Poliittisen osallistumisen etiikasta

Authors

• Heikki Patomäki

Abstract

Nation-state centred liberal democracy contains also the antithesis of democracy because it tends to deny politics and lead to non-participatory elitism. Even the Rawlsian variation that includes the principle of equal, effective participation is tied to the liberalist distinctions between private and public and to the institutional and imaginative preconceptions of the ideal of the classical nation-state. Under these assumptions, if there is enough distributive justice, there is little motivation for citizens to participate in politics (except for the sake of a professional career). Nonetheless, there are many good moral and ethical reasons for thinking that widespread political participation has both instrumental and intrinsic value. Moreover, by relaxing the standard liberalist assumptions of what public politics is and can be about, it is possible to show how participatory democratic politics can be extended to spheres normally assumed to be outside politics, i.e. to intimate, economic and international relations. This is not an argument against the welfarist nation-state but (i) an attempt to show that the radical-democratic tenets of re- publicanist political theory can also cover social spaces that are not constituted by the institutions of the sovereign nation-state and (ii) that it is thereby possible to make a convincing argument for the possibility of widespread political participation also under the conditions of late-modern, globalising societies.