Infinite Acceleration? The Democratic Archive as a Resource of Temporal Resilience

Time-demanding democratic processes are often the object of popular critique: Why waste time with lengthy political negotiation or with deliberative discussions when common sense or “objective” expertise makes discerning and implementing the right decision easy? Democratic systems are not only put under time pressure by such criticism, but also by accelerating societal changes. According to the thesis of acceleration theorists like Hartmut Rosa and William Scheuerman, the economic, cultural and technical subsystems of modern society progress at such a fast pace that democratic decision-making notoriously comes too late. The result is a de-synchronization between democratic politics and the rest of society. Politicians are caught in the bind of either accelerating processes at the cost of diminished capacity for adequate deliberation or (authoritatively) decelerating the other social systems at the cost of decreased efficiency. Against this backdrop, this paper identifies resources of temporal resilience in democracies that can help to address this dilemma under favorable conditions. It argues that acceleration theory overlooks an important historical dimension of democratic systems that I refer to as the “democratic archive”. The paper begins with a discussion of the theoretical implications and blind-spots of acceleration theory. Namely, the theory’s focus on the linear or horizontal dimension of time and its corresponding assumption of a fixed proper time of democratic processes ignores the historical/vertical dimension of democratic conflicts. Next, in order to present this latter dimension conceptually, I introduce and define the concept of the “democratic archive”. The concept captures the entirety of institutions, such as media, that store and make accessible knowledge and experiences from past political processes and conflicts. Drawing on insights from Aleida Assmann’s approach to cultural memory, I sketch the mechanisms through which the democratic archive provides resources for temporal resilience by providing opportunities for mobilizing knowledge, arguments and identities acquired through earlier political conflicts. This argument is then illustrated using a comparative case study of two policy making processes in Germany, which vary in the historical/vertical dimension of their underlying conflict. The first case, the German nuclear phase-out of 2012, demonstrates an instance where the use of the democratic archive is strongly evident. The various materials – contending positions, simulations, technical scenarios, arguments, and so forth – accumulated over the decades-long conflict were used to secure both a very quick and legitimate decision-making process. In contrast, the Euro rescue package of 2011 is examined as a typical case for the de-synchronization thesis because the quickness of the decision was bought at the cost of the legitimacy of the decision-making process. In the latter case, the democratic archive was almost empty because the conflict was relatively new. The paper concludes by discussing the potential positive resources as well as the trade-offs that the use of democratic archives can bring about and indicates the implications for the theoretical assessment of the temporal dimension of democratic systems.