Democracy in crisis: Violence, alterity, community

By Stella Gaon

This volume explores the political implications of violence and alterity (radical difference) for the practice of democracy, and reformulates the possibility of community that democracy is said to entail. Most significantly, contributors intervene in traditional democratic theory by boldly contesting the widely-held assumption that increased inclusion, tolerance and cultural recognition are democracy's sufficient conditions. Rather than simply inquiring how best to expand the 'demos', they investigate how claims to self-determination, identity and sovereignty are a problem for democracy and how, paradoxically, alterity may be its greatest strength.

Drawing largely on the Left, continental tradition, contributions include an appeal to the tension between fear and love in the face of anti-Semitism in Poland, injunctions to rethink the identity-difference binary and the ideal of 'mutual recognition' that dominate liberal-democratic thought, critiques of the canonical 'we' that constitutes the democratic community, and a call for an ethics and a politics of 'dissensus' in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. The authors mobilise some of the most powerful critical insights emerging across the social sciences and humanities – from anthropology, sociology, critical legal studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and critical race theory and post-colonial studies – to reconsider the meaning and the possibility of 'democracy' in the face of its contemporary crisis.

The book will be of direct interest to students and scholars interested in cutting-edge, critical reflection on the empirical phenomenon of increased violence in the West provoked by radical difference, and on theories of radical political change.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847797384

Stella Gaon

Stella Gaon is Associate Professor of Political Science at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax (Canada).

Book preview

Introduction

Stella Gaon

This book interrogates a ‘crisis’ of democracy that is manifest in the increased violence provoked by radical difference (‘alterity’) in Western democratic communities and explores its significance for the thinking and the practical development of democracy today. Significantly, however, the contributors to this volume treat the question of what sustains and what undermines radical democratic practice from an unusual perspective. Rather than beginning from the standard assumption that a greater degree of inclusion of given cultural identities will enhance democracy, the contributors begin from the question of how claims to self-determination and identity are a problem for democracy and, indeed, how they lead to its essential undoing. For, while it is always provocative to claim that a given issue or ideal is just now reaching its most critical state, it must be said at the outset that, at a deeper or originary level, democracy has always been in crisis – indeed, that it has always been a crisis – since its ancient instantiation in Greece.

In the first place, both theoretically and practically – which is to say, both as an idea and as a form of political regime – democracy is essentially impossible as a legitimate form of rule, because the very constitution of the ‘people’ that embodies sovereignty cannot itself be democratically or legitimately established (see Näsström, 2003, 2007, and Keenan, 2003: 13, 25–41). As Sophia Näsström puts it, there is a ‘gap at the heart of democracy in the sense that the people – in order to constitute the legitimate source of political authority – would have to be prior to itself’ (2003: 808). This problem is not, as Alan Keenan remarks,

merely a conceptual one, nor an issue that applies only to the moment (real or hypothetical) of the community’s foundation. … It is relevant any time the community is divided over an issue that touches on its identity as a community – which is to say, it is relevant for any important political issue in a democracy.

(2003: 37)

Because the identity of the people is ultimately indeterminable, every democratic polity is necessarily open to question, and every such regime is also simultaneously subject to the danger that, as Keenan says, ‘the drive to closure built in to the ideal of collective autonomy [may take] more forceful, even violent forms’ (2003: 13).

In the second place, democracy is also always in crisis, because it is always at least potentially unjust, in the sense that antagonism against others and xenophobia are built into its very practice. This second claim can be elaborated in three steps. First, a democratic polity cannot function as such unless the demos itself is delimited as a boundaried entity. Any such process of delimitation necessarily, and not merely accidentally, constitutes its inside and its outside – that is, it constitutes both itself and its other(s) – in one and the same move, because that is the logic of identification (I am this and therefore not that). Second, genuine identification in and with a group involves an affective tie that binds; it requires, as Wendy Brown argues, drawing on Freud, ‘something of a common ego, a common me to a degree that no mere social contract could produce’ (2006: 308). And, insofar as no such identification can ever be guaranteed in the sense that no ego, whether mine, yours or ours, is even conceivably unshakeable, the delimited demos is always essentially vulnerable to real or perceived attacks from within and without, against its boundaries. Third, the culture of liberalism that constitutes the demos in Western countries works no differently: the West, in constituting itself, simultaneously establishes what Brown calls ‘its constitutive outside and its hostile other’, which in this case comprises groups based on ‘religious, cultural or ethnic’ identity, whereas liberalism identifies itself as somehow above the fray developmentally (Brown, 2006: 316, 299). Thus, from a liberal point of view, Brown contends, ‘we have culture, while culture has them’, and therefore liberalism appears as the only ‘political rationality’ that can issue in tolerance or that can determine what modes of culture are even tolerable to begin with (2006: 299).

The outcome of this logic is that any democracy will necessarily entail an inbuilt xenophobia and, if it is a liberal democracy, it may entail a kind of colonial imaginary as well (see Brown, 2006: 302, 732–3, note 51). Either of these entailments may result in either more or less aggression towards other states, while internally every demos must also be on guard against those deemed foreign or different. Thus, democracies are again constitutively rather than merely accidentally vulnerable to the excesses of bigotry and right-wing populism, which is not to say that these excesses will necessarily occur. The fact remains, however, that they always might.¹

Consider Switzerland, for example, where the foreign population stands at 1.5 million, or approximately 20 per cent, because even third-generation immigrants are not automatically granted citizenship. Immigrants, their children and even their grandchildren must wait twelve years before applying for citizenship status. In practice, candidates with any connection to the Balkans, Turkey or Africa are regularly rejected in German-speaking regions – even if they meet the language and culture tests – while those from Western Europe are regularly accepted, after they have been submitted to a public town hall meeting or, until five years ago, to a secret vote. In fact, on 1 June 2008, the option of returning to a secret ballot was rejected by 64 per cent of the Swiss population in a nationwide referendum (BBC News, 2008). The referendum was initiated by Switzerland’s right-wing Swiss People’s Party, on the grounds that the Supreme Court decision to abolish secret ballots had undermined the people’s democratic right to have the final say – at least in principle. In fact, the reality was probably that the Supreme Court decision was perceived, rightly, to have undermined the people’s democratic right to exclude potential citizens on purely discriminatory, racial grounds – a right that citizens in a democracy by definition always have.

To be sure, liberal forms of democracy were instituted to combat precisely this kind of majoritarian bigotry by safeguarding individual rights against the rights of ‘the people’. But liberalism’s methodological individualism addresses the problem of right-wing populism only to introduce another form of injustice: the almost myopic focus on individual rights and (or as) individual property rights works (unwittingly and sometimes not) to aid and abet structural forms of inequality such as poverty or racist oppression, at the very least by occluding their operation, and sometimes even by encouraging it. To see this, we must note in the first place that liberal democracies tend to arise in the context of market economies, and economic globalization and neo-liberal hegemony have issued in an increasingly wide gap between the rich and the poor. As Carter and Stokes write, ‘while formal legal and political equality was achieved’, ‘the social and economic reality was gross inequity’ (2002: 2, 4). Individual rights offer no protection against this structural possibility. On the contrary, as Craig Browne argues, the same globalizing forces that produce a ‘contrast between the mobility of capital and the lesser mobility of people or labor’ also tend to ‘weaken class solidarity’ and promote ‘regressive nationalism and fundamentalism’, thus producing class- and ethnicity-based conflicts (Browne, 2006: 53).

Second, just as economic class disparity fails to appear to the liberal democratic perspective, so too are racial difference and social inequality largely hidden from view. This argument comes across forcefully in Himani Bannerji’s analysis of the Sangh Parivar, the Indian party of the Hindu right, which has made profoundly anti-democratic use of the formality of abstract, individual rights and ‘the liberal democratic tenets of freedoms of speech, association and assembly’. These goods were mobilized in support of an ‘extreme and sustained social politics of hindutva, of exclusion and hatred against Muslims’, she shows, a politics that culminated in a slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 (see Bannerji, 2006: 372, 373).

Most significantly, Bannerji demonstrates that illiberal polities based on ethnic nationalism have often arisen in modern, capitalist states; such nationalisms, she writes, ‘have combined the unfreedom of a class society with that of the free market, a neoliberal stance with an authoritarian form of governing’ (2006: 363). To combat this kind of sophisticated ideological manipulation, she contends, an appeal to abstract individual rights is clearly not enough. As she puts it,

Those who consider cultural politics as unimportant or secondary to what they deem ‘real’ politics do not have the capacity to either understand or resist this fascist hegemony. Nor do those liberals who separate the social from the cultural or the political. Secularism can provide a common platform to unite liberal democratic and left parties and win an electoral victory over the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, as happened in 2004, but this is not enough to hold back the re-emergence of hindutvo fascism.

(2006: 385; cf. Brown 2006: 313)

Taken together, these issues suggest that the perennial debate over questions of cultural ‘difference’, group rights and multicultural recognition – the debate that characterizes the state of democratic theory today – is essentially irresolvable, because these questions constitute the nature of democracy itself. The ideal of collective self-legislation, by and for the people, under conditions of freedom, equality and solidarity, is actually at odds with itself. It entails in the first place an irreconcilable need, in the name of freedom and solidarity, to question the demos while simultaneously closing its boundaries, and it entails in the second place an impossible compromise in the name of equality between the demand for inclusion, pluralism and openness to ‘others’, and the demand that a communal ‘we’ is instantiated and defended against both violent and non-violent threats. The very nature of democratic solidarity and collective identity is thus in conflict with the norms of individual autonomy, freedom and rights that democracies themselves demand.

There are, in short, internal tensions inherent in the very nature of the democratic ideal – concerning its foundational legitimacy and the impossibility of its promise – that simply cannot be fully repaired by the legal, institutional or even ethical remedies that are offered by theorists working to address democracy’s manifest deficits, yet that simultaneously provoke democracy to aim for its unrealizable perfectibility nonetheless. Democracy is, in one sense at least, nothing other than the crisis that gives rise to its own critique.²

Democracy in crisis

Despite this constitutive crisis of the first order, democratic polities do indeed function and even sometimes thrive, which is precisely why legal, institutional and ethical repairs are properly conceived and undertaken. This is true at least in the best-case scenario, which would entail a relatively homogenous populace that shares some kind of communal identity, a relatively stable and adequate economy, a relatively accountable mode of governance and a relative degree of national security. Under these optimal conditions, disputes and contestations that arise among groups within states or between one state and another can be addressed through what Chantal Mouffe might call a form of agonistic politics, which entails adversarial political relations, but not outright violence or antagonism (see Howarth, 2008: 177–8) – provided, that is to say, that institutional and procedural mechanisms to ensure justice are in place.

Moreover, a certain degree of political apathy, prescribed by democratic theorists in the 1950s (in the guise of empirical realism) and institutionalized through mechanisms that effectively disenfranchised the populace, also serves to lessen both the frequency and the severity of social and political conflicts, as it did in the twenty-year period following World War II, thus giving rise to the appearance of successful democratization in various Western nations. As Jeffrey Green summarizes the point, a preference for a certain degree of political ‘apathy’ stemmed from the belief that it enabled social cohesion, whereas mass democracy ‘would lead to chaos and political disintegration’ (2004: 747; cf. Isaac, 1998: 39 and Browne, 2006: 49).

Western liberal regimes that have adopted this model of representative democracy did stave off fascism and achieve stability, but, as Jeffrey Isaac argues, they also resulted in extremely poor versions of democracy. For such regimes do not ensure that ‘the people rule in any meaningful sense or that the will of the people is realized’. Rather, the people’s will is mediated by officials, divided, and only crudely and partially represented (Isaac, 1998: 30).

The great virtues of this representative model of liberal democracy, of course – which is more or less taken as the very essence of democracy in the public imagination – are that it undercuts the kind of popular mobilization that leads to fascism – as notoriously occurred in Germany in the 1930s, for example – and that it achieves at least a ‘modicum’ of comfort, security and political stability (Isaac, 1998: 34). The great drawback of this model, on the other hand, is that it produces comfort and security at the expense of any significant form of collective self-determination or autonomy.

From this point of view, one might say that a legacy of the impoverishment of democracy had already set the stage, at least fifty years ago, for the current state of affairs. In other words, it is arguably precisely because the form of democracy on offer now is so watered down and ineffectual, in terms of providing any real opportunity for civic engagement, that there has been such a dramatic decrease in voter turnout in many Western democracies since the 1980s (which now hovers in the sixtieth percentile in Britain, Canada and the United States), such a manifest loss of trust in public authority, and such a marked decline in governmental legitimacy (see, for example, Parvin and McHugh, 2005: 634–5; Elections Canada, 2006; Carter and Stokes, 2002: 3; Crozier et al., 1975). Writing on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 Task Force Report, ‘The Crisis of Democracy’ (Crozier et al., 1975), for example, Robert Putnam, Jean-Claude Casanova and Seizaburo Sato claimed there was no longer any ‘significant evidence’ that ‘fundamental democratic principles and institutions faced a serious threat’ in 1995. However, they quickly added, even if democracy was essentially more secure in its institutions than had been thought possible twenty years earlier, this was not to say that everything was therefore ‘well with politics and government in the trilateral world’, because there was no question that political alienation and widespread cynicism were rampant in Western democracies (Putnam et al., 1995).

Such a status quo might have been deemed generally acceptable as long as the other conditions (economic, social and political) were met. However, we don’t live in the best of times, and this returns us to the way in which democracy is in crisis now, at a second level or order, as it were – that is, in an urgent and timely sense that goes beyond the ‘spectacular index of public impatience’ with democratic politics that is evidenced by declining participation in elections (Maier, 1994: 48). Indeed, the suggestion that the success of democracy might be measured solely in terms of electoral turnout may itself be a symptom of the very crisis this book attempts to illuminate and to interrogate – namely, that there is less and less public space in which to engage meaningfully in the world or with one another, and that there is greater and greater violence undertaken to foreclose what space there is – rather than as a causal factor that might simply be addressed through attempts to increase civic participation. Given an increasingly heterogeneous make-up of the populace in European and North American countries, due to massive changes in migration flows, the condition of unstable or radically impoverished economies in the global South and East due to privatization and global deregulation, and the growing manifestation of governmental unaccountability in the West in response to real or perceived threats to national security, I would submit, the tensions within democratic regimes that already exist at the first order – concerning the legitimacy of the people, the impossibility of collective autonomy, and the essential antagonism towards others that is built into democracy’s very character – are subject to forces that stress them beyond the repairs that customary checks can provide.

Beginning with the notorious events of September 11, 2001 – barely moments after the obviously premature proclamation of the ‘end of history’ that the fall of the Berlin wall was said to have inaugurated (Fukuyama, 1992) – there has been a marked rise of violence around the world towards intolerable ‘others’ and the gradual erosion of democracy, even where its certainty has been least open to doubt. Consider, for example, the ongoing ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the ‘Bradford riots’ in July 2001 in England, which involved days of violent, racial conflict between ethnic minorities and a white majority in West Yorkshire, the inexcusable abuse of human rights exercised by the US government at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, the illegitimate American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the bombings in Madrid, Spain, in 2004, the riots in France in as many as three hundred towns in response to the deaths at the hands of the police of two African-born teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois in late October 2005, the American Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 – which criminalizes ‘all foreign born people who live, work, and pay taxes in the United States, but from whom … current immigration law has denied permanent resident status’ (Chacón, 2006) – the arrest in August 2006 of twenty-four suspected ‘terrorists’ following the bombing of three tube stations and a bus in London, England, and the violence that erupted in France again in November 2007 in the Parisian suburb of Villiersle-Bel, which is home to a large population of people of African and Arab descent, and which is plagued by high unemployment rates, poverty, racial segregation and inadequate educational opportunities for French-born children of immigrants.³

If the above examples signal the widespread, violent contestation of democratic community, moreover, they also signal a second issue, particularly since September 2001, which is the erosion of the sacrosanct individual rights that are supposed to be the hallmark of liberal democratic societies. The American ‘wars’ on drugs and on terror seem to amount to, respectively, a war on African-Americans and a war on Muslims in particular and on those of (or thought to be of) Middle Eastern or South-Asian descent more generally.⁴ Ironically, there is little evidence that these initiatives to combat drug use or increase ‘security’ have been particularly effective, although it is clear that they have padded prison cells and alienated racialized citizens, immigrants and visitors in Western democracies, often at the expense of legally enshrined individual rights.

An especially egregious case in point is that of Maher Arar, the Syrian-born, Canadian citizen who was detained by US immigration officers in New York on his way back to Canada after visiting Tunisia in 2002. Denied access to legal council or due process, he was suspected (but not formally accused) of having connections to Al-Qaeda, and was summarily deported by the US government to Syria on the basis of incomplete or misleading information supplied by the Canadian RCMP. Arar was held and tortured for almost a year in a Syrian prison. On 18 September 2006, the Canadian ‘Arar Commission’ cleared Arar of all suspected activities and connections related to terrorism in general and to the security of Canada in particular, but the emotional and financial damage appears to be irreparable (see Arar Commission, 2006, and Maher Arar’s website).⁵ Another notorious case was the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the Stockwell tube station in London on 22 July 2005. De Menezes was a Brazilian national suspected of having taken part in four attempted bombings that had taken place the previous day. Although he was unarmed, he was pursued and then shot seven times in the head – killed long before even his identity, let alone his alleged involvement, could be determined. He was later proven to have had no connection to the attempted bombings. Legislation such as the USA Patriot Act of 2001, the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 and the Australian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2005 paves the way for the quashing of individuals’ civil rights in precisely these ways.

These events are by no means conclusive, but they do reveal that democratic constitutional regimes around the world are in significant trouble in ways that are increasingly urgent in their implications. They indicate a widespread and multifaceted problem liberal democratic regimes are having dealing with ‘others’ and thus with making good on their most essential aim of embodying the rule of the people as a whole and simultaneously ensuring their freedom and equality. Such examples suggest an irrefutable rise of virulent, civilizational clash, both between sovereign states and within them. Moreover, the countries that have been implicated in events of these sorts – Canada, the United States, Switzerland, Australia, France, Ireland and the United Kingdom – are among those that pride themselves particularly on the freedom they provide, the tolerance they endorse and the equality they espouse. How can we address the violence that is emerging everywhere towards weak and minority others, the internal rupture of communities and the resurgence of ethnic forms of identity in so many societies that represent themselves as democratic? How might we rectify the growing inequality before the law – or even its suspension – and the increasingly inequitable allocation of civil rights, which are reaching violent and therefore critical proportions?

Theories of democracy

These questions are under serious consideration among political scientists, social theorists and political philosophers. As Carter and Stokes note in the introduction to their collected volume, Democratic Theory Today, ‘the growing assertion of religious or ethnic identity by minorities is due both to the increase in migration in a globalized world and to a new assertiveness among migrants’ and, consequently, there is also ‘a growing awareness of the challenges to conventional notions of citizenship in a culturally diverse society, where people may have multiple identities and allegiances and where the possibility of global citizenship is on the agenda’ (2002: 6, 3–4). On this basis, P.J. Kelly argued in 2001 that ‘multiculturalism’ is ‘a political problem for modern ethnically plural societies’, and that it has arguably ‘become the problem for political philosophers in the last decade’ (2001: 428), particularly in terms of the ‘potential crisis in [liberalism’s] universalist self-representation’, as Wendy Brown has clarified more recently (2006: 316). Indeed, Isaac remarked in 1998 that, as a result of ‘economic transformations … new forms of global mass media, and dramatic demographic shifts’, the most serious problem facing liberal democratic regimes now ‘is what might be called a crisis of national identity’. This crisis is one whereby the very ‘meaning of membership in a national community and of democratic citizenship in a nation state’ is called into question (Isaac, 1998: 35–6). In a review essay on ‘Recent democratic theory’ written at roughly the same time, Mary Dietz summarizes the issues facing democratic theorists as follows:

the crisis of identity/difference (in national and international, as well as group and cultural terms), the creation of shared yet diverse communities, the articulation of civic moral ideals, the meaning of civil society, the challenges of multiculturalism, the problems facing participatory social movements, the procedures of deliberative democratic practices, and – above all – the phenomenon of citizenship, whether as an ‘ideal’ … a ‘myth’ … or a ‘theoretical problem’ … are the themes that animate much democratic political theory today.

(1998, 113–14)

It is clear that questions concerning the nature of national identity, the value of democratic citizenship and the possibility of civic solidarity – questions, in short, that arise from the crisis of democracy I have identified as occurring at the second order – are now high on the political science agenda and, indeed, that they have been for quite some time. As a case in point, the thirty-fourth Annual Conference of the Atlantic Provinces Political Science Association – which met in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in early October 2008 – was entitled ‘Democracy’s Shifting Shorelines: Representation, Citizenship & Governance’, and shortly thereafter the fourth Global Conference on ‘Pluralism, Inclusion and Citizenship’ was held in Salzburg, Austria.

Yet, if it is conceded that, in a certain sense, democracy is always in crisis to begin with – that is, that it is constitutively in critical condition, so to speak – then it is not clear that the kinds of answers to these questions such scholarship will produce – essentially, that what we need now are different or additional institutional fixes – will go very far towards addressing the root issues at stake. In other words, if a timely and urgent crisis at the second order, which is manifest now as rampant, civilizational clash and which has provoked extensive discussions and analyses of citizenship and democratic practice, is itself informed by an underlying crisis of the first order, which is to say, by the critical condition of democracy as such, then debating the relative merits of, for example, deliberative democracy versus communitarianism, or social democracy versus civic republicanism, simply will not be enough, since these approaches were only partially successful even at the best of times. In fact, one might venture that there are arguably two basic limitations to a majority of the conceptual models on offer.

The first limitation concerns the evident theoretical impasse that has all but stalled innovative developments in analytical democratic thought since approximately the 1980s: the liberal–communitarian debate. Already in 1998, Mary Dietz, writing in the British journal Political Theory, expressed frustration with the then decade-old practice of reducing all theoretical questions relating to democracy to the polemical terms of the conflict between individual rights and group identity (1998: 116). Yet this polemic continues to play itself out. Just as K.A. Appiah is applauded (in 2006) for having succeeded ‘where so many other theorists and philosophers have failed: explaining the value of diversity in terms of individuality’ (Soutphommasane, 2006: 115), so Bhikhu Parekh is chastised for falling too far on the communitarian side of the line (see Kelly, 2001). In his text The Politics of Identity (2004), Mike Kenny overviews the debates about identity politics in Anglo-American political thought and focuses particularly, in the final two chapters, on the liberal (recognition) and communitarian (difference) discussions, as do a host of other writers working in the Anglo-American tradition, including Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, James Tully, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, Duncan Ivison, Iris Marion Young, Amy Gutmann and Avagail Eisenberg, among others. These theorists all offer responses to the ‘question’ of social difference and the issue of national identity – with a range of proposals that include increasing the avenues available to members of various sub-national communities for public, civic engagement through deliberative juries, polls, referenda and consultative bodies informed by carefully defined procedural criteria based on discourse ethics (deliberative democracy); increasing social capital through the encouragement of community associations (civic republicanism); instituting the devolution of traditional state functions onto civil society associations comprised of independent, voluntary members (associative democracy); extending democratic structures of governance and political participation from the national to the global level (cosmopolitan democracy); founding collective national identity on constitutional principles drawn from political culture rather than on ethical principles associated with cultural forms of life (constitutional patriotism); encouraging cultural memberships and collective solidarities within an overarching liberal state (communitarianism); and redistributing wealth through progressive taxation and social welfare reform (social democracy) – but fail to address the constitutive (or first-order) crisis of democracy itself.

What these perspectives share, in other words – notwithstanding their many important differences and insights – is the assumption that the contemporary crisis of democracy is provoked by the antithesis between alterity and democracy, between the ‘othered’ and democracy, between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, between the non-citizen and the citizen, and so on; incommensurable ‘others’ are deemed the source of the problem. From this point of view, the kind of radical, irreducible difference that contemporary conflicts manifest is seen as a ‘crisis’ for democracy – a crisis of policy or law, for example – that can best be addressed through the greater inclusion of given cultural identities, expanded conceptions of citizenship or the broadening of civil rights. Such an approach, rooted as it is in the politics of identity and yet insufficiently attentive to its exclusionary logic, ultimately succeeds well only insofar as it sidesteps or defers the crisis that radical difference entails.

Ironically, the continental response, which has often positioned itself on the difference side of the debate and which tends to address the reality of radical difference much more directly, may also be locked into the same dialectic – although, as Patchen Markell rightly notes, most careful continentalists do not crudely advocate radical contingency, anarchy, insubordination, contestation, rupture or some such aim simply in the place of identity, rule or stability (Markell, 2006: 2). On the contrary, because those such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Sheldon Wolin, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Jacques Rancière do all concede that ‘some sort of rule is unavoidable’, as Markell puts it, their theories are in fact troubled, even while they are enriched, by the paradox that ‘democracy’ means both the ideal of popular rule in which ‘the people’ (‘we’) rule over our collective destiny and, simultaneously, the ideal of popular insubordination or unruliness, in which ‘the people spontaneously shatter the bonds of established political forms’ (Markell, 2006: 2, 3). It is a paradox they have neither resolved nor fully taken on. Moreover, just as Browne suggests that Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy is a ‘countermodel’ of the deliberative model (Browne, 2006: 54), so it is not at all clear that these partially inverted models of democracy are not also responses to the same liberal–communitarian, identity–difference, conceptual binds that stymie analytical democratic thought. Markell, for example, suggests that, insofar as continental scholarship on democratic theory proceeds ‘by inverting a common objection to democracy’ – namely, that it amounts to mob rule by the incapable and the uninformed – ‘the space they have opened up is structured by a series of stark oppositions’ between the closure and the openness that democracy constitutively entails (Markell, 2006: 2).

Nonetheless, much of this work does delve, as Markell says, beyond institutional issues into the ‘elementary idea of democracy itself, exploring problems that lurk in and behind its basic terms’, and it is specifically to this endeavour that the present volume is intended to contribute (see Markell, 2006: 1). Many of the arguments in the chapters that follow draw directly on resources those continentalists provide. For the second, more general, limitation attending so many conceptual models of democracy is that they tend to respond to the second-order level of crisis, without fully attending to the first. In other words, while analytical, theoretical work on representative democracy, deliberative democracy, radical pluralism, social democracy, agonism, cosmopolitan democracy, constitutional patriotism, civic republicanism, and so on, does indeed address such obvious democratic deficits as the lack of civic engagement, the impotence of electoral politics, the question of legitimate authority and the inequities attending social and cultural identity, and while continental, theoretical work on various forms of radical democracy does indeed attend to and expose the irreducible contingency, uncertainty, openness and instability at the heart of democratic power, only a handful of thinkers are trying to think about the possibility of democracy itself on the basis of, rather than despite, its inaugural crisis.

To contribute to this conversation, this volume on ‘violence, alterity, community’ addresses the crisis of democracy that is in evidence at the second order of analysis, not by rehearsing, reiterating or reformulating the diversity-within-unity model of democratic reform, nor by simply developing or celebrating the openness of contestability and contingency (as misinformed versions of deconstruction tend to do), but rather by returning to the critical instability that stands at democracy’s first or foundational level – that is, at the level of its very meaning. In other words, this volume offers a departure from the identity–difference, liberal–communitarian, universalist–multiculturalist terms of the debate about the politics of identity. Rather than beginning from either side of those divides, these authors start from the insight that the crisis of democracy is its paradoxical condition of possibility rather than its problem. The term used in what follows to signal this condition is ‘alterity’.

This term appears frequently in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who used it to distinguish otherness in its most radical, irreducible, ethical sense from the more quotidian, ontological understanding of what is merely other than what is. In other words, alterity for Levinas qualifies something far beyond what is merely different from this, from it, from me, and it therefore signifies something quite apart from the plane of being or of identity. For what is other-than (other than this, other than it, other than me) is merely a negative form of existent, merely that which is not the same as what is – merely a not-having the quality of this, of it, of me – and so what is other-than is ultimately a dimension of the same identity as its positive counterpart. ‘Otherness’ in Levinas’s sense is really uncognizable: it is what is not thematizable, not reducible to the categories of identity, being or