Dimensions of Citizenship in Contemporary Brazil

formal rights, it includes the invention or creation of new rights that emerge from specific struggles and their concrete practices. In this sense, the very determination of the meaning of right and the assertion of something as a right are themselves objects of political struggle. The rights to autonomy over one's own body, environmental protection, and housing are examples (intentionally very different) of this creation of new rights. In addition, this redefinition comes to include not only the right to equality, but also the right to difference, which specifies, deepens, and broadens the right to equality. 16 An additional important consequence of such a broadening in scope is that citizenship is no longer confined within the limits of the relationship with the state: The recognition of rights shall regulate not only the relationships between the state and the individual; rather, it has to be established within society itself, as parameters presiding over social relations at all levels. This may be more evident in the struggles of social movements such as, for instance, women, blacks, or homosexuals, since a significant part of their struggles are directed towards fighting discrimination and prejudice embedded within social relations of daily life. But it is also clearly present, as the Assemblia do Povo's first public initiative shows, 17 in popular movements whose more "material" claims, such as housing, health, education, transportation, sewage, etc., are directed towards the state. The process of building citizenship as the affirmation and recognition of rights was seen as a process of transforming practices rooted in the society as a whole. Such a political strategy implies a moral and intellectual reform: a process of social learning, of building up new kinds of social relations. All of this obviously implies, on the one hand, the constituting of citizens as active social subjects; on the other hand, for society as a whole, it requires learning to live on different terms with these emergent citizens who refuse to remain in the places that were socially and culturally defined for them. Participants of social movements of both popular sectors, organized around claims to rights such as housing, water, sewage, education, and health, and those of a wider character such as women, race, or ecological movements, have placed a crucial emphasis on the constitution of active social subjects, able to become political agents, as a central dimension of citizenship. In some definitions, citizenship is even thought of as consisting of this very process. Thus, consciousness, agency, and the capacity to struggle are seen by some as evidence of citizenship, even if other rights are absent. Among fifty-one civil society activists interviewed in Campinas, Sdo Paulo in 1993, this view was a distinctive feature in the answers of members of those movements and of workers' unions, when contrasted with 16. For a discussion on citizenship and the connections between the right to difference and the right to equality, see Dagnino, Os Movimentos Sociais, supra note 7. 17. See supra note 13 and accompanying text. 2476 [Vol. 75 CITIZENSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY BRAZIL the views of members of the middle class and entrepreneurial organizations. 18 The role of the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s in the shaping of this redefinition of citizenship is obviously related to their own struggle and rooted in their practices. If, on the one hand, they were able to rely on the previous history of rights, ensured by the regulated citizenship, 19 they reacted against the concept of the state and of power embedded in that history. They also reacted against the control and tutelage of the political organization of popular sectors by the state, political parties, and politicians that had sustained populism for so long. Finally, they reacted as well against the favor relations that permeate their clientelistic relations with these political actors, which outlive populism as the predominant political arrangement in the relations between the civil and the political society. The adoption of a redefined conception of rights and citizenship expressed a reaction against previous notions of rights as favors and/or objects of bargaining with the powerful (known as citizenship by concession (cidadania concedida)). 20 In this sense, the struggle for rights, also influenced by the human rights movements that emerged in the 1970s in the struggle against the authoritarian military regime, carried with itself not only claims for equality, but also the negation of a dominant political culture deeply rooted in society as a whole. THE RISE OF THE NEOLIBERAL VERSIONS OF CITIZENSHIP The dissemination of this notion of citizenship and its correlate, the participation of civil society as a mechanism for the extension of citizenship, are the two central principles of the democratic participatory project. They achieved its formal recognition in the Constitution of 1988.21 In the next year, Fernando Collor's election marked the beginning of the implementation of the neoliberal project, which reached its peak during Fernando Henrique Cardoso's government from 1994 to 2002, and established what this essay refers to as a perverse confluence between the two projects in dispute. 18. Evelina Dagnino, Ana Claudia C. Teixeira, Daniela Romanelli da Silva & Uliana Ferlin, Cultura Democrdetica e Cidadania, 5 Opiniao Pfiblica 11 (1998). Answering the same question ("Why do you consider yourself a citizen? "), the entrepeneurial organizations emphasized the fact that they "fulfill their duties" and "have rights," whereas the middle class activists stressed their "position in society," derived from their professional activities, as indicators of citizenship. It is also interesting that a large majority of both participants of social movements of both kinds and members of workers' unions do not consider themselves to be treated as citizens, while the proportion is inverted in the answers of the two other sectors interviewed. Id. at 40-41. 19. It is not by chance that Getfilio Vargas, also known as "the Father of the Poor," is still a powerful positive reference in the memory of Brazilian popular sectors. 20. Teresa Sales, Raizes da Desigualdade Social na Cultura Politica Brasileira, 9 Revista Brasileira de Ciencias Sociais (ANPOCS) 26 (1994). 21. See supra note 3. 2007] 2477