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This paper considers ways in which rulers can respond to, generate, or exploit fear of COVID-19 infection for various ends, and in particular distinguishes between ‘fear-invoking’ and ‘fear-minimising’ strategies. It examines historical precedent for executive overreach in crises and then moves on to look in more detail at some specific areas where fear is being mobilised or generated: in ways that lead to the suspension of civil liberties; that foster discrimination against minorities; and that boost the personality cult of leaders and limit criticism or competition. Finally, in the Appendix, we present empirical work, based on the results of an original survey in Brazil, that provides support for the conjectures in the previous sections. While it is too early to tell what the longer-term outcomes of the changes we note will be, our purpose here is simply to identify some warning signs that threaten the key institutions and values of democracy.
As is well known, the 2nd Spanish Republic (1931-1936) was toppled by a military uprising which, after a cruel Civil War, set up an autocratic regime led by General Franco which lasted until his natural death in 1975. According to the contemporary theory of the legal system, a legal order exists on the sole condition that it is efficient in general terms and this was the case for both the Republic and the Dictatorship. In turn, the validity of the legal norms of all legal orders is based on its respective rules of recognition. Thus, neither the existence of the legal order nor the validity of its respective legal norms depends on moral considerations. In this paper, we call this affirmation into question on the base of the fact that the compensatory methods adopted from the Transition to Democracy show an evident concern to repair the damage of taking away a person’s basic rights (life, health, freedom, expression, association etc) although the Spanish Constitution, with its catalogue of fundamental rights was not in force at that time. But these measures would not have much sense if, as Raz says, there was no shared content which is common to all legal systems. Like Nino, we claim that one must discriminate between a democratic legal order and an autocratic one to establish the level of validity of its respective legal norms. Thus it can be assigned a presumption of justice to democratic norms. Finally, we state that the criteria to weigh up the justice or injustice of legal norms, as that of legal orders, takes root in the level of respect they show towards human rights.
In assessing the aftermath of the fraudulent presidential election of 2009 in Iran, one question has received less critical analysis than other complexities of this event: What can explain the remarkable non-violent character of the Green Movement in Iran? I propose that the answer, inter alia, lies with the following three learning experiences: 1) The experience of loss brought about by the Iran/Iraq war; 2) the experience of relative opening during Khatami’s presidency; and 3) the experience of modernization of faith in the work of the post-Islamist thinkers that aimed to make political Islam compatible with democracy. Together, these learning processes fostered a new mode of thinking that is civil and non-violent in character.
The past thirty years have seen dramatic changes to the character of state membership regimes in which practices of easing access to membership for resident non-citizens, extending the franchise to expatriate citizens as well as, albeit in typically more limited ways, to resident non-citizens and an increasing toleration of dual nationality have become widespread. These processes of democratic inclusion, while variously motivated, represent an important trend in the contemporary political order in which we can discern two distinct shifts. The first concerns membership as a status and is characterised in terms of the movement from a simple distinction between single-nationality citizens and single-nationality aliens to a more complex structure of state membership in which we also find dual nationals and denizens (Baubock, 2007a:2395-6). The second shift relates to voting rights and is marked by the movement from the requirement that voting rights are grounded in both citizenship and residence to the relaxing of the joint character of this requirement such that citizenship or residence now increasingly serve as a basis for, at least partial, enfranchisement. In the light of these transformations, it is unsurprising that normative engagement with transnational citizenship – conceived in terms of the enjoyment of membership statuses in two (or more) states – has focused on the issues of access to, and maintenance of, national citizenship, on the one hand, and entitlement to voting rights, on the other hand.
Civil Society became an important theme in the recent discussion of political or social theory. Civil Society is playing a substantial role for the legislation process. We can find it especially in the activities of international NGO. It gives a new aspect of the relationship between state and society, and legal philosophically speaking, of validity of law. Activities of Civil Society are socially recognized and their support systems are gradually institutionalized also domestic in Japan. But Japanese NPO has its own weak point, which arises from the political structure of our society.
Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work.
The normative position of the judiciary under the traditional conception of democracy as self-legislation by the people is too weak to protect in an effective way the rights of suspects in the global War on Terror. Drawing on arguments elaborated by Hans Kelsen and Karl Popper, we shall attempt to devise in this paper an alternative democracy conception that could serve as a much more solid foundation for the judicial branch of government in a democratic state. Through this jurisprudential strategy, we hope to be able to maintain the balance of normative power among the Trias Politica, which, in turn, may contribute to the preservation of the legal rights of every person during the struggle against terrorists.
Within democratic orders, it is the declared aim of a state of exception to secure or restore the endangered foundation of democracy. The provided measures are, however, undemocratic insofar they directly affect individual rights as the principle on which democracy is based: By suspending rights, the state of exception treats individuals not as members of a democratic community (demos), but as parts of a population which has to be secured. Whereas individual rights enable individuals to be part of the demos, the state of exception – by restraining rights – enforces a politics of population. In my article, I show in what way individual rights, too, are used as a strategy of governing the population. Referring to the history of individual rights in the early modern period, I describe a specific form of alienation of individual rights. I argue that this alienation consists in the separation of a private from the political component of individual rights. This alienation is the reason for a dialectical shift from demos to population which occurs in an extreme form in the state of exception. Against this background, the question of the state of exception and the question of individual rights appear in an unfamiliar but crucial relation. In order to oppose the dialectical shift and the misuse of exceptional measures, I claim it necessary to insist on the inextricable link between the private and the political component of individual rights – that is to extend the domain of democracy.
The title I have chosen seems to signal a tension, even a contradiction, in a number of respects. Democracy appears to be a form of political organisation and government in which, through general and public participatory procedures, a sufficiently legitimate political will is formed which acquires the force of law. Justice, by contrast, appears to be a value external to this context which is not so much linked to procedures of “input” or “throughput” legitimation but is understood instead as an output- or outcome-oriented concept. At times, justice is even understood as an otherworldly idea which, when transported into the Platonic cave, merely causes trouble and ends up as an undemocratic elite project. In methodological terms, too, this difference is sometimes signalled in terms of a contrast between a form of “worldly” political thought and “abstract” and otherworldly philosophical reflection on justice. In my view, we are bound to talk past the issues to be discussed under the heading “transnational justice and democracy” unless we first root out false dichotomies such as the ones mentioned. My thesis will be that justice must be “secularised” or “grounded” both with regard to how we understand it and to its application to relations beyond the state.
Disagreement among philosophers over the proper justification for political institutions is far from a new phenomenon. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that there is substantial room for dissent on this matter within democratic theory. As is well known, instrumentalism and proceduralism represent the two primary viewpoints that democrats can adopt to vindicate democratic legitimacy. While the former notoriously derives the value of democracy from its outcomes, the latter claims that a democratic decision-making process is inherently valuable. This article has two aims. First, it introduces three variables with which we can thoroughly categorise the aforementioned approaches. Second, it argues that the more promising version of proceduralism is extrinsic, rather than intrinsic, and that extrinsically procedural accounts can appeal to other values in the justification of democracy without translating into instrumentalism. This article is organised as follows. I present what I consider to be the ‘implicit view’ in the justification of democracy. Then, I analyse each of the three variables in a different section. Finally, I raise an objection against procedural views grounded in relational equality, which cannot account for the idea that democracy is a necessary condition for political legitimacy.