In the spirit of a better understanding of Montenegrin today - especially the social context created by the adoption of the Law on Freedom of Religion - the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts (CANU) organized the lecture "Consensus in Complex Societies" by Milan Podunavac, professor of political and constitutional theory and political culture at the Humanities Studies of the University of Donja Gorica.
Podunavac spent most of his teaching career at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Belgrade, and he also taught at universities in the USA (Yale, Georgia, Florida) and Europe (LSE, UCL, Berlin, La sapienza, Bologna, CEU).
This lecture was also an occasion to discuss the broader theoretical framework of understanding politics and the political. Through the prism of political theory, that old tool of self-understanding of Western civilization, we discussed the fundamental concepts of politics: state, nation, citizenship, social integration strategies and the challenges of the contemporary Montenegrin state and society, as well as the future of Europe. On the meaning of politics, at the time of political analysis. About the dialogue, at the time of the monologue.
On several occasions, in the context of building modern Balkan states and nations, you spoke of Montenegro as a divided community and an unfinished state. How does modern political theory interpret this problem?
- Serbia and Montenegro belong to the model of an unfinished state, for different reasons. While for Serbia this problem is of a territorial nature, in Montenegro the incompleteness is reflected in the fact that it is in the process of forming its constitutional contract and basic constitutional consensus, and as a political community is searching for a common collective identity. Montenegro is facing this complex process: to answer the question of who we, the members of the Montenegrin political community, are and why we are together.
In the lecture, you talked about Monstesquieu, who, dissatisfied with the Hobbesian answer that security is sufficient for the subject to submit to the sovereign, searches for a deeper motive for civil obedience - for the "republicanization of politics". Put more simply: what makes a modern political community and us its citizens?
- The state is based on force, but that is not enough; a deeper foothold in the community's moral views is necessary, and hence the contract establishing it (pactum unionis civilis) is a sign of the political community's political maturity. Montenegro is looking for that contract, for a new social pact on which its statehood will be based, but also for further necessary democratic consolidation.
Nation and citizenship are formative principles of the state as a political community. The idea of citizenship as well as the idea of a social contract - the constitution was left to us by republicanism, and the idea of the nation as a political emanation of the national spirit (Herder) is a legacy of the romantic nationalism of the 19th century. What is the relationship between these two principles?
- The agreement that is reached in the cooperation of free and equal individuals is based on the unity of the procedures (contracts) that are the basis of the agreement. But this is only one face of God Janus. It is shown that the republican, contractual and structural core of the modern state cannot overcome the pre-political field of the modern state. The mobilization effect of the institutionalization of government is insufficient. The unification of the political order cannot remain only administrative, it presupposes and seeks a form of cultural homogenization. Political mobilization is looking for an idea that is strong enough and strong enough to shape the beliefs of citizens that are more attractive to their hearts and souls than dry concepts of national sovereignty and human rights. This gap is filled by the modern notion of nation.
The process of conquering the state from the nation is complex and contradictory, and it takes place in such a way that the unified national language becomes the state (official) language; that the national culture becomes the official culture; that national holidays, symbols and insignia become state holidays and state symbols; that the historical national tradition becomes a state tradition. The identification of the state and nation thus actually strengthens the administrative scope of power.
How do these formative principles of the state function in the 21st century?
- The nationalist strategy of shaping modern states (the modern European pattern) is deeply contradictory and in a certain way the cause of a particular form of structural, legitimation deficit that accompanies the modern national state. Nationalism as a collective identity shaping strategy is fundamentally egalitarian and democratic, enabling a special form of transformation of the "aristocratic nation" into a "people's nation"; all members of the same nation share the same values, the same traditions, the same language, the same insignia, we celebrate the same holidays, etc. However, nationalism is at the same time a strategy for appropriating key political goods on the political market. In both of these functions, nationalism is exclusive and aggressive. Just as in the process of shaping the national identity, the main price of this modernization process was paid by minority communities (assimilation, persecution, ethnic cleansing), so in the process of access to basic political goods and the distribution of those goods, the national state appears to be fundamentally unfair.
And what does contemporary political theory offer as an answer to that problem?
- Liberal nationalism and multiculturalism/multinationalism are the answer to this structural deficit of the nation state. The basic axis of liberal nationalism is an attempt to reconcile liberalism and nationalism. There is a special division of labor between liberalism and nationalism: nationalism is the basic strategy for shaping collective identity; liberalism is the source of the formation of moral and political principles that establish basic human rights and the constitutionalization of politics. Although there are general constitutional principles of liberal equality, the state is not culturally neutral.
The integration strategy of multiculturalism, on the other hand, is the strongest challenge to the nation state and (liberal) nationalism as the basic axis of the normative integration of contemporary political societies. The challenge of multiculturalism is that it inherently disrupts the liberal and universalistic scheme of a well-ordered order and culminates in the political project of multinationalism. This means that in an ethnically divided society, the state cannot be a national state; it can only be a co-national state. The state cannot be identified with any individual national community, but must recognize all political communities of ethnic groups as its constitutive elements. Montenegro did not accept the integration strategy of multinationalism. It reached for a much more demanding normative construction of the civil identity of the state.
You made a great contribution to contemporary political theory with your studies on the topic of fear as a specific political sentiment. The smoldering hotspots of the viral epidemic, migrants left at the European door, the future of the European Union and the return of populism, Europe seems to be forgetting the ideas of freedom, brotherhood and equality with which it embarked on the modernist project.
- "Fear must be on the side of freedom", wrote Tocqueville in Democracy in America and thus pointed to the old teaching that fear and freedom are the two faces of order. Fear of civil war strengthens our respect for public peace and the rule of law, fear of totalitarianism keeps us awake to defend individual freedoms and liberal institutions, fear of fundamentalism constantly reminds us of the importance of political and cultural tolerance and pluralism. However, it is confirmed again and again that our institutions and our public freedoms are worth as much as we, as citizens and members of a community, make them so. Civic courage in everyday life and the school of courage in the collective ethos of the community are ultimately the last refuge on which we must rely. This applies to all Balkan societies in transition, including Montenegro.
You have written several political essays about the Balkan states in which you notice the return of bad regimes in new forms: tyranny and despotism. What would be the sketch of the constitutional and political identity of Montenegro today? How do citizens and the political class self-understand the political community they belong to?
- The construct of civil sovereignty, on which the constitutional and political identity of Montenegro rests, significantly shifts the understanding of constitutive power in the founding constitutions of new states. It is common knowledge that all countries in the post-communist transition tried to be nation states and that in the area of the former Yugoslavia, Central and Southeastern Europe, the concept of the nation state is dominantly defined in categories of ethnic homogeneity. Ethnic and political homogeneity was defended by political and electoral engineering of constitutional nationalism, excluding from the political field all those groups that were potentially labeled as opponents of the process of establishing new states and ethnic homogeneity of political communities. The political engineering of constitutional nationalism was accompanied by an emphatically illiberal citizenship regime. In a stricter sense, these communities define their collective identity in pre-political terms and do not need a constitution as a founding act of the political order and community, because the constitutional and political identity of these communities lies outside the constitution. Contrary to this, in the construction of the Montenegrin constitution, the founding power of the demos is constitutive of the political order. It requires a connective tissue built on the foundations of a common horizon of meaning grounded in the constitutional culture of society that has a self-referential and self-legitimizing function. His second assumption is an open and pluralized public sphere as a fundamental assumption of the democratic shaping of the will. The constitutional identity of the civil state and civil authorship of order is not possible in a non-democratic state. The process of democratic deconstitutionalization and a special form of institutional hypocrisy, extended public distrust in institutions and actors, is a structural limitation of the constitutional construct of civic identity.
Does the concept of civil state have a future in Montenegro?
- I would also warn about the following legality: despite the fact that states - such as Montenegrin - if they want to be liberal-democratic and states of constitutional patriots - to use Pavel Jovanović's formula - there will be an uneasy coexistence of communitarianism and collectivism for a long time in politics and political culture. and populism. The civil state is vulnerable, and the equality of citizens and procedural legitimacy simply cannot support the entire political process. The constitutive power of the people is always intertwined with the ethnic and demotic elements of the people. Hence, the function of the constitution is to always transform this unrestrained power of the ethnos into the responsible power of the demos. The constitution, although based on the constituent power of the citizen, must constantly fight against the tendency of its own creator to introduce pre-political elements into the structure of politics. Of course, this should be distinguished from the legitimate tendency that even when the liberal-democratic principle establishes a political community as a community of citizens, certain lines of solidarity, certain lines of communication and self-understanding lead to the national identity of the community, which does not have to be ethnically defined.
In the lecture, you use Gramsci's concept of hegemony, the establishment of a political idea based on consent, not simple force, and in combination with another of his compounds (organic intellectual) you talk about the crisis of the "organic hegemony" of the state of Montenegro. The adoption of the law on freedom of religion pointed to a deep misunderstanding between the authorities and a large number of citizens and further deepens the line of polarization. How did we get into this situation and whose fault is it?
- Political society in Montenegro is really going through a deep crisis of "organic hegemony". It is expressed in public distrust in the political class, in the lack of strong and mobilizing political ideas in the political field. This is clearly reflected in the inability of the political class to politically respond to the special culture of protest that has spread to Montenegrin cities. On the contrary, the ossification, ossification and petrification of the political class is at work, which increasingly acts as an economic-corporate class within a closed patrimonial system. The answer to this organic crisis is the birth of a nationalist hegemonic strategy, which finds its political articulation in a particular form of identity politics. Nationalism is the powerful force that in such situations provides instructions for collective action. It is a complex process of "building", "constructing" and "imagining" a nation, a symbolic reconstruction of an identity scheme with the basic goal of harmonizing the physical and symbolic borders of Montenegrin statehood.
It seems that in our public political discourse, a specific politics of identity dominates, not identity as self-awareness, as a legitimate relationship of man to his cultural-historical and personal habitus, but as the imposition of exclusionary patterns of identification. Why are these and such identity politics disastrous for civil society?
- The result of identity politics is always a special form of substantive homogeneity that basically depluralizes and radicalizes the social matrix of society and makes it potentially antagonistic. Identity politics legitimately produces "enemies" in the "other" and is at the root of the negative integration of society. All this in the constitutional and political order of Montenegro produces a special form of tension between constitutional identity based on the construct of the civil state and extra-constitutional identity - a social consensus that is produced and organized in the public field - which is based on identity politics. This tension is the main axis of hegemonic struggles in Montenegro.
Turn the state of crisis into a "window of opportunity"
What does political theory tell us about this moment we are in?
- Jefferson analyzed the tensions that accompanied the constitutional development of America, and believed that the political community should search and air the fundamental principles of the state every ten years. Each generation has the right to establish its own type of relationship against the founding principles and its own pact. Montenegro is now in such a state. It has a "constitutional chance" to turn the state of organic crisis - political community, regime of power, political class - into a "window of opportunity" to renew and redefine its political identity. And for this complex process to be the result of her choices and not chance - as Hamilton advised his fellow citizens in the first sentence of the Federalist Papers - this process must be the result of collective deliberation and self-understanding of the limiting conditions under which these decisions are made. My lecture at the Academy was a contribution to that self-reflection and self-understanding.
Bonus video:
