Democracy and Colonialism

For some time now I have been pondering the closely knit relationship between democracy and colonialism. Notwithstanding the widespread conception among democracy theorists that there is a contradiction between the two,² in this paper I contend that colonialism has served as a crucial component in the historical processes through which modern democracies were created and sustained.³ Focusing on the production of “the people”—namely, those who are acknowledged as citizens and consequently have been granted the right to participate in political decisions—I maintain that colonialism has been deployed by democracy as a force that unifies, limits, and stabilizes the people within the metropole by employing violent forms of exclusion. And yet, unlike other forms of exclusion which have been deemed accidents or aberrations and regarded as symptoms of democracy’s evolutionary development,⁴ political scientists have often assumed that colonialism is totally alien to democracy and indeed antithetical to the two basic democratic principles: sovereignty of the people and equality.

I, by contrast, follow post-colonial theorists to argue that colonialism is a strategy employed by democracies (and, of course, other regimes) as a way of achieving not only geopolitical and economic goals, but also as a way of accomplishing social and political objectives within the metropole.⁵ Colonialism, in other words, also has a strategic role at home and the different forms of power that manifest themselves in the colony can be readily traced back to the democratic metropole. Moreover, the series of exclusions that colonialism produces are, I claim, part of democracy’s very logic and can operate in tandem with democracy’s basic principles. Insofar as this is the case, the democracy/colonial relationship can teach us something important about democracy for it reveals, using Michael Mann’s phrase, one of the dark sides of the so-called best possible regime. It underscores, for example, how democracy’s universalist and inclusionary claims are always bound up in colonial exclusionary practices that are implemented through the deployment of violence. My objective in this paper, however, is to further complicate this relationship by suggesting that the colonial practices and mechanisms deployed by democracies to limit and stabilize the people tend to return to haunt the democratic colonizers. Colonialism ends up engendering processes that destabilize the notion of the people and, consequently, produces a double movement that both contracts and extends democracy. What begins as a project of subjugation, may, at times, acquire an unexpected edge of inclusion.

Israel and Colonialism

The peculiar or, more precisely, bewildering relationship between democracy and colonialism is exceptionally urgent for me because I live in Israel. To be sure, according to the dominant worldview the Jewish state is the only proper democracy in the Middle East. Former President George W. Bush said as much when he appeared before the Israeli Knesset in 2008: “We believe that democracy is the only way to ensure human rights. So we consider it a source of shame that the United Nations routinely passes more human rights resolutions against the freest democracy in the Middle East than any other nation in the world.” ⁶ President Barack Obama made a similar point when he spoke to AIPAC: “Our job is to rebuild the road to real peace and lasting security throughout the region. That effort begins with a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel, our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy.”⁷

The notion that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East is informed by the production of “the people” and the formation of the nation. Although one cannot conflate the people with the nation (after all, in Israel 20 percent of the citizens are Palestinians and accordingly not part of the nation), taking the nation into account is also, no doubt, crucial for understanding the connection between democracy and colonialism. Indeed, it is through the demarcation of the people and the careful configuration of the nation that Israel can be at one and the same time both a democracy and a colonizing state.⁸

There are numerous ways to conceptualize Israel’s colonial project depending on one’s historical and...