Take a look at the diagram below. It looks similar to the six dimensions of inequality, but this one is different:
Figure: The six new forms of politics, all part of one emergent, “intra-relational” balance: None of the six forms are fully possible without the others, and the very meaning of each new kind of politics changes depending on how the others develop.
Three Caveats
A few important notes before we delve into it. First of all, it should be noted that none of these forms of politics are themselves answers to the problems of modern life in any static sense .
Each of them is a process ; one that can be more or less consciously recognized and monitored; more or less clearly articulated and productively acted upon. Just like we today have ministries of finance and a host of institutions for financial regulation, this hardly guarantees good economic governance—likewise the existence of Democratization Politics does not guarantee a good process of democratization (and so forth with the other five forms of politics).
But it is still a good idea to have ministries of finance, and likewise it is a good idea to have a deliberately crafted politics of democratization. The existence of these kinds of politics does not in themselves, of course, guarantee good politics within each field. It merely opens a host of potentials.
The point is that these processes are ongoing in our societies either way, whether or not we have a language to describe them and political frameworks to relate to them. As these processes become consciously recognized and re-organized, we increase our ability to create a free and fair society—a great potential, but no promises made.
The manifestation of these six new processes includes several ingredients: they must become seriously considered political issues that are discussed in the public debate, they must have batteries of interventions and experts working with them, and there must be serious efforts to expand this knowledge and understanding through the social and behavioral sciences—i.e. they must become part and parcel of academic life as well. There must be educational and career paths for people who want to work with these issues, and there must be sufficient recognition of this work. That’s how we get the new processes of society’s self-organization going.
Why, then, is a process so much more powerful than any specific policy position or any one “concrete action”? It is because a process consists of a multitude of countless concrete actions that build upon and are coordinated with each other in a coherent, larger pattern. And because there is an ongoing flow of new actions taken, the process can begin to flow in new directions. It is flexible, but still has continuity and an overarching theme. If you want to build a skyscraper, it requires many people to understand roughly what a skyscraper is and what it means to build one. The same goes for large, societal processes. You need to name them, define them, discuss them, and keep developing your understanding of them.
The second point to note is that we’re not —at this point—taking a hard stance on whether these new forms of politics should rely upon state bureaucracy, market solutions or civil society . The only thing that is certain, I would argue, is that the state cannot be entirely left out. It is going to have to involve political parties and other groups, advancing these issues in a political arena. But the extent to which markets and civil society can and should be relied upon is beyond the current scope of inquiry. No doubt, the answers to this question can and will vary across different countries and historical circumstances: some societies have more robust public institutions to build upon, other livelier civil societies, and yet others more dynamic markets.
Future deliberations about the balance between state, market and civil society will need to be specific in nature—for instance, perhaps there is more room for market agents within democratization politics than within Gemeinschaft politics, and perhaps the optimal mix varies over time. It is quite likely that a good mix of the three will be viable within most of these areas of concern—even if the state, and politics, is likely to play an indispensable role, simply because we are, after all, considering institutions.
The third point I wish to emphasize is that I am here speaking of “society” in the abstract , not necessarily as a country with a state. Given that much of society will self-organize through other means than state institutions in the coming period (with blockchain technologies, transnational corporations, NGOs, strong city regions, industry hubs, supranational organizations and so forth) there is no reason to lock down our perspective to states only.
But even beyond states, through whatever form society self-organizes, I hold that this pattern of deeper governance is relevant. So please allow me the luxury of speaking about “society” as if it were a country with a state, and you can make inferences and adaptations to other structures of governance from there. This does not mean we are adopting the state-based social engineering made famous by the Swedish sociologist couple Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in the 1930s, but rather that we are looking at wider patterns or processes, with the development of the state as one primary example .
After these presentations of the six new kinds of politics I will inquire into how these taken together form a master pattern , how they each balance each other out—and how they are instituted.
Hence, there is an element of chicken-and-egg paradox here: You need to understand all six new forms of politics to see the master pattern, but you need to see the master pattern to see how they can function and realistically be instituted within society—so that our thoughts, feelings and actions may emerge together in deeper harmonic coherence across all aspects of everyday life.
Without further ado, let us leap into the torrent. First out is Democratization Politics.
En garde !
Chapter 9:
DEMOCRATIZATION POLITICS
Is democracy a done deal? Is the form of governance prevailing in the West today the most democratic there is ever going to be? We normally think of democracy and dictatorship as a binary question: either a country is a democracy or it is not. Yet this black-and-white conception of democracy has been challenged, for instance by Freedom House’s graded scale or the 2014 Princeton study which argued the US is more accurately described as a civil oligarchy than a democracy per se. [75]
To be, or not to be democratic—that isn’t really the question. No, the intelligent question is the extent to which a society manages to include its citizens into the political processes; not whether a society is a democracy, but how democratic it has become.
So how do we determine just that? How do we define democracy and how do we measure a society’s degree of democracy?
The mainstream account of democratic governance still goes along the lines of what the political scientist Robert Dahl described in the 1950s and onwards. According to Dahl, democracy shows up as a power balance between different interest groups. Such balance forces the parties into a situation in which the following five criteria must be true (this particular definition is from a 1989 book): [76]
1. Effective participation : Citizens must have adequate and equal opportunities to form their preference and place questions on the public agenda and express reasons for one outcome over the other.
2. Voting equality at the decisive stage : Each citizen must be assured their judgments will be counted as equal in weights to the judgments of others.
3. Enlightened understanding : Citizens must enjoy ample and equal opportunities for discovering and affirming which choices best serve their interests.
4. Control of the agenda : “The people” must have the opportunity to decide what should be actual political matters and which should be brought up for deliberation.
5. Inclusiveness: Equality must extend to all citizens within the state. Everyone has a legitimate stake within the political process.
It should be noted that all the states commonly held as democratic fail to truly ful
fill these ideals, and that it would be more or less impossible to actually do so. Dahl’s definition of democratic governance, despite being rather conventional, serves to illustrate how much democracy is more of an ideal than an actual state of affairs; that democracy remains an impossible goal worth striving towards.
Just like the socialist Eastern Bloc didn’t actually consider their societies communist, but rather saw communism as the end-goal that the “actually existing socialism” was in the process of creating, true democracy remains the unrealized promise of liberal society; the equally distant utopia that the “actually existing liberalism” should be in the process of creating.
Sadly, the idea of democracy as an ongoing process—a fight for equality and liberty that never ends—has waned in favor of the belief we have already reached the end-goal of a fully democratic society. As a result, faith in democracy has eroded in recent years. Without the prospect of further democratization, those who feel disenfranchised in modern society have become more inclined to abandon democracy altogether.
As a remedy, I propose we update democracy; that we abandon the notion of democracy as a done deal and renegotiate its terms—that democracy, as it is currently realized, can only ever be a proto-synthesis; that it, by necessity, remains provisional and always subject to future revision.
Updating Democracy Itself
I thus believe we have ample reason to challenge the relative self-contentment of the world’s “most democratic” societies by asking how they could become more democratic? Could the governance of societies like Sweden or the US be transformed and improved upon, even beyond what Dahl envisioned? Could there be future, deeper forms of “democracy” which are not only improvements upon the present systems, but genuinely and qualitatively different in clearly preferable ways?
From such an imagined future vantage point, could today’s taken-for-granted state of affairs in contemporary “democratic” societies even be viewed as terribly undemocratic, primitive and oppressive? Are we medieval?
It is often claimed that today’s democracy is under threat; that it is decaying, that it might be losing its grip or otherwise is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. [77] But such diagnoses can also be understood as a malady of modernity aging, of the modern institutions, founded a century ago or more, having become unable to effectively tackle the complexities of metamodern (postindustrial, transnational, digitized, etc.) society—a society in which the key self-organizational flows occur on a much higher order of complexity.
Thus, we are not only talking about restoring, revitalizing or “saving” democracy, but about fundamentally updating democracy and reimagining its institutions . Hence, we are asking a more radical and dangerous question: How do we reinvent democracy? What kind of democracy comes after democracy?
This is an idea echoed not only in the work of Habermas, but also in the experimental political philosophy of the legal theorist Roberto Unger. Habermas points us towards a deeper form of post-liberal democracy and Unger opens the door to taking an experimental stance towards the democratic institutions—that they can and should be experimented upon under controlled and reasonable forms.
If our present political systems are in a state of relative decay, can they really be mended and saved with the currently adopted tools of democratic governance? Isn’t it more realistic to imagine a path forward towards a democratic system more up to speed with today’s globalized and digitized world? If our democratic institutions are working poorly due to being designed to govern a modern, industrial nation state of yesteryear—doesn’t it make sense to take the issue of updating and reinventing these institutions more seriously?
The fundamental starting point of Democratization Politics is thus a negative : There is simply no conceivable reason to believe our current forms of governance in modern democratic societies would be the only possible and best forms of governance for all posterity. If all other forms of governance have emerged in historical time, have had beginnings and endings, is it really a feasible supposition that liberal parliamentary democracy is an exception?
No, democracy is not a done deal. Why would it be? It is a developmental process like everything else, just one that stabilizes around relatively fixed equilibria (or “local maxima”) because institutional changes require such great investments and create path dependencies. With “path dependency” I mean that, basically, once a society has opted for a certain form of governance, it is very “expensive” and difficult to change the structure.
The fact that liberal democracy has been stably operational for a good while, that is has outcompeted its modern alternatives, such as communism and fascism, and that it remains very difficult to change—even to imagine a credible alternative—can create the illusion that democracy in its current form is “the natural order of things”. But of course, it isn’t.
Luckily there are hacks; there are ways to get around this bottleneck and to open developmental paths that lie beyond liberal democracy.
First of all, a society can expend resources, time and effort in smaller settings to experiment with potentially better forms of governance, e.g. in “experimental zones”, as proposed by Roberto Unger. Secondly, a society can orchestrate a large number of democratic technologies and innovations in governance which seek to enhance democracy incrementally. If enough incremental change has occurred, eventually the system itself will have shifted from one stage to another.
And here’s another way of seeing it: Given the sacred status of democracy, isn’t it strange that no late modern economies are making serious, concerted and patient efforts to develop it and improve upon its quality? By treating democracy as a given, are we not failing to take our own democratic values seriously?
The True North: Collective Intelligence
Let’s begin by plunging into this question by identifying a few general historical trends. What does it mean for democracy to develop? How did it emerge, and why? And what were the attractors that brought democracy into being?
I’d like to suggest that there are some deep and sturdy historical patterns which—again—don’t determine where things are going, but certainly hint us towards some long-term attractor points, i.e. the direction towards which things potentially can go.
If democracy is not a binary variable, not a question of either-or, but a developmental matter, a direction—can we then know and recognize its “true north”? Can we know when democracy becomes deeper, retains higher quality, becomes truer to its own principles and ideals?
And if we go far enough in this direction, will democracy inevitably look like “more of the same”, or will there be qualitative shifts from one stage to another that will make democracy look like something completely different, perhaps event warranting a new word? What if liberal parliamentary democracy isn’t “democratic enough” for governing metamodern society?
To traverse the dangerous territory such questions lead us towards, we’d better have a good sense of a “true north” lest we can get lost and end up inventing new forms of oppression, tyranny, or political disintegration and collapse. Let’s look for such a true north.
One undeniable trend is the increasing dispersion of leadership and decision-making . If we go back in history it becomes perfectly clear that pre-modern and early modern monarchical leadership was more concentrated, more arbitrarily wielded and relying more upon the good nature and talent of specific rulers than what is the case in present-day parliamentary democracies. Today, more people partake in decision-making at all levels of society, and wider groups of citizens can be elected.
But even nowadays, the world-system, as a whole, places incredible responsibility and power in e.g. the US President, which must be viewed as a very high-risk strategy for governance. If this one person has significant flaws—as we all do—
this leads to great costs for people all around the world. As such, there still remain pockets of irrationally and inefficiently concentrated power in contemporary democracies.
Another undeniable trend has to do with the increased total volume of active decision-making, i.e. the sheer volume of information processed by organs of governance, and the complexity of the processes deliberately shaped by governance.
When viewed as a very long historical trend, it becomes obvious that governance has become “more powerful” over the centuries. Governments simply have much greater capacities to interfere in the lives of citizens than in the past. I have already pointed out that the taxation capacities of modern societies, even while limited in practice due to corruption and the flight of transnational corporate capital, are staggering compared to anything that came before. Strong states levy high taxes, and they penetrate society more thoroughly in a variety of ways. As we have discussed, Foucault pointed out that modern “free” society requires many additional layers of control.
Naturally, it is not that a system with greater total power is more democratic in itself, as it is easy to name totalitarian states with high degrees of organization. But there certainly is a correlation between the quantity of self-organization and the growth of democratic forms of governance around the world. And even if libertarianism is a strong current in many present-day democracies (seeking to minimize state power), even the most libertarian ones in the world today are highly organized by historical standards.
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