include child pornography and prostitution; and polygamous marriages are illegal, though these have all been elements of cultural traditions in communities with descendants in the USA.
7Michael Walzer (1983) Spheres of justice: a defense of pluralism and equality. New York, Basic Books, 62.
8Rogers M. Smith (2003) Stories of peoplehood: the politics and morals of political membership. New York, Cambridge University Press, 64–65, 101–102.
9As I have previously stressed, the accounts of communal identity that get institutionalized are inevitably compromises among rival views of that community's character and purposes. Dominant coalitions can shape laws and policies largely in their preferred directions, but rarely if ever without some concessions to opposing positions. It is complexly compromised institutionalized measures that result that socialize and constitute the identities of those to whom they apply. When the members of an existing society subscribe to such different stories of peoplehood that they cannot reach agreement on common policies and institutions and policies, they may instead separate and form distinct communities, often appropriately (Rogers M. Smith, 2003, 50, 160).
10Walter F. Murphy (2007) Constitutional democracy: creating and maintaining a just political order. Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 7, 16.
11Smith, Stories of peoplehood, 86–87, 91–92, 132–133. Although other types of political societies are bound and guided by their own overlapping sets of ethically constitutive stories, those stories do not necessarily endorse universal human worth or human liberty. If the argument for the obligation to include that I advance here applies to such societies, it is not because their own ethically constitutive stories demand it, but because we regard the values of constitutional democracy as universally binding, even on communities that do not embrace them.
12Will Kymlicka (1995) Multicultural citizenship: a liberal theory of minority rights. New York, Oxford University Press, 82–83.
13 Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967).
14For a parallel argument built on the thought of Rousseau and W. E. B. Du Bois from which I have benefited, see Jane Anna Gordon (2006) Double consciousness and the problem of political legitimacy, in: Lewis R. Gordon & Jane Anna Gordon (Eds), Not only the masters’ tools: African-American studies in theory and practice. Boulder, CO, Paradigm Publishers. My view also has similarities to Rainer Bauböck's arguments for incorporating all those who are substantial ‘stakeholders’ in a particular community. See e.g. Rainer Bauböck (2007, p. 100) Political boundaries in a multilevel democracy, in: Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, & Danilo Petranović (Eds), Identities, affiliations, and allegiances. New York, Cambridge University Press, 85–109. But where Bauböck's analysis, like the principle of affected interests, focuses on the shares that persons have established in a community's social, economic, cultural and political life and institutions, mine focuses on the share the community has had in establishing the persons themselves—a type of approach he sees as ‘problematic’ because of its potential stress on ‘the value of societal cultures,’ seen as unitary entities. Because I emphasize that persons are constituted by varied cultural traditions, the ultimate practical difference in these analyses remains to be seen. As noted below, Bauböck defend limits on community obligations much like those I suggest here.
15Goodin, Enfranchising all affected interests, 40, 68.
16Nor does the obligation defended here extend as far as the one recently argued for by Arash Abizadeh, who contends that decisions about the legitimacy of the borders of a political community must be made by all who are subject to coercion by the democracy enforcing those borders Arash Abizadeh (2008) Democratic theory and border coercion: no right to unilaterally control your own borders. Political Theory, 36, 37–65. Such coercion often falls short of significantly constituting persons’ identities and legal status in the manner on which my argument relies.
17David Miller (1995) On nationality. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 73–80, 90–98; Matthew J. Gibney (2004) The ethics and politics of asylum: liberal democracy and the response to refugees. New York, Cambridge University Press, 69–76; Stephen Macedo (2007) The moral dilemma of US immigration policy: open borders versus social justice? in: Carol M. Swain (Ed.), Debating immigration. New York, Cambridge University Press, 76–81.
18Cf. Mark A. Graber (2006), Dred Scott and the problem of constitutional evil. New York, Cambridge University Press.
19See e.g. Palo v. Weedin, 8 F. 2d 607 (1925); Summerfield v. US Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1994 US App. LEXIS 26379 (1994); Valmonte v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 136 F. 3d 914 (1998).
20David Held (1995) Democracy and the global order: from the modern state to cosmopolitan governance. Stanford, Stanford University Press.
21For a parallel argument stressing more narrowly political claims, rather than claims of cultural identity, see Bauböck, Political boundaries, 96–104.
22Paul Lewis (2007) US will speed entry of refugees from Iraq. Washington Post, Sept. 22, A10.
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Ethics & Global Politics eISSN 1654-6369, ISSN 1654-4951
This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Responsible editor: Eva Erman.