Contenu du sommaire : L'État participatif

The participatory state
Contemporary political rhetoric is definitively participatory. The way this issue is taken into account in this special issue is to look at these practices and rhetorical political transformations differently, by stepping aside from the vast specialized literature on participatory democracy on one side, and on governance on the other side. To do this, we define a process of state participationism, as a new State thought that defends the introduction of organized procedures of deliberation, participation, and recruitment of non-institutional actors in the decision-making process of public executives. Moreover, we have chosen to study the participationism practiced by authorities holding the legitimate monopoly of enactment of the common good and of the public interest. Far from seeing a “democratization of democracy” in it, this special issue compares different situations taken from different political regimes and societies, including those where the democratic order takes new forms (European Union), is paroxysmal (Switzerland), enchanted (Regional Council of Rhône-Alpes), purely procedural (Burundi), post-authoritarian and dynastic (South Korea) or spoofed (Ben Ali's Tunisia). To do so, this introduction stresses the need to observe its theoretical rationalization and construction, as well as the importance of taking the role of non-governmental actors into account in changes affecting the State thought and the ideology of “good government”. This introduction also insists on the heuristic gains of an approach through different local and social configurations. All these case studies show how these authorities use their monopoly – based on their statutory or electoral legitimacy but also on the authority of science, or on the social pressure and the police control – to set the order of discourse. In the end, analyzed as State thought, the participatory order always reproduces the political and social order in place.

Responding to crises
This article endeavors to contribute to a political sociology of the crisis management instruments developed within the European Commission in the 2000s. The analysis of bureaucratic transactions within the European institutional space highlights the dynamic of creation of these instruments, which have enabled the Commission to carve out an autonomous space of intervention with respect to armed conflicts. In turn, taking into account the social and professional structure of the spaces in which these instruments were designed from their creation to their use in a crisis situation, that of Burundi, sheds an additional light on the effects of the “instrumentation” of crisis management. The hypothesis of the “weak field” is used to trace some dynamics of the deployment of a “governance through delegation” (Boussaguet, Jacquot, 2009) introduced by these instruments, which rely on NGOs for their implementation. On the one hand, these are characterized by a mutual accommodation between the European Commission and NGOs in the structuring of a professional market for crisis management in Brussels. On the other hand, this governance is also embedded in a reciprocal and continuous relation between Brussels and the space of intervention, in Burundi, which played an instrumental role as a laboratory in the shift of international development policies towards the management of violent conflict since the 1990s.

The “invisible pilots” of public participation
The proliferation of participatory devices in a wide range of policies is rarely analyzed as an instrumentation process. However, the study of the administrative and technical aspects of participatory mechanisms reveals their co-production by public and private actors, which make possible a targeting of the “publics” invited to participate. Based on a monograph focused on the creation and the competitive uses of a tool (a central file of registered participants) within the Rhône-Alpes regional council between 2004 and 2010, this article argues that the institutionalization of the supply of “public participation” enables public authorities to produce participatory devices opened to targeted publics, without any true concern about their utility and the social demands that they should satisfy.

State participationism, the government of the “free formation of the opinion” in Switzerland
The rhetoric of participation constitutes one of the topics of institutional discourse in Switzerland. Votes by citizen on questions of policy are taken as the base of a quite unique political system, a semi-direct democracy mixing political stability and citizens' regular participation in the decision making process. In this participationist context where it seems difficult to question the centrality of the sovereign people, public supervision of direct democracy campaigns (referenda and popular initiatives) by means of the rise of “State public relations” is in potential conflict with one of the components of the governmental coalition, the Swiss People's Party (SVP). By means of their popular initiative “Sovereignty of the people without governmental propaganda”, the leaders of that powerful political party, stemming from Zurich's economic elites, try to preserve their dominant position in the field of public opinion management. The modalities of legitimate symbolic violence and the place of the State constitute one of the stakes in this confrontation between supporters and opponents of public intervention in direct democracy campaigns.

Nation branding in South Korea
The conservative government of Lee Myung-bak (2008-2012) founded the Presidential Council on Nation Branding (PCNB) to promote the Korean nation's brand on the international scene. This policy of soft power shows how a participatory policy is implemented in contemporary South Korea. The PCNB has invited, in the name of public-private cooperation, various categories of private agents into the development of its programs in ways that go beyond the usual boundaries between domestic and foreign areas or between public and private affairs. This form of participationism is based on depoliticized and consensual procedures that tend to neutralize any criticism of the neoliberal and “expansionist” character of the PCNB's action. Thus the PCNB is not simply a symptom of nationalism or a political strategy seeking new legitimacy ; it is rather the product of a social belief based on singular participationism mobilizing around economic patriotism in postauthoritarian period.

The European Union, a stakeholders' democracy
Like other governmental and intergovernmental organizations, the European Union has taken in the 1990s a participatory turn in its decision-making and communication policy. The official introduction of the “new European governance” (defined in the White Paper published in 2001) sought to find a lasting institutional solution to the problem of controlling interactions among European policymakers, experts, and representatives of interest. The failure of the ratification referendum of the Constitutional Treaty in 2005 opened a new window of opportunity. It seemed necessary to forget the “neo-corporatist” model of the governance by developing the direct participation of citizens in decision-making processes. Based on empirical work launched in 2005, this article analyzes the (political and intellectual) genesis as well as the structure of opportunity of what is here called an institutional participationism intended to correct “European democracy”. In order to answer these questions, the authors explore the European reform laboratories, where this new procedural theory of the European power has been imagined. The paper shows the institutionalization of this European participationism by following its genealogy from the White Paper on Governance to the European Citizens' Initiative. The authors focus in particular on the role played by social scientists as experts in these democratic innovations.

“Think global act in a bottle”The analysis of development practices in Tunisia helps to highlight how the global discourse of “participation” is translated into local languages of power. So-called “participatory” projects of development have been undertaken by international organisations in this country since the 1990s. They well illustrate the systemic relation between authoritarian dynamics and neoliberal reforms which they are part of. Although these projects may have variable effects, they provide resources and means of renewing political control in authoritarian contexts. Based on the empirical study of participatory projects in the southern region of Gafsa, this article will show how the locally promoted “participation” became a hegemonic grammar in which Ben Ali's regime reformulated its discourse of legitimacy. “Participation” also enabled the regime to deploy new patterns of political surveillance and to enforce the domestication of civil society. “Participation” thus supports authoritarian rule while giving subaltern subjects the opportunity to take part in development projects. But these trajectories of subaltern integration are possible only through integration to the official party in power, deeply entrenched in the state (RCD). These trajectories correspond to neoliberal processes such as the atomization of social mobility and the promotion of self-help and individualized logics.