Truth without Power: Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Parrhesia in Miller’s An Enemy of the People

Reviewed by: Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa: the unfinished business of democratic consolidation Mbongeni Manqele (bio) Henning Melber (ed) (2003) Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa: the unfinished business of democratic consolidation. Cape Town: HSRC Press The contributors to this volume highlight political issues and processes in parts of Southern Africa since the end of white-minority and colonial rule. Most focus particular attention on the post-independence records of governance of the Namibian and Zimbabwean liberation movements. They tend to argue that, recast as political parties, ZANU PF and SWAPO have since independence sought an overwhelming if not monopoly predominance in both the political arena as well as within state and parastatal structures. They argue too, that they have largely prevailed while also securing the capacity to shape public political discourses to suit their ends. In the process of the above, the contributors argue, ZANU PF in particular and SWAPO have developed into authoritarian and corrupt regimes of varying degrees of repression. By contrast, it is noted that the ruling groups in Botswana and Lesotho, which attained independence by negotiation and without mass mobilisation, have developed into multiparty democracies. The contributors are particularly interested in why this has happened, why did SWAPO and ZANU PF deviate from their originally-declared democratic aims, as well as largely abandoning their goal of socioeconomic transformation. The authors argue that this has stemmed in part from the fact that while these organisations were waging war on systems of institutionalised injustice, they did not themselves always display a sensitivity to human rights issues and democratic values. Nor did it prevent them from falling prey to authoritarian patterns of rule and undemocratic practices towards real or imagined dissidents within their ranks. [End Page 116] The main argument of the contributors is that the political change that has occurred in those Southern African states shaped by settler colonialism should be characterised as a transition from controlled change to changed control. A new political elite has ascended the commanding heights and, employing selective narratives and memories relating to their liberation wars, has constructed a new set of traditions to establish an exclusive postcolonial legitimacy under the sole authority of one particular agency of social forces. Mystification of the liberators has played an essential role in this fabrication. What these elites have also done is to develop militant notions of inclusion or exclusion as key factors in shaping their post-colonial national identities. The boundaries between party and government have been blurred and replaced by a growing equation of party and government. Opposition or dissent has sometimes been branded 'an enemy of the people'. Coinciding with this tendency to autocratic rule and the subordination of the state to the party, a reward system of social and material favours in return for loyalty has emerged. Self-enrichment by way of a system of rent-or sinecure-capitalism has become the order of the day. The term 'national interest' has been appropriated and now means solely what the postcolonial ruling elite decides that it means. It is used to justify all kinds of authoritarian practices while the terms 'anti-colonial' or 'unpatriotic' are applied to any group that resists the power of the ruling elite of the day. These selective mechanisms for the exercise and retention of post-colonial independence power are not too dissimilar from the commandist notions that operated during the days of the liberation struggle in exile. For the essayists in this book, the ruling elites of Southern Africa have shown that their chief concerns are with self-interest and retention of power and that constitutionalism counts for little. This book is an important contribution to an overdue debate. It serves as a point of departure for evaluating the actions of two of the premier liberation movements in this region and of their ruling elites in the postcolonial era. Both Zimbabwe and Namibia and, to a certain extent, other governments in the region like Swaziland and Angola claim to be the fathers of democracy and the liberation struggle. They claim to be democratic yet their actions reflect authoritarianism. They are nepotic, corrupt, politically intolerant, and unaccountable, violate human rights and, more often, dominate and dictate the...

A pivotal question since the Enlightenment has been how to promote reason to the masses. Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and its film adaptations across four countries and seven decades let us examine this discourse across time and geography. Ibsen offers Nietzschean, elitist radicalism to save the public sphere from ignorance. Ein Volksfeind (dir. Hans Steinhoff) insists that only the Nazi Party can straighten out the confused masses. A 1978 version from a screenplay by Arthur Miller (dir. George Schaefer) makes Steve McQueen a hero-martyr for grassroots democracy, while Ganashatru (dir. Satyajit Ray) challenges Eurocentric logocentricity through ‘empathetic humanism’. Norwegian En folkefiende (dir. Erik Skjoldbjærg) declares that in the neoliberal era, people’s resistance to reason threatens our species’ very survival. Such despondency informs today’s populism and democratic apathy, suggesting that humanistic beliefs may have played themselves out and that a new master-narrative could be required to break our twenty-first-century stand-off. As voters are labelled ‘deplorables’ and journalists ‘enemies of the people’, Ibsen’s play has also experienced a renaissance.

'Participatory Democracy' and 'Deliberative Democracy' are two terms that have entered common use, but you certainly cannot say that the meaning attributed to these two notions of democracy are identical or even similar. Indeed, in many cases, and in many current debates, the two terms are confused or conflated. The article contends that a debate on these issues is particularly useful, and that a promising approach might be a theoretical reconstruction of the genealogy of these two notions of democracy: namely, a survey that seeks to bring to light the history of these two concepts, their first formulations, and the conceptual (but also historical and political) matrix that may be identified at the roots of their genesis and development. In this article, we will relate only one chapter of this history: the 'transitional phase' that can be traced in some texts that go 'beyond participatory democracy', that is to say the works of Jane Mansbridge (Beyond Adversary Democracy, 1980) and Benjamin Barber (Strong Democracy, 1984). These works entailed an approach which, in many aspects, was still within the discussion on 'participatory democracy', but at the same time introduced many novelties, thus opening paths to a successive stage, and indicating some possible bridges to a deliberative view.

This chapter explores the relationship between participatory and deliberative democracy; analysing their similarities and differences, compatibilities and tensions, to ascertain whether they should, and can, be pursued in tandem. The case is made that the normative and explanatory potential of each approach is diminished without the presence of the other in these conceptions so it is desirable and coherent to pursue a ‘participatory deliberative democracy’ in which citizens participate in making collective decisions through deliberation. There are certainly challenges in combining them, but the inconclusive evidence on their compatibility provides insufficient reason not to try given the legitimacy benefits that could be accrued if successful. Indeed, it is concluded that many citizens would welcome more opportunities to participate in, meaningful and consequential, deliberation.

Experts and Democratic Deliberation: Insights from <i>An Enemy of the People</i>

In historiography and even more so in the public sphere, the Gorski Kotar region has been portrayed as an area where the population during the World War II almost unreservedly supported the People's Liberation Movement led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, both during the war and in the post-war period, numerous people lost their lives due to the repression of the Yugoslav communists. Based on archival sources, the published and unpublished testimonies of contemporaries, the newspaper reports, and journalistic and scientific literature, this paper refutes the indictment and the death sentence from December 31, 1944 against Stjepan Horžić, the priest who served as a chaplain in the municipality of Mrkopalj and temporarily led the parishes in Ravna Gora and Vrbovsko. The Yugoslav communist court condemned Horžić as the "enemy of the people" who spread the "Ustasha ideology" and the belief in the victory of Nazi Germany and undermined the authority of the People's Liberation Movement in the Gorski Kotar region. However, numerous and diverse sources undoubtedly indicate that Horžić's work did not go beyond the scope of the activities of a Catholic priest, and that he was executed because he was very successful in preventing the influence of the Yugoslav communists among the population of the municipality of Mrkopalj, especially children, youth and women. In other words, it was an ideological contest between Yugoslav communists and members of the clergy of the Catholic Church over the inhabitants of the municipality of Mrkopalj, especially the youth, in which the former side resorted to the use of violence in the most radical form - murder. Chaplain Stjepan Horžić was executed not because he was a "servant of the occupiers" and a "quisling", but because his work as a priest made him an obstacle to the establishment of the totalitarian rule of the Yugoslav communists in Gorski Kotar.

This article challenges the prevalent interpretation of John Dewey as a forefather of deliberative democracy, and shows how Dewey's theory can help turn democratic theory toward participatory democracy, which is widely seen as having been incorporated by deliberative democracy. I argue that Dewey would find deliberative principles to be abstracting from our unequal social conditions by attempting to bracket the unequal social statuses that individuals bring with them to the deliberation. Dewey traces the deficiencies of current political debate to these unequal social conditions, and he thus claims that democratic theorizing should focus on enacting effective plans for overcoming social inequality, plans that may require nondeliberative practices that compel concessions from advantaged social interests. Deliberative democrats have increasingly aimed to account for such practices, but I claim that participatory democrats can draw on Dewey to illustrate how their theory can more comfortably accommodate these practices that directly attack inequality than can deliberative democracy.

The contribution of broad participation as a means of giving voice to all individuals and communities has long been recognized by the United Nations, constituting a cornerstone of democracy and good governance, reflected in the implementation of participatory processes in different areas of society, including cultural heritage. This study consists in the content analysis of 15 international heritage doctrinal documents covering a time span from 1962 to 2019, in order to identify the recommended forms of participation, with reference to six participation categories defined through the analysis of the literature on the topic. A Thesaurus of terms and expressions related to each category was developed, namely information, consultation, intervention, partnership, decision and a generic residual category, and the frequency of its use in each doctrinal document was examined. The study is framed by the models of participatory and deliberative democracy, seeking to establish a temporal relationship between these and the forms of participation identified. It is expected that this exploratory study is extended in future to a greater number of documents in order to assess the feasibility of the methodology developed, thus contributing to the adoption more objective and precise heritage doctrinal documents. Keywords: cultural heritage; deliberative democracy; heritage doctrinal documents; ICOMOS; participation; participatory democracy; UNESCO

This article argues that authoritarian populism poses a serious challenge to sociological theorization. Decolonial Theory has formed the intellectual backbone of the rise of Narendra Modi to power in India and, since 2014, has become a productive force, manifesting itself in new forms of statecraft in India. How has this come to be? Using the tools of historical sociology, this article builds a history of the ‘enemy of the people’ in Indian public discourse to conceptualize how Hindutva intellectuals used Decolonial Theory to gain legitimacy and eliminate the ‘other’. To confront this violent articulation of Decolonial Theory by Hindutva intellectuals, I argue that it is no longer possible to use the category of ‘native/indigenous’ as a location of sociological knowledge production. Instead, I propose the methodology of ‘looking within and without’ sociology to address the claims of decoloniality and meet the challenge of authoritarian populism.

Deliberation and Civic Studies

Deliberative democracy has assumed a central role in the debate about deepening democratic practices in complex contemporary societies. By acknowledging the citizens as the main actors in the political process, political deliberation entails a strong ideal of participation that has not, however, been properly clarified. The main purpose of this article is to discuss, through Jürgen Habermas’ analysis of modernity, reason and democracy, whether and to what extent deliberative democracy and participatory democracy are compatible and how they can, either separately or together, enhance democratic practices. Further exploration of this relationship will permit a better understanding of the possibilities and limits of institutionalizing both discourses, as well as of developing democracy in a more substantive dimension.

The literature discussing the impact of media and journalism upon democracy, typically criticizes both media and journalism for their content and their negative effects on some aspects of democracy. In turn, this raises the question of identifying news standards by which the quality of news journalism might be evaluated. But neither the proposed news standards nor the criticism levelled against them specify with sufficient clarity the model of democracy to be used as a normative departure. This article argues that the question of proper news standards cannot be addressed in isolation from the question of different normative models of democracy. In order to discover news standards by which the quality of news journalism can or should be evaluated, it analyzes four normative models of democracy and their demands upon citizens: procedural democracy, competetive democracy, participatory democracy and deliberative democracy. Building upon that analysis, the article asks: What normative implications for media and news journalism follow from the distinctive perspectives of procedural, competitive, participatory and deliberative democracy?

The purpose of this study is to identify and propose the necessary tasks for establishing deliberative participatory budgeting in South Korea by comparing and examining the characteristics of deliberative participatory budgeting implemented by local governments in three countries with different political and social backgrounds. To do so, theoretical and practical discussions on ‘deliberative participatory budgeting’, which encompass perspectives of participatory and direct democracy as well as deliberative democracy, were reviewed. Then, three cases of ‘deliberation-based participatory budgeting’ implemented by local governments such as Zeguo town in China, the city of Greater Geraldton in Australia, and Eunpyeong-gu in Korea, were compared and analyzed. The cases of Zeguo and Geraldton demonstrated that when participatory budgeting systems are combined with deliberative mechanisms such as deliberative pollings and town meetings to address local issues, participatory democracy and deliberative democracy can positively interact with each other and contribute to problem-solving. The case of Eunpyeong-gu stood out for utilizing deliberation in public forums from the stage of proposing ideas for solving local issues to determining priorities. As improvement tasks, it was suggested to diversify the Korean participatory budgeting model, which is primarily operated under the ‘resident proposal project’, and reduce the ‘bias in participation by self-selection’ through the multi-level operation of public forums based on neighborhoods, themes, and target groups.

The features of the development of the ideas of participatory and deliberative democracy in modern political discourse are researched in the article. The author defines the relationship between the formation of these conceptual models of democracy and political practice. This relationship is accompanied by an "emotional" coloring of a democratic idea, using it as a symbol of struggle for the empowerment of the citizens’ rights and freedoms or as a means of «approximation» the authorities to citizens.The characteristic features of participatory and deliberative democracy and the peculiarities of implementing their tools into political practice are considered. It is noted that a number of such instruments are already widely used in European countries. This applies, in particular, to referendums, online discussions of draft state decisions, advisory bodies. Ukraine also does not stand aside these processes – public consultations, public councils at executive authorities, electronic petitions, public budgeting practices, etc. are introduced. At the same time, the development of participatory and deliberative practices in Ukraine is impulsive. The election campaigns and public protests significantly affect this process.Attention is focused not only on the positive influence on the political system of the tools of participatory and deliberative democracy, but also on the possible negative impact. In particular, examples of complications in decision making, destabilization of domestic and foreign policy are considered.How the ideas of participatory and deliberative democracy, if necessary, can become populist slogans is shown on the example of the electoral programs of the candidates for the post of President of Ukraine. But at the same time it characterizes the political discourse not only in Ukraine, but also in developed Western countries.

Research Highlights and Abstract This article: Provides an overview of the development of deliberative and participatory democracy in the UK. Critically analyses the success of consecutive UK national governments in fostering deliberative and participatory processes. Surveys the development of deliberative and participatory processes in the UK at sub-national and local level. Provides a starting point for comparative politics on deliberative and participatory democracy between the UK and other polities. This article responds to Michael Saward's call for a more context-specific approach to the study of democracy by exploring developments in, obstacles to, and prospects for, a more deliberative and participatory model of democracy in the UK. A review is undertaken first of the New Labour and coalition governments' attempts at constitutional reform, in order to assess the implications these efforts have had, and continue to have, for the institutionalisation of such a model of democracy. Despite proclamations of lofty ambition successive UK governments have wrapped themselves in the straightjacketing logic of the Westminster model of parliamentary government. As a consequence their actual proposals lack ambition and are often incoherent. The story told in this respect is therefore one of largely unrealised rhetoric. The ‘largely’ qualifier is included, however, in recognition of the space created by Labour's constitutional reforms for participation at the peripheries of governance. The second section of the article focuses on these spaces by, first, commenting briefly on whether the participatory aspirations of the architects of Scottish devolution have been realised before, second, examining the use of specific deliberative mechanisms—such as citizens'juries, deliberative polls and participatory budgeting—at varying locations within the political system and in public agencies and services. Evidence of democratic innovation is presented; however, any optimism on this front must be tempered, as the power-sharing potential of such mechanisms, and their capacity to move us towards a more comprehensive and joined-up deliberative system in the UK, is hampered by the lack of a facilitating institutional landscape. Finally, an overview is provided of the three remaining articles that make up this special section on deliberative and participatory democracy in the UK.