Martina Kessel (#3: Democratic Institutions)

(University Bielefeld)

I would like to make three points, on the assumption that it does not suffice to look at institutions alone. Rather, I understand constructions of identity as crucial to the ways of how contemporaries in the past and the present conceptualized and used democratic institutions.

First, democratic institutions since their inception in the late 18^th century were constitutively based upon inclusion and exclusion, organized along essentialized notions of identity. Thus, ‘the modern individual’ that was supposed to organize the world was defined by the modern West as White, Western, and masculine. In addition, Germans since the 1800s considered Germanness as Christian, translating religion into an essentialized dimension of being and casting ‘Jews’ (and ‘Muslims’) as inherently different from ‘Germans’. In turn, such identity projections shaped modern institutions in terms of hierarchy or exclusion, be it citizenship, suffrage, education, politics, or the market. Thus, we should not only ask how institutions impact people, but also the other way around: Namely, which constructions of identity were and are used to define which institution in what way, in order to subordinate and marginalize those defined as not belonging.

Secondly, processes of democratization in the 19^th and 20^th century made neither such essentialist notions of identity nor their impact on institutions disappear. Rather, two processes were intertwined. On the one hand, the idea of democratic equality was in the world. Excluded or marginalized groups could refer to it, and institutions like suffrage became successively more democratized. On the other hand, this was not a slow but steady process toward ever greater inclusion. Instead, those who disliked inclusions invented new practices to keep hierarchies, if less formal ones. To do so, they drew on and perpetuated naturalized projections of identity, in terms of race and gender, but also of religion or heteronormativity. The history of Jewish Germans reflected these entanglements. Whenever Jewish Germans advanced their formal rights in modern society, and certainly when the Weimar Republic stated full equality in all respects, nominally allowing access to all institutions, the majority of non-Jewish Germans insisted ever more rigidly and violently on an alleged natural difference between ‘Jews’ and ‘Germans’. They produced an identity difference that did not exist, and used it to mark who belonged and who did not, and who might or might not be protected by law.

Thirdly, these processes not only intensified during recent decades but also changed. This change it is that attacks on democracy (also) target. Since the later 20^th century, democracies like the United States or Germany reinforced efforts to democratize institutions. But also, more people than before began to question those essentialized understandings of race, gender, religion, sexuality or other dimensions that still foster hierarchies and undercut equal rights. In other words: They critiqued not only the still exclusionary character of institutions, but the discriminatory character of those identity constructions that in subtle ways continue to shape our world, despite formal democratization. For example, more people than before questioned the construction of gender as binary, allowing for self-definitions in non-binary form.

Thus, recent democracies began to highlight the historical and man-made character of identity constructions, in order to undo their exclusionary impact on institutions and social relations. In turn, non-democratic actors attack democracy per se. They shift politics away from policy-issues they would have to argue, and focus instead on identity, presenting gender, race, and other constructions as natural and not needing argument. On this basis, they delegitimize democracy as allegedly destroying the ‘natural’ foundations of the world.

To do so helps them at least in two forms to dismantle and undercut democratic institutions and procedures. First, it allows non-democrats to create a supposedly coherent way of making sense of the world. Secondly, it helps to gain a broader constituency for non-democratic politics. If non-democrats focused on concrete policy issues, they would be confronted by conflicting interests demanding arguments. But by concentrating on identity constructions presented as natural, more people throughout society go along who might otherwise self-define as democratic. And these exclusionary identity projections are then instrumentalized to re-shape institutions and processes such as migration or universities, free speech and equal rights, trying to bend democratic institutions into exclusionary forms that we thought we had overcome.

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