Justice or respect? A comparative perspective on politics in Cyprus

This article argues that the anonymity of modern politics - usually seen as a requirement for good democracy - may in fact undermine cooperative politics in small-scale societies. For very many people in the world, this essay argues, it is not the pre-social, monadic individual of Western liberalism but an immanently social person who is or should be the possessor of the rights, responsibilities and freedoms of the polity. As a result, the principle of 'universal' equality is always already delimited by the nation conceived as ethnos. This essay takes the case of Cyprus to show that in this divided island democracy has been imagined as a freedom defined ethnically - as freedom for a particular group. Moreover, various historical contingencies brought those imaginings of a true and just democratic ethnos into conflict. The themes of "justice" and "respect" employed here represent those aspirations and their seemingly inevitable conflict.