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part of those addressed. Like a greeting it acknowledges their status as participants in discourse,
but in addition, it acknowledges both past exclusions from deliberation, and also recent
testimony.
The most important reason for including apology in deliberative speech in this case is that
without it, crucially important parties to conversations about them refuse to participate – as we
have seen most strongly in the Australian case. This suggests that emotional and non-rational
speech such as greeting, apology and testimony are in some instances required to precede rational
deliberation, in order to satisfy the preconditions of equal opportunity to participate, required by
most theorists of deliberative democracy. While some critics, such as Young, have argued that
the problem with rationality as a deliberative standard was that it tended to exclude some groups,
we might conclude here that, because of historical exclusions, certain groups require the
communicative exchange of testimony (the telling of stories such as those related in Bringing
Them Home) and apology, in order to then participate in rational deliberation.
What this suggests is that deliberative democracy as a political paradigm is more
dependent upon identity and recognition than first appears. As I argued earlier in this paper,
deliberative democratic theory arose in part as an attempt to reconcile the claims of identity
groups by establishing a set of procedures according to which all citizens would be able to meet
together and discuss policy. The problem of recognition would be side-stepped by defining
everyone in terms of their rights to participate in debate, rather than in terms of their identity
group membership. Part of the way this was achieved was the ahistoricism of deliberation: as
long as participants were able to speak equally and freely now, they were assumed to have
equally legitimate status as speaking subjects.
Convention