Post | CTZN.eu

Hi reader,

today I want to talk about citizenship and political indifferentism, looking at its causes and the consequences for our society and trying to find a way to oppose it.

I will start by telling you about the person who most influenced my understanding of citizenship, the Italian professor and jurist Gustavo Zagrebelsky, and in particular about a conference he held on the topic. He has been Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Turin and a judge of the Italian Constitutional Court (as well as the author of my school law books). On the 4th of May 2020, the professor took a conference online, held by Mondadori on YouTube, that was entitled "Are people born citizens or do they become citizens?", whose aim was to explain how a person becomes a citizen and whether he/she has citizenship or not (here's the link to the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5wSUDzYTDA, although it's only in Italian).

First of all, feeling citizens does not only mean belonging to a common life with other people, but also and especially being a responsible part of that common life. Being a responsible part, in turn, means recognizing that everyone has rights and duties to be implemented, and it entails a tension between them: every one of us would like to have only rights that others have to respect and no duties towards others, but this view is not feasible in a society that aims at ensuring the rights of all people, and would only bring chaos and the law of the strongest, and the weak would be left behind; on the other hand, if we had only duties we would not be citizens but subjects, if not slaves, and that’s too high a price to pay for an ordered society.

But how can a person really become a citizen? Here, we all have to take two fundamental steps:

First, we have to abandon the so-called opinionless behaviour (what Dante Alighieri would call “ignavia”): those who embrace the opinionless behaviour are people that throughout their lives do never take a position because they think that they cannot make a difference and that nothing is up to them. Another famous Italian writer, Primo Levi, defined this kind of behaviour, as it was exposed during World War II, as “the grey area”. Unfortunately, it is an opportunistic attitude fashionable also today among lots of people, in particular among the young (Zagrebelsky's words, not mine, even though I agree with him).However, how can we abandon this kind of behaviour? For Zagrebelsky, we must try to know ourselves by asking “who am I for myself? Who do I want to be?”, and once we answer we must stick to that answer and try to be coherent with ourselves. It is certainly a difficult question, which could require months or years or even an entire lifetime to be answered, for we should be able to look at ourselves objectively, from the outside, but it is also the basis of any moral position, fundamental to be able to ask ourselves questions about what’s right and wrong, about what’s good and bad.
Second, we must ask another difficult and important question to ourselves: “who am I for others? Who am I for those people who define me?” Asking this question implies that the human being is ontologically social, and it means that we live by building relationships, more or less important, and that those relationships define us.

The synthesis of these two questions is the identity, considered as the sum of all our partial identities (I, for example, am a student as well as a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a girlfriend, and so on). Each of us spends his/her own time in different places and with different people, and our personality can manifest in different ways depending on the people we are with and the situation in which we find ourselves, and all these manifestations represent and identify what we are.

The risk in this is that the identity can close in itself, becoming exclusive and aggressive with those who are different from it (think for example about nationalism). That's why, according to professor Zagrebelsky, we must strive to build an inclusive and open identity, open in particular to the relation with the other. There are several ways of being ourselves and, therefore, there are several ways of being with others, and everyone should choose a model to follow, a model that pushes us to be respectful, supportive, and critical of what's right and what’s wrong, and of what can be improved.

Furthermore, Zagrebelsky said that his model is the Italian Constitution. He sees it as a proposal of identity. Take the article 3, for example, which says:

"All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinions, personal and social conditions. / It is the task of the Republic to remove economic and social obstacles which, by effectively restricting the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social organization of the country"

Here, the Constitution clearly makes us an ethical proposal: the Republic proposes us to consider others like our fellow citizens, at our same level of dignity. Since it's only a proposal, it does not mean that it must be accepted, though (for instance, gender equality is still not respected in many families).

Hence, there is a question that comes naturally: if not everyone agrees to the constitutional proposal, what happens?

If the Constitution is not interiorized, it's weak; and now it comes to my mind another great man in Italian political scene, Piero Calamandrei, who, at his famous speech to the students of Milan in 1955, said:

“But you see, the Constitution is not a machine that once set in motion goes by itself. The Constitution is a piece of paper: I drop it and it does not move; for it to move you have to put the fuel back into this machine every day; you have to put your commitment, your spirit, your will to keep these promises, your responsibility. For this reason, one of the offences that are made to the Constitution is indifference to politics, indifferentism, which is, not here fortunately, in this audience, but often in broad strata, in broad categories of young people. It is a bit of a disease of the young, the indifferentism. "Politics is a bad thing. What do I care for politics? […]”

While if there are disagreements on what the Constitution proposes we can interpret it, discuss it and change it, if people simply do not care whether the Constitution is in a way or another, or even whether the Constitution is there or not, the entire public discourse is doomed to failure. I think that this conversation can be made for all Constitutions, not only for the Italian one, and that political indifferentism is a real problem which, if not at the heart of the current global political crisis, is surely an important component which keeps a vicious circle in motion.

In this regard, we at CTZN.eu have conducted a survey through a questionnaire on people's political interest, drawing some interesting conclusions.

The questionnaire was opened during about the whole month of July 2020, and of the 187 answers received the most reached age groups were young people (about 50% of answers were composed by people aged between 15 and 25) and middle-aged people (about 35% of answers were composed by people aged between 41 and 60) [Figure 0].

The first important data, in my opinion, is that about 1 person out of 3 claims to have never been interested in politics [Figure 1], while a frightening 85% (more than 4 people out of 5) thinks that there are more people indifferent to politics than people interested [Figure 2]; moreover, about 50% do not want or cannot identify with one of the currently existing Italian political parties [Figura 3].

These data show that political indifferentism is not only an abstract problem or the invention of some alarmist political scientist, but a real and concretely perceptible problem in the population.

But which can be the causes that lead people to feel so distant and indifferent towards something that should be at the centre of their daily actions?

We found part of the answer in other data obtained thanks to the questionnaire, such as the comparison between two questions concerning the impact of politics on our daily lives and the impact of our daily actions on politics. From those answers, we found that, as you would expect, about 92% think that politics affects our daily lives a lot or quite a lot [Figure 4], while the situation gets much worse in the second question: 6 out of 10 people think that their daily actions affect politics little or not at all (or they do not know) [Figura 5]. Already here you can see the reason for such indifference: if what I do does not affect the society in which I live, why should I keep doing it? Or, worse, why should I care about it? A harmful but, sadly, more-than-legitimate question.

In order to continue to explore the complex reality in which we find ourselves, we have raised four equally significant questions: the importance of the right to vote, the perception of living in a democratic system, the effectiveness of parties as the instrument of democracy and their effectiveness as representatives of the various interests within the national community.

Although about 97% thinks that the recognition of the right to vote is very or quite important [Figure 6], almost 1 in 4 people does not believe that he/she lives in a democratic country [Figure 7] and this is demonstrated by the fact that almost 50% does not think that parties are the right instrument of democracy [Figure 8] and, again, by the fact that almost 2 in 3 people think that parties do not effectively represent the interests of the national community [Figure 9].

There is a great paradox among these results, a paradox that clearly highlights the problem of political indifferentism: most people believe that the right to vote is important (thank goodness!), but a large proportion of these people are unable to cast their vote because they do not trust the representative class or even the entire system that should represent them and give them a voice in the administration of the Commonwealth.

It is almost obvious that a person, who can be interested and of goodwill but who cannot identify with any party and cannot trust his/her representatives, will become an indifferent citizen over time because years will pass when he/she will not vote, since he/she will not know who to vote, and thus will not exercise that right (which is also a duty, let's not forget it) which he/she considers so important. Political indifferentism is indeed traditionally exemplified by the citizen who has not voted for a long time and who keeps complaining about everything any government does, without even distinguishing anymore between a more or less wrong policy, but generalizing with a “politicians are all the same”, meaning that they are all equally corrupt, selfish and fundamentally disinterested in what people really want or need.

Do you recognize yourself or an acquaintance in this description? I guess so, but let's not despair: the change starts from each one of us. It may seem a trivial phrase, and perhaps it has become so because it has been too often used to hide a lack of ideas or the fear to take a firm position, but this does not mean that it is not true and always relevant.

You, me, all of us are called to live together and care about each other, no matter how much it costs or if no merit is recognised to us for this. And the first step to take, to break the vicious circle, is really to ask ourselves: "who am I to myself?".

We at CTZN.eu indeed think that an effective way of fighting political indifferentism is the one proposed by Zagrebelsky, that is reflecting on ourselves and the world around us to promote and preserve the rule of law, the Constitution, liberal democracy and a vision of our identity and action as inclusive, not exclusive. According to us, this model is better than both political indifferentism and the false answers to it, like nationalism or populism, which, even though they seem to offer prompt solutions, actually prevent us from reflecting about ourselves and face our problems to improve our society.

Answering Zagrebelsky’s questions by creating an exclusive worldview, which neatly divides the world into friends and enemies, “us” and “them”, cannot be the solution, first of all because it is an anachronistic attitude: trying to stand alone against all, in the globalised world in which we now live, would be an economic and political suicide. Besides, it is irreconcilable with the idea that everyone has fundamental rights which must be guaranteed and respected. Those who consider the “other” as an enemy, and refuse to recognize him the same rights that they want others to recognize them, should be very careful because once this process of discrimination, in which there are A-class and B-class people, has begun, it is far too easy to find oneself on the oppressed and discriminated side and regret those rights that were once denied to others.

Dear reader, we will have time to further explore this last topic in another article, in order to dedicate the space and the time it deserves to it. In the meantime, what do you think about what we discussed today? Do you agree with our analysis and the solution we presented here?

If so, how do you think we can involve more people in this discourse? How can we spread these ideals and convince people of this vision, which today is unfortunately marginal?

If not, instead, which are your doubts about it? What do you think should be improved or modified in our analysis?

Let us know by leaving a comment here, sending us an email with your reflections or commenting on the related post on our social profiles.

Thank you for your attention,

Maria Chiara

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