Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

56 Philosophical Frames


gained—embodied by the nation-state—away from the family, region,
religion, and ethnic community. In the second case, the colonial expe-
rience created a situation in which a break occurred between the anti-
colonial movement for independence and unity on the one hand and the
democratic demand on the other.
e two realms were not that antagonistic under the Mandates Th
and the first independence regimes characterized by the parliamentary
regimes of the merchant-landowner notables. However, the gap widened
in the post-1948 period as a reaction to the creation of the state of Israel
and with the rise of new nationalist movements and the establishment of
the “radical populist” regimes.
uring that period, colonialism and the resistance to it played D
a major role in blocking the public sphere as an agent of democratiza-
tion. The Palestinian nakba of 1948 and the intensification of the Arab–
Israeli conflict served to justify the imposition of authoritarian military
regimes. However, public opinion reflected considerable confusion, and
reproduced the situation as a conflict between rejecting Western colonial-
ism on the one hand and rejecting democracy and modernity as Western
products on the other. The present debate on Iraq’s occupation is a stark
example of the resilience of this schism, which produces its own dichoto-
mies. On the one hand, there are those who want to mythically resolve
the duality by simply wishing away “nationalism” as a defunct ideology in
the era of globalization—while the very factors that reproduce it even in
its most extreme forms are increasing. On the other, you will find those
who want to wish away democratization. This is done for a multiplicity
of justifications: in the name of the primacy of the national question or
because democracy is considered a Western ploy (a means of domina-
tion), at best a Western product which is either foreign to the national
and religious heritage of Arabs and Muslims or initially present in that
heritage in the form of the al-shūrā.


City and countryside


The notions of civil society, the Enlightenment and public spheres have
been commonly associated with the urban setting. I wish to argue here

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