The beginning of the present decade saw an eruption of significant collective resistance to the way governments were dealing with the 2008 financial crisis and an intensified desire for systemic change. From the Indignados in Spain, to the global Occupy movement, the Syntagma Square anti-austerity protests in Greece, and the people’s uprisings in Slovenia, governments around the world were criticised by political movements for their complicity in the continuing neoliberalisation of society and for failing to protect vulnerable people from the negative effects of turbulent market activity. In this book, I will argue that this wave of protest movements points towards a crisis of liberal democracy, which demands that we reconceptualise the relationship between resistance and institutional politics. The crisis takes on different manifestations at different levels of society. The fall in support for the established political parties, especially the social democratic parties on the centre-left and the conservative or liberal parties on the centre-right, coupled with the decline of party membership around Europe and the decimation of their vote share (Van Biezen 2013; Keen 2015); democratic institutions that are seen as unrepresentative by voters; the professionalisation of politics; and the alignment of mainstream political parties around the neoliberal consensus—these are all signs of what may be seen as a growing democratic deficit in liberal democratic institutions. These are also some of the factors that have contributed to the intensification of radical politics outside formal institutions. Different scholars of social and political movements have described this increase in protest activity as a political response to the depoliticisation of established democratic processes (for instance, Graeber 2013; Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis 2014; Laclau 2014; della Porta 2015; Mouffe 2013b, 2015). Others , mainly in mainstream political science, have focused on the anti-political sentiments among voters and on the processes that lead to depoliticisation in modern politics (for instance, Burnham 2001; Flinders and Buller 2006; Hay 2007; Flinders and Wood 2015). In political theory, concepts such as post-politics and post-democracy have been used to explain the depoliticised state of liberal democracy (Rancière 1999, 2010; Žižek 1999; Mouffe 2000, 2005; Dean 2009).
The crisis of liberal democracy is not a new subject of scholarly debate (Offe 1974, 1984; Habermas 1976; Held 2006). The late 1960s and the 1970s were times of intense social upheaval across the West as the oil crises hit currency reserves and economic growth in major industrial economies. The challenges coming from the civil rights, ecological, feminist and anti-war movements prompted, especially conservative, scholars to question the ability of democracies to govern. The increase in democratic pressure on the political system, which they believed to be plural and fair, led them to view the governing elites as being overloaded by unrealistic political expectations and demands (Crozier et al. 1975; King 1975; Sartori 1975; Parsons 1982). Progressive sociologists and neo-Marxists challenged the overload thesis and viewed the rise in social movements and protest activity as a legitimate response to the loss of legitimacy of governing elites. The reawakened civil society and the appearance of new social movements challenged the boundaries of institutional politics and prompted a re-evaluation of key precepts in democratic theory (Offe 1974; Macpherson 1973, 1977; Wolfe 1977).
In order to capture the theoretical complexity of the debates in democratic theory, which continue to this day, and how they correspond with the crisis of liberal democracy, one can start by looking at the analytical models that purport to explain the dynamics between the dominant conceptions of politics in liberal democracies. I return to this in more detail in Chap. 2, but for the moment the following brief outline suffices. The dominant analytical model of democracy is the aggregative model, which draws heavily upon the pluralist-elite assumptions about political life. It emphasises the view of liberal democracy as an electoral competition among a plurality of interests, where the nexus of political power lies with the elected politicians, while the citizens take the role of passive spectators (Schumpeter 2010; Sartori 1975). With the rise of new social movements in the 1970s, this conception of liberal democracy comes under increasing pressure. The deliberative model of democracy is presented as an alternative to the aggregative model by challenging the instrumental economic rationality underlying its main assumptions and shifting the axiom of politics towards solving normative questions through deliberation (Habermas 1987, 1996; Dryzek 2000; Rawls 1971, 2005).
However, both of these models fail to capture the antagonistic aspect of resistance to institutional politics and the resulting crises of liberal democracy: why do social conflicts arise even in well-ordered societies, such as advanced liberal democracies? Can all conflict be institutionalised and dealt with through established democratic procedures? If not, what other analytical model could better account for the inherently conflictual character of social relations and the political divisions among different political groups and rationalities? I will use the agonistic model, proposed by the political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2000, 2005, 2013a), as a partial response to the questions posed. I will not treat her agonistic democratic theory as exhaustive, but in the first instance use it as a starting point for conceptualising an alternative understanding to the aggregative and deliberative models of democracy (Chap. 2), and then build on it by engaging with social movements and new radical left literature. To underline its theoretical merits for my analysis, Mouffe’s agonistic democracy provides an account of politics, which puts emphasis on its antagonistic character and underlines the centrality of power in the constitution of political identities and positions. It also explains how liberal rationality moves the axiom of democratic politics away from recognising the antagonistic character of politics. These two important contributions provide a basis for Mouffe’s project of theorising a radical democratic politics. Like the other two models, however, it treats the institutions of liberal democracy as a neutral mechanism for the translation of political grievances and demands. All three models of democracy, notwithstanding their qualified differences, take an indulgent approach to understanding liberal democracy, while leaving aside the structural and historical analysis of the changing role of state institutions in the context of global market integration. And, while the agonistic model does identify the depoliticisation of liberal democracy as the source of extra-institutional contestation of formal politics, a systemic analysis of what drives this contestation is missing in the literature.
What would such a systemic analysis entail? As already pointed out above, it would need to explain why there has been a trend of depoliticisation in the politics of liberal democracy over the past few decades. It would also need to take account of how neoliberalism, as the main governmental rationality in contemporary societies, has influenced the functioning of Western democracies and their inability to respond to the popular democratic demands of citizens. I will avoid using the word globalisation, which is often used in scholarly literature and the media to describe the rise of neoliberalism and the reshaping of governance structures according to market principles. By focusing on the political rationality that has informed Western policy-makers and leaders in reshaping the structural relationship between democracy and the market economy, I want to emphasise that the structural processes we otherwise understand under the term globalisation are the result of political agency and can therefore be reversed through political agency as well. My argument in the book will be that neoliberalism is in fact one of the key drivers of depoliticisation of institutional politics since it reconfigures the governmental rationality of the state towards further marketisation of society. At the same time, the latter process will also be viewed as politicising, even if indir...