Democracy as conflict

In the following two sections I take a closer look at Mouffe’s version of agonistic,

“radical pluralist democracy” that is based on the idea that there is a necessary tension between the politics of universal individual rights and the values of democracy conceived as equality and collective sovereignty; and investigate how this model of democracy relates to the politics of universal rights and liberal democratic institutions in practice. Mouffe, as I indicated above, conceptualizes democracy as a sphere of inescapable conflict, in which any passed decision, and any apparent moment of consensus, is in fact expression of the hegemony of certain positions at that given moment, necessarily based on exclusions of competing positions and necessarily political and thus contestable, and therefore never justifiable by appeals to moral arguments. This concerns also the politics of constitutionally institutionalized individual rights: the politics of rights is also a considered to be a contingent achievement, indicative of certain hegemonic situation. At the same time liberal democratic institutions appear as a necessary background framework for even “agonistic, plural democracy” to be feasible. A question is, does this framework include a universalist politics of rights?

As I indicated above, Mouffe’s central thesis, borrowed from Schmitt, is that in politics one can never get rid of adversaries; that it is always about division lines between “us” and “them” and any attempt to deny this is bound to lead to repression of different opinions and to hiding the fact that the current states of affairs reflect a hegemony, not a universal consensus. In Mouffe’s view the task of “the political” is to

domesticate the necessarily existent political adversary by turning him to a

“legitimate enemy”, an opponent whose views one resists while respecting her right to express them. That process Mouffe calls the shift from antagonism to agonism;

from open hostility between enemies to civilized confrontation between adversaries.

The task of democracy is, in Mouffe’s scheme, to offer legitimate sites for publicly articulating dissent and for airing conflict and disagreement. If there is no such space, or if the views of the antagonist opponent are declared illegitimate and excluded from the public sphere, the hostilities that have no legitimate channels to develop into civilized opposition through public airing, may turn into populism or violent resistance. (Mouffe 1993, 111; 2000, 98-105; 2005, 10-21.)

Mouffe strongly argues against the idea of rights as a normative, moral framework to politics; emphasizing that it is just a possible way of conceiving and institutionalizing the political, currently hegemonic, but in no way necessary for democracy as such to be realized. She argues that “in order to radicalize the idea of pluralism, so as to make it a vehicle for deepening the democratic revolution, we have to break with rationalism, individualism and universalism” – values identified by her with “liberalism” and its universal politics of individual rights (Mouffe 1993, 7).

Mouffe’ suspicion of liberal universalism and her views on the tension between the values of liberalism and democracy rely on Schmitt’s critique of liberal

“rationalism” and his unconditional opposition of “democracy” to “liberalism”.

Mouffe does not share Schmitt’s view that those values are in irreconcilable conflict, but she follows his critique to insist that there is a tension between them that always creates disagreement within liberal democracies. Mouffe does not quite accept Schmitt’s view that totalitarian dictatorships like Nazism and Bolshevism could be

“democratic” while “antiliberal”; she dismisses his totalitarian understanding of

“democracy” by stating that democracy “no longer” can be conceived as the total identity of rulers and ruled (not discussing whether it ever could be; thus failing to acknowledge that a regime where no one can meaningfully participate in the public discussions on common affairs, because such discussions are non-existent and any dissent from official ideologies is prevented in advance by institutionalized political violence, can and never could, be called democratic by any criteria). Mouffe admits that Schmitt’s allegiance to Nazism stemmed from his hostility to liberal pluralism and “individualism”, but this does not prevent her from endorsing Schmitt’s critique of liberalism as “antipolitical”; or from arguing against the universality of human

rights by using Schmitt’s complaint against the pretense of “liberal universalism” of offering “the true and only legitimate political system”. (Mouffe 1993, 109-111; 2005, 78.)

The role of liberal values in general and rights in particular in Mouffe’s agonistic model of democracy remains thus strongly ambivalent. Pace Schmitt, she claims to endorse the liberal values of pluralism and even individual rights:

“[…]under modern conditions, […] the democratic logic of identity of government and governed cannot alone guarantee respect for human rights. It is only by virtue of its articulation with political liberalism that the logic of popular sovereignty can avoid descending into a tyranny” (Mouffe 1993, 105).

Mouffe also argues that political liberalism is a “central component of a project of radical and plural democracy” (Ibid.). Elsewhere, however, she insists that liberal democracy is a contingent form of government, representing a specific conception of political good that should “renounce its claim to universality” (Mouffe 2000, 62).

This view is further emphasized in her arguments on international politics that I will discuss in the following section. Although Mouffe apparently does not endorse Schmitt’s ideas about viable alternatives to liberal democracy, she shares his resentment against the claim of liberal democracy to universality and insists that there must be “a plurality of legitimate answers to the question of what is the just political order” (Ibid.), and also different legitimate forms of organizing democratic society, without specifying either empirically or normatively, which legitimate and democratic alternatives to liberal democracy she has in mind, given that her own model is admittedly based on the premises of political liberalism (Ibid. 73).

Regarding the tension between “liberalism” and “democracy”, Mouffe does not make a “choice” either for liberalism like Rawls and Habermas allegedly do, or against it like Schmitt, but argues that instead of prioritizing either of these, modern democratic politics should be theorized as “agonistic confrontation” between conflicting interpretations of those constitutive liberal-democratic values” (Mouffe 2000, 8-9). Thus, the Mouffean agonistic political debate and open disagreement is basically about the meaning and the interpretation of the values of equality and liberty, both of which are constitutive of liberal democracy (Mouffe 1993, 114.).

Interestingly, Mouffe assumes that while agonistic conflict is generated by competing interpretations of those values, all participants in agonistic democracy endorse these values per se: she criticizes Rawls for not leaving any space for the agonistic confrontation among contested interpretations of the shared liberal democratic

principles (Mouffe 2000, 30); and states that “adversaries” in agonistic politics are legitimate “enemies” exactly because they have a “shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: liberty and equality”, while they disagree about the meaning and implementation of those principles (Ibid. 102). She even subscribes to a certain notion of consensus as a condition of democracy:

“consensus is needed on the institutions constitutive of democracy and on the ‘ethico-political’ values informing the political association – liberty and equality for all – but there will always be disagreement concerning their meaning and how they will be implemented”

(Mouffe 2005, 31; see also 121).

This indicates that the conflictual dimension of agonistic politics can hardly be unlimited; and that all participants are assumed to share the basic liberal and democratic values and disagree just about their interpretation and implementation.

This restricts noticeably the range of real disagreement and dissent that may legitimately emerge even in agonistic democracy: there is no recognition in Mouffe’s account that some participants actually may reject the values of liberty or equality or both, or indeed democracy itself as a legitimate social order. Thus, Mouffe, despite her strong emphasis on the conflictual side of politics, does not acknowledge, any more than the competing theories she criticizes for “eliminating the political” from politics, the possibility of genuinely illiberal political positions gaining support and destroying democracy through proper democratic procedures. She offers no suggestions how “radical plural democracy” should deal with such positions, except – perhaps surprisingly – by excluding them from the political sphere: she argues while defining “the limits of pluralism”, in full continuity with the proponents of deliberative conditions and even of judicial review, that “some demands are excluded […] because they challenge the institutions constitutive of the democratic political association”; and that

“a line should […] be drawn between those who reject those values [liberty and equality for all] outright and those who, while accepting them, fight for conflicting interpretation”

(Mouffe 2005, 120-121).

As this argument strongly resembles Benhabib’s argument regarding the limits of negotiability when it comes to the basic values of liberal democracy (quoted on p.

139-140 above), the question can be raised how different Mouffe’s radical democratic vision actually is from deliberative and even conventional modes of liberalism; and more generally, how possible it is to conceive of a conception of democracy that is totally inclusive of unlimited and unqualified range of positions and arguments. I

will take up the question of liberal constraints to democracy and present a more elaborate argument about the dependency of democracy itself on such constraints in part III. Mouffe, aware that her limitations regarding legitimate positions within democracy appear similar to those of her opponents, emphasizes that defining such frontiers is a political, not moral decision, and as such, always contestable. In part III I will compare that claim to corresponding assertions in alternative theories. Also, I critically review Mouffe’s claims about the attempts by proponents of conventional liberalism and deliberative democracy to eliminate disagreement from the political sphere and ask whether there indeed is so strong longing for unity, harmony and

“pure rationality” in deliberative theory as critics claim. Below, I analyze Mouffe’s position specifically with regard to the conceptual position of liberal democratic institutions and follow her move away from her allegiance to the basic liberal democratic values when transferring the discussion to transnational arena.