Agonism and Junta: Greece’s Late Bourgeois Contribution to Public Sphere Discourse Barbara Syrrakos New School for Social Research Department of Political Science New York, NY [email protected] Paper presented at the 3rd Ph.D. Symposium of the Hellenic Observatory of the London School for Economics and Political Science June 14-15, 2007 Do not cite without author’s permission PART I: INTRODUCTION The purpose of this paper is to suggest a model of the public sphere under conditions of dictatorship. I build on three pre-existing models: Jurgen Habermas' theory of the public sphere, Nancy Fraser's conception of multiple publics in response to the Habermas model, and finally Hannah Arendt's conception of the agonistic public sphere by way of the ancients.1 In this introduction, I begin with a hypothetical portrait of democratic participation. I then move on to discuss the Habermasean perspective of the public sphere and Nancy Fraser's multiple publics critique. This will be followed by a discussion of Arendt's classical-based portrait of the public sphere, for descriptive purposes, with a focus on agonism. I will then present the historical case of Greece, as an empirical illustration of the hypothetical, as interpreted through the lenses of Habermas and Arendt and offer up a model of the public sphere, consequently, with distinct traits that will allow us to perceive of a departure from the presumptions imposed by normative accounts of public sphere in a non-authoritarian political environment. Finally I will suggest 1 Habermas, Jurgen (Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence): The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991; Fraser, Nancy: "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." In Calhoun, Craig (ed.): Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992, 109-142; Arendt, Hammah: The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958. a model of the public sphere for authoritarian political environments that considers and challenges the multiple publics paradigm. Let us begin with a protracted hypothetical scenario whose foundational imperative is the following: "A democratic society is not the only domain within which a public sphere can optimally function." I would continue the argument as follows: The non-democratic state can also be the site where democratic participation occurs, or where the egalitarian realization of politicized communication and action with a view toward a democratic government may take shape. What I mean is, if democracy, with its implied universal enfranchisement and representative institutions, is the project of modernity, and modernity is the legacy of the Enlightenment, it may be a false distinction to separate the form and function of a democratic state from contained democratic participation on a smaller or lesser scale. Multiple historical cases would remind us that it is the non-democratic state that gives rise to democratic mobilization, as in, to cite two landmark illustrations, France in the late eighteenth century, and Romania in the late twentieth. The ancien regime and authoritarian dictatorship both met their ends through a combination of elite driven and grass roots responses to failing non-democratic systems. The pre-World-War II era has delivered enough similar instances (Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Soviet Union, among others), and their cumulative effect occasions the present discussion concerning the category of authoritarianism, which we can easily speak of in general terms. Authoritarian regimes share many distinct traits: a one-party state apparatus, reliance on the military, high statism, suppression of pluralism, lacking representation, repression of freedom of expression, to name but a few. What commonly follows under these circumstances, particularly if we allow ourselves to focus on the activities of resistance actors, is the search for and claiming of a venue for free expression, covertly, in fragments, wherever it finds ground enough to take root. In oppositional fashion, this movement may take on democratic characteristics, through an openness to participation and involving rational, strategic plans, with a view toward establishment of a fully democratic polity, in contradistinction to the failing accountability of the authoritarian regime. What may arise as a consequence is a growing legitimacy on the part of the resistance, whose responsiveness to the demands of popular will becomes tantamount to that of the regime in power. A memorable case in point is that of General Charles De Gaulle, who served as interim president of France in 1944 and who founded the leading Gaullist party, both as direct results of the legitimacy established by the underground Free French movement, which de Gaulle organized and led. The logical conclusion to the normative scenario laid out herewith is that once the oppositional, or resistance, goals are attained and transition to democratic institutionalization is accomplished, it is the democratic state, replete with accountability and responsiveness — both core constituents, that conceivably allows for its own improvement, in which case an engaged public sphere, or a more inclusive or perhaps autonomous civil society, can give rise to a deepening of those institutions with greater heterogeneous participation. When institutional, structural, economic and ideological dimensions of democracy meet in a given polity, we can say that polity is "enlightened", it has been delivered, in broad terms, from the irrational to the rational, and it has most likely traveled a particular historical course — socially, economically and politically and with an embedded ideology — to arrive there. This is by and large true for advanced industrial or post-industrial democracies. In broad terms, this is the project of modernity, and the earliest historical examples, which have been used as templates and grand bearers of the western standard, would include the original regions of the Enlightenment, namely, in Europe, France, Germany and Great Britain, and in the Americas, the United States. About peripheral, praetorian, or underdeveloped states outside of Europe, development models of liberal democracy and civil society appeal to similar reform, through either external pressure or internal pressure, or both. That has become the project of what is largely perceived to be late modern developments in the name of liberal democracies, now the prevailing order in the developed world. In another category, we have peripheral states on the Continent, which, with the ante upped, are members of the European Union but which have been until lately adamantly resistant to the legacy of the West, which possess pre-modern social traditions and non-conformist capitalist practices but advanced democratic-socialist constitutional institutions. Precarious as it was, this was the Greece of the late twentieth century, with one foot poised to imprint modernity, and the other hovering between antiquity and Byzantium, with pagan and Eastern definition. Such contradictory elements have defined Greece up to the recent decade, swift developments urged on by Maastrict standards notwithstanding. This is why Greece's public sphere has the privilege of legitimately falling within the theoretical domains of both the bourgeoise formulation of Jurgen Habermas as introduced in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and the agonistic configuration of Hannah Arendt as laid out in The Human Condition. PART II: HABERMAS AND FRASER: SINGLE VS MULTIPLE PUBLICS Jurgen Habermas' project with Structural Transformation was to hermeneutically document the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere in the Europe of the Enlightenment. This task derived from a restorative intent, illuminated by Habermas’ admission that it was the style of liberal democracy under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in the Federal Republic of Germany that inspired the analysis — in Habermas' words, "to become clear myself about the dark sides and mistakes of our political system". 2 In tracing the structural effects of political and social change of an essential constituent of democratic societies over time, namely a freely accessible public sphere where consensus can be formed, Habermas, guided by philosophical debate, attempted to uncover the root causes of the problem. In arguing for a quasi-trancendental truth based on the structural process of rational, critical debate whose ends are the common good, Habermas traced the historical devolution of the ideal public sphere and argued that in late modernity individuals had been replaced by larger "private corporate bodies" which served as repositories of sorts of public opinion. 3 These corporations, or mediated institutions, composing an "intermediate sphere,"'* in turn, stand to potentially represent the individual or a collectivity of individuals in the formation of consensus. As this would be the case in late capitalist societies, where institutions both are situated between and are of the public and private spheres, or state and society, Habermas nonetheless held out hope that such "power blocs" enabled by their corporate organization would serve as a viable substitute for the individual in negotiations bearing on democratic processes. 2 Horster, Detlef: Habermas: An Introduction. (Trans.: Heidi Thompson) Philadelphia: Pennbridge Books, 1989, 83). 3 Habermas 1991, op. cit, 142. 4 Ibid., 176. In much