4 - Staging ‘culture’ and Political Legitimacy in the Era of Liberalization

Summary

Introduction

This chapter returns to questions raised in Chapter 2, and addresses them with respect to another historical period, that is, the era heralded by the introduction of multiparty politics and the granting of civic liberties since the early 1990s. The chapter asks what role cultural performances play in the legitimation of the state political order, and, if so, to what particular aspects of this order they lend legitimacy. Do the workings and effects of state-orchestrated cultural performances vary with the political and institutional conditions under which they take place? If they do, in what ways have the new conditions of multiparty democracy and a pluralized media landscape changed the terms of political legitimation? The chapter thus makes a historically specific argument about the relation between culture and legitimation: it examines how conditions for generating legitimacy change with the transition from an autocratic and authoritarian political system to one in which, as we saw in the preceding chapter, the channels by which people in local arenas seek to gain influence and to induce certain decisions have become more complex, confronting the central state with the challenge of containing the centripetal forces of decentralization.

In the Introduction to this book, I argued that existing scholarship on the role of culture in nation-building processes in the postcolonial world should be complemented on two accounts. First, the focus on ‘cultural forms’ (Corrigan and Sayer 1985) and on aesthetics needs to be balanced by a more comprehensive account of the different dimensions of ‘legitimation’ processes and of how these dimensions mould actors’ perceptions and dispositions. Second, as most studies centre on earlier periods of post-independence cultural politics, it is important to spell out the historical specificity of their arguments and insights. We need to ascertain whether the same government agenda of nation building holds true in the era of post-liberalization, when multicultural nation-states are challenged by a new politics of local particularity and difference on one side, and by the interventions and partly revised agendas of international and supra-national bodies on the other. In a post-structural adjustment era of curtailed state sovereignty, as state functions and services have been to a degree replaced by agencies of transnational reach, the interplay between a politics of (local, cultural) difference with a centralist state project of containment, generating legitimacy, and maintaining the capacity to govern in spite of its curtailed powers deserves further scrutiny.