Report on Citizenship Law: Cuba community. In the Aristotelian perspective, the “plebianisation” of politics, the invasion of politics by the poor and ignorant masses fostered demagogy or the dictatorship of the many (the free poor) over the few. Classic oligarchical republicanism was better suited to achieve modern synergies with, starting in 1812, what began to be called “liberalism”, as a stream of political thought (Annino 2012). Both accepted the existence of citizenship a scarce resource, they had arguments to justify such scarcity (the quality of participation) and instruments to achieve it, such as selective suffrage. In this way, in the United States, active citizenship was reserved, ‘republicanly’, for men with land, excluding women and white men who lacked the means to live for them themselves. At the same time, it ‘liberally’ put democracy within a limited sphere in the political, different to and independent from civil society or the economy. This is in contradiction to classic republican theory which did not recognise structural differences between the state and society, nor between politics and the economy3. This is what I call “liberal republicanism” in this text. The experience produced a transmutation of republicanism by liberalism. Known and hegemonic until today as “liberal democracy”, which is capable of enabling simultaneously universal equality before the law, political citizenship for everyone and the oligarchic or “elitist” control of the socio-political order4. Republicanism attaches crucial importance to the legal condition of citizenship —to protect those who are already citizens or broaden the number of those who can be— but is critical of the way liberalism understands the rights proper to such condition. Unlike the liberal tradition —in the way of Constant or Berlin— republicanism defends citizen’s “negative” freedoms (Constant 1997; Berlin 1998), protecting them through assigning private citizenship rights but also “positive” freedom. Its proposal recognises that freedom is a creation of the political community mediated by law, which, in order for it to be so, must safeguard citizen’s freedom as much as the order that makes it possible, that is, the freedom of the republic. Republicanism, in any of its versions, possesses a broadened version of citizenship that is not limited to the passive enjoyment of rights but includes the creation of political identities through active participation. It understands predication as decisive for the creations and maintenance of the rules that ordain the political community. It expects a “civic” or “citizen” behaviour, which it translates into “desirable activity”, as a means of forming the ethos of a citizen identity. In this horizon, for Arendt citizenship is the space for the construction of the public (Arendt 1973) (see also Mouffe 1992, p. 235 and Pettit 1999). Participation is an epistemic value central to republicanism because it allows fitting the conception of citizenship and that of democracy within an understanding of politics. If politics is the creation of, and deliberation on the ethos, on the political character and identity of subjects, it can only be created and recreated by means of the citizenry’s active participation. Its commitment to self-government characterizes republicanism, therefore, as a way of self-expression and self-definition on behalf of citizens and not just a way of 3 The North American experience became a program to maintain the oligarchisation of politics with popular accord: “federalists produced an ideology, specifically a redefinition of democracy, that would conceal the ambiguities of the oligarchic project (…) It was the undemocratic victors in the United States that gave the modern world their definition of democracy, a definition in which the dilution of popular power was an essential ingredient” (Meiksins Wood 2000, p. 238). Liberalism was presented as a substitute of democracy when it inserted “representative democracy”, a liberal creation in the definition of the republic. 4 For Gordon S. Wood, this did not mean that the whole republican tradition was substituted in line with something called “liberalism”: “republicanism was transformed, rather than supplanted by liberalism”. (Wood 1995, p. 95). 2 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/3- © 2020 Author(s)