Conceptualizing Politics

2.   From representation to national democracy
The way it developed in Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth–twentieth 
century, democracy as a form of government would have not been possible with-
out the framework provided by the representative state we have already met in the 
previous chapter. As John Stuart Mill put it,
the meaning of representative government is that the whole people, or some 
numerous portion of them, exercise through deputies periodically elected by 
themselves the ultimate controlling power. . . . They must be masters, when-
ever they please, of all the operations of government.
(Mill 1861, 68)
Mill’s definition fits not-yet-fully democratic regimes, in which voting rights may 
be granted only to ‘numerous’ groups such as male citizens or those with higher 
income (census franchise) or belonging to the country’s official religion, as in Brit-
ain until 1828–1829 or 1858 (when the exclusion of Jews was reversed), or with 
the accepted skin colour.
5
 Also, the ‘ultimate controlling power’ fully resides with 

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84  How politics works
the people’s representatives only in parliamentary, not presidential democracies, or 
those without a constitutional court. The main point remains that, unlike represen-
tation by estates, now all members of the polity are represented as individuals. More 
could be said about the philosophical implications of the notion of representation, 
but we shall limit ourselves to the once – in the time of Edmund Burke (1729–
1797) – famous dispute as to whether the representative has to be a delegate of the 
constituency, only authorised to assert its wishes and requests, or rather a trustee, 
free from binding instructions and representing the whole of the people according 
to one’s own best guess of what their interest is. This second image of the represent-
ative is now overwhelmingly prevalent, but proposals to go back to the imperative 
mandate pop up sometimes as a tool to bring back deputies to their job as allegedly 
true and loyal representatives of their own people, away from ‘corrupting’ political 
games. It is hard to see how the evils of representation in mature, ageing democra-
cies can be cured by resorting to pre-modern forms that were characteristic of local 
communities or guilds.
Other proposals seem to make more sense than imperative mandate and regard 
the selection of representatives, with a view to make it less dependent on party 
bureaucracy, donors’ money and personal lobbies. Draw – as in old Athens – and 
rotation in office are more debatable, provided they are combined with elections 
choosing who can enter the draw and even more necessarily those eligible for 
rotation. The combination, which we do not need to discuss in detail, is aimed at 
taking into account the will of the majority and the ideas emerging in the electoral 
debate, which cannot be ignored in favour of a redeeming mechanism. Generally 
speaking, mechanisms can help, but the poisons of politics such as love of power for 
power’s sake, Godfather-like positions fed by cronyism, feudal management of party 
bureaucracy, still can neutralise them. A shift to a more rigorous civic culture among 
the actors, supported by less complacent laws concerning, say, the role of private 
money in the elections, can bring better and more stable results.
Beyond nature and selection of the representatives, the question of accountabil-
ity is the other face of representation, its second pillar: the appointment by those 
represented is incomplete and only partly legitimate if it is not complemented by 
devices allowing them to test, to reward or to punish the representatives according 
to their performance. The basic device resides in the next election, in which the 
representative (person or party) can be confirmed or voted out of the job. In the 
history of both assemblies and political thought a more radical step, the recall of 
representatives, has been suggested or applied. This seems to bring the power back 
to the people, yet it evokes as well the danger of populism rather than the triumph 
of democracy: it would give a local constituency the power to recall a deputy who, 
once elected, voted in her/his assembly in a way aimed at protecting the interest of 
the nation rather than those of the local majority. It would be good neither for the 
nation nor, at the end of the day, for the local constituency, whose fate cannot on 
the medium-long haul be detached from that of the nation (or the Union, in the 
case of the European Parliament). Quite different is obviously the case in which 
a representative might be recalled because s/he reversed all of her/his original 

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Government and democracy  85
positions for motives of personal utility. In extreme cases a recall procedure should 
be possible, as it is at the state and city level in the United States.
Sticking to the idea that – at least in principle – constituencies elect representa-
tives they deem capable of making good laws for the entire nation or union of 
nations makes sense self-evidently as long as the nation or the union exists. The 
fragmentation processes that go on in several Western and non-Western countries – 
not only in the direction of regionalism and secession, but also because the very 
tissue of society, for example the sense of confidence nourished by the youth, is 
weakened – affect the credibility of democratic representation as well. Decreasing 
participation in election, except in India, and political life altogether is one of the 
signs of this process. A degree of confidence in the future as well as of trust in fel-
low citizens and the institutions is crucial to the life of the polity. Where these two 
important categories defining the social and psychological background of politics 
are weakened, as they are for many reasons in the globalised world, consequences 
such as distrust vs. parliamentary turncoats and more generally politicians and par-
ties do inevitably sneak into political life – organisational measures such as impera-
tive mandate or obligatory step-down for MPs changing party are poor substitutes 
for structural reform of representation. It is in particular the crisis of the parties 
in many important democracies, their growing inability to design strategies and 
organise consensus beyond the short-term interest or whims of the electorate that 
contributes to the stagnation and lower quality of democratic life. In countries such 
as France, Italy, the UK in which workers’ unions used to play a role in political life, 
their waning vitality is a further aggravating factor.
The path – a logical one rather than a historical sequence – leading from repre-
sentative government to a full democratic regime goes through still another station, 
of which we already know some contours: the merging of demos and ethnos. The 
‘people’, which was proclaimed to be the bearer of sovereignty in the American and 
French Revolutions, and later in other European and South-American countries, 
were an ‘imagined community’ of brothers and sisters (vs. kings and despots) in the 
political rhetoric and narrative as well as a legal or constitutional actor (the bearer of 
sovereignty, the generality of voters). It characterised and justified itself on lofty and 
abstract universalistic values. But at the same time this demos turned out to carry the 
very particular traits of an ethnic group or more often of a group consisting of several 
former peoples or tribes, not all too far from each other ethnically, largely merged 
into each other and now kept together by newly evoked cultural ties and a superior 
authority: the original ethnic core developed into a nation, as we have seen in the 
previous chapter. Democracy in France, just to mention a classical example among 
many, was and still largely is a French democracy, a democracy for French people.
This coincidence of demos and ethnos, universalism and particularism highlights 
one element and heeds its consequences. To begin with, a democratic regime always 
comes to be affected by a non-democratic element: he who is a citizen of a democ-
racy is not the outcome of a democratic procedure, as this depends on historical and 
geopolitical factors – on the borders drawn by previous wars and the political evo-
lution within them. With regards to immigrants, this nullified or greatly restricted 

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86  How politics works
the universalization of rights. As to the consequences, the merging of demos and 
ethnos in the nation facilitated the build-up of common, in particular cultural and 
legal institutions, in an atmosphere of national solidarity that helped overcome 
local egoism. It made possible that ‘daily plebiscite’ that Ernest Renan (1823–1892) 
thought to be the essence of a nation. This was true in the European nation states 
of the nineteenth century and again in some of the post-colonial countries. On the 
other hand, that merging fatally laid the groundwork for the later transformation or 
degeneration of the idea of the nation into nationalism, which claims the superiority 
of one’s own nation, defined in opposition to all others, or even its right to domi-
nate them, while asking from its own citizens to be ready to kill and to be killed 
for this purpose.
6
 Under these circumstances, which dominated the first half of 
the nineteenth century, with the frequent addition of racism, ‘patriotism is the last 
refuge of the scoundrel’, as Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) is famously credited to 
have said – and is also known to be a mobilisation tool in the hand of authoritarian 
regimes in need of regaining consensus in the event of difficult times. In the new 
century, nationalism seems to have become a secondary component of populism, 
the most recent degeneration of democratic politics.
Lastly, the relationship between democracy and nation state contains the notion 
of national citizenship that reveals a necessarily non-democratic moment in democ-
racy: determining who belongs to a democratic nation state is not itself subject 
to democratic decision. This is true, and most evident, in the spatial dimension, as 
immigrants painfully know, but also in the temporal one: Germans or Italians who 
lived between the wars and came too late (after the Fascists came to power and can-
celled the previous liberal institutions) or too early (before the Fascist regimes were 
eliminated) in order to enjoy the advantages of democracy. It is not clear how far 
luck egalitarianism, a school of moral philosophy that regards as invalid and worth 
being corrected all inequalities deriving from pure luck and not from responsible 
choice, claims to apply to those being unluckily born in a poor or war-ravaged 
country. This would justify inviting immigrants from unlucky countries or at least 
not rejecting them, which is indeed an actual and controversial policy choice in 
affluent countries. We will leave this debate open until we come to Chapter 9, but 
take note again of the difference between an abstract moral and a political approach 
to the question.