ABSTRACT

As a political system, democracy generally derives its legitimacy through the claim of broad popular participation. Although many social scientists have examined how socioeconomic factors facilitate or erode the institutional basis for public involvement in democratic politics, recent discussions of the cultural dimension of democratic engagement raise questions that need to be addressed. One dominant conceptualization, often employed in large-scale surveys, views culture in terms of subjective, individual-level orientations toward political values or social trust. But such approaches cannot easily come to terms with the puzzle of how discriminatory, racist, and expansionist collective narratives-even to the point of ethnic cleansing-could develop and become dominant in societies where most members share some commitment to democratic values (see, e.g., Mann 2005). In contrast, those who consider political cultures as fundamentally hegemonic and therefore exclusionary tend to focus on tracing the macro processes that shape dominant discursive constellations. But here, too, an important question arises: How is democratic consolidation to develop if hegemonic struggles are inevitable? What, in general, are the cultural conditions or mechanisms that would facilitate democratic consolidation in the face of ongoing social domination or counter-hegemonic struggles? The question about democratic consolidation amidst serious social divisions appears

particularly pressing in many young, fragile democracies in post-colonial Asia and Africa. Few of these countries have achieved the desired outcome of stable, multicultural civil society; many have experienced either outbreaks of civil war, tribalism, or regression into authoritarian rule (Moore 2001; Magnusson and Clark 2005). Faced with the challenge of building a coherent society after decades of colonialism, dictatorship, and anti-colonial struggles, most post-colonial democracies are stretched between addressing legacies of profound anger and inequality and envisioning a civil community capable of communication and cooperation across deep racial and political divides (Monga 1995). Overall, these diverse societies have followed, sometimes in combination, three paths: “to separate along the lines of their differences, to repress their differences, or to constitute their unity through discourse across the lines of their differences” (Calhoun 1995: 268-69). While the “third option” is no doubt the most desirable, its realization is also the most difficult. “One of the crucial questions of the modern era,” then, is precisely “how often and

under what circumstances the third option-meaningful, politically efficacious public discourse without fragmentation or repression-can be achieved” (Calhoun 1995: 269). With the possibility of civil solidarity as one of its central theoretical and empirical

puzzles, scholarship on civil society often is focused on advancing discussions about “the third option,” or the possibility of democratic consolidation amidst hegemonic struggles. On a general conceptual map, civil society can be broadly described as (1) located in a social sphere of associations or informal networks that is autonomous from the state and the family, and (2) sharing a ubiquitous culture of civility that informs individuals’ participation in this social sphere (Hall 1995; Bryant 1995; see Alexander 2006 for a detailed discussion of the concept). Although most contemporary students of civil society trace the origin of the concept to the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, scholars differ over how to properly conceptualize civil society, e.g. whether the idea of an autonomous sphere of association should encompass or exclude the economy and religion, whether legacies of rational individualism are essential to the definition of the culture of civility or merely one of its numerous possible empirical manifestations, or how well the concept of civil society can travel outside of its Western birthplace. Books devoted to discussions of these issues fill shelves at libraries, extending far beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless, the diverse approaches generally agree on the importance of civil solidarity, or a sense of “we-ness” that sustains a healthy tension between differences and social integration, either as a defining cultural feature or a desired goal of civil society.