Foederati chiefs as Roman Senators during Republic

There had been discussion during the Republic, to reform the Empire and give for example Celtic princes the title of Senator and full Roman citizenship. Would such an early foerderative reform give Rome a more participative character in the long term ?
 
Claudius had to harangue the Senate to admit romanized Gauls in the 50s, after 90+ years of Roman subjugation. Besides having them as "friends and allies of the Roman people" the Romans preferred to keep client kings at arm's length, for the most part.
 
Not more participative. It would be a different kind of institutionalising the cooperation of oligarchies in the various parts of the Empire. But it might speed up Romanisation of the elites even more.
 
There had been discussion during the Republic, to reform the Empire and give for example Celtic princes the title of Senator and full Roman citizenship. Would such an early foerderative reform give Rome a more participative character in the long term ?

I think Salvador is quite right with his statement.

If you're searching for something making a participative/representative republic out of Rome, just look on two reforms Augustus proposed during his reign (Suetonius, Augustus, 46):

After having thus set the city and its affairs in order, he added to the population of Italy by personally establishing twenty-eight colonies; furnished many parts of it with public buildings and revenues;

and even gave it, at least to some degree, equal rights and dignity with the city of Rome, by devising a kind of votes which the members of the local senate were to cast in each colony for candidates for the city offices and send under seal to Rome against the day of the elections.
So in fact, he made political participation possible for (wealthy) Roman citizens having been elected in the senate of their city. While most of the population of Italy and many citizens in the provinces had the right to vote in the comitia, they normally couldn't use due to the distance between Rome and the rural areas. Augustus recognized this and imagined this electoral procedure to integrate broader circles in Roman politics (at the expense of poor citizens living in Rome loosing weight in the assembly). Unfortunately, the method seems to have been overruled later as it was quite complicated.

Another measure tended in the same direction, but was more representative than participative:

To keep up the supply of men of rank and induce the commons to increase and multiply, he admitted to the equestrian military career those who were recommended by any town
So you could become member of the second highest Roman order by being recommended by your town (most probably by the local senate of the city). This is in fact some basic of a representative system, as it allows the cities to present candidates to Augustus out of which he than elects and appoints the officials.

Both reforms combined with the death of Augustus (since he was a major obstacle to a more liberal state) can drive the Roman republic into a state where the suffrage is exercised by the local senates, themselves elected by the population, and where the lower officials are appointed on the proposition of the same local senates.
 
There had been discussion during the Republic, to reform the Empire and give for example Celtic princes the title of Senator and full Roman citizenship. Would such an early foerderative reform give Rome a more participative character in the long term ?

Munzer and Syme have demonstrated long ago that the roman city had always worked this way.

The Servilii and the Julii were foreign Alban class that were allied to Rome and made patrician roman gentes when Rome took Alba. The Claudian patrician clan were Sabine foreigner allies.

The plebeian nobility were not enriched roman artisans or merchants but foreign aristocrats allied to Rome that were given only a part of the full political rights (reserved to patricians but patrician did not mean of roman origin, as the patrician Claudii demonstrated) and that were progressively given full full political rights from 366 BCE on.

This continuous integration of foreign atistocracies was Rome's specificity in the ancient world. It just temporarily was almost entirely blocked after the second panic war, which drove to the crisis called the social war. And then It worked again after the social war.
 
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