Democracy without a Demos

Is it possible to have a functioning society without the members of that society regarding themselves as a single coherent group?

Politics is impossible where there is no genuine community.

The basic requirement for collective political action is the pre-existence of a specific community, whose coherence and self-identification are already pre-supposed by the possibility of political activity. Politics occurs within society, and cannot be conceived outside it. For any man to be politically active, there is assumed to be a social relation between that man and those with whom he acts, who act on his behalf, and on whose behalf he acts. Such communities are historical developments, and exist only in terms of their own history. They require “a self-identification of each part with the whole.¹”

Debates about the impact of immigration typically focus on its effects. Are migrants fiscal contributors or extractors?; are there differential impacts on crime (and what are the patterns of criminality)?; what impact do newcomers have on our attitudes to homosexuality, anti-semitism, or female education? Yet there is a far deeper question - one that is rarely discussed but which ought to be the primary concern for any immigration policy: is it possible to have a functioning society without the members of that society regarding themselves as a single coherent group? Do all the members of a society regard themselves as us? - and is it even possible for us to have a functioning society if that ingredient is missing? In short, is it possible to have democracy without a demos?

Alex Salmond: “Scotland has decided No at this stage … I call on all of Scotland to follow suit in accepting the democratic verdict of the people of Scotland”.

Scotland voted in 2014 on the possibility of independence. For this to occur there had to be a pre-existing collective of people who recognised themselves as ‘Scottish’ and who were prepared to engage in a shared political process and defer to the decision of those whom they recognised as their neighbours. There also had to be a recognition by those who were not Scottish that such a transcendence of personal and collective identity existed, in order for the question to be asked. It was understood by both the British state and the Scottish Government that this was a legitimate question and that there was no ambiguity about the terms of the question. A vote could not have been held for independence for the most westerly two-thirds of the Scottish Highlands, as there is no such recognised community.

Similarly, there was no suggestion, after the vote, that we would simply take those constituencies within Scotland which voted for independence and produce an independent country consisting of them alone; leaving those which voted ‘No’ to remain in the Union. If this were to happen then there would be a possibility of infinite regress. One city may have voted for independence, but there are undoubtedly districts within it which did not. Within such districts there would be similarly dissenting streets. In such circumstances, why should all of Dundee be permitted to compel their fellow Unionists to follow them into an independent state? In both instances, a majority is compelling a minority. The difference, however, is that in all these cases it is understood that there is a pre-existing community – that of Scotland – which can find political expression; whether this be for devolution or independence. There is no such pre-political community as Commercial Street, Dundee.

There must be a prior conception of a community for any political activity to occur at all. This is true even if it only exists for the purposes of self-abnegation – as in 1707 – or in the recognition of itself as a component of a greater whole – as in 2014.

Such a truism should be obvious, but contemporary political discourse seems unable to think it through to its logical conclusion. We talk about immigration in terms of net figures; so many in, and so many out. We talk about fiscal impact, or the perpetrators or victims of crimes. These are important questions. But they are superseded by the fundamental question: who are we? Is there a we at all? Is everyone in the world just as entitled to belong to us, and would they all feel the same about our (note the word) community as we do? Norman Tebbit was widely mocked for his cricket test: do the immigrants who move here (and their children) feel the same sense of attachment to this country as they do to that of their ancestors? This is not a trivial question. Our Foreign Secretary describes himself as ‘Caribbean’ and uses the word ‘we’ in reference, not to the country he represents, but to the region his parents came from. A Liberal Democrat MP talks of ‘our’ home and ‘our’ land: she is not referring to the Chilterns but to Palestine. Who is included in this first-person collective?

The reason this truism is so important is that the absence of a coherent demos is catastrophic, and makes political activity impossible. Everyone (now) knows that the neocons who believed they could simply remove the Ba’ath Party and impose one-man-one-vote elections were naive. But have they really understood why? A major reason Iraq descended into civil war is that there was never any collective ‘Iraqi’ identity strong enough to resist sectarian tensions. Iraq was just a series of borders drawn on the map during the First World War. Faisal, the first monarch of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, lamented in 1933 that “There is still – and I say this with a heart of sorrow – no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever”².

King Faisal: First monarch of Iraq, and comrade-in-arms of Lawrence of Arabia.

This points to the core problem of politics without a polity, democracy without a demos. Consider a case nearer to home: Northern Ireland. Four centuries ago, a significant demographic movement took place amongst people with a broadly shared history, but who differed in their theological doctrines and political attachments. 400 years later we are obliged to adopt a political system which we don’t apply anywhere else in the Realm. This is not imposed on Northern Ireland because we believe the Single Transferable Vote - Proportional Representation system to be superior to First Past the Post, but because we are faced with the reality that unless we artificially rig the system so that both ‘communities’ are perpetually included in government, violence will erupt. After almost half a millenia, we have to accept the indignity of murderers being released for political reasons simply in order to maintain good relations between the two communities. 

It is not simply grand politics which demands a coherent community; all the subordinate activities of a society require this also. Jury trials only operate if the juries are focussed on the merits of the case and consider themselves to be one people, rather than members of factions. Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls for twenty years, was forced to retire for suggesting that jurors from separate backgrounds might assess cases differently if we ceased to be a homogenous people³: the entirety of the American nation followed the O.J. Simpson trial for over a year, yet the conclusions arrived at were split almost entirely on racial lines. Foreign policy is also affected by such dynamics. British by-elections can easily be dominated by issues such as Kashmir. When they are, we don’t find that every person of South Asian heritage in Britain is independently analysing the merits of the argument and arriving at a conclusion. They are picking a side: their side. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of any international conflict, it is increasingly preferable for Britain to maintain an isolationist stance, for fear of alienating voters or provoking disorder from elements of our population who have primary allegiances and attachments elsewhere.

Students at Augustana College react to the OJ Simpson verdict.

One of the tragedies of this situation is that Britain had historically been excellent at assimilating newcomers. Regardless of race or creed, Britain at its peak has enabled immigrants and their descendants to participate in every element of life. The first ethnically Indian Members of Parliament were elected in the 19th century: 1892 for the Liberal Party, and 1895 for the Conservatives. British culture was simultaneously homogenous, whilst highly individualistic and idiosyncratic: a nation with an intense social conscience whilst also the home of eccentrics. In the words of a group of Labour Party backbenchers in 1948, we enjoyed “a profound unity without uniformity in [our] way of life⁴.” Assimilation of migrants was easy when we were culturally confident, and when the numbers were small. Isaiah Berlin, coming to an English public school at 12 years old, was immediately assimilated into English life. Yet the sheer volume of arrivals in recent decades makes such assimilation impossible. In fact, the volumes are so large that the character of the nation necessarily changes rapidly - and it then becomes politically incorrect to expect the newcomers to assimilate. Whereas our literary and cultural heritage ought to be used to integrate newcomers, the reverse approach takes place: demands are made to ‘decolonise’ a curriculum which is dismissed as the product of dead, white, males who no longer represent the changed character of our community. Commentators such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argue that it ought to be the host nation’s job to assimilate to the migrants. In October 2000 the Parekh Report concluded that Britain was now “a community of communities”.

Democracy can only operate within the framework of a coherent and self-identifying society. As things stand, our current immigration policies are undermining the very foundation of civil society, and on which our law, political institutions, mores, and culture depend. 

1. Enoch Powell, Wrestling with the Angel (1977), p.5

2. James Barr, Setting the Desert on Fire (2007), p.307

3. James Wilson, Lord Denning: Life, Law, and Legacy (2022), p. 257 - 259

4. Ed West, The Diversity Illusion (2013), p. 28