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Article Excerpt
Kantian cosmopolitanism, already the most important normative tradition in thinking about international law and relations, has been reinvigorated by the 1989 collapse of the bipolar Cold War world and the intensification, before and since, of the economic and cultural processes commonly gathered under the heading of "globalization." These developments reveal the promises and problems of a cosmopolitan condition that seems, in many ways, to be upon us, and underscore the importance of subjecting international relations to law. At the same time, however, changes in normative expectations over the last two hundred years have made an uncritical revival of Kant impossible: as Kant's design for perpetual peace is narrowly occupied with the abolition of war between nations, any attempt to revive "the Kantian project" in international law today will need to have broader democratic and egalitarian concerns than did Kant himself. (1) Despite this, most contemporary philosophical treatments of the cosmopolitan condition tend to follow Kant by focusing on human rights and the rule of law--this tendency may be observed in the vast literature surrounding John Rawls's "Law of Peoples." In recent years, however, another of Kant's influential followers, Jurgen Habermas, has offered a proposal for global justice that combines a concern for the global rule of law with an empirically informed analysis of the effects of globalization on national democracies and the possibilities for institutionalizing democratic governance among nations and world citizens. This contribution is especially important since Habermas's theory of law and democracy, which receives its most complete treatment in his 1992 work Between Facts and Norms, illuminates the ways in which the rule of law and democracy depend on one another, and therefore it can be used to show how a theory of global justice and human rights of the Rawlsian/Kantian variety is incomplete without some consideration of democracy beyond the nation-state. The reception of Habermas's contributions to these issues has unfortunately been hampered by two factors: first, the full force of his arguments only emerges in light of his earlier work on the public sphere and his discourse theory of law and democracy, and therefore may not be apparent to the uninitiated. Second, his discussions of human rights and democracy beyond the nation-state are widely scattered, with several of the most important ones still untranslated. In what follows, I draw together these various threads, reconstructing Habermas's proposal for global governance, showing how his discourse theory illuminates the threats to and possibilities for democracy in an era of globalization in a perspicuous manner. My reconstruction, however, is also critical: Habermas's own proposal for postnational democratic governance fails to strike a felicitous balance between democracy and the rule of law, lurching too far toward the latter pole, almost as if Habermas has failed to appreciate the demands that his earlier work places on any normative account of democracy, national or postnational.
In the first section, I review some important features of Habermas's theory of democracy and his diagnosis of the threat that globalization poses to democracy, explaining how his theory is able to illuminate the problems that democratic deficits caused by globalization engender. In the next section, I present Habermas's proposal for a framework of global governance that is supposed to be capable of recovering potentials for democratic self-rule, and his account of the extent to which solidarity and participation are required for postnational democracy. (2) In the final section, I argue that while there are daunting obstacles to the prospect of legitimating a cosmopolitan legal order through political participation, Habermas endorses conclusions about the limited potential for identification and deliberation at the global level that are both detrimental to his theory and unnecessary. (3)
1. The Nation-State, Legitimacy, and Globalization
It might seem obvious that a version of the Kantian project that takes the idea of postnational democracy seriously would endorse some form of "cosmopolitan democracy," that is, the establishment of democratic procedures and representation on a global scale, forging a common fiscal and social policy for equal world citizens ("world domestic policy"). (4) Though noble in their vision, such proposals are often met by a variety of skeptical rejoinders: skepticism about the potential for efficient global governance, about the possibility for genuinely legitimate cosmopolitan institutions, and about the desirability of shifting democratic politics beyond the familiar confines of national communities of civic solidarity. Habermas has, in fact, kept his distance from those calling for cosmopolitan democracy, and we can look to his political theory to substantiate some of this skepticism. In Habermasian terms, legitimate governance has a series of normative and functional preconditions, like transparent democratic procedures, citizens' identification with a common political project (which galvanizes participation in the public sphere), and efficient bureaucratic institutions, the simultaneous fulfillment of which cosmopolitan democrats are hard-pressed to account for.
At the base of Habermas's social and political thought is an argument that combines normative and functional elements: all societies require legitimacy in order to reproduce themselves--in the long run, persons must have reasons of some sort for accepting their social order as valid. In modernity, legitimacy cannot be secured by the widespread and passive acceptance of a system of authority and domination that is thought of as natural and given. (5) Legitimacy can only mean that citizens by and large accept, on the basis of rational considerations, that norms underwriting the use of political power are worthy of being obeyed. To be sure, there have been attempts to redefine legitimacy in terms of whether people, as a matter of observable fact, habitually refrain from resisting the social order. But such empiricist redescriptions will not do, according to Habermas: "Before norms of domination could be accepted without reason by the bulk of the population, the communication structures in which our motives for action have till now been formed would have to be thoroughly destroyed." While he adds that "we have no metaphysical guarantee that this will not happen," it is, on his view, too improbable an assumption to build a theory around. (6) In order for legitimacy to be a rational matter, practical questions about the validity of norms must be susceptible to consensus through rational discourse. Habermas writes:
The discursively formed will may be called "rational" because the formal properties of discourse and of the deliberative situation sufficiently guarantee that a consensus can arise only through appropriately interpreted, generalizable interests, by which I mean needs that can be communicatively shared. (7)
To the extent that the conditions for free and open deliberations are approximated, we may expect that a consensus about the validity of norms has been arrived at by way of a mutual understanding that these norms serve the general interests of all effected.
The democratic process is the main forum through which the attempt to produce discursively achieved consensus takes place on a society-wide basis. In order for this process to license our confidence in the rational acceptability of its outcomes, certain background conditions need to be fulfilled. Namely, citizens must normally be prepared to deliberate in the public sphere on the basis of an orientation toward the common good (i.e., toward generalizable as opposed to private interests) and administrative capacities must be in place to transform the results of discourse in the public sphere into political power capable of effectively shaping society. The European nation-state has served to consolidate these background conditions by solving a cluster of social problems brought on by economic modernization. It has done so in three main ways, namely, by developing "categorical" national identities that supplement and to some extent replace "network" identities of community and kinship that supplied a sense of identification and orientation to the common good in premodern societies; (8) by substituting popular sovereignty for premodern hierarchies and quasi-naturalistic ways of understanding the legitimacy of the social order; and by developing the administrative capacities able, potentially at least, to regulate increasingly complex modern economies.
Habermas characterizes the achievement of the previous century's democratic constitutional welfare states in terms of "opening" and "closure": economic modernization exposes (i.e., "opens") societies with pre-modern institutions to forces that cannot be made to bend to political will until modern social democracy to some extent manages to bring these systemic forces under legitimate political control. (9) A society that effects "closure" by subjecting market and other systemic forces to political control is one that warrants its citizens' confidence in the capacity of politics to bring about the conscious transformation of society. In retrospect, though, it looks to be the case that just as the democratic nation-state had, after about two hundred years, nearly developed institutions capable of bringing the modern capitalist economy under something resembling democratic control, post-industrial, global capitalism was beginning to expose the achievements of social democracy to the imperatives of the market. This state of affairs led the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm to grimly declare, "By the end of the century the nation-state was on the defensive against a world economy it could not control." (10)
Globalization is thought to undermine the ability of the nation-state to enable democratic self-determination in several ways. Exponential increases in the pace and scale of economic processes have rendered economic systems increasingly difficult to regulate by even the most powerful of states. In Habermas's ironic phrase, "'Keynesianism in one's own land' is no longer possible." (11) For our purposes, the thing to focus on is not so much the question of whether national economies are still important, but that economic globalization seems to seriously constrain the scope for democratic political action, particularly in areas like regulating the global economy, securing dignified employment and a clean environment, and pursuing egalitarian agendas. (12) Nation-states that lose their capacities to effectively regulate economic conditions within their borders are finding that politics is becoming reduced to a series of reactive measures intended to shore up local competitive advantages and, at best, to intelligently manage, but not control, the economy. (13) This hollows out the normative expectations that citizens have for the democratic process: "The political autonomy of citizens gains substance only to...
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