Nations and Democracy
A figure of enduring ingenuity, the nation has for centuries played a part on the socio-political stage. Whether centre stage or background scenery, it has featured in violent tragedies, revolutionary drama and nostalgic fable. Today, the nation is cast simultaneously in the roles of villain and hero. Whereas it is renounced by those advocating trans-national, post-national and cosmopolitan forms of belonging, it has lately also been asserted as the solution to various social failures in liberal democracies. This appears to leave us with two alternatives: to jettison the nation in order to move towards a less parochial world, a world in which new forms of belonging underpin more inclusive politics. Or to celebrate the nation as way of ensuring the social cement that can unite a diverse society.
Using the ideas of Wittgenstein and Lacan, Amanda Machin expertly explains that the overlapping and conflicting language games of the nation produce it as an object of desire in an uncertain world. The nation is not a pre-political thing but a matter of persistent political contestation and coalition. She reveals that the nation still has a vital part to play in democratic politics, but that this role is one of improvisation. Whereas they endure as tools of emancipatory promise, nations nonetheless remain potential categories of violent exclusion. They cannot be pinned down as easily as anti-national and pro-national alternatives suggest. It is precisely the indeterminacy of the nation that gives it ongoing importance for democracy today.
Providing an urgent riposte to dominant accounts, this thought-provoking and highly original account demands a repoliticisation of the nation. This book will appeal to those engaged in theory and empirical research on nations and nationalism and the question of their link to democracy in a changing world, as well as those interested in psychoanalysis and Wittgenstein.
Amanda Machin is a Researcher at Zeppelin University, Germany.
Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory
Edited by David Chandler and Paulina Tambakaki
(both University of Westminster)
Advisory Board: Benjamin Barber (City University of New York), Rajeev Bhargava (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies), Bhikhu Parekh (House of Lords), Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame), John Keane (University of Sydney), Chantal Mouffe (University of Westminster).
Democracy is being re-thought almost everywhere today: with the widespread questioning of the rationalist assumptions of classical liberalism, and the implications this has for representational competition; with the Arab Spring, destabilizing many assumptions about the geographic spread of democracy; with the deficits of democracy apparent in the Euro-zone crisis, especially as it affects Greece and Italy; with democracy increasingly understood as a process of social empowerment and equalization, blurring the lines of division between formal and informal spheres; and with growing demands for democracy to be reformulated to include the needs of those currently marginalized or even to include the representation of non-human forms of life with whom we share our planet.
Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory publishes state of the art theoretical reflection on the problems and prospects of democratic theory when many of the traditional categories and concepts are being reworked and rethought in our globalized and complex times.
The series is published in cooperation with the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, London, UK.
1 Nations and Democracy
New Theoretical Perspectives
Amanda Machin
First published 2015
by Routledge
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ISBN: 978-1-138-77614-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-77339-1 (ebk)
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This book has been a long time in the making. Its started life in the idea for a masters dissertation, grew into adolescence as a doctoral thesis and now several years later has become a fully fledged book. I therefore need to thank many people for their support, encouragement and patience. I am grateful to my friends and family for enduring my ups and downs as a postgraduate student and postdoctoral researcher. I owe a lot to my teachers and mentors at the Centre of the Study of Democracy where I was fortunate enough to be the recipient of the Margaret Blunden PhD Scholarship: David Chandler, Harriet Evans, Simon Joss, John Keane, Richard Whitman, Maria Holt, Patricia Hogwood and Jon Pugh all opened up my horizons with their various distinct perspectives and ideas. I am immeasurably indebted to Paulina Tambakaki who is good friend, reassuring coach, and constructive critic all rolled into one. I wholeheartedly thank Chantal Mouffe for her incredible, inspirational guidance. I never once came away from her office without feeling motivated, stimulated and just a tiny little bit wiser. Finally, Paul Robinson has provided an unceasing source of emotional support and insightful queries throughout the books progression. I dedicate it to him.
It is internal to a convention that it be open to change in convention, in the convening of those subject to it, in whose behaviour it lives. So it is a first order of business of political tyranny to deny the freedom to convene. It prevents the arising of the issue for which convening is necessary, viz., to see what we do, to learn our position in what we take to be necessaries, to see in what service they are necessary.
Stanley Cavell
The tales and testimonies of people who change their identities both intrigue and inspire. These individuals, who take their ostensible destiny in their own lively hands and spin a new story from what appeared to be immutable material, signal the possibility of self-transformation, while at the same time they confirm its trickiness. Do these characters truly change their identity or do they merely pretend to be something that they are not? Can someone choose their identifications or are they not already decided? Which identities are up for negotiation? For most individuals around most of the world, it is not easy to escape the nation. Sometimes violently enforced, sometimes freely pursued, and sometimes left forgotten, the nation persists. It reveals its persistence at a global level and a personal one; it informs the structure of both interstate politics and the intimate subconscious.
