Creating the People as One?

On Democracy and Its Other

Marta Nunes da Costa

Abstract: It is common sense today to say that democracy is in crisis. This

apparently obvious crisis of democracy has several aspects: it is a crisis of its
representative dimensions; it is a crisis that exposes the tensions and intrinsic
contradictions between the political and the economic and financial orders;
but it is also a crisis that begins to question the actual future of democracy,
announcing the possibility that democracy may be replaced by something else
for which we dont have a name yet. In this article I start by looking at the
modern (re) invention of democracy, trying to grasp the ways in which the
people has been theorised. After, I look at the challenges Europe is facing
today, mainly in what concerns the economic and financial crises on the one
hand, and the refugees and humanitarian crises on the other. I conclude by
showing how and why democracy can only be defined as crisis and why the
people must remain simultaneously invisible and un-bodied, in order to fight
current populist threats.
Keywords: crisis, democracy, popular sovereignty, populism, refugees,
representation

What is democracy? What are its premises, its necessary conditions and its
conditions of possibility? What are its limits? These are some of the questions
that seem apparently straightforward to answer we all recognise democracy,
defined by its procedures, methods or regulative ideals. However, even this
preliminary consensus is subjected to critique and several interpretations. Some
authors define democracy as a method of selection of representatives (Schum-
peter 2003; Dahl 1973; Bobbio, 1987); others define it via a set of ideals with
intrinsic value and not merely instrumental, such as the ideals of equality, lib-
erty and fraternity (Rawls 1999). According to the priority we establish at the
beginning of our democratic construction, the results can be very different: a
more egalitarian democracy; a more liberal democracy; a representative democ-
racy; one that tries to deepen the relationship between the dimensions of repre-
sentation, participation and deliberation. Therefore, we are led to the conclusion
that there is not one model of democracy, but many democratic instantiations.
This suggests that contrary to many attempts of several democratic theories,

Theoria, Issue 149, Vol. 63, No. 4 (December 2016): 55-79

doi:10.3167/th.2016.6314904 ISSN 0040-5817 (Print) ISSN 1558-5816 (Online)
56 Marta Nunes da Costa

there is not one definition of democracy, in light of which one can identify in
an absolute and uncontested manner its essential traits. In this light, we become
aware that by speaking of democracy the concern that regulates our inquiry is
not merely epistemological; instead, it is a concern moved by practical reason,
i.e., we cannot know democracy, since there is not one democracy but
many, however we can think the meanings of democracy.
If we accept the premise that democracy does not refer to an object of
knowledge, to an external reference or rigid designator, stable among all pos-
sible worlds, then a different question emerges: how can we attribute a mean-
ing to democracy and under which conditions can we do so? Let us start by
looking at the uses we make of democracy in our language.
It is common sense today to say that democracy is in crisis. This appar-
ently obvious crisis of democracy has several aspects: it is a crisis of its repre-
sentative dimension, since there is a conscious and visible gap between
represented and representatives; it is a crisis that exposes the tensions and
intrinsic contradictions between the political and the economic and financial
orders; but it is also a crisis that begins to question the actual future of democ-
racy, announcing, or at least considering the possibility that democracy may
be replaced by something else for which we dont have a name yet.
All these aspects of crisis of democracy can be described, to some extent,
as social facts translated into empirical and observable data (such as levels of
trust, political participation, political mobilisation, among others). Many the-
orists try to understand the nature of this multi-layered crisis as if, by identify-
ing its nature, it would become possible to find a solution for it. Some argue
that the problem lies in representation, and more specifically the challenge
brought by a representation that claims to be democratic (Manin 1997;
Nasstrom 2015); others argue that the problem lies in the articulation between
institutions (as formal spaces for politics) and informal spaces of political
mobilisation and participation, which would actually reinforce democratic
legitimacy (Urbinati 2006) since these informal spaces actualise the necessary
dialogue and communication between parts (represented and representatives).
However, a search for the nature of the crisis of democracy is doomed to
failure, mainly because democracy has no nature and even if it had a nature
(as essence or intrinsic set of properties), its most dominant and constitutive
trait would probably be a propensity for crisis, which seems to suggest that a
cure for democracy would imply the end of democracy.
The purpose of this article is to explore this line of reasoning, namely that:
a) democracy is not an object of knowledge, or a matter of theoretical reason
(in a Kantian sense), but a matter of practical reason; b) there is not one
unique definition for democracy, since democracy has several possible instan-
tiations, which suggests that the quest(ion) of democracy is a quest(ion) for
the attribution of meaning(s) to it; c) the shift of perspective, namely, from a
perspective ruled by an essentialist concern to one which accepts the openness
and permanently contested character of the concept of democracy, shows
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 57

that one of the goals of a critique to democracy is to understand the ways in

which different democratic models unfold in different system of practices,
placing upon those who live democratically the absolute responsibility of con-
ducting human affairs according to ones ideals and projects. In this light, a
critique of democracy is not only a description of what is wrong with democ-
ratic practices; instead, it is a prescription on how we want to build our own
political community. Having said that, considering that democracy has several
instantiations, my starting point will be the instantiation of representative
democracy, and not democracy tout court, for it must be clear by now that
there is no such thing as pure, authentic or true democracy.
This article has three sections First, I start by providing an historical
account of the meanings of democracy. I argue that the American and French
Revolutions set in motion a symbolic rupture in the political spectrum, open-
ing up a new horizon for politics, and redefining the people, now understood
as only source of legitimate power. I show that the peculiarity of the democra-
tic people is that it must remain undefined, un-bodied and invisible. This
impossibility of materialising the people is what is particularly constitutive of
democratic politics the fact that the traditional space of power, which was
occupied by the king in monarchical settings, must simultaneously remain
empty while reclaiming to be filled. The recognition of this paradox brought
the theoretical and practical challenge of reinventing sovereignty: in order for
popular sovereignty to become real, it had to be divided.
In the second section, I argue that although the discourse of a divided sov-
ereignty (which was translated in institutional settings) was sufficient to grant
some stability for nearly two hundred years (at least if we consider stability in
a minimum sense, understood as not going back to a monarchical setting),
this stability is being contested today in many democratic nations. Here, I
offer a vivid example of democratic crisis: by looking at the relationship
between democracy and capitalism, I expose the open conflict between demo-
cratic founding ideas and economic interests.
In the third section, I look at another manifestation of democratic crisis,
visible in the tension between democratic ideals and the refugee crisis in
Europe. While the previous section questions the egalitarian or libertarian pre-
tensions of a democratic project, via the economic and financial lenses, this
section unveils the formation of a new political constellation that, having the
democratic horizon as its own condition of possibility, aims at transforming
and replacing it by an anti-democratic project via populism. Having Schmitt
as interlocutor, especially with his friends/enemies distinction, this section
exposes the dangers of reconstructing (popular) sovereignty by promoting a
populist project that aims at reconstructing the people as One. I conclude
with a critical reflection upon the tense relationship between democracy and
populism. While populism is attractive because it solves the democratic para-
dox by unifying the people (who is necessarily nobody), transfiguring it
into something or someone in the name of collective identity and political
58 Marta Nunes da Costa

stability, populism is also one (not to say the most) dangerous Other to
democracy, since it uses the democratic space to overthrow democratic ideals
and democratic institutional settings.

The Modern (Re) Invention of Democracy

the People as the Empty Reference

The American and French Revolutions inaugurated a new, specifically mod-

ern, political constellation. On the one hand, it created a rupture with the tra-
ditional paradigm of sovereignty; on the other hand, it opened up the space for
the constitution of a new political actor, with specific properties and powers
the people. In this section, I will show how the shift in the discourse of sov-
ereignty was crucial to create the conditions for a new (democratic) ideology,
namely, the ideology of popular power.
Politics gained a specific autonomous sphere with modernity, i.e., to speak
of politics as we do today is a product of a particular historical construction of
the sixteenth to eighteenth century, which reflected, on the one hand, a rupture
brought about by religious wars in the postulated homogenous order supported
by an appeal to the Divine (and which created room for pluralism in its differ-
ent shapes and domains), and on the other hand, the invention of the nation as
political entity, emancipated from the Imperium Chirstianorum. Sovereignty
was, from the sixteenth century until the Revolutions of the eighteenth century,
generally defined as indivisible, perpetual, absolute and unconditional. Bodin,
for instance, begins Six Books on the Republic by defining a republic as a
well-ordered government of a number of families and of those things which
are of their common interest, by a sovereign power (Bodin [1576] 2009: 43).
A republic is a well-ordered government because it is designed according to
its specific ends of stability, conformity with the laws of nature and justice.
The subjects of the sovereign power are the families, since the individual
was not yet invented; and the sovereign is defined as absolute and perpetual
power that lives in the republic; it is an independent and unlimited power, a
power to define and specify all rights the right to declare peace and war, to
set currency, and to make laws without being subjected to them, among others.
Bodin argues that the sovereign power is best fit in an absolute monarch,
because it is assumed that the king is capable of fulfilling his duties of inter-
preting and translating the principles of harmonic justice, Divine wisdom, the
love of God and eternal justice (Bodin 2009: 248). The defence of absolutism
and of sovereignty as one and indivisible was what permitted the construction
of the modern state, simultaneously capable of legitimising political authority
vis--vis the members of the relatively new political community, but also vis-
-vis other States and even the Church.
Hobbes, like Bodin, had as his main purpose to identify the necessary
means to assure social and political stability, overcoming the threat brought
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 59

by possible civil wars. The Leviathan must be read in this light. Here, Hobbes
affirms the necessity of absolute sovereignty through a double movement of
re-interpreting natural law and of emancipating politics from theology, by
affirming the supremacy of reason. The social contract is the expression of
reason insofar as in a hypothetical state of nature men are thrown in a condi-
tion of war, actual or possible. Only by renouncing the right to all things is it
then possible to exit this state of war. This renouncement is simultaneously a
mutual transfer of rights, in order to create a common power, a unified will.
Before this transfer, there is no people, only a dispersed multitude, governed
by individual desires and passions. The multitude only becomes a political
subject, a unified political will, when the sovereign, by being constituted,
becomes its representative. As Hobbes says in chapter XVI of Leviathan,
what makes the person one is the unity of the representer, not the unity of
the represented (Hobbes 2000). Therefore, the sovereign is the product and
creation of the social pact; it is the artificial person who represents all and
who is fully authorised to act on behalf of this new political subject the
people. There is no people prior to the act of constitution and representa-
tion; indeed, the people exists only as such because the representative grants
its condition of existence. As in Bodin, the sovereign is an absolute, indivisi-
ble and perpetual power.1
Curiously, even Rousseau, who shifted the locus of power from the king to
the people, maintained the definition of sovereignty as that which cannot be
divided. Rousseau uses the social contract to justify a theory of popular sover-
eignty. Similar to Hobbes, the social contract requires the total alienation by
each associate of himself and all his rights to the whole community (Rousseau
1968: 60). Individuals total alienation (which could be interpreted as a nega-
tive moment) is translated positively in the invention of political equality,
allowing the creation of the general will. The act of alienation creates an arti-
ficial body, a common ego, with its own life and will. However, this artifi-
cial body is no longer the absolute monarch, the Hobbesian mortal God, but
instead the general will which, in its active role, is the sovereign (Rousseau
1968: 62). Sovereignty, in Rousseau, appears in a new light: it is nothing more
than the exercise of the general will that by the fact that it is, it is always
what it should be (Rousseau 1968: 63). The bearer of sovereignty is the peo-
ple, also the product of creation of the social pact.
From these brief references one can see how the concept of sovereignty
always played a special role in political theory. The concept of sovereignty is
the central concept from which it is possible to derive two modern concepts,
which became necessarily entangled: the nation and the people, both con-
ceived as interrelated unities.
While Rousseau argued that the legitimacy of political power could only be
found in the general will, his theory was problematic and mainly inconsistent,
insofar as by postulating the difference between general will and the will of
all, it lacked the means to translate this conceptual distinction in a real insti-
60 Marta Nunes da Costa

tutional setting. One can read the French Revolution (in its inception and his-
torical movement from 1789 to the Terror of Robespierre, the rise and fall of
Napoleon, up to several constitutional projects in the nineteenth century) as a
vivid example of how and why Rousseaus theory could simply not be imple-
mented.2 Some, like Benjamin Constant,3 argue that one of the main problems
with Rousseaus theory was that the author was still working within a para-
digm of the ancients, without giving any account of the new modern free-
dom; others, like Arendt, read Rousseaus general will as replacement for
the Leviathan, insofar as it also converted the multitude into one artificial per-
son.4 However, one could question why it was so problematic to instantiate
Rousseaus general will, i.e., to materialise the people. Perhaps the problem
was not only in how the theory was set (inconsistently), but mainly in the real-
ity that it aimed to portray or project. Political theorists in general, and demo-
cratic theorists in particular, tried to overcome the unresolved challenge
announced by Rousseau by shifting our attention to the process of the consti-
tution of the people, and by focusing on the channels that would allow the
people to become materialised through participation and political engagement.
Here, the ideal of autonomy first announced by Rousseau and then developed
by Kant became a pillar of further democratic constructions. However, it
seems that the problem remains unsolved, namely, the fact that in a democ-
racy no one (not God, the nation, the party, the leader) can put an end to the
conflict on who has the right to instantiate the power of the people. Popular
power belongs, literally, to nobody (Nasstrom 2015: 1).
One way to solve this problem is by transforming it. Instead of struggling
with the question of how the people, which is nobody, can govern itself, one
can ask instead what does it mean to act in the name of the people, or to put
it into different words, what makes of representation a democratic representa-
tion. According to Nasstrom, what is required of a democratic form of repre-
sentation is that the act is committed to the principle of equality: it unburdens
human beings from the excess of responsibility that comes with the removal
of an external authority in political affairs by sharing and dividing it equally
(Nasstrom 2015: 2). This vision and conceptualisation of democratic politics,
rooted in the concept and ideal of equality, is faithful to Tocquevilles descrip-
tion in Democracy in America. Democracy, according to Tocqueville, trans-
lates first and foremost a passion for equality. However, it would be a mistake
to suppose that democracy a project that has equality in its core is only
or mainly a form of government, among others. The equality of conditions
that Tocqueville witnesses in America stands for a way of life, a political
regime and a specific ideal of society. Sovereignty, therefore (and popular sov-
ereignty in particular) had to be redefined according to this new ideal.
The American Revolution had profound consequences in reshaping the
ideal of popular sovereignty. It redefined peoples vision of the world and
of themselves; it lifted the curtain and revealed the possibility for human
beings Americans but ultimately all others that poverty was not a necessary
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 61

human condition. However, as Arendt pointed out, the truly revolutionary ele-
ment that affected Europe, and France in particular, was not the revolution per
se, but instead the particular ideology of equality in America. Equality was a
new experience that projected the human being to the novelty (Arendt [1963]
2006: 24) inaugurating a new pathos, linked to the idea of freedom.5
Tocqueville was the first author to think what was, until him, unthinkable
the equality of conditions and to show that what was now taken as truth or
evidence was the social product of a violent confrontation between radically
different realities: democracy in America became possible (and thinkable, an
object of thought and of a set of practices) because it constituted and created
itself by opposition and in contrast to the European Ancien Rgime. One could
say that this ideological shift represents the way in which it became possible
to create and attribute meaning to the structural transformation brought about
by the American Revolution. If the new world proposes creating a new man,
this new man is a man that is, or is it better to say, wants to become equal.6
Equality plays an interesting role insofar as it is simultaneously taken as a
theoretical starting-point for a new political construction and a practical ideal
that ought to govern mans actions in the public political sphere. After the
Revolutions democracy acquired a different meaning from democracy in
ancient times, since the city-state of Athens, for instance, was democratic only
because inequality of the many granted the conditions of possibility for
equality among citizens (the few) who participated in the process of collective
decision-making. What happens when the other of equality is removed from
the theoretical apparatus? It seems that the concept of equality plays different
functions: the formal political equality assures the universal equality between
human beings, at least as potential political actors, but it is an artificial equal-
ity, which by itself cannot grant real political equality. Therefore, equality
works as the regulative ideal that guides the construction of a political and
social system consistent with the enlightenment ideal of autonomy and human
emancipation, but at the same time it opens the path for practical dimensions
of inequality as spaces of exclusion and discrimination of which represen-
tation becomes the symbolic line through which one can evaluate whos in
and whos out of the political process. In different words, while citizens
become equal, they are well aware that this equality is only a promise that
each one wants and expects (at least in principle) to actualise.7
Since the American Revolution, democratic government stands for the ideal
that people rule themselves indirectly via representatives. The concept of rep-
resentation, although with a specific history that was, by no means, democratic
in nature,8 was introduced by the Founding Fathers because they had a pro-
found mistrust of power as such and of human nature. Madisons views
strengthen this reading: men, by their specific nature, are incapable of receiv-
ing unlimited power, and those who receive power are soon tempted to abuse
the power by impulse.9 Government a republican government aims first
and foremost at protecting society against oppression in two ways: oppression
62 Marta Nunes da Costa

by governors or representatives, and oppression by one part of society over

another. The key ideological concept that allows the acceptance of representa-
tion as the friend (instead of enemy) of democracy, despite its aristocratic ori-
gins, is the concept of popular sovereignty. Curiously, popular sovereignty in
the American context does not mean that the people literally rule themselves;
they do so indirectly and only through a thoughtful coordination between for-
mal and informal spaces. Even if representation in democracy always runs the
risk of not being entirely democratic, popular sovereignty as embodied in
institutions and as informal political power that exercises pressure over elected
officials in the public realm is still the regulative ideal to keep; it is the ideal
that allows one to judge the quality and extension of democratic procedures. It
cannot, however, be reduced to a power of the majority, even if the majority is
the most direct manifestation of the intuitive myth of popular sovereignty. Toc-
queville, and Stuart Mill after him, had warned us that the tyranny of the
majority is a realistic danger intrinsic to democracy and only political freedom
is able to combat it effectively.
The awareness of this duality, where the majority appears simultaneously
as proof of democratic legitimacy and as potential actor that absorbs the peo-
ple in a particular and sectarian way (depriving it of its postulated universal-
ising character), is what creates the conditions for permanent contestation on
who we, the people are.

Divided Sovereignty? Europe Unfolded

The fact that we, the people is an empty designator, since it designates
nobody and it stands for an empty space that invites its constant (re) occupa-
tion, suggests that it can have simultaneously paralysing or empowering effects
on individuals and groups. Because democracy is crisis and it always invites
change and permanent redefinition of itself, it was always taken as problematic
in terms of the need for social and political stability. Let me be clear on what
I mean by saying that democracy is crisis. I started this article by suggesting
that democracy has no content, no essence, therefore, it cannot be positively
defined; however, if we wanted to define it, we would define it as crisis. The
word crisis comes from the Greek krinein, which means to separate, decide,
judge; also from the Greek krinesthai, which means to explain. A crisis is
that which takes us to the root and divides it; from a different angle it could be
seen as a root that is divided in itself. Crisis therefore has three important
components: it points to separation, to decision, and to judgment.
Democracy, as non-definable per se, finds the approximate attempt of self-
definition in the word and concept of crisis, for several reasons. First, democ-
racy has as its necessary condition pluralism and difference. To be plural is to
be more than One, therefore democracy lives permanently with itself and its
Other. It is divided, separated in its own root(s), and the art of politics is to
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 63

artificially create bridges between those who are separated. Second, the cre-
ation of artificial bridges is the product of a decision and of political judgment.
Judgment reflects the choice in favour of something and to the detriment of
other (possible) alternatives. Democracy, in order to remain democratic, must
constantly choose the creation of bridges between differences without
annulling them, i.e., it must choose to preserve plurality and resist the tempta-
tion to create Oneness and only foster homogeneity. Finally, because democ-
racy is open to difference, which can be opposition, there can be multiple
types of crises, triggered by distinct factors, i.e., there is not one meaning,
translation or practice of crisis. Crises are multifaceted as they also reinvent
themselves. In this light, given that crises are multiple, have different natures,
are triggered by different events or causes, and have distinct manifestations, to
define democracy as crisis would still avoid the essentialist trap of attributing
specific characteristics to it. The core of democracy and democratic politics
is the space for crises to happen; it is a set of conditions of possibility for its
own actualisation, placing the entire responsibility on us.
Having said that, the twentieth century observed several movements that
tried a) to reduce democracy to a political method (such as Schumpeter and
later Dahl);10 b) to replace democracy by other forms of government (dictator-
ship, totalitarianism); and c) to recover democracy and reinvent it by granting
new conditions of possibility for the people to become a significant political
actor. Let me briefly say something on these three tendencies, which were
actualised in the past century.
Schumpeter defines democracy as [a] political method, that is to say, a
certain type of institutional arrangement for arriving at political legislative
and administrative decisions and hence incapable of being an end in itself,
irrespective of what decisions it will produce under given historical condi-
tions (Schumpeter [1943] 2006: 242, emphasis added). Schumpeters goal
was to shift our attention from a discourse grounded on ideals to a discourse
governed by practical concerns. Since governments need to make decisions, it
seems more efficient to define democracy as a method to achieve this goal
than to dwell on an apparently endless discussion on whom the people really
is, or what does a government of the people mean. I believe that Schumpeter
was deeply bothered by the logical incoherence of nobody (as the people)
as the actor that rules. A government by the people can only be defined,
according to Schumpeter, in an arbitrary way, as a matter of convention, which
generally leads one to accept the majority rule as a way of compromising with
the ideal of the people, while at the same time having some common ground
that allows it to exit political impasse or indecision.
This general anxiety around fixing the peoples unity for the sake of stabil-
ity and social cohesion was maximised by the phenomena of dictatorship and
totalitarianism in the twentieth century.11 This tendency, which culminated in
the Second World War and the Holocaust, paved the way for a movement of
recovering and reinventing democracy by granting new conditions of possibil-
64 Marta Nunes da Costa

ity for the people to become a significant political actor. As Arendt noticed,
the twentieth century was the century of revolutions in the name of democracy.
However, the twenty-first century seems to be reversing this tendency, even if
the democratic discourse remains at the core of official politics. Having
Europe as the object of study, my goal in the second and third sections of this
article is to offer a critical reflection on its actual multifaceted crisis, a crisis
that intersects national and trans-national levels and which articulates different
claims that are in permanent tension and point to opposite ways of resolution:
one, a democratic exit (which would imply the strengthening of democratic
institutions and the revival of democratic ideals specially the founding ideal
of fraternity); another, an anti-democratic exit, which is opening its path via
the revival of populist arguments and worldviews which resemble, to a large
extent, pre-war worldviews. In this section I explore the relationship between
democracy and capitalism in the European context, in order to highlight the
ways in which democratic ideals become compromised. In the next section, I
use the refugee crisis as illustration for the eventual anti-democratic exit and I
situate it under the revival of a populist strategy in contemporary Europe.

Between Founding Ideals and Economic Interests:

Democracy Versus Capitalism
The European project was originally guided by a commitment to the three rev-
olutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. A common economic and
political order shared by several countries had as its first target to maintain
peace in the European continent, and then to work on conditions for freedom,
equality and the prosperity of its members. Countries wish (or wished) to
belong to and be part of the European Union because despite the challenges
of imagining how democratic ideals could be instantiated in a supra-national
order, it seemed that membership would pay off members would gain polit-
ically, economically and culturally speaking; they would be part of a project
of transforming the old world in a renewed world, an example of democracy
at work.
Since 2008, however, the global financial crisis triggered by the US has led
to the inability of many European countries to effectively respond to external
and internal pressures. Ireland, Greece and Portugal were three countries that
experienced intervention on the part of the European Troika (IMF, CEB, EC).
Each country responded differently to the help received. Ireland and Portugal
were capable of turning the famous measures of austerity into something pos-
itive, using them as a pretext to put public affairs in order and control the
expenses of the State. However, austerity has high human costs. In Portugal
and Greece the younger generations are being sacrificed some speak of it as
lost generations because of the high unemployment rate (over 50%);
salaries in Greece were cut to between 30% and 48%, and the pension scheme
also suffered a dramatic reduction. Between 2010 and 2015 we observed mul-
tiple demonstrations and protests across European countries against austerity
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 65

measures. This attack against austerity measures must be seen in two ways: on
the one hand, it is an attack on national governments and existing representa-
tive institutions. Democracy appears (and is indeed) at risk because when such
intervention in countries occurs, democracy (as the ideal of popular sover-
eignty) is suspended. On the other hand, it is an attack on European institu-
tions, but mainly an attack on how Europe is privileging financial and
economic interests and forgetting about their own foundational ideals.12 These
two dimensions, which are necessarily linked, bring to the surface what
remained hidden for decades, namely the contradiction between European
ideals and discourses and their instantiation.
By the suspension of national democracies I mean that countries who
experienced Troika intervention, as well as other European countries, end up
losing their sovereignty to an abstract European we to which no one can
relate and which no one is able recognise as a mirror of oneself. When Troika
intervenes in a country, this dynamics of alienation becomes more evident,
because the national people is confronted with the absence of its own voice;
democratic institutions exist and continue to function but the will of the peo-
ple is necessarily bound to the external will that lends the money at exorbi-
tant prices. Other European countries maintain the illusion of sovereignty on a
daily basis, however most of the political agenda is predetermined by European
guidelines and must conform to the limits designed and imposed by Europe.
Of course, the European dynamics could be read as translating to what in
Krasners words amounts to the organized hypocrisy that governs the con-
cept of sovereignty. As Krasner puts it, [that] sovereignty has always been
characterized by organized hypocrisy, a disjunction between logics of appro-
priateness and logics of consequences, is not surprising in an environment as
complex as the international system. [] But what is, perhaps, surprising is
the durability of this decoupling. [] Despite these inconsistencies, no endur-
ing alternative construct has arisen to replace or even complement sover-
eignty (Krasner 2010: 98). In the case of Europe what one openly observes is
the conflict between two distinct orders, namely, the modern order of domestic
sovereignty and the postmodern world,13 of which Europe is the example and
which scholars and theorists are still trying to grasp via traditional (or trans-
formed) conceptual tools.14
Regarding the subsumption of national interests over other interests, I
want to suggest that this subsumption only mirrors the previous dynamics
where the empty concept of the people is filled by specific and private inter-
ests that use the democratic rhetoric to project an illusory legitimacy in poli-
cies proposals. It is interesting to look at the unemployment dynamics to
uncover the tension between the hypothetical interests of a real people and
the interests of the people represented by the few. I assume that a general
interest of the people any people, regardless the country is to have
employment for the adult population; representatives who claim to represent
the people should defend the interest of proposing and implementing spe-
66 Marta Nunes da Costa

cific policies that fight unemployment. However, one is confronted instead

with a global interest in increasing the unemployment army in order to
lower salaries and explore the progressive precarisation of work, which under-
mines the democratic expectation of prosperity, well-being and human
development. According to Eurostat of 1 September 2015, Spains youth
unemployment (under 25 years old) stands at 48.8%, Greece at 48.3%, and
Italy at 40.7%. As the document explains: The unemployment rate is an
important indicator with both social and economic dimensions. Rising unem-
ployment results in a loss of income for individuals, increased pressure with
respect to government spending on social benefits and a reduction in tax rev-
enue. From an economic perspective, unemployment may be viewed as
unused labour capacity.15
Apparently Europe has a strategy to combat this trend of unemployment by
fostering lifelong learning, improving support to those seeking a job, as well
as ensuring equal opportunities (Eurostat 2015: 1), given the recognition that
globalisation brings new pressures on daily life and new demands for different
types of work. However, it is striking how the European policy makers look
for solutions within the actual capitalist mode of production, without even
raising the question that perhaps the actual system is the problem, not the
solution. Individuals are permanently being reduced to their labour-force
capacity, which is abstract by definition; in being reduced to numbers that sta-
tistics employ to portray and construct reality, individuals become exchange-
able, they become things and are indeed treated as things, as theoretical
problems that the system must solve in order to prove, once again, its superi-
ority and its internal coherence.
In this approach that reduces human beings (in their potential humanity) to
things, obviously there is no concern for individuals rights to freedom or
equality, even if the document states that equal opportunities should be fos-
tered in order to deal with the problem of unemployment. As Kant said in the
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, only human beings have dignity.
To have dignity means not to have a price, not to be reduced to an exchangeable
thing. As Kant says, [m]orality and humanity, insofar as it is capable of moral-
ity, is that alone which has dignity (Kant [1785] 1964: 53). The inability to
address structural problems of global capitalism only exposes the deep wound
to which not only Europe, but the world, is exposed: the danger of inhumanity.
The reduction of equality and freedom to a rhetoric deprived of real meaning
exposes the total absence of one of the fundamental pillars of democracy,
namely fraternity or solidarity. This absence announces, as Kant warned us,
the incapacity of morality and therefore the killing of human dignity.
The reduction of individuals to exchangeable things denounces the unde-
mocratic nature of contemporary democracies that place economic and finan-
cial interests above human interests. For the sake of capitalism everything is
allowed. But ultimately, the actual crises of capitalism simply manifest the
crucial tension and contradiction that always existed between capitalism (as a
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 67

mode of production where the relationship of exchange is naturalised) and

democracy (as a set of ideals where values mean something and cannot be
translated or reduced to prices).
There are political actors and forces forces that have the appearance of
being political that capture the nature of this contradiction and use democ-
ratic means to achieve undemocratic results, in name of the people. The
refugee crisis is a great example of this historical movement (that reminds us
of a not so distant past) where thought is affirmed by opposition, and identities
are caught in a permanent struggle for recognition that no capitalist system is
able to provide.

Reconstructing Sovereignty?

Until recent times, everybody would have taken for granted that another Holo-
caust would be impossible, that no group would be capable of engaging in a
specific project of erasing the other. The European Union, which is a child
of the Second World War and which incarnates the physical and symbolic
efforts of setting the stage for peace, trans-national cooperation and tolerance,
frames the future that humanity may have through Europes choices. I have
suggested that the choices Europe as a whole made since its inception, mainly
the choice to embrace and promote a capitalist system in its most advanced
stage, has high costs, mainly that of strengthening the Marxian sense of alien-
ation (Marx, 1988).16
However, this is not the only danger faced by humanity, or democracy.
Despite the pernicious consequences of the actual economic system in the
way it transforms and redesigns human nature (to better fit the logic of the
market), one could argue that it is still possible to find spaces of resistance
and contestation, i.e., spaces where the other resists total assimilation and
integration in the system. However, the space of resistance is generally thought
as individualised, atomised, even if in more complex cells or groups of indi-
viduals. Indeed, it seems like the other is recognised as an-other but an-other
who still resembles the same, therefore, the other is simply a variation of the
mass of equals regulated by the same logic of identity. The real problem
emerges once the other appears and confronts the same: an-Other who is
not moulded by the same culture industry, an-Other who has different customs,
different references (religious or secular), an-Other who, because of its differ-
ence (of not being equal but different), re-ignites the original fear generated
by ones existential condition. The refugees represent the Other that Europe
faces today and with it the challenge of choosing between embracing a human
(universal) project or opening the path to a more inhuman future.
According to Timothy Snyder,

Most of us would like to think that we possess a moral instinct. Perhaps we imag-
ine that we would be rescuers in some future catastrophe. Yet if states were
68 Marta Nunes da Costa

destroyed, local institutions corrupted and economic incentives directed towards

murder, few of us would behave well. There is little reason to think that we are eth-
ically superior to the Europeans of the 1930s and 1940s, or for that matter less vul-
nerable to the kind of ideas that Hitler so successfully promulgated and realized.
(Snyder 2015: 1)

Is there such a thing as a moral instinct? Debates over the past century have
increased the gulf between a positive and a negative answer. While the enlight-
enment tradition, represented by Kant, affirmed the existence of a moral
instinct via the practical use of reason, which allowed the postulation of a
community of human beings who, because of their rational nature, are equal
in the kingdom of ends, the twentieth century developed in the sense of ques-
tioning this rational identity and moral equality. The Second World War repre-
sents the paradigm that rejects the universal thesis (by rejecting a moral
intuition tout court). According to Snyder, [t]he Holocaust began with the
idea that no human instinct was moral (Ibid). For Hitler, human beings were
doomed to a permanent and violent struggle for survival, i.e., human beings
were doomed to an eternal state of nature that is simply impossible to eradicate
via politics. In such a scenario, individual and collective fears and passions
are maximised and directed towards an-Other who becomes the objectification
of negativity, the objectification that needs to be erased in order to recover
ones sense of security (even if only illusory).
The refugee crisis represents a double challenge for Europe: a political/eco-
nomic challenge, since it brings to the surface the tension between capitalism
and democratic ideals, a tension which is instrumentalised for the sake of non-
democratic agendas (with the rise of nationalist, neo-Nazi and far-right move-
ments); and a moral challenge, because it brings about confrontation with the
Other and in this confrontation it becomes manifest how the logic of identity
has been assimilated and replicated across the European space. Both expose
the absence of a more fundamental principle, namely, the principle of frater-
nity considered in its unfolding of tolerance and recognition. In this section I
want to argue that politics, as Carl Schmitt said, is a space of struggle between
us and them, between friends and enemies; and that democratic politics
represents the specific challenge of maintaining conditions for struggle and
contestation of meaning of who the people really is without annihilating
one of its parts.
A critical reflection upon these two aspects reveals a paradox: on the one
hand, democracy requires the distinction between friends and enemies; but
at the same time, it must balance the process of creation of an enemy in
order not to objectify it, since the objectification of an enemy converges
with the creation of a non-democratic space within itself that aims at sub-
verting the rules of the game. Ultimately, this permanent tension forces us to
rethink how it is possible to constitute and occupy the empty space that the
people represent.
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 69

Friends and Enemies Revisited

Carl Schmitt, in the beginning of The Concept of the Political, states that [the]
specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be
reduced is that between friend and enemy (Schmitt [1927] 2007: 26). This
dichotomy serves the purpose not of offering a definition of the political, but
instead of delineating the contours of the political sphere, in the sense that this
distinction denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of
association or dissociation (Idem). This distinction does not have to rely on
any other sphere (moral, religious, aesthetic, etc.); it has its own autonomy.
Indeed, this distinction is important because it does not require a justification
for discrimination or estrangement on any other grounds than politics itself.
The friend/enemy opposition points to the necessary confrontation between
entities (id-entities) that separate one from another; it points to the confronta-
tion between non-equals that recognise each other as different. The kind of
recognition at play here is important because it simultaneously denounces two
aspects: first, recognition is a process for agents, i.e., the participants of the
situation of conflict; second, recognition emerges from an awareness that the
other represents a danger to oneself and opens the path for a struggle for
survival, domination or submission.17
The relevance of Schmitts distinction derives mainly from the fact that he
treats the concepts of friend and enemy in their concrete and existential sense,
not as metaphors or symbols (Schmitt 2007: 28). Therefore, the recognition
(or projection) of the other as an enemy reveals the consciousness of oneself
as opposition to what is strange. As Schmitt says, an enemy exists only when,
at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar col-
lectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a
relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation,
becomes public by virtue of such a relationship (Schmitt 2007: 29).
The enemy does not mean merely the competitor, the other as an abstract
or normative concept; the friend/enemy distinction acquires meaning from
the fact that they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows
from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy (Schmitt 2007:
33). One of Schmitts central points is that politics only exists as long as this
distinction remains in place, vivid, pertinent. If one erases the enemy, so
the politics too disappears.18

Struggle for Inclusion? On Refugees and the Project of Eradication

of the Other
If politics requires, as its existential condition, the distinction between friends
and enemies, one must clarify what makes of politics a democratic politics.
Arendt seems to suggest that politics is always democratic, i.e., politics, con-
sidered as a space of encounter, of visibility, of appearances, requires an exis-
tential democratic setting (i.e., we are equals when we appear to others). One
the one hand, Schmitt is an author that could be used to reinforce Arendts
70 Marta Nunes da Costa

reading (since the confrontation between friends and enemies requires a back-
ground horizon where each stands as equal, since only an equal can be recog-
nised); on the other hand, he could be read as starting from the equality of
conditions (of visibility and appearances) and ending up in a scenario where
recognition is no longer possible because struggle for survival could easily led
to the destruction of the other.
I will not enter in the nuances of this discussion, although I should men-
tion that a cautiousness to put these thinkers together derives from the fact
that, despite their common elements regarding the political, they ultimately
lead in opposite directions which trigger totally different political para-
digms.19 Ultimately, as Lipping argues, one either sees Arendt or Schmitt,
never both of them; and yet together they constitute, to paraphrase iek, the
matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations (Lipping
2010: 193). It is exactly because Arendt and Schmitt represent totally differ-
ent perspectives that they ultimately converge in the task of constituting the
framework that allows us to think, view and imagine politics and a political
life. Just as we need an enemy in Schmitt to open up a political horizon
which designates to each player his/her specific role (including identitys
formation), we also need these two radically distinct perspectives about the
space (physical and symbolic) that emerges from the encounter with an-
Other, regardless of whether the Other serves to build a we that embodies
the political, for it is acting in concert, as Arendt would say, or a we that
in order to exist and affirm its existence struggles for the (quasi) annihilation
of the other.
What is common in both thinkers is that both conceive the political as this
space that opens up for a becoming, that explores the possibilities (of being or
not-being); briefly, both ultimately conceive the political as distinct from the
state, therefore projecting onto humans the total responsibility for their
actions by making them political. The political is not a substance, it is a medi-
ation, it is a relational field, it is a horizon that constitutes itself from the ten-
sion and recognition of an-Others presence and existence. It is in this light
that Schmitts affirmation should be understood, when he starts the book by
saying that The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political
(Schmitt 2007: 19).
For my purpose I want to underline the idea that (democratic) politics faces
the specific, permanent and insolvable challenge of maintaining the conditions
for struggle and contestation about the meaning of who the people really is
without annihilating one of its parts. The question, simply put, is how to
grant the conditions for human existence i.e., the space in-between which
creates the possibilities for constitution of the One and of an-Other without,
at the same time, contributing to its own annihilation? The danger, as I sug-
gested, is that democratic practices require the wisdom not to objectify the
enemy in a way that would undermine its necessary conditions for pluralism
and difference.
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 71

Europe has been confronted with a serious refugee crisis for the past couple
of years, although it became accentuated in 2015. I will not discuss here why
this is happening, or look for other(s) to blame; a thoughtful look over the past
fifteen years of history will clearly show how events are connected and why
the interests of the few put in danger the well-being of the many.
According to a UNHCR Report, just for the first semester of 2015, 137,000
people crossed the Mediterranean Sea into Europe; one third came from Syria,
another third from Afghanistan and another from Eritrea. By the end of the
year over one million people had arrived in Europe. If we look at the bigger
picture, today there are around 60 million people displaced around the world
as a direct consequence of wars and conflicts, from Syria to South Sudan, ten
per cent of whom are in Europe.20
The several waves of refugees arriving in Europe over the past year have
accentuated a tendency that was already set in motion, namely the revival and
strengthening of far-right political movements. According to Matthew Good-
win, populist extremist parties constitute one of the most difficult challenges
in Europe, because they fiercely oppose immigration and rising ethnic and
cultural diversity; and they pursue a populist anti-establishment strategy that
attacks mainstream parties and is ambivalent if not hostile towards liberal rep-
resentative democracy (Goodwin 2011: 1).
The Front National is an example of this general trend in Europe that seems
to be turning right. If one looks at the agenda of the Front National, it is very
clear that the party, under Marine Le Pens leadership, has as its priority the
fight against immigration and terrorism. Je demande que lon mette lislam
radical genoux [I ask that we bring radical Islam to its knees],21 says Marine
Le Pen this is presented to the public not only as a demand for eradication of
the other who is different, but also in its positive aspect as a demand for the
recovery of the national sovereignty and national identity of the French peo-
ple. The agenda of the Front National regarding foreign politics rests upon
apparently republican arguments: the concept of libert and national sover-
eignty, articulated through the concept and practices of national citizenship.
According to the party, the uniqueness of its political project lies in its insis-
tence that France must separate itself from the dominant euro-Atlantic logic,
and that France should not subject itself to the United States:

[P]our sortir de linluctable programm par nos lites rsignes, et qui peut
conduire au chaos, nous proposons une rupture forte. La politique est aussi lart
du possible. Cette rupture nest pas seulement souhaitable. Elle est possible juste-
ment parce que nous ne sommes pas les seuls la souhaiter, loin sen faut.
Dautres pays la souhaitent et cest avec eux que nous voulons reconstruire
lavenir. (emphasis added)22

Politics is the art of the possible. In this passage one identifies the underlying
assumption of the necessity of the analytical and practical distinction between
us and them, between us who are equal and the same and them
72 Marta Nunes da Costa

who are different, who are the other and who do not fit into the necessary logic
of identity which constructs the collective we. The entire political project of
the Front National can be read through two interdependent components: first,
the project to recover national sovereignty vis--vis European authorities and
institutions, which are non-democratic in nature;23 second, to recover a sense of
individual identity and belonging through the recreation and re-founding of the
collective identity the Republic. The republican and democratic project
requires, according to the Front National, a political and moral realignment
where collective values are recovered (and the Republic is re-founded) on a sec-
ular basis. If Republic and laicit (secularity) go hand in hand in the French
context, that means that it is impossible to continue granting physical and sym-
bolic spaces for ways of life (culture and religion) that reject or simply do not
recognise the supremacy of French republican values. Communitarianism
became a problem that is now exacerbated by the increasing flux of migration
and refugees. Indeed, according to the Front National, la politique communau-
tariste en vient nier les principes fondamentaux de la loi franaise sur la laicit
puisque des lieux de culte sont souvent subventionns avec de largent public.24
Of course, there is a real and analytical distinction between immigrants and
refugees the refugee is pushed to a situation of exodus of his/her own coun-
try as the only way to escape violent death in a war scenario.25 The problem is
that the refugee crisis uncovers a multi-layered set of conflicts and contradic-
tions that have been in place since the French Revolution, i.e., the reality of
refugees in Europe forces Europe as a whole to question and re-evaluate its
own foundational principles, the nature and intention of its political, but also
social, economic and cultural project, as well as to confront the unresolved
and unsolvable conflict between political (and human) projects with finan-
cial interests. As Agamben puts it:

It is not only the case that the problem presents itself inside and outside of Europe
with just as much urgency as then [during the Second World War]. It is also the
case that, given the by now unstoppable decline of the nation-state and the general
corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories, the refugee is perhaps the only
thinkable figure of our time and the only category in which one may see today at
least until the process of dissolution of the nation-state and of its sovereignty has
achieved full completion the forms and limits of a coming political community.
(Agamben 2008: 90)

The refugee exposes in a flagrant manner the impotence of the rights of Man,
just as Arendt denounced it decades ago.26 The refugee, the one who becomes
fully denationalised, i.e., the one who has lost the rights associated with citi-
zenship and nationality, also becomes the Other who can easily be appropri-
ated by nationalist discourses to enhance a populist, anti-democratic cause.
It is worth saying a few words on populism. While the goal of this article
was not to offer a detailed account on why and how populism represents an
eminent danger to democracy, the current dynamics of the refugee crisis in
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 73

Europe exemplifies the objectification of an-Other that is fully instrumen-

talised in order to enhance populist causes. I understand populism in
Urbinatis sense: starting from a dialogue with Norberto Bobbio, Margaret
Canovan and Benjamin Arditis conceptualisations, I see populism mainly as
a strategy for criticising representative democracy, by condemning the doxa
component and replacing it by knowledge, reason or truth, which aims not
only at emptying the locus of power but also, and mainly, at reoccupying that
space by subverting and ultimately overthrowing democracy. Urbinati says

Populism is a radical contestation of parliamentary politics and thus an alternative

to representative democracy [] a populist movement that succeeds in leading the
government of a democratic society tends to move toward institutional forms and a
political reorganisation of the state that change, and even shatter, constitutional
democracy. These forms and reorganisation include centralisation of power, weak-
ening of checks and balances, strengthening of the executive, disregard of political
oppositions, and transformation of election in a plebiscite of the leader. (Urbinati
2014: 129)

Indeed, we should refrain from conceiving populism merely as bringing politics

to the people via a figure-leader. While populism emerges from a democratic
horizon of pluralism, confrontation of different and distinct views, doxa and
human responsibility, it capitalises strength by promoting a polarisation between
us and them ( la Schmitt) and creating a common and collective ideology
where the many see themselves portrayed, at the expense, of course, of the
few who are necessarily excluded. While the Front National is an example of
right-wing populism, I am convinced that both right- and left-wing movements
are prejudicial to democracy, since both compete to represent the people, and
this competition happens at the expense of pluralism, by promoting a simplistic
view of a unitary people that is always right. It is in this light that we should
understand Urbinatis claim that populism is parasitical on representative
democracy (Urbinati 2014: 135), recovering Leforts contribution.27
Clearly, populisms strategy is to exacerbate the problems and/or limitations
of representative democracy and to capitalise on peoples frustrations about
economic, financial and humanitarian crisis. Democratic crisis exposes in a
flagrant manner the (im)possibilities of democratic life: it brings to the realm
of visibility the struggle to determine who the people really is; it forces indi-
viduals to contest and fight to fill the space. This space, as I started by saying,
must remain empty, while allowing multiple determinations in different time-
space moments. Democratic life is this aporia, as Foucault might say, the
movement back and forth, of determining, re-determining, attributing mean-
ings and transforming them according to each historical a priori. The danger
of populism lies in the fact that it tries to stop this movement and to determine,
in a definite manner, who constitutes the people; it promises a more genuine
identification of the represented with the representatives than elections allow
(Urbinati 2014: 136). In such a scenario, it is irrelevant which side of the polit-
74 Marta Nunes da Costa

ical spectrum right or left populism is situated in. As De la Torre shows, in

several countries of South America (such as Venezuela under Chavez, Ecuador
under Rafael Correa, Bolivia under Morales, among others) the people is
embodied in a leader (De la Torre 2013: 10), which is what right-wing pop-
ulists in Europe try to do.

Concluding Remarks

As Guterres (the UN High Commissioner for Refugees) rightly said: Europe

has a clear responsibility to help those seeking protection from war and perse-
cution [] To deny that responsibility is to threaten the very building blocks
of the humanitarian system Europe worked so hard to build. European coun-
tries must shoulder their fair share in responding to the refugee crisis, at home
and abroad.28 The European project was the result of a specific commitment
to a set of ideals, namely, the respect for the modern vision of fundamental
individual rights (and therefore, the priority of liberty) and the value of equal-
ity, as a regulative idea and goal. However, as the French Revolution taught
us, the democracy that has been reinvented according to the famous equality
of conditions (Tocqueville) had to rest upon the close articulation between
liberty, equality and fraternity. Fraternity translated in the idea of solidarity
or even humanity is as important as its counterparts. It is exactly this fra-
ternity that is at risk in Europe (and elsewhere), as Guterres acknowledges.
In this article I started by arguing that democracy is not an object of knowl-
edge but a task for practical reason; democracy has no essence or core,
instead, this concept allows for multiple instantiations. One of my goals was
to explore the ways in which we think the meanings of democracy, and more
precisely, the meanings of representative democracy. I then took a step forward
and argued that if democracy had to be defined, it should be negatively and
should resist the essentialist trap. The only definition I conceived as possible
was democracy as crisis. I showed how crisis articulated the two necessary
conditions of pluralism and difference, which unveil the constant work that
democratic life demands.
Seen in this light, crises in democracy are not something which is acciden-
tal, nor should they be seen as a problem to be fixed. On the contrary, if
democracy is crisis, if politics is the art of the possible, that means that the
challenge of democratic politics is to actualise possibilities without compro-
mising the unfolding of new ones; in different words, democracy is only
democracy if and as long as it guarantees the conditions of possibility of dif-
ferences, pluralism, opposition and resistance without objectifying any of its
forces or eradicating others.
After providing an historical account of the meanings of democracy and its
relationship to the concept of popular sovereignty, I turned to two examples of
crisis: the economic and financial one that is affecting not only representative
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 75

democracies in Europe but also across the world; and the humanitarian/refugee
crisis in Europe that is forcing Europe as a whole to re-think its original demo-
cratic commitments and transform its system of practices. Both crises have
been used to advance non-democratic projects, visible in the rise of populism
in Europe. While democracy, as crisis, constitutes the permanent struggle to
fill the empty space of the people, a people that must remain simultaneously
invisible and un-bodied while claiming to be objective in the course of time-
space institutional and personal instantiations, populism promises to overcome
the limitations or problems of representative democracy and to solve the
democratic paradox, creating the people as one.
Given that the uniqueness of democracy lies in the necessary incomplete-
ness of its own project, and given that democracy is first and foremost a set of
conditions of possibility for its own actualisation, placing the entire responsi-
bility on us, the reality of populism today forces us to choose between who we
still are and who we want to become. While populism is attractive because it
promises to solve the aporia we live in, it is also the most dangerous Other
to democracy, since it uses and maximises the democratic space for its own
destruction. Ultimately, I have tried to show that what truly guides the demo-
cratic project is the permanent contestation of the meaning of the people,
rather than its ontological status; this implies that no identity problem (nor
search for the constitution of a clear and well defined we) can be stronger
than our democratic commitments. Given that democracy is not a thing, but a
practice, the future we build today in democratic settings is our entire and
total responsibility.

MARTA NUNES DA COSTA is currently a Visiting Professor at Federal Univer-

sity of Santa Catarina, Brazil. She is currently developing new work on partic-
ipatory mechanisms in contemporary democracies. Some of her books are
Redefining Individuality (Humus Ed, 2011); Modelos Democrticos (Arraes
Ed., 2013); and Oramento Participativo: Leituras comparadas entre Brasil e
Portugal (Observatrio Poltico Ed., 2013).

Notes

1. One should be aware that the conceptualisation of sovereignty, which rested on the pre-
ferred political model of absolutism, was by no means hegemonic. As Skinner points out
with his genealogical approach to the sovereign state, there was a simultaneous movement
which repudiated the conceptualisation of sovereignty as necessarily being the renounce-
ment of a certain power of the people. As Skinner puts it, [they] repudiated the metaphor
according to which this societas or universitas is a mere headless torso in need of a sover-
eign to guide and control it. It is equally possible, they claim, for sovereignty to be pos-
sessed by the union of the people themselves. We accordingly find these writers using the
term state to refer not to a passive and obedient community living under a sovereign head,
but rather to the body of the people viewed as the owners of sovereignty themselves (Skin-
ner and Kalmo 2010: 30).
76 Marta Nunes da Costa

2. For a critical reading of the French Revolution, see Furet 1978.

3. See Constant 1819.
4. See Hannah Arendt, when she says that [the] very attraction of Rousseaus theory for the
men of the French Revolution was that he apparently had found a highly ingenious means
to put a multitude into the place of a single person; for the general will was nothing more
or less than what bound the many into one (Arendt [1963] 2006: 67).
5. As Arendt argues, revolutions are historical events that force us to confront new beginnings:
What the revolutions brought to the fore was this experience of being free, and this was a
new experience, not, to be sure, in the history of Western mankind [] but with regard to
the centuries which separate the downfall of the Roman Empire from the rise of the modern
age. And this relatively new experience, new to those at any rate who made it, was at the
same time the experience of mans faculty to begin something new. These two things
together a new experience which revealed mans capacity for novelty are at the root of
the enormous pathos which we find in both the American and the French Revolutions, this
ever-repeated insistence that nothing comparable in grandeur and significance had ever
happened in the whole recorded history of mankind, and which, if we had to account for it
in terms of successful reclamation of civil rights, would sound entirely out of place (Arendt
[1963] 2006: 24).
6. For a detailed account on Tocqueville, see da Costa 2015.
7. The search for materialisation of this equality leads to an open competition between indi-
viduals who start the race at different points. As Rawls would say, the system of natural lib-
erty is insufficient to assure justice, because the starting point is uneven (natural talents,
social position, etc.); but even the liberal conception of freedom is not sufficient to assure
a truly democratic and just setting, given that it tries to mitigate the influence of natural
contingencies and luck, but it still doesnt address the social contingencies. That is why
Rawls proposes an alternative conceptualisation of democratic equality via the difference
principle. See Rawls 1999, especially paragraphs 12 and 13.
8. See Pitkin 1972. See also Manin 1997 and Urbinati 2006.
9. See Arendt 2003, especially chapter 3.
10. See Schumpeter [1943] 2003 and Dahl 1973.
11. Curiously, what one would think of as belonging to the past seems to be in a revival mode
today; this revival is not only a European problem, but instead a global one and as such,
needs a global solution. We will turn to this next.
12. The Greek situation is particularly difficult, since after five years of austerity no one sees
any light at the end of the tunnel. The situation has only got worse, culminating in the ref-
erendum of 6 July 2015, when 62% of Greeks voted no to austerity measures, but which
ultimately culminated in the governments acceptance of more austerity, triggering the res-
ignation of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. On 20 September 2015 Alexis Tsipras won the
elections again, but the future remains uncertain.
13. Krasner 2010: 97.
14. In a similar vein, authors like MacCormick argue that we should be talking more of post-
sovereignty, rather than sovereignty, at least in the European context. See MacCormick
2010. However, it should be noted that the discussion for these authors happens around the
concept of sovereignty of the state, and not directly around popular sovereignty. I suspect
that addressing the problem via the popular angle would make the question even harder.
15. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Unemployment_statistics,
accessed on 30 September 2015.
16. See Marx, 1988.
17. It would be interesting to develop this line of reasoning taking into account Hegels Phe-
nomenology of the Spirit, especially the master-slave dialectic.
18. A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe,
would be a world without politics. [] For the definition of the political, it is here even
irrelevant whether such a world without politics is desirable as an ideal situation. The phe-
Creating the People as One? On Democracy and Its Other 77

nomenon of the political can be understood only in the context of the ever present possibil-
ity of the friend-and-enemy grouping, regardless of the aspects which this possibility
implies for morality, aesthetics, and economics (Schmitt 2007: 35).
19. For an interesting account of the Arendt-Schmitt dialogue, see Lipping 2010.
20. See http://www.unhcr.org/568e82ff6.html, accessed on 22 January 2016.
21. Article in Le Monde, 29 August 2015: http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2015/
08/29/marine-le-pen-veut-arreter-l-immigration-legale-et-clandestine_4740105_
823448.html, accessed 17 February 2016.
22. http://www.frontnational.com/le-projet-de-marine-le-pen/politique-etrangere/notre-poli-
tique-etrangere/, accessed 17 February 2016. Translation into English: In order to get away
from the inescapable programme set up by our resigned elites, which could lead us to
chaos, we propose a strong rupture. Politics is the art of the possible. This rupture is not
only desirable; it is possible precisely because we are not the only ones who desire it, far
from it. Other countries desire it too and it is together with them that we want to rebuild our
future.
23. For more on this, see the partys statement on democracy, institutions and public morals
where it appears as the leader of a project to recover democracy by strengthening its repub-
lican nature: http://www.frontnational.com/le-projet-de-marine-le-pen/refondation-repub-
licaine/democratie/, accessed on 17 February 2016.
24. http://www.frontnational.com/le-projet-de-marine-le-pen/refondation-republicaine/laicite/,
accessed on 17 February 2016. Translation into English: Communitarian politics has come
to deny the fundamental principles of French law regarding secularity, since places of wor-
ship are often subsidised by public money.
25. As Arendt rightly pointed out, Refugees driven from country to country represent the van-
guard of their peoples (Arendt 1995: 119).
26. See Arendt 1951, especially part II.
27. For more on this, see Lefort 1988.
28. http://www.unhcr.org/5592b9b36.html, accessed on 22 January 2016.

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