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This chapter examines the concept of depoliticization in detail. It seeks to show how it has played an increasingly important role since the election of New Labour in 1997, and how it raises fundamental questions about the nature of ‘the political’, the limits of democracy, and the existence of more positive choices in the face of growing public disenchantment with politics.

Under a variety of generic names like Occupy!, Indignados, the Outraged, and others, a wave of deeply political protest is rolling through the world’s cities, whereby those who do not count demand a new constituent process for producing space politically. The heterogeneous urban gatherers are outraged by and expose the variegated ‘wrongs’ and spiralling inequalities of autocratic neo-liberalization and actually-existing instituted democratic governance. The celebrated era of urban social movements as the horizon of progressive urban struggles seems to be over. A much more politicized if not radical mobilization, animated by insurgent urban architects, is increasingly choreographing the contemporary theatre of urban politicized struggle and conflict. It is precisely the aftermath of such urban insurrections that provides the starting point for the arguments developed in this chapter. From a radical political perspective, the central question that has opened up, after the wave of insurgencies of the past few years petered out, revolves around what to do and what to think next. Is there further thought and practice possible after the squares are cleared, the tents broken up, the energies dissipated, and everyday life resumes its routine practices?

Judging what is and what should be are everyday human activities, and, by understanding how they are done, analysts can explore the issue central to this chapter: that citizens are losing sight of the positive functions of politics and becoming too focused on its unavoidable and undesirable traits. Two aspects of political culture are making it more challenging for citizens to embrace the mixed nature of politics. First, too much fast thinking—intuitively driven cognition processes—is framing the political exchanges between citizens and political elites by citizens leading the former to focus too much on the negative features of politics. Second, a weakened system of moral accounting means that citizens do not have the satisfaction of seeing a moral balancing of the books that might in turn reconcile them to the yin and yang of politics.

This chapter returns to the idea of ‘nexus politics’ and the collection’s overall concern with how depoliticization functions to reinforce anti-politics in the context of changes in governance. We organize an agenda for further research around theoretical, methodological, and empirical themes. Theoretically, we argue that further work is needed to better account for how and why depoliticization and politicization occur, and on which forms of politicization promote choice, deliberation, and agency. Methodologically, we need to develop analytical models that map out what institutional and discursive configurations make choice and collective agency appear more or less visible. We need to keep pushing the envelope by examining how depoliticization operates in unconventional arenas. While much more work still needs to be done, this book makes a modest yet distinctive contribution towards a better understanding of ‘nexus politics’ and the growth of anti-politics as one of the most significant issues of our time.

While the main current in the growing research on governance has praised its virtues, a critical undertow has insisted that governance carries the danger of depoliticization and democratic decline. Chapter 2 aims to complicate things by arguing that interactive forms of governance intending to involve a plethora of public and private actors in the governing of society and the economy are not in themselves depoliticizing or repoliticizing public governance. Much depends on how we talk about governance. Hence, while the public management perspective tends to depoliticize governance, the political science perspective has a sharper eye for the political choices, conflicts, and power struggles. If the political science perspective has a blind spot, it concerns the role of elected politicians in the exercise of political meta-governance. That role is further developed towards the end of the chapter, which also reflects on the limits of repoliticization.

In the concluding chapter, the authors return to the question of democracy. Yet in the on-going fallout from the global financial crisis, even the least radical of democrats would struggle to disagree with Alain Badiou’s assertion that democracy now means ‘nothing more than an eager willingness to service the needs of the banks’ or his claim that what passes for democracy would be more accurately named ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’. In this context, the chapter argues that any commitment to democracy that precludes the urgent transformation of the capitalist mode of production can only be regarded as part of the problem. It is from this perspective that the idea of communism is discussed, an idea that may galvanize a new emancipatory imaginary.

This chapter discusses the consequences of the constitutionalization of the European treaties through a revolutionary judgment of the ECJ. The development of European integration that occurred in the wake of this ruling is usually regarded as a success story. But it has an often overlooked legitimatory price. It marginalizes the democratically legitimated and accountable institutions and lays the power to determine the process of European integration largely into the hands of the administrative and judicial institutions of the EU. Decisions of highest political impact are thus taken in a non-political mode. As a consequence, European citizens see themselves confronted with a state of European integration that they were never able to influence. The chapter explains the mechanism that brought this situation forth and develops remedies by which the democratic legitimacy of the EU could be enhanced.