Creating a Textual Public Space

The Umbrella Movement (Sept-Dec 2014) represented a watershed for Hong Kong’s political culture and self-understanding. Based on over 1000 slogans and other textual and visual material documented during the movement, this study provides an overview of its claims. The slogans mobilize a diversity of cultural and historical repertoires that attest to the hybrid quality of Hong Kong identity and underscore the diversity of sources of political legitimacy. Finally, it is argued that by establishing a system of contending discourses within the occupied public spaces, the movement strived to act out a type of discursive democracy, which represents an unfinished attempt to build a new civic culture among Hong Kong’s younger generation.

Demokracja dyskursywna w myśleniu politycznym

The paper concerns one of the concepts of democracy. Each democracy assumes that the people who live together in society need certain procedures/institutions to make binding decisions that take into consideration everybody’s interests. The notion of a deliberative democracy is used to describe a system of political decisions based on the decision-making process perceived as a combination of consensus and representative democracy. Discursive democracy is a theoretical model of a political system propagated by Jurgen Habermas and Jon Elster, and also by Joshua Cohen, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. The concept was used for the first time by Joseph M. Bessette in his work Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government in 1980, and later on in The Mild Voice of Reason in 1994. Public debate is a key aspect of the discursive concept which emphasizes the manner in which all arguments are presented in open discussion. Discursive democracy assumes a larger participation of citizens in the legislative process by means of institutionalized debates organized to complement the process of informal opinion shaping. Deliberative democracy will win an increasing number of proponents. This certainly is not only a matter of will but also of realistic opportunities to participate in the process of building a deliberative democracy.

Discursive democracy and the challenge of state building in divided societies: reckoning with symbolic capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Current approaches to democratic state building place serious conceptual limits on policy options. A democratic future for Bosnia's people will require far more searching engagement with identity formation and its politicization than reform efforts have so far contemplated. Theories of discursive democracy illuminate how this might be possible. We deploy the discursive idea of symbolic capital to show how one might identify the lines along which people in Bosnia could constitute meaningful, internally legitimated political communities - or that would indicate the experiment was not worth attempting. Unless advocates of democratic state building can articulate, rather than assume, a sufficiency of common ground among the populations’ multiple, overlapping and conflicting identities, they may have to revert to the default of separate political communities.