Democracy Without Boundaries 
Rado Riha 
The title of today's workshop »Democratic Politics Today« relates the question of the possibility of democracy to time. I myself shall attempt to answer this 
question in such a way that it also relates to space. In short, what kind of possibility 
does the individual living within socialism have in answer to the question of the 
possibility of democratic politics today? 
As subjects of scientifics discourse, which by nature is desegregational and universal, 
we all have equal possibilities - as much those living in the West as those living in the 
East - to contribute some new knowledge to the discussion on the possibility of 
democratic politics: But I leave the problematics of the strictly theoretical definition of 
the essence of the political aside here. 
What I am interested is the following question: what chances, we from the East, have 
to intervene in a »democratic discussion«, if we remain in the vestibule of theoretical 
reflection or, furthermore, if we remain with the theoretical generalisation of the 
practical experiences of the struggle for human rights, political plurality and a legal 
state in socialist countries. The justification of such a question is well illustrated in an 
article which the German monthly, Kommune, had devoted not long ago to the 
political happenings in Slovenia; the afore-mentioned article gave a thorough and 
precise description, accompanied by a disconcerting observation that: »the visitor 
from the West«, if I use the author's formulation, is reminded by the democratic 
struggle in Slovenia more of history than of the question of democratic politics today. 
One most probably does not have to stress that the democratic struggles in 
Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia etc. differ amongst themselves in regard to 
their specific context and form as also in regard to their historical tradition, 
development and expansion, etc. But the more we consider their renewed historic 
specificity, their irreductible differences, the more that is common to them comes to 
light. Namely, that they are directed towards that, which in western societies is already 
a fundamental social characteristic, their »common sense«: toward formal democracy 
and towards the abstract, noncontextual subject as its bearer. With this orientation, as 
it seems, towards a certain fundamental sameness of democracy, they open up the 
question which is spontaneously brought up by the afore-mentioned article in the 
Kommune; i.e., can they offer the »visitor from the west« anything truly new at all? 
Here we must reply cautiously. It is obvious that there is enough theoretical 
explanations and empiric evidence for the reciprocal influence of the democratic 
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struggles in the East and in the West. But it is more appropriate to read the above 
question as its own answer. What is produced by the democratic struggles in the East 
as new is the question itself: in what way these struggles are new. Strictly speaking, 
they place the fundamental question to the forefront of what the real core of 
democracy is, of those processes which always come full circle, without regard for the 
diverse historic specificities of »democratic invention«. 
I think that on the basis of the present democratic struggles in Slovenia the following 
claim can be made: Although these struggles are directed towards formal democracy, 
formal democracy is not established as a meta-historic, universal ideal. That, which in 
the actual struggles for political plurality and a legal state always comes full circle, is 
the internal impossibility, the internal barrier of formal democracy, the »democratic 
crises«, which is immanent to the established democracy. The democratic struggles in 
Slovenia are evidence that the internal condition, the true core of democracy, is its 
radical impossibility. 
I shall try to illustrate this claim with three events from the complex of the current 
disintegration of the Yugoslav State and the social community. By event, I understand 
the simblization of some social fact by ist introduction into the network of social and 
political conditions. The afore-mentioned democratic events are: One.) the 
demonstration in Montenegro in the autumn of 1988, where the workers demanded 
the resignation of the republic leadership, and who the police dispersed by force: two.) 
the »unprincipled coalition« formed by the liberal wing of the Yugoslav communists 
at its 17th Conference with the status quo forces: entire Yugoslav and three.) the 
gathering in »Cankarjev Dom« in Ljubljana, collectively organized by official and 
alternative political groups to »Oppose the state of emergency, for peace and 
coexistance in Kosovo«. 
The demonstration in Titograd was understood in Slovenia /if I simplify somewhat/ as 
an attempt to export Milosevic's model of authoritarian populism and that the police 
harassment of the workers was accepted as a democratic act which saved the 
minimum of democratic invention in Yugoslavia. Two things were essential for this 
understanding. First, that it was not based on the level of »true facts« (no one truly 
knew what happened in Montenegro, whether rebelious factors or justified social 
demands of the workers were overruled at the demonstration). Second, that the 
invention of the police was not even attempted to be ideologically justified (that is to 
say, as an act worthy of repentance, but which was urgent for the preservation of 
higher democratic values). In other words: democracy was not preserved by 
truncheons in Montenegro, but by our decision that it was perserved by truncheons. 
This decision was not based on the firm reality of facts nor on this or any other 
imaginary order, but only on itself. In essence, it was an empty, totally formal gesture 
by which we only accepted, as an essential condition of democracy, certain naked 
facticide. 
Furthermore: The coalition Kučan - Šuvar - Army, which came about at the famous 
seventeenth Conference of the Yugoslav League of communists was in itself 
extremely unprincipled and by its context, antidemocratic. Despite this, it was 
received with relief, as it seemed it would at least temporarily stop Miloševič's march 
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for Yugoslavia. But even during the acceptance of this coalition, the awareness that 
this unprincipled coalition had not yet in itself preserved a minimum of democracy 
was vital, and that it was preserved only by our decision that democracy is maintained 
also by alliances which cannot be justified. 
The third event was the gathering in »Cankarjev Dom«. Its direct purpose was to 
oppose that which is trying to affirm itself, through the events in Kosovo, as the 
general model for solving all types of Yugoslav differences and discrepancies: forced 
unification with the assistance of the military-police and legal system. It was 
interesting to witness, for the first time, not only the tolerance of but also 
acknowledgement of the existant political plurality in Slovenia, at the 
afore-mentioned meeting. This gathering was the first step towards the 
institutionalising of political plurality. In other words: the gathering was the moment 
and the place where formal democracy in Slovenia - at least in its embrio - was 
actualized, whereby the different political standpoints also got their bodies. This 
minimal institutionalization, the materialization of formal-democratic efforts is 
expressed in the signature which unites the old political leagues and the new political 
subjects. The meeting could act as a material establishment of formal democracy only 
because it was simultaneously an expression of a new political will. On one hand, it 
was proof that formal democracy exists only as it materialises, as much as it has its 
own institutions. On the other hand, it also revealed that the condition for this 
materialization, the condition for the establishment of formal democracy, is a specific 
act of pure will. In this case it was the decision - which the liberal wing of Slovene 
official politics also noted - that things could no longer continue in that way, that a 
part of Yugoslavia was not willing to cooperate anymore in the systematic destruction 
of legal state. 
I do not even attempt to deny that this decision had its support in reality, that it was as 
much a response to the hard politics of the authoritarian populism as it was to the soft 
politics of further party domination of social life. But the main part of the decision 
was, in my opinion, a specific moment which did not have its support in political 
reality. Its only support was the decision itself. This moment was best defined by 
someone who said that, »We cannot keep on blinding ourselves with brotherhood and 
unity, that realistic politics today are 'serbophobia' politics«. Here we should add only 
this: the 'serbophobia' is not a political category, it is not a category of political reality. 
I am not interested in politics as such. I am interested in the meeting in Cankarjev 
Dom which, in my view, represents a rough model for the establishing of democracy. 
It is a fact that 'serbophobia' is the feature which simply must be added to this 
»democratic invention«. There is, in my opinion, only one way to avoid the fall into 
nationalist and cheap political demagogy: to accept the notion of 'serbophobia' as 
something given without content or sense. We have to accept it as a radically 
contingent moment which is not founded in the political reality nor its imagery. It is 
necessary only in so far as it sprang out exactly at the moment of the establishment of 
democracy. In short, it is another name for democracy. 
We could say, as Lefort did, that the foundation of democracy is in the impossibility to 
determine and to utter its essence. But it is quite another thing to say that democracy is 
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in its essence »undeterminable« because here and now we cannot do otherwise than 
to state that the moment of 'serbophobia' is a part of its constitution. With the latter 
statement the impossibility to define and to utter the essence of democracy fades away 
as something transcendent and appears as something belonging to this world. 
Democratic experience is therefore experience of the radical impossibility as 
something positive, as something given, that is to say, experience that democracy is not 
an unreacheable ideal. We have nothing at hand but nevertheles everything is already 
here. 
There is no doubt that democracy is only formal or it does not exist. The socialist 
giving of the true content to middle-class formal freedoms gave nothing but actual 
non-freedom. But these three events point to the fact that standing for only formal 
democracy without content is by no means empty in itself. 
The symbolic language of formal-democratic relations can act only as much as its 
constitutive part is a specific moment, a specific decision -1 shall call it »democratic 
engagement«. With this term I am not aiming at an active stand for democracy, or at 
true political and social struggles. Democratic engagement is a symbolic, purely formal 
gesture, with which we agree upon the fact that in the midst of democratic conditions, 
in the midst of the struggle for it, there perseveres a specific moment, a positive 
characteristic, which has nothing to do with democracy and its formal freedoms, but 
without which no democracy could exist.