Communicative democracy does not forgo the state in favour of deliberation among those in civil society. Instead, the state is “a subsystem specialized for collectively binding decisions” (Habermas 1996, 300). The deliberative process points the activities of the subsystem and its administrative power in specific directions. Relationally, deliberative power generates from the public sphere, the periphery of the nucleus that is the state. Deliberations pass from the periphery into the nucleus of administrative processes in order that the state may formally institute them. Law and politics, in Habermas’ view, help to reduce the social complexity of a large, diverse society. He writes, “The basic rights and principles of government by law can be understood as so many steps toward reducing the unavoidable complexity evident in the necessary deviations from the model of pure
communication” (327).
The state also functions as an important institution for the promotion of justice by providing the buttresses against oppression. According to Young, one should understand justice as both self- determination and self-development. She writes:
Self-development means being able actively to engage in the world and grow. Just social institutions provide conditions for all persons to learn and use satisfying and expansive skills in socially recognized settings, and enable them to play and communicate with others or express their feelings and perspective on social life in contexts where others can listen. Self-development in this sense certainly entails meeting people’s basic needs for food, shelter, health care, and so on. It also entails the use of resources for education and training. Self- development does not depend simply on a certain distribution of materials goods. Using satisfying skills and having one’s particular
cultural modes of expression and ways of life recognized also depend on the organization of the division of labour and the structures of communication and co-operation. While self- development is thus not reducible to the distribution of resources, market- and profit-oriented economic processes particularly impinge on the ability of many to develop and exercise capacities. Because this is so, pursuit of justice as self-development cannot rely on the communicative and organizational activities of civil society alone, but requires positive state intervention to regulate and direct economic activity (2000a, 184).
The state acts as the formal institutor of structures that allow plural publics of self-determining people to engage each other in a way that promotes learning and combats institutional oppression. While the state and civil society are complementary, there is a tension between the deliberative public and the state because there is a tension between “participating in one’s action and determining the condition of one’s action” and actively engaging and growing in a diverse world (Young 2000a, 32). Self- determination without the formal and centralized regulations of the state may lead to competition and selfishness among plural publics while a state without a deliberative public sphere may fail “to take account of individual, group and local differences” (190). In other words, communicative democracy promotes “relational autonomy” in which “persons [can] pursue their own ends in the context of relationships in which others may do the same” (231).62 The state provides the context and ensures
formal regulations to bring attention to the relationships among diverse peoples.
This formal procedure of self-development must still adhere to communicative power despite its location in the political sphere. Habermas (1996) writes, “The constitutional state does not represent a finished structure but a delicate and sensitive—above all fallible and revisable—enterprise, whose purpose is to realize the system of rights anew in changing circumstances, that is, to interpret the system of rights better, to institutionalize it more appropriately, and to draw out its contents more radically” (384). In some cases, the state may reverse the circulation of power, generate decisions from within, and project them outward into the periphery. In this case, Habermas contends, “The only
62 Quite simply, relational autonomy refers to the fact that “people live together.” Young (2000a)
continues, it is “because they are together, they are all affected by and relate to the geographical and atmospheric environment, and the structural consequences of the fact that they all move in and around this region in distinct and relatively uncoordinated paths and local interactions” (222).
decisive question concerns which power constellations these patterns reflect and how the latter can be changed. This in turn depends on whether the settled routines remain open to renovative impulses from the periphery” (357). In other words, the decisions from within the administrative nucleus must be susceptible to the deliberative processes of the public sphere to maintain legitimate democratic authority. The periphery is not responsible for formally instituting its deliberations—that is the responsibility of the administrative nucleus. According to Habermas, one should not view this role for the periphery as incapacitation. He writes, “The administration does not, for the most part, itself produce the relevant knowledge but draws it from the knowledge system or other intermediaries” (372). Ideally, deliberation among affected parties translates from communicative power into legislative and legal power. Those within the nucleus of formal power do enter the public domain of communicative procedures but they may do so “only insofar as they make convincing contributions to the solution of problems that have been perceived by the public or have been put on the public agenda with the public’s consent. In a similar vein, political parties would have to participate in the opinion- and will-formation from the public’s own perspective” (379). The ability for the deliberative public to influence the political sphere may seem difficult, but power shifts from the political to the
communicative with the greater vibrancy of affected peoples (i.e., the public). The state and
deliberative politics are interwoven. In a complex society, the state may act as formal administrator, ultimate decision maker, and participant in the deliberative process, but only insofar as it
acknowledges the communicative power of the deliberative public as the cornerstone of a just democracy.63
4.2.3 How can deliberative politics extend to include multiple political jurisdictions