Democracy in Ireland

The case for a conference

This is simply the argumentative justification for a conference I plan to organise at Cambridge for next summer, on the history, theory, and trajectories of democracy in Ireland. I shall write here more regularly in future. Writers’ block and a characteristic dose of self-doubt have hovered over me like a cloud these past few months, but these seem to have dissipated and the sky looks serene.

To characterise the political institutions and social mœurs of democracy in many Western, developed nations as presently rapt by crisis is not to issue a novel observation. By 2025, the notion that we find ourselves inextricably caught in what the economic historian Adam Tooze once described as a ‘polycrisis’ seems to have infiltrated our collective imagination, forming what amounts to a new axiom of serious political deliberation. Stemming from the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Britian’s furores over Brexit, and the election of several right-wing, ethno-nationalist parties in Europe on the force of an undulating populist wave, the quantity of publications, opinion pieces, and cultural productions to have appeared in recent years lamenting the condition of democracy has been considerable. No doubt this posture is justified; one need only enumerate the interlocking facets of the current political conjuncture to strike the source of our collective malaise. The climate crisis; the return of economic volatility to the west following the Covid-19 pandemic; wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Africa that have frayed international alliances and perpetuated migrant crises that have helped destabilise domestic politics in Europe; the recrudescence of international belligerency and the heightened prosect of global conflict; the metamorphosising ‘culture wars’ and the collapse of political moderation; the surreptitious influence of poorly-regulated media and financial corporations; the rising prevalence of politically-motivated violence; the looming demographic crisis; collapsing rates of political engagement; the imminent prospect of a second Trump presidency…. One of these challenges alone would be sufficient to test our abilities to comprehend, cooperate, and act. Faced with all of these challenges simultaneously, we seem to have strained these abilities amid a din of moral invective and recrimination, leading us not to concerted action but to division and equivocation. Acquiescing to partisan or identitarian modes of political agitation in our fraught efforts to vindicate relativistic moral claims, we have neglected the potential dividends of impartial inquiry. In elevating factional interest, a process encouraged by the echo-chamber of social media, we have forsaken the difficult yet vital task of trying to understand rather than discredit the real conditions of our political circumstances and the conceptual terms we employ to explicate them.

Nowhere is this tendency more conspicuous than in consideration of democracy’s present state. Formerly animated by a fretful sense of purpose, particularly during the first phase of our current period beginning in 2016, ensuing years of disenchantment with democracy, its morose institution, and perceived moral sanctimony have thrown a pale cast of thought over an ongoing debate concerning its viability, trajectory, and potential, or lack thereof. Apathy, in this domain, is gaining pace, but far from becoming de rigueur. In some quarters, representative or ‘liberal’ democracy is dismissed as outmoded. In justifying a vertical hierarchy of inequality between the citizens and the state, it is taken as promoting both a passive rather than active citizenry and preserving an elected aristocracy, thereby alienating the people from a de-politicised process apparently shorn of legitimacy and captured by an indifferent caste of meritocratic brahmins. Representative democracy, on this reading, by failing to approximate the normative conditions of Athenian democracy – that every citizen has a right to participate on an equal basis in the political process (ἰσονομία), as well as to express their opinions on all matters of national importance (ἰσηγορίη) – ought to be supplanted by a political regime more capable of actualising the promise of popular sovereignty, of giving force to public opinion and power to the people. Trumpism, insofar as it can be said to constitute a political ideology, presents itself as one supremely deleterious solution to this state of democratic discontent, in appropriating the concepts of political justice and equality and turning them against the institutions of democracy in the name of popular right and legitimation. Defenders of democracy, meanwhile, commonly fall back on its instrumental justification, as a regime that not only protects individual rights in granting power to the people, irrespective of their social origins, ethnicities, or genders, but which also preserves the rule of law, the division and balance of government, freedom of speech and assembly, religious toleration, a fair judicial system, and a fair penal code. A subscription to egalitarian democracy founded on universal suffrage should, and for many does constitute the baseline of legitimate political argumentation. But in presenting democracy as an unsurpassable principle of organisation for any modern political order, the essential prerequisite for any state to achieve liberality, prosperity, and ‘modernity’, defenders not only subside into a state of complacency with respect to the contingencies of quotidien politics; they also neglect the fact of democracy’s fundamental condition of ambiguity, indeterminacy, and natural recalcitrance to unequivocal classification.

In sum, the manifold sources of political and economic volatility in the world today, allied to the increasingly dysfunctional politics of all the major western democratic states and their institutions, should, as John Dunn advised in 2014, alert us to the prevailing condition of democracy as ‘unstable, vulnerable, and replete with continuing danger’. But rather than disposing us to apathy, nihilism, or a belief that democracy, in principle, is sound but cursed by malevolent assailants, this state of affairs should imbue us with a healthy scepticism; a disposition that regards democracy less as a serene, structurally cohesive, and self-sufficient entity, and more as a deeply complex and largely amorphous historical contingency, one that assumed its modern form out of a concatenation of historical circumstances but which remains unachieved and forever unachievable. It is this tension, afforded powerful exposition in the work of Pierre Rosanvallon, that explains the strange malaise that has accompanied democracy’s modern history, one aptly summarised in his suggestion that ‘les démocraties sont bien marquees par la deception, comme si elles incarnaient un ideal trahi et défiguré’. Democracy itself is a moving target, an amorphous entity that has never proven unproblematic. When its value became transcendent, according to Russell L. Hanson, ‘its meaning was lost in the cacophony of competing interpretations’. In democracy, the dream of the good was combined with a reality of indeterminacy; a set of normative principles were conflated with an ideology incapable of realising them, giving rise to an irreconcilable state of contradiction of which our present crisis is one manifestation. Efforts to close that contradiction by lending democracy a concrete, institutionalised form have, in part, served to exacerbate that contradiction by papering over its moving components; imposing uniformity where there should be debate, interpretive singularity where there should be multiplicity, considering the various intellectual strands that went into the formation of democracy over its two-hundred-year history. It posits abstract ideals of popular determination, equality, and liberty, but democracy’s unmoored condition militates against their concrete application and fulfilment. It’s history, then, is the history of a disenchantment and the history of an aspiration bound up as one.

So far as we are concerned, the only way to explicate the tangled, contradictory mass of democracy is by embracing its contradictions and discontinuities through the careful historical analysis of its diachronic morphology since the late eighteenth century, if not antiquity. As political theorists and intellectual historians, our goals in doing so should be twofold: in delineating the historical course by which democracy descended to us, our attention should lie with foregrounding the indeterminacy of that process, with elevating the fact of its overriding contingency, and with extrapolating the various strands of thought that contributed towards its formation. Many of these strands have been overtaken by history, but they still exert a discernible weight over such core normative concepts of democratic theory as deliberation, representation, and political capacity. An in-depth historical understanding of the various shapes and iterations these concepts have assumed over the centuries aids our apprehension of them as shifting intellectual formations: as products of the specific historical contexts from which they emerge, allowing us to better appreciate how their component parts fit together and how our current political vocabularies bear their mark. One goal, then, of approaching the history of democracy is to edify or enrichen our conceptual framework as the product of a complicated historical process, one that can neither be reified nor conveniently compartmentalised. Democracy, in short, has a history, just as all of its standard components have individual histories. Insofar as it has an essence, this can only be identified after having collated and analysed the multiple shapes it has assumed over the course of that history, which requires a detailed understanding of how particular concepts function at specific historical intervals. We can and should, however, take this process further: by following the thread of democracy as it has been spun, theorists can apply the insights thus acquired in efforts to rethink democracy in response to the political dilemmas and democratic shortcomings we face in our own day. Democracy, we know, has a history, but we can go further by asserting that democracy is a history, for it presents a constantly unfulfilled and unfulfillable experiment of coming and failing to actualise itself. In conducting a historical genealogy of the questions that have occupied a central place in the concerns of democratic theorists through the centuries, we can render contemporary questions more intelligible, refracted through a distant mirror. This approach permits us to expand the horizon of argumentative postures available to us, collecting as it does the various successful and failed attempts made by past thinkers and political actors to understand their situations and to realise their ambitions within designated historical purviews of activity. We can retrace the path of trial and error, of conflict and controversy, in order for us to come to a better grasp of democracy and its components; but we can do so, simultaneously, to the end of employing these historical resources in aid of our efforts to reimagine democracy today, to maximise its potential, and to account for its conspicuous shortcomings. History, here, acts as a sort of laboratory for political theory, providing empirical data and a series of failed and successful past experiments from each of which we can draw a hint of insight to aid our prognostications.

The proposed conference, in approaching the subject of democracy in Ireland though the vantages of history and political theory, seeks to approximate both of these goals: of employing history to revitalise our political vocabularies; and of casting anew the history of democracy in Ireland both in order to understand its unique constitution and to provide us with the material necessary to set about reimagining it in light of pressing contemporary deficiencies and in anticipation of future developments. In this respect, the proposed conference amounts to a novel enterprise and a unique opportunity. The history of democracy in Ireland has been poorly served, as has the history of Irish political thought more generally. We lack a concrete historical understanding of the multifaceted process whereby the various intellectual components of Irish democracy came to assume their present form. But more than that, the various ways in which the core concepts of modern political theory – sovereignty, citizenship, legitimacy, representation, equality, etc. – interweaved with and informed the writings and decisions of Irish thinkers and political actors alike from the late eighteenth century to the present, have been inadequately grasped by Irish scholars, barring some important recent contributions. The effect, nevertheless, has been to the detriment of Irish historical scholarship, political theory, and contemporary political commentary; but this has also been to the exclusion of the Irish case from the consideration of scholars beyond Ireland. The two most important figures to have written about the constitution of democracy in Ireland as they found it in the early nineteenth century, Gustave de Beaumont and his travelling companion Alexis de Tocqueville, likely would have looked on this development with regret, given how they both saw in Ireland an intimation of democracy’s likely developmental trajectory in Europe, while at the same time displaying in vivid detail many of its innate contradictions and volatile components. Ireland presented a localisation of the modern democratic experience, one that was appreciated alike by advocates and opponents of that new political dispensation. But the contours of the Irish case have been improperly delineated, and the situation of Ireland, Irish democratic movements, and Irish political writers within the deeper confluence of British, French, German, and American intellectual developments from the late eighteenth century to the present, has only begun to be considered. The proposed conference seeks to aid the rectification of this situation by aiming to assemble political theorists and intellectual historians of and beyond Ireland to the end of inaugurating a new conversation about the particular historical course taken by democracy in Ireland and its location on the broader plane of democracy’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century development in European, North American, and colonial contexts. In bringing political theorists and intellectual historians together, the aspiration is to demonstrate the fruits that will ensure from a thorough synthesis of Irish history and conteampory political theory: at once helping to expand the purview of Irish historiography while urging Irish political theorists to reconsider the historicity of their political concepts and the indeterminacy of what they understand by democracy.

Keeping all this in mind, a further goal of this conference is to pursue the approach sketched above in relation to the history and theory of democracy in an attempt to bring the resulting insights to bear on the present condition of democracy in Ireland. So far as that is concerned, Irish politicians and commentators commonly find themselves taken by a myth of Irish exceptionalism, one that sees Ireland as standing apart from political trends in Britian, Europe, and the US as an oasis of moral righteousness and common sense. That myth is growing harder to sustain; a violent riot in Dublin in November 2023, catalysed by a poorly-handled immigration crisis but stemming in large part from years of accumulating discontent at the ongoing housing crisis, social disinvestment, a cost-of-living crisis, growing wealth disparity, and dissatisfaction with the efficiency of Irish institutions and the political process, was roundly construed not as an aberration from the norm, but as providing a sharp indication of processes already afoot in Ireland. Political extremism, violence, intolerance, ethnic nationalisms based on magical conjurings from Ireland’s misty history of an organic, homogenous national community on which to base justifications of ‘original’ Irish entitlements and rights, are nothing new; they dot the country’s storied history, and have taken on a new fervency in line with the growing temperature of politics beyond Ireland, but they remain incompatible with democracy. That fact, however, should not occasion a rear-guard action, an uncouth reassertion of democracy’s moral pre-eminence and institutional perfection to stifle its opponents. It should, by contrast, spur us to creative criticism: to take on the challenges presented to democracy in Ireland today as real challenges, and to exploit this moment of general crisis to try to inaugurate a series of discussions not only about the possible trajectories of democracy, but about what it is at a basic, philosophical level, and what form we would like to see it take in the future. Such conversations, of which the proposed conference would mark a central instalment, can only be pursued under the shadow of history and in the language of political theory. Democracy, as we have established, is an evolving historical process that derives its standard concepts and essential aspirations from history. History thus grants an unpanelled insight into its inner workings, while political theory provides both the apparatus and the incentive to apply that insight in response to pressing dilemmas as we now face them. If in Ireland we wish to understand in a broad context the present conditions of Irish politics, and if we do wish to work towards a more just, equalitarian, and politically-engaged republic, then the serious analysis of the history, theory, and likely trajectories of democracy in Ireland is in order.