Does Europe have a political Translation Deficit? A Deliberative Democracy Perspective

If Germans unionists and Greek protesters would have the occasion to sit on one table, would they arrive at the same decisions as institutional deliberators negotiating about the future of Europe? This question is relevant for theorists of democratic deliberation as well as for citizens wishing to debate politics in multilingual publics. Many scholars, indeed, have thought about the democratic deficit of EU politics caused by linguistic difference and the absence of European wide public counterbalancing policymaking. In this paper I present a counter-intuitive position on the question of democratic deliberation among ordinary Europeans, one that connects two opposing ways to think about democratic communication: The assumption that people can actually understand each other through democratic deliberation, and the counter idea that democracy starts with the recognition of lasting political translation problems caused by existing inequality. I then develop an empirical model of political translation which ha been used within by radical street protesters negotiating with institutional unionist and politicians in the European Social Forum process movements, negotiating at the European level community organizing and local participatory democracy. My counter-intuitive findings show that political dialogue fails where it is based on the idea of shared understanding and it success where it recognizes power-related misunderstandings as the starting point for a democratic politics of translation.