1,721,080 research outputs found
Reclaiming Democracy: Judgment, Responsibility and the Right to Politics
Full text linkDemocracy is in shambles economically and politically. The recent economic meltdown in Europe and the U.S. has substituted democratic deliberation with technocratic decisions. In Athens, Madrid, Lisbon, New York, Pittsburgh or Istanbul, protesters have denounced the incapacity and unwillingness of elected officials to heed to their voices.
While the diagnosis of our political-economic illness has been established, remedies are hard to come. What can we do to restore our broken democracy? Which modes of political participation are likely to have an impact? And what are the loci of political innovation in the wake of the crisis? It is with these questions that Reclaiming Democracy engages. We argue that the managerial approach to solving the crisis violates ‘a right to politics’, that is, a right that our collective life be guided by meaningful politics: by discussion of and decision among genuinely alternative principles and policies. The contributors to this volume are united in their commitment to explore how and where this right can be affirmed in a way that resuscitates democracy in the wake of the crisis. Mixing theoretical reflection and empirical analysis the book offers fresh insights into democracy’s current conundrum and makes concrete proposals about how ‘the right to politics’ can be protected
Democratization, Economic transition and sustainable development: A perspective from the EU's new member states
No full textThe risk-opportunity cleavage and the transformation of Europe’s main political families
Full text linkAnalyses of the last two rounds of general elections in the EU (old) 15 member-states, as well as of the 1999 and 2004 European elections, reveal some of the symptoms of what Key and Burnham called "critical elections": elections that mark a sudden, considerable and lasting realignment in the electorate, leading to the formation of new electoral majorities. I explore the hypothesis that these series of critical elections at the turn of the century are triggering a radical realignment under the pressures of a new fault-line of conflict aggregation -- one shaped by attitudes to globalization. As a result, an opportunity-risk cleavage is emerging which is challenging, and opting out to replace, the capital-labor dynamics of conflict that have shaped the main political families in Europe over the 20th century. This paper traces the dynamics of realignment in terms of shifts at four levels: 1) The public agenda of political mobilization; 2) The social composition of electoral constituencies 3) the ideological basis of party competition. On this basis, an alignment is taking place, on the one hand between the centre-left and centre-right midpoint around an "opportunity" pole and, on the other, the circumference of far-right and radical-left parties around a "risk" pole. To what extend will these pressures of realignment manage to unfreeze (in reference to Rokkan and Lipset) the established party-political constellations in nation-states remains to the determined. However, tensions between the analyzed pressures of realignment and existing institutionalized forms of political representation go a long way in explaining the current crisis within both Social Democracy and European Conservatism, as well as the rise of new forms of populism in Europe
Le Potentiel Démocratique de la Constitution Européenne (ou Les Démocrates doivent-ils voter pour?)
No full textIn the run-up to the French referendum on the Constitutional Treaty for Europe in the spring of 2005, the author addresses the most politically sensitive question surrounding debates on the draft law: does it achieve the promised balance between policy efficiency and democracy. She examines two types of constitutional solutions to the ‘democracy deficits’ of the EU: on the one hand, measures enhancing the direct impact of democratic legislatures on the policy-process at EU level; on the other hand, measures increasing accountability (rather than direct input), in the tradition of liberal constitutionalism. The analysis leads to the conclusion that, while the first group of measures tends to enhance democracy at the expense of policy efficiency, the second type of measures help solve the democratic deficit while also increasing policy efficiency. Overall, the author asserts that, as the proposed constitutional treaty contains solid measures of the second type, it should be supported by both center-left and center-right constituencies
Thinking the Muslim Question by way of Rethinking the Jewish Question: A Critique of Frankfurt School's Secular Analytics of Religion
No full textWhile Europe's "Jewish question" gained prominence in the nineteenth century and has become a cardinal ordeal for emancipatory thought and praxis, its "Muslim question" started to surface in the early 1980s and gelled in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 attacks. Whereas the former reached an apotheosis in a genocide of European Jewry and a resolute exportation, and confinement, to Palestine, the latter is steadily brewing in Europe, and globally, and has not hitherto received satisfactory answers - nor any "final solutions." And yet, the ''Muslim question'' is an increasingly prominent cipher that signifies the construction and abstraction of Muslims and Muslimness in relation to their standing and integration within the secular Western polities and beyond, as well as the problematization of their political and epistemic statuses within the Western-styled secular public sphere.
Prima facie, this study asks: is it possible to examine the "Muslim question" in Europe through the lens of the older discourse on the "Jewish question," despite the differences in group under consideration, gaps in time, discursive trajectories, and not the least the Holocaust? Building on multidisciplinary scholarship, I contend that, despite these variances, and the changing political contours, there are common and parallel European-framed grounds, tropes, and historico-political affinities between the "Jewish" and the "Arab/Muslim" figures. These, which unfolded over half a millennium (at minimum), make it hardly possible to understand the modern construal of their respective representations unless considered jointly. There are, furthermore, critical insights to be gained from studying the historical discourse surrounding the "Jewish question" to illuminate current discussions about, and analytical paradigms of, the "Muslim question."
To that end, the study interrogates the epistemo-political effects of the racialized genesis and transmission of "religion" in critical Enlightenment thought - as a concept through which "Jewish being" has been apprehended - and the forms of their reception and elaboration in the Frankfurt School tradition more specifically. As a category, religion was uniquely distinguished from emerging and established modern notions of social life, especially starting from the latter part of the eighteenth century and through the intellectual consolidation and political ascent of the Enlightenment. Still, the contours of Enlightenment's notion of religion were essentially derived from early modern Western Christian (mainly Protestant) derivations thereof. The proliferation of "religions" in the secular age endowed the category of "religion" with multiple descriptive and normative attributes, and entrenched its status in juridical and legal edifices, social and political thought, and shaped concomitant discourses of emancipation. Whence, "religion" asserted itself as a world-embracing, secular, sphere of knowledge capacious of grasping various forms of life and traditions based on universalizable analytical precepts sourced from intra-Christian differences.
In attempt to sketch the contours of a counter-model of the prevalent family of Enlightenment understandings of religion that sedimented in the last two centuries, the study revisits Karl Marx's analysis of the "Jewish question" as posed in the 1840s as an index to Enlightenment's problem of emancipation and religion: of the emancipation of, and/or from, religion. To that end, it argues that Marx's analysis suggests, counterintuitively, that the "Jewish question" is fact an ideological artefact of a substantive Christian question, and that "religion" is not an elementary basis for emancipation (and that emancipation is not itself not one but a bifurcated horizon: political and human). In short, rather than perceiving religion as a descriptive category, Marx demands that we understand religion as a mediational, re-descriptive, category, and critique its operations accordingly.
The study subsequently proceeds with problematizing the descriptive validity, normative status, and socio-political valorization of religion in the Frankfurt School's tradition. More specifically, it scrutinizes Frankfurt School's reflexivity vis-à-vis its social (qua secular) imaginary and epistemo-critical apparatus with regards to "religion/religious" figures of thought and objects of analysis. To that end, it shows that early Frankfurt School's approach to the critique of religion is confounded by Weberian conceptual logistics, and thus does not correspond with the Marxian approach previously elucidated. Rather, it relies on Weberian Marxist lens which essentially does not challenge the descriptive normativity of the category of religion. Henceforth, the study contends that the critical apparatus of the early Frankfurt School is bent on reproducing an "emancipatory prejudice" when analyzing the oppression and domination that are associated with "religion/religious" objects. To remedy this deficiency, it argues for the incorporation of theologico-political lens in the systemic level of its critical instrumentarium, as a corollary to the economic-political one, for that would endow the ideologiekritik of "religion" with awareness to systemic forms of domination and social harm steeped in the operation of secular(ist) power.
Having shown the early Frankfurt School's inherent Weberian Marxist secular schematics of religion the study focuses moves to address the post-secular turn that the tradition's most eminent second-generation theorist, Jürgen Habermas, has effected in its agenda and viewpoint. It sets to unpack and bring to light the tacit investments qua assumptions upon which Habermas's purportedly inclusive and pluralist framework relies. In this vein, it critiques his epistemological position on secular reason in three ways, arguing that: (i) there is a distinctive conserving power in Habermas's argument for the wider recognition of religion; (ii) it engages in religious boundary-drawing; and (iii) it amplifies the voices of the so-called Judeo-Christian heritage over others. In doing so, the study clarifies the limits of the emancipatory horizon entailed in Habermas's formulation of the post-secular society and argues that it ends up reinscribing the religious-secular binary.
Lastly, the study dissects Habermas's engagement with the Jewish question in the aftermath of the Holocaust and its ramifications for the German Enlightenment tradition and identity. It contends that Habermas's unmitigated urge to salvage the Enlightenment tradition in its German formulation leads him to singularize the event of "Auschwitz" and its emblematic Jewish victim as the litmus test of any emancipatory social theory worthy of the designation "critical." Habermas's secular redemption of the "philosophical Jew" is met, however, by a lack of critical historical reading of the broader historical torment that brought Auschwitz into being. The study reads Habermas's silence on the history of real Jews, pre- and post-Auschwitz in the context of what he views as a relevant history for redeeming Germany's enlightened soul - German Jews as leading exponents of Enlightenment thought until the Holocaust and the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine in its aftermath. Habermas's post-Auschwitz Jewish question becomes then the question of enlightened conscientious Germans who want to endow their morality with political legitimacy regardless of the contemporary history of real, sovereign, Jews. This post-national German predicament, I argue, perpetuates Enlightenment's emancipatory prejudice against the Jews - i.e., it reaffirms both the Orientalist framework that denied Jews collective identity and national consciousness in pre-Auschwitz Europe and the approval of the realization of Jewish national self-determination outside of Europe in the post-Auschwitz epoch. Habermas's interlocking of the post-Auschwitz Jewish and German questions leads to the extension of Enlightenment's emancipatory prejudice to Palestinians and, effectively, to the denial qua sacrifice of their existence as a nation. In short, by continuing denying the ongoing impact of the legacy of European Orientalism and racialist enmity vis-à-vis the figures who it once constructed as "Semitic brothers" and affirming an enlarged yet exclusivist civilizationism (Judeo-Christian) stance as the moral backbone of the Enlightenment tradition, Habermas's post-national and post-secular theorizing end up short on delivering the emancipatory thrust needed to cater for the Enlightenment endeavor as an "unfinished project."
Aside from the critically discussing the above thematics, the study has manifold implications. Theoretically, it enhances the analytical capacity of the critical method to analyze the conjoined social reality of religion and the secular(ist) bias of the Frankfurt School (and beyond). Practically, it dialecticizes the pervasive principle of epistemic ruptures and enables a bi-focal look on continuities and dis-continuities between religion and cognate analytical social categories. The political and normative implications of this study bring back the possibility of viewing the Muslim question as historical figuration of a stealthy Christian-European complex that for several centuries centered on the figure of the Jew. In other words, the study "re-Europeanizes" the vantage point from which the critique of the Europe's Muslim question should proceed and reaccommodates what appears as a sprawling global question to its still potent racializing European/Western trajectory
Capitalism, Democracy, Socialism: Critical Debates
No full textThis book, collectively authored by members of the Research Committee on Socialism, Capitalism and Democracy (part of the International Political Science Association) and co-edited by Albena Azmanova and James Chamberlain, critically analyzes the current historical conjuncture with an eye to its emergent alternatives
Finance and the Financialization of Capitalism
Full text linkA thorough critique of contemporary capitalism must include a critique financial capitalism. Observers agree that, over the past fifty years, financial markets, mechanisms, and institutions have become an increasingly prevalent, and in some places hegemonic, feature of capitalist societies. Yet agreement ends when it comes to both the causes of financialization and its implications for the democratic critique of capitalism. While the question of finance came to the fore of public debates after the 2008 financial crisis, that crisis reflected deeper trends in capitalist economies: the rise of new modes of capitalist accumulation, new structures of public and private debt, new financial technologies and political rationalities, and new forms of individual subjectivity and collective futures. This chapter provides an overview of these recent debates about the financialization of capitalism with a focus on implications for critical theory, broadly construed. In addition to discussing the phenomenon of financialization itself, the following examines the ramifications of financialization in a range of domains: for the politics of race, gender, and welfare; for democracy and the state; for subjectivity and culture; and for global environmental crises.
We begin with a discussion of the financialization of capitalism, examining the debate about the nature of the phenomenon and its causes (Section II). We then turn to explore the ramifications of financialization, examining how the predominance of finance within capitalism alters social and political relationships throughout society. Section III discusses the financialization of the household and the rise of an asset-based welfare system, which reveal the disparate gendered implications of financialization. Section IV examines the historical role of race in structuring the development of finance and the racialized implications of financialization, especially in the context of the United States. Both of these discussions reveal that financialization is as much a social and cultural as an economic phenomenon. Section V examines financialization from the perspective of theories of culture and subjectivity. Sections VI and VII turn to two arenas of the political consequences of finance: first, for democracy and the state (VI) and then for ecological politics and the possibilities of averting catastrophic climate change (VII). In both cases, the financialization of capitalism accelerates the forces hollowing out contemporary democracy and generating ecological crises. We conclude with a brief discussion of political alternatives to the current organization of financialized capitalism as well as directions for future research
A democratic panopticon as citizen involvement in EU decision-making
No full textLecture given online on 14 April 2021The conference ' Conversations for the Future of Europe' 2021 edition is organized as a series of 4 lectures by Robert Schuman Centre. This is first out of four lectures.Deepening the reach of democracy remains what it has been for the last 200 years: the expansion of the franchise. But franchise does not necessarily express itself through the right to vote in elections in the context of representative democracy, neither necessarily move towards direct democracy . Instead, the question is how to open up the idea Republican ideal of participative democracy or active citizenship. In this regard, amending the democratic script both in the member states and at the EU level requires to craft ways for citizens to be involved in EU politics, policies and decision-making on an-going, permanent basis. In other words, participation needs to become a civic habitus. In the EU, this requires multiple channels of involvements, from a permanent citizens’ assembly to widespread processes of upstream consultations on European laws: Europe needs a kind of democratic panopticon , as a way to subvert Jeremy Bentham original idea. The specific proposal is a permanent citizens control over the disbursement of the 750 billion euro which make up the Next Generation EU funds made available to address the economic and social impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. As the first expression of a common European debt these funds and how they are spent must be the object of the highest possible standards. Never before has the imperative of no taxation without representation been so important: can we update it to call for no EU funds without participation ? Today the envisaged role of European citizens in allocating those funds is marginal although never before has the EU invested on such a scale in its member states. The Treaty on European Union does state after all: This Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen (art 1). It is time for the EU, its central institutions and their expressions at the national and local level to put its money where its voices are and take seriously the requisite of citizens’ empowerment called for by a mature democratic politics
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