ABSTRACT
Postmodernity allows for the hybridity of politics, but that means, as Chantal Mouffe argues, that societies accustomed to the naturalized values of deliberative democracy must develop new institutions appropriate to the constructed and complex values of postmodern democracy where all unities are provisional. Politics is perpetual contest, not something rational, resolved and singular, so it is necessary to build institutions for manifesting and maintaining dissent. By accepting the postmodern condition in which all systems function differentially, we accept that differences are the only basis for those provisional linkages that maintain democracy. The democratic system can be maintained, in other words, only through revising our specifications of it in ways appropriate to the contested postmodern condition. Mouffe argues that the very condition of postmodern democracy is ‘agonistic’ (as distinct from ‘antagonistic’), hence her redefinition of ‘democracy as agonistic pluralism’. In an international context especially, positive possibilities are opened up precisely by increased cultural division and decreased cultural homogeneity.
