Thirty-three years after the fall of the Berlin wall, bloc-thinking is back. The democratic “West” against the authoritarian “East”. Authoritarian alliances in the “West” recede into the backdrop, critique of liberal democracy’s chronic shadows grow silent. States recently accused of threatening democracy and the rule of law are embraced. They belong once again to the democratic “We”. With the war in Ukraine, authoritarianism in the “West” is externalized to the Putin regime. But authoritarian populism has been growing in Europe for a long time in the midst of liberal democracy, in states that claim to be illiberal, but not only there. The pandemic has intensified this neoliberal-authoritarian transformation. When uncertainties increase and bring about the compulsion to control, all sides take recourse to identitarianisms, as if there had never been a critique of it.
If we want to understand democracy in a fundamentally different way — without the nation, without the people, without bloc thinking — we must stop approving of identity constructions and — to put it in Foucault’s terms — affirm what we can become in the present without identity attachments, how we can become different, how we can de-subjectivize ourselves.
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