Neve Gordon, ‘Democracy and Colonialism’, Theory and Event 13, 2 (2010).

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, 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. 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, 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. 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.

[…]

Turning once again to the Israeli case, one finds that many on the political left currently claim that the two-state solution is passé. In other words, the solution whereby Israel withdraws to the pre-1967 borders and a Palestinian state is created in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem cannot be implemented due to Israel’s project of settler colonialism that has led to the intricate interweaving of the two people—so much so that they cannot be separated. In Meron Benvenisti words you simply “cannot unscramble that egg.”

The claim, then, is that the only possible way to undo Israeli colonialism is through the one-state solution. There are, of course, two very different possibilities for this one-state solution. The one that currently exists is an apartheid regime, which will only become more manifest in the next decade as the Palestinian population becomes a majority within the territory Israel controls. The other is the bi-national democratic state, which entails the full incorporation of all Palestinians into the citizen bod (including those from the Diaspora who wish to return), some form of power sharing on the federal level between Palestinians and Jews and the adoption of a parity of esteem – the idea that each side will respect the other side’s identity, language, culture, and religion. In the context of our discussion, the bi-national one-state solution constitutes a radical extension of democracy by the dramatic broadening of the conception of the people.

It is unclear how events will unfold or how the situation will develop. One does know, however, that the bi-national one-state solution is gaining considerable grounds, so much so, that the NYT recently published an op-ed about it. Furthermore, the bi-national one-state solution has become one of the possible solutions to the conflict only because Israel’s colonial project has been so successful; over the past two decades, the Jewish settlers have penetrated so deeply into the Occupied Territories that in order to undo the colonization, Israel might indeed need to incorporate the colonized people. From a different perspective, the official Israeli government line considers the bi-national one-state solution an existential threat because it will destroy the existing conception of the people, and, consequently, may put an end to the current formation and conception of the nation.