Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Social Justice

Heather D. Gautney, Neil Smith, Omar Dahbour, Ashley Dawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135856816
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Social Justice draws on the fields of geography, political theory, and cultural studies to analyze experiments with novel forms of democracy, highlighting the critical issue of the changing nature of the state and citizenship in the contemporary political landscape as they are buffeted by countervailing forces of corporate globalization and participatory politics.

Using interesting case studies, the book explores these 3 main themes:

• the meaning of radical democracy in light of recent developments in democratic theory
• new spatial arrangements or scales of democracy – from local to global, from streets protests to the development of transnational networks
• the character and role of states in the development of new forms of democracy

The book asks and answers: are participatory models of democracy viable alternatives in their own right or are they best understood as supplemental to traditional representative democracy? What are the conditions that give rise to the development of such models and are they equally effective at every scale; i.e., do they only realize their radical potential in particular, local places?

A useful text in a broad range of advanced undergraduate courses including social movements, political sociology or geography, political philosophy.

PART I
Radical Theories of Democracy and Sovereignty

Introduction

OMAR DAHBOUR

Today there is an increasing urgency about the many attempts currently under way to revisit fundamental problems of democratic and state theory. Advocacy of the democratization of the state appears increasingly anemic in the face of the cooptation of legal systems, the expansion of policing agencies, and the brutalization of whole populations by military and financial means that are the common coin of the present. If there is an adequate political response to these initiatives of the wealthy and the powerful, it cannot only consist of the democratization of existing state structures; rather, these very structures need to be reconsidered for their efficacy in realizing emancipatory and egalitarian goals. But neither can these state structures be simply swept away—even if this were possible. The options of a truly liberal democracy and a thoroughly libertarian anarchy seem equally foreclosed for the present. If democracy is then to be usefully radicalized in service to emancipation and equality, its meaning must be reexamined in relation to other more fundamental political norms that can provide the ineradicable context for such radicalization.

This is one lesson that is taught by all the selections from the first part of this volume. Each in its own way calls for such a reexamination. Furthermore, there are some commonalities in how this intellectual project of rethinking the state should proceed. Three such common themes will be briefly mentioned here, followed by an explication of how these themes are developed by the four individual contributors to this section.

One commonality of all the following four authors is the idea that democratic politics always takes place within a larger struggle for power, hegemony, or sovereignty. The latter term is preferred: power has its specifically political manifestations, and these are ignored—or subsumed within notions of “social” power or cultural hegemony—at our peril. In fact, there is a new “sovereignty debate” taking place and at least three of the contributors (the exception is Carol C. Gould) aim to make a contribution to this debate in one way or another.

A second commonality is that that the renovation, revitalization, or radicalization of democracy can take place only in a global context. This means different things to different theorists—and all but one of the contributions to this section (with Brennan and Ganguly being the exception) have specific ideas about what is required. But it always implies the importance of recognizing that democratic politics within putatively sovereign states can be affected—encouraged, strengthened, weakened, or destroyed—by political forces and events at a global scale. Rather than attempting to ignore this fact, political theory should take it fully into consideration in reformulating what is meant by democracy. Politics, in other words, is about much more than what is traditionally referred to as “internal sovereignty”—who has power (the people, the politicians, the elites) within a sovereign state. Equally significant is who possesses the “external sovereignty” necessary to maintain or protect democratic experiments.

Finally, one thing on which all the contributors agree is the necessity of aiming at a new conceptualization of political power or sovereignty that enables democracy to flourish again as a form of the state. There is, of course, substantial disagreement about what form this should be. While Brennan and Ganguly invoke a “principle of hope” and Buck-Morss advocates the development of a new nomos, Gould and Benhabib argue for more specific concepts, such as “transnational democracy” and “republican federalism.” But all concur that the possibility of a radical democratization of the state needs to be placed on the contemporary political agenda.

Brennan and Ganguly begin with the claim that contemporary US politics is based on the acceptance of or acquiescence in the theft of the 2004 presidential election by the Republican Party. The result was to accustom the political elites to further subordination to a politics of “techno-medievalism” without precedent: the employment of advanced technological means of incantation, intimidation, and incarceration, all to further the centralization of power by a group of political insiders cloaking their moves with the cynical deployment of fundamentalist discourse. What conclusions do the authors draw from this characterization of US politics, 2004–2006? First, that any evasion of the crudity of how power has been wielded will fail to draw the obvious conclusion that the key to power has been and continues to be the control of the state and its deployment for consolidating further power. Any radical response that has a chance of redemocratizing the US will first have to seize state power, just as its enemies have done. A new discourse capable of “unmasking” the false and cynical consciousness of those who have power must be followed by one that articulates the desirability and inevitability of a political leadership unafraid to take power itself, though a leadership also without elitist or “vanguardist” tendencies.

Second, this requires a long-term assembly of an oppositional civil society capable of taking power, based on a clearly articulated “utopian project” and eschewing any version of the “realism” that accedes to the demands of short-term accommodation. Here, Brennan and Ganguly make reference to the two thinkers most influential on the neoconservative movement in the US—Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. Brennan and Ganguly’s view, contrary to that of Susan Buck-Morss in her essay that follows, is that Schmitt is much less useful to oppositional movements than is Strauss. It was the latter who taught conservatives to forgo the everyday politics of realism for a long-range strategy of taking power based on a radically alternative vision of politics (that is, alternative to the prevailing politics of liberal welfarism in the 1960s and 1970s). This strategy was itself based on neoclassical ideals of political life taken from a tendentious reading of Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, among other political philosophers. Schmitt, on the other hand, with his “friend–enemy” concept of the political, and his “state of exception” notion of sovereignty, affirmed a much “purer” power politics, devoid of principle or vision. It is an existential concept of politics, not susceptible to any rational or normative justification—and also one unable to articulate a vision of social life other than that of unending agonistic strife. Schmitt is unable to offer a view of sovereignty useful for emancipatory–egalitarian political movements, since he equates sovereignty with the capacity for the arbitrary assumption of command—with dictatorship. Democratic oppositions need a concept of sovereignty that provides them with hope for an end to arbitrary power, not one that assumes the irreducibility of political violence and struggle.

This concept of sovereignty must include two things. First is the notion that, as Brennan and Ganguly put it, “effective political action is always about controlling the state” (Chapter 1, this volume, p. 33). This still involves a movement based in civil society, not an appeal to political elites. But this movement must form around a “utopian goal” or “shared ideal” of a new society, including a new form of the state. If such an effort is to succeed, it can be neither an instrumental accommodation to power nor a pragmatic negotiation of divergent group interests. The Rousseauian–Hegelian project of reimagining the state must be taken up again. Above all, political “escapism” is precluded, for the reason that such escapism is itself possible only when permitted or enabled by a certain sort of state institution. In the age of the national security state, no such possibilities exist. So no “counterhegemonic imaginings,” “endorsements of quotidian subversion,” or “popular-cultural resistance” can substitute for state power and the seizure thereof.

Second, the notion of the ethical state must be revived. Not to do so is to acquiesce in the notion that all power is arbitrary power—that sovereignty is equivalent to dictatorship. This neo-Hobbesian notion has been most famously revived by Carl Schmitt in his concept of the “friend–enemy” distinction underlying all state institutions.¹ The state—and by extension, political life in general—is, in Schmitt’s account, always based on an existential encounter between peoples who identify the other as friend or enemy. Politics, in this view, generates its own meaning—and this meaning cannot be translated into the ethical terms of good and bad, just and unjust.

Brennan and Ganguly reject such a notion of power; but, since they do not seek out the intellectual foundations of an alternative conceptualization of state power, they are left doing what Schmitt has so powerfully criticized as an imposition of moralistic and legalistic constraints that inevitably weakens sovereign authority.² While constraints on state power are not to be shunned—in fact, they are crucial for making such power nonarbitrary—they are also not a sufficient characterization of the purposes of the state. Power is not simply an instrument for the enforcement of moral or legal rules; it is an enabling capacity for the achievement of social goals (of equity, justice, redistribution, investment, and so on). The alternative to a Schmittian Machtpolitik is not the liberal state, minimally enforcing a “rule of law.” It is an Hegelian Polizeistaat, properly understood (and translated) as a “welfare state”—a state that utilizes its power for the public good.³ This was the real “enemy” of the Schmittian attack on the German constitution in the 1920s and 1930s, since that constitution had been formulated in part by democratic and socialist parties influenced by this neo-Hegelian idea of the ethical state.

Susan Buck-Morss differs from Brennan and Ganguly in arguing that a Schmittian approach to sovereignty can be useful for a critique of the neo-Marxian theory of the state. For Buck-Morss, it is important to recognize that sovereignty is distinct from a simple affirmation of state power. For her, Schmitt made this distinction central to his understanding of nomos, the concept of law-giving or -creating. The establishment of the state itself depended on having the power to build or constitute a regime, along with its own rule of law. This power was central to the idea of sovereignty, common to Schmitt, Weber, and others, as the monopolization of violence. The ability to monopolize violence led to the creation of legitimacy for a state and its laws. This understanding of sovereignty as a kind of originary power means that sovereignty and state power are not the same; the latter is derived from the former, in fact. Any attempt to theorize oppositional politics must recognize this form of power as antecedent to and determinative of state power as such.

Buck-Morss elaborates a neo-Hegelian narrative of sovereign power that suggests the possibility of an oppositional sovereignty for the future. Thus, sovereignty originates in the unitary rule of the Church, followed by a multiplicity of sovereign states, and culminating in an idea of national sovereignty, semi-independent, and normatively determinate, of state sovereignty as such. At the end of her essay, Buck-Morss turns to think about what might lie beyond this narrative. But first, she argues that understanding the importance of this nonstate sovereignty, this “nomos of the earth,” in Schmitt’s terminology (which Buck-Morss favors), lies in also leading us beyond the blindspot about the state that is found in neo-Marxian (and perhaps other radical) theories.

It is the idea that the state, once its authority is breached, could “wither away” that is inimical to serious radical theorizing about the state, according to Buck-Morss. Such an idea implies that the economy is a free-standing, and potentially self-regulating, system which can function independently of states. This idea, from a Schmittian perspective, is nothing less than a denial of the reality or importance of “the political” in social life. But, this denial is not a merely theoretical point; it is also politically disabling, since without a conception of a new form of sovereignty (nomos), no alternative form of power can be legitimated once the state is overthrown. Besides, the patent unreality (or “economism”) of viewing economies or markets as self-regulating or administering opens the door to the reconstruction of state power, legitimate or not.

So the revival of state power as a desideratum of radical emancipatory politics is necessitated by the flawed economistic assumptions of neo-Marxian state theory. The fact that Marx in Capital devastatingly criticized the idea of the market economy as a free-standing, self-regulating entity did not prevent him (and later Marxians) from reimporting this idea into their concept that, absent the market economy, the “administration” of society would be a simple matter entailing the “withering away” of the state. Even someone as politically astute as Lenin was not immune, in his theoretical work (that is, in State and Revolution), from making this assumption.⁴ As Buck-Morss concludes, “That is a blind spot in Marxist thought, which did not deal with the problems of sovereign legitimacy and violence that actual Marxist regimes later had to face” (Chapter 2, this volume, p. 58).

The sovereign state will therefore continue to be needed to regulate economic life. The fact that, as Marx maintained in the German Ideology,⁵ the economy is more able, through the rule of economic elites, to dominate the state than vice versa—in capitalist society—does not mean that in postcapitalist societies the state will not still be needed to prevent the reemergence of capital accumulation and its attendant inequities. And, for that matter, as Buck-Morss has emphasized, whichever postcapitalist societies arise will need states that can ensure and protect the gains made in the face of restorationist pressures by global capital and its imperial allies. What this role for the state will be and how it changes the theory of sovereignty for the postnationalist era is what we need to consider now.

As a basic concept, most clearly formulated by Max Weber, sovereignty is taken to be “monopoly over the means of violence” possessed by a legitimate authority.⁶ The critique of sovereignty from Locke to Weber was primarily concerned with who rightly possessed such authority. But, since Weber, the idea has arisen that perhaps political life can dispense with sovereignty in general. In other words, the idea has been put forward (for instance, by Hannah Arendt) that politics requires no such exclusive or final authority, and that violence itself is not essential—and may even be inimical—to political action.⁷

So it may be useful to recall the purpose and role of the basic idea of sovereignty. Here is how Buck-Morss puts it: “The state is not only a means of wielding power … It is power … The state not only makes laws but embodies the Law that makes laws legal. It is not just a legislating or administrating state, but a legitimating, sovereign state” (Chapter 2, this volume, p. 50). Sovereignty is therefore the entity that binds together into an indissoluble whole the state, laws, and legitimate violence: it is what gives purpose to the state, force to the laws, and authority to the use of violence. Power is of the essence of all these institutions, and it is power that is legitimately wielded by those who are sovereign.

To identify who today can claim such legitimacy requires the creation of nothing less than a new conception of nomos or sovereignty. Contrary to older concepts of sovereignty (such as Schmitt’s), it must now include commitments not only to “globalizing” democratic governance, as Carol C. Gould claims, but to a just reorganization of the goods and rights pertaining in (global) civil society, as Seyla Benhabib maintains. How this new global sovereignty can be made democratic is the subject of Carol C. Gould’s article. Gould, however, prefers the term “transnational democracy” to talk of sovereignty. The reason is that her concern is one of extending democratic rights beyond the limits of sovereign states, as traditionally conceived. Rather than attempting to renovate the concept of sovereignty, Gould prefers to focus on the creation of political communities (and the corresponding imputation of political rights) across competing claims for sovereignty. In this way, she hopes to ensure the revitalization of democratic initiatives—making them transnational (not to say, global) provides the opportunity for new alliances and solidarities.

Transnational democracy consists of four elements, in her account:

• cross-border associations of people(s) engaged in common activities (e.g., communication, trade, education);
• regional human rights (legal) frameworks that can provide a basis for making claims on undemocratic regimes;
• the development of means of democratic participation by all those importantly affected by long-distance (i.e., global) state or market actions; and
• forms of transnational solidarity with other democratic or emancipatory movements.

The most original and important of these elements are the first and third—the encouragement of cross-border communities and the claim to cross-border democratic participation. In the first case, it is the creation of transnational networks of people similarly identified or employed that provides the social basis for linkages of various kinds. Gould argues that the oft-cited phenomenon of globalization can provide the empirical basis for crucial normative claims to democracy: at its most general, “globalization” can be defined as linkages of various kinds between distantly situated peoples. To the extent that these linkages are real, they provide the basis for arguing that the common activities creating these linkages ought to be codetermined by all the participants involved. So, in the first instance, such transnational linkages provide reasons for making human rights claims transnational or regional (not to say, global): all rights violations in regions of linked socioeconomic activity ought to be adjudicated according to similar criteria (of right). Second, these cross-border linkages provide the underlying “social empathy” upon which to base solidaristic actions. To the extent that these linkages are institutionalized in associative communities of some kind, such solidarities are accordingly strengthened.

Finally, and most importantly, transnational associations (whether formal or informal) provide the rationale for according distantly affected others rights of democratic participation. This is where transnational associations can become transnational democracies. Gould’s claim is that all those “importantly affected” by actions are entitled to participate in the determination of those actions. “Importantly affected” means affected in terms of their basic (human) rights. Thus, those affected by stat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Permissions
• Contributors
• Introduction: Altered States
• PART I Radical Theories of Democracy and Sovereignty
• PART II New Spatial Scales of Democracy
• PART III Rethinking Activism and the State
• Conclusion: Conflict, Coexistence, and the Next Global Assemblage
• Notes