Conceptualizing Politics

parties, but also at avoiding conflicts with powerful actors) do quite often lead 
to solutions that in technical or economic or even legal-constitutional terms 
are sub-optimal.
On the other hand, political processes do not always lead to a decision, as they can 
be suspended, delayed, with any decision postponed – or reach a deadlock. The 
omission to decide is a political act as much as making a decision, and it under-
standably changes the initial settings of the process and generates consequences of 
its own – mostly the search for other solutions or other partners or other tools, 
including resorting to force. Time is an essential element in both politics and policy 
making, as it can change the physical configuration of the issue, the coalition sup-
porting a certain solution, the perception of the issue among those concerned.
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Before this section comes to an end, it is wise to make possible equivocations 
explicit. I shall make three examples:
• 
a decision can come into being through several channels, such as arbitrary acts 
of the powerful or, on the contrary, collective deliberation, as we shall see when 
talking of (deliberative) democracy in Chapter 5.
•  in advanced democratic societies, social and political power comes to bear as 
a network of influences and impersonal constraints rather than the pyramidal 
command structure it used to be in an absolute or aristocratic regime.
•  the settlement of a conflict is not necessarily a zero-sum game, in which the 
winner gets what the loser is deprived of. Well-known is the recent expression 
‘win-win game’, at the end of which all partners gets something that meets 
their wishes, though someone gets more (be it simply more prestige), while the 
losers may exist, for example future generations, but do not appear on the stage 
among the actual players. This was the case with the neo-corporatist agreements 
between governments, employers and trade unions that were popular in Europe 
in the 1960–70s and could rely in some countries on heavy borrowing and 
expansion of public debt, which is now burdening the younger generations.
This section ends with a warning to non-Anglophone readers: do not underrate the 
importance of language, which mirrors different political and intellectual histories, 
in adding difficulty to the complexity of political affairs. In proper terms, ‘power’ 
overlaps neither with pouvoir (French) nor with poder (Spanish) or potere (Italian), 
not to speak of the confusing German couple Herrschaft and Macht or 政权(zheng-
quan/political power in Chinese). The English word is much more generic and 
neutral and therefore more flexible than most of its translations; the same holds for 
its Latin predecessor potestas, though ‘power’ and potestas (as well as 
κρáτος /kratos in 

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Politics and power  17
ancient Greek) also fail to overlap (in some case ‘power’ translates imperium). When 
using translations we should always be aware of the major or minor equivocations 
due to the Tower of Babel in which, despite all homogenisation in globalisation, 
we – to our good luck – are living.