Citizenship and the social question in Colombia.

For T. H. Marshall citizenship, the acquisition of rights followed a temporal sequence: civil rights, followed by political and finally social rights. In Latin America the sequence of rights was, however, quite different from that in England. Countries with a populist tradition like Argentina and Brazil first granted social rights, while Colombia and Venezuela, where the populist impulse was weaker, first achieved political rights. In both cases,civil rights were granted in a limited and biased manner. The consequence of this inversion is the presence of a citizenship of ?low intensity?(O?Donnell). In this paper I ask how the institutionalization of the social affects the extension of citizen?s rights? While O?Donnell?s thesis is not without insight, I argue that the best explanation for the appearance of low intensity citizenship is to be found in the social narratives through which elites attempt to forge a sense of community. This approach fits with Marshall?s dynamic view of social citizenship as that which creates ?a horizon of legitimate expectations.? This paper concentrates on the capacity of social languages to create this horizon or, expressed in a negative manner, in the presence of languages that hinder the translation of social benefits into full-fledged rights. The paper illustrates the theoretical argument by the case of Colombia in the 1910-1948 period. In Colombia the social is the result of a matrix of narratives emphasing, hygiene, populism, economic liberalism, Catholic morality and labour. Gender intersects these different narratives. These combinations of narratives precluded the formation of actors with capacity to further citizens? rights. As a result the state lost its capacity to mediate conflicts as the country entered in the period known as La Violencia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]