Spaces of Democracy

Geographical Perspectives on Citizenship, Participation and Representation

Clive Barnett, Murray Low

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446223314
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

?This volume successfully exposes the "ghostly presence" of democracy in the field of geography and shows the value of thinking about democracy geographically. It is a major contribution to serious examination of a normative political issue from a geographical perspective. This is welcome above all because geography is a field whose cultural and economic branches, though often claiming the appellation "critical", are currently dominated by unexamined radical political fantasies? - John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles

In an historically unprecedented way, democracy is now increasingly seen as a universal model of legitimate rule.This work addresses the key question: How can democracy be understood in theory and in practise?

In three thematically organised sections, Spaces of Democracy uses a critical geographical imagination (informed by thinking on space, place, and scale) to interrogate the latest work in democratic theory. Key ideas and concepts discussed include globalization and transnationalism; representation; citizenship; liberalism; the city and public space; and the media.

This volume comprises commissioned work by leading academics investigating democracy. Historical and comparative, animated by wider debates on globalization, it will facilitate the critical discussion of core questions on citizenship, the state, and democracy. Spaces of Democracy is essential reading for students of human geography, political science/international relations, and political sociology.

1	Geography and Democracy: An Introduction Clive Barnett and Murray Low

Where is Democracy?

Amid debates about globalization, neo-liberalism, and anti-capitalism, it is easy to forget that probably the most significant global trend of the last two decades has been the proliferation of political regimes that claim to be democracies. Democracy refers to the idea that political rule should, in some sense, be in the hands of ordinary people. It is also a set of processes and procedures for translating this idea into practices of institutionalized popular rule. In a remarkably short space of time, commitment to democracy has become near universal. The universalization of democracy as an ideal, if not as a set of agreed-upon practices, is historically unprecedented: ‘Nothing else in the world which had, as far as we can tell, quite such local, casual, and concrete origins enjoys the same untrammeled authority for ordinary human beings today, and does so virtually across the globe’ (Dunn, 1992: 239). This assertion pinpoints one key geographical dimension of the contemporary ascendancy of democratic norms. This is the problematic relationship between the particular historical-geography of democracy’s ‘origins’ on the one hand, and democracy’s more recent globalization on the other. However, it is striking how little impact processes of democratization, or democracy as a broader theme, have had on research agendas in human geography. While a great deal of critical analysis is implicitly motivated by democratic norms, there is relatively little empirical research or theoretical work that explicitly takes democracy to be central to the human geographic endeavour. This book aims to address this lacuna, by bringing together contributions from across the discipline of geography, addressing various research fields in which democracy is often a veiled backdrop, but not usually a topic of explicit reflection. We hope the book will thereby help to encourage the sort of detailed attention to issues of normative political theory that has recently been called for by others (Agnew, 2002: 164–78).

The ghostly presence of democracy in geography can be illustrated with reference to a number of fields. First, debates on the geography of the state, starting in the 1970s with Marxist-inspired work on the capitalist state, and developing in the 1980s and 1990s through an engagement with regulation theory, certainly took the concept of legitimacy and the representative dimensions of state institutions into account. However, detailed examination of routine democratic procedures of participation and representation have remained peripheral to the analyses developed in this area, which remain constrained by a conceptualization of political processes as derivative of more fundamental economic interests. More broadly, the neo-Gramscian state theory most favoured in geography has remained largely untouched by the flowering in the last three decades of post-Enlightenment liberal political philosophy that has reinvigorated debates about democracy, citizenship, and power.

The concern with social justice stands as a second example of the marginalization of democracy as a theme in human geography. This might sound counter-intuitive, since the value of democracy as a form of rule is often linked to its role in securing social justice (Rawls, 1971). Geographers have engaged in debates about social justice since the 1970s. But geographers’ interest in these questions has tended to focus on substantive distributive outcomes and spatial patterns, rather than on the issues of political process and procedure that would lead to democracy becoming a central topic for debate. Themes of geography and justice have been revitalized recently by the development of an explicit concern with moral and ethical issues (see Proctor and Smith, 1999). Yet the focus of this ethical turn has been on moral rather than political theory, leading to a concentration on questions of ethical responsibility detached from both wider issues of institutional design and political processes.

A third example of the displacement of democracy in geography is recent research on the geographies of citizenship. This work has concentrated on relationships between migration, citizenship and discourses of belonging and identity, and how these shape differential access to material and symbolic resources from states. Most discussions of these matters in geography have been conducted in light of the question of whether globalization complicates the spatial dimensions of membership and access to material resources of citizenship. The uneven development of rights of political citizenship, and the practices of mobilization and engagement these enable, has received relatively little direct treatment by comparison (Low, 2000). Electoral geography is the area of human geography research that has consistently addressed the political and participatory dimensions of citizenship rights, and by extension the area that has been most consistently focused on core features of democratic politics. An interest in the dynamics of democratic process and procedure has been unavoidable in this work, as has a focus on questions about political representation. While there are many empirically detailed analyses of electoral ‘bias’ in particular political systems, the broader issues raised by the subject matter of electoral geography have often remained unexplored. Only recently have geographers begun to explore the links between this predominantly quantitative-empirical field of research, and normative issues of political theory and democratic justice (Johnston, 1999; Hannah, 2001).

Finally, one might expect that the proliferation of culturally-inflected research in human geography would have been the occasion for a more systematic engagement with political theory. Power has become a ubiquitous reference point in the new cultural geography, and in work touched by the cultural turn more widely (Sharp et al., 1999). However, on closer examination, this concept is a conceptual black box rarely opened up to detailed analysis (see Allen, 2003). Too often, the recourse to the vocabulary of resistance and hegemony in cultural theory marks the point at which reflection on first principles is displaced in favour of the imaginary alignment of the academic analyst with popular struggles (see Barnett, 2004).

These examples point towards a recurrent preference in human geography for the language of explanatory rigour, social change, or policy relevance, rather than reflection on normative issues. As a consequence, geography’s treatment of politics is characterized by theoreticism. By this we mean a tendency to deduce desirable political outcomes from deeper interests, established outside political processes, into which the academic researcher has a privileged insight. This preoccupation is often combined with voluntaristic injunctions to the community of researchers, governments, or social movements to work to help bring these outcomes about. In short, the very terms in which geographers have engaged in discussion of politics, justice, citizens, elections, have nourished an avoidance of reflection on the normative presuppositions of political institutions and on the basic criteria of political judgement underpinning democratic processes – criteria concerning what is right, what is just, what is good, and concerning how best to bring good, just, rightful outcomes about.

As other commentators have argued (Sayer and Storper, 1997; Corbridge, 1998), radical traditions of geographical research have persistently evaded normative political philosophy in favour of either the abstracted-individualism of ethical reflection or the certainties of radical political critique. It is in areas of the discipline often thought of as more ‘applied’ that one can find the most sustained reflection on the normative issues raised by democratization processes. This is the case, for example, in both urban planning and environmental policy studies, in which the meanings and practicalities of deliberative decision-making and participatory democracy have been extensively discussed (e.g. Burgess et al., 1998; Hajer and Kesselring, 1999; Mason, 2001; O’Neill, 2001; Owens, 2001). Likewise, it is among development geographers that one finds sustained critical discussions of the concepts of civil society and social capital, and of the meanings of participation, representation and empowerment, all issues with implications and currency far beyond the Global South (e.g. McIlwaine, 1998; Jeffrey, 2000; Mercer, 2002; Williams et al., 2003). Planning studies, environmental studies and development geography all connect up with broader interdisciplinary arenas where issues of democratic theory have been central in shaping research agendas. This is less true of the favoured interlocutors of ‘mainstream’ critical human geography.

The disconnection of a theoretically confident tradition of critical human geography from the concerns of political philosophy and democratic theory requires some explanation. Is it because these other fields are not sophisticated enough in their treatment of space, spatiality, or scale to satisfy the agenda of critical human geography? As we will argue below, this explanation does not stand up to scrutiny. In order to explore the question further, we want to identify three points of potential overlap but actual separation between geographical research and democratic theory. First, there is the problematic status of liberalism in human geography. We relate this issue to geography’s treatment of the state. Secondly, there is the question of the degree to which the geographical imaginations of human geography and political theory diverge. Thirdly, there is the thorny problem of how to understand the value of universalism, a concept that is central to debates about democracy, but which geographers find hard to assimilate to their disciplinary matrix of ideas. In flagging these three themes, we want to contextualize the chapters in the book, by providing some sense of the most fruitful cross-disciplinary engagements towards which they might lead.

Rehabilitating Liberalism

The templates for democratic institutions in the West, and indeed in most other contexts today, are usually referred to as being liberal in character. Alternative conceptions of democracy (including communitarian, deliberative, participatory, radical, and discursive approaches) all tend to define their own virtues by reference to the strengths and weaknesses of liberal theory and practice. However, liberalism is a rather broad label for a heterogeneous collection of ideas and practices. One tradition of liberalism, best exemplified by Hayek, explicitly seeks to restrict the scope of democratic decision-making in the name of the higher goods of personal liberty and free markets. One irony of the ubiquitous recourse to the vocabulary of ‘neo-liberalism’ in contemporary left-critical discourse is, however, the identification of liberalism tout court with this particular variety of conservative political thought. In this unlikely convergence, liberalism is reduced to a doctrine that counterposes the state to the market.

This mirroring of left and right readings of classical liberal doctrine erases the historical variety of liberalisms (Gaus, 2003). The market liberalism exemplified by Hayek echoes a broader discourse of elitist disenchantment with mass democracy, which includes Weber, Pareto, Schmitt, Michels, and Schumpeter. What connects these thinkers is an intuition that the mass scale of modern polities, in both spatial and numerical terms, renders democracy implausible and hazardous. By contrast, there is a diverse tradition of avowedly liberal thought that reasserts the plausibility and value of extending democratic procedures across larger scales and into a wider range of activities. This tradition would include the work of Robert Dahl, John Dewey, Otto Kirchheimer, Carole Pateman, and John Rawls, as well as that of Noberto Bobbio, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Pitkin, and Roberto Unger. This is a disparate group, but that is partly our point. It comprises a range of different projects that include a revivified Kantian republicanism, political liberalism, civic republicanism, and democratic liberalism. The key feature that these projects share is an effort to overcome ossified dualisms between equity and liberty, by finding practically informed ways of thinking through disputed conceptions of the right, the good, and justice. Taken together, these post-Enlightenment liberalisms can be said to constitute a broad tradition of radical democracy, one that is characterized above all by a shared concern with defining democracy in relation to practices of citizen participation.

We think it important to reassert the significance of this tradition of self-consciously egalitarian, democratic liberalism precisely because liberalism largely remains a denigrated tradition of thought in critical human geography. Radical human geography explicitly emerged by turning its back on liberal approaches in the 1970s. One consequence of this has already been noted. This is the persistent tendency to elevate explanatory accounts of socio-spatial process and substantive (outcome-oriented) accounts of justice over an engagement with the significance of procedural issues of participation, representation, and accountability (see Katznelson, 1996). As Howell (1993: 305) has observed, while geographers have engaged with an ever-widening range of theoretical ideas, the dimension of normative reflection on political principles contained in writers such as Habermas, Foucault, or Derrida is too often obscured ‘by the use to which they are put […] as part of a generic social theory to which we as geographers appeal almost exclusively for validation’. This preference for social rather than political theory means that it is rare to find discussions of the geographical dimensions of inequality, or the spatialities of identity and difference, which are able to address fundamental questions concerning the significance of the values of equality, diversity, or difference that such analyses implicitly invoke.

The suspicion of liberal traditions of political theory has had two further consequences for the ways in which geographers address themes of democracy. First, liberalism as political theory is easily associated with the manifest flaws of ‘actually existing democracies’. It is certainly true that elements of liberal discourse (rights, freedom, liberty) can readily take on ideological value in defending undemocratic or illiberal practices. But this is not a unique feature of liberalism. In fact, this ideological potential seems a very good reason for critically reconfiguring key terms such as ‘rights’, ‘liberty’ or ‘representation’, rather than assuming that they cannot be divorced from compromised realities and that we must find less tainted images of authentic political action.

This brings us to our second point, which is that ideal-typical liberal theories of democracy are persistently framed as the benchmark against which truly radical theories of democracy should be judged. As a result, the definition of radical politics is moved further and further away from the sites of mundane politics. Of course, one of the crucial insights provoked by a variety of new social movement mobilizations since the 1960s is the political stake involved in distinguishing what is politics from what is not. It is often argued that this requires that the meaning of ‘the political’ should be reframed beyond narrowly defined understandings of government, constitutional rule, voting, or party support. One example is Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) conceptualization of radical democracy. This is perhaps the most important example of political theory to attract sustained attention in human geography (see Jones and Moss, 1995; Brown, 1997; Robinson, 1998). The characteristic Marxist response to their distinctive poststructuralist, post-Marxism has been to dismiss it as revised liberal pluralism. However, in their concern to destabilize standard conceptions of interests, the people, or representation (and to develop an alternative vocabulary of articulation and antagonism), it is clear that Laclau and Mouffe are strongly committed to moving decisively beyond liberal formulations of democracy.

Counterposing mere ‘politics’, with all its disappointments and limitations, to the question of ‘the political’ is central to the poststructuralist project of radicalizing democracy. It is associated with the claim that grasping the essence of the political requires a form of analysis utterly different from liberal rationalism, which is supposedly unable to acknowledge irreducible conflict and antagonism. But this leads poststructuralist accounts of radical democracy into the rather thankless task of trying to redeem some democratic value from the plainly anti-democratic political thought of writers such as Martin Heidegger or Carl Schmitt. With their analytics of forgetting and disclosure, neutralization and depolitization, these writers have become the unlikely foundation for new formulations of radical political action that apparently escape the inauthenticities of ordinary politics. In this strand of work, the banality of ordinary politics is transcended by the promise of a more heroic variety of political transformation rooted in an image of liberating the creativity unjustly contained by the limits of state, capital, or bureaucracy. So it is that poststructuralist accounts of the political come to resemble a form of idealistic superliberalism (Benhabib, 1992: 16). They claim to be more pluralistic, tolerant, and affirmative of difference than conventional liberalism, yet are unwilling to acknowledge the practical dependence of these values on the real achievements of liberal political cultures. This in turn explains the consistent difficulty that poststructuralist theories have in accounting for democracy as a specific sort of ins...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Geography and Democracy: An Introduction
• Elections, Voting and Representation
• Democracy, Citizenship and Scale
• Making Democratic Spaces
• Index