Participation and Democratic Transformation: Building Effective Citizenship in Brazil, India and South Africa

Abstract

When we pose the question of democracy and inclusionary development in the Global South we are inevitably drawn to models of political economy. One could be forgiven for quickly turning to European social democracies for inspiration. The democracies of Northern Europe have indeed demonstrated that it is possible to reconcile the imperatives of capitalism, including global competitiveness, with social policies that promote inclusion and equality. But in telling the story of the rise of social democracy and its protagonist, the industrial working class, there is a tendency to telescope history and in so doing to conceal a critical part of the story. And what is concealed, it turns out, is critical to understanding the prospects for inclusionary democratic development in the Global South. Social democracy did not begin with the working class and a grand class compromise that reconciled private profit with social investment. This social bargain was rather the end point of a fairly long, often contentious, process of mobilization and political transformation. It took root, I argue, in local democratic arenas, and the key ingredient was not so much the formation of a working class that came to demand social democracy, as the more general formation of effective forms of citizenship. This more prosaic process was, at the very least, a necessary prerequisite to the kind of politics that would eventually produce social democracy