ERIM Research Clinic: The Rhetoric of Manageable Democracies

The first rhetorical question: how democratic is a parliamentary democracy? The second rhetorical question: why individuals sometimes decide to act as citizens and stand for themselves and for the others?

When the European students of the late sixties invented the label of a “non-parliamentary opposition” in order to signal their disagreement with available political choices, to manifest their reluctance to limit themselves to the options represented by the established political parties, they coined yet another historical term for a more “direct democracy”. When the French students sprayed the walls of Odeon theatre and Sorbonne with the slogan “Imagination au pouvoir” (“Power to imagination”) – they meant a direct democracy of concerned citizens mobilized for political activism and directly shaping political decisions. They managed to topple general de Gaulle, but did not manage to sustain their revolutionary fervor in an institutionalized way.

The third rhetorical question: is egalitarianism manageable in a non-egalitarian world? “Democratization is not about being left alone, but about becoming a self that sees the values of common involvements and endeavors and finds in them a source of self-fulfillment.”(Wolin, 2008, 289) The answer to this question is based partly on historical evidence and partly on what is currently happening in the Arab peninsula and in Northern Africa.  The great “Spring of nations” in central and eastern Europe, triggered by the Polish mass movement of civil disobedience “Solidarity” in August 1980 and completed by the peaceful transfer of power from the Polish communist party to the democratic government in 1988 (after the “round table” negotiations), followed by a spectacular breakdown of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet occupational zone legitimized by a puppet regime of German Democratic Republic (November 1989), accompanied by the downfall of the communist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, had not been based on a clandestine build-up of clandestine, violent underground armies, fighting squads or terrorist networks. The mobilization was peaceful and the tactic was non-violent. Jeffrey Goldfarb called it “the politics of small things” and placed in the daily local “small scale” acts of refusal to pay dues to the ideology, repressive dictatorship and lawlessness. But do we notice it in time to pay attention and to design a successful action?

“If classical diplomacy is mediation by letter and emissary conducted in secret, contemporary diplomacy is mediation via television and Internet. The rise of spin represents a realization that a transparent world requires different strategies than an opaque one. Spin is the rhetoric of an information age (bold letter type mine – S.M.).” (Brown, 2003, 155)

Required reading:

• Brown, Robin, 2003, “Spinning the World. Spin Dcotors, Mediation and Foreign Policy”, in: Debrix,   Francois, Weber, Cynthia, eds., Rituals in Mediation. International Politics and Social Meaning, Minneapolis & London, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 154-172 (available through the ERIM Doctoral Office)
• Magala, Slawomir, 2009, The Management of Meaning in Organizations, Basingstoke & New York, Palgrave (Macmillan) (chapter 7, pp. 213-221). Download reading