Post-politics
Post-politics is a term in social sciences used to describe the effects of depoliticisation—a move away from the antagonistic political discourse, empowering unelected technocrats with decisions—in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when the representative democracies of the post–Cold War era had arguably entered depoliticisation. Generally related to and used alongside similar terms such as "post-democracy" and "the post-political", the term "post-politics" carries negative connotations of depriving the people from having a voice on issues deemed settled by the elites.
Terminology
The history of the term "post-politics" is disputed: Slavoj Žižek in 1999 attributed it to Jacques Rancière, with the latter denying ever using it. Rancière argued, however, that after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the resulting "end of history" feeling caused "an internal weakening of the very democracy that was assumed to have triumphed", and that the neoliberal state institutions increasingly started to make decisions that traditionally belonged to the legislatures.Depoliticisation
The term "depoliticisation" has been used extensively in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in many contexts, ranging from central banking to philosophy. Despite this, little analysis has been done on the precise definition, resulting in a lack of terminological precision.Depoliticisation can be broadly described as politicians offloading the decision making to technocrats or "the strategic shifting of blame and responsibility away from political actors and the removal of potentially contentious issues from the realm of public debate"
Peter Burnham observed that the politicians usually retain effective control by proxy: depoliticisation is "the process of placing at one remove the political character of decisionmaking".
The benefits of depoliticisation occur on few levels:
- society as a whole can benefit from decoupling long-term decisions from the short-term election cycle;
- governance can improve by offloading the day-to-day decisions from ministers, freeing them up to think about more strategic goals;
- individual politicians gain ability to disassociate themselves from results of the bad policies.
- institutional depoliticisation occurs when the politicians use non-elected administrators that have a wide discretion in setting up policies within the pre-set mandate. This common approach releases the appointed administrator from the short-term political pressure. An example is provided by the political reforms of British New Labour in 1997 that created many new institutions, like a Postal Services Commission for regulating the mail service.
- rule-based depoliticisation occurs when explicit rules are laid down so politicians can withstand the electoral pressure by claiming that their "hands are tied". The expectation is that the day-to-day political negotiation can be avoided, as the policy choices become "technical";
- preference-shaping depoliticisation happens when a government proclaims that some issues are simply beyond the scope of politics or state control. The options contradictory to this normative view of one side of the discourse are declared "irrational".
While the broad agreement between political parties carries some benefits, it is associated with voters being denied the political choice, thus causing public distrust in the political institutions. In the 21st century, depoliticisation has been linked to disillusionment with neoliberalism. Depoliticisation has negative consequences for government legitimacy, and anti-political sentiment through populism, can result in repoliticisation.
Post-political
There is no agreement among the researchers on the precise definition of the post-political terms either. In a broad sense, all definitions describe a political arrangement, where the political discourse, with its characteristic contestation, has been displaced by policies handled through technocratic means and legitimized participatory processes that at best select the policies from a narrow selection of the outcomes predefined by experts.Post-politics replaces disruptive citizens with consumers, expected, through elections, to make a choice of managers based on private economic necessities. The overall framework that includes representative democracy, free market economics, and cosmopolitan liberalism cannot be questioned.
"There is no alternative"
Researchers of populism generally agree that its growth in the 1990s is the result of political elites accepting certain concepts as unalterable truths. This consensus, frequently expressed as "there is no alternative" or , and the associated disappearance of the political discord created a virtual "party cartel", where the views of established parties did not differ on policies. Due to growing inequality part of the electorate found itself on the losing end of these policies, but the agency of voting became hollow, as no mainstream parties were able to challenge the consensus.History
Wilson & Swyngedouw trace the post-political era to the concept of the end of history by Francis Fukayama, who also declared the "end of politics".Generated by a cohort of prominent philosophers – namely Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek – and their concern with politics as the institution of radical, active equality, the critique of post-politics claims that the politics of consensus has created a systematic foreclosure of the properly political moment: with the institution of a series of new “post-democratic" governmental techniques, internal politics proper is reduced to social administration. Meanwhile, with the rise of the postmodernist "politics of self" comes a concomitant new "politics of conduct", in which political values are replaced by moral ones.
Roots of the post-political consensus
The global political landscape post-1989
The disintegration of the Eastern communist bloc following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 announced the end of the Cold War era, and with it the great ideological stand-off between East and West, between the communist and capitalist worlds. In the eyes of Western society, Capitalism emerged the victor, with liberal democracy as its corresponding political doctrine. With the fall of state-communism in the former Soviet Union and its proxies following the attempted 1991 coup and subsequent disintegration of the bloc, the USSR ceased to exist, and its de-facto successor, the Russian Federation, abdicated the former's role as a key political player and advocate for world communism, thus abandoning its former purportedly social democratic, Keynesian form; and neoliberalism entered a new global phase. With Francis Fukuyama's End of History as its founding statement, this was the birth of the post-political, post-ideological "Zeitgeist".Intellectual climate
Alongside Fukuyama, various other intellectual currents are associated with the consolidation of the post-political consensus. The "reflexive modernity" thesis of post-industrial sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, for example, has acted as the intellectual accompaniment to Third Way politics. In "reflexive modernity", say these authors, the central imperative of political action shifts from issues of social welfare to the management of "risk" : that is, the "environmental externalities" that are the ever more visible, unwanted by-products of techno-economic progress. For both Beck and Giddens it is this imperative, and the new "social reflexivity" that has developed in response – rather than instrumental rationality or, crucially, political struggle – that has driven the profound social changes of the post-war period. Indeed, for Giddens, it is "social reflexivity" – the enhanced autonomy of individual action called forth by the dispersal of socio-technological knowledge and risk in "post-traditional" society – that paves the way for:- Post-Fordist production ;
- The reconfiguration of society's relation to authority according to the principles of deliberation and “active trust”.
Not all commentators agree with this version of events, however, and it is the critical perspectives considered in this section from which the post-political critique derives. Nikolas Rose, for example, counters Beck and Giddens by highlighting the role of a new governmental "politics of conduct" in forging the political subjectivities that emerge with the advent of Third Way politics in Britain under New Labour. Against Giddens' "social reflexivity"-based account, Rose's study of this new "ethopolitics" suggests that it is the strictures of the new, market individualist forms of governance-beyond-the-state that has driven the recent emphasis on the autonomous, freedom-aspiring, self-sufficient individual. A key feature of "ethopolitics", says Rose, is its concern with the ethical, rather than political sensibilities of its subjects; a trend wholly consistent with the moralistic turn that politics took on under neoliberalism. Indeed, in his work on the decline of the public sector in Britain, David Marquand relates the moral ideology that – via the wider "revenge of the private" – underpinned the neoliberal reforms and sell-offs imposed on the sector by the Thatcher and Blair governments. This is a key development to which the post-political critique responds: Mouffe speaks here of “politics played out in the register of morality”; while Rancière's re-envisioning of the political is an express challenge against the de-politicisation of political philosophy that occurred with the field's Aristotlean, “ethical” turn in the late 1980s.
Similarly, while Beck points to environmentalism as a paradigm case of the progressive potential of the personalisation of politics, Erik Swyngedouw reminds us that in the guise in which it most often appears in the developed world, environmentalism's emphasis on personal lifestyle choices and on particularist struggles against the locally felt effects of environmental "bads" can work to draw attention away from the properly political issue of human society's structural relationship with nature. Likewise, Beck celebrates the new scepticism associated with post-modern, identity-based politics as a progressive consequence of the universal uncertainty that characterises risk society. By contrast, critics lament the profound consequences that the anti-essentialist position on truth has had for the imagination of "grand narratives" – for proponents of the post-political critique, it is these grand narratives that are the real substance of politics.