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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).
18
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.
19
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).
20
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)
22
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
23
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
24
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
29
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.
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