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Abstract
The article's main argument is that a public sphere forms a constructive arena for citizenship practice if we by citizenship understand four components: rights, responsibilities, participation and identity as formulated by Gerard Delanty. The Habermasian (re)working of the concept remains an essential contribution to theories of democracy and of political participation. With this in mind, the author's ambition is to address and to rework a specific type of public: an opinion-forming public within a framework of feminist political theory. The article is informed by the assumption that an opinion-forming public sphere is a central democratic arena in which the process of deliberation has intrinsic value. The analysis draws on a debate where a broader concept of communication than the one proposed by Habermas has been discussed. Iris Marion Young's concept of ‘inclusive communication’, greeting, rhetoric and narratives, is an attempt to widen public communication and further an ambition of constructing a concept of a more inclusive public sphere. The author suggests that feminist political theory goes some of the way towards reconstructing a concept of an opinion-forming public sphere within a Habermasian framework. The empirical cases (the women's rights as human rights movement and a Scandinavian feminist debate) illustrate how participants in such a public can use the public arena for internal learning by employing a broad concept of communication such as narratives and storytelling as a means of politicizing their situation and as a consciousness-raising and identity-giving process. The article also suggests that the positive reasoning around an extended concept of communication can be criticized. The overarching idea is that the type of communication in itself does not provide the democratic inclusion and the egalitarian communication it intends and that decisions made as a result of it can be misleading.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the article's two anonymous reviewers for creative and constructive comments.
Notes
1. I presented an earlier version of this paper at The 4th ECPR Pan-European Conference on EU Politics (European Consortium of Political Research's Standing group on the EU), University of Latvia, Riga, September 25–7 2008.
2. The relevance of the concept of the bourgeois public sphere has been broadly examined. The British media researcher John B. Thompson (1995), in an influential formulation, suggests that the strength of early Habermas is that he treats the development of the media as an integral part of the constitution of modern society.
3. The Norwegian political scientists Erik Oddvar Eriksen and John Erik Fossum (2002) have picked up Fraser's baton and further developed these two concepts by renaming them strong publics and general publics. The latter refers to a sphere of opinion formation without decision-making power.
4. Fraser's concept of a feminist public sphere has equally been employed by Felski (1989) as an adequate theoretical means of understanding the deliberative qualities of an empirical feminist public sphere outside the parliamentary complex.
5. Fraser exemplifies ‘the late-twentieth-century U.S. feminist subaltern counterpublic’ as an illustration of a weak public with its range of journals, bookstores, publishing companies, film and video distribution networks, lecture series, research centres, academic programs, conferences, conventions, festivals, and local meeting places. She presents several elements of collective (group) exclusion and collective emancipation of the empirical case: ‘They insist on speaking publicly of depoliticised needs’, ‘they contest the established boundaries’, ‘they offer alternative interpretations’, ‘they create new discourse publics’ and ‘they challenge and displace hegemonic elements’ (Fraser 1989: 171).
6. Applying the concepts to an empirical case of the EU institutional system, Eriksen and Fossum (2002) reproduce Fraser's initial hierarchical relationship between strong and weak publics by arguing that the strong publics in the EU-system foster general publics. For example, the emergence of the European Parliament as a strong public has spill-over effects on, and helps spur, general publics.
7. Lister thereby brings together Oldfield's bifurcation of citizenship as a status and as a practice (Lister 1997: 41).
8. See Benhabib (2002) for a discussion of the analytical separation of the concepts of citizenship and national identity.
9. Since the early 1990s, the dialogue between Habermas (1971, 1996a) and American feminist theory has contributed to the development of a more inclusive perspective on theories of deliberative democracy and the public sphere. Proponents of this dialogue have employed a Habermasian framework on debates on types of solidarity (Dean 1996), particularity and universalism (Benhabib 1992), inclusive communication (Young 2000), a post-bourgeois typology of an extra-parliamentarian weak and a parliamentarian strong public sphere (Fraser 1992).
10. For a discussion of changes in the resonance of the term Öffentlichkeit, see Turner (2009).
11. The main goal of Fraser's reworking (2007: 9) is to repoliticize public sphere theory by rethinking it in a transnational frame and by delinking the public sphere and the Westphalian state. Fraser has criticized her own early critique of (1992) Habermas' theoretical framework for having presupposed the national-territorial understanding of publicity, for having correlated the public sphere with territorial states and for aiming ‘at enhancing the legitimacy of public opinion within it’ (Fraser 2007: 13).
12. The liberal model of democracy constructs the citizen as the bearer of rights that protects negative liberties against the state and other citizens (Habermas 1996b). The state serves society understood in terms of market interactions and it does so through group politics and voting. The republican model of democracy, in contrast, views the status as citizens not as determined by the model of negative liberties to which these citizens can lay claim as private persons. Rather, political rights – pre-eminently rights of political participation and communication – are positive liberties (Habermas 1996b: 22). This model is based on a concept of politics rooted in a shared form of life. The nature of the political process is here based on other structures than the structures of the market processes. According to Habermas, contemporary republicans tend to give this public communication a communitarian reading. It is precisely this move towards an ethical construction of political discourse that I call into question (Habermas 1996b: 23).
13. Young points out that we ‘cannot assume that we sufficiently share understanding to which we can appeal in many situations of conflict and solving collective problems’. Neither can we assume that the deliberative process leads to ‘transformations from self-regarding to enlarged thought’ under these structural conditions (Young 2000: 41–2).