Where did we get to, and where do we go from here?

This book has departed from the expression of disbelief in the verdict that the contemporary world is entering a new phase of post-democracy. It has not questioned the symptoms of the malfunctioning of our contemporary democracies but its forms of diagnosis. Democracies, the starting assumption goes, cannot predict their own failure without at the same time reconfirming their commitment to democratic principles. Democracies cannot discontinue forms and practices of democratization. Such an account focuses on democracy as a ‘state of mind’, and not simply an institutional form. Democracy shapes people's expectations about government and is a motivation for people to apply critical standards to assess governments’ performance and their legitimate use of power. As such, democracy remains intrinsically related to the modern public sphere, which sets the conditions for the validation of the claims of legitimacy raised by the holders of political power and of criticism of those who contest power. We can establish nondemocratic forms and practices of political authority, and many governments and states in the contemporary world would try to do so, but we cannot seek the legitimation of the exercise of political authority over others without recurring to democratic norms and principles. Democracy is a normative claim of validity (Geltungsanspruch) that is raised in public legitimation struggles whenever political subjects use communicative tools to support or challenge the holders of political power and confront them with the expectation that they will act in their common interest. This goes beyond the formal account of the establishment of ‘real-existing democracies’, pointing at a process of institutionalization that was triggered after the First World War in what is called the ‘first wave of democratization’ (Huntington, 1991). My argument throughout this book has been that democracies are insufficiently described in terms of their ‘real’ existence. Before democracies materialize, they exist in the political visions and ideals of the people who challenge the holders of power with claims for rights and political participation. The French and American revolutions allowed, above all, a new imagination of society and the emergence of political subjects who might still have had only a few rights as citizens but learned to raise claims of inclusion through the mass media to share their visions, and engage society in a process of self-emancipation.