Democracy as a civilising process

Abstract

Problems of democratic essentialism The two preceding chapters have argued that the experience of communism has been crucial for the historical composition of meanings of democracy. Democratic attitudes developed during the resistance of techniques of communist power that subordinated individual freedom to the collectivist logic of total images about the past and the future. This final chapter contrasts such an experiential approach with the popular and widely propagated idea of ‘democratic consolidation’. Discourses of democratic consolidation subordinate logics of experiences to logics of outcome. Their epistemological basis rests upon a deliberative filter according to which communism and democracy were logically generated categories, characterised by non-communication and radical antagonism. In this view, the values and the systemic features of communist and democratic regimes seemed incompatible because situational premises were left largely unmentioned. This chapter puts forward the hypothesis that the situational premises of ‘unconsolidated’ moments of uncertainty are crucial for understanding the emergence of democracy as a process of meaning-formation.