Posted by ccld201
15 October 2024Reflecting on the rise of far-right and hard-right politics and on their electoral success over the summer in the EU, France, Thuringia, and Austria, this paper observes that human beings considered solely in their humanity are invisible for democracy. As noted by Rosanvallon, ‘invisibility’ of the national citizens is a root problem of today’s democracy [1]. But the problem goes more deeply to the heart of the theory and imagination of what democracy involves. It is suggested that democracy is (almost) exclusively conceptualised, imagined and designed on the basis of constructing – and therefore seeing – human beings as citizens-qua-nationals. The structural invisibility of all the non-citizens living in a democracy is problematic in two ways. In practice, it denies a significant reality: non-EU citizens make up 41.3 million out of the EU total population of 448.8 million (Key figures on Europe 2024 Eurostat), or the equivalent of the entire populations of Poland and Croatia. In principle, this makes it very hard to counter exclusionary politics and policies of the far-right and hard-right parties. Since they were lawfully elected, these parties can present themselves as being democratic.
Invisible human beings in democratic thinking
Democracy is about the people, the demos and the cratos, the government of the people by the people and for the people. However, ‘the people’ who elect their representatives and in the name of whom laws are adopted are not defined by reference to their humanity. Rather, they are defined by reference to other criteria, primarily their nationality and their key role or function, namely voting at regular intervals to select those representing them. In its ancient Athenian origins, the ‘demos’ is both a collective and exclusionary concept. Somehow this foundational exclusion of certain human beings (women, slaves and non-Athenians) has also been and remained associated with democracy due to 500 BCE Athens being (re)presented as the first democracy [2]. While women have had to fight hard to be eventually recognised as part of the demos and to be given the right to vote and to stand in elections, and while European democracies are now committed to abolishing slavery and servitude under the Council of Europe, the fact that foreigners share the same humanity as national citizens has remained mostly un-addressed by theories on democracy. Scholars have criticised the rather limited prism of national citizenship, including for instance by promoting the idea of cosmopolitan democracy [3], or through the all affected types of theories [4]. Neither approach, however, focusses on the humanity of people living in a democracy (be it national or ‘postnational’ like the EU). Neither engages with the ways in which democracy theory considers human beings.
Negative humanity, exclusive democracy
When democracy (theory and practice) considers human beings, it is mostly through an exclusionary dichotomy, that is the national citizens and non-national-non-citizens. According to this logic, human beings are not primarily considered and valued in their intrinsic and equally shared humanity. The underpinning distinction lies between those who belong to the demos (the nation, the electorate) and those who do not. Those who do not belong (unless they are minors who are destined to belong when reaching adulthood) do not seem to matter as much as those who do. Further, as citizenship (and nationality with which it tends to overlap) is the key criterion for identifying people in a democracy, the humanity of those who do not belong becomes invisible, and therefore irrelevant for democracy theory. Deprived of their positive identity as human beings, they can only be ‘others’. Therefore, built-in deep at the heart of democracy appears to be a logic of othering that has become particularly problematic in relation to a large group of ‘others’, namely migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, as well as mention the bi-nationals as well as other lawfully settled foreigners. If a majority of citizens vote to support racist and exclusionary policies against migrants and foreigners (broadly considered), this is considered to be democratic as long as the elections are not flawed. Critics of this aberration have called on a set of values (e.g. the elusive French ‘republican values’, or Habermas’ ‘constitutional patriotism’ [5]). In the EU, the first of these values is human dignity under Article 2 TEU.
Democracy is for everyone
Rethinking democracy through the prism of equally shared humanity has rarely been so timely. It is suggested to connect democracy theory with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights commitment that ‘all human beings are born equally free in dignity and in rights […]’ (Article 1), which has become the foundation and new paradigm of human rights adopted after the experience of inhumanity in war and totalitarianism. First of all, this can contribute to bridging a problematic gap between the theory of democracy on the one hand, and the human rights paradigm and legal frameworks which value and protect all human beings on the other [6]. Regardless of their nationality or citizenship status, all people belong to the ‘human family’ (UDHR) even if they can only belong to (mostly) one demos. All human beings should therefore be equally valued and welcomed in the place and society in which they live. In human rights law, there is no acceptable argument for treating some as human beings and others as lesser human beings, whose life and death do not matter and who are forced to live in inhumane conditions. Rethinking democracy through the principle of humanity and of dignity means that racist and exclusionary policies and law are not just unlawful (they mostly already are). They are also undemocratic, an important point to raise to counter claims of democratic legitimacy based on elections.
Secondly, rethinking democracy through the prism of all human rights, rather than exclusively through its core rights to vote and stand in elections, brings to the fore a key legal and empirical component of healthy democracy. Namely, that all people living in a democracy can exercise all civil and political rights, except the right to vote and to stand in elections which is restricted to those with citizenship. The rights to free speech, to peaceful assembly, to privacy and to access to justice (to name a few) make it possible for everyone living in a democracy to contribute to shaping electoral issues regardless of their citizenship and nationality status. Crucially too, these rights also keep democracy ticking in-between elections and ensure that it is not reduced to the ‘electoral moment’. These rights therefore complement and indeed ‘counter’ decisions and discussions of elected bodies [7]. Through this prism, all human beings become citizens in a much broader and more inclusive sense than the narrow national citizenship that dominates mainstream representative democracy theory. Citizenship can therefore be ‘denationalised’ [8], and can also be about the capacity to act rather than mostly the right to vote and to stand in elections [9]. The Kantian origins of the concept of human dignity (which is at the foundation of human rights) reminds us that being human involves the capacity and freedom (as well as perhaps duty) to shape one’s own life. Human rights and human dignity are not just about oneself; they are – crucially – about treating others in ways that respect people’s shared humanity.
Thirdly therefore, re-thinking democracy through the prism of humanity can contribute to addressing the fundamental question of what holds people together beyond the artificially external condition of nationality. This question is central to the rise of the ‘society of individuals’ [10], as well as to the current populist challenges to democracy. People can develop many ways of forming a whole and – importantly – staying a whole in times of crisis. Violence, coercion, segregation and imposed social (class) hierarchies are some of these ways. In contrast, based on human rights and anchored in human dignity, democracy has a different and powerful way of keeping people together. Poetically expressed as the ‘Du-Bezug’ by German constitutional lawyer Peter Häberle [11], democracy fosters relationships of equality, reciprocity, solidarity. Namely, relationships based on acknowledging in the other the same humanity as in the self. Moreover, bringing humanity to the heart of democracy reminds us that people – including citizens – are just human beings with all their faults and less positive emotions and inclinations, including fear of those who are different, a sense of injustice, anger and even hatred against others. Denying these emotions in favour of an exclusive focus on disembodied rationality makes it difficult for people living in a democracy to learn how these emotions might arise [12] and, how they might be manipulated by populist and far-right and hard-right parties to target the ‘others’. To sum up, making everyone living in a democracy equally visible can be a useful first step towards valuing all those living in a democracy equally. While representation is a core requirement of democracy, it does not fully address the question of why democracy matters. As a tentative answer it is suggested that democracy matters because it is only in a democracy that all human beings matter equally.
Catherine Dupré is a professor of comparative constitutional law at the University of Exeter. Author of The Age of Dignity: Human Rights and Constitutionalism in Europe (Hart/Bloomsbury, 2015), she is also the founding editor of the Dignity&democracy Blog.
This paper was presented at the workshop on Democracy and Representation Challenges, University of Exeter and the Observatory for Representation, 3-4 October 2024.
[1] P Rosanvallon, Le Parlement des Invisibles (Seuil, 2014).
[2] See e.g.: D Held, Models of Democracy (Wiley, 2016) with a first chapter on ‘Athens as classical democracy’
[3] See e.g. D Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens. Towards Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2008)
[4] See e.g.: R E Goodin, ‘Enfranchising All Affected Interests and its Alternatives’, 35 (2007) Philosophy and Public Affairs, 40-68.
[5] J Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State’, in J Habermas, The Inclusion Of The Other: Studies In Political Theory (1998) 225-26.
[6] J Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Holocaust: An Endangered Connection (Georgetown UP, 2019).
[7] P Rosanvallon, Counter-democracy: politics in an age of distrust (Cambridge UP, 2008)
[8] C Colliot-Thélène, La Démocratie sans demos (Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).
[9] E F Isin, « Theorizing acts of citizenship » in Engin F. Isin et Greg Nielsen (eds), Acts of Citizenship. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 15-43.
[10] M Gauchet, ‘A la découverte de la societe des individus’, (2020) Le Débat, 155-168
[11] P Häberle, Europäische Verfassunfslehre (Nomos, 2009, 9th ed) 288.
[12] P Hassner, La revanche des passions: métamorphoses de la violence et crise du politique (Fayard, 2015).