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Reconciling Historical Injustices: Deliberative Democracy and the Politics of Reconciliation

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Abstract

Deliberative democracy is often celebrated and endorsed because of its promise to include, empower, and emancipate otherwise oppressed and excluded social groups through securing their voice and granting them impact in reasoned public deliberation. This article explores the ability of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy to accommodate the demands of historically excluded social groups in democratic plural societies. It argues that the inclusive, transformative, and empowering potential of Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy falters when confronted with particular types of historical injustices. It falters because it pays little attention to the historical dimension of injustices and the demands to which it gives rise. The historical dimension of longstanding injustices, it is argued, gives rise to a set of distinctive demands, such as collective memory of exclusion, acknowledgement of historical injustices, taking responsibility, and offering apology and reparations for causing these injustices, which go beyond the type of democratic inclusion that is often offered by deliberative democracy. Yet, the solution is not to abandon the model of deliberative democracy. Quite the contrary, it remains a valuable basis for forward-looking political decision making. The article concludes that in order to achieve inclusive, empowering and transformative deliberation in consolidated democracies that have experienced historical injustices, the politics of reconciliation is indispensable.

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Notes

  1. Ivison (2010, p. 124) relies on fairly similar features to distinguish between reconciliation in Australia and South Africa.

  2. African Americans largely demand coming to terms with the legacy of slavery and segregation in order to achieve profound integration and inclusion in American society, politics, culture, and economy. Indigenous groups often demand coming to terms with colonial legacies not in order to attain integration or assimilation, but for the sake of self-government, land rights, treaty, and protection and recognition of their cultures and identities. Thus, some of the claims of indigenous groups such as in Australia often challenge the very legitimacy of the basic structure of society and its social, political, and cultural norms and values (Schaap 2008, p. 254; Ivison 2010, pp. 132–133).

  3. For more on the global spread of reparations politics and its increasing centrality, see Miller and Kumar (2007).

  4. For other sets of complications that the principle of responsibility involves, see Kiss (2000, pp. 74–79).

  5. For more on the distinction between personal responsibility and political responsibility, see Schaap (2001, pp. 749–766).

  6. One could argue that the challenges historical injustices pose to deliberative democracy aren’t unique to Habermas’ approach but concern some of the fundamental theoretical postulations underlying deliberative theories more generally. Put differently, one could extend the main charges discussed in this paper to theories of scholars grounded in the deliberative tradition who have developed their own variants of deliberative democracy (e.g. communicative democracy; discursive democracy). Surely, this is a rough sketch of a strong generalization in need of much greater analysis and contextualization than possible here.

  7. Fish (1999, pp. 88–102) argues that the test of reasonableness is less of a moral principle and more of a political action that involves the exercise of power and operates as a ‘device of exclusion’.

  8. Indeed, several communitarian and indigenous social groups who lead political struggles for recognition don’t usually accept the ideal of individual autonomy or reject its priority over the realization of certain substantive conceptions of the good.

  9. Honneth (1995, pp. 212–215) raises similar charges against Habermas’ notion of deliberative democracy.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks for comments on earlier versions of the article to Rachel Busbridge, Paul Kelly, Will Kymlicka, Shlomi Segall, and two anonymous referees of this journal.

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  1. The Department of Political Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel

    Bashir Bashir

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Bashir, B. Reconciling Historical Injustices: Deliberative Democracy and the Politics of Reconciliation. Res Publica 18, 127–143 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9163-1

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