Agonistic pluralism and the politics of rights

Mouffe does not present her model of agonistic democracy as alternative to liberal democracy, in spite of her increasingly harsh criticism of the “liberal” conception of politics. Rather, her project is about changing the way of conceptualizing “the political” and opening up spaces within the institutional framework of liberal democracy to air conflict, disagreement, dissent and confrontation. Liberal democratic institutions thus appear as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for achieving democratic legitimacy in the agonistic sense. This interpretation is confirmed in Mouffe’s recent critique of visions of cosmopolitan democracy and universal politics of rights as a project of securing human rights for all human beings at the global level. As I will indicate in this section, Mouffe rejects globalizing the politics of human rights both because she regards it as specifically “Western” and because she opposes it as part of the project of universalizing liberal democracy as a political regime that she considers suitable for “Western” culture only (although not specifying how she defines “Western” geographically, culturally or politically).

In this critique, she implicitly acknowledges the inherent link between the universalist politics of rights and liberal democracy. As she elsewhere emphasizes the importance of the institutions of liberal democracy for any democracy, also the agonistic model, to be conceivable; one can make the conclusion from her critique of

universalizing liberal democracy that democracy as such is suitable for some collectivities, but not for others. Mouffe tries to avoid this problem by hinting to the theoretical possibility of conceiving “different forms of democracy” or “different concepts of human dignity”, but without specifying which forms and concepts she has in mind she fails to make an argument for the democratic legitimacy of such possible alternatives. This case is not made clearer by Mouffe’s insistence that there are no relevant criteria for deciding which regime is democratic: such argument, along with the rejection of the universality of human rights, is on the verge of a relativism that might be used to legitimize any political regime. (Mouffe 2000, 73;

2005, 81, 87, 124-126, 129.)

To enter discussions on international politics or on legitimate measures for promoting human rights on global level would be beyond the topic of this thesis.

Nevertheless, an excursion to Mouffe’s criticism in this area reveals something about the conceptual interconnectedness of democracy and universal rights, although not necessarily in the way that Mouffe has intended.

I indicated above that Mouffe assumes that in her agonistic model of democracy the adversary participants share the basic liberal democratic values of liberty and equality, although they disagree about their interpretation and implementation. She perceives, not unlike Habermas, liberal institutions as constitutive also of deep forms of democracy: “the interconnection between liberal institutions and democratic procedures is the necessary condition for the extension of the democratic revolution into new areas of social life” (Mouffe 1993, 105). And along with classical liberals, she regards liberal rights as a safeguard against the possibility of collective power sliding into tyranny. Thus, although Mouffe argues there is a tension between “liberty” and

“equality”, she sees liberal institutions as a precondition for creating the public sphere where to politicize that tension. In her later work Mouffe retains her support to the liberal democratic structures and institutions and admits that these need to be protected to enable democratic pluralism to flourish: “When parliamentary institutions are destroyed or weakened, the possibility of an agonistic confrontation disappears and it is replaced by an antagonistic we/they” (Mouffe 2005, 23).

An interesting question is, then, how would the arguments that explicitly denounce those democratic institutions and the liberal values that they embody, fare in the adversarial public sphere of agonistic democracy? As liberals can use constitutionalist and rights-based arguments to dismiss explicitly anti-liberal

positions from the range of valid political claims, and deliberative democrats refer to the “moral conditions” to do the same, Mouffe presents the agonistic model as more permissive and more “pluralist” in terms of political arguments than those models.

For example, she criticizes what she calls “post-political” theorists for recognizing only “fundamentalist” enemies, not “agonistic” adversaries, as their opponents in the democratic debate. According to Mouffe, that approach “forecloses the possibility of giving an ‘agonistic’ form to political conflicts; the only possible form of opposition is the ‘antagonistic’ one” (Mouffe 2005, 50). In apparent contrast, Mouffe assumes that in her genuinely pluralistic political sphere, “antagonism” is turned into “agonism”

by taming the “enemy” into a respectable adversary who shares the basic liberal-democratic values. But assuming that the “legitimate enemy” will eventually be

“tamed” to share the basic liberal democratic values, Mouffe follows Rawlsian liberals and deliberative democrats in failing to theorize political confrontation in democratic terms with the “enemy” who persists in rejecting those values. As I noted above, Mouffe admits that even agonistic pluralism cannot recognize all demands as legitimate; some of them must be excluded from the democratic debate:

“I do not believe that a democratic pluralist politics should consider as legitimate all the demands formulated in a given society. The pluralism I advocate requires discriminating between demands which are to be accepted as part of the agonistic debate and those which are to be excluded. A democratic society cannot treat those who put its basic institutions into question as legitimate adversaries. […] Some demands are to be excluded, […] because they challenge the institutions constitutive of the democratic political association” (Mouffe 2005, 120-121).

Like Benhabib, Mouffe is explicit about the need to constitutionally exclude anti-egalitarian claims as well as demands of parallel legal systems in connection with multicultural debates:

“[O]ne can establish a rough distinction between a set of demands whose satisfaction can be granted without jeopardizing the basic liberal democratic framework and those which would lead to its destruction. This would be the case for instance with demands whose satisfaction would require the implementation of different legal systems according to the ethnic origin or religious beliefs of groups. […] A democratic society requires the allegiance of its citizens to a set of shared ethico-political principles, usually spelled out in a constitution and embedded in a legal framework, and it cannot allow the coexistence of conflicting principles of legitimacy in its midst. […] Such a system [of legal pluralism] is incompatible with the exercise of democratic citizenship which postulates equality for all the citizens” (Mouffe 2005, 122-123, my emphasis).

Thus, even in this explicitly conflictual “political” account citizens can be coerced to follow the principles fixed in the liberal constitution, and persistent fundamentalist demands can be excluded as incompatible not just with the universal politics of rights, but also with democracy itself. Mouffe’s position reflects that of Jung in her response to Isaac et al’s democratic argument against liberal constraints to the range of legitimate political claims:

“To the extent that fundamentalisms are articulated in such a way that they stand in totalitarian opposition to democracy, they cannot be processed within a democratic system”

(Jung 1999, 272).

Mouffe’s position on the relationship between constitutional rights and democratic legitimacy changes, however, when the debate shifts to international politics and

“cosmopolitan democracy”. While in liberal democracies respecting constitutional rights is a precondition for pluralism, in the international arena Mouffe defends

“another type of pluralism”: here, the “absence of effective pluralism” is equaled with the spread of liberal democracy (Mouffe 2005, 123, 82). In the international arena Mouffe revokes the Schmittian opposition between “liberalism” as the politics of rights and “democracy” as “popular sovereignty” and protects the “democratic right” of nations to “self-government” from interventions by international human rights law (Ibid. 115-116). She argues against the idea of the universality of human rights on the global scale, claiming that an international politics of human rights is an unacceptable imposition of “Western values” on the rest of the world. Although she does not specify which geographic, political or cultural entities she categorizes as

“Western” and “non-Western” (for example, it remains unclear whether the liberal democracies in e.g. Japan, India and South Africa are considered “Western” or whether the democratization of e.g. Eastern Europe should be interpreted as an illegitimate imposition of “Western values” on the “non-Western” Communist regimes); Mouffe equates the democratization of “non-West” with its

“Westernization”, and even with “cultural extermination”. (Mouffe 2005, 83-87, 100-103, 117, 123-128.)

While Mouffe single-mindedly equates democracies with “the West”, she argues that “to defend a model of society different from the Western model should not be seen as an expression of backwardness” (Mouffe 2005, 124). Not without a sense of nostalgia over the collapsed Communist tyrannies, Mouffe complains:

“nowadays the possibility of maintaining socio-political orders different from Western ones has been drastically reduced since all international organizations are more or less directly under the control of Western powers led by the United States” (Ibid. 81).

Transferring to the international arena the agonistic argument that repressing

“difference” in politics eventually leads to violence, Mouffe explains even the recent rise of Islamic jihadist terrorism by this alleged “lack of alternatives” under the international human rights regime: “It is […] not a coincidence that since the end of cold war, […] we have witnessed a significant increase in terrorist attacks” (Ibid.).

She argues that terrorism “tends to flourish in circumstances in which there are no legitimate political channels for the expression of grievances”; assuming that jihadist terrorism stems from the global human rights regime repressing alternative collective voices of non-liberal political orders on the international arena; while ignoring the lack of legitimate sites of non-religious resistance within the Middle-Eastern and Central Asian dictatorships where the ideological forces behind that violent movement have gained strength (Ibid. 81).

By equating democratic institutions with the “Western” model and at the same time opposing the extension of the “Western model” to “non-Western” polities, Mouffe effectively de-legitimizes any efforts in what she defines as “non-West” to democratize the societies or to promote human rights. She does not specify whether there also should be “sites of legitimate dissent” within “non-Western” societies and if so, how these would be arranged without the respect for basic human rights like freedom of speech, conscience and association, rights to inviolability of the person, fair trial and equality before the law. She bars non-democratic regimes further from external critique by arguing that any attempt to make a distinction between

“democratic” and “undemocratic” states represents “Western” standards and is thus illegitimate (Mouffe 2005, 87). By delegitimizing attempts to evaluate policies of sovereign nations, and by dismissing the plurality of interests, power relations and the contestability of traditional values within the collectivities she generalizes as

“non-Western”, Mouffe represents a tendency that Haideh Moghissi, an exile Iranian author, has warned about in postmodern theory. Moghissi argues:

“Whatever their intent, arguments which assert the right of different cultures to establish, define and exercise their own standards, meanings and principles play directly into the hands of political and economic elites, religious leaders and authoritarian regimes, and, above all, fundamentalists, who argue, for their own purposes, that the notion of human rights is

‘culture-bound’ and Western, that international measures for human rights are imperialist ploys” (Moghissi 1999, 62).

Relying on her experience of “non-Western” regimes, Moghissi is more skeptical than Mouffe about raising the legitimacy of collective self-determination over that of human rights:

“Authoritarian leaders in Islamic societies sometimes oppose what they describe as ‘Western’

notions of individual rights in the name of collective values of the sanctified community of believers, the umma. Their main concern, however, is somewhere else. They wish, first of all, to insulate themselves from internal challenges and international scrutiny. And they wish to continue their open, sometimes legally sanctioned, political, cultural, ethnic, religious and sexual discriminatory practices directed against individuals and groups who do not belong to the dominant political and cultural interests” (Ibid. 62-63).

While Mouffe argues that “it is high time to question the belied in the unique superiority of liberal democracy” (Mouffe 2005, 87), she does not provide examples of legitimate political regimes that do not follow the international treaties of human rights. She regards “culture” as legitimate ground to reject human rights, but does not analyze the relationship between “culture” and politics, or acknowledge that there are minority “cultures” and contested interpretations of “cultures” within “non-Western” regimes. Nor does she specify what legitimizes the “sovereign” decisions of those polities that do not grant basic rights or equal citizenship to all their subjects or offer internal sites for expressing “legitimate dissent”. Thus, Mouffe’s position against the universality of human rights can be read as justification for oppressive regimes as long as they are defined “non-Western”. As no regime that does not respect the human rights of its subjects is known for opening legitimate political spaces for articulating grievances for those who would like to question or challenge the foundations of that regime, Mouffe’s statement about the limits of liberalism also defines the limits of democracy, establishing what she apparently denies in her argument against Habermas: that there is an inherent relation between democracy and the politics of universal rights as an institutionalized collective commitment to the equality, freedom and dignity of all citizens.

It is easy to agree with Mouffe’s claim that democracy as a value system is partisan: it is based on a certain set of values that are not “neutral”, and its defense is an explicitly political enterprise. As I will argue in part III, many “liberal” writers are less reluctant to agree with that statement than Mouffe claims in her critique. But

admitting the “politicalness” of rights does not answer the question whether one can support democracy while rejecting the basic rights of each citizen within it. The debate on cosmopolitan democracy, in particular the question to what extent collective values can override the individual rights of community members, recurs also within liberal democracies as the debate on multiculturalism (that I will briefly discuss in the following chapter). As I indicated above, Mouffe does not accept inequality based on collective values within liberal democracies; but the problem is more general: hardly any political regime can be perceived inclusive, egalitarian or democratically legitimate if it allows the non-recognition of the equality and basic rights of some of its members. Indeed, her protection of parliamentary institutions and her statements on the “limits of pluralism” indicate that the relationship between democracy and rights is after all not very differently conceived in agonistic democracy, compared to conventional liberal and deliberative models.

Despite Mouffe’s critique of liberalism and deliberative democracy for

“eliminating the political from politics” and her claim that Habermas’s argument about the interdependency of rights and democracy just works to illegitimately extend the sphere of liberal democracy in the world, Mouffe’s own account confirms that argument rather than rejects it: the main quarrel here concerns the role of open conflict in public debates within the framework of the liberal institutions, not the conceptual position of constitutional rights in relation to democracy. As Mouffe agrees that respect for equal rights is a precondition of liberal democracy, and that liberal democratic institutions constitute the precondition for agonistic democracy;

her resistance to global universal rights and defense of “different kinds of social orders” does not prove that there can be non-liberal democracies, it only states that democracy is not the preferred social order for all societies: an argument against the universality of rights is also an argument against the universality of democracy¹⁴.

Thus, as Mouffe’s “agonistic” model of democracy enriches the democratic-theoretical debate with valuable insights in the inevitably conflictual nature of politics, it also indicates the limits of promoting “democracy” in opposition to

14 The difficulty of establishing non-liberal “democratic” regimes is currently being painfully revealed in connection with the attempted democratization processes in the Middle East, in which democratic elections tend to result in religion-based legal orders that severely limit the freedom of speech and conscience of the citizens – as is indicated by the recently internationally debated demands of death sentences for blasphemy and apostasy in Afghanistan, for crimes such as speaking up for women’s equal rights (the case of Ali Mohaqeq Nasab) or converting to Christianity (the case of Abdul Rahman). As genuine democracy is unthinkable without the right of citizens to think and speak freely, those developments confirm that majoritarian elections alone cannot guarantee the democratic legitimacy of a political regime.

universalist politics of rights: it appears from Mouffe’s discussion of international politics that defending “democracy” while opposing the universality of rights is a slippery slope; eventually legitimizing tyrannical collectivism which necessarily compromises the inclusive egalitarian ideals of radical democracy itself. Thus, while there indeed is a tension between institutionalizing rights beyond the reach of the democratic public and the democratic ideal of inclusiveness in making all collective decisions; extending that tension into an insoluble conflict undermines not only the politics and ideal of rights, but democracy and democratic ideals as well.

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