Determining the self: democratic identity beyond the monist fiction

The last decades witnessed an intense debate in political theory on the legitimate foundations of political community both within and beyond established forms of statehood. In largely unconnected ways, this debate has been paralleled in the realm of real politics by a variety of new conflicts that question the inherited frame of democracy as hegemonic and unjust. Although there are substantial differences with regard to the causes and effects of experienced domination, this questioning ultimately links the strive for sovereignty in contexts such as Scotland and Catalonia to the struggle of indigenous groups and other minorities in Europe and the Americas. Focusing on concrete empirical cases, the paper will argue that the practical experiences they entail offer a rich and important corrective to abstract normative theorizing. Even if their impact on the institutional realm has so far remained limited, they show how notions of shared democratic "popular" identities that transcend dominant monist views emerge in the conflict-ridden mobilizations that challenge such views. These notions seem especially relevant in view of the populist backlash observable in a great number of liberal democracies at present.