Philosophy and Critical Theory
Rainer Bauböck's work on popular sovereignty, citizenship and the demos problem is an important touchstone for contemporary political, and especially democratic, theory. In this chapter, the author aims to put some pressure on the relationship between populus and demos in Bauböck's account. It is an important strength of Bauböck's argument that his account articulates complementary relations of the all affected interests (AAI) principle, the all subjection to coercion (ASC) principle and the all citizenship stakeholders (ACS) principle. The author focuses on the authorial membership of the demos. He endorses Bauböck's proposal of ASC as the best principle, under contemporary political conditions, for determining access to national citizenship. The author also explains his incorporation of AAI, ASC and ACS into an account of democratic legitimacy.
In this chapter, the author explains how the all subjected principle is seen in terms of a purely protective neo-republicanism, which is distinguished from the democratic republican self-government of citizenship stakeholding. She re-examines the interpretation of the neo-republican non-domination account that Rainer Bauböck associates with the all subjected principle. The connection between non-domination and autonomy leads beyond domination to the kind of self-government among related individuals that Bauböck associates with his citizenship stakeholder account. The author argues that a modified version of the all subjected principle escapes a number of the criticisms levelled at it, and provides a clear basis for membership of the demos. Finally, she offers future continuing subjection as a more defensible basis for birthright citizenship while ensuring the continuity of the democratic political community.
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book focuses on the principles that guide citizens of a democratic polity and their representatives when considering whose interests should count in their political decisions, whom to offer protection, and whom to include in their midst as citizens. The principles are meant to establish democratic legitimacy through inclusion in a world structured by political boundaries. The book proposes that all affected interests (AAI), all subject to coercion (ASC) and all citizenship stakeholders (ACS) each address a specific aspect of democratic inclusion, but that only ACS applies to membership issues. It considers the following three ideas: democracy as popular self-government, as government directly accountable to citizens, and as a method for making collectively binding decisions. The book aims to combine these ideas with the corresponding inclusion principles into a comprehensive conception of democratic inclusion for democratic politics.
In this chapter, the author interrogates Rainer Bauböck's stakeholder model as a matter of theory and highlights possibly unsustainable empirical assumptions behind it. The intergenerational qualities of citizenship are central to Bauböck's analysis. Bauböck understands that citizenship persists only where boundaries exist and where populations remain relatively sedentary. The author utilizes the archetypes of diaspora communities to critique his position on citizenship inside and outside the territory of the state. Diaspora communities may be disconnected from the political community of their state of residence even as they maintain a strong intergenerational connection qualifying as stakeholder citizenship in the homeland. Local territorial membership also supplies a useful vehicle for interrogating stakeholder citizenship. The incidence of instrumental citizenship will continue to grow, further undermining the empirical premises of stakeholder citizenship.
Rainer Bauböck has offered a fascinating and wide-ranging analysis of a question that is often now referred to as "the democratic boundary problem". This chapter begins to discuss how a democracy might function, what decision rules it should use, and how it should be constituted. It addresses questions of jurisdiction first, and concludes that, for economic and other reasons, it makes sense to have a single state in the region covered by the state of Israel and the occupied territories. The chapter considers the composition of the citizen body who should govern it, as well as other questions concerning the institutional form that democracy should take in that area. It illustrates how one-state or the two-state solution makes a difference, whether the question is about jurisdiction or about inclusion in the demos.
Just as anti-racist movements often struggle to discuss 'racism' as structural oppression rather than individual prejudice, studies of the Yugoslav region struggle to thread together discussions of race. During the Anglophone academy's postcolonial and subaltern turn, which overlapped with the end of state socialism and the Yugoslav wars, the asymmetric relationship led to a decisive theoretical conjunction when scholars brought up in the region but working in the USA applied postcolonial theory to explaining postsocialism. Queer studies have injected new energy into the postsocialism-postcolonialism conjunction, in the footsteps of eastern European feminists using postcolonial theory to explain how post-Cold-War western European feminists had marginalised eastern European women's perspectives. Postcolonial thought is still closer to the centre of south-east European studies than many other fields.
Ethnicity and migration, two central topics for studies of the Yugoslav region, have been and are intimately linked to race. Just as ethnicity has been more central than race in south-east European studies, certain migrations have been more central than others, which tell the history of majoritarian ethnicity but are integral to understanding the place of 'race'. Indeed, even the ethnopolitical violence responsible for forced migrations within and away from the region has often involved translating ethnicity and nationhood through 'race' to more effectively dehumanise the subjects of violence and harden the symbolic boundaries of ethnic difference to their extreme. The Great War is a part of the history of race and the Yugoslav region as the theme on which the explicit discussions of race in the region have turned. The racialisation of ethnonational and religious boundaries facilitated genocidal expressions of Serb and Croat ethnonationalism during the Second World War.
Like south-east Europe and Europe's ex-state socialist societies in general, the Yugoslav region has legacies of nation formation, forced migration and genocide that invite seeing its past and present through the lens of ethnopolitical and religious conflict. Scholars of eastern European countries and the USSR, not just the Yugoslav region, face the obstacle of reconciling the predominance of ethnicity and the invisibility of race. Scholars in Black European Studies at locations including Germany, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands have had to confront exceptionalism in order for the mainstreams of their own area studies to hear them. Much scholarship on race, postcoloniality and whiteness on European peripheries is indebted to academics and activists in German Studies, including Afro-German women who started theorising their 'double oppressions' in white German society in collaboration with Audre Lorde.
Evidence from popular music shows that the Yugoslav region just like other European countries does possess a 'deep reservoir' of notions of modernity, morality, hierarchy and entitlement through which popular culture and everyday discourse mobilise meaning. Wekker's search for the affective legacies of racialised colonial imagination in the 'cultural archive' reinforces Anikó Imre's argument that scholars of European media ought to apply the lens of east European postcoloniality to everyday popular culture as well as highbrow literature and cinema. The most unambiguous examples of colonial racialised imaginaries in post-Yugoslav entertainment, even more so than Cro-dance's tribalism and primitivism, were occasional blackface performances on music television. Popular music stands alongside transnational sport and film as a major vector for an embodied transnational cultural politics of race, where what producers and audiences perceive through transnational media is adapted or vernacularised through their own perceptions of race and identity.
Race, as well as ethnicity, is an essential category for understanding the micropolitics of postsocialism, and for situating the Yugoslav wars more widely in late-twentieth-century European history. Post-9/11 Islamophobia compounded late-twentieth-century Western cultural racisms that already stigmatised Islam as incompatible with liberal democracy, along lines inflected by specific national histories and experiences but with common assumptions that Islam was incompatible with a secular Europe or West. The forms of anti-Muslim racism combined the xenophobic opposition to extra-European migration of late-twentieth/early-twenty-first-century European cultural racism with the War on Terror's racialised Islamophobia. The idea of 'postnational' defence in twenty-first-century European security viewed national interests and defence as 'multinational', 'achieved in solidarity with others well beyond the borders'. The politics of racism and peacekeeping in the Yugoslav wars exemplified how post-Yugoslav racisms mediated the geopolitical reversal that many ex-Yugoslavs felt they had undergone.