Can Citizenship be Taught?

Do we want people to be virtuous? Let us then start by making them love their fatherland. But how are they to love it if the fatherland is nothing more for them than for foreigners, and accords to them only what it cannot refuse to anyone?
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1755

Today, citizenship is a buzzword in liberal democratic states. In the last twenty years or so there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept, among governments and NGOs, as much as academics. Unfortunately, Belarus has a long way to go before it can be called a liberal democratic state, but nevertheless, the implications of citizenship education for the development of civil society in Belarus are immense. In its turn, a thriving civil society is, according to the structuralist-functionalist approach, one of the three prerequisites needed for triggering the process of democratic transition in an authoritarian state. The other two prerequisites are economic growth and the influence and assistance of a powerful democratic state – the factors that are, in my view, quite sufficiently present in Belarus at this stage (although the former is rapidly vanishing due to the downturn in oil and gas subsidies from neighbouring Russia).

The factor that is almost non-existent is civil society. In order to voluntarily participate in social organizations and institutions and form civil society, participants certainly need to have a sense of affinity for and unity with one another. In other words, they need to see some features in the structure of their identities that make them similar to one another as opposed to representatives of other political communities. What is it that we, the Belarusians, have in common? It is our political identity that is institutionalized in citizenship.

In seeking to describe “Citizenship,” I will borrow a definition from Wikipedia - that great international encyclopaedia of collective wisdom—which defines it in the following way: “Citizenship is membership in a political community (originally a city or town but now usually a country) and carries with it rights to political participation; a person having such membership is a citizen”.

Thus, we can see that citizenship is membership, a status that entitles its bearers to certain important rights, or benefits, such as the right to vote, the right to an old age pension, the right to unemployment benefits, the right to protection at home and abroad, etc. On the other hand, one should always bear in mind that having certain rights presupposes having ceratin duties, or obligations. The former are impossible without the latter, e.g. one cannot exercise their right to an old age pension without complying with their duty to pay taxes whilst in their working age in a morally sound society. This way we can see that citizenship describes the rights and obligations associated with membership of a social unit. Without citizenship people would be political outcasts because the state would not be obligated to guarantee their rights. This explains the importance of various international organizations that strive to protect the rights of asylum-seekers.

The above-mentioned aspect of citizenship is what I call “formal citizenship”. It is basically a list of rights and obligations that Belarusian passport holders possess as summarized in the national constitution (the moral integrity and legitimacy of which is highly questionable, however, this is a subject for a separate discussion). What I would like to focus on is a sense of political identity that underpins the notion of citizenship and that unites a people. Political identity is regrettably exceedingly weak in Belarus. This is the reason why Belarus is falling behind its CIS neigbours, such as Ukraine and Georgia, in following the path of democratic transition. Due to idiosyncracies of its historic development, Belarus has had very little time to form a national identity. This is why Belarus is facing the task of developing a national identity virtually from scratch (unlike Ukraine and Georgia, where a full-fledged national identity formed long before the emergence of the USSR and survived its destructive assimilating influence). In other words, the Georgians and the Ukrainians have to recollect and to restore their national identity as it was before 1917, whereas the Belarusians have to actually construct it anew.

A residual sense of national identity is the missing element that could unite the people of Belarus in their struggle for a politically and economically sound future for their families. In its absence, the most ambitious project and the greatest challenge for the democratically-minded section of the Belarusian society is the construction and nurturing of the national identity. The failure of this endeavour will inevitably lead to the disintegration of Belarus and its annexation by Russia sooner or later.

Despite the sadness of the above-mentioned prospect, I believe that Belarus still has a chance to survive as a sovereign political unit on the map of the world. According to some prominent political scientists, political identity can be socially constructed, because it is made of beliefs in one’s imagination. People can be persuaded to adopt political identity. This is where citizenship education fits in – its primary role is to explain to people what rights and obligations their citizenship entitles them to and how their membership in a political unit benefits every single one of them and the society in its entirety, to give them the right arguments, to persuade them to adopt or to sustain their political identity. What can these arguments be? According, to American political scientist and constitutional scholar, Rogers Smith, they can be divided into the following:

(a) economic arguments: they claim that the allegiance of a particular group will make people economically better off;

(b) political arguments: they claim that the allegiance of a particular group will empower people by way of offering them protection at home and abroad;

(c) ethically constitutive stories: they stress the commonality of racial, religious, ethnic and cultural elements that makes citizens better at cooperating and reproducing their way of life with one another rather than with outsiders.

In some countries of the world (England, for example) Citizenship Education is a compulsory subject at schools. In my opinion, this practice is extremely conducive to helping young citizens understand their role in shaping a better future for their society and the importance of active and responsible participation. Citizenship can be taught and this education has the potential to assist individuals in developing into active, responsible and critical citizens.

Join the debate: Take part in the Citizens of Europe OpenForum “Promoting Citizenship by Education?” on 14 - 16 March 2008, hosted by the European Humanities University (EHU), a “University in Exile” for more information: www.citizens-of-europe.eu