It is often stated that one of the greatest threats to democracy is when citizens become over-emotional. Emotions are in this view seen as an immense danger to the system of democracy. However, in recent years the importance of the emotions for the stability of distinctive political regimes came to the fore in both political theory and in the humanities. Several cultural historians have tried to show that emotions also have a crucial place in people’s identification with democratic societies of the post-war era. Inspired by this new interest in the role of emotions within democracy, one can question whether there is something like a ‘democratic emotion’ – an emotion that only exists in democratic societies or an emotion that is conditional for the functioning of democratic systems. It can be worthwhile to investigate if there is something like a ‘democratic self’ produced by the process of democracy and if there are distinctive ways in which individuals emotionally connect to the collective in democratic societies.
The conference ‘I, the people: negotiating individual and collective emotions in democratic societies’, organized by Philipp Nielsen (Berlin) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, focussed on the role that emotions can and should play within democratic societies, bringing together scholars from both political theory, the humanities and law. Each scholar contributed in his or her own way to the idea that emotions are of crucial importance to the formation of the individual identities of citizens within democratic societies.
During the first session the question of the conditionality of emotions for the democratic process was most directly addressed. The central question was whether certain emotions are required for democracy to function properly. Coming from the study of political psychology, ERIC GROENENDYK (Memphis) gave his solution to one of the central problems of rational choice theory, namely, the problem posed by the fact that the costs of participating in collective action are essentially higher than the expected benefits. If we look at real democracies, however, one can see that people do participate, since the majority of people still vote. Groenendyk argued that the solution to this problem should be sought in the way group identification leads to stronger emotions of anger and enthusiasm, motivating people to participate in collective action. The stronger someone identifies with a party, he argued, the more anger or enthusiasm someone feels. These emotions, he concluded, are essentially action-motivating, in contrast to an emotion such as fear which rather leads to the avoidance of any political action. JAMES JASPER (New York) identified not enthusiasm or anger, but the emotion of compassion as the ‘key democratic feeling’. Explicitly contrasting compassion with pity, he argued that compassion places people on the same level as others, since it is the ability to feel what others are feeling and to really feel ‘with’ them. Pity, however, rather distances people from each other, because it always contains an admixture of contempt. Compassion is in Jasper’s view fundamental to the inclusion of others within the process of democracy as it fosters the idea of human dignity that is foundational for a democratic society. As a condition for properly functioning democracy, Jasper thus pled for the encouragement of the feeling of compassion by means of education and the abolishment of all conditions that inhibit this feeling.
Whereas the first session was engaged with individual emotions, the second session laid more emphasis on the feeling of togetherness and what might be called ‘collective emotions’. This session focussed on the topic of ‘the stage of democracy’, and addressed the question of how collective identities in the political arena are formed and regulated by sound and vision. The important role of emotions in identity formation was explained by looking at populism on the one hand and communal singing during party conferences on the other hand. PAULA DIEHL (Berlin) discussed the tension between ‘verticality’ and ‘horizontality’ as the primary aspect of the emotional relationship between the populist leader and the people. This means that leaders are often the object of identification, but are just as much the object of idealization. Identification promotes the ideal of equality, whereas idealization is a product of the value of strong leadership. The success of the populist leader, argued Diehl, is to establish an emotional bond based on both idealization and identification. However, the idealization should not tend towards ‘love of the leader’, since this is where fascism begins according to Diehl. Where Diehl primarily made theoretical reflections on emotional identification, SARAH ZALFEN (Berlin) focussed on actual emotional identification during party conferences. She showed how communal singing regulated the feeling of togetherness and belonging during party conferences in the post-war era. Singing, she argued, has the performative function of demonstrating and embodying the feeling of belonging to a group. In addition, she stated that singing has the function of bridging the rational and the emotional. This was clearly expressed in the complicated patriotic feelings attached to the national anthem in West-Germany. The emotion of patriotic love, she stated, was regulated by ways of moderate and subdued singing. This affirms the idea that the emotional regulation of singing contributes in a complex way to collective identity formation.
The fact that academic inquiry into democracy should not merely be about collectives making decisions was made clear in the following session on law and emotions. The legal aspects surrounding assemblies were at the centre of ANDRAS SAJO’s (Strasbourg/Budapest) contribution. Sajo argued that there has been a major shift in the way assemblies have been treated by the laws of Western European countries. Whereas public gatherings had been treated as a threat to public order during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the attitudes of the authorities changed into one of tolerance, stressing rather the fundamental right to assembly. Sajo argued that this change implied that in the late 20th century the role of the police in the regulation of public assemblies became of greater legal importance. In his view, the most important question for judges became whether the police were capable of emotionally connecting to the purposes of the crowd in question. JULIA HÄNNI (Zürich/New York) focussed more on actual legal judgement. She argued that pre-rational cognition is of fundamental importance to the formation of judgements, including legal judgement. For Hänni, pre-rational cognition refers to the intuitive and emotional factors that inform our important decisions. She drew on phenomenological theories of cognition put forward by Frantz Brentano and Max Scheler and argued that in the search for justice, people will ultimately have to rely on their emotional abilities in order to judge. Therefore, Hänni advocated that extra-legal value judgement should have an important place in legal decision making within democracies.
The fourth session shifted the perspective to architecture and centred on the question if and how architecture could foster democratic practices. DELPHINE GARDEY (Geneva) and FELICITY SCOTT (New York/Berlin) both talked about the use and function of specific buildings, the former discussing the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the French National Assembly in Paris, and the latter the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York. In both buildings, the ‘democratic’ or egalitarian aspects of the building changed over time, a fact vividly illustrated by both speakers. Gardey mainly focussed on the performance of self-determination seen in the Palais Bourbon. The right of the parliament to police inside the building was one of the most important aspects here. Significant was the fact that the internal policing of the plenary hall was done by civilians. Military forces were not allowed in the plenary hall, except when there was an instance of force majeure during the debates. The most ‘sacred’ part of the building, as Gardey defined it, was the Chamber’s territory circle. No police force was allowed to penetrate this area without authorization from the president. All of this, argued Gardey, fostered the idea that the parliament was sovereign. In addition, she showed that the masculine representation of democracy is clearly present in both the staff and the building, incorporating spaces of masculine sociability and masculine suits and uniforms. Gardey concluded that the Palais Bourbon embodies a clear paradox between the durable presence of male emotional images on the one hand and the proclamation of a universal neutral order on the other. The headquarters of the Ford Foundation is an example of a building that was designed with specific purposes, but turned out differently in the end, as Felicity Scott showed in her contribution. The headquarters, located in New York, was designed by architect Kevin Roche in a modernistic fashion. The foundation’s purpose was to express the idea of a durable human community in the design of the building by bringing in natural landscapes and furnishing the building with glass panes. The foundation wanted this building to embody the agenda of American philanthropy. In the end, however, the glass panes, which were meant to express the idea of human equality, blurring the lines between inside and outside, in fact enforced relations of inequality within the office building itself. The superiors, who were working at the top of the building, could easily look down upon their employees and give them the feeling of permanently being watched. The story of the Ford Foundation’s headquarters shows how the building ironically came to embody the ambiguous role of the USA in global governance, where it was actually meant to symbolize ideas of equality and human community.
The final session discussed concrete examples of negotiation of feeling between individuals and communities, focussing on the culture of post-war West-Germany. The session addressed the private and commercial lives of West-German citizens as foundational for their outlook on democracy. TILL VAN RAHDEN (Montreal) gave an outline of a research program on the functioning of democracy that focusses less on democratic ideas and polities and more on the ‘content of form’, that is the styles and manners that are foundational for the democratic process. He argued that in order to understand democracy in the 20th century, one should investigate it as ‘a way of life’. The humanities in particular could contribute to this understanding by looking at the quotidian encounters of ordinary citizens. As an example, he discussed ‘the quest for normality’ of post-war German citizens as an expression of their democratic way of living and their expectations of democracy. Moreover, the ‘clumsiness’ of the post-war German authorities was essential to their way of dealing with the organized uncertainty brought forward by the democratic system. Van Rahden’s argument was backed up in several ways by NATALIE SCHOLZ’s (Amsterdam) contribution on the permanent presence of the Volkswagen Beetle in German society. Like van Rahden, she stressed the challenges brought forward by the uncertainty and indeterminacy of the democratic society, arguing that the presence of unchangeable objects could play an important role in citizens’ acceptance of the reality of democracy. The Volkswagen Beetle, whose production was initially commissioned by the National Socialist regime, had a tremendous popular revival after the war and became the symbol of post-war economic recovery during the 1960s in Germany. Scholz defined the Beetle as a ‘transitional object’, drawing on the psychological theories of Donald Winnicott. Although the object itself did not change, the emotional attachment of the citizens to the car changed in several ways, giving them an opportunity to accept the reality of uncertain times by emotionally attaching themselves to unchanged objects.
Van Rahden’s call upon the humanities to look at the content of form summarizes the conclusions of the conference best. None of the participants thought there to be an exclusively democratic emotion, but all of the contributions opened up new ways of conducting research on democracy, particularly focussing on the emotional lives of individual democratic citizens. Future inquiry into democracy should be aware of the cultural basis of democracies and the emotional relation of citizens both to each other and to democracy as a whole. The interdisciplinary perspective of the conference showed how much is neglected if democracy is studied merely as a political theory. To really understand democracies one should thus be willing to expand preconceptions of what ‘democracy’ really is.
Conference overview:
Panel I: Emotions, Democracy and Identity in Theory
James Jasper (New York): The Compassionate Republic.
Eric Groenendyk (Memphis): Emotional Rescue: How Affect Helps Partisans Overcome Collective Action Problems.
Chair: Matthew Specter (New Britain, Ct/Vienna).
Panel II: Staging Democracy: Sound, Media and the Populist Connection
Paula Diehl (Berlin): The Populist Emotional Bond between the Leader and the People.
Sarah Zalfen (Berlin): Tuning the Crowd? On the Use and Function of Music on Party Conferences in Germany.
Chair: Daniel Morat (Berlin).
Panel III: Emotions, Democracy and Identity in Law
Andras Sajo, Judge (Strasbourg/Budapest): Passion Management in Assembly Law.
Julia Hänni (Zurich/New Haven, Ct): Emotion and Law – How Prerational Cognition influences Judgment.
Chair: Dagmar Ellerbrock (Berlin).
Panel IV: Transparency or Awe? Emotions in 'Democratic' Architecture
Delphine Gardey (Geneva): The Body of the French Parliament: Architecture, Gender and Sovereignty (1789-1940).
Felicity Scott (New York/Berlin): 'Not Emotional Poetry but Rational Prose': Ford Foundation Headquarters, New York (1963-1967).
Chair: Margrit Pernau (Berlin).
Panel V: Between Courtesy and Consumption: Realizing Desires and Respecting Others in Post-War West Germany
Till van Rahden (Montréal): Clumsy Democrats: Forms, Style and Passions in Postwar West German Politics.
Natalie Scholz (Amsterdam): The Car Who Lived: West-Germans' emotional relationship with the Volkswagen Beetle in the 1950s.
Chair: Philipp Nielsen (Berlin).
Concluding round table discussion