Five - Repoliticising depoliticisation: theoretical preliminaries on some responses to the American fiscal and Eurozone debt crises

Summary

Introduction

‘Depoliticisation’ and cognate concepts need disambiguation. Relevant questions include whether these processes are intended outcomes of deliberate action or unintended, possibly unacknowledged, effects of societal trends, other processes, or practices with other goals. Depoliticisation is also a relational term: it demands specific reference points in past and present political space-time against which to establish its occurrence. This means that politics and, a fortiori, politicisation are polyvalent, context-dependent concepts. As Kari Palonen notes:

There are no naturally political questions, but only questions that have been politicised. Issues arise only in response to moves or processes of politicisation, and only when they are thematised as contingent and controversial topics. Each of them has its own different temporal layers and contextual indexes that indicate when, how, and where they have become politicised. We may always ask whether they still carry any kind of political weight in a current situation, or whether they have been devaluated in favor of more recently politicised questions (2005, 44).

Recognising this polyvalence helps to avoid three theoretical and analytical pitfalls:

• 1. A pan-politicism that conflates politics and power, sees them everywhere, denies the specificity of the political field, and treats depoliticisation as a mere change in the mode in which and/or site where (political) power operates. This can be avoided by specifying a referent for politics, for example, open class conflict, political partisanship, issues falling within the authority of a territorial state, decisions made by those with official roles in a given political sphere, and so on.

• 2. A sur-politicisme (overly political interpretation of politics) that adopts a broad definition of politics, restricts the scope of its ‘other(s)’, and so limits the space for politicisation. However, if one sees the demarcation between the political and non-political as meta-political, then re-and de-politicisation can be defined as equivalent meta-political acts despite their substantive differences.

• 3. A crypto-normativity that treats one form of politics as genuine and others as inauthentic. Examples include the equation of politics with an antagonistic friend-enemy politics (Schmitt, 1993), an agonistic politics of disagreement oriented to reaching and revising consensus on the common good (Rancière, 2005; Mouffe, 2000), a mode of freedom opposed to the state's police power (Arendt, 1960; Castoriadis, 1991), the technocratic administration of things (utilitarianism), and so on.