Commentary on “DEMOCRATIC “SACRED SPACES”: PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE” by M.Mihai

Mihai’s theory on public architecture focuses on how modern liberal democracies should tackle it. She believes that institutions in liberal democracies, should “encourage citizens to internalise equal respect and concern for all” (Mihai, 2015) and therefore, transitional justice measures must be taken to address the violations of the past. Although she explains the different types of humiliations that an individual or a group can suffer, she focuses on symbolic group humiliation and how different states have tackled it.

She uses Levison’s book “Written in Stone” (2011) to set the limits to what monuments are humiliating or are not. Levinson believes that public constructions and monuments are a way by which the state tries to shape the citizens’ attitudes to those that the state embodies (Mihai, 2015). He proposes different solutions to humiliating monuments, ranging from leaving at it is to destroy it (Mihai, 2015). He also adds that the state should not be neutral regarding those monuments as public art is never innocent or neutral, position to which Mihai agrees (Mihai, 2015).

She believes that if a monument could humiliate different groups, at least a plaque should be installed. She adds that if goal is to educate the citizens in a democratic ethos, which should be in a liberal democracy, “efforts must be made to purge monuments that humiliates certain groups and are undemocratic” (Mihai, 2015).

She looks at to specific monuments, the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa, openly racist, and the People’s House in Romania. Both were built by oppressive regime, the apartheid regime and the communist regime respectably.

Since the fall of the aperheit system, the Voortrekker monument has seen little change to its racists propaganda, and although the state has built other monuments to balance it, the Voortrekker is still one of the most visited monuments in the country and 16% of its income comes from the state (Mihai, 2015).

Even after the fall of communism, the Romanian state continued to pay for the construction of the building, and even situated many democratic institutions in it, furthering the humiliation of all the 40,000 people who were displaced, the 20,000 conscripted workers and those that lived in extreme poverty compared to the magnificent building (Mihai, 2015).

She believes, that the Romanian case it is more humiliating because the House built by the people, is still not of the people but of the corrupt political elite (Mihai, 2015). The Voortrekker Monument is highly humiliating, especially seeing the state involvement in it, but because there have been counter monuments, it is less humiliating than the People’s House.

The main strength of the argument is found in how she believes liberal democracies should act regarding symbolic humiliation. In liberal democracies, each voter’s vote has the same value, and therefore, the state must treat every citizen equally. By symbolically humiliating groups of people, the state does rather the opposite. Recently we’ve seen liberal democracies taking this approach. On November 3rd 2020, the U.S. state of Mississippi voted, through referendum, to change its flag. This was very important to the African American community in the state as the previous flag had the Confederate Flag in it. The new flag will not only lose the Confederate emblem but also pay homage to the Native Americans in Mississippi (Cineas, 2020). Therefore, this shows how Mihai’s argument is strong as a country like the USA and a state as Mississippi with a very long and dark history enslaving people, are taking her approach to completely destroy the monument which is humiliating and replacing it with another.

Nevertheless, the argument is weak when assessing the role buildings should play in liberal democracies. While she fiercely attacks the people’s House in Romania, she does not acknowledge the amount of resources, economic, human and natural, to make it happen. Although the way the building was constructed might be symbolically humiliating, it has a cost of 1.5 billion U.S dollars (Mihai, 2015) and thus, destroying it or giving it a meaningless use, would be more humiliating to a country that has struggled for so many years financially. By hosting the Constitutional Court and the Parliament, the building is useful to the whole country. If those institutions did not use that building, some others would have had to be build, leading to more government spending and less economic stability.

To conclude, when monuments or symbols are humiliating and are not materially useful to society, they should be rethought or replaced. Nevertheless, when great efforts have been placed into something which can serve the people, this should be kept so that the country can benefit from it. We should not forget that the state should always mention and explain how the building came about, but in no way, the building should be not in use.

Bibliography

Cineas, F., 2020. Vox. [Online] Available at: https://www.vox.com/2020/11/4/21537591/mississippi-measure-3-flag-confederate-results [Accessed 4 November 2020].

Mihai, M., 2015. Democratic ‘Sacred Spaces’: Public Architecture and Transitional Justice. In: C. Corradetti & N. Eisikovits, eds. Theorizing Transitional Justice. London: Routledge.