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Citizenship Studies
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Cultural citizenship as a normative notion for activist practices

Pieter Boele van Hensbroeka
a
Department of Practical Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, The
Netherlands

Online publication date: 27 July 2010

To cite this Article Boele van Hensbroek, Pieter(2010) 'Cultural citizenship as a normative notion for activist practices',
Citizenship Studies, 14: 3, 317 — 330
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 Citizenship Studies
Vol. 14, No. 3, June 2010, 317–330

Cultural citizenship as a normative notion for activist practices

Pieter Boele van Hensbroek*

Department of Practical Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen,

The Netherlands
(Received 1 December 2008; final version received 1 October 2009)

This paper explores the possibility of a notion of cultural citizenship that can function
as an activist tool for formulating claims against cultural exclusion. It claims to have
captured such a notion in the definition of cultural citizenship as the ability to co-author
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the cultural context in which one lives. The argument proceeds in several steps. First, it
argues that the agenda of relevant cultural issues should go far beyond questions of
cultural groups and recognition as posed in most contemporary literature. For instance,
cultural exclusion on a global scale as well as exclusion within groups and exclusions
effected by commercialisation of cultural processes should receive equal attention.
Second, the article argues for a ‘stand-alone’ notion of cultural citizenship, i.e. defining
cultural citizenship as citizenship in the cultural sphere rather than as concerning
merely cultural aspects of political citizenship. Finally, it assesses the potentials of the
proposed notion of cultural citizenship as compared to several competitors in the field,
viz. Kymlicka’s liberal communalism, Sen’s idea of cultural liberty, and approaches
focussing on cultural participation.
Keywords: cultural exclusion; cultural participation; liberal communalism; cultural
freedom; concept of culture

Globalisation, in particular the emergence of multicultural societies in the western world,

has put the culture/politics nexus on the agenda of intellectual debate. Key notions used
in this debate include recognition, cultural group rights, cultural exclusion and, more
recently, cultural citizenship and cultural liberty. The situation of cultural groups
demanding recognition from the wider society has become the exemplary case for
discussing issues in the border zone of culture and politics.
This paper arises from dissatisfaction with the central role of this exemplar. It tends to
elbow out of the agenda other cultural issues related to citizenship which I consider to be
at least as relevant, pressing and exciting today. I think of issues such as the under-
representation in global intellectual life of intellectuals residing outside the west, the case
of dissidents, minorities and cultural pluralism within cultural groups, the stereotyping and
essentialising of cultural traditions, and the blatant manipulations which occur in relation
to what Alberto Melucci (1996) has called ‘the power of naming’. With that term he
referred to the ways in which the key terms that frame our conceptions of the good life are
being coined, providing the vocabulary for public discourses and for intellectual and
public agendas. An example of the power of naming would be the reframing of the notion

*Email: p.boele@rug.nl

ISSN 1362-1025 print/ISSN 1469-3593 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13621021003731880
http://www.informaworld.com
 318 P. Boele van Hensbroek

of ‘terrorism’ since 9/11, so as to make it a useful instrument for criminalising opposition

and liberation movements in many parts of the world.
I would not deny that, for instance, land rights of indigenous peoples, the headscarf, or
ritual slaughter are relevant new issues, especially in some of the western countries.
However, I venture that there are more and larger questions that deserve a central place in
both academic and public debates concerning culture and citizenship. A relevant agenda
for such debates should include, for example, concerns about journalism and ownership of
media, diversity of film production, publishing avenues in different part of the world, and
heritage representation. In short, it should include the whole range of issues related to the
politics and economics of meaning-making in national as well as in global contexts. And
when a focus on ‘cultural groups’ is chosen, then it should include discussions on hip hop,
new age and anti-globalisation counterculture as much as discussions on ethnic or
religious minorities.1
In this paper, I aim to discuss cultural citizenship with this broader agenda of cultural
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dynamics, exclusion and contestation in mind. Such a broad agenda includes empirical and
normative questions. There is a rich and diverse body of empirical social science and
cultural studies literature emerging on the actual dynamics of citizenship; I focus here on
conceptual and normative questions. More specifically, I focus on the potential of ‘cultural
citizenship’ as a key term for framing ideals and claims in a context of social, political, and
cultural action. Can this notion be a better tool than its rivals for framing claims in
struggles for non-exclusion, for pluralism and against the influences of commercial and
power interests on cultural action? How should the notion be framed in order to be an
effective tool for defining cultural and political roles, setting ideals, and pinpointing
opportunities for and threats to democratisation and innovation of the cultural sphere?
These are the central questions that I address in this paper. I first sketch a few examples of
cultural issues which mark the broader agenda that I aim at. Then I proceed with
elaborating a proposal for a combative and sharpened notion of cultural
citizenship. Finally, I show the added value of such a notion as compared to its
competitors.

Towards a broader agenda

To begin with, we need a clear view of what sorts of cultural issues are at stake. The
contemporary theorising on normative questions related to culture and citizenship has
received much inspiration from discussions on problems in multicultural societies,
especially that of Canada. The Canadian exemplar builds on a situation where cultural
issues are in the first place seen as related to the inclusion in a nation-state context of
various groups, in particular indigenous populations (Indians), linguistic minorities (the
Quebecois) and various new immigrant groups. Although the Canadian case is certainly
rich and the theorising very enlightening and inspiring, the role of exemplar which this
case has assumed also limits the scope and relevance of contemporary discussions on
culture and citizenship.
A key example in an intellectual argument is generally more than just illustration.
Thomas Kuhn, in his reflections on the idea of a paradigm, gradually replaced the word
‘paradigm’ with that of ‘exemplar’, thus indicating that in the process of learning to
practice a science, or of getting acquainted with an approach, we actually do not apply a
list of rules or principles but imitate an exemplary study (Kuhn 1969, 1977). Such an
exemplar involves a way of delimiting and constructing the object, of mapping the
research question, and of approaching the analysis; it embodies ‘tacit knowledge’ in
 Citizenship Studies 319

Michael Polanyi’s terms (1974).2 Lolle Nauta (1985) has argued that in social thought key
historical situations – which he calls ‘exemplary situations’ – have the same role.3 My
contention is that the dominant strand of theorising normative questions related to culture
and citizenship are framed by the exemplar of a situation like that in Canada. Therefore,
changing the direction of theorising could be helped by directing attention to other
important examples where the relation citizenship-culture is at stake. Let me try to stretch
our imagination by elaborating on a few of such examples of cultural exclusion.

The case of the democratisation of memory

Viewed from a global perspective, we tend to operate with a rather distorted, one-sided
view of our intellectual heritages. Most of the intellectual history of the world, even very
intriguing and possibly relevant episodes and traditions, is absent from our collective
memory. Complete regions of the world are almost ‘zones of silence’ when it comes to
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noticing their intellectual production.4 This is a massive and fundamental case of

exclusion – exclusion from memory – that receives very little attention. Just an example:
the flamboyant writer and preacher Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832 –1912) is considered by
several experts to have been the most important black intellectual of the nineteenth century
(Lynch 1963, 1967, Ayandele 1971). He elaborated a rich crop of arguments on culture
and on African cultural revival – arguments that are in many respects more sophisticated,
wide-ranging and consistently developed than most identity discourses of the twentieth
century. Yet, Blyden is almost erased from memory, also that of Africans, receiving a few
passing references even in the highest quality historical studies of Africa. Blyden’s case is
not an isolated one. Whereas there is abundant academic attention for interpreting the
intellectual history of the west (and a few other areas such as China), most intellectuals
from non-western regions are not well documented, their works unavailable or not
translated. The democratisation of memory, one could argue, is a vital task for achieving
cultural citizenship in the age of globalisation.5

The case of dissidents and innovators

Another exemplary case of cultural exclusion is that of cultural innovators and dissidents.
Such dissidence involves quite different aspects of cultural exclusion than those related to
the recognition of groups. In many situations, cultural struggles concern ‘unblocking
agency’ within a tradition or the right to freely cross cultural borders. They concern
struggles by individuals or movements against certain aspects of the cultural traditions in
their life-world, and against established cultural spokesmen. Such struggles aim for access
to meaning-making, not the strengthening of cultural group rights. One could, of course,
construct every case of dissidence as a threat to the cultural identity of a group, but such a
formulation of cultural struggle in terms of threats to a cultural group assumes that the
cultural collective and its conservative cultural spokesmen are really ‘cultural’ and the
dissident is not. Such reasoning is built on an outdated collectivistic and static notion of
culture. We can take the example of an Iranian woman wanting to wear elegant clothes and
a traditionalist wanting to prohibit this in the name of culture. This conflict may be framed
as the traditionalist claiming a cultural right and the woman a liberal freedom right, but,
depending on the actual situation, both may be equally ‘cultural’ (and probably equally
political in their concerns with expanding or reducing freedom). They simply represent
different views of what Iranian culture is, or should be. The claim of the Iranian woman
can well be interpreted as a claim to cultural citizenship. This example shows, as do many
 320 P. Boele van Hensbroek

other cases of struggle over culture, that any larger community includes a great variety of
cultural orientations, interpretations and identities. If we focus on what we see as cultural
groups then we risk disregarding this plurality within cultural traditions. Issues of culture
should not be seen as issues of identity but rather as issues of cultural agency in all its
forms.

The case of disempowering the cultural citizen

The focus on questions of recognition has drawn public attention away from several
classical issues related to the cultural domain in contemporary societies. Classical
criticisms of commoditisation, cultural industries, and the colonisation of the life-world
come to mind – processes that all negatively affect the cultural agency of citizens. With
the increasing monopolisation and commercialisation of the means of cultural production
and the shaping of consumption and lifestyle through modern marketing strategies, these
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questions continue to be highly relevant. For instance, when listening to Dutch radio
stations one could easily get the impression that the Dutch only appreciate a very narrow
range of music styles. Everything exotic is absent, as well as experimental and innovative
music styles. This narrow range may be due to Eurocentric and conservative prejudices of
Dutch DJs, but it probably rather results from a commercial logic which suggests that the
highest number of listeners can be achieved by aiming at the largest group of consumers.
The logic of media as commercial enterprises is here at odds with equal citizenship in the
cultural sphere for anybody with aesthetic orientations deviating from the mainstream.

Citizenship: political and cultural

The three examples of cultural exclusion introduced above serve to show that a broad
agenda can include highly interesting and relevant contemporary issues in the debate. In a
thumbnail-size formulation it can be called an agenda covering the diverse aspects of the
politics of meaning-making in societies. I propose that this is the agenda where the notion
of cultural citizenship has to prove its value by framing emancipatory normative positions.
The task at hand now is to elaborate a pointed formulation of the ideal of cultural
citizenship with this agenda in mind. Let me prepare the conceptual ground for elaborating
such a formulation.
Culture has certainly not been absent from the theorising about citizenship. It is central
to communitarian concerns with questions of unity and social integration (Etzioni et al.
2004, MacIntyre 2006). It can be linked to Thomas Marshall’s (1965) liberal approach by
expanding the series of historically evolving dimensions of citizenship to include a
cultural dimension, as well as to Will Kymlicka’s ‘liberal communalism’ (Kymlicka
2004). And it is a main focus in discussions about cosmopolitan citizenship (Stevenson
2003, Delanty 2000) and in postmodern analyses of the cultural production of the political
(Appadurai 1996, Hannerz 1996).
The idea of cultural citizenship which I elaborate here is somewhat unusual because it
suggests that we consider cultural citizenship in a quite specific domain, not as cultural
aspects of political citizenship, but as citizenship in matters of culture. Giving central
place to this distinction may look like a return to mainstream liberal approaches to
citizenship where the public and the private, in this case the political and cultural, are
viewed as separate (and to be separated) spheres. However, this is not my intention. In fact,
I agree with critiques of mainstream liberalism which state that political citizenship is
always cultural in important ways, namely culturally specific in its definition (not ‘neutral’
 Citizenship Studies 321

or completely ‘above’ cultural differences in society), as well as culturally exclusive in

practical respects. Therefore, rather than a strategy of neutralising real differences by
ignoring them in the public domain, we may often need a lively ‘politics of difference’
which takes cultural issues out of the private sphere and makes them into an issue of public
deliberation and in some cases public action (see the contribution of Judith Vega in this
issue).6 I fully endorse such arguments, but my line of reasoning still requires that, while
not separating the two, I distinguish between the political and the cultural. My pressing
question is how to enhance citizenship roles in cultural processes in society. While
political citizenship concerns processes of decision-making, cultural citizenship concerns
those of meaning-making.
The notion of culture which is used in these formulations needs some justification. It
clearly deviates from the use of the word culture by many participants in public debates
today as well as from some classical definitions in the history of social science. However,
it is largely in tune with theoretical developments in Cultural Anthropology and Cultural
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Studies over the last decades, where classical definitions have been replaced by semiotic
ones. Culture, here, designates socially constructed ‘webs of meaning’ and the activities of
constructing these. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz is considered to be the father of this
‘semiotic turn’ (Geertz 1973, see below).
The concept of culture is being used in a confusing number of meanings and therefore
often misguides rather than enlightens academic as well as public discussions. Today it
may be considered an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie 1956). The semiotic turn in
the use of the notion of culture leads it away from definitions such as culture as ‘a
particular way of life’, or as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member
of society’ (Taylor 1958, p. 1). Culture, in many classical meanings, is everything
‘extrasomatic’, or transmissible by mechanisms other that biological heredity (Kroeber &
Kluckhohn 1952, p. 283). Introducing a new development, Geertz suggests understanding
culture as ‘socially established structures of meaning’ (Geertz 1973, p. 12). Both the act
of ‘reading’ such a cultural text by the student of culture, as well as the continuous
constructions and reconstruction of the webs of meaning in social interaction come into
view here (Kuper 1999, van Binsbergen 1999). An instructive differentiation in the uses of
the notion of culture is Dick Stanley’s (2005) discussion of ‘three faces of culture’. He
distinguishes culture as the repository of past traditions, symbols and meanings (‘Culture
H’); culture as the making of new meanings and symbols (‘Culture C’); and culture as the
set of symbolic tools of persons in constructing their ‘way of life’ (‘Culture S’). Culture C
play a key role in understanding change, the culture/power nexus, and emancipatory
claims because it pinpoints the agency of individuals and groups in reshaping contexts of
meaning.
Such a semiotic notion (as Geertz calls it) of culture fits well with my endeavour to
explore the outlines of a notion of cultural citizenship directed at processes of meaning-
making in society. As explained above, I want to advance a self-contained notion of
cultural citizenship, i.e. not as a dimension of political citizenship, but as a specification of
what it means to be a citizen vis-à-vis cultural processes in society.7 Thereby cultural
citizenship is positioned ‘next to’ rather than as ‘an aspect of’ political citizenship. In this
article I try this ‘stand-alone’ approach to cultural citizenship and see how far it leads us. If
successful, the advantage would be that we have a conceptual tool for identifying and
assessing relevant forms of cultural exclusion, as distinct from political exclusion. For
instance, considering cultural citizenship as a separate type of citizenship may take
account of situations in contemporary affluent and democratic multicultural societies
 322 P. Boele van Hensbroek

where persons and whole communities may be very well catered for in terms of political
rights, welfare provisions and even economic position, while nevertheless being
completely sidelined in terms of social or cultural life. The issue here seems not to be their
political citizenship status, which may be fine, but their cultural existence, i.e. their
involvement in meaning-making processes in society. This example shows that it may
be very fruitful to distinguish issues of cultural exclusion from problems of political
exclusion, and, consequently, issues of cultural citizenship from those of political
citizenship.
With the conceptual clarifications in this paragraph, the leading questions for this
paper can be formulated in the following, more specific form. As full political citizenship
is an ideal, even an entitlement that can be claimed in political life today, could cultural
citizenship obtain the same role for cultural life? What are the key issues that cultural
citizenship should address? How can cultural citizenship usefully be defined with this aim
in mind? What should be identified as the key dimensions of the term? How can these
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dimensions be operationalised? In short: what does it exactly mean to say that cultural
citizenship is something to be strengthened or achieved?

Elaborating the idea of cultural citizenship: co-production in meaning-making

As a practical heuristics for elaborating a stand-alone concept of cultural citizenship,
I propose to conduct a type of ‘translation’ of the key aspects of the well-theorised idea
of political citizenship to that of cultural citizenship. I will do so for one general
characteristic of citizenship, which I derive from the republican tradition in political
theory, and for three of its specific aspects. The key republican idea of citizenship is that
the political community is the autonomous production of its citizens. What would be the
cultural equivalent of ‘both to rule and to be ruled’, as Aristotle epitomised the republican
ideal of the citizen as the co-producer of his own society? ‘Ruling’ in the cultural sphere
could mean that cultural citizens are co-producers, or co-authors, of the cultural context or
contexts in which they participate. ‘Being ruled’ would involve the partaking in the
community’s representations, which means being visible in the media and in public and
intellectual life. The focus of both political and cultural citizenship, then, is on the idea of
co-production as a normative social ideal. The political citizen can put forward the positive
claim to be involved, that is, can claim political actorship while rejecting any claim of
some to be a ‘natural’, ‘divine’ or ‘traditional’ guardian of power (such as in an aristocratic
system). Similarly, the cultural citizen can claim co-authorship and thus also the right
to challenge any authoritatively or traditionally established cultural consensus and
hegemony. While political citizenship concerns the process of decision-making in society,
cultural citizenship concerns that of meaning-making. The essence of the idea of cultural
citizenship is then: to be co-producer, or co-author, of the cultural contexts (webs of
meaning) in which one participates.

Individual
Several further aspects of the classical idea of the citizenship provide a useful and
attractive ground plan for the notion of ‘cultural citizenship’ as a normative key term for
action in the cultural domain. I will discuss three such aspects. First, citizenship refers
primarily to individuals. In the political domain groups are generally taken as associated
individuals; claims made by certain religious, class or ethnic groups are taken as the
aggregate of the claims made and actions undertaken by the constituent individuals.
 Citizenship Studies 323

Translated to the cultural domain this would mean that cultural citizenship belongs
primarily to individuals and addresses persons as agents in cultural processes. Cultural
agency is often exercised together with others, in churches, associations, identity
groupings or movements, but these may be taken to represent aggregated individual
agency. This individual cultural agency focus provides a much more attractive ground plan
for discussing cultural action than the usual equation of cultural issues with cultural
groups, groups which are often even mapped as spatial entities that divide the cultural
domain in cultural provinces each assumed to have its own unity, natural membership, and
identity.
This argument for conceiving cultural citizenship as essentially belonging to
individuals may be complemented by the observation that individuals can put forward
claims ‘as cultural citizens’ outside any cultural group context, such as in the exemplary
case of Emile Zola’s dissidence in formulating his ‘J’accuse’. Other examples concern
claims to a space for exploring non-mainstream lifestyles, or the claim to frame
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testimonies of cultural hybridity, such as in the case of Salmon Rushdie, certain TV

personalities or artists. The individual-oriented premise, also in cultural matters, may
sound somewhat extreme and in everyday life cultural action may more often be shared
rather than individual. However, one may notice that we would generally say that persons
are ultimately individually accountable for their cultural choices and that one cannot hide
behind the group consensus when asked to justify cultural choices.8 For instance, the fact
that European cultures include strong traditions of anti-Semitism and racism will hardly be
taken as justification for continuing these traditions. Similarly, we would tend to see
infringements of cultural liberties, such as prohibitions on the use of a certain language or
lifestyle, as not only a problem for cultural diversity but also as a problem for certain
individuals in becoming full members of society (Sen 2004).
The non-communitarianism of a citizenship approach already derives from its
characterisation of what the ‘cultural’ is, namely the ‘production of meaning and
representation’, ‘shaping and re-shaping interpretations’, ‘the construction of imagined
selves and imagined worlds’ (Appadurai 1996, p. 3). This is not to say that the cultural
should be considered a product of isolated individuals, or that culture consists merely of
contestation. We may adopt Stuart Hall’s formulation: ‘culture is an argument through
which people, regions, classes, communities work out the meanings by which they live and
express themselves’ (Prins Claus Fund 2001, p. 5).

Equality
A second aspect of the idea of political citizenship that can be usefully translated to that of
cultural citizenship is that citizenship automatically implies the notion of equality. As far
as the official status of citizen is concerned, one person cannot be ‘more’ of a citizen than
another. Translated to the cultural domain, this leads to outspoken positions in current
debates. On the one hand, citizens can claim a right to be heard. On the other hand, no
individuals or groups can claim a special status as the true guardians of the cultural
patrimony or patrimonies that shape public culture. The autochthonous citizen cannot have
a special right to represent the collective and to dominate public culture. If, for instance,
the idea of a ‘Leitkultur’ or of a national cultural ‘canon’ is advanced (quite apart from the
question whether that is a good idea), then the equality inherent in the idea of cultural
citizenship requires that engagement in further elaboration and change of this culture
should be open to all citizens. The equality implied by the idea of cultural citizenship thus
results in an inherent demand for the democratisation of cultural processes.
 324 P. Boele van Hensbroek

Co-citizen
A third relevant aspect of the idea of citizenship is that one cannot be a citizen alone:
automatically included is the idea of co-citizenship, involving inter-subjectivity, shared
problems and shared commitments. In Thucydides’s famous phrasing of Pericles’ funeral
oration, it should be the citizen’s business to mind our common business (Thucydides
1979, p. 35). This idea of a shared responsibility belonging to a political community, when
translated to the cultural domain, deviates from the classical liberal position of allocating
cultural issues to the private sphere. From the point of view of cultural citizenship, nothing
is a priori in the private sphere. Issues such as cultural participation, cultural diversity and
cultural dynamics may be made issues of public concern. One of the key functions of
advancing the notion of cultural citizenship is to galvanise claims in the cultural domain
that call for public attention and may change the established consensus or laws. Vital in
this third aspect of the citizenship idea is that citizenship, while framing individual
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entitlements, at once points beyond the individual to a civic practice where citizenship is
co-citizenship.
The exercise in this section of translating key dimensions of political citizenship into
those of cultural citizenship results in an attractive characteristic of cultural citizenship as
a normative ideal, namely to be co-producer, or co-author, of the cultural contexts in
which one participates. It is social but non-communitarian and includes a fundamental
equality with fellow citizens. As such, I would claim, it can be a tool for addressing issues
of exclusion, inequalities in ‘the power of naming’, and of struggles over representation.

Added value of cultural citizenship: beyond liberal communalism, cultural liberty

and participation
At this point in the argument it may be asked whether the proposed notion of cultural
citizenship is not just attractive, but actually more attractive than already available
vocabularies. I can provide here only sketchy comparisons, but hopefully convincing ones,
covering three relevant approaches, namely Kymlicka’s liberal communalism, Cultural
Liberty as conceptualised within the Capability Approach, and the more classical
discourses on increasing participation and democratisation of culture, such as of Raymond
Williams (1983).
Will Kymlicka’s well-known endeavour is to stretch the liberal agenda so as to include
concerns for representation of cultural groups (Kymlicka 1995). Liberals, he argues,
cannot ignore that individuals in different cultural groups require different conditions to
materialise their freedom of choice. Some aspects of life which in a liberal political theory
usually belong to the private sphere (such as customs, language, religion) require public
attention and recognition in order to achieve equal freedom, thus requiring certain
concessions to the idea of equality before the law by granting group rights. His resulting
position of ‘liberal communalism’ (Kymlicka 2004) seeks to marry communitarian
concerns about respecting group cultures with liberal ones on individual freedom.
The idea of ‘cultural liberty’ as advanced in the Capability Approach, initially
formulated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, is not much different from Kymlicka’s
approach. It conceptualises Human Development as the advancement of substantive
freedoms, with freedom being defined as the actual possibilities persons have to achieve
aspired ‘livings’ (or ‘doings and beings’). Such freedoms can be, for instance, being well
fed, having your children’s schooling guaranteed, being able to participate in productive
work and in democratic politics, or having access to health services and social security. In
applying the Capability Approach to cultural matters, the notion of ‘cultural liberty’ has
 Citizenship Studies 325

been advanced. This notion has guided the interesting 2004 Human Development Report,
titled Cultural liberty in today’s diverse world and published under the United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP 2004). The report, as well as the background papers to
it, introduce the notion of cultural liberty as the opposite of cultural exclusion, and then
analyse various forms of such exclusion and assess practical policy options to manage
cultural diversity in a way that enhances non-exclusion.9
In the Human Development Report and related papers, cultural liberty is defined as
‘being able to choose one’s identity’ (UNDP 2004, p. 1), or as having access to ‘a context
of choice, . . . the familiar, understandable and predictable environment needed for
rational decision-making and for the development of personal autonomy’ (Kymlicka 2004,
p. 9). In an interesting chapter in the report, Amartya Sen (2004) suggests that cultural
liberty can be operationalised as the absence of two types of exclusion: ‘living modes
exclusion’ and ‘participation exclusion’. He defines ‘living modes exclusion’ as the
suppression of the culture of a group, for instance, their language, religion or customs. One
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example is excluding minority languages from being the language of instruction in

primary schools. Next, ‘participation exclusion’ is defined as the social, political or
economic exclusion of members of a group because of their ethnic, linguistic or religious
identity. An example here is discriminating against people from minority cultures in
public life. Identifying these two specific types of exclusion makes it possible to analyse
actual situations in society from the point of view of cultural exclusion by pinpointing the
specific ‘unfreedoms’ to be eliminated by policy measures or social action.10
The main concern of Kymlicka and the Capability Approach is to facilitate increased
individual choice, and cultural liberties define a range of dimensions along which such an
increase may be realised. The presupposition is that, in some special cases (e.g. of ‘cultural
groups’) it should be a public concern to increase private freedoms, that is, to increase the
capabilities set of individuals. Thus, the basic picture is a national political context with
cultural issues being a private matter. In this context, the special situation of different types
of minorities and different types of exclusions related to these special groups requires
special normative principles and policy measures to guarantee equal freedom of choice.
The task at hand for Kymlicka and the Capability Approach is to identify the normative
principles and the effective policy measures to implement these and thus to maximise
individual freedom/capabilities.
A republican citizenship approach shares many of the concerns and analyses with the
two just discussed. However, the basic picture is drawn somewhat differently and is richer
in colours, so to say, colours which make it possible to depict citizenship not only as an
individual legal entitlement laid down in a vertical relation with the state, but also as a
social role, namely the role of co-producer of the political (or cultural) community.11
Citizenship in a republican view is basically a horizontal relation with fellow citizens,
aspects of which become confirmed in legal relations which shape the citizens’ state. The
citizenship approach is also different because by giving a social role the central place, it
draws attention to a range of societal and socio-psychological preconditions that need to be
fulfilled for the actual practice of citizenship roles. It can, in addition, draw attention to the
broader historically specific societal dynamics of power and class relations, institutional
arrangements, and social, political and economic systems which frame citizens’ action.
Thus it does not isolate the discussion of citizenship from relevant traditions of social and
cultural analysis, from Marx to Foucault and Appadurai.
Thus, with a citizenship approach there is immediately more on the agenda when
discussing the culture/politics nexus than the question of formulating normative principles
and designing policies to implement these principles, such as in the more strictly liberal
 326 P. Boele van Hensbroek

approaches of Kymlicka and the Capability Approach.12 For cultural citizenship to

actually become a tool for stating and specifying claims for emancipation, the social and
institutional conditions that can sustain it need further exploration. The more detailed
elaboration of the idea of political citizenship may again be exemplary here. Political
citizenship defines social and political roles, and involves possible institutional
frameworks – parliament, councils, courts, ombudsman and so on – that make
citizenship operational in a particular society. It also specifies relations to co-citizens, in
political parties, movements, and civil society. It furthermore implies obligations upon the
actors themselves, to listen, to engage in debate, to respect difference, and even to acquire
minimal capacities to execute the citizenship role (such as speaking the common language,
being informed, showing tolerance). It thus suggests a social ethics beyond the minimal
idea of not harming others. The idea of cultural citizenship needs such levels of
institutional, social and attitudinal elaborations as well. Just as political citizenship is
much more than the act of voting in elections, cultural citizenship involves a wide array of
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practices which may require institutional and motivational foundations.

My idea of cultural citizenship as co-authorship of cultural contexts, as explained
in the previous section, also needs to be compared to more classical discussions on
democratisation of culture. Can it provide a better conceptual vehicle for formulating
protest against cultural oppression and exclusion than the classical views? I think so. I will
substantiate this claim by arguing one specific point, namely that the idea of co-authorship
can specify more concretely the relevant dimensions of what, in other discourses on
emancipation and culture, is captured in notions such as ‘participation’ or ‘democratisa-
tion’.
For that purpose, let me try to specify what it can mean to co-author one’s cultural
contexts. Initially, it involves the formal and physical freedom to engage in cultural
practices.13 However, is such freedom to engage enough to actually speak of co-
authorship? I do not think so, because co-authorship involves not just participation, but
also having an actual impact. Take the example of a situation where there is no formal
prohibition against historical research on slavery, where the ambitions of some to engage
in such research are reasonably facilitated. Is that all that is necessary for co-authorship of
cultural processes? Of course the whole idea of such studies is not just to facilitate the self-
realisation of the researchers, or even of their community (assuming that the researchers
belong to the descendents of those same slaves). The idea of the whole exercise is to
provide reinterpretations of history, to challenge or enrich existing views, in short, to have
an impact on the cultural consensus. This deeper aspect of participation is captured well in
the idea of co-authorship, for if deviant historical interpretations remain in a cultural niche
and the ruling images are not challenged, then there may be cultural freedom but no co-
authorship. Without some impact on the construction process of the cultural consensus
there would still be deficient cultural citizenship.
As a second step, we should go beyond this requirement of cultural ‘impact’. This can
be seen from the following example. When we look at the cultural participation of
immigrant communities in Europe, then, even with the criterion of ‘impact’, the situation
may be judged not unfavourably. In Western Europe we have internationalised our cuisine
to a great extent and, apart from radio and TV, which remain very much mainstream, a
whole range of musical institutions and media present a rich variety of cultures. However,
this picture changes considerably when we move outside the domains of popular culture.
The production of literature has become increasingly cosmopolitan and diverse, but what
about academia, philosophy, history, political culture? I do not want to evaluate the actual
situation here, but simply to indicate that a true democratisation of culture involves more
 Citizenship Studies 327

than visibility or impact as such; it also requires a criterion such as the political and social
‘relevance’ of this impact. Cultural citizenship requires cultural engagement and
contestation across the board, in cultural fields where it concerns ‘the power to name,
construct meaning and exert control over the flow of information’ (Stevenson 2003).
These examples show that elaborating the notion of cultural citizenship as co-authorship
of one’s cultural contexts may specify and deepen our understanding of what is usually
described in terms of cultural participation and democratisation of culture. The notion of
cultural citizenship can be a more effective tool here for formulating cultural claims.14

Conclusion: difficult questions about cultural citizenship and globalisation

This paper set out to explore the possibility of a notion of cultural citizenship that can
function as an activist tool for formulating claims against cultural exclusion. I claim to
have captured such a notion in the definition of cultural citizenship as the ability to co-
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author the cultural context in which one lives. The trajectory of the argument proceeded in
several steps. First, I argued that the agenda of relevant cultural issues should go far
beyond questions of cultural groups and recognition as posed in most contemporary
literature. Second, I specified the notion of culture – what Geertz calls a semiotic concept
of culture – that can shape a suitable idea of cultural citizenship. Third, I suggested a
‘stand-alone’ notion of cultural citizenship that can formulate specific claims for cultural
inclusion rather than defining cultural citizenship as merely an aspect of political
citizenship. Finally, I assessed the potential of this notion of cultural citizenship in relation
to competitors in the field.
The argument for a notion of cultural citizenship as a claim for co-authorship provides
no more than a starting point. A number of issues remain. There is, for instance, the
question of whether cultural citizenship can actually be the flag, so to say, under which the
struggle against discourses for cultural assimilation or against further commercialisation
of cultural production can be fought. Second, there is a range of interesting empirical
and policy-related questions about understanding how cultural citizenship practices are
sustained and may be enhanced in society. Finally, there remain a number of theoretical
questions. I conclude my exploration in this article by hinting at two interesting questions
in this regard, namely (1) the relation between political and cultural citizenship, and (2) the
consequences of globalisation and transnationalism for the idea of cultural citizenship.
First, designating cultural citizenship as parallel to political citizenship raises the
question of the relationship between the two. Does the one presuppose the other in a
logical way? Does the one empirically depend upon the other? Or are there normative
reasons to give primacy to one of them? As for the logical question, for instance, does the
whole notion of cultural citizenship make sense if a person does not hold political
citizenship status? Or should we problematise political citizenship from the point of view
of culture in the ‘web of meaning’ sense and argue that political citizenship is unthinkable
without an underlying cultural citizenship because it presupposes communicative
processes and institutions facilitating these? This question also has its normative
counterpart. Could it be argued, for instance, that the political community can legitimately
demand that certain cultural preconditions for political citizenship are fulfilled, such as
command of a national language, or minimal levels of literacy and numeracy? If this last
reasoning holds water, then political citizenship can set the boundaries (or minimal
conditions) to cultural citizenship practices. On the other hand, the whole point of the idea
of cultural citizenship is that claims derived from one’s cultural citizenship status have
political consequences, challenging, for instance, the fact that there is a minister for family
 328 P. Boele van Hensbroek

affairs and not for single people, or that a nation defines itself as Christian rather than, for
instance, secular. From a republican view, where the co-production of political and
cultural communities is taken as a central value, it would be argued that the relation
between the two citizenship statuses can be limiting in two directions: political citizenship
roles can set limits to the exercise of cultural citizenship as well as the other way around.
Second, this discussion about a possible primacy of political citizenship may itself be
challenged from the point of view that contemporary tendencies in globalisation result in a
weakening of national political communities and cultural processes, which become
increasingly transnational. The evolving global realities seem to undermine the idea of the
primacy of the national political community. Political citizenship itself may have to be
defined today at different levels – local, national, transnational – thus challenging the
whole republican idea of citizenship as full membership of a (political) community.
Globalisation seems to be even more radically pluralising the cultural worlds in which we
live. One can be schooled in one’s local cultural world, receive news from a faraway
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homeland via satellite TV, and seek entertainment in a cosmopolitan urban setting replete
with cultural crossovers, exotic productions and innovations. Which world are we
referring to when we speak of co-authoring one’s cultural contexts? It may seem that my
proposed notion of cultural citizenship is made for an age past, when the primacy of the
national community was unquestioned.
These are relevant questions that I cannot seriously address at this point. However, we
may note that the idea of cultural citizenship does not prescribe that the relevant cultural
context is a national one. Claims to full cultural citizenship could in principle be advanced
in different cultural contexts at the same time. Therefore the proposed idea of cultural
citizenship as co-authorship may well fit a global cultural economy of the kind sketched by
Arjun Appadurai (1990). In fact, the ideal of cultural citizenship, which is directed at
gaining equal command over processes of meaning-making, may be as relevant in
transnational contexts as in national ones. The idea of cultural citizenship here is not in a
situation much different from those other fruits of the critical tradition of social thought
such as ‘democracy’, ‘civil society’, or ‘human rights’. These key concepts were originally
applied in the nation-state context, but are gaining an extended application to the global
context. The ideal of cultural citizenship as a claim to co-authorship of one’s relevant
cultural contexts deserves a similar place in our vocabulary and faces similar challenges.
Given the prominence of cultural dynamics in contemporary processes of globalisation,
cultural citizenship may even have a special relevance for thinking about emancipatory
action today.

Notes
1. It should be noted that outside the domain of political philosophy, for instance in Cultural
Studies, such a broader agenda is clearly present (e.g. Miller 2007).
2. ‘The components of knowledge (are) tacitly embedded in its shared examples’ (Kuhn 1969,
p. 175).
3. ‘Exemplary situations’ animate and structure the key concepts and the way a theorist constructs
the problematic studied; they also reflect the ‘situatedness’ of social thought. The case of
multiculturalism and national integration in Canada can be considered such an exemplary
situation for theorising multiculturalism in the past decades.
4. The innovative Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development uses this term to describe their
mission. See http://www.princeclausfund.org/en/c_and_d/index.html
5. Questions of ‘democratisation of memory’ are also highly relevant at the national and
European levels. For instance, we need to revise the image of Europe as the home of all
 Citizenship Studies 329

rationalism and Enlightenment, because then we conveniently forget out heritages of

discrimination, slavery, colonial brutality, antisemitism and other forms of racism.
6. For a useful overview of different strands of theorising cultural citizenship see Pawley (2008).
7. Strictly speaking, my argument could also be termed one for ‘semiotic citizenship’, or
‘discursive citizenship’. However, such technical terms hardly resonate in contemporary public
discussions and therefore would not help to make the idea of cultural citizenship an effective
normative notion for activist purposes.
8. The individual nature of cultural citizenship may also be criticised as being very much western.
I would agree that it would be incorrect to assume something like a universal model of
citizenship independent of differences in cultural traditions. However, this does not mean that
we should repeat stereotypes such as that individualism is typically western. In all cultures
there is the figure of the hero who stands up to culturally rooted forms of oppression such as
slavery or discrimination. The stereotypes are fed by western and eastern ideologues. An
example is the discourse on Asian values as expressed by various Asian leaders (e.g. from
Singapore, Malaysia and, previously, South Korea), or the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’ as
introducted by Samuel Huntington (1993) (see also Mamdani 2004, Sen 2005).
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9. The report and Background Papers are all available through the UNDP website http://www.
undp.org
10. However, it should be observed that within the capability literature, the idea of cultural liberty
has not been developed much beyond the 2004 report. In addition, there is a bias in the way in
which the idea of cultural liberty has been elaborated even in that report, making it
unnecessarily focused on group-related forms of cultural exclusion. For instance, Sen’s two
types of exclusion relate to ‘living modes’ of collectives and do not address the problems of
dissidents or innovators who do not claim a new living mode. Nor does Sen’s argument address
questions of cultural incapacitation related to commercialisation. The idea of cultural freedom
needs further elaboration to show its full potential for academic study, policy and public
normative debates, and it needs to distance itself from the idea that culture is necessarily related
to groups and identities.
11. See e.g. Pawley (2008) for a criticism of the narrow agenda of Kymlicka in discussing culture.
12. The idea of cultural citizenship includes the notion that it may be vital for emancipation that
claims in the cultural domain are brought to public attention, calling for deliberation, change of
attitudes, and policy action if needed. Such calls for public attention do not only derive from
minority groups. Reviewing the borderlines between private and public is an ongoing process
in the republic which conceives of itself as the autonomous construction of the associated
citizens.
13. This attention to actual possibilities for cultural agency is also well covered by the idea of
cultural liberty in the Capability Approach.
14. It may be argued that a fully developed idea of cultural liberty in the tradition of the Capability
Approach could also lead to more such specific analyses of what cultural democratisation can
mean in practice.

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