Session 3b: Case Studies
1st Global Conference
Friday 30th April – Sunday 2nd May 2010
Prague, Czech Republic
Direct Democracy vs. Democracy by Representation in the Middle East
Zvi Barel
Sapir Academic College, Ashkelon, Israel
“We are not Syria, we do not transfer our regime from father to son” said Egyptian president Hosni Mubark when he was faced with his opposition criticism over his apparent decision to transfer his responsibilities to his son Gamal.
But it was exactly this kind of opposition which had driven Mubarak to amend some articles in the Egyptian constitution. Amendments that may pave the way for more candidates to run for presidency.
How, then, can we define the Egyptian “democratic” structure? Indeed it has a parliament, but it is under the president’s control, its public opinion was always considered as irrelevant, yet it forced the president to listen to it and to act accordingly.
The Egyptian case is just an example for an alternative structure of regime-public relationship. We can detect similar structures in most Arab and Islamic states where the formal democracy is substituted by “direct democracy”. Perhaps its roots could be traced in the 7th century Caliph Mu’awiya’s famous saying, “I do not apply my sword where my lash suffices, nor my lash where my tongue is enough. And even if there be one hair binding me to my fellow men, I do not let it break. When they pull, I loosen, and if they loosen, I pull.”
In these states a different parallelograph of forces takes place. The regime has to work its way between “liberals” and “religious” factors, between traditional and global forces rather than between opposition political parties.
In my paper I argue that this “other” form for regime-public relations should also be considered as part of “democracy-scape”. This argument addresses the question of “what do we want from democracy” rather than “what is the right democracy”.
I believe that watching and analyzing some Middle Eastern cases along the line of my arguments way stimulate some thoughts about the scope of democracy.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Unravelling the Boundaries of Democracy between the ANC and the Media in South Africas
Glenda Daniels
Department of Political Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
This is a theoretical conceptual study which elucidates the ANC’s democratic project through the prism of its relationship to the media. Several theorists have been referred to in order to put together a conceptual theoretical framework with which to clarify and account for the emergent pattern of interpellation against those in the media who highlight the short comings of the ruling party. The case of South Africa’s award winning and irreverent cartoonist, Zapiro, shows how through experience, a participant in democracy, discovers that democracy does not exist without freedom of expression. The question is: what does ‘freedom of expression’ and what does ‘democracy’ mean in the new South Africa when a cartoonist is being sued for defamation by the country’s president over a cartoon, referred to as ‘Lady Justice’? This study scrutinises the changing meanings of democracy and freedom of expression through the gaze of journalists on the ANC and its alliance partners, especially when the former anti-apartheid activist cartoonist is interpellated as a ‘racist’, ‘enemy of the people’ and a ‘right-winger’. My argument is that the ANC makes a mockery of democracy when it attempts to create unity in the social by foreclosing through interpellation and lawsuits. This hampers the spaces for openness and for the deepening of democracy. The conceptual framework adumbrated in the analysis draws heavily from Zizek, Mouffe and Butler. The concepts of ‘subjectivisation’, ‘resignifications’, ‘reflexive turns’ and ‘refused identification’ come from Butler, while ‘Ideological interpellation’, “social fantasy” and ‘enemies of the people’ hail from Zizek’s Lacanian deployment. The concepts of ‘legitimate adversaries’, ‘agonistic pluralism’ are borrowed from Mouffe. These theoretical conceptual tools are deployed to account for the compulsion that characterizes certain discursive interventions on the media by the ANC, which are always in some respect in ‘excess’ of expectations.
Market-model Politics in Contemporary Post-socialism: The Case of Serbia
Josip Kristovic
Department of Sociology, University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Serbia
This paper is intended to be a proposal for comparative analysis of implications and consequences of the process of democratization in postsocialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, considering the issue of rationalization and utilitarization of political praxis in contemporary capitalist society. With the acceptance of essential and permanent link between liberal plural democracy and capitalism, it is justified to point out that obviously dominant market-model discourse is dominant in political sphere of social praxis too. Politicians need to be “useful” and “profitable” for a society to succeed. The central standpoint of the paper will be “undisputable” ideological position of contemporary democracy in postsocialist countries. Without neglecting the significance of gradual abandoning of straight-forward, laissez-faire “postsocial capitalism”, it is not far away from the truth that the question of alternatives to democracy and capitalism is almost forbidden to ask. If there are some ideological and practical alternatives to them, it is certainly not the case in these countries. Serbian case is specific in relation to other postsocialist countries, excluding maybe two other ex-YU postwar countries – Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, because of the specific experience of self-management socialism which was, it is trivial to emphasize, quite different than “classic” sovet-model socialism and have had many positive traits, therefore, it was much more difficult to put the ideal of democracy in these countries than it was the case in post-soviet block countries. Discourse analysis of programmes of two “most market oriented” political parties in Serbia is applying, with some empirical examples of various governmental bodies, types of workplaces in them and legislative considering state administration.
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