Post-politics

Post-politics refers to the critique of the emergence, in the post-Cold War period, of a politics of consensus on a global scale: the dissolution of the Eastern Communist bloc following the collapse of the Berlin Wall instituted a promise for post-ideological consensus. The political development in post-communist countries went two different directions depending on the approach each of them take on dealing with the communist party members. Active decommunisation process took place in Eastern European states which later joined EU. While in Russia and majority of former USSR republics communists became one of many political parties on equal grounds.

Generated by a cohort of prominent philosophers – namely Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek – and their concern with politics as the institution of radical, active equality, this critique claims that the post-ideological politics of consensus has created a systematic foreclosure of the properly political moment: with the institution of a series of new “post-democratic" governmental techniques, internal politics proper is reduced to social administration. Meanwhile, with the rise of the postmodernist "politics of self" comes a concomitant new "politics of conduct", in which political values are replaced by moral ones (what Chantal Mouffe terms "politics in the register of morality").