Sporadic Democracy : Education , Democracy and the Question of Inclusion

In this paper I take up the question of the relationship between democracy and inclusion. I present the deliberative turn in democratic theory as an attempt to overcome ‘external exclusion’ and discuss Iris Young’s work as an attempt to overcome ‘internal exclusions.’ I argue that although attempts to make democracy more inclusive are laudable, they are ultimately based upon a colonial conception of democratisation, one in which inclusion is seen as a process where those who are already on the inside include others into their sphere. I use the work of Jacques Rancière to argue for an understanding of democratisation as the interruption of the existing political order from the outside in the name of equality. This can not only help us to think differently about the role of inclusion in democracy. It also urges us to see that there are opportunities for the democratisation of education that lie beyond the inclusion of ‘newcomers’ into the existing democratic order. “The guarantee of democracy is not the filling up of all the dead times and empty spaces by the forms of participation or of counterpower: it is the continual renewal of the actors and of the forms of their actions, the ever-open possibility of the fresh emergence of this fleeting subject.” Jacques Rancière (1995 p.61) 1. Democracy and Inclusion It could well be argued that inclusion is one of the core values, if not the core value of democracy. The ‘point’ of democracy, after all, is the inclusion of everyone (the whole demos) into the ruling (kratein) of society. This is why Pericles defined democracy as the situation in which “power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people” (Held 1987, p.16) and it is why Aristotle wrote about democracy as the “rule of all over each and of each by turns over all” (ibid., p.19). Inclusion also affects the legitimacy of democracy because, as Iris Young has pointed out, the normative legitimacy of democratic decision-making precisely depends “on the degree to which those affected by it have been included in the decision-making processes and have had the opportunity to influence the outcomes” (Young 2000, pp.5-6). Inclusion is not only the main point and purpose of democracy; it is also one of its main problems. The question that has haunted democracy from day one (and in a sense already troubled democracy before it took off) is the question ‘Who are to be included in the (definition of the) demos?’ This is the question of democratic citizenship and we know all too well that in the city-state of Athens citizenship was a highly restricted affair. Only Athenian men over the age of 20 were eligible for citizenship. Women, children, slaves (who made up about 60% of the population) and immigrants, even from families who had settled in Athens several generations earlier, were simply excluded from political participation (Held 1987, p.23).