I wish to thank Samantha Besson for inviting me to participate in this volume. This invitation has allowed me to reflect on my work, or, should I say, my former work, as a look at the conference’s programme made me feel that the entire reflection on the question of representation that had been mine in the 1980–90s has changed dramatically. I recognized that this theme of representation and the demand for representativeness in institutions was a legacy to be preserved, maybe even developed in certain respects, but that it is perhaps no longer the engine of democratic progress that it had long been.

As a historian, I would like to recall that the notion of representation was historically linked to the creation of assemblies which were soon known as ‘parliaments’. Representation was aimed at shaping and envisioning the constitution and role of these assemblies. It seems to have fulfilled this function successively through archaism and utopia. Archaism characterizes the old assemblies that were conceived of as the expression of a society of corporate bodies (corps). A society comprised of such corps had an obvious consistency because there is no separation between these societies’ legal constitution and their social existence. Social corps can be defined as social forms that are legally constituted. In such a case, representation refers to the process of imagining and shaping these legally constituted parts. These social forms have evolved based on the purpose assigned to these assemblies, in order to organize the relationships to the royal power (levying taxes, defining margins of autonomy, etc.). To better understand this history, one should refer to the research performed over more than forty years by the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, which published fifty volumes during the 1970s and many additional seminal works since. In these cases, representation is figurative. Its function is to offer a condensed yet faithful image of the social world. Hanna Pitkin spoke in this sense of a ‘microcosmic’ conception of representation.Footnote ¹ Honoré-Gabriel de Mirabeau, in the context of France’s Ancien Régime and a few months before the beginning of the French Revolution, wrote that an assembly ‘must be constituted in such a way that it is for the nation what a map is for a physical land; either in part or in large, the copy must always have the same proportions as the original’.Footnote ² And indeed, in order to be able to reduce scale, it is necessary to distinguish the constitutive principles of what the figure represents. This is why we have long spoken in this sense of state assemblies (states with a lower case, meaning social states). In this case, the assemblies had to reproduce the social structure, such as the Ancien Régime’s division into three social groups – those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked – or its corporate organization into trades, or its territorial divisions into cities, provinces, and so on. This is the reason why Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected the notion of representation by calling it ‘medieval’. Karl Marx would say a century later in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that this gave civil society an immediately political, not separate, dimension. Social states, he famously wrote, ‘acquired no [additional] significance in the political world, but signified only themselves’.Footnote ³ ‘The Middle Ages was the democracy of nonfreedom’, concluded Marx.Footnote ⁴ For Marx, democracy means the complete identification of the political with the social, which took place in medieval societies, but in a context of non-freedom. This is why Marx used this seemingly paradoxical expression of democracy of non-freedom, to emphasize that the goal of modern democracy should always be to achieve a melding of the political and the social, and no longer return to the notion of representation.

The French Revolution endeavoured to break free from archaism. Triggered by Louis XVI’s summoning of the Estates General (a typical form of ancient parliament), the Revolution resulted in the transmutation of this ‘old’ parliament into a modern National Assembly. Instituted in a society of (still exclusively male) individuals equal in civil and political rights, the French National Assembly was characterized first of all by its function to express the general will and guide the life of the nation accordingly. At the time, the legislature was considered the only real power and the executive was subordinate. Many ignore that one of the major innovations of the French Revolution in 1794 was the suppression of the executive power: ministers and ministries were abolished and replaced with commissions of the parliamentary assembly. The parliament and the enactment of laws were considered essential. The law’s enforcement was the responsibility of parliamentary committees and, as a result, the executive power as such no longer existed.

Under such a configuration, the assembly not only represents the nation, it is the nation. The assembly is the nation because its members are not conceived of as delegates, but are elected in the French departments as ‘representatives’ (a formulation that has been retained in the current French constitution). These representatives – and here lies the utopia – are the embodiment of the qualities deemed constitutive of the process of elaborating the general will: a combination of intellectual capacity (talent) and moral qualities (virtue). The power of the general will expresses itself through an election-selection, with the ‘aristocratic’ dimension that this entails.Footnote ⁵ The utopia even appears twofold, as it not only relates to the elaboration of the general will, but also to the election itself. The election was not understood as a selection in the sense of a choice made after conducting an open competition between candidates. Rather, it was understood merely as a procedure for identifying ‘representatives’ who embodied qualities of generality (talent and virtue). This explains why, during the French Revolution, standing as a candidate in elections would be forbidden: there would never be competitive elections. The question then arises as to how to proceed with an election if there are no candidates. The voting techniques used during the French Revolution involved extremely time-consuming procedures because the voting was conducted in so-called primary assemblies composed of about a thousand people. Rounds of voting took place without candidates, and, indeed, in the first round, it was possible to have 200 different names written on the ballot papers. At least one to two days were necessary to finish with only one name, although the absence of official candidates did not preclude behind-the-scenes effects. In 1791, which is one of the most active voting times during the French Revolution, second-degree Parisian voters voted nearly 200 days a year. Without candidates, it took 200 days simply to accomplish these appointments. This process was gradually seen as problematic, but it was not questioned until 1800. There was a firm belief that democracy was not a competition of ambitions but the discernment of the general will.

In this framework, the utopia is a kind of direct government of the general will. It must be distinguished from direct democracy, which was perceived as a power of the street. It is important to keep in mind that the word ‘democracy’ was absent from the vocabulary of French revolutionaries. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès often repeated that France – a country with twenty-five million inhabitants (ten times the American population at the time) – could not be a democracy in the strict and technical sense of the term. Such a view combined unspoken practical arguments and a form of implicit social contempt. Conversely, the distinction between democracy and representative government would be explicitly formulated in the United States. While the term democracy was considered ‘archaic’ in France,Footnote ⁶ the American founding fathers rejected direct democracy as an immediate threat and compared it to mobocracy.Footnote ⁷

Archaism and utopia, the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, would eventually overlap in the nineteenth century. At that time, the two dimensions merged to give rise to ‘representative democracies’. A ‘neo-corporate’ vision of society inspired that evolution in Europe, as traditionalist and socialist perspectives de facto overlapped.Footnote ⁸ The former envisioned a ‘corps society’ and the latter a ‘class society’ in similar terms. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for instance, regarded socialism as a kind of modernization of the corporate world. The ‘old’ and the ‘new’ combined in the development of a pluralism of parties that reflects, for some, class struggle, and, for others, the social world’s diversity. This vision is the antithesis of the first conceptions of democratic unanimity in the American townships, and of what the ‘spirit of 1848’ would still signify in France. The ‘good composition’ of assemblies would also be evaluated in relation to all of the other characteristics considered to be structural in the society. This conception would feed into many electoral reform projects. In the nineteenth century, the movement advocating for ‘proportional representation’, which was first conceived in sociological terms,Footnote ⁹ offers an example.

Yet, in time, archaism will dissipate and utopia will turn against itself. Proudhon marked a turning point by publishing a famous pamphlet entitled ‘For New Corporations’.Footnote ¹⁰ The intuition that Proudhon expressed in this pamphlet served as an inspiration for a new way to redefine representative democracy. This way included both the weight of the past, which was modernized through the vision of a class society, and a renewal of the electoral utopia, albeit in a much more restricted form. From that time forwards, the understanding of an assembly’s good composition would be linked to all of the other characteristics considered to be structural in the society. In Europe, it is possible to make a double history of political representation with the two structuring dimensions of social representation and religious representation. Obviously, some political parties have an ideological dimension, but most important political parties were born as parties of a social class, whether among farm workers, the industrial working class, or in the form of religious parties (the Christian democracies were structuring parties).

The creation of international organizations (IOs) was approached on this basis. While IOs were initially considered through the sole lens of State representation, they gradually opened to the idea of complementing the representation of civil societies when they were dedicated to the study of, and the intervention in, specific areas. The example of the International Labour Organization (ILO), set up in the aftermath of the First World War, stands out.Footnote ¹¹ The ILO has served as a model for a whole range of other IOs. There was, however, a practical difficulty of implementation: that of the determination of how the institutions of civil society could be considered as ‘representative’. This question had been straightforward in the field of labour because trade unions and employers’ organizations are institutionalized and universally recognized.

At this point, it may be interesting to draw a parallel with the contemporary reflections on the economic and social councils that have been set up in many countries, especially in Europe. There even is a European Economic and Social Committee that can be considered as an example of an IO. The French case is typical.Footnote ¹² Considered as the third constitutional assembly of the State (after the Senate and the National Assembly), the French economic and social council was first a Labour Council and is now an Economic, Social, and Environmental Council (ESEC) that includes, in addition to unions and union representatives, social organizations, specifically those active in the field of ecology. The French ESEC now claims to see itself as an assembly of ‘organized civil society’. But how to define its contours? This question is all the more difficult as the world of civil society organizations develops and becomes more complex. In specialized fields such as health, it is possible to envision a multiple representation model, to use the terms of Samantha Besson, because there are indisputable major players from civil society that are organized at the international level.Footnote ¹³ But such cases are difficult to generalize. At the same time, the perspective of the classical representative model also seems structurally problematic.

There are two reasons for this. First, the praise of civil society that marked the 1970s has waned.Footnote ¹⁴ It was linked to the presupposition that the structuring of civil society would be readily discerned. By contrast, today, in the age of social networks and the mutations of contemporary capitalism, civil society appears fragmented, even radically unrepresentable, in the sense that it imposes itself in the form of a ‘direct opinion’ that has de facto replaced ‘direct democracy’ in the public imagination. The weakening of the sociological substratum of the old representative ideal goes hand in hand with the second evolution, which is the tendency towards ‘secondarizing’, or reducing the centrality of, parliamentary institutions. While parliamentary institutions used to be at the heart of democratic life, it is now the executive power that imposes itself and dominates parliamentary power almost everywhere. Debates take place in the press and on social networks (which revives the old competing claims to representation between the pen and the tribune). The electoral procedure has also lost its representative monopoly, as seen, for example, in the development of ‘citizens’ conferences’ constituted by drawing lots.

The new pre-eminence of the executive branch is reflected in a redefinition of democratic expectations. A ‘good government’ will henceforth be defined by criteria other than that of representativeness.Footnote ¹⁵ The way of assessing the ‘democratic performance’ of European institutions also testifies to this shift from an ‘input legitimacy’ (representativeness) to an ‘output legitimacy’ (the nature of the decisions taken), to use a noted conceptualization.

In this context, one should highlight five major developments that traverse democratic regimes and call for a reassessment of the analytical framework of representation. The first element is the attention shift from the quality of representativeness to its legitimacy. Representativeness is always difficult to define because its relationship to social generality presupposes a vision of the division of society into different segments, that, once pieced together, comprise the collectivity. By contrast, legitimacy claims to directly define the common good. In the context of representation, the common good has a cooperative function: it is the cooperation between differentiated interests. In the context of legitimacy, the common good proceeds from the ability to articulate principles of justice and the meaning of the common good in terms that make them recognizable as such.

This sense of recognizing the common good applies across domains. For example, in France (as in other countries), there is a National Consultative Ethics Committee, whose important function is to give its opinion on ethical issues. This committee recently hosted a celebratory event to mark its fortieth anniversary, to which I was invited. At this occasion, one of its founding members stated: Fortunately, we have never been representative because if we had been representative, we could have been criticized on the ground that we did not cover the full spectrum of the different organizations that deserve to be consulted. We are strong because we are not representative. Quite the reverse: we are able to embrace this non-representativeness because it makes it possible to put forward another quality: the fact of being recognized as legitimate.Footnote ¹⁶

This legitimacy is the product of social recognition. It is equivalent to the constitution of authority in the Roman sense of the term, that is, the exercise or possession of qualities that directly link an institution or a person to the foundations of collective existence. It is neither a power nor a status, but a quality. Today’s world is saturated with competition for authority and legitimacy. The social movements that are the most important are not representative movements. To be representative requires giving proof of representativeness in the form of members, publications, budgets, or affiliations. However, the proof of legitimacy – the constitution of authority – is achieved differently: it is made in the public opinion. This explains why the contemporary emphasis on legitimacy over representativeness gives rise to new types of organizations and new forms of action. Nowadays, multiple emerging forms of direct action are developing as counter-powers: they begin as trial balloons and eventually become recognized as legitimate. The organization Extinction Rebellion does not have many members, but it has come to be recognized as a legitimate organization because of the compelling nature of the themes it highlights and its ability to carry out spectacular actions. The number of its members has become a secondary consideration.

This has led to heads of State becoming more willing to receive symbolic figures who appear legitimate than leaders of organizations. Greta Thunberg has been received by many heads of State in the world, even though, from a certain point of view, she represents only herself. But she has acquired a status of authority and is able to lead public opinion. While one can currently see a renewal of the idea of direct democracy, it is not infused by the idea of a direct exercise of power, but rather, by the idea of a hard-charging legitimacy that is external to the notion of representativeness. In such a framework, representativeness can even come to be perceived as a burden or an insurmountable constraint. Admittedly, there is always space for representative institutions, and IOs still need representativeness, but it is no longer the only way of expressing the social world.

When it comes to organizations, it is therefore crucial to distinguish between organizations of representativeness and organizations of legitimacy. These two different fields have come to impose themselves with their specific modes of operation, their different relationships to public opinion, and their own modes of recognition. Moreover, we increasingly see governments that are themselves able to play on both fields, which is also a decisive evolution.

Yet, another element impacts this assessment: the greater importance of the interstate level. Interstate meetings are increasingly important given the globalization of many issues and the fact that these issues are solved by agreements between nations. Diplomatic activity remains extremely important at the international level, and today maybe more important, from a certain point of view, than in the days when we anticipated a transition from the centrality of diplomacy to IOs. To illustrate this point, it seems that Samantha Besson’s reference to the classic opposition between ‘input and output legitimacy’ amounts, at its core, to the opposition between representativeness and legitimacy.Footnote ¹⁷

The third element that deserves emphasis is the creation of new arenas for international action or cooperation following the increasing number of truly global issues affecting humanity and the planet, which IOs can no longer handle alone. International organizations make functional distinctions between different regimes or sectors of activity. The whole variety of international organizations reproduces the variety of human activity or public activity, such as public policy. But when an increasing pre-eminence is given to a whole set of issues that are global, this functioning based on specialization no longer works, which explains why these new authorities become more important and, in a way, arbiters of legitimacy.

Representation remains essential in societies, but perhaps in a different sense than in the past. It appears to be gradually taking a figurative meaning: it is becoming representation in the sense of the need to explain and shed light on a complex world, a world in which, for example, the question is not simply to represent social classes, but to try to understand a whole world of social invisibility. Such a world is no longer a world of organized groups, but the world of those left behind, the forgotten. This corresponds to a narrative function of representation, which appears bound to play an increasingly important role at all levels, whether national or international. But who will be the actors of this narrative democracy? These actors of this narrative democracy can be multiple, and in the future, they will have an increasingly influential role because they are those who have the ability to impose a narrative on what constitutes society and to define its vital problems. From this intellectual power, they can draw a real social power. Social power has become inseparable from intellectual power, and this intellectual power is largely emerging or redrawn today through the different modalities of narrative representation.

The purpose of this reflection is not to say that we will move from one world to another, but to show that several democratic worlds now coexist, that there is a growing number of democratic forms and arenas, and that it is important to keep this in mind for a very simple reason: a single democratic modality will not suffice to advance our democracy.

For a long time, we believed that the imperative was for democracy to find the right representation, the ideal parliament, and the miracle election. Of course, procedures have been put in place to make politics or elections more moral, but the idea that a single modality of shaping democracy is enough seems a profound mistake.

Democracy can only exist to the extent that multiple institutions and experiences bring it to life: only a multiple vision may answer this call. In such a vision, IOs obviously have a role to play, but they must now contend with what we may call the new ‘international voices’. Voices have become as important as organizations.