Recent Parliament Architecture: Symbolizing Democracy without Political Theology

Comparison of parliament buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the parliament architecture of the late twentieth and twenty-first reveals a striking contrast:  looking at Barry’s New Westminster (1870) or the neo-Greek temple that houses the Austrian Parliament (Hansen, 1884), on the one hand, and Behnisch’s Bundeshaus in Bonn (1992) or Richard Rogers’ Welsh Assembly (2003), on the other hand, it is difficult to reconcile that they should serve identical functions.

The obvious explanation for the stark difference in appearance between parliament buildings separated by a good century is architectural change. But this falls short, because it takes into account only the artistic-architectural, but not the political side of the equation. Nor would it suffice to point to the robust nexus between architectural modernism and democracy that developed in (Western) Europe after WW II and as a response to the monumental abundance of totalitarianism. To capture the changes in the aesthetics of parliament and liberal democracy requires taking into account the fundamental change in the self-reference of society (“pluralism” instead of “identity”) and the consequent change in the political theory of representative democracy, which cannot anymore base its legitimacy on the imagination of an identiarian people, but instead has to derive it from procedural norms for the fair mediation between the symbolic level of integration qua values and the technical-operational level of policy-making.