Respect My Right to Dominate

Máté Zombory,Péter Csigó

doi:10.17356/ieejsp.v6i1.679

Abstract

In this article, we present how the recognition framework of political and historic representation has enabled reactionary political forces, which increasingly recognize its inner contradictions and turn them against the basic principle of universal dignity, with the clear aim of corroding the whole recognition political edifice from the inside out. Taking the field of the symbolic construction of European identity as our main focus, we will reconstruct how the takeover of recognition politics has destabilized political and historic representation in Europe and ended up undermining European integration rather than enhancing it. Following one of the most important theorists of political and historic representation, Frank Ankersmit, we introduce the conceptual distinction between antifoundationalist vs. founda-tionalist representation in order to account for the series of decisive institutional changes that since the 1970s have contributed to the intersection of two separate fields into ‘memory politics’ and led to the rise of a new and inherently non-democratic foundationalism, of which recognition politics is one of the main symptoms.

Highlights

We address a parallel process of decay that we see taking place in the fields of political and historic representation that is related to the takeover of recognition political discourses in both fields
We argue that no natural alliance exists between liberalism and the discourse of recognition, the rise of which is related only indirectly to ideology, as its direct roots lie in a new institutional régime of political representation that emerged in the seventies and eighties and took the place of the former class- based representation régime of post-WWII social democracy
Today when the liberal hegemony is crumbling in each of its constitutive fields, illiberals are taking the lead and exploiting the delegitimating potential and symbolic violence that is inherent in recognition political discourse

Summary

Introduction

Unlike in the social democratic past of the twentieth century, when political actors fought for particular goals inside an institutional system that they all accepted as legitimate, today’s competitors play a game of mutual delegitimation: under the flags of liberalism and illiberalism or populism they struggle to settle what should be the only legitimate order for the whole political community (Orsina, 2017: 8) Parallel to this is the decay of historic memory to a symbolic ‘victimhood competition’ (Chaumont, 1997; Novick, 1999), which makes historic memory the prey of increasingly mythological and moralizing narratives that reduce historical complexity to black-and-white lessons and incite a symbolic struggle of mutual degradation, impeding genuine historical understanding (Todorov, 1995; 2000). Symbolic declarations cannot substitute for open negotiations undertaken on explicit terms: the function of such ‘foundational’ acts is not to establish new ground for the future, but to naturalize established power relations

The symbolic violence inherent in recognition politics

Radicalizing reappropriation

The power of foundationalist representation

Conclusion