European Governmentality: The Liberal Drift of Multilevel Governance by Richard Münch

Author:Richard Münch [Münch, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, European, Political Ideologies, Political Science, World, Conservatism & Liberalism, Law, General
ISBN: 9781136962684
Google: XI8vCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17585057
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Liberal democracy versus political republicanism

The republican tradition rooted in France has been at odds with liberalism since the beginning. Whereas liberalism sees the freedom of citizens as protected by the setting of tight constraints on the state’s interference in the people’s affairs, republicanism regards the state as the embodiment of the polity in which citizens collectively decide on the laws to which they wish to subject themselves. According to the republican view, the polity is a place of freedom in which citizens make laws for themselves. From the liberal point of view, even a state, in the republican sense, is a threat to its citizens because its laws limit those citizens’ freedoms. The more competencies the state has, the more it limits the freedoms of the citizens. There is therefore a need for constitutional limits on state competencies and the guarantee of citizens’ inalienable freedom rights (Sadoun 2002).

In the same way that republicanism represents a contrast to liberalism, it also represents a contrast to democracy, where the implied democracy is the Anglo-Saxon liberal model of the kind put into practice in the USA. With this in mind, Regis Debray (1992) differentiates between the French idea of the republic and the Anglo-Saxon idea of democracy. According to his understanding, freedom and reason (raison) come together in the republic. The reasonable argumentation of the assembled citizens of the republic allows for the identification of the common interest, common welfare and public good and their separation from particularistic interests. Citizens do not subordinate themselves to any external power, not even God; they subordinate themselves only to their own freely reasoned law. The republic is therefore laical. Its laws are made by free citizens who are only following their collective reasoning (raisonnement). Thus, the republic harmonizes freedom and reason. Participation in the matters of the polity trains citizens in the public virtue of caring for the public good (Sadoun 2002). As civic citizens (citoyens), they create themselves the common good that defines the framework within which private citizens (bourgeois) can pursue their interests without harming the interests of others or doing harm to the common good (Rousseau 1762/1964). A functioning republic requires schools that are responsible for raising young people as citizens who are committed to the public good. Debray (1992) states that the republic of virtuous citizens is the legitimate foundation for the validity and due process of the law and the guarantee of fundamental equality of citizens and social justice.

In contrast, according to Debray (1992), the Anglo-Saxon, and especially the American, idea of democracy rests on the precedence of the private citizen over the civic citizen, and the private citizen’s mistrust in the activity of the state, which always implies interference in his freedom of action. The liberal model of democracy has particularly been formed by the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant countries. In these countries, the citizen is primarily a member of a prepolitical cultural and/or religious community, and he only secondarily aligns himself with the larger political community. The recognition of citizens’

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