Page 88 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 83

links between communicative and strategic rationality but, rather,
more analysis of the tensions and links between communicative and
tactical rationality in these localised spheres of activity.
Whether the shift in emphasis from the strategic towards the
tactical in contemporary political culture is productive or retrograde
is not quite the point here. Habermas cannot even begin to see how
ordinary citizens might (re)engage communicatively, rather than

opportunistically, with the official polity – be it at local, regional,
national or supranational levels – if he does not take seriously the
possibility that a critical mass of citizens is simply not interested
in struggling to reform a set of structures so thoroughly external,
remote and arcane in appearance. How, then, might we think
beyond this fatalism? If a more vigorous public culture cannot be
magically ‘switched on’, can we imagine it growing slowly from small

beginnings? Might a political culture grow in confidence when citizens
acquire experiences of ‘making a difference’ and seeing something of
themselves in those micro-public spheres and small-scale initiatives?
Or is political culture being irrevocably fractured by this drift? These
questions are a blind spot in recent Habermasian theory. I have
suggested that Habermas is putting the conceptual but not necessarily
the historical cart before the horse in this endeavour partly because,
in abstraction, we cannot prejudge the extent to which these micro-
public spheres of discourse and action are already contributing to or
detracting from the development of a more outward looking political
culture: and partly because we would do well (and this is one saving
grace of the recent Habermasian bias) to remember that a civil society
without constitutional and legal guarantees is an impoverished and
Darwinian one, so those large-scale constitutional issues can scarcely
be dismissed as irrelevant. Nevertheless, it still turns out that, after
all, there is too much globalism and not enough localism in recent
Habermasian theory.
Then we might come to the question of evaluating the tactical
turn in political culture. It’s certainly beyond the scope of these
pages to analyse the supposed gains and losses. But we must at least
acknowledge the pervasive discourse of globalisation as the dispersal
or decentring of power. The potentially mystifying aspect of this
discourse – that it belies increased inequalities and consolidations of
power – is deeply problematic. That globalisation makes for more
mobile and complex fl ows of capital, information, culture, technology

and people, and calls into question the efficacy of centralised, statist,
and localised forms of regulation, is much harder to dispute.

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