Nation und Repräsentation

Michel Dormal sheds new light on the fuzzy relationship between democracy and the nation. He does not start from notions of collective identity but from recent theories of political representation. Public representation of social conflict creates collective narratives in a way that most theories of nationhood tend to overlook. In constant dialogue with authors such as Claude Lefort, Ernesto Laclau, Benedict Anderson or Pierre Rosanvallon, and combining approaches from political theory and history, Dormal develops a dynamic theory of how political community is constructed in democracy. In the concluding chapter, he addresses contemporary issues of transnational democracy and argues that we should avoid the parallel traps of nationalistic nostalgia and radical dissolution of boundaries.