Democracies as "imagined communities"?

If democracy is a form of popular self-rule, it presupposes answers to two individual questions: A) how do the people rule? and B) who are the people? While most of the democratization literature has focused on the kratos question, few have paid careful attention to the demos question. Even scholars who emphasis civil society over formal institutions look at ways to increase the state’s inclusiveness of different elements of civil society, whether these are class, gender, ethnic, or other pluralist groups. Whether deliberately or not, most scholars seem to have accepted a basic framework similar to Dahl’s formulation of the problem in Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (1982) — that the key challenge facing all democracies is how to manage or balance the demands of their pluralist demos. In short, the pressing concern of democratization literature — and democratic consolidation literature in particular — has been on building institutions that facilitate and deepen broader political participation, accountability, and legitimacy.

Little attention, however, has been given to the consolidation of the demos. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (1996) marked the importance of stating that democratic consolidation required the consolidation of a state (“no state, no democracy”). But an equally important question is whether the demos is consolidated — or asking whether a previously consolidated demos, like a state, can break down. Here, Benedict Anderson’s (1991) conception of nations as “imagined communities” is insightful. Anderson’s description of nations as imagined communities, where individuals develop very real bonds with abstract “community” members they will never meet, but share a common public bond simply by engaging in and participating together in the public life of their community, does not sound too far removed from the kind of public democratic engagement needed in a modern democracy.

The establishing of pluralist democracy can be dangerous. The very advances necessary to improve pluralist autonomy may, in the long term, threaten the nation-state itself, as the demos seeks to re-articulate itself. In the Bolivian case, measures to decentralize state power and legitimize ethnic and regional pluralism gave rise to demands for political autonomy movements from groups as different as Andean kataristas to lowland cambas. The issues raised in the meeting of academic discourses of “identity politics” and “political institutionalism” rarely suggest question the basic territorial integrity of the nation-state. The rare instances where such integrity is questioned — such as the former Yugoslavia — involve tacit acceptance of a reformulation of the demos. But if we accept Anderson’s premise that nations are “imagined communities”, why is it are we more willing to entertain Basque separatism than camba separatism?