Session 3a: Democracy’s “Others”
1st Global Conference
Friday 30th April – Sunday 2nd May 2010
Prague, Czech Republic
Democracy: Its Premise and its Promise; Its Crisis and its Critique
Stella Gaon
Department of Political Science, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
This paper addresses the urgent problem that, as Daniel Ross puts it, “‘democratic’ government . . . seems progressively to be expanding the kinds of violence undertaken in its name,” and even that “violence . . . is becoming the very means *and end* of the state.” Examples of expanding and escalating state force aimed at minority and ethnic ‘others’ since 2001 are countless (e.g., Guantanamo Bay, the invasion of Iraq, race riots in France, the implementation of anti-terrorist legislation in Canada and Australia, the Bradford riots in England, etc.). These events signal not only the widespread, violent contestation of democratic community, but also a marked erosion of the sacrosanct individual rights that are the hallmark of liberal democratic regimes. Yet violence by and within Western democratic states against unassimilable ‘others’ is arguably a symptom rather than a cause of democracy’s current crisis. For ‘democracy’ itself is characteristically crisis-prone, I maintain, insofar as it is founded on a fundamental contradiction between freedom and equality. On one hand, democracy’s constitutive condition at this primary level leads to various forms of violence at a secondary level under certain social and historical conditions. But on the other hand, it also demands of democratic regimes their perpetual interrogation and critique. This latter effect, I argue, is precisely what allows democracy to honour its promise and its hope. It thus follows that theories of democracy (such as civic republicanism, constitutional patriotism or deliberative democracy) that limit analysis to political problems and institutional solutions at the symptomatic or secondary level will not produce effective remedies, whereas a return to the critical instability that stands at democracy’s first or foundational level allows us to pursue democracy’s most radical promise and, indeed, the very essence of its meaning, which lies nowhere other than in its critique.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Democracy and Colonisation
Neve Gordon
Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel
In this paper I briefly examine the closely knit relationship between democracy and colonialism, while focusing on the production of “the people” – namely those who are acknowledged as citizens and consequently have been granted the right to participate in political decisions. I would like to suggest that colonialism has been deployed by democracy as a force that unifies, limits, and stabilizes the people by deploying violent forms of exclusion. Unlike other forms of exclusion which have been deemed accidents or aberrations and regarded as symptoms of democracy’s evolutionary development, colonialism has been considered to be totally alien to democracy and indeed antithetical to the two basic democratic principles: sovereignty of the people and equality. In the paper, I examine colonialism so as to show that it has served as a crucial component in the historical processes through which modern democracies were created and sustained. More specifically, I maintain that colonialism produces a series of exclusions that are actually part of the very logic of democracy and can operate in tandem with democracy’s basic principles. This in and of itself raises serious questions about the democracy and its inherent limitations. My objective, however, is to further complicate the colonial/democracy relationship by suggesting that the colonial practices and mechanisms deployed by democracies to limit and stabilize the people tend to return to haunt the democratic colonizers. Colonialism ends up engendering processes that de-stabilize the people and, consequently, produces a double movement that both contracts and extends democracy. What begins as a project of subjugation, may, at times, acquire an unexpected edge of inclusion.
The Democratic Boundary Problem
Marcus Verschoor
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
In this paper, I address “the democratic boundary problem”. This is a fundamental political philosophical problem that concerns the decision as to who should be included in the demos or the constituency when democratic decisions are taken. In other words, what constitutes the legitimate demarcation of the political units within which democracy will be practiced? Democratic theory refers to a people, a community of individuals who are collectively self-governing in some sense. In this paper, I argue that every attempt to demarcate this collectively self-governing people by appealing to democratic theory is bound to collapse into an infinite regression. The fundamental problem here is that before a democratic decision can be made on the substantive issue who constitutes the people, a prior decision has to be made as to who constitutes the constituency. It is commonplace among political philosophers to argue (a) that this prior decision, which will be determinative of the ensuing substantive issue, requires a democratic decision for it to be legitimate as well, and (b) that this causes an infinite regression of democratic decision-making procedures from which no procedural escape is possible. Based on this argument, the following conclusions are normally drawn in the literaure on this topic: first, that it is impossible to solve the boundary problem within the framework of democratic theory, and second, that a non-democratic solution to the boundary problem is necessarily inconsistent with, i.e. rules out, democratic decision-making within a demarcated people. Although I agree with the first conclusion, I disagree with the second. In this paper, I will argue that it is possible to provide a non-democratic solution to the boundary problem that (a) does not collapse into an infinite regression and (b) does not rule out democratic decision-making within the non-democratically demarcated people.
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