Post-politics

Post-politics refers to the critique of the emergence, in the post-Cold War period, of a politics of consensus on a global scale: the dissolution of the Eastern Communist bloc following the collapse of the Berlin Wall instituted a promise for post-ideological consensus. The political development in post-communist countries went two different directions depending on the approach each of them take on dealing with the communist party members. Active decommunisation process took place in Eastern European states which later joined EU. While in Russia and majority of former USSR republics communists became one of many political parties on equal grounds. Post-politics refers to the critique of the emergence, in the post-Cold War period, of a politics of consensus on a global scale: the dissolution of the Eastern Communist bloc following the collapse of the Berlin Wall instituted a promise for post-ideological consensus. The political development in post-communist countries went two different directions depending on the approach each of them take on dealing with the communist party members. Active decommunisation process took place in Eastern European states which later joined EU. While in Russia and majority of former USSR republics communists became one of many political parties on equal grounds. Generated by a cohort of radical philosophers – namely Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek – and their concern with politics as the institution of radical, active equality, this critique claims that the post-ideological politics of consensus has occasioned the systematic foreclosure of the properly political moment: with the institution of a series of new “post-democratic' governmental techniques, internal politics proper is reduced to social administration. Meanwhile, with the rise of the postmodernist 'politics of self' comes a concomitant new 'politics of conduct', in which political values are replaced by moral ones (what Chantal Mouffe terms 'politics in the register of morality'). The disintegration of the Eastern communist bloc following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 announced the end of the Cold War era, and with it the great ideological stand-off between East and West, between the communist and capitalist worlds. In eyes of Western society Capitalism emerged the victor with liberal democracy as its corresponding political doctrine. With the fall of state-communism in Eastern Europe and Eurasia as the final blow to an already crisis-ridden system, the USSR as a key political player on side of communism abandoned its social democratic, Keynesian form; and neoliberalism entered a new global phase. In the USSR the main driver for this change was idea of 'convergention' between socialism and communism formulated by Andrej Sakharov in his Nobel prize speech. With Francis Fukuyama's End of History as its founding statement, this was the birth of the post-political, post-ideological 'Zeitgeist'. Alongside Fukuyama, various other intellectual currents are associated with the consolidation of the post-political consensus. The 'reflexive modernity' thesis of post-industrial sociologists Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, for example, has acted as the intellectual accompaniment to Third Way politics. In 'reflexive modernity', say these authors, the central imperative of political action shifts from issues of social welfare (a politics of redistribution) to the management of 'risk' (a politics of 'distributive responsibility'): that is, the 'environmental externalities' that are the ever more visible, unwanted by-products of techno-economic progress. For both Beck and Giddens it is this imperative, and the new 'social reflexivity' that has developed in response – rather than instrumental rationality or, crucially, political struggle – that has driven the profound social changes of the post-war period. Indeed, for Giddens, it is 'social reflexivity' – the enhanced autonomy of individual action called forth by the dispersal of socio-technological knowledge and risk in 'post-traditional' society – that paves the way for: According to both Beck and Giddens, these changes render obsolete material, class-based, ideologically grounded politics organised via traditional, collective forms such as the party or trade union. In their place, we see the emergence of a new “politics of self” (“subpolitics” in Beck; “life politics' in Giddens) in which, as part of the wider post-modern turn, issues previously considered to be purely personal enter the political arena. Not all commentators agree with this version of events, however, and it is the critical perspectives considered in this section from which the post-political critique derives. Nikolas Rose, for example, counters Beck and Giddens by highlighting the role of a new governmental 'politics of conduct' in forging the political subjectivities that emerge with the advent of Third Way politics in Britain under New Labour (and, by extension, in developed nations in the post-industrial period). Against Giddens' 'social reflexivity'-based account, Rose's study of this new 'ethopolitics' suggests that it is the strictures of the new, market individualist (Schumpeterian) forms of governance-beyond-the-state that has driven the recent emphasis on the autonomous, freedom-aspiring, self-sufficient individual. A key feature of 'ethopolitics', says Rose, is its concern with the ethical, rather than political sensibilities of its subjects; a trend wholly consistent with the moralistic turn that politics took on under neoliberalism. Indeed, in his work on the decline of the public sector in Britain, David Marquand relates the moral ideology that – via the wider 'revenge of the private' – underpinned the neoliberal reforms and sell-offs imposed on the sector by the Thatcher and Blair governments. This is a key development to which the post-political critique responds: Mouffe speaks here of “politics played out in the register of morality”; while Rancière’s re-envisioning of the political is an express challenge against the de-politicisation of political philosophy that occurred with the field’s Aristotlean, “ethical” turn in the late 1980s. Similarly, while Beck points to environmentalism as a paradigm case of the progressive potential of the personalisation of politics, Erik Swyngedouw reminds us that in the guise in which it most often appears in the developed world, environmentalism's emphasis on personal lifestyle choices and on particularist struggles against the locally felt effects of environmental 'bads' can work to draw attention away from the properly political issue of human society's structural relationship with nature. Likewise, Beck celebrates the new scepticism associated with post-modern, identity-based politics as a progressive consequence of the universal uncertainty that characterises risk society. By contrast, critics lament the profound consequences that the anti-essentialist position on truth has had for the imagination of 'grand narratives' (read political teleologies) – for proponents of the post-political critique, it is these grand narratives that are the real substance of politics.