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Liberal Democracy in Crisis: Redefining Politics and Resistance Through Power

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Liberal Democracy in Crisis: Redefining Politics and Resistance Through Power Liberal Democracy in Crisis: Redefining Politics and Resistance through Power Alen Toplišek Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy I, Alen Toplisek, confirm that the research included within this thesis is my own work or that where it has been carried out in collaboration with, or supported by others, that this is duly acknowledged below and my contribution indicated. Previously published material is also acknowledged below. I attest that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge break any UK law, infringe any third party’s copyright or other Intellectual Property Right, or contain any confidential material. I accept that the College has the right to use plagiarism detection software to check the electronic version of the thesis. I confirm that this thesis has not been previously submitted for the award of a degree by this or any other university. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. Signature: Date: 17 September 2016 Details of collaboration and publications: / 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To my brother Žan, my mother Jana Krajnc, my sister Etien Horvat, the rest of my family, and to the people that I can call my friends. I am extremely grateful to my supervisor Lasse Thomassen for his caring support, patience, readiness to help me with his expertise and advice, for being the best supervisor I could ever wish for. I tend to forget, but my move to the UK would not be possible without the financial support from the Slovene Human Resources Development and Scholarship Fund (Ad Futura). I am also grateful to Katja Cankar for her very much appreciated advice on administrative matters when I needed it most. 3 4 ABSTRACT This thesis seeks to create a more robust concept of resistance that may respond to the crisis of liberal democracy in contemporary neoliberal society. The crisis comes as a result of increasing dissatisfaction with the liberal democratic institutions, which are viewed by citizens as unrepresentative and unresponsive to their political demands. I argue that the post-2008 wave of protest movements represents an important attempt at challenging neoliberalism through the political project of radicalising democracy. Drawing upon different post-Marxist and poststructuralist approaches in contemporary political theory, the key theoretical contribution of the thesis is to elucidate the relationship between radical politics of protest movements and the existing political institutions. I suggest that the relation between the two is antagonistic largely due to the tension in liberal democracy between liberal institutions and rights and popular sovereignty. To this end, I argue that the political project of theorising radical democracy needs to be complemented with a political economy analysis. The political project of radicalising democracy responds to the limitations of the pluralist-elitist conception of politics in contemporary democratic theory and points towards social movement and new radical left literature as a fruitful way for constructing an alternative model of democracy. In response to the objection to power in parts of the radical left, I maintain that a more nuanced understanding of resistance is needed, which accounts for the structural relation between resistance and power. Finally, to properly account for the structural conditions and obstacles facing the radical left in the struggle against neoliberalism, the thesis also provides an economic-institutional analysis, which explains the ideological relationship between liberal democracy and neoliberalism from a historical perspective. The different theoretical contributions together help elucidate the empirical case of radical politics in Southern Europe and the challenges lying ahead. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................... 8 Introduction: neoliberalism and depoliticisation ....................................................................... 8 Liberal democracy in contemporary democratic theory ........................................................... 9 Governmentality and institutions: Foucault and Polanyi .........................................................13 Resistance ............................................................................................................................14 Structure ................................................................................................................................17 CHAPTER 1: Challenging Liberal Rationality and Depoliticisation: Rethinking Democratic Politics ...................................... 22 Introduction ...........................................................................................................................22 Liberal democracy’s governability crisis .................................................................................25 The tension between liberalism and democracy: depoliticisation and politicisation ................27 The critique of aggregative and deliberative models of democracy: what’s the alternative? ...33 Abandoning the rationalist view of politics: antagonism and hegemony .................................37 The institutional dilemma for radical politics ...........................................................................43 Repoliticisation and radicalisation of democracy: social movements and populism ...............46 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................50 CHAPTER 2: Understanding Neoliberalism: The Relationship between the Liberal State and Free Market Capitalism ......... 53 Introduction ...........................................................................................................................53 Explaining (neo)liberalism and capitalism after Marx .............................................................58 The emergence of liberal governmentality: self-limitation, political economy and bio-politics .63 The institutional conditions for a self-regulating market .........................................................72 The refinement of liberalism: the emergence of neoliberalism ...............................................80 The contemporary relevance of economic institutional analysis of neoliberalism ...................85 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................88 CHAPTER 3: Crisis: Critique, Temporality and Trauma .......... 91 Introduction ...........................................................................................................................91 A brief analysis of conception of crisis ...................................................................................92 Crisis and critique ..................................................................................................................98 Crisis as an event and temporality ....................................................................................... 108 6 Crisis as trauma and the possibility of resistance ................................................................ 116 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 123 CHAPTER 4: Politics and Resistance as Power.................... 126 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 126 What is politics: between Arendt and Foucault .................................................................... 130 How to think power differently: Foucault and Arendt ............................................................ 135 Thinking the relationship between counter-conduct and conducting power through institutionalisation ................................................................................................................ 142 Interplay between politics and resistance as a vicious circle ................................................ 150 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 158 CHAPTER 5: Challenging Neoliberal Governmentality: Social Movements and the New Radical Left ............................. 161 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 161 Social movements and populism in times of austerity .......................................................... 163 The Slovenian case ............................................................................................................. 170 The challenges for the new radical left in Europe ................................................................ 180 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 189 CONCLUSION ........................................................... 192 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................... 200 7 INTRODUCTION Introduction: neoliberalism and depoliticisation The beginning of the present decade saw an eruption of significant collective resistance to the way governments were dealing with the 2007–2008 financial
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