Republicanism under scrutiny

Abstract

This introduction discusses articles on the theory and politics of republicanism that were presented at the Istanbul Seminars 2015. It asks the following questions: Could it be that republicanism is at least in part the cause of the current cultural clashes and religious violence in both the Arab world and Europe?. Is it just an accident that republics in many parts of the post-colonial world turned authoritarian? Or does republicanism as such risk resulting in illiberal outcomes? In this regard, it analyses, first, if there is a tension or inherent contradiction between republicanism and Islam. Second, this article examines if the political models in Turkey and France are misconceptions of republicanism and the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination. Last but not least, it raises the question if deliberative democracy is the best possible interpretation of republicanism, able to accommodate both freedom as non-domination and pluralism.

Keywords

deliberative democracy freedom as non-domination Islam pluralism republicanism

For at least two centuries, republicanism has been the political ideal of the subjugated people around the world, from the French Revolution to the anti-colonial struggles. The republic has come to be seen as the place that realizes true freedom and self-determination independently from gender, religious, or ethnic backgrounds. However, in the last decades, republicanism has been challenged not only by the progressive weakening of state borders and the decline of state sovereignty in front of the internationalization of economy, law and communication (Pensky and Kastoryano, in this issue). More and more, republicanism has also become the synonym of state nationalism and even authoritarianism, struggling with pluralism, cultural differences and the rights of minorities.

France, the birthplace of the modern republic, had, even before the terror attacks in January and November last year, to cope with marginalized and radicalized ethnic, racial and religious minorities, not only of Muslim origin, living segregated in the suburbs of the large cities, the banlieues, and largely isolated from the opportunities of mainstream society¹ (Gaudin, in this issue). Turkey, one of the major non-western republics, has not only been engaged for almost a century in a violent conflict with its Kurdish minority; in recent months, journalists and academics have been jailed for criticizing the politics of the ruling AK Party and the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Turkey’s political history throws up important questions about freedom of speech and basic civil rights in a republic (see Turan and Boyraz, Ünlü, Cemgil, Erozan, in this issue). In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, the pioneer, anti-colonial republics in the Arab world and the Middle East, disillusioned and unemployed young people without any social and economic perspectives initiated the Arab Spring revolutions and together with partly outlawed Islamic movements effectively toppled the republican political system.

All this gives rise to the following crucial questions. Could it be that republicanism is at least in part the cause of the current cultural clashes and religious violence both in the Arab world and in Europe? Is it just an accident that republics in many parts of the postcolonial world turned authoritarian? Or does republicanism as such risk resulting in illiberal outcomes?

Articles in this issue try to provide an answer to these fundamental challenges that republicanism is currently facing. At the same time, they make proposals of how to move ahead. So far the Arab Spring has resulted in political turmoil without bringing forth a viable and legitimate alternative political system. Syria and Libya drifted into an outright civil war de-stabilizing the whole region and Egypt reestablished a form of dictatorial military rule deepening the profound moral and economic crisis in the country. Also Tunisia, despite the undeniable constitutional success in 2014, is far from being a stable democracy (Corm, Haddad and Ishay, in this issue).

The tradition of republicanism covers the political thought from Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Kant to contemporary thinkers like Philip Pettit and Jürgen Habermas. It is not clear that the different republican theories are reducible to one another and that there is an intersection with elements common to all of the theories. Probably in the substance Plato’s republic is quite different from Rousseau’s and, in particular, contemporary republican theories, like Pettit’s civic republicanism and Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy, are clearly intended to improve the shortcomings of more traditional republicanism (see section III, in this issue). We can nevertheless individuate a concern that motivates republicanism, and which gives the different republican theories a common scope, namely the fear of pluralism. Republicans tend not to accept that a society cannot have any other common ground and values than the respect for one another’s freedom and civil and political rights. Republicanism generally criticizes the skepticism lurking beneath liberalism and provides a conception of the person, a political procedure, or an idea of justice, which is able to overcome the divisions in a society: the general will (Rousseau, Kant), deliberative democracy (Habermas), the freedom of non-domination (Pettit), etc. Hence, it is the search for a common good, a political morality beyond individual rights, that characterizes the project of republicanism.

In the first section, articles discuss to which extent Islam as a religion or republicanism as a political model is the problem in the current conflicts in the Middle East and Europe. Articles in the second section criticize the direction republicanism in Turkey and France has taken and make reform proposals of how it can deal with ethnic and religious questions. And the third and last section engages in showing that the deliberative model of republicanism can respond to the challenge of pluralism.

Republicanism and Islam

Manlio Graziano argues that the rise of religion goes hand in hand with the decline of the nation-state and the social welfare and benefits it provides. Although Graziano recognizes that nation-states construct national identities through the religious, ethnic and cultural homogenization of the population, he nevertheless concludes that the reaffirmation of the traditional republican state is the best answer to solve religious conflicts and wars. Religion is an instrument for pursuing rational interests and once the latter are taken care of by the state, religion is going to fade.

Georges Corm analyses the factors why republicanism and citizenship have not developed and become established in the Arab world and the Middle East, despite the fact that Arab states endorsed for a long time a secular nationalist ideology. He identifies basically three causes of the failure of the republican system: (1) American and western hegemony as much as more regional Saudi-Arabian, Iranian and neo-Ottoman or Turkish imperialism; (2) the related instrumentalization of religion and the rise of political Islam; and (3) ethnic and religious pluralism in the region (notably the Sunni–Shia divide). At the same time, he recognizes that Middle Eastern republics have failed to bring about economic development and social justice and at least in what concerns the Armenians, Kurds and Palestinians have committed serious injustices. Still, Corm concludes that it is particularly the rise of political Islam that ‘constitutes a formidable obstacle to implementing the notion of secular citizenship’.

Micheline Ishay agrees with Corm that ‘[t]he Middle East experienced deep grievances over externally imposed arrangements, including humiliation at the hands of outside powers, a destabilizing encounter with globalizing capitalism, non-hegemonic civil societies, weak state structures, and Bonapartist bids for power in the name of a transcendent ideology’. She compares the rise of belligerent Islamism with the emergence of fascism in Europe in the last century and concludes that the current religious wars are the result of socio-economic dynamics rather than Islam as a religion. Analysing the Arab Spring revolutions, however, she blames secular Arab nationalism and the ‘Arab nationalist leaders and their kleptocratic entourages’ for the economic underdevelopment of Arab societies and the eventual rise of the Islamic State (ISIS). The solution she is proposing to end the civil and religious wars combines liberal constitutionalism with a Marshall Plan and foreign occupation of the Middle East. Whereas Graziano and Corm make a more or less republican proposal for the Middle East, Ishay rather stresses cosmopolitanism as a policy to overcome conflicts.

Mohamed Haddad addresses explicitly the crisis of the republican model both in Europe and the Arab world. The republican political model in the Great Middle East has come to fail as a result of 4 factors: (1) conflicts over geographical borders; (2) transnational ideologies such as pan-Arabism and Islam; (3) the failure of constitutionalism; as well as (4) pre-modern ethnic and religious social structures. Moreover, when the secular modernization of the society and economy did not take off, the republican state did not manage to make Islam part of the national political identity and incorporate it into a new state ideology. As a result, Islam turned into the political ideology of opposition groups. Haddad thinks that neither the traditional secular republican model nor the Islamic model could bring stability to the region and proposes a reformist national model that focuses on ‘pluralism, democracy and human rights’.

The objective is neither the use of religion to serve the state's interests, or vice versa. Rather, the objective is the integration of religion into the general social movements in a way that makes religious discourse develop according to the development of society, liberating itself from the conflicts in which it had been entrapped when it was a medium for justifying ruling regimes or their opposition, or for serving sectarian and partisan purposes.

Riva Kastoryano questions republicanism more radically. She writes that secular ‘[r]epublicanism lead[s] to political actions that are irrational’, given that religious and ethnic identities constitute a sense of belonging and solidarity for migrants that require states to recognize rather than to deny collective identities. Moreover, migrants tend to be organized in transnational identity networks that give rise to political participation beyond the nation-state and multiple memberships and loyalties. ‘Thus for Muslim populations … Islam represents a unifying identity for asserting collective interest and structuring a transnational community which transcends the boundaries of member-states.’ Despite its internal pluralism, ‘the transnational community is “recentered” around norms and values’ that are mainly cosmopolitan in nature, given that European supranational institutions promote and structure transnational cooperation. Yet the problem is, as Kastoryano clearly recognizes, that transnational Muslim communities are increasingly attracted by the idea of the Umma, the global Muslim nation reuniting around a common moral identity that transcends internal differences. Whereas more traditional diaspora networks endorse explicitly and integrate the multiple identities of the home and host countries, the Umma stands in stark contrast to nation-states and aims to overcome them. Kastoryano believes that transnational jihadi groups act in reaction to the states’ denial of ‘citizenship as a foundation of democratic equality’. The question then is which political system can account better for citizens’ democratic equality than republicanism.

Republicanism in Turkey and France: Challenges and Responses

Barış Ünlü makes a strong thesis. In his view, republicanism in Turkey was and still is an instrument of domination of non-Turkish minorities, such as the Kurds, and of privilege of Muslim Turks. Republicanism created the conditions for Turkishness to play the same role of domination as whiteness in other parts of the world. Kemalist republicanism adopted the so-called Muslimness Contract and Turkishness Contract that were tacitly accepted between 1915 and 1925 and privileged Muslims identifying as Turks. The problem is, as Ünlü is pointing out, that republicanism has justified the domination of Turks over non-Turks and non-Muslims identifying Turkishness not with an ethnic property but with the nation and its moral universal aspirations, and non-Turkishness with moral particularism, ethnicity, tribalism and identity politics. Given the ideology of republicanism, even well-meaning Turks, intellectuals and left groups cannot recognize and see the truth of ‘the Kemalist state’s oppressive and chauvinistic policies in Kurdistan’.

Similarly to Ünlü, Ömer Turan and Cemil Boyraz, analysing the Kurdish question, argue that Turkish republicanism stands in conflict with democracy, diversity and pluralism. They hold that the authoritarian nature of republicanism in Turkey is the result of societal modernization and nation-building. Both are based upon a process of system integration that, according to Jürgen Habermas, despite contributing to the rationalization and economic development of society, tends to undermine the lifeworld’s function of social integration on the basis of communicative action. So did the Turkish state prohibit the speaking of Kurdish in the public sphere, deport Kurds to western Turkey, ban Kurdish parties and Kurds from the public administration as well as rule the region with the help of the military. Turan and Boyraz claim, however, that the recent democratic turn of the Kurdish movement, the recognition of Kurdish minority rights in education, culture and politics, and the increasing decentralization and democratization of the Kurdish region give rise to dynamics of social integration that challenge fundamental principles of Turkish republicanism.

Can Cemgil argues that these new democratic practices in the Kurdish regions are themselves inspired by republican principles and that Kemalism as such is simply a misconception of republicanism. According to Cemgil, the contemporary state not only does not promote but also violates the neo-republican ideal of freedom as non-domination, as it has been recently theorized by Philip Pettit. The modern state is based upon a homogenous nation, the concept of territoriality, an apolitical and legal-technical administration and laissez-faire economic policies that all give rise to different forms of domination. Therefore Cemgil concludes with the words of the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] leader Abdullah Öcalan that ‘it was the nation-state itself, with a statist and nationalist homogeneity-seeking orientation that caused for so long the oppression of Kurds’. Yet, the ongoing democratic confederalist project, the so-called Rojava experiment, in war-torn Syrian Kurdistan avoids these pitfalls of the state and realizes the ideal of freedom as non-domination from below. First, in the autonomous administrative units in Rojava ‘different ethnic and religious groups such as Syriacs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Arabs, Kurds and Chechens are represented, and quotas serve to ensure this representation at every level’. Second and third, the administrative structures are organized across territorial borders and democratic checks and balances are established. And finally, ‘the democratic confederalist project seeks to establish democratic control over the production and reproduction of life through a repoliticization of economy based on interdependent self-sufficiency and cooperatives as well as a redistributive mechanism’.

Boğaç Erozan fundamentally agrees with Cemgil that Turkish republicanism is strongly distorted and incompatible with the republican conception of liberty, as formulated by Pettit. Erozan individuates historical and institutional causes for this distortion, such as the heritage of monarchy and Caesaro-papism and widespread illiteracy. In his view, however, the main causes for the Turkish deviation from the core of republicanism are the misinterpretations of republican political theory by the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and intellectuals of the early republic. Erozan reproaches Atatürk for believing ‘along with Rousseau’ that ‘the national will cannot be subject to separation of powers’ and for following Montesquieu’s premise that ‘a republic is based on moral virtue’. Erozan’s point raises two important questions briefly touched upon in the introduction. First, is Pettit’s conception of freedom as non-domination the essential core of republicanism? And second, does Rousseau’s theory of the general will really stand in contrast to the conception of freedom as non-domination?

Philippe Gaudin defends in line with Cemgil and Erozan the emancipatory character of republicanism and makes proposals about how a contemporary secular republic such as France has to relate to religion. He argues that a ‘21st-century secularism must be a balanced system in which religions must be present in the public sphere, rub shoulders and express themselves and also take action’. This means that a republic cannot any longer afford to separate politics, the state and the public sphere from religion and confine the latter to the private sphere. The state ‘will never be able to replace the spiritual, ritual, communitarian and artistic substantiality of religions’. Today good republican policies govern and integrate religions within the public system and take advantage of the services religions can provide. They should go well beyond 19^th-century republicanism that limited itself to ‘freedom of conscience and worship within the framework of the law, the equality of religions and citizens whatever their beliefs [and] the reciprocal autonomy of state and religious spheres’. In this revised secularist republican framework, Gaudin proposes that religious education becomes an important element of citizenship formation and that the state has to provide the education and employment of religious authorities. Gaudin’s post-secular republicanism faces the challenge of how still to account for the distinction between the secular and the religious and how to avoid the risk that the government of religion collapses into the religious governance of the state.

Republicanism, Pluralism and Deliberative Democracy

In their articles Cemgil and Erozan criticize classical republicanism for discriminating against religious and ethnic minorities and for not respecting cultural pluralism and they claim that contemporary civic interpretations of republicanism based upon the notion of freedom of non-domination do not run into this problem. However, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak shows that true individual freedom from domination must not necessarily correspond to the recognition of people’s actual desires, ideas and identities. Analysing the concept of cultural pluralism, Spivak argues that ‘it usually emphasizes identity at the expense of class’ and is based upon a notion of freedom that does not take into account ‘the task of subject-formation’, remaining on the level of ‘just recognition in the status quo’. Spivak asks provocatively: ‘What about those who, cognitively damaged millennially through social apartheid, have neither power nor right, and yet must vote without access to the rights of citizenship? Where are they in the formation of collectivity?’ The recognition of cultures and actual subjectivities as sources of normativity, without addressing the underlying class structures, does not increase freedom, but contributes to further and greater domination of the subaltern. In other words, in order to address and perhaps emancipate the ‘billions of electors epistemologically trained into identitarianism by the hyper-real discourse of the residual’, the realization of freedom as non-domination must adopt and apply objective political standards and cannot be equated with the particular will of the people. Accordingly, even civic republicanism might run into troubles with cultural pluralism.

Giovanna Borradori makes a not very dissimilar point. She claims that the WikiLeaks scandal following the publication of classified information gathered by the US government has not to be understood in Orwellian terms ‘draw[ing] a sharp distinction between the agent and the object of surveillance, mapping them onto highly polarized active and passive roles, suggesting a definite perpetrator and a vulnerable victim’. An exclusively liberal reading of WikiLeaks in terms of violation of ‘constitutional principles of personal privacy and freedom’ ignores and obscures the citizens’ active participation in the massive dataveillance of social media providers and ‘the global circulation, analysis and commercial exploitation of personal data’ of the marketing, entertainment and health industries. Borradori asks: ‘What if there was instead a secret desire for surveillance and that such desire made so many of us expose ourselves, day in and day out, to the gaze of known and unknown others, on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat?’ ‘The libertarian fantasy of the radically autonomous self, the view that human agents initially own themselves’ has contributed to ‘the totalitarian drift of our supposed democratic polities’ and does not protect the citizens’ ‘right to the secret, a right to invisibility, … the right not to answer and not to belong’. In this sense, the ideal of freedom as non-domination might require policies that not only go well beyond the simple respect for our subjectivities, but which sometimes also go against our subjectivities.

To some extent, the political theory of deliberative democracy aims to provide a solution to the republican dilemma outlined above, namely that people are not necessarily aware of their own domination. Albena Azmanova argues that a ‘fundamental right to politics’ can overcome current relational and systemic forms of domination, where the former concerns the unequal distribution of resources and the latter relates to the system of redistribution. According to Azmanova, ‘the standard answer republicanism offers – of representing the general will of the community rather than the particular and partial preferences of its individual members – contains the risk of sacrificing the individual to the community, of forcing pluralism into uniformity, of instigating intolerance to difference and dissent’. Liberalism, on the other hand, cannot avoid political outcomes in which ‘choice and individual freedom are perfectly compatible with domination’. Therefore Azmanova proposes, following Seyla Benhabib, a ‘retranslation of republicanism’ along the lines of deliberative democracy. Agency not only gives people the inherent right to freedom as non-interference, but requires them also to justify to one another their political values and actions in the public sphere. The proper application of this ‘right to justification’ (Rainer Forst) or, in Azmanova’s terms, ‘right to politics’, ‘is to engage in the contestation of existing rules of social cooperation in view of actors’ particular circumstances and perceptions of personal and collective interests’. And yet Azmanova admits, first, that the outcomes of deliberation and politics might be ‘faulty and incoherent’ and, second, that neo-liberalism, which she holds responsible for current de-politicization processes and forms of domination in the name of TINA [‘There Is No Alternative’], is based upon ‘the notion of political autonomy’, defending democracy as the ‘ultimate source of political legitimacy’. This gives rise to the serious question if people’s freedom and agency are sufficient grounds for liberating them from, in particular, systemic forms of domination.

In some sense, Regina Kreide defends deliberative democracy from exactly the opposite criticism, namely that deliberative democracy is too close to republicanism and that its moral interpretation of freedom and agency in terms of political participation and the obligation of justification in the deliberative process makes it somewhat undemocratic. More radical democratic theorists, the ‘left-Heideggerians’, as Kreide calls them, criticize deliberative democracy for being excessively idealistic, screening out ‘the unjustifiable, contingent and conflictual character of society and democracy’ and risking thereby the ‘impositions of identity, completeness and the assimilation and suppression of otherness’. Kreide’s answer to this criticism is that non-normative approaches to democracy ignore the ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ (Habermas) and the social and economic structures that hinder democratic action and participation. Moreover, deliberation does not foreclose difference, but takes it as a starting point of any communicative practice. At the same time, Kreide recognizes that the ‘normative standpoint’ introduces a form of ‘ideal’ participation and that communicative power aims at a ‘potential common will formation in a realm of non-coercive communication’. But what happens if, as Kreide writes with regard to the situation in Europe, citizens ‘leave the public sphere to the media moguls, the Internet to the big corporations, and the social media to the hatemongers’? Kreide concludes: ‘The deliberative theory of democracy relies on citizens who are alert and are stirred by the sight of a broken apple. It is not paternalistic, therefore, but it cannot be had without effort either.’

Max Pensky defends a deliberative conception of republicanism claiming that it is the best possible political system for avoiding domination both on the international and also on the domestic level. Discussing the striking ‘push-back of states against the impunity norm’ in international criminal law, which authorizes the International Criminal Court to prosecute and punish certain crimes in cases where concerned states are ‘“unwilling or genuinely unable” to do so’, Pensky concludes that it ‘reflects opposition to the larger cosmopolitanism that the norm promotes … rather than opposition to the deontic claim of the norm itself’. Pensky argues that ‘in the context of political transitions … a new and potentially quite fragile government will need to balance’ competing needs: ‘the delivery of criminal justice’ on the one hand and ‘domestic political stability, international standing and recognition’ on the other hand. In this regard, ‘the legal category of sovereignty needs to be taken in relation to the broader moral-political concept of republicanism’ and ‘the political ideal of self-determination’. Accordingly, in order to avoid that the ‘impunity norm is imposed in an overly unilateral manner … appear[ing] as an instance of unaccountability’, it needs to be understood ‘as the expression of a deliberative norm with an interpretive intent’, involving in the deliberative process of its interpretation all the parties affected, that is, domestic and global civil and political society. As a consequence, however, if a polity could quite legitimately decide to leave crimes under certain circumstances unpunished, Pensky’s republicanism does not necessarily coincide and give rise to freedom of non-interference in terms of inalienable individual rights.

To sum up, it seems to be rather surprising, at first sight, that for some authors republicanism is the ultimate source of domination, whereas for others it is the theory of freedom as non-domination. This is largely due to the fact that there is disagreement about what domination actually is. If we think in line with the liberal tradition that ‘the only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way’,² then any form of interference with our values and agency constitutes a form of domination. If, on the other hand, we conceive non-domination as an objective condition that is largely independent from our will and subjectivity, then interference is not immediately an injustice. It could seem that the identification of a republic and the general will with a particular nation or religion should clearly constitute a form of domination. Yet, here also, matters are perhaps more complicated, if we take into consideration Gaudin’s post-secular republicanism³ and the fact that the general will otherwise risks being empty, without substance. Deliberative democracy seeks to mediate between these extremes and the question is if it provides a practicable third way.