Source: Democratic and Authoritarian Political Systems in 21st Century World Society. Vol. 1 – Differentiation, Inclusion, Responsiveness. Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar. Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5126-3. PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5126-7. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839451267. © 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License: 4.0 (BY-NC-ND).
Democratic and Authoritarian Political Systems in 21st Century World Society, Vol 1 – Differentiation, Inclusion, Responsiveness.
Anna L. Ahlers, Damien Krichewsky, Evelyn Moser, Rudolf Stichweh
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Preface
This book reports on the work of a research group that was established at the University of Bonn in 2013. This group ‘Comparative Research on Democracies’ is a part of the ‘Forum Internationale Wissenschaft’ in Bonn, an interdisciplinary research institute that focuses on the functional differentiation of contemporary world society. In the Forum we created three departments for the study of contemporary religion, for research on the global system of science and for research on the world polity.
In our days, there are many thousands of academic research institutes in the world. But the ‘Forum Internationale Wissenschaft’ appears to be the only one among them that truly concentrates on the ‘functional differentiation of world society’ as its major research problem.(1) This special and rare position is for us a challenge and an obligation. In this book – the first of two volumes – we do not run the whole gamut of functional differentiation of society. Instead, we focus on one function system, the world polity, a function system consisting of hundreds of democratic and authoritarian political systems. However, we always write from a perspective that seeks to compare function systems. In studying features of modern political systems – patterns of internal differentiation, the duality of representation and responsiveness, the dynamics of problem expansion and problem retreat in polities – a comparison to similar dynamics in other function systems is inescapable. Furthermore, many of these characteristics derive from ecological relations among function systems. Thus, though we are primarily interested in polities, we have to understand them on the basis of the relations of the polity to other function systems.
We do not arrive at an adequate understanding of modern polities if we primarily study them as modern transformations of premodern states. Premodern states were at the apex of a stratified, i.e. hierarchical, society. They dominated society and all its groups and strata. In doing this, they constituted the whole of society and included every societal relevance into their domain. Religion may have made similar and competing demands on society. It was the only other function that could claim the whole of society (including the state) as being part of its domain and subordinate to it. As long as these interpretations were dominant and decisive for societal structure formation, society consisted of the competing claims of two totalizing functions, both of which were monistic, not pluralistic visions of society. This monism embedded into stratification constitutes the radical difference between premodern society and modernity.
Modern polities have to be understood through the ecology of relations among function systems. They have to find and incessantly redefine their place in society. They produce decisions that are collectively binding, but in preparing decisions they experience constraints and knowledge deficiencies that are always related to the complexity of a functionally differentiated society. This book concentrates on six key analytical perspectives that mirror the way modern polities are embedded into the ecology of functionally differentiated world society. In the following, we summarize these six analytical perspectives.
There is, first, inclusion (Ch. 1), which is a universal imperative in all the function systems of world society. They are all based on inclusion revolutions which begin in the eighteenth century and continue into the present. Inclusion is related to the institutionalization of the individual as one of the core inventions of modernity that connects locality and globality, structures and beliefs. Polities always have to balance individual and collective inclusion. How they do this shapes the democratic or autocratic or populist regimes they build.
Modern political systems can no longer adequately be described by looking at the apex of a hierarchy. To do so was instructive in the premodern world, but it is instructive no more. Function systems of the modern world achieve their autonomy and identity by building complex patterns of internal differentiation (Ch. 2). The best way to understand a function system is to understand its milieu intérieur (Claude Bernard), that is its internal environment, the practices and imperatives built into it, and the way the system is different from all the systems in its external environments on the basis of the complex reality of its internal environments. To understand autocratic mainland China one needs to study its villages and regions and provinces and cities and the immense multi-level governmental apparatus, the way decision capabilities are distributed in it, and the way decision alternatives are generated and made use of. Another core question is the interrelation between the ongoing internal differentiation of a function system and the processes of differentiation progressing in its external environments.
What is characteristic for political systems and distinguishes the polity from other function systems is that politics is almost never a profession, which can be learned by studying a specific knowledge system (Ch. 3) that ‒ as a scientific or intellectual knowledge system ‒ defines the core of what politics is about. In contemporary society in most world regions exist a profession of law and a profession of medicine and often a professionalization of religious core roles, and even, in the last decades, a certain amount of professionalization of managerial roles in the economy. But there is no profession of politics. The inclusion into political public roles (voters and the public sphere) and political performance roles (political parties and political offices) is independent of professionalization. The inclusion of everyone with equal rights of participation seems to be so important that it conf licts with any professionalization imperative for politics. If one starts from this diagnosis there arises the core question of how political processes organize the access to the knowledge resources they need in order to work on the ever more numerous societal problems that are being redefined as part of the problem set in need of collectively binding decision-making by political institutions. For this they need advisors and experts and other forms of knowledge import. The study of modern political systems will in one central respect be the study of these forms of knowledge import.
But how does the political system observe society? If modernity no longer has a problem set that defines which problems are the invariable core responsibilities of political systems, one has to find out how political systems select the problems they work on. For this selection process modern political systems make use of two strategies by which they try to affirm and expand their relevance for society. These two strategies are representation and responsiveness (Ch. 4). Representation is based on inclusion which, via votes, petitions, protests and public opinion allows the political system to apprehend the problem perspectives, preferences and interests present in the population. These are then selectively represented in the system. Representation already works in small-scale political systems. But political systems grow in complexity over time. They build an institutional set of their own and this set of political institutions develops diagnostic tendencies regarding relevant societal problems that operate independently of direct inclusion. We call these somehow autonomous diagnoses responsiveness. The path from representation to responsiveness seems to be a general feature of the differentiation histories of function systems: they start as relatively simple machines for the representation of environmental features, only over time do they build much more complex interpretive schemata which demonstrate cognitive autonomy. But the responsiveness of polities is obviously limited, as polities are organized around the fight for power, but not around the search for knowledge.
Besides the power structures, ever more organizations and institutions arise in complex political systems. These institutions and organizations are specialized on functionally defined policy fields and relatively specific problems in those policy fields. Policy fields are obviously near to the functional differentiation of society and they operate as channels for the interaction of the polity and the other function systems of society. The institutions and organizations (central banks, constitutional courts, cartel and patent offices and many others) are often endowed with autonomous competences for collectively binding decision-making. They are functional autonomies (Ch. 5) and as such insulated from power processes, although their decisions can claim the force of collective bindingness, which is only available in a political system. Such autonomous organizations are always expert organizations and the kind of expertise they represent is in most cases near to the problem perspectives of other function systems beyond the polity. The rise of these organizations documents the respect for knowledge which is unavailable or not sufficiently protected in the power processes of political systems, and it documents the respect a democratic polity may build regarding the autonomy of other function systems. Functional autonomies are the structural form through which polities accept the primacy of the functional differentiation of society and operate with self-limitations on the basis of this acceptance.
The inclusion revolution at the beginning of modernity is clearly a democratic revolution. But in most cases this was a slow process, in which mixed forms of government – monarchies, aristocracies, democracies – dominated for most of the 19th century and into the 20th century. At least until 1918 (dissolution of empires as a consequence of WWI) and in some respects until 1960 (final decolonization) the most important states were empires, what implies that different regime types were part of the same empire. Only after 1960 did the modern system of the universality of national and territorial states arise. In this modern system the bipolarity of democracy and authoritarianism (Ch. 6) becomes the dominant regime difference. Authoritarian regimes mostly do not mean the continuing dominance of traditional aristocratic elites. In some respects, autocracies participate in the democratic revolution as most of them call themselves democracies and they affirm the universal inclusion of everyone in the possibilities of participation they offer. The major differences of democracies and autocracies have to do with the way they react to functional differentiation.
Democracy seems to be the political regime that maximizes the compatibility with functional differentiation. Democracies are receptive towards a plurality of societal values and they limit their Eigenvalues to core values that protect the autonomy of the individual. They create the autonomous institutions analyzed in Ch. 5, and thereby enlarge the social spaces for other function systems and processes of self-organization in other function systems. They identify and fix political problems in open search processes that aim for representation and responsiveness (Ch. 4). Compared to such structures authoritarianism nearly always means the resistance to and a partial negation of functional differentiation. Autocracies realize the renewed dominance of a stratum, an ethnic group or a family/dynasty in politics and society. In other cases, autocracies institutionalize a prevalence of one of the function systems of society over the other functions. This may be religion gion (theocracies or ideocracies of quasi-religious systems), the economy (technocracy), or the polity itself, if there is a political actor who successfully claims a non-negotiable domination (a political party, the military, a dominant person). These different claims for dominance are often based on non-contingent values.
The research group that produced this book will continue the work on the analytical perspectives presented here and add further perspectives. We prepare a second volume with case studies on Mainland China, Russia, India, the EU and the USA. We have to thank the University of Bonn and its rectors who established and continue to support the ‘Forum Internationale Wissenschaft’. We are grateful to the other members of the democracy group who did not contribute chapters here but actively participated in the conceptual work and discussion of these papers: Lena Laube, Felipe Peréz-Solari, Philipp Rückheim, Anna Skripchenko, Gioconda Vallarta-Cervantes, Pascal Goeke and Christine Weinbach. Special thanks are due to Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck (Madison/Wisconsin) who contributed language editing and to Raja Bernard who functions as the organizing spirit of the research group.
Bonn, September 2020
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1 One of the authors of this book was part of an earlier, somehow similar endeavor, also related to a new research institute. See Renate Mayntz, Bernd Rosewitz, Uwe Schimank, Rudolf Stichweh, Differenzierung und Verselbständigung. Zur Entwicklung gesellschaftlicher Teilsysteme, Campus Verlag: Frankfurt/New York 1988. It might be interesting to compare these two books, asking the question how far the understanding of functional differentiation has progressed in 32 years.
Individual and Collective Inclusion and Exclusion in Political Systems (Chap.1)
Rudolf Stichweh
I. Inclusion revolutions and the genesis of modernity. Modernity and functional differentiation.
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Modern society arose after 1750, and the arrival of modern society was closely connected to a plurality of inclusion revolutions that occurred around this time or since then and that are still going on. The political transformations that are the subject of this book are a part of these processes.
Modernity is first of all a temporal concept. It points to a discontinuity that separates ‘ancients’ from ‘moderns’ and articulates a strong preference for moderns. The present time is no longer related to a superior past but rather to a future we are looking toward with our unfulfilled expectations. Time becomes universal. It becomes a standardized and synchronized world time. It seems to be running faster or even accelerating. And in our days, in some cultural domains there is a switch from modern to ‘contemporary’ (Belting 2009; Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel 2013; Stichweh 2016b), which indicates that there are many streams of activity running parallel to one another, running fast, and defining a feeling of what is necessary for being contemporaneous with one’s time.
From a sociological point of view, the most important aspect of modernity is functional differentiation. The pre-modern order of estates or strata in which every person was invariably included since the moment of its birth, dissolves or at least loses its primary relevance. Instead, there arise macro societal communication systems such as the economy, religion, education, science, law, and the polity, to which individual persons are linked only momentarily, switching their engagements from system to system and defining themselves by the plurality, sequence, and cumulative results of these temporary engagements.
Estates or strata were regional and/or local systems, and one cannot imagine a global extension of an estate/stratum. These strata and the hierarchical social order they established entailed relations of asymmetrical dependence between members of different strata (higher/lower strata), which were almost impossible to control over long distances. Function systems are, from their beginnings, potential world systems. All function systems are built on the basis of abstractions – money, religious beliefs, philosophical insights, behavioral norms – that after some time might prove to be of universal relevance. In addition to function systems, there are other forms of system formation that are defining for modernity. Most important among these are social networks (especially small-world networks, which are often global networks), formal organizations (many of them world organizations), and epistemic communities (united by shared cognitive and normative expectations), all of which often are subsystems of function systems but sometimes transcend the boundaries of function systems (Stichweh 2007). To study the political systems of modernity that are part of the world polity as one global function system we must also study networks, organizations and epistemic communities.
The polity as a function system
The polity is one of the function systems of contemporary world society and it is clearly a global function system, a ‘world polity’, a term very much shaped by the writings of John W. Meyer (Meyer 2010). In looking at the polity as a function system, we must define its function. As is the case for all function systems, the main task of a political system is solving social problems, problems that the political system understands as social problems that are part of its domain and for which the polity (and perhaps only the polity) is responsible. Is there a possibility of defining the class of genuine political problems? The answer is probably negative. Over decades and centuries, problems – e.g. poverty and public health, sexuality and marriage, university curricula and the selection of the professoriate – move in and out of the domain of political action. While there is a history of shifting political problems, there is no logic of political problems that are inherently identifiable as ‘political’. In one of his last speeches as president of the United States, Barack Obama opted to define political problems as often being ‘dirty problems’: “… part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with”(1).
If there is no inherent characteristic that defines political problems, ‘the political’ may be identified by looking at the way the political system ‘solves’ its problems. In the political system this is not done by cognition or diagnosis but by looking at alternative problem solutions and choosing one of these alternatives. The decision that is finally made on the basis of deliberations and other political processes is then considered binding for the collectivity that defines the social boundaries of the respective political system. ‘Collectively binding decisions’ still seems to be the best formula for describing the function of the political system (on collective bindingness, cf. Parsons 1969). And ‘collective bindingness’ means that once the final decision has been made it is binding even for those who preferred an alternative course of action before. They can still try to change the situation by a later decision that reverses the earlier decision, but as long as this later decision has not been made, they must accept what has happened and adapt their course of action to align with the decision. The ‘Brexit’ decision, which is now implemented by people many of whom voted against it, is a case in point. Further, the Brexit process has illustrated again and again that people may doubt the democratic legitimacy of reversing decisions that have only recently been made.
Besides the making of collectively binding decisions, there is one other characteristic that is constitutive of political systems. Political systems and the decisions made within them are always and everywhere based on power as a symbolically generalized medium of communication (Luhmann 1975; Parsons 1969). Power as a medium of communication means the possibility of using threats of negative sanctions to motivate others to accept a proposed course of action. Power, in this understanding, is a very elementary communicative operation in political systems. Elementary power accrues to everyone who participates in a political system. If an individual voter expresses that she might not vote again for the party she voted for in earlier elections, and if at the same time she points to certain political expectations she wants to be fulfilled, this is clearly a case of communication via power – and these communications that point to the potential negative consequences of a specific course of action are very much the elementary ‘noise’ occurring in millions of communications from which the ‘order’ of political systems is continually built and rebuilt (Atlan 1979). There is clearly a cumulative aspect to power. If a political party reliably represents 10-15% of the electorate, then this number is a measure of the power this party can bring to political decision-making processes.
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(1) Remarks by the President in Opening Remarks and Panel Discussion at White House Frontiers Conference, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, October 13, 2016, https://obamawhitehouse. archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/10/13/remarks-president-opening-remarks-and-paneldiscussion- white-house.
The polity as a world system
Since at least the 18th century, each individual political system has been part of a continental (European, Asiatic) and a world system of states (cf. Vries 2015). States in this world system observe one another, compete with one another, opt for imitation or differentiation, and experience the rise of normative structures that are formative structures for the World Polity. Among these normative structures is the law of nations, which first emerged in the Roman world and was later renewed in 16th/17th-century Spanish legal theory and in other European countries (the Netherlands, the German Empire) (Loh 2019). In addition, a significant corpus of human rights has arisen since the middle of the 18th century, and these rights have inspired many of the dynamics in the 20th/21st century World Polity.
If one looks at the history of the World Polity over the last 150 years, one can perceive three core distinctions that have functioned as organizing distinctions in this system. From 1870 to approximately 1960, there was a political world in which the national state was not yet the most prominent feature. Instead the world was still dominated by a number of colonial, transcontinental empires (England, France, Spain, etc.) and by continental empires such as the Habsburg Empire (until 1918), the Ottoman empire (until 1923), and the Russian Empire. In this World Polity, the guiding distinction was probably the distinction between ‘great powers’ and ‘regional or local powers’ – to be a ‘great power’ was a status that states actually strived for and indeed fought for in the ‘Great War’ from 1914 to 1918 (Clark 2013). After 1945 there emerged for a half century a late- or post-colonial world for which the distinction between communism and (democratic) capitalism was the most characteristic self-description. In more political terms, the communism/ capitalism distinction was accompanied by the distinction between ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘democracy’, and beginning in the 1970s, the social sciences added the term ‘authoritarianism’ (Linz 2000) to describe non-democratic regimes (especially in Latin America) that could not be characterized as ‘totalitarian’. Around 1990, communism collapsed and since that time the guiding distinction of the World Polity has clearly been the bipolarity of democratic and authoritarian political regimes. One of the core problems this book addresses is describing and explaining this bipolarity of democracy and authoritarianism.
A sociological theory of inclusion as a theory of modernity
For us, the sociological theory of inclusion and exclusion (Bohn 2006; Luhmann 1981; Luhmann 1995; Parsons 1965; Stichweh 2016a; Stichweh and Windolf 2009) is one of the core instruments for understanding modernity, and by implication, for understanding modern political systems. In one respect, the inclusion of persons in social systems is a universal phenomenon in the history of human social systems. In every social system, people must know who belongs to the system and can be considered a member of it (if membership is a relevant category) and will therefore be addressed as such. A theory of inclusion becomes especially relevant when being included in a social system is no longer a primordial fact established at the moment of birth and extending for (potentially) a person’s entire lifetime. Instead, in modernity decisions about the inclusion and exclusion of persons in social systems have their basis in the ongoing communicative operations that constitute social systems. There are many of these processes occurring incessantly because there are many social systems processing parallel to one another. Further, decisions on inclusion and exclusion must be renewed and can be revised and are therefore a dynamic feature of the structural reality of modernity.
Inclusion and exclusion as concepts in social science
What are the basic insights built into a theory of inclusion and exclusion? First, one must distinguish social systems and psychic systems (persons from the perspective of social systems). If one introduces such a distinction, social systems will be described as consisting of communications, and consequentially psychic systems will be seen as existing external to social systems, but being potentially included in social systems via the communications that are ascribed or addressed to them. Then, the inclusion of persons becomes a variable and temporary reality that can change from moment to moment.
Some inclusions can take the form of membership of the respective persons in social systems, however. This seems to be true only for organizations, because an organization is the only type of social system that constitutes itself via decisions about who is a member and who is denied membership. Most other types of inclusions are more f luid and do not have this stable basis provided by formal decisions about membership.
In opposition to inclusion, there is always the possibility of exclusion, which means that someone is somehow ‘unwanted’ in a social system. Other participants ignore this unwanted person. No communications are addressed to her. Many exclusions are implicit, i.e. are communicated via ignorance and indifference towards those who are excluded. In other cases, there are explicit communications in which exclusion is decreed by words or in writing.
Inclusions, which in most social systems do not take the form of membership become more stable in nearly all social systems by being transformed into social roles. A role is always a set of expectations addressed to someone, and in this rolebased understanding inclusions are couplings of expectations regarding obligations and rights that realize the inclusion of individual persons by making use of this social form of an inclusion role.
The duality of inclusion roles (performers and professionals vs. clients, observers, amateurs, and the public)
In many of the function systems in contemporary world society two types of inclusion roles can be distinguished (Stichweh 1988). There are, first, roles that are constitutive for the description and self-description of the respective function system. The health system is about illness and healing, and in modern society most healing is conducted by doctors and other medical professionals. Therefore, the social role of the medical doctor and the other professional roles that have been added in the evolution of modern medicine define the professional core of the health system as a function system in society. These professional roles constitute one of two major role types by which persons can be included in the health system. Although there is an enormous number of medical professionals today, most persons in society do not become health professionals. They have other occupations connected to other function systems. Nonetheless, those people are not excluded from the health system. For them exists the second major inclusion role of the health system: If they suffer from illness or from other health problems they are included into the system as clients or as patients. On this basis, it can be postulated that the modern health system, in principle, includes everyone, either as patient/client or as health professional, and, of course, health professionals, too, become patients at some point during their lives. Therefore, there is one non-selective inclusion role into the health system (patients) and one selective inclusion role (health professionals). This duality of inclusion roles for a function system can be observed in most of the function systems of world society. There is often a non-selective role for everyone and a selective role for those who contribute constitutive performances to the system. It is not always about ‘clients’ versus ‘professionals’; in other cases we have ‘observers’ versus ‘professionals’ or ‘observers’ vs. ‘performers’ (in sports, the arts, the sciences). ‘Clients’ are always the clients of specific professionals but ‘observers’ have a more ‘generalized’ role. They observe the ‘system’ and do not necessarily observe specific ‘performers’. And, of course, performers are in other situations themselves observers in the system in which they are performers, while professionals are in other situations clients in the system in which they mostly work as professionals.
There are interesting cases in which both role types are non-selective, i.e. both role types – even the performance roles – are accessible to everyone. The political system seems to belong to this category, although in this respect there are remarkable differences between political regimes. We will discuss this point later in this chapter. Religion seems to be similar. Sometimes there is a clear professional/client difference in religious communities, while in other cases religious performance roles are accessible to everyone (e.g. ‘universal priesthood’ as a consequence of the Reformation).
For those who are clients or observers there is often one additional alternative available to them. They can become ‘amateurs’. This is another non-selective role option. Everybody can become an amateur in music or science or the sports. And as an amateur, one can become a performer (practicing instruments, doing some kind of research, practicing sports exercises). In many function systems there are ‘bridges’ built that connect amateurs and professional performers: There are events in theater and music in which professionals appear on the stage with amateurs, and the same is true in some sports (marathon, triathlon). This again demonstrates a certain f luidity in the boundaries between types of inclusion roles, and this f luidity is not accidental because a society built on inclusion (as a defining value principle) generates normative pressures to avoid any devaluation of any activities in the system.
A last interesting role variant exists because clients, observers and amateurs are often interpreted as ‘the public’. In this understanding they are part of an interpretation of society that always confronts professionals and performers with a non-exclusive version of the whole of their societal environment understood as ‘the public’. There is, for example, the ‘public understanding of science’ which means the collective, internal environment of science that includes everyone. There is also the concept of ‘public opinion’, as a collective internal environment of the polity again including everyone, even those who did not know that they have an opinion.
Inclusion revolutions (1750-2020)
The function systems of contemporary world society are not recent inventions that arose unpredictably and late in the history of stratified societies. Rather, religions, normative-legal systems, and philosophy (as a precursor of science) are based in traditions that are as much as 3.000 years old (Jaspers 1949). And, of course, in Europe there have been roles, professionals, institutions, and organizations arranged around the meaning complexes of certain function systems since the middle ages and even earlier. Since 1200, European universities have served as institutions for educating high-status professionals in religion, law, and medicine. These same universities were, together with other schools, matrices of an emerging function system of education (a function system often built from top down, that is from universities to secondary schools). Further, since the 16th century universities, have been an important instrument in the formation of early modern European states (Stichweh 1991).
However, all these complexes of functional institutions emerging in a stratified society were clearly elite institutions, including only very small segments of the society. Only about 1% of the male population of early modern European countries ever experienced a university from inside and the case was similar for access to medicine, law, science and the polity (as an active participant in a political system).
If one starts from the analysis proposed here it becomes obvious that the fast progression of functional differentiation after 1750 is probably related to transformations in the capability of the emerging function systems to include ever more members of society into their functional domains. If this hypothesis can be confirmed, the genesis of the switch from stratification to functional differentiation as the primary form of differentiation of society should be explained by inclusion revolutions that have occurred in the emerging function systems since the second half of the 18th century.
In comparing function systems, there is a plausible candidate for a function system that is a likely precursor in the history of inclusion revolutions. This is religion. There may be good reasons to hypothesize that European religiosity in late medieval and early modern society anticipated and prepared the inclusion revolutions of other function systems (Stichweh 2020). Religion may have been the earliest function system because religion is the most obvious realization of a meaning perspective that has no real alternative to the near complete inclusion of everyone into its domain. Of course, there are some religious exclusions. Heretics, unbelievers, pagans, and heathens are not included in religion and often are excluded in dramatic forms. But from the perspective of medieval Europe, which had a totalizing vision of itself as ‘Christianitas’, these objects of exclusion were either very rare or lived in far distant regions that were of no real relevance. However, all other members of society, which really meant nearly all members of society, had to possess somehow equal status in the way they were a part of religion and were therefore included in society on equal terms as long as this inclusion was dependent on religious inclusion.
One interesting indicator of this special status of religion is the way medieval Europe looked at poverty or at poor people. In purely social terms, poor people would be the best candidates for being marginalized or excluded. In religious terms, however, nearly the opposite was the case. The poor were considered nearer to God and to salvation. Therefore, it became very important for rich people to give a significant portion of their property to institutions that helped the poor and indigent (Crassons 2010). The poor, and only the poor, could pray with some probability of success for the rich and this was the basis of a strong religious inclusion. The reformation and counterreformation (or confessionalization as the process is often called today) were the next steps in intensifying religious inclusion from the 16th through the 18th century. The early modern situation was not about building a bridge between rich and poor via an exchange of property and prayer, but rather about building a broader basis for inclusion. Learning to read; prioritizing education; and emphasizing work and profession, interiority and individualization – these were major building blocks of the first inclusion revolution of pre-modernity, which occurred in the domain of religion and its transformations. Even today it is easy to observe, in the favelas and other districts of marginalization in the world, that religion is still the function system – and it is no longer restricted to Europe – in which the focus on inclusion is much stronger than in other function systems.
The second half of the 18th century witnessed a progression of inclusion revolutions in other function systems of society. We could start with education, which is strongly linked to religious confessionalization. This shift resulted in the universalization of the primary school, which had been finalized in some Calvinist provinces in Europe (Scotland, Netherlands) by the late 18th century. Parallel to this, an expansion of secondary and tertiary education began already in the 17th century. A good example within Catholicism is the development of the Jesuit system of education, which focused primarily on secondary education in colleges (with a few tertiary faculties – law and theology ‒ added to some colleges) and first addressed the Catholic nobility, a stratum that had not shown much interest in higher education before (Brizzi 1976). The major expansions of secondary and tertiary education occurred only in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. In both cases, there were countries that approached inclusion rates of 100% at some point (late in the 19th century for secondary education in the USA, late in the 20th for tertiary education for countries such as New Zealand, Taiwan and South-Corea) (Goldin and Katz 2008; OECD 2019).
For the economy (as is true for other function systems, too) there are plural indicators of inclusion, for example monetization. How many people participate in a money economy and how many are included more indirectly? A major transformation regarding inclusion in the economy transpired in the second half of the 18th century when, as a result of industrialization, there were the first cases of economies that combined the inclusion of a growing population in the economy (in terms of work and access to money) with still faster growth of the economy as a macrosystem, which meant that population growth was no longer the cause of increasing pauperism but rather became a driver of further economic growth. Thus, the growing population was no longer a burden but rather became a resource for economic growth (North and Thomas 1973).
In science we observe very different patterns. With regard to the transformation that occurred after 1760 and that brought about the modern system of scientific disciplines (Stichweh 1984; Stichweh 1992), we can speak about inclusion in an understanding that points to the disappearance of restrictions on authorship. In the new open and specialized journals that emerged beginning in the late 18th century, anyone who could write a paper could publish a paper. There were no longer privileges for academicians and other elite members. Therefore, the author space clearly expanded. However, the inclusion in authorship still encompassed only the very few persons who could actively conduct scientific research. Starting in the early 19th century, in European cities there were established bourgeois clubs and associations that included a bourgeois public in the culture of science. Again, the numbers were small and there was obviously no anticipation of the creation and necessity of a universal inclusion role in science. The inclusion revolution in the modern system of science did not materialize until the 20th and 21st century, when a much bigger system of world science became increasingly relevant for the way of life of every individual and for the future of world society.
We will not discuss further cases at this point, although later we discuss inclusion revolutions in different types of political systems. However, we should draw an initial conclusion. In stratified societies function systems still only occupy niches in the communications of society. They exist but are only small islands in a huge sea of inequality and stratification. For the further proliferation of functional differentiation one has to wait until the inclusion revolutions beginning in the 18th century effect a transformation of scale in function systems and bring about function systems of universal societal relevance. At that point stratification was pushed back and became of secondary relevance. Function systems became highly differentiated macrosystems that seek further expansion and actively scan society for potential problems and for new relevances. The function systems as they are emerging now are highly responsive both to society and to the other function systems of society. For them there are no longer conf licts between functional autonomy and responsiveness to society as function systems have become big enough that they no longer fear for their autonomy.
II. Individual and collective inclusion and exclusion. Types of individuality and historical consequences.
The forms of inclusion that brought about modernity cannot be examined without considering the modern definition and institutionalization of individuality. Questions of inclusion in modern social systems would not have become so central if individuality had not been invented and established as a core institution of modern society. Since Durkheim we know that the individual is not an anti-institutional cause of societal disorder. Just the opposite is true, the individual is a very prominent societal institution (Durkheim 1898). Parsons and Goffman continued this line of thought, stating that the individual is more than an institution. It is a value principle and informs a kind of (civil) religion. We all are devotees of the ‘cult of individuality’ (Goffman 1972; Parsons 2007).
But what is meant by ‘individual’ or by ‘individuality’? There is a bipolarity embedded in modern individuality. Modern individuality means the ‘equality’ of all individuals just as much as it means the ‘singularity’ (German: Einzigartigkeit) of each individual. Individuals are both similar and completely dissimilar (Eck 1908; Schleiermacher 1800; Simmel 1890; Simmel 1917). The idea of singularity can even be formulated in a very strong version in which there is no other individual in the world who can be compared to the one we observe at this moment. From this bipolar structure of equality/similarity versus singularity/dissimilarity follows the corollary that a population of many individuals who are just as equal as they are singular will be characterized by microdiversity (Luhmann 1997). Individuals are similar in certain general respects and dissimilar in certain specific respects they do not share with most of the others around them. And this combination of general similarity and specific dissimilarity can be be described as microdiversity. If individuals are microdiverse in relation to one another, each social and political collectivity consisting of many individuals can be described as a population, using an understanding of this term introduced by evolutionary biology. The populational microdiversity of a collectivity functions as the basis for the dynamics of change in social systems (Stichweh 2018). Microdiverse individuals in a political system are characterized by microdiverse interest articulations. The processes and structures of a political system specialize in being selective in a way that transforms diverse articulations of interest into political decisions supported by majorities or relevant minorities.
A further interesting interpretation of the individual is that there is a direct relationship between ‘the individual’ and ‘the world’. There are some remarkable semantics, mainly in the Romantic tradition, that describe the individual as an active entity who tries in its highly individual way ‘to reconstruct the world’. This world-reconstructing capacity can be ascribed to collectivities as well as to sociocultural systems. In this respect, one might say that collectivities/systems can be considered higher-level individualities. It is this ‘world affinity’ that allows us to contend – as Simmel already argued in 1890 (Simmel 1890, p. 181-2, 198) ‒ that in modernity there is a direct linkage from the individual as a micro-entity to cosmopolitanism and to world society as the most extensive context in which an individual can possibly move.
Political individuality and inclusion roles in political systems
As is true for all function systems of world society, the political system defines its own concept of individuality and does so in a way specific to the function system, thereby producing semantics and variants of political individuality that are the starting point for the definition of inclusion roles in different political regimes. The core of modern political individuality is clearly being an individual citizen and this idea takes the place of the most important premodern idea of political individuality, namely being a (subservient) ‘subject’ of some political regime. The change seems dramatic. A subject is defined by a dependency, and thus the individual as subject is, from the beginning, defined by someone on whom she is dependent. In comparison, a citizen seems to be constitutive and autonomous.
Further, a citizen is not a member of an estate or any other social collectivity, and it is being a citizen (not a family member) that is one of the most important ways of being an individual, namely not considering oneself primarily a member of a family. A citizen must truly stand for himself/herself and define the context in which he/she claims to be a citizen. This can be an urban setting (a city), a state, or the world. Since the Graeco-Roman world, there has even been the possibility of claiming citizenship in the world, which has been used often since that time, whatever its social effects (Coulmas 1990; Stichweh 2008). The other side of citizenship is conferral. Citizenship is conferred or offered. There is a political system that confers or offers citizenship. This is still about individuality, but as is often the case with individuality, we have to do with a kind of individuality based in social expectations to be and to qualify as an individual: Citizenship is clearly one of the cases in which a demanding idea of individuality is addressed to someone as an expectation. One can deny an offer of citizenship, at least as an adult, although usually only if there is another realistic context of citizenship that one prefers.
There are two aspects or variants of the citizen as a political individual that can always be distinguished. On one side is the political individual as an observer of ongoing political events and discussions. As an observer, the political individual primarily contributes opinions – either communicated by or inferred from other observers – and contributes interests to political processes. Being an observer, the individual does not fight for the interests, but these interests are observed by other observers and are clearly inputs to political processes. Most citizens in modern political systems prefer to be observers most of the time because that is what their other interests and obligations (in other function systems) allow them to be. The other side of political individuality is to be an actor who contributes a willingness to act, political passions and engagements, virtues and vices. Under conditions of modernity, there may be a certain value-preference for the active individual. However, there are many other contexts of potential action in the other function systems of society, and for this reason it is much more probable that most citizens finally opt for the observer interpretation of political individuality.
These two aspects of political individuality correspond to the two alternative and complementary versions of political inclusion roles. In each function system in society there are observer roles ( = public roles, client roles) characterized by a certain passivity on the part of role bearers. In addition, there are performance roles, i.e. roles for producers of the activities that define the outputs of the respective function system. In some function systems only the observer/public role is accessible to most of the individuals included in the system. Modern polities, especially democratic ones, are clearly different. The idea of democratic political individuality and its radical insistence on the equality of individuals seems to demand the potentiality of inclusion of each individual in both types of political inclusion roles. Every political individual is an observer of the ongoing events in their own political system (and potentially of all the other political systems in the world) and on this basis can opt for the elementary possibilities of participation accessible to observer/public roles: interest based voting, communicating political opinions, participating in protests. At the same time, however, every individual is considered to be able and legitimized to move to the other side of the political role spectrum and emerge as an actively engaged, creative, and virtuous political actor, who, in principle, can access any performance/producer role. Anyone, without any exception, can become the ‘President of the United States’ or the ‘Chancellor’ of the Federal Republic of Germany – and in both countries, very recent history has shown that this is not a far-fetched potentiality but rather a very realistic possibility (the elections of Trump and Merkel, neither of whom had any professional political education). This non-selective universal inclusion in both role types of the political system seems to result from the radical equality in modern political individuality and seems to be non-negotiable in democratic political systems. There are, however, alternative structures in other political regimes and we examine these in the next section.
The duality of inclusion roles and types of political regimes: Aristocracies and democracies
A first interesting type of political regime is a system in which there are no observer/public roles. In such a system everyone who truly intends to be involved in the polity must do so in a performance role, i.e. must participate as an active citizen endowed with public virtue – which somehow delegitimizes private interests. The historical name for this political regime based on activism and political passions is republicanism. Its most important historical realizations were probably the aristocracies of early modern Europe. An aristocracy is based on the equality of all aristocrats who are bearers of performance roles in the respective system. The number of these role bearers need not be small but was clearly limited because only members of the aristocracy could take on political roles. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in early modern Europe was a paradigmatic case of an aristocratic regime. The early American republic from the signing of the Declaration of independence (1776) until the election of Thomas Jefferson as the third president of the United States (1801), was still an aristocratic republic with a strong preference for reserving performance roles for a type of aristocracy based more in education than in wealth (Wood 2009). Of course, the early United States was more a mixed form of government with strong democratic elements (popular elections and a rapidly intensifying public opinion) and even monarchical tendencies (relating to the presidential role) than it was a classical and pure aristocracy. Aristocracies no longer exist in the present-day world. They are clearly incompatible with the inclusion imperative of modernity and the dual role structure it implies.
A very important structure that only emerges on the basis of the inclusion revolution of the political system is a regime that realizes universal inclusion in observer/public roles and in performance roles, too. This is democracy – and, of course, there are many variants of it. There are some democracies in which the move from an observer/public role to a performance role is more an idea than a reality – an idea rarely realized at a later point in the life of a citizen. The other extreme case of democracies consists of direct democracies of which Switzerland (and perhaps California) are the only cases at present. Direct democracies design all performance roles in a way that role-taking by non-professionals is realistic and compatible with the other obligations and roles people hold. Switzerland invented or generalized the ‘Milizprinzip’ to solve this problem.(2)
Authoritarian universal inclusion
A third interesting type of political regime are autocracies or authoritarian political systems. These regimes are distinct from democracies in that they do not have universal inclusion in performance roles. This type of universal inclusion would represent a risk they cannot take. In autocracies performance roles are limited to a small segment of the population that is perceived as consisting of the guardians of the value principles on which the authoritarian regime is based. This can be a party, a kind of clerisy (religiously or otherwise ideologically unified) or any other social structure apt to take this guardian role.
At the same time authoritarian regimes are undoubtedly modern in that they allow and are based on the universal inclusion of everyone in observer/public roles. These regimes claim to act in the interest of everyone, and the available paths of exercising inf luence in and on them (elections, petitions) are accessible to everyone, except members of stigmatized and therefore excluded populations that conf lict with the value principles of the authoritarian system.
Regarding the inf luence and power processes that guide the relationship between observer/public roles and performance roles, authoritarian regimes in many cases invert the direction of f lows of inf luence and f lows of power. These regimes often conduct mass mobilization from the top of the political system and in this way substitute strategies of control over the population via mass mobilization for the possibilities of participation by every individual. This shift from individualized participation (starting with individual role bearers) to processes of mass mobilization – trying to include each and every individual in these mobilized masses – is one of the reasons authoritarian regimes prefer the modern collectivities (i.e. nation, people) to which all individuals are supposed to belong rather than collectivities in which inf luence potentials rest on individual role bearers and their initiatives.
Of course, mass mobilization means something different in different authoritarian regimes. Only in the case of totalitarian types of authoritarianism (e.g. Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism) is mass mobilization actually based on the obligatory inclusion of everyone. Modern authoritarianisms do not need everyone. They can tolerate a certain amount of indifference, and even pluralism. In addition, they shift their mode of legitimation from the mobilization and participation of the entire population to the inclusion of everyone in the outputs of political processes. It is this legitimation via outputs and inclusion in outputs that is very characteristic of modern authoritarianism. In other words, in the case of modern authoritarianism, while access to performance roles remains largely restricted, there is equalized inclusion in observer/public roles (for example, as receivers of welfare benefits), which makes the inclusion imperative institutionalized in modern society visible once again.
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(2) A ‘militia’ is an army consisting of non-professionals and this structure can be transferred to other domains of political action. A good description was offered by a Swiss banker: “Typisch schweizerisch war: die Erledigungskompetenz auf hierarchisch sehr tiefer Stufe.” Hummler, Konrad. 2004. “Im Geruch von Schnapsmatrizen.” Pp. 51 in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 8. Dezember 2004. (“Typical for Switzerland was: the competence to do and decide everything on the lowest hierarchical level imaginable”.)
Populist political inclusion
A fourth type of political regime, one that falls between democracy and autocracy, is populism. This is the remarkable case of a temporary (not permanent) political regime that claims to be based on the populus – which is undoubtedly a collectivity. All members of the populus are bearers of an observer/public role. However, the emphasis is not on the diversity or microdiversity of the individuals included, but rather the commonalities that unify the populus, making it a collective entity. At the head of this collective entity are populist leaders who claim to effect a direct and complete representation of the will (‘conscience collective’ in the Durkheimian understanding) of the populus. Given that populism is, for the most part, an anti-elite political system, one of its notable features is that it is a political regime without a very pronounced need for performance roles. In this respect populism is a kind of inversion of aristocracy.(3)
Collective inclusion in democratic and authoritarian systems
In a functionally differentiated society, the function of the political system is the production of collectively binding decisions. The political system can claim societal primacy for decision-making that is collectively binding. These decisions made by a political system distinguish among values and regard the distribution of resources.
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(3) Cf. on populism Ch. 6.
In this functional description of the political system there is no prejudice regarding the form of government or the form of political regime implied. The functional characterization is compatible with autocracies, democracies, monarchies, aristocracies and other government and regime types as long as they reliably produce collectively binding decisions. But one must know the constitution of the collectivity that is supposed to be bound by these collective decisions. How does the collectivity come about? What does its internal social structure look like? Why and how long does it accept the decisions that are produced? And what does ‘acceptance’ mean?
Societal modernity is rooted in a fundamental transformation of the collectivities on which political systems are based. A person is no longer a member of the respective political collectivity via inclusion in the estates and strata of pre-modern (European) society. It is no longer membership in social categories (nobility, peasantry, bourgeoisie, clergy) that guarantees inclusion in the political system. Instead membership is based on individuality, which means it is based on a paradoxical property: Individuality is something everyone shares with everyone else as all humans are individuals and no exceptions are imaginable. However, individuality distinguishes every individual from all other individuals, each of whom realizes their individuality in a different way and must be different as an individual in order to be an individual at all (Ghosh 2013). This paradoxical structure of individuality seems to guarantee both the unity and the internal diversity of a political system and it generates these two effects via the same institution: the individual as a core institution of modernity (Dumont 1987; Parsons 2007). Similar structures arise in all the other function systems of modernity (education, science, economy, religion). These function systems are all based on the inclusion of individuals, and each one has a completely different take on individuals.
Political systems invent new terms or redefine old terms to describe themselves as an inclusive collectivity of individuals: The ‘people’ and the ‘nation’ are the most prominent of these terms. Both are concepts that refer to collectivities that may include a significant number of individuals, even millions of individuals, and neither term directs attention to any social structure internal to the collectivity. What distinguishes the two semantics in a first approximation is that ‘people’ is more clearly dominated by political connotations, although it is not devoid of references to other social domains. In the case of ‘nation’, the political, cultural and ethnic implications of the term have approximately equal weight. Both terms are egalitarian and as such they formulate a semantics of inclusion. All individuals are part of the people and part of the nation. However, both terms are not necessarily tied to democracy. They can become prominent, decisive terms in either a monarchy or an authoritarian system. It is possible for the individual governing the collectivity to say: “This is my people, this is my nation”. The prominence of these two terms reveals the shared semantic basis of modern democracy and modern authoritarianism. Both types of regimes typically claim to be based on an inclusively interpreted collectivity. In the case of democracies this takes the form of self-government by the people, while in monarchical/authoritarian systems it will be understood as government for the people, for the welfare of the people, and in the best interest of the people, all of which are indirect forms of the representation of the people and the nation. The study of these forms is the study of authoritarianism in modernity.
Contemporary political systems have a bipolar structure that includes, on the one hand, the individualizing of inclusion in the political system, and on the other hand, the different collectivities to which all included individuals belong. Democracies typically focus on the individual pole of this bipolar structure and emphasize the individual exercise of participation in political processes, whereas autocracies accentuate the collectivity that is the context for the belongingness of individuals, and focus on exercising authority in the name of the collectivity. In autocracies there is someone outside the collectivity who has authority over the collectivity (a hereditary monarch, an irreplaceable party, a charismatic personality with innate qualities, a cleric from a religious role structure, a military person). In democracies any leadership roles are derived solely from the self-organization of the collectivity as a collection of individuals. There is no individual in the collectivity who could not, in principle, take on the most powerful political roles in the political system. In other words: both regime types realize the complete inclusion of all members of society in some possibilities and roles of participation in the political system (‘public roles’). Only in democracies there is a complete inclusion of everyone, even in the possibility of taking the highest political offices in government (‘performance roles’) (Stichweh 2016a).
It is instructive to look a bit more closely at differences between ‘people’ and ‘nation’ as the two major terms for the modern political collectivity based on inclusion. From the perspective of a theory of inclusion, ‘people’ signifies an inclusion from below. People were originally the ordinary, simple people who had no claim at all to a privileged place in society. If, in the current times, ‘people’ becomes a universal term that includes everyone into ‘the people’, this means the inclusion of the higher strata in a collectivity to which for centuries they did not want to belong. With ‘nation’ a shift in the opposite direction occurs. The original usage of ‘nation’ primarily meant the higher strata of society, as in ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ where clearly the ‘Nation’ referred only to those who were the politically independent estates of the empire. In this case inclusion is from above. The concept of the nation expands and ever more people from ever more social strata and stations become part of the nation, and finally the idea of the nation becomes a kind of political program that seeks to include ever more persons, for example by ‘national education’, which has established itself as a Europe-wide program since approximately 1770 (Schriewer and Caruso 2005).
Another dimension of the distinction is related to scope. ‘Nation’ is the more global of the two semantics. Inclusion in the nation is the inclusion of regions, provinces and other smaller groups and units in an encompassing concept of the nation. Eugen Weber’s well-known formula “Peasants into Frenchmen” (Weber 1976) is a good illustration of this. Another interesting variant is ‘National People’s Congress’ (People’s Republic of China), a formula in which ‘people’ establishes the universality of the inclusion of everyone and ‘nation’ adds the global extension of inclusion to all regions of the respective country.
To speak of ‘the people’ or simply ‘people’ does not refer to transregional or global circumstances but is more closely tied to locality and local circumstances. Martin Luther’s famous “dem Volk aufs Maul schauen” (“to listen to what people really say”) (Luther, Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen 1530 in Luther 2012) contains both meanings discussed here: to listen to simple people and to observe local variants. A last difference is related to exclusion. The two core concepts for the modern political collectivity (or ‘community’), ‘people’ and ‘nation’, are both clearly coupled not only to ideas of inclusion (mainly the complete inclusion of all individuals) but also to ideas of exclusion. There is again an asymmetry. In the case of ‘people’ exclusion is comparatively rare. A person can become an ‘enemy’ of the people or can be a ‘stranger’ to the people. In the latter case he or she probably belongs to another people. This once more affirms that ‘people’ is a strongly inclusive term that is observed in many variants such as ‘People’s democracy’ (‘Volksdemokratie’), which is a tautology because ‘demos’, too, means people). Regarding ‘nation’, exclusions are much more likely. In a political system (democratic or autocratic) it may be declared that certain groups do no longer belong to the nation – and this may result in variants of political exclusion.
III. Internal differentiation of political systems and the diversification of inclusion. Internal Differentiation of Political Systems.
As is true for all function systems in modern society, the historical dynamics of political systems is characterized primarily by ongoing internal differentiation. Between 1750 and 1800, most European states and the emerging United States had no elections, only a small number of ministries with a limited bureaucratic staff, only very few embassies in other states, no political parties, no politically relevant mass media or no mass media at all, no social movements (although there have always been petitions and rebellions), no labor organizations or movements or other organized interests (besides some organized groups of artisans), almost no state-based welfare institutions, and no technical and organizational means to contribute to and observe public opinion.
From this perspective, states in the second half of the 18th c entury w ere r elatively small-scale phenomena with little institutional differentiation. They did not constitute an autonomous function system of society with a complex internal differentiation of its own. Instead they were based in the stratified orders of premodern society and were instruments by which the dominant strata – in Europe mainly the aristocracy and the clergy and some other groups based in property (landowners) or learning (lawyers) or control of violence (military people), most of whom were aristocrats ‒ exercised their prerogative to dominate all the other groups in society.
From this point of view premodern states can be understood as structures that balance the claims and prerogatives of the dominant societal groups. Modern states are, for the first time, autonomous function systems in society that do not consist of groups and power balances among these groups, but rather consist of institutions, the ongoing differentiation of institutions, the attribution of responsibilities to institutions, and the creation of checks and balances of power among these institutions. The state as a function system in society emerges as a new system, which did not exist in premodern Europe, by enacting the internal functional differentiation of the institutions that constitute it.
Inclusion and the Internal Differentiation of Political Systems
The internal differentiation of political systems is relevant to the understanding and historical development of political inclusion. Until now this paper has focused on the duality of inclusion roles (performance roles vs. observer roles) and the forms of collective inclusion. However, as soon as the internal differentiation of polities is seriously considered, the inclusion picture becomes more complex. There are now a multiplicity of roles for political inclusion. The duality of roles is relevant to some of these roles and not relevant to others. The internal complexity of the modern state becomes visible in the emerging complexity of inclusion roles. First, citizenship is the elementary membership role that demonstrates that the modern state (unlike all other function systems) is an organization or consists of organizations and is therefore based in membership. Citizenship is not a dual or split role. It seems simple: a person is either a citizen (inclusion) or a non-citizen (exclusion). If an individual is not a citizen of any nation (‘statelessness’) this individual is excluded from the political system of world society. The picture becomes more complicated with the emergence of plural citizenship (which accentuates the differentiation of individuals and states, and allows individuals to become somewhat independent from states) as well as with the return or emergence of ‘denizenship’ (Zolberg 2000), i.e. having multiple institutions of residence (each with different packages of rights and obligations).
The next relevant context of inclusion that is added in the modern state comprises elections and voting rights. In medieval and early modern Europe there were some elections, e.g. sometimes for kings, but voting rights were strictly limited to the highest ranks in the stratification of estates. Modern republican ‒ and after some decades democratized ‒ states, were primarily characterized by the rise of elections and the long-term expansion of voting rights. Into elections is traditionally built the dual structure of inclusion. There are electors or voters and there are those who are via elections chosen for performance roles. The related rights are called ‘active’ and ‘passive’ voting rights and the so-called passive rights enable the more active political participation via performance roles. In addition to the implementation of this role structure, it becomes important that elections are competitive, i.e. that there are alternatives between which electors can choose and that these choices are real choices for electors. If this is not the case ‒ if in a non-competitive election voters have no choice ‒ elections only affirm an asymmetrical dependency. Even in this case, participation in an election implies an act of inclusion, but it is an involuntary inclusion in structures of authoritarian control. Elections in the so-called ‘people’s democracies’ in the former communist world are a good illustration of this.
In the early republican-democratic regimes there were generally no parties, parties were even perceived as illegitimate because they were seen as the organization of partial interests, which conf licted with an orientation towards the commonweal. But without parties it would have been difficult for states to transcend a local level of political organization. At the local level individuals can vote for people they know personally. However, when elections are organized at the regional or national level, individuals must vote for parties, which substitute a multiplicity of political (party) programs among which individuals choose for the particularity of persons who cannot be sufficiently known on a national level. As soon as there are parties in a political system a new form of political inclusion is added. Citizens can now become a member of one of the political parties, and by being a party member can increase their opportunities for political inf luence. Party membership is an organizational inclusion role that is ambiguous regarding the difference between public and performance roles. In one respect individual party members become participants in events and elections that may be decisive in a political system (for example, in the summer 2019 in the United Kingdom, 120.000 members of the Conservative Party, or 0.18% of the population, chose the next prime minister of the United Kingdom). In other respects, party membership, in principle, makes any performance role in a political system accessible to any party member.
Additional core structures of any political system include the public administration and the judiciary and other expert organizations. Each of these structures can be perceived and institutionalized in different ways. They are, in one respect, service organizations of the political system (and, potentially and simultaneously, of other function systems) that are staffed by professional experts whose expertise is separate from political opinions and interests. Insofar as this is the case, staffing these organizations has nothing to do with political inclusion but is based solely on professional education and expertise. Of course, there are inclusion aspects even then, although these may relate to other function systems in society (higher education, law etc.). However, from another perspective (and these two opposite perspectives may be compatible), the staffing of these roles can be – at least partially – perceived as acts of political inclusion. In this case, elections and other selection procedures that guide the staffing of these positions will be institutionalized as selection processes based in political choices (selection from a limited population of qualified professional experts). The selection of judges for the ‘US Supreme Court’ or the German ‘Bundesverfassungsgericht’ are pertinent examples of this. In other cases there may even be popular votes, elections in which all electors of a political system participate, as is the case for some judicial positions in the United States.
A second aspect – still referring to public administration and other expert organizations – pertains to collective inclusion. From the perspective of a political system it may be important to ensure that a representative number of people from certain social groups have access to professional positions in the respective organizations. This type of representation articulates collective inclusion; the groups included may be regional communities, linguistic or ethnic communities or other subcommunities of the people/nation of the respective state. The Indian public service setting quota for members of scheduled tribes and lower castes illustrates this type of collective inclusion, as do other forms of political affirmative action. There is a third aspect of political inclusion in administration and expert organizations. Everyone – including those who would never compete for professional roles – has access to these organizations as much as they involve the individual’s interests. The affected individual must be able to address the organizations, petition them, get answers from them, and litigate against them. This necessity demonstrates that there is a political public of administration and expert organizations that includes everyone who is a member of the respective political community.
Another central organization in every state is the military. In premodern societies the military organization was often nearly identical to the state (cf. on Sweden Scott 1988, esp. Chapter VII-VIII), and the leadership of the military was entrusted to the dominant estate, i.e. to the aristocracy. This is what aristocrats were supposed to be able to do: lead incessant wars, to defend and expand their respective countries. Normal soldiers were often foreigners, i.e. mercenaries, slaves or foreign settler populations (e.g. Cossacks, Kollmann 2017). These foreigners were often offered a kind of political inclusion (citizenship, landownership) as long-term payment for their service. In modern political systems it is exactly the other way around. Political inclusion is not a reward for military service; rather, military service is one or even ‘the’ core obligation for those, who, as citizens, are included in the political system. This obligatory military service has disappeared in many modern states. The military has become an organization of military professionals. This raises another question: Can all societal groups enter the military (e.g. LGBTI-people)? Once more this problematic may regard foreigners who once again exchange military service for later political inclusion.
A remarkable invention of recent political systems are social movements. For the most part they are not organizations. Instead, they are based on the modern principle of ‘free association’ (Parsons 1971) and as such demonstrate the flexibility of political inclusion in liberal democracies. Interests that are not included in the several ways described above, or feel insufficiently included, can form a social movement. In addition, the principle of social movements can be inverted, becoming mass mobilization from above and taking the form of centrally administered campaigns. This pattern is characteristic of authoritarian systems, especially authoritarian regimes emerging after a populist takeover.
Social movements were made possible by an invention that is highly defining for modernity: the Public Sphere (Habermas 1962; Stichweh 2007). The invention of the public sphere demanded the development of mass media, first newspapers with regional as well as national distributions, and later the whole range of communication media of modernity. The most important step was the transformation from an interactional, conversational concept of the public sphere that was mostly based on the limited inclusion of a few well-educated people to a global concept of Public Opinion that is not local but is rather vast, global, impersonal and fundamentally democratic (Wood 2009, p. 311). Public opinion is no longer an elite consensus worked out via conversation. Now it is really “the people’s opinion, and it could be trusted because no one controlled it and everyone contributed to it.” (Wood a.a.O.). Public opinion is based on neither individual inclusion, nor collective inclusion but rather on the inclusion of microdiverse, extensive populations.
Input Inclusion and Output Inclusion: The Internal and External Growth of Modern States
The modern state based on the differentiation of institutions and the differentiation of levels of government is a state that derives its legitimacy from an increasing plurality of outputs, performances and services. This development highlights a final form of political inclusion. All the forms of inclusion discussed thus far are mainly forms of inclusion that regard the inputs to political processes and the structural possibilities of individuals and collectivities to shape the inputs to political processes. But looking at the state as primarily a producer of outputs, performances, and services reveals another perspective. There arises a complementary form of inclusion that should be called output inclusion (Stichweh 1998). This is not something new; indeed, it is probably older than the focus on input inclusion, which only occurred with the rise of republicanism and democracy beginning in the eighteenth-century world. Before this focus emerged, states had always sought the sources of their legitimacy and stability in the outputs (performances, services) they were able to produce for their constituents who were still considered as subjects and who only in modernity are perceived as citizens.
Finally, one further twist has arisen in modern society. The emergence of citizenship and the enormous internal differentiation of the modern state generates the many new forms of input inclusion analyzed here. Parallel to this, the distinction between input inclusion and output inclusion becomes visible as a very relevant distinction that may be helpful in analyzing differences between political regimes (e.g., authoritarian regimes likely prefer output inclusion), and in identifying differences between populations living within the territory of the same state. The new reality of ever-widening input inclusions is primarily describing the expansion of rights accruing to citizens and often only to them. At the same time, in a rapidly globalizing world ever-new populations of denizens and residents emerge. For these groups, a certain prevalence of and preference for output inclusions, which are the only inclusions they are usually granted, is one of the main factors that motivates their actions and shapes their lifestyles in a global world in which they often cannot live in the states of which they are citizens. That is, the genesis of the modern state can be described as the parallel and concurrent emergence of ever-new forms of input inclusion and ever-new forms of output inclusion. In other words, one has to say: the genesis of the state is a combination of internal growth, i.e. the differentiation and multiplication of inclusion roles, with external growth, i.e. the differentiation and multiplication of societal fields to which the state contributes outputs.
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