This episode explores grassroots utopian practices and the Democratic Odyssey project, which recently convened in Athens. Building upon the notion of “demoicracy” in the European Union - the ideal of a union of people that govern together, but not as one – the conversation investigates collective access to political decision-making as a complementary mechanism of deliberative democracy.
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Glossary
Democratic Odyssey
(02:19 or p.1 in the transcript)
The Democratic Odyssey is a decentralized, collaborative, and transparent exercise of crowdsourcing and co-creation kicked-off by a core consortium composed of The European University Institute’s School of Transnational Governance, Particip-Action, European Alternatives, Citizens Take Over Europe, The Democracy and Culture Foundation, Democracy Next, Mehr Demokratie, Eliamep, The Real Deal, Phoenix, The European Capital of Democracy, as well as the Berggruen and Salvia Foundations. This community is open to all who want to be involved. Threatened from within and outside by the rise of partisan hyper-polarization, authoritarian buy-in, disinformation and electoral interference, European democracy is under attack on all sides. As Europe needs to address citizens’ sense of disenfranchisement, pathways to renewal are necessary. For the Democratic Odyssey consortium, part of the solution lies in creating a standing European People’s Assembly that will become a core part of the institutional landscape of the European Union, made of citizens selected by lot, serving on a rotating basis. This project comes at an opportune moment. In the past five years, in Europe, there have been ten national assemblies and around 70 local assemblies on the topic of climate change alone. The EU itself took a huge leap with the Conference on the Future of Europe which integrated transnational, multi-lingual, sortition-based deliberation into the policy making process. The Conference planted a seed which the Democratic Odyssey wants to make flourish. As James Mackay, the project’s coordinator, declared in a recent interview with European Alternatives: “we are not aiming at making a ‘perfect’ assembly (whatever that would even mean). Our hope is more modest: to offer a “proof of concept” that, in the window between the EP elections but before the new Commissions convenes, can bring grassroots and institutional actors together to consider how citizens’ participation can be institutionalized in the longer term.” source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna, Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute, Geneva.
In today's episode, I continue my conversation with Kalypso Nicolaidis from a fortnight ago. Kalypso is a professorial Chair in Global Affairs at the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Florence. She also chairs the EUI's Democracy Forum and the School's Transnational Democracy Initiative. Her main areas of research are European integration, transnational legal empathy and social solidarity, global governance and international trade, as well as the impact of new technologies on international relations. She's a prolific writer, and has published several important books, "A Citizen's Guide to the Rule of Law," in 2021, "Exodus, Reckoning, Sacrifice: Three Meanings of Brexit," in 2019, "The Greco-German Affair in the Euro Crisis," in 2018. But the book that I will talk with her today about is the "Echoes of Empire: The Present of Europe's Colonial Pasts," which she published in 2015.
In my earlier conversation with Kalypso, we explored her fascinating notion of “demoicracy” in the European Union, democracy in the plural, the idea of a union of people that govern together, but not as one. We spoke about the need to pluralize democracy in view of the legitimacy deficit and the crisis of representative democracy governance in Europe. I ask her today to reflect on her experience of last week, with emergent models of transnational grassroots participation in the political process in Europe, last week's experience of starting the Democratic Odyssey in Athens. It's a radically reformist transformation of politics that she wants to put in practice, together with activists and academics across Europe, and she's experimenting with these new forms there herself.We'll also talk about post-colonial critiques of European exceptionalism, and the historically situated foundations of many ideals that are considered universal. I'll also ask her what Europe can learn about democracy from the rest of the world, and could this learning generate patterns of truly democratic geopolitical engagement in the future?
Welcome to the podcast, Kalypso. Thank you so much for joining me from Florence today. It's a great pleasure to have you back.
Kalypso Nicolaidis (KN): Shalini, it’s a great pleasure to have this conversation with you.
SR: Kalypso, let me start with the Democratic Odyssey, which I just mentioned. You've started with this very bold, innovative experiment in Athens last week, and I'd love to hear about the first phase of this exciting journey. The background is, as we discussed, the crisis of legitimacy in Europe, the crisis of representative systems; the realization that representative democracy alone can hardly respond to the increasing gap between governments and the governed. So, what is this experiment, and how did it begin last week?
KN: Well, Shalini, this is indeed a journey, an adventure. It's called Democratic Odyssey, because it is a collective endeavor to not only think about and analyze what we all call the crisis of democracy, the pathologies of democracy, the challenges to democratic practices around the world, a diagnosis we are all familiar with. So, it is a challenge to respond to thisin practice, not just as intellectuals and academics, but to actually do it. Because part of the diagnosis, as you just alluded to, is that electoral democracy is here to stay. And we still need to make sure that everyone is enfranchised, because we see a lot of attempts to capture this process. Electoral democracy remains very important, but it has its blind spots and its pathologies. It does create binary choices. It bans nuance and ambivalence, and increasingly our own democratic countries, so-called democratic countries, are losing their democratic resilience in the face of electoral interference, mass surveillance, disinformation, etc.
But add to this, very important to me, as, in part, a political economist, is that we have this huge rise in social economic precarity, the sense that people have of environmental and geopolitical vulnerabilities. We're at war. And at the same time, the social protections of our countries have weakened. So, if you put all of this together, this has fueled, indeed, a kind of anger and distrust in traditional institutions. All the polls show it. All the academic studies show it, this kind of radical decrease of trust that leads to political disenfranchisement, apathy, and the rise of a new kind of reactionary democracy and electoral authoritarianism that people really are sensitive to in Europe, and around the world. Basically, the question is, well, how can we climb out of this hole? And of course, politicians, civil servants, the state, the Weberian state, needs to do better, on one hand.
So, the state and the public need to be visibly serving people's interest. And at the same time, people need to feel that they are not out of the picture that they write themselves. We talked about this last time, that it's not just the epistocracy that is in charge. Now,how do you do this transnationally is even harder. So, there are many different ways and many different actors who are doing democratic innovation. With my crew of the Democratic Odyssey, we're doing it by not only promoting a permanent transnational citizen assembly throughout Europe, but actually making it happen. And last week, we were in Athens, starting a journey that will last a year, because in a year's time, we will hold an assembly of something like 500 citizens randomly selected in Athens. Last week, we created the first mini assembly. We actually made history, Shalini, by having the first assembly in 2,345 years at the Pnyx, where, as we know, the Ecclesia, the assembly of Athenian citizens, assembled more or less once a week, themselves serviced and supported by the boule, a citizen council, which was randomly selected.
And so, what we did was try to enact, as an act of constitutions of ourselves as an odyssey, to enact and reenact in the 21st century, on a much smaller scale, what was happening then. We spoke together at the Pnyx. We created an assembly. We debated what a future assembly could be, the topics it could take on, and I would add that we did so with a kind of sense of distance and irony vis-a-vis the ancients who at this very spot met with only men, no foreigners, and obviously no slaves. So, our calling is that of radical inclusiveness, and we try to demonstrate it in the way we launched the project.
And if I can add about last week, which was a very beautiful time, with so many citizens and people around, also, we had a lot of non-Athenians and foreigners in this conversation. We also had, a couple days later, a philosophical conversation at the Stoa. And you know the Stoa, as a philosopher, Shalini. For our auditors who may not know, this is where the Agora, which has been rebuilt as it was, with the columns of the Stoa building, where the philosophy and questions of the day were debated. Zeno created the Stoic school, which later became known as the Stoics because of the Stoa. And there we asked together about the relationship between our innovative politics, our politics of deliberation and participation, and emotions. Emotions of disenfranchisement, emotions of fears and trauma, emotions of happiness when you're together, and sense of togetherness, inspiration, and how all of these emotions get channeled where? How can they be channeled constructively, in these new attempts to reinvent politics? There's much more to say about last week, Shalini, but this is just a taster, and much more can be found on our website of the Democratic Odyssey[i].
SR: We'll definitely let our auditors know about the website, give the link, so they can follow it up. But Kalypso, if I were to play devil's advocate on this, there are so many critics of these bottom-up alternatives to representative democracy, let me ask you, what would you say to the objection that simple stochastic methods of representative selection, such as sortition, or rotation, which are determined by an algorithm, would not be a sufficient corrective to the traditional electoral representation? And can we really presume a virtuous civic habitus and a self-reflective commitment to the basic norms and values of democracy in ordinary citizens who are randomly selected? We are seeing so many of them voting for parties, which are attacking the rule of law, attacking human rights. So, can we really operate on a simple model of algorithmic selection and presume that we will get rational, critical, informed, self-reflexive individuals who will join these assemblies?
KN: Well, Shalini, of course, and as always, you put your finger on the great challenge. And frankly, the most important thing about this odyssey is we don't have the answers to these questions. Indeed, we have created the odyssey to have that conversation, to question our assumptions. So, this is the first point.
The second point is that this democratic odyssey indeed is grassroot, bottom-up, but also working very closely with institutional actors, in the EU Commission, Parliament, Council, governments, representatives, MPs, because we want to hear them, and we want their say. And I do know that there are many MPs around Europe who may not always dare say it, but who actually ask this question too: "Why should these randomly selected citizens be better than me? I've knocked on 20,000 doors. I know the ordinary citizen better than the algorithm."
And there are a number of responses to that. To have democracy in the 21st century, let 100 democratic channels bloom, or flow, if we continue with the river metaphor. So, there are many modes of representation, and random selection is a mode of representation. It's just another mode. So that's why I never say representative democracy versus deliberative democracy, because the citizens who are selected, they don't individually represent an electorate, but collectively, they descriptively tend to reflect society better. First of all, they have the look and feel. They dress and speak like normal people. But also statistically, because it's not just random selection, but it's stratified. So, you randomly select a very big pool of people, in our case throughout Europe, but then you have equal representation, men and women, non-binary, age and social-economic profile. So, first of all, it creates assemblies where societies can reflect themselves. Now you are asking about what's in their mind and their behavior. Now, they are ordinary citizens, they are like everyone else, every type and way of thinking and ideologies, and that's the whole idea. And you wouldn't eliminate someone because he's not on your political side.
Secondly, however, they have something we value hugely in democratic theory, and I know you do too, which is the fact that they are not so vulnerable to corruption and to seeking extractive advantages from society, because they're in and out. They're rotating. They don't have time to be corrupt. They don't have time to try to seek personal advantage from their position, even though some may be tempted to enter politics. And this is very important, because if we think that the biggest pathology of democracy nowadays is state capture by special interest, look at the discussion that just happened on pesticide in the European context. we see it all the time. So, these assemblies are less vulnerable, and the individual members are less vulnerable to state capture.
Combining equal access with epistemic diversity, and the virtue of deliberation itself means that as we've studied in a lot of social science studies, citizens who come into this process very quickly take on a much more attentive and listening mode than when they're simply in the arena of politics, where the call for your tribal belonging is very strong, where politicians play this game, and when you want to recognize your friends who are in the same tribe. Suddenly, you're in assembly with people you would never talk with, and you are put in a listening mode. Yes, there are experts, and they play their role, and there are the other citizens. And there is a conversation itself.
And what we find is that from the first time to the last time they meet, they tend to converge towards much more consensual compromise-type discussion. Doesn't mean there is no agonistic. Doesn't mean suddenly in a few weekends everybody acquires this kind of virtuous social habitus that you call for. But my belief is that most citizens are pretty virtuous on average. And even Machiavelli believed that. Machiavelli was not Machiavellian in the sense. He believed in the people. That's why he wanted a people militia. He believed that when they're captured by the princes, they become different. But on average, people wanted their kids to be happy, they want their societies to be peaceful, and what we need to find out is how do we create civic spaces? We talk about the European public sphere, but what we're doing here, the assembly is just one exemplar of a much bigger agenda of creating these civic public spaces of conversation, that themselves prepare the ground for much more mature decisions, including in and by the state. So, we are not talking about a separate realm from the Weberian state. We are talking about a much greater and better working-together alliance, kind of a Gramscian, counter-hegemonic alliance between all “tout le genre de bonne volonte” in the state, in politics, among citizens, even among corporations, those who want to change the way they operate.
I say "even" because it's pretty rare. But, so, I'm not in the intellectual business of simply saying civil society and everything, the be-all and end-all is grassroot. Although, final point, I'm a Castoriadis type, not just because I'm French and Greek, but I do believe in the self-institutionalization of society. And I think that in the 21st century, when we have such complex problems to deal with together, you can't just be an anarchist, and think, "Oh, society will do its thing." No. Society needs to work with the state, in an eco-socialist kind of way, to resolve the big problems of our time. And the state needs the citizens, because the citizens come up with solutions that are too hard to take by politicians. They are more able, actually, to look for the long term, and that's fascinating, because we people always say citizens are short-termist, but that's not true. So, I threw a lot of reasons at you, Shalini. I know that you also think a lot about these things, but we all need to think much more and more deeply about this alliance.
SR: I think this is a really exciting experiment, because we need to think of how to counter right-wing authoritarian agendas and tendencies at work in Europe, but also everywhere else in the world. And one of the things that these rulers have really succeeded in doing, these soft authoritarian rulers, as I call them, is to channel all manner of ideological manipulation to create an effective illusion of pseudo-participation, defined as the antithesis of elite corruption and power-grabbing. Any way to mobilize ordinary citizens to come together, in different kinds of publics, in different spaces across Europe, to discuss the kinds of issues that urgently need addressing, I think is a very bold and timely attempt. And I think the two things which you've just underlined are important. One, it's a permanent institution, but the individuals who are coming into the citizens' assemblies will change all the time. So, only the institution itself has permanence, not the elected or selected individuals.
And secondly, we do know also that our elected representatives are rather unrepresentative of the income and educational backgrounds in our societies, right? Most of them earn a lot more than ordinary citizens do, and most of them have university degrees, unlike ordinary citizens. So that I think there is a very good reason to broaden the base for discussions, as you have very rightly pointed out here. But let me ask you about another problem, which the complementarity of citizens' assemblies alone will not be able to address, and that is the creeping authoritarianism within the European Union with member states such as Hungary, who are really flouting the rule of law quite flagrantly. Comprehensive monitoring tied to conditionalities by the EU has been actually too slow, too late. The rule-of-law mechanism to which Hungary has now been subjected, its EU funds access has been blocked. But interestingly, Orbán has cunningly taken advantage of this turn, and he's turning the Hungarian population against the so-called "Brussels elites," whom he portrays as out of touch with ordinary people, whose voice he represents. So, the question that I still worry about is, with all of these populist leaders, be it Trump or be it Orbán, saying they are the ones who really represent the real people, how are we going to be able, in citizens' assemblies, to deal with this right-wing authoritarian push, which is undermining all democratic norms and institutions across the world?
KN: This is a great challenge, and not only in Hungary and Poland. But first of all, I think we need to acknowledge and trust the vivid force of the people themselves in these countries. As you saw this weekend, we had one million Poles walking in the street to support democracy in Poland, and demonstrating against the party in power, worried that it would win. So, I mean, in some ways, you have kind of half a country against the other half. And so, when we think about external intervention, we need to think in terms of empowerment, and in terms of democratic respect of what happens within. This idea of democratic respect, something very close to my heart, when European leaders say, "We know what to do, but we won't get reelected for it." It's not true. I mean, we need to respect the people. And the best advocate for democracy, the EU rule of law, in Hungary and Poland are the Hungarians and the Poles themselves, which means that we need to think about how to work more closely with the cities and regions that belong to the opposition, which means that we need to help civil society actors who are working so hard in these countries to counter disinformation and propaganda.
Butit also means, of course, that there is a role to be played by the EU institutions, as we've seen in Rule of Law Conditionality. It came too little too late, frankly, if you ask me. But it helps, because you don't want to fund somebody who's going to use your fund for propaganda against you. And you know this very well, Shalini, with the CEU. It's been a terrible thing. And we know, as you just said, how clever someone like Orbán has been in pretending, in his campaign, that if people get a discount on their energy bill, he personally gave it to them. How clever is that? They use these strategies, and we democrats do not have a counter to that, because we do believe in something called truth. We need to find a better narrative, a better story for the Hungarian people, that this is not some sort of machine in Brussels that is pushing the button against Hungarian, that it is all of taxpayers’ money, yours and mine, and everybody else around Europe, poor farmer in Portugal, or teacher in Latvia, all of them, with their taxes, are contributing to money going to Hungary.
So, all of us, as citizens of Europe, have a say, it's not big brother on top, in what we do in each other's polities. This is what I call political mutual recognition. We need to be interested in each other's polity, and indeed in where our money goes. And the Hungarians want to understand that it is a community of citizens and states, that together, around the table, decide, "Well, you're beyond the pale. What's happening in your country does not cohere with what our union is about." I think we need to tell this story differently than some opaque bureaucracy in Brussels. And then, last point is that I very much hope we can hold many more citizen assemblies at the very local and regional level, all around Europe, but including in countries like Hungary, where it will be this bottom-up empowerment, that, to me, will be a big part of the promise of change.
SR: Kalypso, let me turn to another aspect of your work, which has I think been very influential and very important, and that is your writings on the repressed collective memory of colonial and imperial history in the European Union. It persists in the partly unconscious generalization of provincial historical experiences as universal rules and norms to be diffused worldwide, in a classic modernization scenario, where Europe is teaching the rest of the world something that they should learn from Europe. And you very rightly pointed out that the European Union, and I quote you, "has worked hard to make the world believe in the story of its virgin birth, but it cannot escape the echoes of its colonialism and pretend that it is possible to simply engage in Messianic universalism." And yet it's precisely this kind of civilizing and civilizational mission that has largely informed even the enlargement of the EU itself after the end of the Cold War, with Eastern Europeans, many of whom have lived under various empires, right, Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, Soviet, having to go through the accession process of what many of them feel intra-European Union colonization. The question I have for you here is, how can a critique of universal norms and values grounded in a Eurocentric historical experience be better articulated, without unwittingly providing discursive ammunition to authoritarian enemies of liberal democracy, all of whom are now questioning the universalism, and have arrogated to themselves the tropes of anti-colonialism?
KN: Shalini, I know you also struggle with that exact dilemma. So many of us do, right? It is so difficult to hold the two ends of this story, as you summarized, absolutely. The fact that this EU indeed originally was about, in the '50s, a Eurafrica. We are going to pool our sovereignty in order to pool our colonies, in order to manage together this big African continent full of resources we still haven't finished exploiting. But this time, instead of doing it and competing with each other, we had World War II, let's now exploit our colonies together. There was a lot of that, right, in the '50s. But the EU was created at the very same time as decolonization. In fact, you can never find a map of the EU with, say, Algeria in it, although it was part of France. And so you had, in a very few years, a radical forgetting. This is indeed, as you quoted, what I call "the EU's virgin birth." Suddenly we have an EU, and EU has nothing to do with its member states or its member states' colonial past. It's this new enterprise. So, that's a virgin birth.
Now, of course, these states, and EU itself, went through a process, or what I call process, in addition to denial and forgetting, of atonement. So, we tried to do atonement. We will do development. We will do partnership. But it was the same people who were working in Brussels who had been governors and managers of the colony, and the colonial trope stayed alive and well. Now, of course, we're in a different generation, but there's so many very concrete expressions of this colonial trope. You speak with many of my friends in African countries who were dealing with the EU, and of course they recognize the good intentions, etc., but they do also hear the tone, or the, "We'll tell you how to do development," or "We'll tell you which country in Africa you should cooperate with by creating new regions," etc. Again, good intentions, often, but very much reproducing this colonial legacy. And the legacy of the mind, as D'Souza said, empire of the mind. And of course, all of countries around the world that have been colonized are themselves in their post-colonial project, themselves struggle. This is not all about European legacies. Moreover, of course, as you said, there are many countries in Europe that were themselves the object of colonization, from Ireland all the way to, of course, our Eastern European friends.
So, it's a very complex mosaic and complex picture. But the EU as a whole is indeed a project that in part should be a postcolonial project. And what do I mean by this? I do mean that it should be both realizing and acknowledging this past and seeking to transcend it. And this is where your question or the tension comes in, because we want to continue, you and I and everyone else, both from Europe and from outside Europe, to make visible these colonial traces and these colonial legacies, including economically and structurally, in the structure of global capitalism. But at the same time, we do believe in the European project. You and I were just talking about the Democratic Odyssey, and making Europe more democratic, because we believe that it is a fascinating and important project that is exploring the next frontier of transnational cooperation.
And so, one way to try to, if not reconcile, but hold this tension between the critique, but also the acknowledgement of the EU, is to do several things, to ban the term "model," or the idea that somehow the rest of the world should listen to “la petite musique” of standards of civilization and civilizing mission that is still there in Europe, to ban the idea that the EU can write blueprints from countries, as if democracy could be exported. First of all, what are we exporting, given our own problems? And secondly, democracy can of course only be created, invented, and crafted by the countries and the peoples themselves. So, all of these modes of enlargement, neighborhood, etc., are still to this day highly problematic. But also, as we do so, maybe ask ourselves if Europe cannot still be thought of as a laboratory, where we try stuff. You try modes of cooperation, with many more failures than successes. We know that in any laboratory, trying to develop a new vaccine, you failed 10 times before succeeding, and even your success is very partial, and probably not reproducible. But nevertheless, it is a laboratory, a bit the irony of the fact that the colonies themselves were the laboratories of European for all sorts of things in the 19th and 20th centuries. So, we offer ourselves, Europeans, as laboratory, but for the rest of the world, not to be told, "You take it," or to "take whatever we come up with," but maybe be sometimes inspired, or use it as a toolbox. And on the condition, I would add, Shalini, that as Europeans do that, they acknowledge that they have so much to learn from the rest of the world. And this is what I call reversing the democratic gaze.
SR: Could you say something exactly about that? What is it that Europe could learn from the others? And the other question I wanted to add to that, Kalypso, is, you've recommended, and I think quite rightly, that the EU reconstruct its foreign policy, in a changing international environment, to overcome the gap between its rhetoric of promoting democracy and its very interest-driven, pragmatic alliances, bordering on cynicism, if we want say so, when it comes to its relationships with authoritarian regimes, right? Look at how the EU made a pact with Erdoğan in Turkey on keeping migrants out of the European Union. So, the question here isEU foreign policy: How should it position itself towards authoritarian regimes in its neighborhoods, both within EU but also in its neighborhood? And then the larger question: What should it learn from the others? As you've very rightly pointed out, and I quote you, you say, "The EU could do more to open itself to democratic innovations unfolding around the world where, reformers have long been grappling with anti-democratic playbooks." So, could you give some examples of what we could be learning from elsewhere in Europe?
KN: Many questions packed into one, Shalini. I mean, of course we can't, as academics, simply tell diplomats and policymakers, "Do not deal with the Saudi Arabias of this world," or all of the authoritarian regimes around the world, because those are the rules of the game of the international system in the UN. You have everything and anything. And we did see authoritarian regimes condemn the invasion of Ukraine, even if they don't really condemn Russia. We need, as a grouping, the EUto be in that world, and to deal with it. And hopefully, as the EU, in part, is obliged to take this transactional approach, including because of its dependency on energy, it should, to me, minimize the vulnerabilities and dependencies on these kinds of regimes. This is the whole thinking these days about strategic sovereignty. I think that's very important. It should hold on to some of its red lines, in terms of values and principles, to the greatest extent possible. It should acknowledge that in the Global South, countries also seek their strategic autonomy. And if you're India, I understand. I do not approve of Modi and his move recently, or for a while, but I understand that all big, and smaller countries, in the Global South, and I put this term “Global South” with lots and lots of quotes, seek strategic hedging. It's very normal. I would do the same if I was in charge. Why not do it when you have so many complex demands to navigate from your people?
But as Europe, while we need to acknowledge what the rest of the world needs to do and respect their demand for autonomy in the same way as we have ours, we need to be consistent with our own beliefs. So, for instance, well, we preach multilateralism. We say in spite of this upheaval of the global order, we need to uphold multilateralism, which is in trouble. Well, then, let's do that. Let's put our money where our mouth is, including financially, and let's ourselves in our practices as Europeans not be so unilateral, when we're so proud of Europe's regulatory power because we can impose our standard to the rest of the world. I say, "Hmm, not really." We should first try to cooperate much more with other countries in developing these standards. I know we do in lots of areas, but we need to do it much, much more, and be much more consistent in doing so. And as we cooperate in trying to strengthen the global multilateral system, indeed, Shalini, I think Europe has so much to learn from the practices of the rest of the world. just to simplify, into, three kind of ways, you know, one is the ways in which countries draw their social contracts, whether constitutional or otherwise, how they share power.
In South Africa, India, Indonesia, there's fascinating attempts at doing so, and at representation of minorities, etc. And I'm not saying it unfolds well always, that it works, but there are these insights, transformative constitutionalism and all of that, that we need to study very carefully. There's alsoall of these practices often, which go from participation in providing public goods by civil society in Lebanon, out of all places, all the way to methods of protest and resistance, and truth-telling, from Hong Kong to Thailand to Venezuela. And of course, these days in many African countries, democratic movements are alive and well.The EUI, we have a young African leader program, and they're all involved one way or anotherlocally and transnationally promoting democratic spaces and practices. But I would add the third level is, the EU is very proud of its own supranational constraints. But if you look at the Mercosur in Latin America, if you look at SADC in Africa, if you look at ASEAN in Southeast Asia, they all have clauses, which don't work that well, okay, but that also are a bit of mutual monitoring of democracy. It's not just us. They're struggling with that, including because, in their midst, they have their own Hungarys and Polands. And we should spend much more time exchanging notes, tips, between supranationals around the world on how we do this.So, I think we have a lot to learn. I've written about this, as you say, but I also hope to create a website and a project where we actually have a global conversation about what Europe can learn from the rest of the world in terms of democratic practices.
SR: So, Kalypso, let me wrap up by a last question, to ask you to follow up on this project and this insight of yours into what you call utopian practices of grassroots democratic geopolitics, or even grassroots diplomacy, as you've termed it once, whereby the people of Europe could extend a network of non-hierarchical relations, based on mutual recognition to people elsewhere. So, do you think by recognizing and cherishing this diversity within each European society, Europe could hope to become an exciting cosmopolitan experiment, rather than thinking of itself as a model for the rest of the world? You said very rightly the word "model" should be banned. What kind of an exciting cosmopolitan experiment can this become if diversity within Europe is recognized? And could we turn this into not just a laboratory, but as we were talking about it the other day, a collaboratory. So, can we collaborate with, and what kind of collaboration would this be?
KN: I love the word "exciting," Shalini, and perhaps maybe everyone listening, and you and me, could close our eyes for, like, five seconds and imagine such a world. And indeed, I think imagination, the power of imagination and social imaginaries, is at the heart of this question and of this vision and of this utopia. And imagination is actionable. How else can we imagine a world where butterflies don't die than by stirring up our imaginary potential? It's not just all analytical, as we like to be, right? So, a lot of our utopia, we just need to tell each other stories from the imagination. And this story about an exciting cosmopolitan experiment for the rest of the world starts at home. Indeed, we can't tell the rest of the world or do in the rest of the world without being ourselves that place where we try to actualize, to make possible what I like to call citizen-powered Europe, a Europe that is powered by a citizen. And because it's powered by a citizen, it acquires power in the rest of the world, the power of an experiment that becomes attractive to many. And that experiment is about people from different horizons, languages, political culture, different electoral cycles and all the rest of it, who are interested in each other, who deliberate, who oppose each other, who compare notes.
And that's what we've seen in part with the incipient panels and assemblies in Europe transnationally, where people in the South tell Scandinavia, "Oh my god. You do health this way," or "You do sustainability or food waste this way?" And the others say, "Oh, wow. You do social solidarity this way," and they learn from each other. And so, when we try to lay out a progressive agenda globally, the experiment of mutual recognition in Europe can be something that the rest of the world observes, looks at, improves on. This is where reversing the gaze is so important. And where we mingle, and we work on an entanglement, a kind of collective practice. And indeed, your colleague Istvan used this lovely word "collaboratory," a laboratory in common, or pooling our laboratories. So, we would imagine that you've got laboratories and democratic odysseys around the world, and that they connect, and that they send lots of ambassadors to each other, and indeed, that in this world of digital democracy, we connect virtually, obviously. AI can help us, and draw the best out of this connection, but also natural human intelligence, and not just the artificial kind. All of these things can be imagined. Technological enhancement is part of the solution, although I know we fear it. So, yes, Shalini. I think that these utopian practices, these “EUtopian” practices, are not just pie in the sky. They can happen. And we in Europe, as citizen-powered Europe, can be a small piece of this very global mosaic. So, this is me being completely idealistic, in a world where authoritarian supermen continue to break the social fabric everywhere. But we have to retain some hope and some utopia in this story.
SR: Thank you so much, Kalypso, for this optimistic conversation and also a very exciting one. I can only wish us both, you, of course, as somebody who's orchestrated the Democratic Odyssey, for me as a participant in it, all the very best for this journey. And I'm going to follow it with great interest, and we'll have you back next year at the time of the closing session, to discuss what was achieved together during this year. So, thanks very much for being with me today.
KN: Thank you so much, Shalini, for this wonderful conversation together. I always learn so much from listening to you too.
SR: Talk of the legitimation crises of modern electoral democracy is certainly not new. Jürgen Habermas wrote a book about it some 50 years ago, but we can only dismiss such concerns about legitimacy at our own peril today. As Kalypso pointed out, even democratic states have become intrinsically vulnerable to a host of systematic threats, which fuel anger and distrust in institutions, along with creating a general sense of powerlessness and disenfranchisement. Projects such as the Democratic Odyssey that Kalypso has recently convened in Athens could hopefully counter these negative trends through a genuine sense of active involvement of citizens and participatory praxis. This will require, however, what she has called radical inclusiveness, that is, transnational solidarity and the mutual engagement of citizens and non-citizens, locals and resident foreigners. But it's important not to see such new forms of political representation as either opposed to or antagonistic towards established institutions of electoral democracy because they are indeed complementary and not alternatives as they are being portrayed by many populist demagogues today. We should value collective access to political decision-making on a rotating basis, as we heard today, then as a complementary mechanism of deliberative democracy. It could be a corrective against the risk of state capture and of vested technocratic interests. In Kalypso's view, it is time to overcome the polarizing, dichotomous imaginary of society versus state, civil society versus the political elite class, and work towards what the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis famously called the self-institution of society. This could also generate a more successful strategy against pseudo democratic anti-elitism practiced by soft authoritarian regimes, especially when they are pursuing it today very effectively on a transnational scale. The European Union, as we heard, is a privileged site of such transnational politics, but Europeans must therefore reflect critically on the imperial lineages of their current historical privileges and balance the emancipatory promises of a common demoicratic European project with an uncompromising awareness of these colonial traces coming down all the way to the present. The turn to a post-colonial Europe would mean abandoning the idea of Europe as a model for the rest of the world and replacing it instead by the ideal of Europe as a laboratory, in fact, as a collaboratory where Europeans and non-Europeans would mutually learn, experiment with, and also develop democratic best practices in collaboration with one another.
This was the eighth episode of season seven of Democracy in Question. Thank you very much for listening and join us again for the next episode in a fortnight. But if you've missed my previous discussion with Kalypso, please go back a fortnight and listen to it as well. My next guest will be Maciej Kisielowski, my colleague at the Central European University, a Polish intellectual with whom I will discuss the results of Poland's crucial election that could prove to be a turning point in Polish as well as European politics. Please go back and listen to any other episodes you might have missed. And of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu, and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.