Conflicts and democracy: Considerations on political conflicts and the need of their delimitation

Abstract

According to our common experience of political life, the relationship between politics andconflicts seems to be obvious. However, it is also common to think about delimiting the intensityof conflicts in a democratic context. This kind of complexity of the relation of democracy andconflicts can be cexplained from two theoretical perspectives. First, in order to protect democraticorder, conflicts may lose their relevance in comparison to the value of consent or compromise. Second, even if we accept the importance of conflicts, we also should take into account the limitsof their intensity. These theoretical problems arise in the context of contemporary politics whichnature is eminently public and in which every announcement is open to discussion. This is whatdiscourse as a theoretical horizon means. The core concept for theorizing the conflictual characterof politics in a discursive manner is political debate. The article explores three kinds of debateand communicative conflicts: John Stuart Mill, as a classical nineteenth century liberal, shedslight on the importance of debate in issues of collective truth-seeking and emotional devotionto our personal values. Márton Szabó, a leading theorist of political discourse in Hungary, alsotreats debate as a core concept of political discourse studies, and theorizes debate not only asa series of singular acts in the realm of politics, but as a mode of existence of politics itself.Contrary to other contemporary ideas of communication and politics, discourse is thereforeinherently conflictual in its character. Similarly, but more embedded in contemporary debatesover democracy, Chantal Mouffe, one of the eminent theorists of agonism, interprets conflictsin the context of democratic order, and emphasises the democratic conditions for constructingdemocratic identities. Her ideas on agonistic democracy can fathom the relation of valuableconflicts and their limits in a democratic regime.