Fábio Medina Osório, for “O Globo”: “The strength of contemporary citizenship”
Article in O Globo, of 17/04/2019, on the historical evolution of the concept of citizenship since the Greek city-states.
Translated from the original.
If we look at the most remote origins of the concept of citizenship, we must recall the development of the Greek city-states, the famous poleis, between the 8th and 7th centuries BC. That is more than 2,500 years of History of a concept that has been radically transformed, and along that path it has been acquiring dynamic and increasingly inclusive and complex contours.
A modern concept, since the Enlightenment, with the intellectual revolution of the 18th century, gradually brought citizenship closer to the ideals of equality and liberty, allowing citizens to take part in building the collective in which they are inserted. Rights come to have greater protection by the State, with the perspective that the status of citizen conferred on its holder the prerogative of enjoying official protection in a given dimension.
In contemporary civilization, there is no doubt that every citizen must act on behalf of society, in defense of the rights inherent in his local condition and also in the broadening of the spectrum of citizenship at the international level. The title of citizen, besides including rights, also imposes duties and obligations. And no one is unaware that nowadays state protection extends far beyond the network of citizenship in the strict sense, within what may be called a statute of universal citizenship.
It must be understood that there are no natural rights in a context of citizenship, because they are achievements won with great difficulty and over the course of centuries, insofar as rights are social phenomena, historical products, even changeable in time and space, partly linked to the very concept of citizenship.
It is important to note that, even today, many rights regarded as indisputable by some, in reality, continue to be fully controversial for others, corruption itself being a value that acquires greater or lesser weight depending on each person’s ideological conception.
Note that in Congress the discussion of off-the-books electoral funds (caixa 2) was postponed to a second stage of the anti-crime package, from the Supreme Court’s standpoint that the occurrence of an irregularity in a political campaign does not automatically mean the commission of a related crime of corruption.
Likewise, while it is argued that combating corruption must be a prerequisite of any sustainable economic agenda, there are also those who propose acting with caution so as not to hinder economic development.
All this involves civil and political rights, closely associated with the reach of citizenship. That is, the exercise of citizenship depends greatly on the political choices freely made by any nation, in a democratic regime. The majority principle is still important, and always will be, to validate the will of the people.
In Brazil, the recent political choice was for a citizenship committed to the ever greater inclusion of the fight against corruption, to speed up the eradication of poverty and inequality, within economic liberalism agendas.
Today, the concept of citizenship, in addition to broadening people's political participation, tends to restrict the participation of corrupt persons in public life. This is a global trend, not only in Brazil.
In a way, one perceives that corruption is a cancer that destroys the most elementary foundations of a civilization, weakening the bonds of trust that unite citizens and the holders of decision-making power in the public and private spheres.
As Eduardo García de Enterría used to say, corruption ends up eroding democratic regimes themselves, insofar as it undermines citizens’ trust in institutions. Those elected do not win a blank check to govern, but rather a mandate under the terms of the laws and the Constitution.