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Nancy Fraser has argued against the culturalist model of identity and analysed how
demands for redistribution, recognition and participation need to be balanced
through a network of public spheres. 48 By acknowledging cultural citizenship, state
institutions can strive to guarantee a minimal level of communicative resources for all
citizens. It must be remembered: (1) that these communicative rights always need to
be defended and developed by civil society actors in the everyday lifeworld of society,
and can never be delegated to state administration; and (2) that they are only a condi-
tion for securing that the continual power struggle over resources and interpretations
can take place in a reasonably democratic and fair way. Thus they are never a substi-
tute for the concrete interaction that takes place within the lifeworld. Fraser,
Williams, Habermas and others who support an intersubjective model of society and
culture, still regard the individual citizen as the basis for civil society and the public
sphere(s). They instead place the emphasis on communicative rights and networks in
the public sphere, mediating between individuals and groups of different kinds and
on varying levels of society. Canclini has used Ricoeur to argue for ‘a politics of recog-
nition over a politics of identity’. He notes that citizenship ‘is no longer constituted
solely in relation to local social movements, but also through the communicative
processes of the mass media’, and that critical policies should support ‘the sites of
consumption where the aesthetic foundations of citizenship take shape’. 49 Since
culture rests on communication, cultural citizenship is the form of citizenship that
most clearly strives to expand outside any national confines. Citizenship has histor-
ically been developed under the umbrella of the nation state, but today there are a
number of debates and efforts concerning a widened concept – and practice – of citi-
zenship, including supranational initiatives like the European Union, up to the global
level of the United Nations. Cultural citizenship is tendentially global, though its
present embryonic forms have largely been created in national forms.
Cultural citizenship thus requires access to tools for full and active participation in
communication practices. This demands access to the means to fully use the widest
possible range of media in dialogues with others. Communicative rights aim to secure
the democratic availability of three main kinds of such means: material, social and
personal resources. 50 Each of them is linked to one of the three basic elements of
communication and culture: the text, the context and the subject.

(1) The material resources for interaction include access to many kinds of media
forms – objects with which to communicate. This is linked to political issues of
censorship and rights of free expression, as well as economic issues of how the media
market pools resources for consumers. Material media resources include access to
both software texts and hardware machines, and to technologies for consumption as
well as for production. Not everyone has reasonable means to access these material
resources in commodity form through the market, and there is therefore a need for
provision through other channels as well, including interpersonal gifts and public
utilities. 51 This requires a combination of efficient media markets and democratic
networks of libraries and other public services. It also highlights the unfair global

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