A New Research Focus at the Forschungskolleg Humanwisschaften

Democratic Vistas. Reflections on the Atlantic World

beginning 2021

»Today, ahead, though dimly yet, we see, in vistas, a copious, sane, gigantic offspring,« the poet and journalist Walt Whitman wrote in the opening paragraph of his 1871 essay Democratic Vistas. Democracy, Whitman contended, denoted a political and social order oriented to the future. It was an orientation that befitted the United States of America, a country without much of a past. What little of a past it did have was stained by slavery and four years of staggering bloodshed among its citizens. And yet, Whitman insisted, though discernible only dimly, American democracy promised to bring forth »gigantic offspring.« That promise, however, came at the price of peril: »The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of Feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.« The nature of democracy, Whitman recognized, lies in its contingency. Democracies have no foundation but their own poetic self-making. They exist in a radically open future. Democracy is an experiment in the pursuit of freedom, equality, and happiness. Yet experiments, by necessity, can go wrong. The specter of tyranny is, and must remain, the underside of making and remaking the collective self.

 

Whitman made the strategic decision to »use the words America and Democracy as convertible terms.« When, some fifty years later, »the Atlantic World« came into being as a new concept, it, too, was imagined as convertible with »democracy.« The »Atlantic World« was the coinage of the influential American journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann (who later also originated the phrase »Cold War«). Writing on the eve of the United States’ entry into World War I, Lippmann conjured a transatlantic community committed to democracy and freedom. To Lippmann, it was the »deepest needs« and »deepest purposes« of this community that dictated American national interest. Hence, US forces needed to enter the war so as to »fight for … the common interest of the western world, for the integrity of the Atlantic Powers.«

 

During the Cold War, »the integrity of the Atlantic Powers« (which now encompassed West Germany) became a multidimensional agenda that shed much of its idealism. It revolved around American and Western European security interests and the tethering of the idea of freedom to market capitalism. If deemed necessary, the United States had few qualms about waging war, instigating regime changes, and suppressing liberation movements that subscribed to alternative notions of freedom. The United States did so in the name of the very ideals that held together the Atlantic Alliance. And yet, in the Atlantic World the ideals of democracy, equality, and freedom were not reduced to hypocritical justifications of violence and domination. A cultural sphere as much as political region, the Atlantic World created and recreated aesthetic forms of expression committed to equality, freedom, and self-realization. In short, the Atlantic World continues to disclose ever new democratic vistas. On frequencies low and high, the Atlantic World remains a normative community in which the ideals articulated in the democratic revolutions of the 18th century continue to exert authority.

 

Or so we thought. Until, during the last decade, the Atlantic World and its shared vocabulary of values encountered challenges from within. Antipluralist populist movements have sprung up on both sides of the Atlantic and managed to succeed in the electoral process. Illiberal and ethno-nationalist, these movements’ leaders have positioned themselves against the very idea of value-based, cooperative, and multilateral institutions that have characterized the Atlantic West. Waging polarizing culture wars within and across their national borders, they are attempting to redefine the Atlantic World by tearing down existing multilateral institutions in favor of transactional bilateralisms that throw over board what they regard as the hifalutin conceits of old. It behooves us to remember Whitman’s warning that democracy may yet »prove the most tremendous failure of time.«

 

But illiberal populists are not the only ones who call into question the cold war constellation of the transatlantic West. Academic humanists and political activists alike have challenged the conception of the Atlantic World as an ensemble of liberal capitalist democracies of the North Atlantic region. Scholars of Atlantic History and Atlantic Studies have reframed the region’s geographic scope: today they chart a world of circulation for which trajectories of North and South are, at a minimum, as crucial as the more traditional East-West axis. In redrawing the geography of the Atlantic World, they have also abandoned the teleology that traditionally subtended the narrative of the Atlantic World. No longer reiterating implicit assumptions about progress and the eventual triumph of liberal democracy (and capitalism), scholars of the Atlantic World today explore how circuits of exchange have been embedded in disparities of power, violent conflict, and resistance to revolution. Focusing on unmitigated political passions rather than the slow but unstoppable progress of rationality, these newer approaches to the Atlantic World may in fact help to enlarge the intellectual tools necessary for coming to terms with the illiberal onslaught on transatlantic democracy.

 

Our new research focus »Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World« starts from the assumption that the Atlantic World, with its redrawn boundaries and trajectories, continues to provide spaces for experimentation in democracy. Democracies in the Atlantic World are multifaceted and their success and survival ought not to be imagined as preordained. Given the stress tests that established forms of liberal democracy have had to submit themselves to in recent years, democratic experimentation in a Whitmanian spirit warrants renewed interest, attention, debate, and study.

 

(Johannes Voelz, 2022)