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Chapter One from Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria: How Ideas Shape Publics

(James Dawson, Ashgate, December 2014)

Chapter 1

The Neglect of Citizens in the Measurement of Liberal Democracy: An Agenda for the

Application of Public Sphere Theory to Central and Eastern Europe

The institutions prescribed by the Western-led project of democratization – competitive elections, the rule of

law, the separation of powers and so-on – are themselves the realization of liberal principles such as individual

liberty, equality, civic tolerance and representation. The apparatus of formal democracy measurement,

represented in this chapter by Freedom House, tends to treat the implementation of these liberal institutional

forms as equivalent to liberal democracy itself. In this way formalist approaches to democratization neglect

the fact that, besides formal institutions, ‘democracy also needs to be reflected in the ideas that people hold

and value’ (Blokker 2009: 1). As I will demonstrate in this book, existing theories of the democratic public

sphere1 can be harnessed to evaluate such ‘cultural’ dimensions of democratization. This is achieved by

focussing directly on the discursive practices2 – including the everyday discussions of citizens as well as the

public discourse of political figures – through which persons are constituted as democratic citizens. This

approach allows the scholar to distinguish between more liberal, pluralist public spheres characterized by open

and vigorous contestation over matters of common concern and more illiberal and restricted public spheres in

which challenges to conservative orthodoxies are rare and lacking in public support. Since citizens only attain

the capacity to uphold liberal democratic institutions when they both understand and identify with the

principles enshrined in them, I claim that the comparative analysis of public sphere discourse could usefully

complement existing formal modes of democracy measurement.

1 The public sphere is explained at length further on in this chapter. At base, the public sphere may be understood as the aggregation

of numerous sites in which citizens meet to discuss matters of public concern, allowing individuals to constitute themselves as

democratic citizens through civic participation.

2 Practices are ‘repeated actions or deeds that are repeated over time; they are learned, repeated and subject to [change] through

interaction’ (Wedeen 2008: 15). In the sense that practices embed agents within structures of meaning – discourses – then they may

be called ‘discursive practices’. These same discourses – ‘liberal democracy’, ‘Serb nationalism’, and so on – are observable only

through the practices of agents. From this, it follows that when practices change, so too do the discourses that structure them.

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The emphasis that public sphere theories place on the constitution of citizens through everyday

practices of deliberation could be particularly useful to those hoping to understand recent political

developments in several newer members of the European Union, where successful ‘democratic consolidation’

in the formal, institutional sense has not necessarily entailed the formation of liberal democratic publics. From

Poland to Hungary to Romania and beyond, voting publics have shown themselves to be ready to follow

political elites into the increasingly illiberal political landscape of the present (Tismaneanu 2009). In this vein,

the Bulgarian portions of this study serve to illustrate the sociological shallowness of the successful elite-led

push to adopt liberal democratic institutional norms towards the goals of EU and NATO membership. The

frustrated Bulgarian public that emerges from the data of this project is one in which even young and highly-

educated people, ill-served by a chaotic media sphere that is hostage to deal-making between economic elites

and their political allies, tend to fall back on illiberal ideals of ethnic nationalism and social conservatism that

are antithetical to liberal democratic principles. Perhaps surprisingly in the light of the fact that Serbia has only

recently achieved candidate status for EU membership and continues to lag behind Bulgaria in terms of

Freedom House’s Democracy Scores,3 the picture emerging from the Serbian data of this project reveals a

public sphere wherein nationalist, pro-authoritarian and socially conservative discourses are consistently

opposed by liberal-progressive discourses promoting solidarity on the basis of cosmopolitanism, minority

rights and a concern for equality under the law. From the perspective of the liberal democratic project, Serbia

may be viewed as a society in which illiberal and authoritarian defects of the political establishment

comparable to those in Bulgaria are, crucially, acknowledged and opposed by a significant minority of the

citizenry who are committed to upholding values congruent with liberal democracy. The fact that this distinct

liberal ‘counterpublic’4 is evident in Serbia means that, unlike in Bulgaria, an illiberal consensus cannot form

around nationalist and socially conservative discourses.

3 The ‘Democracy Scores’ system of measurement is discussed at length further on in this chapter, while the relative scores of different

states in CEE are described in the early part of Chapter 2.

4 To facilitate understanding of this term, it is necessary to bear in mind that I have taken on board criticisms of Jürgen Habermas’s

original conception of a singular, inclusive public sphere of discussion in order to accept that national contexts will generally consist

of multiple publics and counterpublics. As I describe in greater detail further on, following Michael Warner’s definition, a

counterpublic is a kind of public brought into being through an oppositional discourse containing the reflexive awareness of its own

subordinate status in relation to a dominant public (Warner 2002).

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These references to the empirical findings of this book are, however, a preview of the chapters that

follow: the imminent task is to clarify my theoretical approach with reference to existing comparative

scholarship on democratization in the region. The argument of this chapter must necessarily proceed in stages.

First, I consider why formalist measures of democratization are so influential in the context of a

democratization movement that consists of policy-makers as well as academics. In the interests of representing

a prominent and rather comprehensive example of formal measurement, I describe the Freedom House system

of ‘Democracy Scores’ in some detail. While I endorse the basic utility of the system, I claim that the

methodological tendency to consider the non-repression of liberal ‘virtues’ (such as media independence and

civil society) as analogous to their actual practice represents a significant flaw that compromises the reliability

of the scores. Next, with reference to one highly-cited paper arising from a high-level mid-2000s conference

on democratization (Ekiert, Kubik & Vachudova 2007), I show that some scholars arrive at conclusions on

the basis of Freedom House scores, while at the same time they recognize the importance of several aspects

of democratic practice that are not considered by formal measures. In response to the authors’ call for the

development of methodologies appropriate to the task of facilitating understanding of ‘cultural’ aspects of

democratization, I argue that the existing literature on the public sphere provides a wide array of conceptual

tools that may promote such understandings. In the remainder of the chapter, I describe the specific conceptual

tools that I apply in this study. In addition, I argue that, contrary to the normative convictions of some fellow

scholars of cultural dimensions of democracy, it is justifiable to evaluate democratizing states against a

specifically liberal standard of democracy. In conclusion, I advocate the benefits that attention to the messy

and contextual business of discursive practices can bring to the democratization field. Analyses of the

discursive content of public sphere discussion can distinguish liberal discourses from illiberal, nationalist and

authoritarian ones. Rather than studying institutions as ‘liberal democracy’, these analyses can reveal to what

degree life in the societies regulated by these institutions may be experienced as liberal and democratic.

Measuring the Measure: Freedom House as an Indicator of Liberal Democratic Practice

Before considering Freedom House, it is worth recognizing that not all attempts to measure democracy involve

a serious attempt to identify liberal societies. For example, scholars taking inspiration from Joseph

Schumpeter’s procedural notion of democracy typically require nothing more than the holding of elections in

which more than one party has a chance of winning. An exemplary ‘minimalist’ definition of democracy of

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this kind is that employed by Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub and Fernando

Limongi in Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990

(Przeworski et al. 2000). Przeworski and his collaborators define democracy simply as ‘a regime in which

those who govern are selected through contested elections’ (2000: 15). In their study then, the formal

procedure of the (competitive) election is held to be synonymous with ‘democracy’, leading to a binary

classification system that codes all states as either ‘democratic’ or ‘authoritarian’. With ‘democracy’ thus

defined, the authors were able to test the relationship between ‘economic well-being’ (measured in GDP Per

Capita) and ‘democracy’ statistically, identifying a positive relationship between democracy and prosperity.

This approach to the classification of democracy has been praised by those hoping to perform statistical tests

on data classified according to independently-verifiable criteria (Munck & Verkuilen 2002). Furthermore,

even scholars who are generally sceptical of the preference for statistical modelling in the human sciences

have been moved to applaud the apparent robustness of their findings (Shapiro 2002). However, their approach

has earned a sustained theoretical critique from Lisa Wedeen on the grounds that the authors’ definition seeks

to displace more historical and philosophical understandings of the term, completely ignoring questions of

popular participation among many other concerns of democratic theorists (Wedeen 2008: 105–111). In spite

of these concerns, such studies continue to be influential far beyond academia, providing easy-to-use databases

‘in a situation in which the labelling of a country as “democratic” or “authoritarian” can have far reaching and

sometimes devastating consequences for international funding or the relations among states’ (Wedeen 2008:

106). Nevertheless, these databases focus attention on those states where the occurrence of competitive

elections is debatable, thereby rendering most of Central and Eastern Europe as belonging to the part of the

world in which the battle for democracy is ‘already won’. Accordingly, scholars of democratization working

on CEE tend to pay attention to measurements of democracy that consider practices beyond the ballot box.

Among formalist measures, Freedom House lies at the other end of the complexity spectrum,

measuring ‘democracy’ through a wide range of criteria along a continuous scale that allows for marginal

differentiation between states that are classed as democracies. Freedom House therefore stands as a suitable

example of an attempt to represent liberal democratic progress in a comprehensive and multifaceted way. By

including consideration of dimensions such as civil society and the media, it could be argued that Freedom

House attempts to address some of the analytical concerns of public sphere theorists, albeit from a different

angle. In this section, I have elected to rely on the ‘Democracy Scores’ system used in the regionally-specific

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Nations in Transit report that Freedom House publishes annually on the post-socialist states of CEE and

Eurasia, rather than the Political and Civil Rights scores used in the annual Freedom in the World report.5 In

particular, I will focus my critical attention on the ways in which FH recognizes democracy and the process

of evaluation that leads to the allocation of the quantified ‘democracy scores’. Quantified scores are important

because they enable facile ‘at-a-glance’ comparison between states, increasing the accessibility of social

scientific research to non-academic audiences. As with the data of Przeworski et al., these audiences include

national and international policy-makers who almost certainly take such data into account when decisions are

made domestically about the direction of political reforms and internationally about the allocation of

international funding – and possibly even about admission into international political-economic blocs such as

the European Union.6 FH probably remains the best known measure of democratization in the world today

and, as I will discuss further on, the data the organization provides acts as a common reference point for many

scholars and policy-makers in the context of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe. Finally, I will

take for granted the idea that the Freedom House system, in that it prescribes liberal principles such as the

separation of powers and freedom of speech through measurements of ‘judicial framework and independence’

and ‘media independence’, is a transparently liberal measure of democracy. I will therefore be judging the FH

system on its own terms: to what extent does it succeed in credibly measuring liberal democracy?

Like Przeworski et al., FH gives prominence to elections. However, as of 2012, Electoral Procedures

(EP) is just one of seven categories, the scores of which are averaged out to provide an overall ‘Democracy

Score’ (DS). The other six are Civil Society (CS), Independent Media (IM), National Democratic Governance

(NDG), Local Democratic Governance (LDG), Judicial Framework and Independence (JFI) and Corruption

(CO). In each of these categories, states are graded between 1 (‘lowest level of democratic progress’) and 7

(‘highest level of democratic progress’) according to a methodology that relies on expert-based testimony

5 A fuller rationale for this decision will be supplied in Chapter 2. The main reason is that, unlike the Democracy Scores system

described above, the Freedom in the World system does not provide gradings that are nuanced enough to distinguish between the

countries of the study, as scores are rounded to whole numbers. For example, both Serbia and Bulgaria score 2 for both political and

civil liberties as of the new 2013 report and are thereby simply classified as ‘Free’.

6 Further to my claim that FH is more widely used than minimalist measurements in the CEE context, it is also cited by many scholars

and analysts (Tilly 2007, O’Donnell 2008) who recognize sociological aspects of democracy that are simply neglected by minima list

approaches.

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rather than independently-verifiable criteria. Specifically, the grades arise from an interaction of the

evaluations of the authors of country reports (often academics or political journalists from the states in

question), the input of groups of ‘regional expert reviewers’ and ‘Freedom House’s academic advisory board’,

so that the organization itself ultimately exercises ‘editorial authority’. It is expressed in the methodology

section of a recent FH report as follows:

Authors of individual country reports suggest preliminary ratings in all seven categories covered by

the study, ensuring that substantial evidence is provided where a score change is proposed.

Each draft report is then sent to several regional expert reviewers, who provide comment on both the

score change and the quality of its justification in the report’s text.

Over the course of a two-day meeting, Freedom House’s academic advisory board discusses and

evaluates all ratings.

Report authors are given the opportunity to dispute any revised rating that differs from the original by

more than 0.50 points. (Freedom House 2012b: 24)

The unavoidably subjective dimension of ‘expert’ opinion leads some statistically-oriented researchers to

express their concerns about a lack of data transparency (Munck & Verkuilen 2002), but is a less of a concern

for those scholars of democracy who recognize that categories such as ‘civil society’ or ‘media independence’

cannot merely be enumerated according to any objective or universal criteria. From this second perspective,

the subjective and corporate character of the grading procedure may arguably be understood positively, as

introducing the elements of discretion and moderation necessary to interpret complex and sometimes

contradictory bodies of data. Ultimately, the grading procedure of FH is a case of ‘describing with numbers’

to promote easy access and facile comparability between data that is fundamentally qualitative and descriptive.

At least in theory, the element of ‘expert’ discretion raises the possibility that the authors may take

dimensions of practice and meaning into account. Certainly, the inclusion of categories such as ‘Independent

Media’ and ‘Civil Society’ reveals an underlying concern with the spread of ideas and the participation of

citizens in political life beyond the ballot box. However, the ethos behind the evaluations is one that prioritizes

institutional form and legal accommodation over intelligibility of meaning and actual practice. This ethos may

be accessed by reading the qualitative justifications for the scores, and it is illustrated effectively with reference

to the summarizing paragraph on Civil Society in Bulgaria in 2012:

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Civil Society. The civic sector in Bulgaria is well regulated, generally free to develop its

activities, and well established as a partner both to the state and to the media. However, the

ability of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to raise funds domestically remains limited,

impeding the emergence of rich feedback links between NGOs and local communities. The

absence of specific regulations for lobbying activities also creates a space for dubious practices

and hinders the ability of civil actors to effectively express and pursue the interests of various

segments of society. Therefore, Bulgaria’s civil society rating remains unchanged at 2.50.

(Freedom House 2012c)

The authors7 applaud the regulation of the ‘civic sector’, which is ‘generally free to develop its activities’,

although they concede that nongovernmental organizations have funding problems in practice. In the following

sentence, the reader is told that a lack of funding means that the development of ‘feedback loops between

NGOs and local communities’ is impeded. Presumably, it can be deduced from this that civic participation in

public life is not very widespread beyond the employees of NGOs. In fact, in most of the qualitative

justifications for Civil Society scores the key opinion expressed in the topic sentence tends to be congruent

with the authors’ judgement on the NGO sector, with the degree of public participation being a secondary

consideration. As an example of this, consider the identical formulations in the Bulgaria reports for 2007 and

2008 wherein civil society is claimed to be ‘vibrant’ in spite of the subsequent admissions that NGOs do not

enjoy ‘public support’ (Freedom House 2007, Freedom House 2008).

In fairness to Freedom House, it is necessary to state that the longer description of civil society

presented later in the 2012 report does provide the reader with some sense of the kinds of identities and

interests that are represented in Bulgarian civil society.

A nongovernmental web portal for NGOs, launched in 2010, contained 5,302 entries in 2011,

compared to 5,094 entries in 2010. Among these web-registered NGOs, 267 defined their basic

activity as related to environmental issues, 191 as related to human rights, 137 as related to

ethnic issues, and 77 as related to women and gender issues. The two registers indicate that

Bulgarian NGOs cover various social spheres (health, education, social services), rights issues

(human, minority, gender, religious), public policy and advocacy (with an increasing interest

7 The credited authors of this report are Georgy Ganev, Daniel Smilov and Antoinette Primatarova, all of the Centre for Liberal

Strategies, a prestigious think-tank in Sofia. However, it should be noted that certain features of the layout are standardized (‘Therefore

[the score] remains unchanged at …’), and the allotted grade, according to the methodology quoted in the previous paragraph, is

officially that of FH rather than the authors.

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for environmental issues), business and development, and sports. Most of the organizations

[…] in the nongovernmental online register, appear to be active. (Freedom House 2012c)

From this description of the nongovernmental sector, the reader is likely to understand that the Bulgarian civil

society sector supports a very wide range of interests, many of which identify themselves in terms of a liberal

discourse of social advocacy and human rights. Furthermore, the reader is assured that the majority of these

hundreds of organizations, defined as environmental, human rights, ‘ethnic’ and gender-based ‘appear to be

active’. However, it is impossible to infer from this whether or not such groups have actually contributed to a

spread of liberal ideas because we are not even informed of the character of any specific campaigns8 by these

NGOs, let alone whether or not they resonate with broader sections of the public. In the absence of any more

meaningful data, it is reasonable to conclude that the sole purpose of noting the existence of these groups is to

support the central claim that the civic sector ‘is free to carry out their activities’. According to this evidence,

the FH methodology would appear to conceptualize the formal, legal freedom to fulfil some liberal ‘virtue’ as

analytically equivalent to the actual (anthropological) practice of it.

From an empirical perspective however, it is quite obvious that the notional ‘freedom’ to participate

in civil society and the realization of the practice implied by it are not the same. With respect to the cited

example of ‘civil society’ in Bulgaria, any scholar working from the assumption that the content of political

discourse counts would surely wish to cross-examine the authors further before accepting their conclusions.

Do subordinate groups such as the ‘ethnic’ or gender-based groups dare to challenge national majoritarian or

patriarchal norms? Does what Habermas called the ‘force of the better argument’ take precedence over other

kinds of authority? (Habermas 1989). Are ‘civil society’ actors actually ‘political’ in the Mouffian sense that

they dare to challenge political and economic hegemonies? (Laclau & Mouffe 1998, Howarth & Glynos 2007).

Informed by such concerns, I wonder whether knowing about the legal possibilities provided by ‘civil society’

legislation helps the reader to know whether people not working for NGOs actually participate to any degree

in non-institutional politics at all. Furthermore, similar questions can be asked in relation to the other

dimensions of ‘democracy’ measured by the index. Concerning media independence, for example, does a

country score better or worse when more of its journalists undertake risky investigative assignments that result

8 For example, even assuming that all of these groups are based on sincere grounds of public-spirited advocacy, a ‘gender’ group could

easily promote conservative ideals antithetical to liberal ideals such as human equality just as any of them could conceivably articulate

their claims in nationally or ethnically exclusivist terms.

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in efforts by lawmakers to constrain media activity and/or threats to their personal safety? Concerning

‘electoral procedures’, can a state achieve top marks even when its citizens are presented with what the

Bulgarian sociologist Ivan Krastev has referred to as ‘elections without choices’ in the sense that meaningful

policy differences are not apparent (Krastev 2002)?

Freedom House supplies no clear answers to these questions. In spite of what I perceive to be the

laudable aim of recognizing that democracy is enacted in numerous sites across society, the reliability of the

data is surely hampered by the methodological bias towards a negative conception of liberal democratic

practice – ‘the prevention of unfreedom’ (Blokker 2009: 4) – that fails to adequately distinguish between

possibility and realization. This surely compromises the reliability of Freedom House’s claim to measure

liberal democratic practice. In this sense, it could certainly be argued that databases like Freedom House’s

would be more credible if they dropped pretensions to measure democracy as a whole in favour of claiming

to cover only specific aspects of it.9 However, seen from the perspective of the democratization movement as

necessarily composed of both scholars and policy-makers, the problem does not necessarily lead to

catastrophes of misunderstanding. In the next section, I hope to show that key actors within policy-making

circles are well aware of the limitations of such databases, using them in a similar, sceptical way to that I

would confess to doing myself. While the Freedom House methodology, for example, seems quite blind to the

question of whether citizens actually debate politics at all, it does not follow that all those who consult this

data fail to grasp the import of such questions.

Formalism Meets the Liberal Citizen: The Hybrid Formal-Cultural Approach of Advocates of

Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe

The ‘rapid democratization’ of most of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe until the mid-2000s was

largely measured, assessed, recognized and applauded on the basis of formalist understandings of

democratization. This is true both of the conditionality imposed by the EU as it judged the performance of

candidate states against the highly-formalist criteria of the acquis communautaire and, as I will describe below,

of the scholarship that applauded these achievements. However, for all that Western policy-makers and many

scholars of democratization seem wedded to the formal measurement of democracy, this evidently does not

9 Wedeen has made a similar point with reference to Przeworski’s approach (Wedeen 2008: 111).

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preclude the notion that many of these same actors also focus on socio-cultural aspects of democracy that are

neglected by these same databases. Since at least the mid-1990s, for example, Western-backed projects in CEE

have been implemented that treat democracy as existing far beyond the formal institutions and procedures of

the state (Greenberg 2010). In addition, policy-oriented scholarship studying the intersection of

democratization and economic transition with citizens’ everyday lives has been repeatedly commissioned and

funded by influential Western sponsors of democratization (Brown 2006). In this section, I will focus on one

particular article in order to show how a declared adherence to formalist measurement has long co-existed

with broader, more philosophically-aware understandings of democracy as embodied in context-sensitive

practices that are poorly addressed in the existing formal apparatus of democracy measurement.

The paper I have chosen to focus on is ‘Democracy in the Post-Communist World: An Unending

Quest?’, co-authored by the senior political scientists Grzegorz Ekiert, Jan Kubik and Milada Anna Vachudova

(2007). It is written on behalf of the influential democracy promotion think tank Club de Madrid, which is

comprised of many former heads of state, ‘leading academic experts’ and other dignitaries who met in Prague

in late 2005 at a time when many states of the region had recently acceded, or were just about to accede to full

membership of the European Union. It may thus be read as a corporate policy discussion paper of a significant

democratization establishment as well as the authors’ attempt to guide that movement.

The paper starts with a promise to ‘diagnose and explain the state of democracy in post-communist

Europe’. The diagnosis is swiftly delivered as the authors claim on the basis of Freedom House scores that the

post-communist states exhibited both ‘the best and the worst record of transition from authoritarianism to

democracy’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 9). In the first group, the citizens of Baltic and Central European states which

entered the EU in 2004 evidently enjoyed a ‘quality of democratic institutions similar to that enjoyed by

citizens of established Western democracies’ and were ‘closely followed’ by prospective future members

Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia. The second group, comprised of the states of the former Soviet Union

(excluding the Baltics) and ‘other Balkan countries’ were either ‘semi-democratic’ or ‘consolidated

autocracies’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 8). This disparity between the evidently very successful democratic transitions

of countries in the first group and the lack of success seen in the second was explained by the authors as being

due to the fact that only the first group benefited from the ‘real prospect of EU membership as a reward for

comprehensive political and economic reforms’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 12).

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This strong correlation between successful candidacies for EU accession and an upward trajectory on

the Freedom House measures of democracy (and to a lesser extent economic freedom as measured by the

EBRD and Heritage Foundation databases) informs the main conclusion of the article, specifically the

affirmation of the ‘European Union’s democratization power’:

The European Union may be presiding over the most successful democracy promotion program

ever implemented by an international actor. The track record so far is excellent: every

democratizing state that has become a credible future member of the European Union (except

perhaps Serbia) has made steady progress toward liberal democracy. (Ekiert et al. 2007: 22)

It is a triumphal message that would likely have echoed the sentiments of many among the pro-Western policy-

makers and scholars of the democratization field at that time. Considering the subsequent reversal of many of

these democratic gains, as evidenced both according to the formalism of Freedom House and according to

more qualitative accounts of politics in the region (Krastev 2007, Tismaneanu 2009, Bánkuti, Halmai &

Scheppele 2012, Ganev 2013), it would be possible to criticize the authors’ conclusion as being symptomatic

of some wider tendency to give far too much credence to formalist measures of democratization. However,

viewed as a whole, their paper is far from triumphalist and communicates an uneasy awareness that the

institutional progress that had seen the Freedom House scores of most CEE countries shoot up and propel them

into the EU was unmatched by several dimensions of democratic practice that are not addressed by such

measurements.

In fact, the remainder of the article is largely given over to the authors’ descriptions of alleged

problems in the politics of the region, most of which call for an analytical attention to discursive content rather

than institutional frameworks. For example, in calling for ‘ideological and philosophical clarity’ on the part

of political actors, the authors raise an issue that speaks directly to the concerns of a number of theorists of

political discourse who have argued that the articulation of distinct political platforms is a precondition for

citizens to identify with political competition (Laclau & Mouffe 1985, Torfing 1998, Mouffe 1999). In a

similar vein, the importance of ‘leaders’ commitment to democracy’ (pp. 16–17) is stressed, with references

to the benefits of having ‘well-known and committed democratic leaders like Lech Wałęsa and Václav Havel’.

Even where the authors discuss issues that can be measured formally, such as economic reform, their

conclusions are centred on citizens’ perceptions rather than political-legal frameworks: ‘Citizens need to

believe that reforms are legitimate … [and] fair …’ (p. 21). Further policy recommendations call for measures

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to address ‘the feelings of isolation’ felt by those in the Western Balkans subject to travel restrictions,

something which allegedly ‘hands votes to nationalist and anti-democratic parties’ (p. 28) and to address the

problem of students in those same countries who grow up ‘suffocated by ethnocentric and antidemocratic

propaganda’ (p. 27). What links all of these recommendations is that they are based on reasoning other than

that used by Freedom House and other formalistic measurements that the authors used to laud the success of

democratization in CEE.

Most of all, the authors seem to be concerned by the idea that the institutional progress they laud at

the beginning of the article is unmatched by any progress in the imaginative cultural project of creating

democratic citizens. The most emphatic statement of this normative agenda is quoted below:

Democracy needs informed citizens and a culture of moderation. Thus, a ‘proper democratic’

culture needs to be developed. Some cultural syndromes, such as various forms of religious

and nationalistic fundamentalism, are anti-democratic, but culture is not immutable; it can be

changed – albeit slowly – with considerable resources and patience. No effort should be spared

to instil prodemocratic culture through education and through building free and responsible

media. (Ekiert et al. 2007: 17)

This vision is preceded in the text by a friendly mention of ‘liberalism’ and holds out little room for

compromise with non-liberal conceptions of democratic culture. In short, Ekiert et al. argue for an extensive

project of identity-construction analogous to that undertaken by ‘national awakeners’ across much of the same

territory in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, much as Eric Hobsbawm recognized that the need for

‘awakeners’ demonstrates that national identity was largely absent before these intellectuals promoted their

ideas (Hobsbawm 1983), Ekiert et al. perceive ‘liberal democracy’ in the same category: a set of ideas that

will be observable in the thoughts and practices of citizens only to the extent that these ideas are actively

promoted from above and resonate with the people below.

Scholars who believe that democracy ought to be promoted rather less prescriptively sometimes

critique such interventionist policy approaches that aim to ‘discipline’ people in democratizing states in order

to produce ‘good’, democratic, liberal citizens. Bearing in mind the sheer ideological zeal evident above, it is

unsurprising that the article in question has received such treatment (Greenberg 2010). In recognition of this

critique, I defend the normative bias in favour of liberal conceptions of democracy further on. At this stage,

however, my intention is to highlight the theoretical gulf between Freedom House’s negative conception of

liberal democracy as the ‘prevention of unfreedom’ and the authors’ assumption that a liberal democratic

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culture needs to be actively promoted, through education, the media, political ‘reformers’ and an active

opposition to ‘nationalistic fundamentalism’. Indeed, when liberalism is seen in the context of the history of

political ideas, it is surprising that so many scholars evidently believe that liberal democracy can be promoted

in some kind of ‘neutral’ manner that remains agnostic with respect to the question of whether political leaders

campaign on the basis of ‘tolerance and equality’ or ‘nation and fatherland’ so long as they commit to abide

by the results of elections. It is this tension between the political-legal conception of liberal democracy as a

set of rules on the one hand and as a set of ‘cultural’ practices on the other that leads to the kind of double-

speak that permeates the article wherein democracy in CEE is simultaneously presented as mission

accomplished on the basis of formalistic measurement and as a nascent cultural project that has made little

progress in the direction of creating liberal democratic citizens. Unsurprisingly, Ekiert et al. call for more

research into these ‘cultural’ dimensions of democracy (13).

Recognizing Liberal Democracy in the Practices of Citizens

In the remainder of this chapter, I will describe an alternative set of criteria for the identification of liberal

democratic practices that departs from the formalism of Freedom House. I derive an inexhaustive set of criteria

for recognizing ‘cultural’ aspects of democracy through reference to normative and empirical research into

what is generally referred to as ‘the public sphere’ – an aggregation of sites in society through which

individuals meet and discuss public matters, constituting themselves as democratic citizens in the process

(Habermas 1989). In political theory, the emphasis on ‘civic participation’ that public sphere theories imply

is often promoted as an alternative to liberalism (Sandel 1982, Taylor 1985). However, this line of critique

assumes a rights-based negative conception of liberalism of the kind promoted by John Rawls (Rawls 1971);

indeed, the target of these critiques is a liberalism not too far removed from the conceptual approach of

Freedom House. When liberalism is instead understood as a form of identity that requires the kind of active

promotion that Ekiert et al. advocate, it becomes possible to argue that there is no contradiction between

liberalism and civic participation. On the contrary, I claim that it is through participation in public spheres of

discussion where liberal ideas are present that liberal democratic citizens are made.

Chantal Mouffe provides an eloquent definition of liberal democratic citizenship that may suffice for

the purpose of guiding my endeavour:

14

What we share and what makes us fellow citizens in a liberal democratic regime is not a

substantive idea of the good but a set of political principles specific to such a tradition: the

principles of freedom and equality for all. Those principles constitute what we can call,

following Wittgenstein, a ‘grammar’ of political conduct. To be a citizen is to recognize the

authority of those principles and the rules in which they are embodied – to have them informing

our political judgment and our actions. To be associated in terms of the recognition of the

liberal democratic principles, this is the meaning of citizenship that I want to put forward. It

implies seeing citizenship not as a legal status but as a form of identification, a type of political

identity: something to be constructed, not empirically given. Since there will always be

competing interpretations of the democratic principles of equality and liberty there will

therefore be competing interpretations of democratic citizenship. (Mouffe 1992: 75)

In this view, liberal democracy itself becomes recognizable through reference to the embodiment of liberal

principles, specifically freedom and equality, in the practices of agents. I will elaborate upon this definition of

liberalism further on, but this will suffice for now. This definition of liberal democratic citizenship as a form

of identification rather than a legal status provides a point of reference that is at once flexible enough and yet

intelligible enough to facilitate reasoned consideration of whether what Ekiert et al. describe as ‘a proper

democratic culture’ is evident through practices of discussion in given contexts.

In this project, I seek at once to ascertain the existence of liberal democratic discourse in the public

rhetoric of political actors at the elite level and in the everyday practices of citizens. My assumptions with

respect to the dynamic relationship between elite discourse and everyday practice are informed by nationalism

theory, specifically by Eric Hobsbawm’s oft-cited statement on the matter:

Nationalism and nationhood are dual phenomena that while constructed essentially from above,

cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions,

hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and

still less nationalist. (Hobsbawm 1993: 10)

If the terms ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationhood’ are substituted by ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘liberal democratic

citizenship’ then the logic of Hobsbawm’s statement can be used to justify examination of both the elite study

of liberal democratic discourse and the resonance of those discourses in the everyday practices of citizens.

This recognition of the mutual constitution of ‘above’ and ‘below’ dimensions of discursively constructed

identities has informed the theoretical convictions of many nationalism scholars (Fox 2004, Brubaker,

Feischmidt, Fox & Grancea 2006) and even of some scholars of democracy who opt to forgo analyses of

15

everyday practices. For example, Laclau and Mouffe analytically privilege the ‘political moment’ rather than

direct observation of everyday discussion but nevertheless recognize that ‘political identities are constituted

and re-constituted through public sphere debate’ (Laclau & Mouffe 2001: xvii).

In the following theoretical discussion, I attempt to outline evaluative criteria designed to recognize

liberal democratic practice with reference to discourse accessed through everyday discussion alongside

analyses of elite political rhetoric in recognition of the fact that neither dimension of ‘liberal democracy’ can

properly be understood in isolation from the other. This dual analytical focus may similarly be justified with

reference to nationalism theory. Outlining what they call the ‘everyday nationhood’ approach, Jon Fox and

Cynthia Miller Idriss argue against deducing the ‘quotidian meaning and salience of nationalism from its

political and cultural privileging’ on the basis that while ordinary people may ‘engage and enact’ nationalist

discourses, they may also ‘ignore and deflect’ them (Fox & Miller Idriss 2008). Their framework does not

aspire to the normative and evaluative purpose that I embrace in this project, but their recognition that the

cultural privileging of political discourses of nationalism does not directly correspond to the frequency with

which it informs everyday practice is an idea that I can adapt to the study of liberal democracy. The logic of

not taking political discourse as evidence of popular resonance could be argued to be particularly apt in the

context of post-socialist states where many political leaders, including Slobodan Milošević, have discursively

advocated ideas such as tolerance and democracy (Gagnon 2004) while being widely perceived to inspire

support on the basis of parallel appeals (clientelism, nationalism, and so on). Thus while I concede that liberal

democratic citizens are unlikely to manifest themselves in the everyday public sphere unless politicians or

civil actors have advocated liberal principles publicly (and I will provide analyses of elite political discourse

to ascertain this point), evidence of elite articulation does not guarantee popular resonance. It is for this reason

that I subtly favour evidence gathered ‘from below’ by recognizing liberal democratic citizens primarily

through reference to everyday public sphere discussion rather than seeking to infer their existence from

political discourse. To these ends, I will make ample use of existing empirical and theoretical work on the

public sphere in order to assemble a suitable theoretical toolkit. What follows may be taken as an inexhaustive

set of theoretical principles that may be used to distinguish more democratic practices from less democratic

ones. My aim is to provide convincing comparative analyses guided by a dynamic set of principles derived

from the literature rather than to benchmark societies against rigid criteria.

16

Public Spheres and the Making of Democratic Citizens

The concept of the public sphere is generally associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas, who popularized

the term (1989 [1962]). In rough terms, Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as the aggregation of

numerous sites in which citizens gather to discuss the public matters of the day. The existence of a vibrant

public sphere of discussion is vital for democracy for two key reasons. Firstly, access to public sphere debate

is a condition of possibility for feelings of community, for the transformation of atomized subjects into

democratic publics of citizens who understand and care about more than just their private lives. Secondly, it

is only through participation in public sphere discussion that civic power is generated, which is to say that

citizens articulate their identities and interests together in ways that can lead to collective action. The sites that

constitute the public sphere (sometimes referred to as ‘institutions’ which contains an unhelpful implication

of formality) are neither ‘private’ social contexts such as the family home nor hierarchical institutional settings

such as workplaces (or most political parties) but a ‘third setting’ for conversation with three main

characteristics: ‘participation is optional, potentially open to all and potentially egalitarian’10 (Eliasoph 1998:

11). I will begin by discussing where the public sphere may be encountered and will then consider in greater

detail how it may be recognized by reference to the two key democratic functions mentioned above.

Habermas idealized the communities of debate that emerged from the coffee houses of eighteenth

century England, while Wedeen has spoken up for the democratic qualities of the qat11 chews in Yemen

wherein inclusive male audiences articulate their political concerns in common (Wedeen 2008). Some of the

institutional activities understood by the phrase ‘civil society’ may qualify as public sphere discussion to the

extent that political debate is actually encouraged within NGOs or leisure groups, while other civil society

groups are no more conducive to open debate than workplaces. For example, Eliasoph gives the example of

American and British government initiatives to replace public services lost in cutbacks with volunteers who

were expected to refrain from any broader political discussion of the kind that might possibly result in activism

or ‘civic power’ (Eliasoph 1998: 13). In the East European context, it might be added that socialist-era states

10 These conditions originate in the work of Habermas, who stipulates that inequalities among the social status of participants must be

subordinated to a temporary equality (‘ideal speech condition’) based on a shared adherence to the principle of ‘rational-critical

discourse’ which dictates that the force of the better argument ought to prevail.

11 Qat is a leafy stimulant chewed on social occasions in parts of the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.

17

organized numerous contexts for citizens to indulge in collective pursuits – pioneer clubs, student brigades,

veterans’ organizations and so-on – that were not generally conducive to the generation of civic power; in fact,

some social scientists argue that socialist states were, in view of their conspicuous failure to organize

economies or ensure their own continuance, surprisingly successful at forestalling any possibility for civic

power (Dvornik 2010).12 On the other hand, there are a potentially unlimited number of sites that are not

usually subsumed under the rubric of ‘civil society’ in the democratization literature where the public sphere

may be encountered: in bars, coffee shops, sports clubs, street corners, residents’ associations and so-on.

Ultimately, what designate such sites as belonging to the public sphere are the functions that they perform in

making democratic citizenship possible, a point upon which I will presently expand.

No society can be considered properly democratic unless it consists of democratic citizens who are

produced through the discursive act of articulating worlds in common. Furthermore, everyday talk can only

really be understood as the deliberation of citizens when face-to-face conversation is directed at a wider circle

of concern than the individual lives of participants and their acquaintances. It is through the reflexive

awareness of participants that other, similar conversations are taking place across the shared territory of

concern that citizens come to understand themselves as belonging to a public of deliberative strangers

(Habermas 1989 [1962]). This reflexive awareness may be exhibited quite simply, as may be illustrated with

reference to a hypothetical example. When two women in a school playground talk about a drop in family

allowance entitlements with respect to the consequences for their children, they exhibit no explicit awareness

of their interconnectedness within society.13 However, if they talk in any way that acknowledges that welfare

reforms affect a far broader community than themselves and their families, and especially if they express

12 It is perhaps curious that this idea has emerged from a study centring on the former Yugoslavia, (Srdjan Dvornik’s 2010 Actors

Without Society thesis) wherein an unusually diverse array of civic organizations, some of them political, were allowed to exist (see

Chapter 3 of this book). However, it is important to remember that even Yugoslavia was an authoritarian state that tolerated dissent

only up to a point (Cohen 2001, Jou 2009). This idea may be taken to hold more generally across the former Eastern Bloc countries,

in relation to which scholars of democracy do not consider it necessary to qualify references to ‘inherited atomization’ (Tismaneanu

2009: 360).

13 Eliasoph calls this tendency, prevalent among women in her sample, to express any claim in terms of the interests of their children

as ‘Mandatory Public Momism’. More broadly, she contends that Americans at the time she wrote learned to suppress explicitly

‘political’, public-spirited modes of conversation in public settings, effectively confining the public sphere to more intimate,

‘backstage’ settings (Eliasoph 1998).

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opinions about whether the changes are desirable or not for society (regardless of whether they refer to or take

a stance on the actions of political decision-makers), then they exhibit a reflexive awareness that they are

bound with others similarly affected over a distinct territory. As Wedeen has argued, even the act of discussing

reports in national newspapers that refer to events remote from the local context of the speaker identifies such

activity as contributing to the constitution of a public that is recognizably national in scope (Wedeen 2008).

Thus, being a ‘citizen’ and belonging to a ‘public’ are each defined by modes of thought and practice that link

subjects through shared areas of human concern that are acknowledged to affect the lives of many.

Once this condition of shared community is recognized, it becomes possible to imagine the role of

public sphere discussion in constructing civic power. This is the result of the articulation of identities and

interests through discursive speech, what Arendt calls ‘priming for action’ (Arendt 1958). At an everyday

level, civic power can be observed any time that speakers discuss matters with reference to normative

principles, or imply identities and interests in relation to matters of public concern. If one speaker in a group

argues that it is important that public officials are appointed on the basis of having appropriate experience and

qualifications and the others in the group endorse his opinion, then it becomes, for example, rather more likely

that these people will be dissuaded from voting for a party that is observed to appoint well-connected insiders

over more competent outsiders. If these kinds of views are widely and regularly expressed within the public

sphere of discussion, it may even happen that more direct forms of civic power may be observed in the form

of, say, street protests or online petitions. More often however, in a society that really merits the appellation

‘democratic’, the aggregation of such views at the everyday level will attain some degree of congruence with

the acts of political decision-makers (who in turn seek to influence public discussion through their

interventions). By this account, public sphere debate ‘performs the function of “legitimating state authority”

… transforming the voluntas of executive power into the ratio of law buttressed by public opinion’ 14

(Habermas 1989 cited in Wedeen 2008: 119). In this way, the civic power of the public sphere may be observed

in an institutional politics that is responsive to the discursive practices of citizens, just as it may be observed

in extra-institutional acts through which citizens seek to affect political change.

14 These are legal (and obviously Latin) terms, with voluntas referring to the will or power behind decision-making and ratio connoting

the reasoning behind it.

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While I am addressing these themes, it is also appropriate to note that the public sphere is very

commonly misrecognized in scholarship and its discursive content misappropriated. Public sphere discourse

may not be identified by reference to public opinion polling, which is an attempt to infer a public without

reference to the discourse through which it is called into being. Furthermore, the fact that ‘public opinion’

polling results are dependent upon the subjective question choices of the researcher is another reason why this

kind of data cannot pass for a reliable indicator of the dynamic and context-dependent contours of public

discussion (Bourdieu cited in Warner 2002: 54). Much the same arguments can be applied to studies into

‘values’, such as the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, which are based on questionnaires

devised remotely from the discursive contexts they appropriate. This is not to argue that survey results are not

indicative of anything; so long as they are interpreted in terms of the context in which they are found, they

may reveal trends in social attitudes that escape the gaze of other kinds of research. However, they cannot

stand in for analysis of public discussion which, by definition, is self-organized and discursive. It is also worth

adding at this stage that voting patterns similarly cannot be used to infer the quality and content of public

discussion. Congruent with Habermas’s own reservations 15 and contemporary thinking in anthropology,

election results do not provide a reliable source of data concerning identities because election results show

only what happens when publics are compelled to choose from a limited field of options at a specific time

(Borneman 2007). Even if one considers that the actor can sometimes reveal herself through her vote, it is

nonetheless clear that votes may also be cast without any degree of identification with political platforms or

even personalities. Even when clientelistic dynamics are not in play, political power may just as well change

hands as a result of shifts in the allegiance of economic elites or media barons in a way that may have little to

do with the discursive triumph of a new idea in the public sphere. As with all of the research problems

discussed in this section, public sphere discussion can most reliably be accessed by reference to that same

public sphere of discussion, which entails a patient empirical approach employing some combination of

ethnographic and discourse analytic methods.

15 Habermas endorses ‘deliberative democracy’, a modern form of participatory democracy, on the basis that polling ‘[produces]

something that passes for public opinion when in fact it results from a form that has none of the openendedness, reflexive framing, or

accessibility of public discourse’ (paraphrased in Warner 2002: 54).

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Publics and Counterpublics

As Chantal Mouffe argues, understandings of democratic citizenship rooted in civic participation on the one

hand and discursive content on the other are not mutually exclusive (Mouffe 1992). While the concept of the

public sphere is invoked principally by scholars stressing civic participation (Habermas 1989, Eliasoph 1998,

Wedeen 2008), the impetus towards a deeper consideration of discursive content in the public sphere literature

arises from critiques of Habermas’s conceptualization of the public sphere in the singular as a discursive arena

in which all members of society would discuss public (rather than purely private) matters (Habermas 1989).

In the most famous of these critiques, the feminist scholar Nancy Fraser argued that some groups would

inevitably be excluded from the ‘universal’ public sphere. This would occur both because inequalities in

society would inevitably permit more access to the public sphere to some than to others and also because those

controlling the discourse as a result of these same power asymmetries would tend to disqualify as ‘private’ the

consideration of many dimensions of experience related to the wellbeing of ‘members of subordinated groups

– women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians’ (Fraser 1992: 122). In response to these actual

inequalities of access, Fraser argues that discrete ‘subaltern counterpublics’ have repeatedly constituted

‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to

formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’ (Fraser 1992: 123). The means

by which such dominant publics and subaltern counterpublics could be identified is through reference to

discourse, a point that I will presently elaborate upon.

Michael Warner further develops the concepts of public and counterpublic in ways that provide very

usable definitions. Concerning the former, he states:

A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. […] it exists

only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches

delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed. (Warner 2002: 50)

Thus, it is only through reference to discourse that the existence of publics may be postulated; hence being a

member of a public is not analogous to being a member of a community or group on the basis of ascriptive

criteria. So, while discourse may be observed either through reference to cultural artifacts (‘shows’, ‘books’)

or ethnographically (‘opinions produced’), it may not be observed by reference to ‘objectivist’ criteria such as

census categories or, as I argued in the previous section, to voting patterns. With respect to counterpublics,

Warner generally agrees with Fraser’s idea that any democratic society should consist of discrete publics rather

21

than a universal one, but added the element of reflexive awareness of subordinate status to his definition of

the counterpublic:

A counterpublic maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate

status. The cultural horizon against which it marks itself is not just a general public or a wider

public, but a dominant one. (Warner 2002: 84)

This feature is not common to dominant discourses wherein speakers ‘can take their discourse pragmatics and

their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or

normalcy’ (Warner 2002: 88). As an example of this tendency, we may consider the tendency of many straight

people to refer to themselves as ‘normal’ in relation to gays, or the tendency of many nationalists in different

contexts to speak as ‘the people’. In such cases, the specificity of one’s own identity or cause is hidden or

denied in a manner that it is not available to those whose concerns are excluded from ‘mainstream’ discourse.

Warner provides the example of a proto-feminist counterpublic in eighteenth century London which existed

in relation to a discourse of subverting societal (patriarchal) expectations of female decorum (Warner 2002:

78–81). Of course, the construction of this discourse in opposition to the general or mainstream public negates

the possibility of this (counter) public’s members mistaking their own practices for ‘normalcy’. Thus it is

possible to distinguish dominant publics from counterpublics on account of the reflexive awareness of

subordinate or oppositional status on the part of the latter.

Finally, Warner cautions that it is only a small sub-set of discourses that ‘acquire agency in relation

to the state’, which is achieved when discourses ‘adapt themselves to the performatives of rational-critical

discourse’ (Warner 2002: 89). In this sense, it is probable that the proto-feminist discourse Warner describes

was preoccupied with social life in a way that had little bearing on the political lives of its members (many of

whom called themselves ‘She-Romps’). However, though I am in agreement with the idea that not all

discourses imply an aspiration to political agency, I take issue with Warner’s Habermasian assumption that

rational-critical discourse is the default register of political discourse. Rather, I would adapt this statement to

make clear that discourses acquire political salience when they adapt themselves to the performatives of

mainstream/dominant (rather than necessarily rational-critical) political discourse. As Peter Stamatov has

noted, the assumption that ‘rational-critical’ discourse represents a shared standard across the varied contours

of historically-constituted political world is a shaky one:

… human reasoning and argumentation – the ideals on which our modern idea of public sphere

is based … are never perfectly rational and universalist. (Stamatov 2000: 565)

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If this logic is followed through to its logical extreme, then it is possible to imagine that ‘human reasoning and

argumentation’ can be grounded in almost any form of discourse. For example, in states where the public

sphere has arisen in the general absence of liberal ideas –as in deeply religious societies for example – then

appeals to ‘rational-critical discourse’ could mark a daring act of subversion or even blasphemy.

Like Fraser and Warner, I interpret the existence of a plurality of discursively-constructed publics as

a necessary condition of pluralistic and inclusive debate. Chantal Mouffe has developed this argument further,

claiming that it is only possible to identify oneself in terms of political competition when ‘meaningfully

differentiated positions’ are represented (Mouffe 1999, 2000). This rejection of Habermas’s avowed aim of

consensus forms part of the theoretical basis for my analysis of elite political discourse in Chapter 3. However,

in spite of this, I nevertheless take the liberty of referring to the ‘Bulgarian public sphere’ or the ‘Serbian

public sphere’ in a manner that should be understood to refer to purely aggregative categories. The use of these

phrases serves the analytical purpose of allowing for comparisons of the relative degrees of civic participation

in public discussion, and of discursive/philosophical differentiation, between national contexts. Of course, it

emphatically does not communicate any claim of discursive uniformity within these contexts. On the other

hand, congruent with the discursive theories above, references to ‘publics’ and ‘counterpublics’ should be

understood as referring to self-organized ‘spaces of discourse’ that are identifiable with reference to shared

discourse and are usually explicitly identified with that discourse in the text (for example ‘the liberal

counterpublic’). It is through reference to discourses and the publics they imply that the national ‘public

spheres’ may be considered as ‘meaningfully plural’ to a greater or lesser degree. In addition, it is also with

reference to discourse that it is possible to identify performances of recognizably liberal forms of citizenship

as I will now describe.

Liberal Democratic Citizenship

In this section, I follow Ekiert et al. and Chantal Mouffe (1992) in arguing that liberal democracy requires the

creation of liberal citizens in much the same way that nationalist projects require the creation of national

citizens (Fox & Miller Idriss 2008: 536). While this is not an entirely new idea, it is necessary to justify this

approach both from an empirical perspective and, because implicit normative judgements lie behind all

evaluative work on democracy, an ethical one too. From the empirical perspective, the first thing to note is

that the specific institutional configurations that are prescribed by the western-led project of democracy

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promotion are themselves the institutional embodiment of liberal ideals such as individual liberty, equality,

civic tolerance and representation. When these ideals are enacted and embodied in the everyday practices of

citizens – including elites – liberal democracy is strengthened because, besides formal institutions, ‘democracy

also needs to be reflected in the ideas that people hold and value’ (Blokker 2012: 1). It is not difficult to

imagine how exalted liberal institutions like competitive elections, the rule of law or the separation of powers

could be undermined if the philosophical ideals underpinning them were misunderstood or maligned. I will

limit my list of illustrative examples to just two kinds of blatant abuse of liberal institutions observed during

the fieldwork period. Unqualified judges could be appointed by politicians on the apparent understanding that

they would owe their loyalty to their political masters, thus violating the principle of the separation of powers;16

similarly, electoral codes could be altered to oblige television stations to withhold TV access to candidates

unable to pay above a legally-mandated threshold, restricting access to political representation according to

financial means.17 As the literature on political abuse of the liberal democratic system attests (Bánkuti, Halmai

& Scheppele 2012, Ganev 2013), there is no limit to the inventiveness of political actors in seeking to actively

undermine the spirit of the liberal institutions they inhabit. Furthermore, it is intuitively correct that the

capacity of ordinary citizens to hold these elite actors to account is proportional to the degree to which they

themselves understand liberal ideas on the one hand and positively identify with them on the other. From an

empirical perspective, then, so long as one endorses the normative task of evaluating liberal democracy (which

I attempt to justify below) through reference to public sphere discussion, one cannot logically remain

‘agnostic’ with respect to the question of whether liberal ideas, understandings and identifications are evident.

Liberalism is inscribed into the institutional forms of the state which can be (and are) grossly undermined

when these same ideas are not upheld by office-holders and citizens.

Before progressing to the question of ethics, it is worth pausing to describe in somewhat greater detail

what I mean by liberal – a task seldom embraced in a broad democratization literature in which promoting

liberal democracy is the point of the exercise.18 Liberal ideas are not, according to the approach endorsed in

16 In early 2011, a spokesperson from EC Commissioner Caroline Ashton’s office warned the Serbian government for appointing

unqualified persons to the judiciary, prompting some comment from my informants (discussed in Chapter 4).

17 I refer to the issue of the changes made to the Bulgarian electoral codes January 2011 in chapters 2 and 5.

18 Besides the formal approaches to democracy measurement addressed in this section, this contention could equally be levelled at the

more epistemologically open ‘quality of democracy’ literature, in which authors routinely refer only to ‘democracy’ but attribute

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these pages, a kind of universal standard as Habermas (1989) and some others hold, but a specific set of ideas,

the development of which can be dated to the past two and a half centuries in Western Europe and North

America. Since at least the French Revolution, ‘liberal’ thought has advanced a dual concern with both

freedom and equality, concepts that were understood to be in tension with one another from the very beginning.

Thus political liberalism necessarily connotes some attempt to reconcile this tension (Rawls 1971,19 Mouffe

1992). According to John Stuart Mill’s influential mid-nineteenth century polemic, the freedom of the

individual should be limited only in those cases where harm to others could result. By way of clarification,

Mill is quite clear that the imposition of one’s own values on those who do not share the same convictions

(‘the Tyranny of the Majority’) is against the principles of the liberal creed (Mill 1859). This idea finds its

material realization in many anti-majoritarian features of the accepted template for institutional design in

democratizing countries, from diplomatic pressure to sign up to Minority Rights conventions, the promotion

of proportional representation systems (Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998) and the more recent push for the adoption

of ombudsman institutions (Monogioudis 2013).

With respect to contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, the dominance of socially conservative and

nationalist discourses in most political contexts will usually mean that liberal identifications will be

recognizable as a distinct ‘civic’ alternative. In a recent edited volume on Serbian political culture, Sabrina

Ramet uses the terms ‘civic’ and ‘liberal’ interchangeably, probably going just a little too far in presenting

nationalist and liberal ‘values’ as diametric opposites:

Civic values are understood to be values supportive of ethnic tolerance, interconfessional

harmony, human equality, tolerance of sexual minorities, and the rule of law. Those subscribing

to civic values emphasize common citizenship as the basis for the community – in this case, all

Serbians, regardless of whether they are ethnically Serb or Hungarian or Albanian or Turk.

decidedly liberal characteristics to it (Blokker 2009: 6). For example, Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino present the key domains

of investigation that collectively constitute the study of democratic quality in decidedly ‘liberal’ terms: ‘The rule of law’,

‘participation’, ‘competition’, ‘vertical plus horizontal accountability’, ‘respect for civil and political freedoms’, ‘the progressive

implementation of greater political (and underlying it, social and economic) equality’ and ‘responsiveness’ (Diamond & Morlino 2004:

23). Thus, the promotion of ‘democracy’ as liberal democracy, whether in the narrow sense of material institutions or in the broader

sociological sense of the checklist above, is very much the rule rather than the exception in the literature.

19 I have in mind Rawls’s second principle of justice, which stipulates that inequalities may only be justified to the extent that they

benefit the most disadvantaged members of society (Rawls 1971).

25

Uncivic values are understood to be values corrosive of these civic (liberal) principles. Those

subscribing to nationalist (uncivic) values look to common ethnicity as the basis for the

community – in this case all Serbs, regardless of whether they live in Serbia or in Bosnia-

Herzegovina or Croatia or elsewhere. (Ramet 2011: 3)

To clarify, I do not follow Ramet in perceiving all expressions of nationalism as necessarily uncivic/illiberal,

because I accept the argument that some underlying form of solidarity is necessary for democratic competition

itself (Calhoun 2002). As I argue in Chapter 3, nationalism can, when discursively articulated in rather

atypically inclusive forms, fulfil this constructive purpose. However, I claim Ramet is right to highlight the

tension between these distinct, regionally-salient discursive constructions. For the sake of providing an

empirical rule of thumb, it is sufficient to state that, in order for a discourse to be regarded as liberal, then

liberal principles – tolerance, equality of difference and so-on – must take precedence where a clash with

nationalist or socially conservative principles is observed.20

It is necessary to note that, rather curiously from my perspective, the term ‘liberal’ is frequently also

used to refer to a specific set of economic policy orientations that are also associated with the terms ‘economic

liberalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. Though these ideas are only very tenuously linked to the philosophical

rationale underpinning the familiar set of liberal democratic institutions prescribed in democratization efforts,

the dominance of these economic doctrines in the foreign policies of most of the contemporary capitalist

societies that are also involved in promoting liberal democracy leads many to view the projects of economic

liberalization and democratization as two sides of the same coin (Krastev 2007, Tismaneanu 2009, see

discussion in Chapter 5 of this book). However, as Philippe Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl argued more than

two decades ago, in the context of evaluations of democratization, the conflation of these ideas is unhelpful.

While preferences for such neoliberal policies as low corporation tax and minimal state regulation may be

represented as compatible with democracy, it is not justifiable to understand such policy orientations as

necessary criteria of liberal democracy. I would add that the same principle applies to the currently fashionable

mantra of ‘fiscal discipline’. From this, it logically follows that strong political advocacy of social welfare

need not necessarily be understood as some kind of ‘populism’ that is antithetical to democracy: indeed,

20 For some points of empirical reference, the delicate formulation of ‘nationalism and patriotism’ of the late Serbian PM Djindjić (see

Chapter 3) qualifies in the sense that he clearly took pains to avoid contradicting liberal principles. However, claims to be ‘tolerant’

on the basis that ‘we’ put up with ‘the Gypsies’ (see Chapter 2) do not qualify.

26

vigorous political conflict over the role of the state in the economy has been a recurring feature of many well-

functioning democracies (Schmitter & Karl 1991: 86). From the perspective of the citizen-centred approach

to democracy advocated in these pages, Mouffe’s argument that competing interpretations of liberty and

equality will lead to different interpretations of liberal democratic citizenship (Mouffe 1992: 75) justifies an

open-minded approach to competing economic outlooks. It is thus reasonable to apply a methodological

‘agnosticism’ with respect to the question of economic policy preferences.

Finally, due to the fact that my valorization of distinctly liberal forms of citizenship distinguishes my

approach as a normatively-committed one, it is reasonable to justify it in ethico-normative terms. To this effect,

it is worth considering the fact that several critical scholars, some of them ethnographers and discourse analysts

who share much of my theoretical vocabulary, take the position that applying a prescriptive liberal framework

to democracy promotion fails to allow room for more local, culturally-rooted forms of democratic practice to

develop (Blokker 2009, Greenberg 2010). Paul Blokker argues that the prescriptive approach to

democratization is against the very principles that underpinned the historical impetus for liberal democracy in

Western contexts, where it was seen as an open-ended, creative and emancipatory response to the closed

discourses of power of the old regimes that preceded it. In particular, he is concerned that when democracy is

promoted together with a liberal political culture, it may affect a ‘closure of meaning’ that defeats the original

historical purpose of liberalism:

[T]he reduction of the democratic imagination to a predefined liberal understanding ignores the

very nature of democracy as a continuous process of political meaning-giving. As Claude

Lefort has argued, democracy has emerged as an emancipatory project against both the regimes

of absolute monarchy and totalitarianism, and in this has substituted openness for closure.

Democracy embodies exactly the attempt to avoid the closure of meaning that was the result of

the legitimation of political power by extra-societal markers (as was arguably the case in pre-

modern and early modern societies in the form of references to nature or God, or in totalitarian

societies by reference to historical materialism) … Not much creation and imagination seem to

be going on if democratization is merely about the appropriation and reproduction of a liberal

political culture. This is obviously even more so if such a political culture is to be transposed

from ‘advanced’ democratic societies to democratizing ones. (Blokker 2009: 3)

By this account then, liberal ideas were not emancipatory in and of themselves, but because they were

perceived as a useful means of preventing rulers from legitimizing their acts with reference to ‘extra-societal

markers’ like God and global workers’ revolution. When liberal ideas are imposed in a prescriptive and

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specific form, on the say-so of more powerful foreign powers, they evidently affect the kind of ‘closure of

meaning’ that they were once articulated against.

It is, however, possible to question the assumptions upon which Blokker bases his argument. Most

importantly, Blokker’s account rests on the idea that the power asymmetry in the Post-Socialist societies that

he focuses on is biased in favour of ‘advanced’ democratic countries responsible for transposing their ‘liberal

political culture’ to the new context. When the political arena is viewed in terms of discrete national

representatives sitting around tables in international fora, this is indeed the case. Certainly, EU conditionality

has been predicated on the adoption of characteristically Western liberal institutional forms and the fact that

this has been effected across the region speaks for the power of democracy promotion in the narrow,

institutional sense. However, as Blokker himself argues, democracy is not just about institutions but must also

be ‘reflected in the ideas that people hold and value’ (Blokker 2009, p. 1). Evaluated in these broader terms,

it is far from clear that liberal political cultures have even become dominant in many countries of the region,

let alone hegemonic to the extent that they bring about the ‘closure of meaning’ that concerns Blokker. Indeed,

as many scholars working on the countries of CEE agree, it is the relative absence of liberalism, not its

ubiquity, that threatens to define political discourse. In this vein, we may consider the consistent promotion of

national chauvinism by Bulgarian parties of right and left (Rechel 200721) or the following appraisal of Serbia’s

democratic future supplied by Ramet:

As Timothy Edmunds has noted, “(in) Serbia since 2000, electoral politics has become solidly

established. Liberalism has not. Reformist elements have had to work within – and often

struggle against – a political space shaped by the illiberal practices of the past”. Whether Serbia

can succeed in building a truly liberal democracy will depend on how successful it is in

fostering civic values, and that, in turn, will depend on the future behaviour of the press, the

future contents of school textbooks, and the future pronouncements of clergy, politicians, and

other persons with influence – or, in a word, on the firm and stable commitment of the ruling

establishment to building a civic culture and promoting the rule of law in Serbia. (Ramet 2011:

406)

Far from having presided over a complete linear progression from one master narrative to the next, liberals in

Belgrade and Sofia have to make their case in the context of a political climate in which appeals made in the

21 See also Albena Hranova, ‘Rodno: Dyasno I Lyavo’, Liberalen Pregled, 21 November 2008. Available at

https://librev.com/index.php/component/content/article/413. Accessed 20 August 2013.

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names of dead fourteenth century princes and nineteenth century revolutionaries cannot be contradicted

without risk. If one privileges the power asymmetry at the domestic rather than the international level then it

is reasonable to argue that it is not liberal democracy but the hegemony of illiberal and especially nationalist

discourses that threaten to bring about the ‘closure of meaning’.

Indeed, the fact that liberalism has been adopted as the politics of choice by very disparate groups of

intellectuals in many CEE countries appears to mark it out as a discourse of dissent rather than coercive power.

In Serbia for example, liberal discourse is routinely employed by committed social democrats, anti-

nationalists, minority advocates, LGBT activists and even some radical feminists.22 The rationale for this

convergence probably has less to do with the idea that all of them have been similarly converted to Millean

(still less Fukuyamian) visions of the good life, but that they share the perception that liberalism holds out the

possibility of avoiding the monopolization of public discourse on the part of entrenched political and economic

elites who have generally adopted some combination of national, religious and social conservatism as their

politics of choice. Newspaper editorial policies are a good indicator of power relations between liberal and

illiberal voices, with the latter usually enjoying a considerable advantage in most national contexts, in the

Balkans at least.23 From the perspective of the ordinary citizen striving to make sense of politics, liberalism

emphatically does not represent the only show in town. From the perspective of local journalists, activists and

even those rare cases of politicians who seek to disrupt dominant, exclusivist aspects of the social order

through the invocation of liberal principles, the threat of extra-democratic harassment is intermittently present

in a way that does not apply to the opponents of liberalism.24 Thus, my normative position is based on a

22 I undertake a survey of the landscape of discursive political articulations in the countries of the study in Chapter 3.

23 On Serbia, see Kisić & Stanojlović 2011; for Bulgaria, see Štětka 2011. The respective media spheres are briefly characterized in

chapters 4 and 5.

24 It is impossible to ignore the fact that many of those close to Milošević during the assassination campaigns shortly preceding the fall

of the regime in 2000 were either in or close to political power during the fieldwork period in 2011. For example, Milošević‘s former

spokesman, Ivica Dačić was Interior Minister in 2011 and became Prime Minister in 2012. Rather less well known is that many key

figures occupying the Bulgarian political mainstream at the same time are known to have collaborated with the communist-era secret

police (Darzhavna Sigurnost) and have subsequently been responsible for provoking nationalist intolerance in Bulgaria – such as

outgoing President Georgi Parvanov and politician and historian Bozhidar Dimitrov who left the Socialists to join the right-wing GERB

party which formed the government in 2009. At a more everyday level, threats against journalists and activists were common in both

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political judgement that liberalism will never conclusively make the political weather in the contingent

political terrain of CEE, but that it will continue to form a useful means of dissent for those scattered citizens

who envisage a more open and egalitarian future. From this perspective, the case for perceiving the promotion

of a liberal political culture as a threat to the open-endedness of the democratic adventure is not a strong one.

Summary: Applying Public Sphere Analysis to Democratizing States

Formal measures of democratization such as that provided by Freedom House represent a shared standard for

many scholars who are committed to the task of promoting liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.

The fact that Freedom House offers a global database that is carefully updated every year undoubtedly provides

a useful point of reference for those scholars and policy-makers who seek to hold political elites to account

according to the standard of ‘democracy’. However, it has not gone unnoticed that Freedom House fails to

adequately measure much of what counts with respect to the question of whether or not life in the societies

concerned is experienced as democratic. As in the article featured in this chapter, the tension between the data

supplied by Freedom House and scholars’ own observations of non-institutional features of political life can

force a strange kind of double-speak in those who aim to promote democracy. Freedom House’s data can

demand that the analyst must laud the success of the enterprise of democratization while experiential evidence

suggests that something very important, sometimes referred to as ‘a democratic culture’, is missing. As I have

shown through the theoretical discussion above, analysis of the public sphere provides ample grounds for

distinguishing dormant, exclusivist, uncontested public spheres from vibrant, inclusive, contested ones.

The vast majority of scholarship on the public sphere is not directed towards democratizing societies

but long-standing democracies. This literature arose from Habermas’s considerations of the historical

development of liberal democracy in eighteenth century England (Habermas 1989), and some subsequent texts

have applied his basic insights to North American (Eliasoph 1998) and Western European settings (Fraser

1992, Warner 2002). However, it is precisely the fact that this literature does not equate democracy in these

‘advanced democratic societies’ with the material institutions through which those principles are realized that

make it indispensable for understanding non-institutional challenges of democratization in newly

cities of the fieldwork study. In Plovdiv, for example, an activist of my acquaintance had to endure being denounced in libellous terms

on national radio stations.

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democratizing societies. As most of the authors I have cited in this section recognize, democracy is itself

dependent upon the existence of public spheres through which individuals can come together and discuss

matters of public concern, constituting themselves as democratic citizens in the process. Moreover, it is simply

not reasonable to expect that citizens will be inclined to uphold liberal democratic institutions unless they

identify with the principles underpinning these same institutional forms. The analysis of public sphere

discourse can serve the purpose of differentiating liberal from illiberal discourses in a way that is simply

beyond the remit of formal measurement. As I hope to demonstrate in this project, the question of whether

citizens are being constituted in a way that encourages identification with exclusivist categories or with

principles such as liberty and equality is certainly within the reach of public sphere analysis.