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CHAPTER 18 Belarusian-Specific Nature of the Public Sphere: “Invisible Wall” The Polish political scientist E. Wnuk-Lipiński writes about the pluralization of the public sphere, which took place with the disappearance of the rigid control the communist system had over public life. In the conditions of a democratic system “articulation of interests and expression of values are not limited by anything, nor the possibility of institutionalization of social forces focused around different interests and differentiated systems of values is limited. These differentiated interests and values that circulate in public sphere can be interpreted to a certain extent as an institutionalized bunch of claims addressed to other members of public life or state institutions.”1 Pluralization of public sphere is connected with settling such rules of the game in public sphere that, albeit being controlled by the state, are nevertheless established in accordance with democratic procedures. However, as Wnuk-Lipiński writes,“the less democratic a state is, the more narrow is the range of actions permissible in public life and the less is the degree of autonomy of these actions in relations to the state. In cases of a totalitarian state, in public life only such forms of activity are permitted that are initiated by the state and are completely controlled by it.”2 At the same time, many authors who analyze public life and the public sphere in those Western societies often referred to as “old democracies” call attention to the fact that the logic of “a public’s” existence is not always easily combined with the idea of pluralism of its subjects. There has been debate over whether, for example, Habermas’s theory implies a unitary public sphere or multiple publics. Michael Warner in his essay “Publics and Counterpublics” writes that the sense of public as such implies the public as a kind of social totality. “Its most common sense is that of the people in general. It might be the people organized as the nation, the commonwealth , the city, the state, or some other community. It might be very general, as in Christendom or humanity. But in each case the public, as a 1 E. Wnuk-Lipiński, Socjologia życia publicznego (Warsaw: Scholar, 2005), 188. 2 Wnuk-Lipiński, Socjologia życia publicznego, 211–12. people, is thought to include everyone within the field in question.”3 Nancy Fraser in her article “Rethinking Public Sphere” analyzes the forms of participation in public life by members of different subgroups,“minorities.”As she observed, when public discourse is understood only as a single, overarching public, members of subgroups have no space to express their needs, objectives, and strategies. Fraser writes that such social subgroups as women, workers, people of color, and gays and lesbians are forced to constitute alternative publics.4 These parallel public spheres serve as arenas for members of social subgroups to articulate and manifest their interests and identity. There is a certain paradox in the existence of multiple publics and tendency toward their integration as Craig Calhoun points out. Although “publics” may be multiple in many senses, but “where public discourse addresses, and/or is occasioned by, a state, there is a pressure for reaching integration at the level of that state. It is necessary for plural publics to sustain relations with one another if they are to facilitate democracy within that state by informing its actions.”5 The aspiration of the public sphere to an inner integration at the state level inherent in democratic systems, in non-democratic conditions is reduced to a rigid policy of separation and exclusion of those with opposing views. Representation of interests in the public sphere appears subordinate to the logic of confrontation of two disconnected but, in a way, selfsuf ficient public spheres. One can say that a social subgroup in Belarus is the part of the society that in a radically different way understands its Belarusianness, has different views on the basic contents of the Belarusian national idea. The alternative position refers not only to aspects of individual identification of members of such groups, but also to fundamental issues of life in the state, as well as to understanding of the national essence of this very state. This leads to shaping of two parallel discursive arenas and, in principle, two “public spheres.” Each of them functions based on its own sources of information (state run and non-state run media), its own social organizations (state institutions, educational establishments, on the one hand, and NGOs and...

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