DEMOCRACY AS A BATTLEFIELD. CONTEMPORARY GRASSROOT MASS MOBILISATIONS IN WESTERN EUROPE, "POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY" AND THE REFRAMING OF "DEMOCRACY"

How is ‘democracy’ (re)framed in contemporary Western Europe? Which are the consequences of such a (re)framing? Are they desirable? In the conviction that conceptual articulation is dynamic, historical and immanent to political discourses and practices, the starting point of this research is the observation of significant mass grassroot movements in contemporary (2017-9) Western Europe (UK anti-Brexit, French Yellow Vests, Catalan Independentists). The preliminary study is conducted both through direct on field observation and through the collection of public sources (public speeches, press releases, parliamentary debates, political campaigns, newspapers articles, official reports). The research focuses on the debates those movements sparked within their national contexts about the meaning of ‘democracy’. In particular, these debates address the relation between political legitimacy, ‘the Law’ and ‘popular sovereignty’, and the ways in which contemporary ‘democracy’ can be (re)framed within that scope, in the contention between a ‘legalist-constitutionalist’ and a ‘radical-popular’ understanding of it. The first part of the dissertation provides an overview of the theoretical frame within which the research is developed, mainly focusing on performative and immanentistic ontologies and philosphies of language in the ‘New Wittgenstein’ legacy. In the central part of the work, through the application of the Discourse Theory method, the structuration of such debates will be analysed as a political struggle for the hegemony over ‘democracy’ between antagonistic discourses, grounded in different ontologies and values. Each discourse produces conflicting criteria for political legitimation, participation and inclusion/exclusion and different understandings of political spaces, communities and practices, which can escalate in dramatic conflict. One of the most critical differences regards the relation between the acts of foundation and Constitution of a political community, popular sovereignty and the legitimacy of political practices. Those specific empirical cases, as they explicitly address those issues, are, on the one hand, real examples of a contemporary reframing of the concept of ‘democracy’ and, on the other hand, an opportunity for highlighting pivotal political and philosophical questions. The last part will be a tentative elaboration on the consequences of the reintroduction of a radical understanding of ‘popular sovereignty’ for political stability, inclusion, participation, equality and freedom, of their desirability and of the possibilities for those conflicts to be solved.