Does Antagonism Precede Agonism in Challenging Neoliberalism? The Gezi Resistance in Turkey
Pelin Ayan Musil
Does Antagonism Precede Agonism in Challenging the Neoliberal Order?Mouffe argues that the effective way of challenging the power relations in liberal demo- cratic capitalism is to embrace agonism, not antagonism. That is, the left should acknowl- edge the contingent character of the hegemonic configurations in liberal democracies, and in order to put liberty and equality into practice, it should similarly adopt hegemonic tac- tics. Such tactics include the disarticulation of existing practices as well as creation of new discourses and institutions. Yet, by stating that ‘the task of democracy is to transform the antagonism into agonism,’ Mouffe also implies that antagonism should precede agonism and thus contradicts her very position of how to challenge the neoliberal order. Indeed, the anti-neoliberal movements that occurred in Latin American countries in 1990s as well as in New York, Greece, Spain, and elsewhere during the occupy movement in 2010s show that without the emergence of antagonism, there is no room for the development of democracy in an agonistic way.
In defense of this argument, this article conducts a within case research in Turkey in order to attain a deeper analysis of how the rise of a social movement can transform the con- flicts and power relationships in neoliberalism from being hidden to being visible: The social movement in Turkey helped in the discursive construction of a left-wing identity that represented ‘everything but the repressive and authoritarian government’ and thus acted as the neoliberal government’s constitutive other. Prior to the appearance of the social movement, yet, the hegemonic articulations of the neoliberal order prevented agonistic politics from arising in the first place. This article thus argues that the agonistic approach of democracy can only emerge following an open antagonistic construction of the we/they relation in a neoliberal order.
