Reifying democracy: post-colonial perspectives on decentralized self-governance

The paper furthers the study of participation, reconsidering the theoretical and empirical relationship between federalism and democracy. It sheds light over the intersections between federal theory and radical democracy, as well as with participatory and deliberative democracy theories. The analysis is grounded in a reconstruction of the intellectual journey of the federal idea, with a focus on its inextricable relationship with democracy. The paper’s theoretical foundation is built upon the concepts of “comprehensive” or “decentralist” federalism, respectively advanced by Daniel Elazar and King Preston. With these notions, the two authors referred to those approaches which maintain that federalism is an overarching notion that applies to both the political and socioeconomic spheres. While Elazar and Preston did not follow the ramifications of such interpretations of federalism, the paper contends that their influence extend far beyond what is presently acknowledged and that they have a profound impact on contemporary democratic theory. The paper introduces the notion of libertarian federalism, a non-hierarchical, bottom-up understanding of federalism, based on decentralized self-governance and -management and embodied by citizens’ councils and workers' councils. Most often conceptualized as council democracy, such tendencies were embodied, to different extent, by the 1871 Paris Commune and in 20th-century council movement (particularly in Germany, Italy, Russia, and Hungary). The paper argues that council democracy remains a crucial point of reference also for today’s political theorists. Arendt’s federalist reinterpretation of councils as ‘spaces of freedom’, wherein ‘political activity’ can occur, serves as key theoretical starting point. The paper thus seeks to rehabilitate council democracy, engaging with the recent intellectual debate animated by James Muldoon, Shmuel Lederman, Benjamin A. Popp-Madsen, and Dario Azzelini, who examine councilism within the framework of participatory and deliberative democracy theories. In doing so, it stresses the similarities between council democracy and democratic innovations, such as participatory budgeting, citizens' assemblies, but also workplace democratic self-management. The paper thus revolves towards councilism today. Given the forerunning role of South America in the field of democratic innovations, it brings up the contributions of 20th century Brazilian social scientists Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, Fernando P. Motta, and Maurício Tragtenberg, and present days’ scholars José Herinque Faria, Fernando G. Tenório, and Ana Paula P. de Paula. Their critical approaches to organizational studies are the interpretative key to learn how council-based participatory mechanisms have been integrated into local governance structures in Brazil. Also, they provided innovative analytical tools and conceptual categories to address the concrete articulations of democratic governance and participation. This paper has multiple objectives: (a) it reconsiders the meaning and scope of the participation, as one of the main paradigms within democracy theory; (b) it attempts at untangling the participation-representation dichotomy; (c) it aims at recasting council democracy into the debate around participatory and deliberative democracy. To this aim, it brings up postcolonial and critical perspectives on State-society relations. The paper advances a fresh theoretical approach to the study of participation, providing new insights over its reification in the context of democracy crisis.