Democracy Searching New Formations of Dignity

In 1986, the Chernobyl disaster made real a fear that haunted people throughout the Cold War period of a nuclear explosion. Of course, instead of a deliberate nuclear attack that would potentially provoke an escalation, it was a nuclear accident, but the fears of its effects on individuals were just as legitimate. Across the whole of Europe people asked what those effects might be, and the question of whether and when the nuclear cloud would reach them became a matter of speculation, nowhere more surreally than in France where unprepared authorities at first announced there was zero risk – quite the opposite to what West German authorities were saying – some overly optimistic weather forecasters showed maps with a ’stop’ sign over the Swiss alps suggesting the Azores anticyclone would helpfully redivert any nuclear fallout away from French territory, and by the end of the year the comedian Coluche made a famous joke encapsulating the absurdity of this national frame that would enter popular folklore: ‘we used to wonder what borders were for, well now we know!’

The epoch of the ‘risk society’ announced by sociologist Ulrich Beck appeared already to be with us, and the need for international organisations that can mitigate and manage shared risks appeared evident. The vision was fundamentally Kantian: if humanity was not going to spontaneously or rationally organise itself into a universal cosmopolitan polity, a series of escalating disasters and crises, or at least the risk of them, would ultimately oblige it to do so. 40 years and multiple, planetary and accelerating crises later, the vocabulary of risk is everywhere in our politics and its experience everywhere in our lives: who is most exposed and who is protected, who is vulnerable and precarious and who is safe, who and what determines these things and what can be done to strengthen defences are at the core of both domestic and international politics. But the cosmopolitan international organisations predicted and called for by Beck are inexistent, weakened or no longer have a clearly cosmopolitan vocation. The borders mocked by Coluche are proliferating and have become vote-winners across much of Europe and beyond. The official institutional vocabulary of democracy itself in Europe has become centred on defence, preparedness and resilience. There is no shortage of real threats to defend against, but the crucial question about every such policy articulated in these terms is who or what is really being defended: national sensitivities, vested interests, taboos, borders and capital or people, justice, creativity and wellbeing?

The intelligence of the most effective of the democratic activist movements in Europe today is to centre themselves on a profound sense of dignity: dignity and justice for individual victims and their families, but also against the indignity of living in societies and economies which are dominated by corruption, extraction and deceit. The feminist movements against gendered violence, to movements for migrants rights against lethal border regimes, to movements for the victims of train crashes in Athens, the student movement in Serbia, the protests against the Gaza war, the Freedom flotilla, all those refusing the legitimacy of the ‘Georgian Dream’ government, protestors against state capture and corruption in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belgium and in so many other places over recent months, and of course the Ukrainian resistance against Russian invasion are all centred on and fuelled by a profound claim for dignity.

To have dignity is not only to be protected, to be safe, to be cared for and loved, to have access to basic requirements of life, including food, housing and family. All of these things are fundamental, and increasingly under threat. It is also to not be lied to, not to be fooled, not to be stolen from. It is not to be misrepresented or obliged to pretend you are someone or believe something you are not or do not; to not have to hide. Not to be dominated. And it is crucial to have the right to take action, to take initiative, to address injustice, destruction and to stand up to cruelty and violence, putting oneself at risk in the name of something more important. So one’s own sense of dignity is not unconnected to the plight of others: if we fail in our obligations to others we rightly feel shame, the opposite of dignity. Fostering, preserving, defending this sense of dignity, of a dignified life and a dignified society has become the centre of democratic action at the grassroots on scales from the highly local to global.

To call and act for dignity is of course nothing new. It is a familiar one in revolutions: the 2014 revolution in Ukraine is called the Revolution of Dignity, the Syrian Revolution of 2011, the Tunisian revolution of 2011, the Iranian uprisings in 2018-19 all take the banner of dignity. In the same decade former members of the French resistance memorably called for new generations to recover a sense of indignation. Why does it come back again so strongly today? What is new in its extent is the contradiction inside our democratic spaces, those spaces that are opened up by our being in contact with each other, with experiencing each other, and the inevitable questions of power and agency that are involved in all such relations. Democracy itself is not only or even principally a set of rules and procedures: it is the aspiration of a political space in which each can assert themselves and is recognised as of fundamentally equal worth. The promise of this space is under profound threat today. On the one hand, what engaging in political spaces makes visible are profound injustices both near and far from us, which we are compelled to address, and often feel a shameful helplessness about. On the other side, our physical public spaces and our mediatised public spaces are deeply and deliberately privatised, instrumentalised, polluted and intoxicated and our engagement in them is monetised, exploited and its value extracted. Taking part in them at all implicates us inescapably. Total withdrawal is not a dignified long-term option, as forgivable as it can be for recovery and disintoxication. Attempting to defend or reestablish national public spheres will also not adequately address or simplify this problem – our political lives now inescapably reach across and beyond any such borders and we cannot be blind to the violence of borders themselves. Our collective democratic dignity is therefore searching for new formations and spaces, attempting to feel out new patterns of practical solidarity and political agency, of compromise and coexistence, of plurality and togetherness. These are scarcely visible today in our dispersion, but perhaps just discernible at the horizon if we continue to hold our heads high enough and can together bear the horrors we witness.