[Music]
Welcome to today's book launch of The D-Word Perspectives on Democracy in
Demultious Times here at the recent Globe in Leipzig. So I'm
Constanze Blum. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the
Institute Social Cohesion here and very happy to be moderating the
session today. Now today's event is held in the context
of the Drogfrisch series, so freshly printed, which was
founded in 2012 as a cooperation between the European
Network in Universal and Global History and the Leipzig
recent Globe. And the series offers a forum
for academic authors and for readers to to meet and to discuss current
contributions to regional transnational studies and
of course global history. Now today's launch of the D-Word
recently published with Nelson Mandela University Press
is, yeah, I guess not only fitting perfectly into this format but
also extremely timely because it addresses the globally perceived malaise
or crisis of democracy. And I just want to
highlight this is not the first launch of this
book but the first here in Germany and as we discussed earlier in the
northern hemisphere and deliberately also in
Leipzig as of course the regional elections here in
Saxony and Thuringen and Brandenburg have shown quite drastically the
democratic backlash with the far-right AfD parties' electoral advances.
But today we want to shift the focus from the often dominant Western,
you know, European and U.S. narratives on this issue to perspectives from
what the book calls the margins. And we have a wonderful
panel with us today as you can see. We are very privileged
to have with us professor Christi van der Westhosen,
one of the editors of this volume, which she has put together in collaboration
with C.P. Oedube and Suletu Joulobe. And we also have with us two of the
contributing authors and we warmly welcome
professor Rashid Boutayeb who joins us today from Doha online. So thank you so
much for being with us. And we also welcome
Dr. Svetlusa Surova who came yesterday all the way from
Bratislava. So welcome as well. And thank you also of
course to professor Ulf Engel who is going to provide a commentary
following the presentations by the authors. And you'll get a more
detailed introduction for each speaker before their respective
input. But yeah, before we start also maybe a special welcome
to a new senior fellow here at our institute,
professor Cheryl Hendricks, the executive director of the Institute
of Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa who's
recently arrived to live session and will be with us for the next
three months. So welcome and thank you so much
for joining the sessions and just arriving
in time. We'd also like to welcome Dr. El-Hassim Wan.
Yeah, former special representative of the UN
secretary general and the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali amongst
you know a lot of other positions. So he'll be with us
here at the institute as well for the month of October if I'm correct. So
warm welcome as well to you. But yeah now without further ado
I'd like to give the floor to professor Christy who will
give us an overview of this exciting publication project and we then hear by
the contributing authors on their specific
chapters before the floor is given to the discussant and
then we open up to debate of course to the audience online and here. So
professor Christiana Westhausen is of course very well known here
in Leipzig. She was a visiting professor at this very institute in 2022
and is a member of our scientific advisory council.
She's an associate professor at the center for the advancement of
non-racialism and democracy at Nelson Mandela University in South
Africa and yeah as a transdisciplinary scholar
interested in identity difference ideology and democracy and with a
specific focus on post-colonial and post-apartheid approaches
she has published widely both academically and and popularly.
You know apart from the D work her scholarly books include
for example as a co-editor as well the Routledge International Handbook of
Critical Studies in Whiteness published in 2022 where we
had a similar launch here some time ago just to name one of her
many publications. So Christy it's so great to have you
and the floor is yours. Thank you so much
Constanze and thank you to colleagues here at the
Research Center Global Dynamics and particularly to
Prof Ulf Engel for
succumbing to my insistence that I that I launched the D word here. I'm
very appreciative of this opportunity to present this
work to colleagues here at this university.
I really enjoyed my time here previously and it's very wonderful to be to be back
in the city and also at quite an illustrious
moment as I understand we're celebrating 35 years
of the demonstrations on the Augustus Platz
that led to the the fall of the Berlin Wall.
So quite an illustrious moment to be with with you today.
Thank you for for joining us. So we know that this year
is also just in terms of the very recent history of democracy as
because we have to remind ourselves this is actually quite a young phenomenon
historically speaking the idea of democracy
and we're in well more than halfway through
a major watershed year one could say for democracy
given that something like half of the world's population actually went to the
ballot box this year. You had your elections here in
Germany, in South Africa we had very important
elections marking our 30 years of democracy
but many other countries as well and some of them
actually delivering unexpected results like India for example where Modi
actually came back with a reduced majority even though he was
hoping on the exact opposite. Britain of course with with quite an
interesting well the strengthening of of of the
Labour Party but if you actually drill down into the
numbers actually quite a thin majority for for Labour and so forth and of course
I think whether we like it or not everybody's got their eyes also on the
United States and and very
worried and and also I think generally nervous to see what will
happen there in November. So a very important year for us
as human beings on the globe.
So in a sense while we have struggles we've had
struggles to deepen democracy over the past many many decades
and to make democracy more and more inclusive we are
definitely also battling the worldwide rise of
authoritarian forces that Costanzo also just alluded to.
So we previously launched this book in South Africa
we've tried to showcase all of the
authors chapters that's why I'm very happy to
have Svetluza here today to speak to her chapter and then Rashid
online and I'm not going to run through the
previous launches but we had three launches in South Africa where we
basically managed to to get most of our authors to to explain more
about their chapters.
The idea for the book comes out of an international interdisciplinary
conference that we held in in 2021 with the title the state we're in
democracies fractures fixes and futures and out of that
came this book and and very much it's a very much an interdisciplinary
piece of work we're also spanning different
sectors in the sense of academia civil societies so people also
working as activists to advance democracy we wanted to
to bring one could say South Africans into conversation with
with both with scholars and activists and scholar activists
also from elsewhere in the globe and particularly
the European periphery particularly also reflecting on the Arab world which is
what Rashid is doing and and we've also got a chapter
that's titled queering democracy in Africa
and there we have four people who I would also describe as
scholar activists basically reflecting on advances but
also challenges in queering democracy on the African
continent. We also will be
let me just see what else I want to talk about specifically
so we've got four chapters looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic
including Svetluzas because of course that's something
that we still have to reckon with there's a lot of work happening in this
regard but I would say in the global south less work
actually happening and this is this is an important area to fully understand
the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic also politically
and then just to give you a sense of the book itself
it's divided into four sections got a section on democracy and the law
practices of democracy and the politics of identities
democracy political culture and the economy and then we end off with a
section titled democratic futures
and in our opening chapter that I've written with
as related Jollobi and Sapiwe Dubé we address the disillusionment
with democracy as already alluded to these are
dark times for democracy across the globe
and this is also what we try to capture with with our cover art
which is by South African artist Ricky Diallo
which for me captures the kind of ominous moment that we're in in
terms of of democratic futures we have seen a mass withdrawal of
voters from electoral processes in various
contexts we are seeing an opportunistic politics
of populism that's trying to capitalize on the
socioeconomic misery that's been caused by neoliberal
capitalism and and particularly to try and roll
back the advances that have been made with representative and accountable
democracy during the 20th century just to home
in on on South Africa we have
an Afrobarometer finding that's shown over over several years
how a growing majority of South Africans are willing to sacrifice
democratic gains and agree to an autocratic
government in exchange for law and order housing and jobs
now for a young democracy of of 30 years this is very very troubling we but we
also see this elsewhere in the globe as mentioned and
interestingly resonances have been found with Latin
America as well with their with the America's Barometer
actually finding similar results for for Latin Americans for
example if we look at South Africa specifically
again voter turnout has dropped by almost 40 percent between our first
democratic election in 1994 and the democratic election
in in 2019 we have something like one in three
eligible voters declining to vote in the 2021 local government election
if we look at our election this year we actually have
a turnout if we count eligible voters not only registered voters but eligible
voters our turnout dropped below 40 percent
so what we argue in the chapter is that the crisis of democracy
can be read as a cultural fallout from the economic devastation of neoliberal
globalization the we regard the crisis of democracy
particularly as a problem of the behavior of political elites we think
that sometimes in some analyses there's a
kind of a suggestion that in a sense people who don't who can't
grasp democracy properly are making
wrong decisions and voting for the for the wrong people but we
we in our in our chapter argue that you actually see political elites
driving a particular opportunistic politics
to um to it's also a politics of distraction
to actually throw people of course in terms of the real source of
of socioeconomic misery and um and to pin uh very popularly the
the the problem on on frequently on foreigners
and this is something that you actually see across the globe
um you see resonances of you know of course here
and on this continent but in south africa it's very noticeable
we struggling with the phenomenon of uh xenophobia doesn't actually capture it
with phenomenon of afrophobia of of
basically attacks and and and violence aimed at people from the rest of the
continent of of africa who've arrived in south africa so you
see these kinds of um you see very explicit discourses
actually pinning um the the problems of the moment onto
onto foreigners so you get this this very explicit process of
scapegoating so basically we end off with with an
argument by saying that that uh what needs to be
to be challenged and what needs to be critically interrogated
is how the current neoliberal economic system
has actually brought us to this moment with
uh precarization of of vast swaths of populations that have
been left over to to wallow in extreme socioeconomic
misery and um and that that is actually where
where the attention um should be um let me
uh i think i'll i'm going to end on that note not to take up too much time
and looking forward to to questions and i have to say i find it
schlep all the way from south africa some books
and and they are available i will hand i will pass over my author's discount
so they will be available at a very very decent
price of 16 euros so just to to mention if anybody wants to alleviate my load
you know but i don't have to you know anyway but thank you
all right uh thank you so much um christy for this
for this overview and for taking us through the different um section of the
book and you know appreciating how many different
regions um have kind of fed into into um this edited volume so without um
further ado and of course before we get to questions um we will now move
directly to professor butaie who i will briefly introduce as well
so he is an assistant professor of social philosophy and ethics
at the doher institute for graduate studies he has previously worked as a
lecturer in philosophy anthropology and islamic studies at various universities
in germany and he has also authored numerous research papers on the ethics
and social philosophy of migration in particular
his most recent publications include christus oblige
and uh and modernity and counter vulnerability
so uh rashid uh you have the floor
good afternoon everyone and thank you for having me
first of all i would like to thank professor christy funderbest hoyzen
for her works engagement and solidarity and at the same time i apologize for not
being able to be there in light sick given what is
happening today the ongoing wars the alarming return of
the far right and various forms of tribalism that
besiege democracy from all sides including
the neoliberal one the german concept of guilt democracy
should democracy seems to be of great importance
and not only for the torturous of the past
and their victims surely it is impossible to imagine
a critical thought today that does not consider the forms of manipulation of
historical memory even within a country like germany
whose democracy is inconceivable as hyper mass
explains without this critical relationship with the past
what relationship should we build with the past
how is this past been used and misused politically
why is a democratic transition without a cultural transition
doomed to fail these are some of the questions
that have preoccupied me in my text undoubtedly the past and its cultural
and religious heritage still play a significant role in arab
and islamic politics today a quick look at the middle east and
north african political discourse reveals the negative presence of
religion in politics this uses contrast modernities
epistemological political and human rights achievements
authoritarianism in the region emphasizes particularity
over universal values to consolidate its powers
it realizes itself also as a cultural hegemony
that defends a ridiculous doctrine of religious
and cultural heritage therefore confronting authoritarianism
also requires the construction of a democratic counter culture
with a democratic relationship to religion
let's not forget that in the arab context the three manifestation of
politics represented by authoritarianism salafism
and sectarianism share an ideological interpretation
or an imagined past which defends a closed identity
and is also responsible for the failure of the modernization project
in these region the historical experience of germany and the experience
of a post-eruic policy is of great importance for the arab present
this is precisely what i have chosen to illustrate
using a philosophical political reading of german
and arab stamps he who wants to save his people
can only think heroically it says the slogan of a nazi stamp
the era of heroism ended with the construction of a democratic system in
germany after the second world war but it will
continue elsewhere and where heroism and glory are absent
from reality they will be sought in the past a real or
imagined one and among the dead this is depicted in many postage stamps
from egypt syria jordan and iraq for example celebrate
saladin who liberated jerusalem from the
crusaders indeed we can understand the past as a
weapon of the struggle against colonialism as nelson mandela
did still simultaneously mandela translates
it into the language of modernity law
as the south african sociologist prevon guini expresses it
the struggle mattered him and made him a man with
and not for tradition i would not have thought of writing this
book chapter if not for the small gift i received
from marcus knayer a german theologian and philosopher who
during a scientific trip to tunisia shortly after the tunisian revolution
will acquire a new tunisian stamp alien in every way to its arab context
that shows boazizi the street vendor and his cart
with a caption describing him as the martyr of the tunisian revolution
it was the first time i had seen a face other than
that of kings and presidents on an arab postage stamp
the well-known moroccan historian and tinka abdallah arwi
writes in his book on the concept of the state in the arab context
we discover state before discovering freedom
what needs to be aided to larvis wars is that the state is detached
from the people's destiny and may engage in prolonged and destructive wars
without consulting the people's opinion it is a separatist state because it is
an unfinished one in the language of the tunisian scholar
ali misrani it advocates a modernization that is against modernity
and its political and human rights values and does not
hesitate to falsify heritage and run it in the
ideological battles of the present thanks for your attention
all right thank you so much um uh rasheed um
and uh yeah we're very good in time i realize
so i'm very happy uh that uh to now give the floor to dr sweat loser surova
and uh we just briefly um present her she's the president and
senior researcher at the minority issues research institute headquartered in
bratislava in slovakia and as a senior researcher she investigates minority
policies in serbia and slovakia diasporic policies
and collective identities slovak minority in in serbia she's also
working on projects examining the impact of
covet 19 measures on human and minority rights in slovakia and the political
participation of minorities in serbia has been widely
published in this regard and dr is also an
expert member of the group of friends of minorities in the national council of
slovak republic which has you know prepared
expert analyses of approximately i think 70
laws that directly or indirectly concern minorities
so uh the floor is yours thank you hello to everyone uh let me
first just say that i'm very honored and happy to be here today with
all of you special thanks to professor when there
was reason and to the organizers of this event
in the chapter for this book the divert i have analyzed the official acts of
regional offices of public health during the first and second wave of
covid 19 pandemic in slovakia that especially targeted
marginalized roma communities and the reason why i did this because
slovakia has deployed heavily securitized responses towards these
communities during the first wave of covid 19 pandemic that resulted in the
so-called militarized quarantines of six marginalized roma communities
and during the second wave slovakia was one of a few if not the only EU member
state that continued with these kind of policies
and was closing houses apartment buildings streets and entire settlements
again so this was the puzzle that motivated me to do this study
i tried to collect all the official documents
uh that that ordered measures for marginalized roma communities and i have
collected 58 acts and this is a multi-case study so
each of these act i was treating as separate research cases so i have 58
research cases one for the first wave 57 for the second wave
um and i approached this topic from the political science
and rights-based perspective and i deployed qualitative research
design so in the study i was looking who ordered this measure
which actor what kind of measure was was ordered what was the nature of the
measure based on what kind of legal grounds it
was ordered and for what reasons and since these measures not that only
limited fundamental rights and freedoms of these people
they also violated them i scrutinized all these measures in terms of legality
proportionality and its duration their duration and
again racio behind this was that the legality and proportionality are the
very important elements of the rule of law and also
they can be very useful analytical tools to analyze
if the measures uh adopted during the crisis such as pandemic was were in
accordance with constitution and parliamentary law so
i i created database collected i changed all my research questions
i operationalized them into the indicators i collected data for
and the the result of my analysis um are that in the first way with one act
regional hygienist ordered for bait contact with the
more than 6 000 people live in living in six
roma settlements with the rest of the population
and of course my analysis showed that yes regional hygienists can
adopt this kind of measure but not during the public health threat of the
second degree and during the state of emergency
which was at in place at that time the public health threat of second degree
means that you need to take a special procedure based on a different
law that the this regional hygienist was acting
so because the right
regional hygienist exceeded its scope of competence
the measure was illegal and when it's something illegal then you don't do
other proportionality and other review and in the
second way of all analyzed 57 cases they had the same legal basis they were
basically copy paste just concerning different
roma communities and here in the second way
what has happened that all the measures in the first way
were unlawful and how the legislators dealt with that so instead of pointing
that executive cannot act like this limiting
fundamental rights they exceeded the powers
for ministry of health public health authority and regional
offices of public health but the constitutional court
said no this is not a way to do it you can't do it like that
revoke some provisions and even specifically said that
executive cannot adopt by subordinate legislation the the
norms that would set up the boundaries of limitation of
fundamental rights in other words they said that executive cannot limit human
rights because this power belongs on only to
the legislators but the damage was already done towards
the marginalized roma communities because the regional
hygienists were closing them as on the treadmill
and beside all of this they all these measures
did not included the termination date so they were just broad and then
at the end they were all revoked by arbitrary decisions of the
hygienist without saying what has changed in epidemic
situation in practice so
i don't know yes i have still five minutes but so the conclusions were
that in the first way the measure lacked legal basis the actor
who adopted did not follow procedure it was
illegal unconstitutional more than 6 000 people
had their rights violated in the second way
uh 57 measures again lacked legal basis actually what they did they said that
they act upon the law and protection of public health but
they ordered something else they ordered municipalities and cities
to control if these people adhere to the quarantine measures
ordered isolation at home but by based on the law they did not
have this competence to entrust these actors
so again the measure and and the execution of the measure was
illegal and more than 43 up till from 40 to 43 000 people
were affected with this measure and again illegally
so um yes quarantine is a standard measure for the protection of the
public health but it cannot be adopted without any constraints
it always has to be legal proportionate limited in duration
and also it has to be adopted in an open and transparent way which did not happen
in this case they did not have any data i even asked
all these regional hygienists i'm writing now article about that
and they did not have a data for that and did just
they it was based on the allegedly not adherence to the uh pandemic measures
of of these people
belonging to these communities so
besides all of this uh slovakia as eu member state of course has a
discrete competence in the protection of public health but
it has also other obligations that derive from the international law
concerning human and minority rights and most restrictive measures could not be
discriminatory or disproportionate to minorities which in this
case were so slovakia failed to um
to recognize the euro guaranteed rights for the most vulnerable uh people
and this has of course uh a huge impact for democracy human and
minority rights in slovakia thank you all right thank you so much
uh sweat loser and i think uh yeah this case shows
democratic backlash um it's not only against institutions but in particular
also against minority uh rights right and that there's new
administrative practices um under legal disguise that uh that
come up um i'd now uh like to give the floor to
um professor olf engel to provide reflections
comments and to maybe start our discussion off also with some
open questions um let me briefly introduce him olf engel is a professor
for politics in africa at the institute of african
studies in leipzig he is a visiting professor at the
institute for peace and security studies at adis ababa university in ethiopia
and a professor extraordinary at the institute for political science at
stellenbosch university in south africa and he's currently working on
the african union and challenges in the area of peace and security
as well as on theoretical perspectives for research on regional organizations
and regionalism in the global south olf you have the floor
thank you for your kind introduction and thank you for the great papers and
the really interesting book many chapters i truly enjoyed
reading um being a german social scientist i start off with two
slides two figures oh man if you please
give me the first one this is taken from the most recent bertelsmann
transformation index that looks into um a certain notion of liberal democracy
in uh almost 120 countries worldwide on a scale from one to ten um it
simply shows that the number of free and fair elections
association of assembly rights freedom of expression separation of power and
civil rights declined in the last um
well almost 20 years no 18 years and this is in line with findings that
you may have heard of larry diamond editor of the
journal of democracy who in 2008 stated that we are in a democratic recession
this is giving similar data for the african continent looking at a longer
timeline 1972 to 2023 freedom house index data
which has the advantage of running longer timelines
there are some mythological issues or ideological even
what it shows looking at
political rights and civil liberties is that
with the democratic transition the change in 1989 1990
we saw an improvement of all these data which is kind of
reflecting on baskets of sub-data on a scale from
one to seven and you can see on the left hand side that the whole
debate when it comes to africa still is below
the level of four which would qualify as a
partly free state or whatever and that we
importantly since 2006 have seen again a decline the recession
in the quality of data on democracy in um african countries so
as you can see from that democracies are of course difficult
to compare and the cases discussed in this volume
are really quite unique of course there are unfortunately rather successful
attempts by both liberals and authoritarian nationalists alike
to reduce democracy to liberal democracy you mentioned that at the beginning this
volume i think stands out because it's not the usual northern
political science talk about democracy or the lack thereof
it brings together different perspectives from mainly south africa
but also uganda slovakia and the arab world as we've heard
so what are the reasons for the global crisis of legitimacy provided in this
volume are there any commonalities and
i mean you already used that quote but i will repeat it
in the introduction christie and colleagues argue that i quote
opportunistic politics of populism capitalized on the socio-economic misery
caused by neoliberal capitalism if democracy does not deliver what it
promises to people support support for democracy dwindles
um however to me some conceptual questions still
need further debate and i'm just putting that up so that we can enter a debate
after first in global studies
the varieties of capitalism is a concept acknowledged long time ago
related to heil broner 2008 how does that relate
to a seemingly homogeneous understanding of neo
liberalism employed in in this book by capitalist neoliberalism certainly if
you think of it uh fetcher's neoliberalism in the early
1980s is quite different from neoliberalism
employed by the african national congress in the early 1990s
or is different from um what the german free democrats
propagate today as neoliberalism so that's an issue of
facing something becoming homogeneous to mine like secondly the question
becomes particularly important uh when considering the distorted
function of economies in parts of the global south
numerous examples of state capture patronage
clientelism are cited in this volume and this is little to do with neoliberalism
as the major there's a different problem behind it and you
are already in the role of elites in that thirdly the concept of the
developmental state is proposed by isaac kambouli one of the
contributors to this volume raises the interesting question of how
the past experience of building developmental states at least in africa
which all have been quite authoritarian fits with the quest for inclusive
democracy so i see a tension between for a developmental state and the practices
in the past of those states think of ethiopia run
and others finally the demos needs to be specified more precisely
that remain outside the institutions what exactly is the will of the people
and how can this be addressed by research strategies beyond activist
arguments so luza's chapter is a good example of
how this can be discussed but we still lack a better understanding
of for instance why the majority of south african voters
are did not take part in the may 24 general elections
20 62 percent who were eligible did not take part and this is a huge
decline if compared to the first elections 1994
and 1998 however over and above the volume is posing a
number of very pertinent questions which are addressed from different angles
it would be worthwhile to expand the inquiry beyond the country case studies
and empirically research similar or related questions in other african
countries in latin america and southeast asia
to name but a few global regions where democracy
is in retreat too and sitting here in leipzig today
on 10th of october i suppose we have enough reason to ask ourselves
how is it that a growing majority of the people
wants to abolish democracy by democratic means thank you
all right thank you so much um i think this
gives us already a lot of uh points to to further discuss and with you know
before um uh we open this discussion up uh to the
audience maybe um we give the panelists
a chance to uh to address some of the uh the comments um by olf angle and
is there anyone who would would like to start maybe a hand
tour to christy and then sweat loose and rashid can
can join in i trust olf to to um come with all the hard questions thank
you so much um
so um yeah i do think that neoliberalism definitely
uh like every you know like other ideological phenomena
um is a historically contingent phenomenon
and therefore it um it's not always the same in in all places and at all times
so the but we broadly um understanding as
neoliberalism here is uh well some you know in my other
writing i use a lot of wendy brown's understanding of
of like a more expansive understanding of neoliberalism as a
as a rationality but if you if you drill it down to
to economic policy then for me it refers to deregulation
liberalization informalization and so forth
um and the so the the the slimming down of of the state's uh
welfare functionalities the the boosting of of its security
functionalities and so forth the the idea of the state
as as becoming its primary function is actually to
protect um uh capital and and profit making
basically but of course you know within that very broad
sketch you will have different varieties and different
extents to which countries actually um employ uh neoliberalism and um in south
africa we have seen that the anc has
brought in quite a strong social democratic
dimension in the form of the biggest social security network on the african
continent with something like i think the last
time i looked it's for example we've got about
um i think it's almost half of our population now
are able to access some kind of social security support
so that is that is significant um and that's of course to try and ameliorate
the impact of of neoliberal capitalism but we have all the you know we've got
the commodification of of water we've got um
various uh uh other um uh you know if you look at uh just
capital flows and how and and exchange control and
and those kinds of of phenomena that one you know the
the over reliance on um foreign investment
um the you know all of those kinds of features
we find in this in the south african example so
um so it's so i do i do think that the you probably won't find anywhere in the
world a pure neoliberal um
a purely neoliberal state i think if you find different inflections
and it depends also on the particular historical development of that of that
state in our country of course um we come from a
from a uh a particularly
extractive um capitalist past with with um with almost like a murderous
kind of capitalism if and and the and i'm not saying that
lightly um you know given that our economy to is
by and large based on on minerals and particularly
deep level gold mining and the number of of
of miners who are black men who have sacrificed their lives for the
economy of south africa um because of of the the dangers
associated with that kind of but at the same time not only the
dangers the fact that um that um
there was a chronic underpayment of people so in terms of remuneration not
being properly remunerated to the extent that um
mine workers were receiving less income in 1970
than they were receiving in 1920 so so there you can actually see how that
system that that we call racial capitalism how it actually worked as a
super extractive super exploitive exploitative um system with a very clear
racial inflection and out of and and so the shift in
neoliberalism actually already happens under the national party
um in the late 1970s and i write about that in
my first book white power but you know so so it takes
so i think that i'm mentioning this historical context because i think
neoliberalism will pan out differently depending on
on the historical context um um then in terms of the of state
capture yes in fact the
the beneficiaries and the and the and what shall we call them
not the creators but the you know the state captures
and generally um are quite outspoken against neoliberalism
but one could also say that they actually involve a faction of the ruling
party that is um really part of the african
national congress in south africa that's particularly
uh opposed to to a more neoliberal faction in the party so neoliberalism
still playing a role there um but but your state capture is using
kind of a revolutionary to reconstruct the position themselves against
neoliberal capitalism then uh just um azik kambula's chapter i take your
point around the developmentalism on the african
continent um certainly it has been associated with
authoritarianism and in fact um frequently was used as
as as the ruse for authoritarianism in a sense that
a centralized state um is is the only way
to to drive uh development and um so what isaac kambula is is trying to
say is is it possible for us to have a
developmental state but that's framed within our constitution
and and i think that the the link there is that our constitution is
unusual for the fact that it includes socioeconomic rights
and and so the way i'm understanding his argument and i don't want to put words
in his mouth is that is that he's he's saying is there a
possibility for us to actualize those socioeconomic rights
um in in such a way that we actually create a developmental state that is
still democratic so it is in the democratic futures
section of the book so it is um you know isaac uh sort of challenge
challenging us um to to sort of think further
and um and trying to open a conversation on that um then the the uncounted
in terms of who they are just briefly um so in in our chapter we do try to
explain this mass withdrawal from the electoral process by south africans
the way that we understanding it is that the
that there's been such a disillusionment with
the with holding politicians to account
through the usual process of of elections that people have now
found other um or are trying other methods and that's basically
kind of um how it's playing out is is violent protests at community level
where south africa is a very protest intensive society some
um some say we are we've got more protests
than anywhere else in the world you know but you know we've got more of
everything than ever anywhere else in the world so that's why i don't
completely buy it but but one thing is true we are very protest intensive
and and i think the point is that people have decided to take it to
community level protests to make direct appeals
to um particularly counselors um and and um and then with the with the
hope that national level politicians will pay
attention and come and resolve the problems so we frequently actually have
that situation where a national level politician will go and visit
the specific community hear all about the grievances
promise x y and z and then nothing happens after that
and i think that's why we've also seen protests becoming more violent in an
attempt to to attract attention and and and have
some kind of impact in terms of change um but uh it it
that that shows you the level of disillusionment where where people feel
you know through a direct appeal you know i'd rather try and launch a direct
appeal through violence at community level and
and and hoping to to achieve some kind of
outcome and and these are because these protests are usually about
issues around socioeconomic um uh development
you know so so just to to answer i've made a little bit of a dent in in your
very hard questions thanks yeah thank you so much chrissy um at this
point is there anything um rashid and sweat loser would like to
add from your maybe from your cases or
perspectives or shall we go yes rashid
yes
not directly
i mean uh concerning the problem of neoliberalism
and neoliberalism and democracy i think
it's interesting to uh take a look on the writings of
the german uh economic soci uh sociolog volvgangstrek
that especially his work buying time on the delayed crisis of the democratic
capitalism the processes of the
economization of democracy and the democratization of
economy and at the same time i want to mention also the work of uh
social uh social philosopher uh nancy freza
uh for example in his short short book the old is dying
and the new cannot be born uh she thematized the divorce
in a context like the u.s american one the divorce between the politics of
acknowledgement and the social justice for freza we cannot
we cannot or we cannot criticize for example
the pathology the democratic pathology of
or the populism as as a pathology of democracy
without addressing the problems of social inequalities
yeah professor elf you mentioned a few important points that i would
like to refer to my to my work and uh showcase
their shortcomings such as you mentioned inclusive democracy
uh all these things that i was talking about my research happened in a
institutionally inclusive context of eu member state in 21st century
uh i didn't want to be dramatic in the first
expose but now in the uh loose discussion i can uh
tell you how that happened the police with army with the guns
came to the roma settlements they taped it
and regarded for days and weeks and nobody could have come out and
they didn't care what happened inside they said they
had to bring these measures to protect those people but in my
previous study on securitization and this militarized quarantine i
claimed that they actually exposed them to coronavirus
so again this happened now in the you know in the country we with the
good rankings from uh freedom house when it comes to democracy so
uh but that leads me to another uh
thing that we have democracy in normal times and then we have a crisis
and it's very very very important to look how democracy functions during the
crisis and what we know from the past uh that during the crisis always those
most vulnerable suffer the most and
that's why i think as christy said in her
opening words that is important to to more to do more research
about a covid 19 pandemic and its implications for democracies
so and then yes about these inclusive democracies
i wanted to say about you said that i will paraphrase that when
politicians don't deliver what they promise is that
can you know create these illusions but my case also shows how politicians
how i even write that in my chapter how you
expect that the people will follow the rules if you as a state
authority
do not act upon it you know because state authorities they can act
only based on the constitution as regulated by laws
and then they have the laws that they actually
vote for in parliament and they don't act in accordance with this law so what
we can expect from the people how we can even say you know and there
was all kind of debate however during the pandemic everybody were
blaming those people you know they didn't want to
uh adhere to the measures and they were calling them nasty names and so on
and then we have one of the a hygienist or doctor
who was all the time in the media saying how we have to wear
uh you know protection and distance ourselves dancing on some party
you know not distancing at all so uh so and that brings me you mentioned
to the third point and then i wanted to make a reference the
demos yes who is demos what they want and so on but we have to know that there
is like a people and there is like a people and in this case we see
that there is like a also second class citizens because roma were
treated like a second class citizens not during the crisis all the time but
this this uh this is the extreme to what this kind of
doing business as usual what can actually uh
to what kind of and can lead so um during the crisis or during the normal
times we always have to stick to the rules and always
the the rights of people have to uh be respected
and let me see that that that is all i wanted to say
thank you all right thank you so much um then it's time now to open up uh the
discussion um so please uh free free
to share your comments uh questions of course online as well um you can use
the chat function um and uh yeah i think we have a microphone
i already see one hand up that's very good and please uh briefly introduce
yourself with named institution the question so we have a first question
here
it's for the online guests as well so i'm joshua herbert
i'm a student at university at leipzig i've just started a masters in european
studies um from the uk as well um so i have a
couple of questions but the first most pressing one uh i want to sort of
aim towards under west houston um i agree with a lot
of your sentiment on the theories about um neoliberalism being a
root cause of sort of socioeconomic driving factor that sort of democratic
recession processions that we're seeing for
the best part of a couple of decades now i would say um
but it does seem as well at the same time while i think this is
not a particularly controversial opinion and you hear it sort of quite
widely in academic uh sort of circles it seems that time and time again up
until very recently now the political quote-unquote lessons that
are being learned from elections is almost the exact opposite that
sort of centrist neoliberal policies and politicians
are going to be the saviors of this sort of uh
lurch to the far right um i think that we see this in
a lot of countries the uk in particular uh sort of
labor going far more towards the sort of new labor
principles of the late 90s and sort of this idea that
we don't want extremists on either side so that wouldn't indicate anything
extremely towards the left so it's sensible centrism that will save the day
um and and even more poignantly i think in the french elections where
the coalition of the left um was the sort of driving factor that stopped
uh the pens party and now i think in the last month or so we've seen the
appointment of michelle banier as the new prime minister
who is far more centrist than anyone from that coalition of parties that were
actually successfully democratic um democratic so it just seems that time
and time again we're seeing in the sort of
big players of the european union or or the uk no longer in the european union
um that it seems to be the opposite lessons
that being learned that to combat extremist of the far right we
need much more solid center ground and that would be more business as
usual more neoliberalist policies that has i seem to be sort of understanding
what you're saying actually been the root cause of this
stuff for a long period of time so how do we combat that
being the lesson that is learned by politicians and
and political systems
great thank you so much can we take some more questions is that fine
can we accumulate some questions christie sure
oh yes please sure
thank you um to christie and the other authors of the book
um i haven't read the book we're just listening
and i also had the challenge of simply placing the problem
um on the shoulder of neoliberalism it seems to me that neoliberalism
and democracy in africa almost go hand in hand
in terms of the emergence that they are intrinsically linked there
and i'm wondering uh if the book pays sufficient attention to the forms of
democracy i it's a particular form of democracy that also comes
into africa the procedural form rather than substantive democracy
and how to unpack that a little bit more yes political elites um but
more and more i'm beginning to think around political culture
we have neglected um to look at political culture for various reasons in
the in the 50s and 60s um this was a particular focus of
modernization theory and it didn't sit well with us but i'm
wondering if there isn't something there that we need to go and uncover again
and then just in terms of south africa and the drop in voter turnout
um there's definitely a lack of trust and afrobarometer also shows this
trust deficits in uh political parties and institutions themselves
um and the isc we must remember was also under attack just before those
elections as well the credibility of those elections
were also at stake and then i'm playing around with this
notion of democracy as a conflict resolution mechanism
um and if it's failing um what does that say
about conflict resolution as a whole and the mechanisms that we need to
think about um so i guess i'm asking us to
unpack not just the economic systems as a challenge but
to to go to the political system as well and
construct that too
thank you very much cheryl any other questions at this point
and then um maybe let me add one um also that might be interesting
uh to hear from um from swed loser and rashid and you know
when you were exchanging with other chapter authors on different regions
different kind of national contexts um did you come across any cases of where
you felt oh this is quite similar or there's even some type of maybe
learning process between either pro or anti-democratic forces that are ongoing
between different regions between different of uh different of
the cases that you are that we're looking at um like maybe
mimicking of rhetoric or even like more substantial kind of exchanges
um so if there's anything um in your work that you came across
when you were doing your workshop or you know when you were engaging as chapter
authors um that would be very interesting and
now i hand uh uh flow back to to our panelists um
anyone who would like to start i know most questions were going to direction
south africa so maybe we can start there um
okay thank you thanks for those questions um
so well i think that the fact that the political lessons are not landing with
our political elites um is to do with our power relations
uh have been organized actually very effectively by
neoliberalism over the past 40 odd years and you've you've seen um
because for me neoliberalism is actually a
fundamentally anti-democratic phenomenon
and um and i i it is it has um worked as a system to
roll back the advances that have been made but
through particularly through social democracy
and um and what's what's happened is you've had
a massive redistribution of wealth you know upward
you know up up the the pyramid um and we're all familiar with the one
percent phenomenon etc etc so you have a completely
skew newly skewed readers uh
not really a newly skewed distribution of wealth
with the over over concentration at the top of the pyramid
and uh and we have our political classes running
basically with the economic um classes on this so with with your super wealthy
and so forth and in that sense of our politics
has become very much infected um by uh by this this
neoliberal way of of of looking at the world
for me it's been a very effective system to undo the gains
um made uh in terms of of uh democracy and human rights uh in the
wake of the second world war that it's been extremely effective in
that into and to um take us back to to a situation of
elites that are that are beyond account you know who are
unaccountable who cannot be called to account
and um and where political elites are actually buffering economic elites
you know from from the great unwashed which
includes in the neoliberal system um the middle class because if we look at the
middle class the middle class actually shrinks under neoliberalism
people actually drop out of the middle class
and a new kind of underclass which is not so new anymore because it's been
going on for for a number of decades has been created
that's been called um variously the precariat
um but i think the the the term the precariat actually captures
um this situation of of informalization in fact um and i think that the left have
have not been able to actually meet the challenge of this because
if you and i'm just thinking in terms of of south africa's left
which is very much still married to ideas around
um marxism leninism and so forth and um but yeah we've got a capitalism now
that is actually moved to the point where the worker has become superfluous
the worker is as so the whole idea of a of an organized working class then that
must be the motor force that will now bring us to a socialist
nirvana that is you know that that working class
cannot cannot form because the the worker
has has has been done away with um and we've got in south africa so that's
why i think that the global north have have a lot to learn actually from
how capitalism has been happening our neoliberal capitalism has been
playing out on the periphery of the capitalist world order and um and
in south africa for example the fact that we've got
almost 50 of our population because we've got two definitions the one is a
narrow definition that doesn't count people that have
given up looking for work but if you count both people who are
still looking for work and people who've stopped
we've given up looking for work so then we're almost at the 50 percent
um unemployment rate so and and our so we talked about
structural unemployment so basically in our system you you
the worker has become superfluous you know so
um and i and and of course uh technological changes have have
accelerated this process and ai is now bringing us in into
into a whole new uh situation around actually understanding what is
the future of the worker um so um
so i think basically the yeah you've got an and you've got your
political class that is that is acting at the best of your
of your economic elites um if if we look at um
you know the the u.s system at the moment for example with
um on the one hand a venture capitalist you know as as deputy president or
vice vice presidential candidate you know running with with trump um
carmelo harris who's who's well known um to be to be close to very particular
sections of of of capital as well and so forth
and i think that um that politicians at this point in time are not
they're actually disregarding um the will of the people
um the idea of course that neoliberalism could be centrist
is for me um not correct because neoliberalism i see actually as a
right-wing phenomenon because it is fundamentally anti-democratic
um and it's it's fundamentally against the participation of
of of people um and um and it's uh it's it's very elitist
in its outlook so um but but you're right that
this is how you know this is how our political spectrum has become so skewed
that the neoliberal actors who frequently call themselves socialists
still which you know that's the ridiculousness of
where we are now um are uh yeah so these are neoliberal
actors who call themselves socialists who regard themselves as centrists
but in fact they are serving a right-wing ideology
um so these are the complications that that we are in
um so and sheryl thanks thanks for your question as well um and i think that
um certainly in in south africa there has been a a
neoliberalization of our democracy um through through a an emphasis on
proceduralism um but i i would argue that this
actually comes in a sense the the
there's a strong strand in the ruling party that is
that became enamored with neoliberalism but that that we are also and this is
now part of this contradictory ideological moment
who are also Leninists and and i think neoliberal technocracy
links quite nicely into um the Leninist idea of
of uh of a vanguard party and a you know a
group of select kailas who who you know knows
definitely better than we do and um and and we should still we should
you know just be quiet and you know bring out our vote every five years
but the rest of the time leave the complicated business of government over
to to the political class and that's that
but that was a kind of a line from the ANC almost from
the word go in the late 1990s already so there's been an active attempt at
the demobilization of of of people in south africa um which goes
quite against the kind of discourse that one
that people frequently think that the ANC is busy with which is about
power to the people and all of that but it but in fact
um what you actually see is a discourse of of demobilization
and um and then um interspersed with with you know selective mobilization so
when we need the people then you know then the masses
you almost now come and and do our bidding
basically so um but it's it's it's when the leaders
side it's now time for the masses to make you know some kind of well point on
behalf of the ruling party um so yeah let me stop at that point
and maybe allow some of our other panelists some some inputs as well
thanks sure thank you um Rashid do you wanna respond to some of
the questions concerning the similarities between
the different context i want especially to mention
the conflict between eros and demos in east europe as in the arab world
in east europe it express itself in populism
in a nationalist catholicism in xenophobia
etc and in the arab world as i mentioned it in a
persistent authoritarianism that's why i we have to defend
also outgoing of the social philosophy of the modernity
from Marx until Bourdieu and don't forget also Jean Dewi
the idea that democracy is not only is not only
a form of government but it is a way of life an art or a kind of
societal education or in the words of a german philosopher
Axel Honnett the art of democratic ethical life and
democratish zitlish kites yeah i think in the neoliberal context
we are dealing with a democracy from above
and it seems to collaborate with the
the neoliberal erosion of social institutions
well there were similarities to those chapters that were dealing with
democracy and the law and there was one chapter that dealt
with the one case that end up on constitutional court in
south africa for scrutinizing the
if the measures were the petitionist wanted to
constitutional court to scrutinize from the to defend democracy
that if these measures were democratic or not
and difference i have to say it's really nice to see Rashid like this
i have to say that my chapter was ridiculously long and thank you
christopher for approving that and really horrible to read i don't
recommend to nobody
and but i have to say that Rashid chapter i
had the opportunity to read at the workshop before the workshop and i have
to say that was another chapter it was a belletry it was
so nicely written that i was looking what is this
scientific work or which writer wrote this it was really really nicely written
thank you Rashid for that experience i should add that it was it's definitely
not a horrible chapter to read i mean we we did slim it down somewhat
like it you know but the thing is there was um
it's part partly to do with the fact that you've got a very solid
database um that's actually built up so so there were a lot a lot of
details um and but that to me also speaks to the
substance of of your chapter you know the fact that it's really a substantial
chapter built on on proper data that apparently various power brokers in
the slovakian society are trying to get their hands on this database so
yeah so it's quite a quite a solid piece of work yeah but
not to quote it just to throw it to the trash to
to remove it not that so how about it well because of
suppression more to do with suppression as i understand you know
yeah they want to read get rid of their evidence and if i can say now as a self
promotion something small thing i really wanted to do this as a
for for the future i wanted to collect and document
everything what has happened because i know that because these measures were
published on the internet site you know and
that can be all gone one day but and every nobody will know what has happened
because slovakia actually sold this as i said to professor elf before this
um event as a success story this is a success story of the
slovak MPs in european parliament selling to to their
colleagues so they showcased how you should actually treat rova
and uh and the difficulty why nobody really wants to
talk or to pick up on this topic is because
in the state also you said we have demos we have elites
i agree with christopher you said in your expose how
it's important to look at that but we have also so many different actors
and doing this research as a political political scientist i
i was really um surprised to to see how many actors
actually were participating in this illegal
discriminatory activities and what was the striking finding is that those
people who daily help those roma those in those communities
they were the executors they did not say no
they could have said no no they were arguing to me because before this
chapter i did also allied interviews with all
these people who were making decision about
and these measures and implementing them and evaluating them and they were
saying to me you know like if we don't do it
you know maybe somebody else will do it and they will be worse than us
but in you know what kind of argument is this
i know i'm into germany now i don't want to put the salt on the wounds
from the last century but uh you know so they were saying we are
humanitarians we bring human aid where is needed really
you know so uh but many many things on on this uh study i have also learned
and understood as a as a political scientist
and what is most important that how i got the data
nobody asked me that because of course they know but
but actually they were willing to share because they were willing even to speak
with me because they all wanted to persuade me how this was the right
decision and and even those regional hygienists
that i mentioned uh i spoke with them that they brought
this decision and the end of the interview was please
don't think that i'm a racist i'm not a racist you know but i was not
there as a as a psychologist i was there as a
researcher and i i was listening to everything but
you know they had a need to precede me that they are good good people
but not me i think they were proceeding more themselves so
so that was one side of the story and the other side of story i just shared
with because you are all colleagues studying
that you know uh is some people were sharing
because they were in a political rivalry with somebody else
even in the same government i got the data for the for the other research on
testing from the first wave so they said it's
a lot of positively in those six marginalized roma
communities six thousand people and they said everybody is positive we
had to close them they didn't want to say say the exact number and then i asked
from the ministry of defense and they sent my request to the army
and they sent me their database not the number
the database so i could see how they classify what what was important how
they organized and everything which was for me like wow
and of course there were very little cases
you know positive uh 38 if i remember or not from six thousand people but
many times when i ask uh it's like even that they were in the same government or
colleagues that they wanted to share you know just
to do the harm to the others or so so it was actually i get got a lot of data
and just to finish what what with this because this is
you know it was published but i i was trying last year hard to get some
response from the government previous and this new to to remedy these people
to apologize to them maybe even to bring a law
because there is a similar situation in past happened to roma
women they falsely sterilized them and now in slovakia they try to prepare
a law for that and this is on that i think
on the same level but this was not yet successful
but i i hope that maybe something will change and these people will see the
justice because 50 000 people almost for several weeks to be held their
hostages it's not not acceptable
yeah thank you so much sweat loser i think it's always very important to also
have a glimpse into these um these insights these um yeah
practical yeah practical elements of of of the research and the interactions
with the with the people on the ground um thank
you so much and of course if you wanna support the important
documentation of of cases like this it was mentioned already there's some
hard copies available that you can purchase after this event i
think with christie uh so don't forget about that but we
have time for a last quick round of questions in case there's
still anything on your minds yes i see one hand up here
hi um i'm anna i'm from uni leipzig i just start my master in global studies
and um i will try to understand my question because they're in portuguese
i'm from brazil and i was uh i was thinking
i have a question for one of each i hope it's okay
i would like to ask to christie um i know you were
more writing about south africa but i come from south america
and i think we have a very similar colonial background
uh and um so i would like to ask to you like
what is the challenge and the limits of democracy
when we are talking about the global south because
um is country are countries that came from a colonial
background and then at some point democracy
yeah so how we can um think and manage democracy
when we don't have the learning experience but we are
getting this from outside and i think this is a bit connected with the
question i want to do to hash it i'd really like it
um like to talk about what uses with it we do from the past when we rebuild
democracy all the time and um so i would like to ask you how we
can think uh democratic reference when they don't
exist in the country so for example uh in the case of brazil um we still learn
democracy from outside yeah european democracy u.s democracy
how we can think about democratic past when we don't
it doesn't exist yeah we have natives and then colonial times and then
poor said democracy that was not built with the people
so i don't know if you have an answer and i said i studied history and i don't
think i have an answer for this but i would like to see if you have uh
some ideas how we could think about it and to switzerland i really really like
the exposition about kovit um it was very uh interesting i also
studied a bit of kovit uh in brazil for some time
uh in the bachelor and i would like to ask you
if you found um what ways you found to think about the
democracy when we are looking to these uh groups that are marginalized or
not even considered part of the people when democracy are not working for them
and if you see this this eugenist policy
you can also see this in other groups from the society for example poor people
or immigrants or if this is not something that you
get through it yeah that's my question sorry it was too much
thank you so much uh that's great one question for panelists so
um that will also be kind of rounding up for the discussion so kind
of the last words and i guess we go in the same order christie um
okay thank you yeah thanks thanks for that question
uh i think in the south african case the struggle has always been for democracy
so the imagination uh the political
imagination has actually centered on on the idea of democracy and there's i
don't think that the sense is that democracy is an imposition from
outside um so um the a and c
that's now ruling with a in a coalition government with a reduced majority but
they rule for the past well between 1994 and 2024
and um they are the oldest liberation movement
on on the african continent and i would say very much that
the political imagination that they carried with them was was
centered on democracy what happened with them in exile of course is a whole
other very long conversation that we can't go into now
but um inside the country if you look at the anti-apartheid
uprisings and the anti-apartheid movement
it was very much again built around the democratic
imaginary and so so i think there was a real sense from
you know so so the sense is that democracy is something that's
that is that is sought and and and that can be created through practices
you know by south africans and um and uh you know as racine was saying
that's also how we're approaching it in in the book we're also approaching it
very much as a practice um but the the um
in most recent times because we've got a constitution that
that uh you know entrenches certain rights that
um you know has got certain principles that are
quite liberal democratic but then we've also got social democratic dimensions to
to the constitution so there has been an attempt um
uh to to suggest that the constitution is some
somehow a western import or a western imposition
but that is being very much contested because
um we've had um i think one of our foremost senior councils
who's also an author um tim beca and kuka toyb is his name
he represented south africa actually in the case at the
um uh the case on against israel um now recently um
and and he's written a book for example where he traces the
the beginnings of of of the constitution to black lawyers at the beginning of of
the 20th century so um so very so i think there's there's
quite an intense contestation at the moment
around just handing democracy on a platter to to the west and to say
that democracy is a western idea i think um in fact you know i um
i regard it as an insulting idea that um african people can't imagine democracy
and can't practice democracy and i don't know if Dimitri wants to say
something about the special edition of comparative
that's just come out but um but but the you know that democratic
imaginary that you actually find in other post
independence african states as well and then what happens with the political
elites that's a different question but but i think that there's a disjunction
between the position of the political elites
and and how people understood this um moment this emergence into
independence and the kinds of of democratic rights
that they wanted to claim for themselves and then you've you've got a something
else happening with the political elites so for me that that differentiation is
is um very important and and this kind of research that
that went into the special edition let me do a little plug for it
comparative latest i think it's the latest edition
um read all about it um so this is um the do you want to say a
few words
um but yeah this post-independence moment and
this this um disconnect actually that you see emerging between
political elites and people
institution into africans yeah well i did do that indeed yes
okay but thank you for that thanks thanks everybody for
for the questions and the comments appreciated
thanks chrissy um Rashid
yes concerning the question of historical memory and how
to deal with it i mentioned in my text to two famous
philosophers namely Hapermas and Jacques Derrida and
maybe i want i want to mention now especially Jacques Derrida in his book
Rogue State two essays on reason in this book Jacques Derrida calls after
the 9/11 terrorist attack
his Arab friends to establish a democratic relationship to the
religious texts and to the historical memory
with the aim to overcome what he calls the logic of the brothers or in in
french language it means to overcome the
authority of brothers in politics law and society
and it's a old idea in in the french political philosophy
we find it especially by uh crudle for uh in his uh
in his conception of democracy as a empty place
of power but also as a system that
implies a social division and that's why i tried in my text
to defend the idea that we cannot we cannot establish
a democratic transition without a cultural transition
and thanks for all the questions
it answered yourself Anna thank you for your question i hope
that i understood good have uh was the view on the different type of
type of the minorities uh well uh first i have to say that this
members belonging to marginalized roma communities they are socially and
economically most disadvantaged so they face like
more than 50 percent of them face material deprivation
and the 86 percent for others you know so
they also live in in the houses without no running
water flesh toilets 30 around 30 percent uh they didn't have
access to sanitation disinfect disinfections
equipment so they are most vulnerable vulnerable also i don't want to use the
poor okay but they're most vulnerable in this
sense as well but during different times
political actors they use different kind of discourses against minorities in the
90s it was against hungarians and roma you
know they were seeing them as a threat to
national security roma during the covid were seeing as a
threat uh public health threat and before this
event we spoke a little bit with christy and i also
said that for example now uh the politicians from the
governing party but also many conservatives
uh and christians they see queer people as a threat to the
traditional family you know so this evolves during the time and
all the time changes but now the queer people
uh became as i can i say that what i said
then the new jews uh in in uh in slovak society which is
ridiculous completely because there is so little of them they don't have no
rights they cannot endanger nobody but daily
leads use this rhetoric against them what kind of threat
they pose and not only a socialist
but governing parties social democracy but they get uh support from these
christian democrats you know because they it's not that they are
well they think they have values that are not compatible
uh with the rights for queer queer people and also
what they try to sum under all this
queer rights for queer people under the label of
human rights so for example this government tries to forbid
the discussions or uh education about human rights in primary and
secondary schools
so i don't know if i answered your question but
seems you have yes thank you so much okay well i think we're coming to
an end of this panel discussion um now so i would like to
thank our wonderful panelists again thank you for being here thank you for
joining us online online thank you to our discussions as well
and of course to to all of you here in the room and and
online for for being part and we'd like to invite you now to
continue this discussion if you wish over some light refreshments in an
adjacent room just nearby and yeah so stay a bit engaged uh with
each other with the panelists and um have a nice evening thank you thank you