Democracy in a Multipolar World

I have decided that the best way to address the theme of this conference, ‘Interrogating Democracy in International Relations’, is to examine the implications of my agonistic approach for envisaging what democracy could mean in a multipolar world. I will begin by presenting the basic tenets of the theoretical framework that informs my reflection on the political. It has been elaborated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-written with Ernesto Laclau.1 In this book we argue that the two concepts needed to grasp the nature of the political are ‘antagonism’ and ‘hegemony’. Both point to the need for acknowledging the dimension of radical negativity and the ever present possibility of antagonism which impede the full totalisation of society and foreclose the possibility of a society beyond division and power. They require coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and the undecidability that pervades every order; this means, in our vocabulary, recognising the hegemonic nature of every kind of social order and envisaging society as the product of a series of practices whose aim is to establish order in a context of contingency. The practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed are what we call ‘hegemonic practices’. Every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. Things could always have been otherwise and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. It is always the expression of a particular configuration of power relations. What is at a given moment accepted as the ‘natural’ order, jointly with the common sense that accompanies it, is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity that would be exterior to the practices that brought it into being. Every order is therefore susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices which attempt to disarticulate it in order to install another form of hegemony. In The Return of the Political, The Democratic Paradox and On the Political I have developed this reflection on ‘the political’, understood