The concept of democracy after history’s resurrection: a radical point of view

The authors start from the assumption that the promoters of (liberal) democracy have given up on the policy to make liberal democracy the only political form in the whole world. This means that the concept of democracy undergoes yet another transformation. The question arises, what were the characteristics of the form of democracy that is being abandoned today? In order to demonstrate this, we will first present Rancière's understanding of the so-called consensus democracy. He observes that in 1989, together with the Berlin wall, a distinction between the so called "formal" and "real" democracy also collapsed. It collapsed together with the myth about the power of the people either in its Rousseauian ('sovereign nation') or in the Marxist sense as a worker or proletarian dialectical subject. In the form of democratic politics that dominated until the Russian-Ukrainian war, only individuals, that is, groups that "agree on legal-political forms that can ensure the coexistence of all" (Rancière) were supposed to survive. Apart from this, Rancière warns that the power of democratic institutions (such as parliaments) has gradually collapsed in favour of various 'instances without responsibility' (judges, experts, committees). For this French philosopher, the post-Cold War transformation of democracy paradoxically rehabilitates Marxism because compared to its late modernism variant, is positioned as the exclusive "expression of a certain social state". Thus, democracy is based on parties that are "already given, (and) their community is already established..." (90). In short, the post-Cold War democracy was denying the possibility for 'emergence', which in Rancière's radical-democratic understanding means the end of politics. We will then turn to John Gray, a British philosopher, who long ago opposed Fukuyama's thesis that "liberal democratic institutions are uniquely necessary for justice and the human good" (1996). Gray announced that Fukuyama is mostly wrong because "all the evidence suggests that we are now moving back into an epoch that is classically historical". It means that Western democracy today, as in the first half of the last century, is faced with the possibility that it may not be able to secure its universal hegemony. This principle of universal hegemony seems no longer relevant, and therefore it seems that the concept of liberal democracy is (at least temporarily) saying goodbye to its universalist component. We might be entering an era of a more parochial concept of democracy, of ‘democracy in one country' and should explore the consequences of this abandonment of universality for the concept of democracy.