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 by Brian Milstein Submitted originally as a final paper for the course "Sovereignty and Solidarity," Fall 2002, at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, Nancy Fraser, Instructor Cite as: Milstein, Brian. "Critique and Vision in the Body Cosmopolitic." Unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, New York (accessed on [DATE] at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/cosmopol.html). More than two centuries later, Kant's idea of a "cosmopolitan right" continues to provide an inspiration for political theorists and philosophers anticipating a global political society. Yet as many have observed, the world has grown much larger, societies more complex, wars more devastating, and technologies more advanced, such that Kant's original ideas are in many ways no longer applicable without major revision. This essay looks to investigate a philosophical way of proceeding, while critically reflecting on recent attempts to reconcile Kant's thesis with the needs of the present day. In Part I, I would like to reconstruct Kant's line of reasoning that led him to develop the idea of a ius cosmopoliticum by demonstrating how it figures into his larger philosophical project. In Part II, I will weigh Kant's original concept of cosmopolitanism against James Bohman's attempt to envision a "cosmopolitan public sphere," and so try to extract the problems we must face in approaching a cosmopolitan constitution today. These exercises should allow me in Part III to propose some ideas as to how we could reconstruct Kant's ideas as a critical theory of international politics. In "Perpetual Peace," Kant delineated a typology of public right that he would elaborate further in The Metaphysics of Morals. In general, Kantian right begins with an idea of private right subsisting in human beings by the very fact of their being human. This primary or "innate" form of right is freedom, and derived form it equality and "a human being's quality of being his own master (sui iuris), as well as being a human being beyond reproach (iusti)" (MM 6:237-8). Kant annotates the last phrase with the Latin word iusti, the nominative variant of iustus, which means not only "just" as we conceive it today but covers a range of connotations including "equitable," "well-grounded," "regular," "perfect," and "complete" (Cassell's 1959; 331). Right, as a "universal principle," is of course bound up with the categorical imperative, derived from his assertion that every human being is an end in itself -- a just end, and equitable end, a perfect and complete end. More than that, the human being as a complete end in itself is the just in itself. Right is thus subsistent at its very origins in the human status, and it is in fact here that we can locate what we now call "basic" or "human rights." With equality and ontogenetic justness comes the capacity of autonomy and responsibility: [One is] authorized to do to others anything that does not in itself diminish what is theirs, so long as they do not want to accept it -- such things as merely communicating his thoughts to them, telling or promising them something, whether what he says is true and sincere or untrue and insincere (veriloquium aut falsiloquium); for it is entirely up to them whether they want to believe him or not. (MM 6:238)Kant's distinction between normative action and communication is crucial. In a footnote, Kant specifies that a "lie" is the only form of speech act with a direct bearing on right (ius), although he does not deny other normative distinctions that may have bearing on "ethics." The ability to engage in discourse in which a hearer is free to agree or disagree with the utterance of a speaker is of course central to the communications-based social theory of Jurgen Habermas, which descends directly from the Kantian idea of autonomy as Mundigkeit. For Habermas, action is coordinated by a reference to certain "validity claims" that imply a capacity for consensus among participants: "In actions, the factually raised claims to validity, which form the underlying consensus, are assumed naÔvely. Discourse, on the other hand serves the justification of problematic claims to validity and norms" (Habermas 1973, 18). In Kant, this capacity either to assume or to virtualize such claims allows him to ground a concept of "popular enlightenment" in a respective distinction between "private" and "public" uses of reason, a distinction that Bohman draws upon as well. We will engage this idea further below. A civil order, Kant writes, is the condition of a people universi, brought together under "a rightful condition under a will uniting them, a constitution" (MM 6:311). The capacity to use one's own understanding to agree or disagree with statements lays the foundation for the "original contract," the idea in terms of which we understand the legitimacy of a civil order. The rightful condition takes the categorial form of a hypothetical or causality both in Kant and in the European natural law tradition in general; a century earlier, Pufendorf distinguished absolute and hypothetical laws in which the former were applicable unconditionally while the latter required the intervention of a "human act" in the form of an agreement (Milstein 2002a, 6). Ius civitatis, right within the state, is constituted by the common will of a people that creates the state as a moral authority ("moral person"). With this development, Kant takes us from "private right," under which all claims to possession are but provisional, into the domain of "public right," under which they are legitimated by law in a rightful condition: In accordance with the original contract, everyone (omnes et singuli) within a people gives up his external freedom in order to take it up again immediately as a member of a commonwealth, that is, of a people considered as a state (universi). And one cannot say: the human being in a state has sacrificed a part of his innate outer freedom for the sake of an end, but rather, he has relinquished entirely his wild, lawless freedom in order to find his freedom as such undiminished, in a dependence upon laws, that is, in a rightful condition, since this dependence arises from his own lawgiving will. (MM 6:315-6)Public right goes hand-in-hand with the capacity for public deliberation, which is only possible in a civil society in which members guarantee to each other the freedom to present oneself in public, to express opinions and reasons, to agree or criticize. Yet this freedom to deliberate is dependent upon a prior agreement -- a constitution -- which coordinates a consensus among equal citizens of a state that they will defer to a common rule of law. Coercive law is structured to facilitate freedom in the public sphere: "Argue as much as you will and about whatever you will, but obey!" (WE 8:37; cf. PP 8:349-50). The process of public enlightenment described by Kant and taken up later by Habermas (1973) is achieved gradually, but has an immense capacity for inspiring change if allotted but a basic latitude of freedom "to make public use of one's reason in all matters" (WE 8:36). Bohman is quite right to note that the particular power of public opinion lies in that it "can be made known and recognized in such a way that even the supreme political authorities of the state cannot avoid acknowledging them" (Bohman 1997, 181). This is, for Kant, the precise function of public right. To summarize with a Habermassian twist, the institution of public right transforms the governing principle of free sociation from the lawless force of the stronger into that of the better argument. It is important to recognize the schematics of Kant's typology of right in the categories of pure reason, which he draws upon heavily throughout The Metaphysics of Morals. Right for Kant is concerned with individuals and their relations to each other and to material things (property). In the first Critique, Kant delineates three possible judgments of relation -- categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive -- and from them derives the three categories "of inherence and subsistence," "of causality and dependence," and "of community" (CPR A70-83/B95-109). We have already seen that private right, deriving from the inherent iusti of every human being as an end in itself, is categorial, and that public right as ius civitatis, depending on the establishment of a "rightful condition," is hypothetical. The role of the third type, disjunctive judgments or community, is more complex. Kant describes community as a "combination" of the other two categories, or "the causality of a substance in reciprocal determination of others" (CPR B110-1). Community describes a collection of entities that are substantially separate but are to the same extent determined by their coexistence. Kant explicates this definition further in the "Third Analogy," where he addresses an "ambiguity" in the idea of community. The principle of community can be approached in two ways, as communio or as commercium (see CPR A213-5/B260-2): (a) Communio refers initially to simultaneous existence, to commonality tout court. Yet the Latin term Kant employs is itself subject to an ambiguity: communio means "sharing" or "mutual participation," on one hand, but it moreover denotes an effort "to fortify thoroughly on all sides" (Cassell's 1959, 121; Caygill 1995, 117). This ambiguity is not lost on Kant, who employs the term with reference to the bounded sharing of a territory, as land plays the role of "first acquisition" in his consideration of property rights (MM 6:261-2). He identifies a persistent natural communio, an "original possession in common" by all the world's inhabitants of the surface of the earth. This original concept is not historical -- unlike assertions of other natural law theorists such as Pufendorf and Vattel -- but a priori. On the one hand, the precept that all individuals have equal access to the earth is the condition that makes any kind of individual or group possession possible; on the other hand -- and it is here that Kant breaks with his predecessors -- this original condition does not diminish with the mere introduction of temporal laws, and even less does he recognize any hard principle of de facto legitimacy in possession. Both of these arguments were common in Kant's time to justify practices of both imperialism and despotism, to which he was a vocal opponent. To be sure, property rights, along with the freedom they accord, are secured only in a state of civil society, an established communio of recognized possession (MM 6:264ff). Strictly speaking, however, all claims to territory and property are but "provisional," i.e., unlawful, short of a legitimate order recognized freely by all inhabitants of the earth (MM 6:350). (b) Commercium, too, has a range of connotation that can refer to "commerce" in the sense of conducting trade or relations of economic exchange or more broadly to "intercourse" or "communication" in all forms (Cassell's 1959, 119). While Kant of course does not exclude "commerce" in the narrow sense from his use of the term, he clearly gives priority to its broader meaning as "interaction" (Wechselwirkung; see Kant 1996, 489 note "o"). In the "Third Analogy," Kant uses commercium to describe the "dynamical community," which serves as a condition of possibility for the very cognition of "spatial community" (communio spatii; CPR A213/B260). It is the compositional element that determines how substances, elements, or people can be considered together at all, in the sense of coexisting simultaneously. Commercium, for Kant, is also a moral precept designating the ability of individuals to interact and to affect one another, and this precept becomes inescapable given that the earth is limited in scope: "the spherical surface of the earth unites all the places on its surface; for if its surface were an unbounded plane, people could be so dispersed on it that they would not come into any community with one another, and community would not then be a necessary result of their existence on the earth" (MM 6:262). This idea lays the empirical foundation for both communio and commercium as original and persistent precepts of right once we begin to consider politics on a global scale, which Kant addresses under the headings of "right of nations" (ius gentium) and "cosmopolitan right" (ius cosmopoliticum). Kant states at the outset of Part II of "The Doctrine of Right" that all forms of public right arise out of the ability of a multitude, whether one of human beings or of groups, to affect one another, and who therefore require some sort of "rightful condition." Right on a world scale poses a fundamental problem, which concerns the fact that the world has been empirically carved up into a multitude of states that have no common system of laws upon which they are equally dependent. The relation here is one of disjunction as a "nonrightful condition," a state of nature: "Here a state, as a moral person, is considered as living in relation to another state in the condition of natural freedom and therefore in a condition of constant war" (MM 6:343-4). In a condition of war, the only "right" to speak of is "the right of the stronger," regardless of whether or not actual hostilities are in progress; to be sure, Kant does not consider "the right to go to war" as a genuine right by any means, but rather a license that results from the absence of public right as such (PP 8:356-7). The most obvious logical solution to achieving a rightful condition would be the establishment of a world state, and Kant in fact entertained the possibility of "a cosmopolitan commonwealth under a single head" in his essay on "Theory and Practice" (TP 8:311). Three years later, in "Perpetual Peace," he reluctantly concedes to "rejecting in hypothesi what is correct in thesi" (PP 8:357). But in The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant dismisses the idea entirely, believing that "if such a state made up of nations were to extend too far over vast regions, governing it and so too protecting each of its members would finally have to become impossible" (MM 6:350). Without a world republic, "perpetual peace" is at best an ideal to be approximated. Kant proposes instead a "right of nations" (ius gentium) grounded in "a federalism of free states" (PP 8:354-7; see also MM 6:350-1). Note that in "Perpetual Peace" Kant prescribes his "league of nations" as the second of three "definitive articles," after first specifying that "The civil constitution in every state shall be republican." Kant's ius gentium presupposes the public spheres secured by ius civitatis, and is intended to harness the enlightening power of public uses of reason in relations between independent states and in this way approximate the counterfactual public sphere of a world republic without demanding that states relinquish their sovereignties (sovereignty is regarded by Kant as the ability of a state to maintain its own constitution in legislation). He takes care to distinguish his "pacific league" from a "peace pact," for whereas the latter is a singular event that in form "seeks to end only one war," the former is an ongoing project that "seeks to end all war forever" (PP 8:356). Like public right in civil society, ius gentium aims to transform the rule of the stronger into that of the better argument via a rational institution. Yet as Bohman notes, this federalism lacks the coercive binding power of a universal republic, but rather stands in relation to the idea of the latter as a "negative surrogate" (PP 8:357; cf. Bohman 1997, 180). Moreover, there is the problem of this congress being a "voluntary coalition of different states which can be dissolved at any time" as opposed to a constitutional federalism of the American model (MM 6:351). States seem to retain the prerogative to withdraw from the league at any time, such that the rightful condition that is produced by the league is left with a somewhat precarious status. This has of course been a common sticking point for many of Kant's critics. I would rejoin that the potential for Kant's pacific league, as described in his "Second Definitive Article for Perpetual Peace," can only be unpacked in joint consideration of the reasonings he makes in the "First Definitive Article," which deals with the need for republican constitutions, and the "Third Definitive Article," which deals explicitly with Kant's idea of a "cosmopolitan right" (ius cosmopoliticum). The maxims of all three are to be pursued simultaneously in order to invigorate "public right" at a global level, and so to achieve a universal aspiration toward popular enlightenment for all peoples (Mundigkeit), which is the underlying final aim of Kant's vision. We can engage Kant's idea of ius cosmopoliticum in relation to his concepts of communio and commercium, using James Bohman's idea of a "cosmopolitan public sphere" as a point of departure. | ||||||||||||||
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Kant delineated two versions of the concept of "community." Communio refers to a bounded community of possession, that is, a shared space fortified from an outside, and it is this principle that constitutes a civil society as a delimited body politic ordered by positive laws. This particular kind of community ordering depends on the society possessing the function of sovereignty, which constitutes the community as a "moral person," as a unified entity that assumes the capacity for autonomy and responsibility that goes hand-in-hand with the ability to take action. Of course, the state is not a "moral person" in the same sense as human beings, for while the latter are to be considered to be categorical ends in themselves, the former is contingent upon the establishment of a rightful condition. The very possibility of communio is not possible unless we suppose that human beings are in a position where they can establish relations of interaction, which Kant describes as the original feature of community, commercium. The world, for Kant, has been divided up into an assortment of fortified communities in the form of states who set up constitutions for themselves, yet even these individual communities of public right are not sufficient to erase or obviate the capacity for interaction among their citizens: This rational idea of a peaceful, even if not friendly, thoroughgoing community of all nations of the earth that can come into relations affecting one another is not a philanthropic (ethical) principle but a principle having to do with rights. Nature has enclosed them all together within determinate limits (by the spherical shape of the place they live in, a globus terraqueus). And since possession of the land, on which an inhabitant of the earth can live, can be thought only as possession of a part of a determinate whole, and so as possession of that to which each originally has a right, it follows that all nations stand originally in a community of land, though not of rightful community of possession (communio) and so of use of it, or of property in it; instead they stand in a community of possible physical interaction (commercium), that is, in a thoroughgoing relation of each to all others of offering to engage in commerce with any other, and each has a right to make this attempt without the other being authorized to behave toward it as an enemy because it has made this attempt. -- This right, since it has to do with the possible union of all nations with a view to certain universal laws for their possible commerce, can be called cosmopolitan right (ius cosmopoliticum). (MM 6:352)Ius cosmopoliticum concerns not so much the relation of states to one another as that of members of one civil society to members of others. In "Perpetual Peace," Kant declares that "Cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality" (the "Third Definitive Article"; PP 8:357ff). By "hospitality" he means the right of a foreigner to "present himself to society," to "seek commerce" with the inhabitants of any part of the earth's surface. Kant cautions that this does not amount to a right to stay or "to be a guest," but merely a "right to visit"; further, each society retains the right to turn a foreigner away, so long as they do not do so with hostility. This seems like a very minimal right at first glance. Upon closer inspection, however, Kant's prescription yields much more. First of all, he is adamant that cosmopolitan right does not entail the right to settle, annex, or exploit foreign lands; Kant fears that his idea of the earth belonging to the human race in common could be used to justify forms of imperialism -- hence his distinction that the right to participate in commercium or interaction does not imply a right to participate in communio or possession. Moreover, Kant does not call simply for "hospitality," but for the conditions that make universal hospitality possible. This requires a basic level of cordial relations between societies in which a foreigner can expect to approach and present oneself without hostility. To be sure, the cosmopolitan right to conditions of hospitality is nothing less that the guarantee of a certain kind of freedom in individual relations between societies. (One is reminded of the minimum degree of freedom Kant once specified to be the sole condition of possibility for public enlightenment, "the freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters," which he declared to be "indeed the least harmful of anything that could be called freedom" [WE 8:36].) It is precisely this connection that James Bohman sees when he draws from Kant the theoretical groundwork for a "cosmopolitan public sphere." Bohman correctly observes that Kant's underlying intention in "Perpetual Peace" is to prescribe the "means to bring about the public conditions for peace, which become effective once nations are similarly organized and governed" (Bohman 1997, 180). Bohman wants to use Kant's ideas of a federation of states supplemented by a cosmopolitan right to press forward the idea of a cosmopolitan public sphere that approximates a pluralistic, deliberative democracy. In contrast to Kant, however, he looks to incorporate the cosmopolitan ideal into processes and prospects of social and political globalization. He makes his argument in three stages: (a) Bohman begins on the assumption that Kant constructed his ideas with an eye to the "regulative ideal" of a "perfectly universal state"; Kant's recommendation for an international deliberative body sets up a public sphere as "a substitute for the limiting effects of coercive civil law on 'lawless liberty' to the extent that a cosmopolitan public sphere can now exercise constraints upon the lawless conditions of constant warfare and political violence" (181). As a result of this public sphere being a negative substitute, international law (ius gentium) is institutionally weaker than national civil law, when in theory it should be stronger and overriding. Kant rather relies on his "transcendental formula of public right" as the mechanism of effectiveness, as Bohman explains: Publicity has a limiting effect upon all strategic actions, both within states and between states. ...[I]f many maxims of political expediency are publicly acknowledged, they cannot attain their purpose. To the extent that publicity can be an eliminative test for international strategic maxims, an effective world public sphere makes it impossible for nations to use strategies which require secrecy. But Kant goes even further. Under cosmopolitan conditions, the very success of political actions would depend on their public acknowledgement. ...These are ends that can be attained only be cooperative means, through the harmony of various institutional ends with those of the larger public.... (Bohman 1997, 182-3)The maxim of publicity -- the effect of public opinion on political aims -- ties cosmopolitan idealism directly into a communicative theory of public enlightenment. For Bohman, the distinction between public and private uses of reason that Kant introduces in "What Is Enlightenment?" can be measured in terms of the extent to which a communicative actor assumes a certain level of shared validity and belief claims with her audience. There is a risk of epistemic misunderstanding when the audience is not restricted within the limits of these shared claims, as in a pluralist public sphere. Communication within a large, unrestricted public must remain accountable from a variety of epistemic viewpoints: "Pluralism entails that we give up convergent agreement as the proximate goal of political association, even if the convergence of all publics is still a regulative ideal of cosmopolitan thought" (Bohman 1997, 183-4). "Public use of reason," in this case, entails an ideal situation of unrestricted interlocution where arguments are formulated in such a way that they are rationally comprehensible to a widely inclusive audience. In progress toward this ideal, world citizens must use the cosmopolitan public sphere to discursively criticize and challenge existing forms of power and inequality. It becomes the duty of citizens to engage in activities of pluralistic consensus-formation, to take an active part in integrating themselves into a pluralistic political culture that facilitates spaces of open discussion while preserving the integrity of diverse systems of belief and practice (Bohman 1997, 187). (b) For Bohman, a successful cosmopolitan public sphere depends on the commitment of its citizens to give it life by fostering cosmopolitan integration with the aim of creating and critically engaging with democratic institutions. He notes that, while Kant is a strong proponent of republican government and of public deliberation with broad-minded intent, he does not offer any mechanism for achieving these conditions, relying instead on the constraints of his teleology of nature (Bohman 1997, 187). He proposes, ostensibly in contrast to Kant's republican orientation, the vision of "a well-ordered and pluralistic democracy [that] provides the institutional basis for a much more demanding and potentially transformative cosmopolitan public sphere" (Bohman 1997, 188). Bohman is here looking for the foundations of world integration first at the domestic level, where national public spheres strive to take on a disposition that is both critically self-reflexive and cosmopolitan in outlook. Here, a public seeks to constitute itself "qua public," as a broad network of sites of interlocution whose participants maintain a practical awareness of their capacity for broad-minded thinking; this public qua public, the model for which Bohman draws on Habermas's early work on the late eighteenth-century public spheres of Europe and the United States, concerns itself with the cultural issues of the day and with controversial political and social topics, and it vitalizes itself as a resource for creativity, innovation, and change (Bohman 1997, 189-90). Self-reflexive public spheres have a way of rearranging and redefining themselves in a way that "changes the conditions of political deliberation." Political institutions depend on a certain legitimating relation to the public, and so must ultimately change to accommodate new public forms or risk losing their legitimacy. Bohman is counting on this effect influencing national and global political structures as public spheres become "increasingly pluralistic and cosmopolitan" (Bohman 1997, 191-2). In addition to the promotion of pluralistic public spheres in each state, Bohman insists that we look to build an "informal network of communication" among a variety of transnational governmental and non-governmental organizations that would strengthen an "international civil society" in which to institutionally ground the innovative potential of the cosmopolitan public sphere: Experiments in wider forms of international association require both a plurality of interlocking publics and a civic public sphere that encompasses them all. After formulating their way of looking at the problem in their voluntary associations, world citizens can then address the cosmopolitan public sphere, the broadest possible forum for the exchange of arguments and perspectives. This interchange among publics and institutions means that the public sphere must be relatively free of community-wide biases and serious blockages in communication. The cosmopolitan public organized in a world civil society must understand itself as maintaining this openness and inclusiveness in communication; it must be possible for new publics to emerge, to place new themes and issues on the public agenda, and to challenge current public understandings. (Bohman 1997, 193)Bohman's vision thus rests on an arrangement of interlocking domestic public spheres that feed reciprocally into a larger cosmopolitan public sphere of expansive plurality and complexity. Such an overarching public depends on flourishing civil societies at both the domestic and international levels, which in turn entails reliable democratic structures. For Bohman, the cosmopolitan project is inextricably linked with the project of radical democratization -- in existing democracies, in newly and non-democratic countries, and at the level of global governance. (c) Of course, such an agenda for a worldwide public sphere immediately raises all the issues that continue to persist regarding public spheres in contemporary democracies. Following Dewey, Bohman notes that open deliberation is much easier to produce on smaller scales such as on the model of the "town meeting"; the form of deliberation that civic involvement has a tendency to deteriorate with the increase of complexity, especially as communication comes to be mediated through multiple institutions and institutional technologies. A cosmopolitan public sphere would therefore run up against "the seeming contradiction between the openness of the town meeting and the closed and inaccessible character of large institutions" (Bohman 1997, 195). Many international institutions, for example, are organized according to the representation of states, not citizens as such. Bohman believes the a cosmopolitan public sphere should connect to world citizens directly, which means focusing on forms of transnational organization that bypass the wall of sovereignty and place deliberative potential back into the hands of citizens as world citizens. But there is the additional question of the role of mass media institutions, which, while they play an already indispensable role in raising political awareness in a global perspective, are notoriously more influenced by private market concerns than by the greater cause of cosmopolitan civic responsibility (Bohman 1997, 195-6). Bohman does not offer a specific answer to this last set of difficulties. He concludes by reflecting that two main problems stand in the way of construing a flourishing cosmopolitan public sphere. These are the challenges of cultural conflict and pluralistic solidarity, on one hand, and of practicing democratic sovereignty on a widely transnational scale, on the other. He is fairly confident however that the process of innovation and solidarity-building that would lead to a cosmopolitan public sphere will be able to work out these problems: Viewed ahistorically, the problems of establishing a just set of international institutions and a free and open world public sphere seem intractable and overcomplex. However, such difficulties seem less overwhelming in view of the fact that cosmopolitan public spheres already exist. At a certain scale, and as a consequence of certain historical processes of globalization, all public spheres eventually become so pluralist that they are as a matter of fact already cosmopolitan. (Bohman 1997, 198)While it is indeed true that processes connected with globalization have to a significant extent already moved the world toward a stance "making the emergence of an international institutional framework inevitable," there remains something unsatisfactory in Bohman's assurances. In particular, Bohman does not really address relations of power, of hegemony, of under-development or of extreme cultural conflict that underlie not the hopes but the fears of many with regard to the emerging global society. It is also not immediately apparent that his construal of Kant's notion of "publicity" will be sufficient to overcome the "communitarian challenge" that skeptics cite as an essential block to wider forms of integration. I do not believe that these difficulties render Bohman's idea of a cosmopolitan public sphere inoperable, but I think Bohman falls short of clarifying the bases that make his schema effective, beginning with his interpretation of Kant's cosmopolitan ideal. Re (a): Bohman's assumption that Kant sought to approximate a world republic is only partially true. Kant did declare that "in thesi" a "state of nations" was the most logical way of ensuring peace, and that short of such a world republic perpetual peace is at best an ideal that can be approached. On the other hand, Kant did not recommend the public sphere as itself a "negative substitute" for the institution of positive law. Quite to the contrary, coercive law exists solely to secure the public sphere, which is a necessary conduit for the realization of human autonomy in the form of popular enlightenment. In any case, while there is a very prominent side of Kant's cosmopolitan ideal the recommends a paradigm of global governance, we must recognize that Kant permits himself to make such recommendations only upon a critical examination of the foundations of right. Bohman does not so much address this aspect of Kant's thinking, which involves not just the transformation of worldwide polities but the constitution of political life itself, which for Kant is rooted in the very ability and necessity of individuals to affect one another. It is in this respect that we can understand Kant's distinction between communio and commercium. Only the former implies an arrangement of political "closure" that legitimates an administrative structure of positive law characteristic of a state -- what international relations theorists call "a monopoly on organized violence." Being that no rightful condition of closed communio on the order of a republic can be achieved to positively unite states into a singular community, Kant recommends a substitute in the form of a league of states to pursue the negative function of avoiding war. This is why, in both "Perpetual Peace" and The Metaphysics of Morals, he introduces his federation under the heading of the "right of nations," not under cosmopolitan right. Commercium, on the other hand, implies an indefinite condition of openness and works as an original condition making the formation of communities of closure possible. Cosmopolitanism, in this view, is a project in the reconciliation of political opening and closure. Its aim is to negotiate a hospitable worldwide realm of publicity through a critical investigation of the question: "How did it come about the original community of all human beings broke up into separate and antagonistic forts of closure?" Of course, Kant's own answer to the question is insufficient, and Bohman is quite right that Kant's idea of "thinking from the standpoint of everyone else" is in need of revision to become consistent with the epistemic pluralism we now understand to populate the globe (Bohman 1997, 185-6). But I do think it is in our best interest not to collapse the problem sets of state interaction and citizen interaction into a single, if layered, program of democratic sovereignty. Re (b): The problems of doing so become more apparent as we consider the second and third parts of Bohman's argument. His idea of a cosmopolitan public sphere rests in part on the establishment of "pluralistic public spheres in each state" (Bohman 1997, 191). There is no guarantee, however, that this goal is at all a probability. Demographic pluralism is a contingency that today often follows patterns of economic development, civil strife, and fluctuations in living conditions in the form of migration flows. Such flows are by their very character "unbalanced" in the sense that the "level" of pluralism increases in the developed world at a faster rate than elsewhere, even if most societies are becoming more pluralistic to some degree. On the other hand, one could make the argument that all that is needed is a certain "attitude" of receptiveness to pluralism, and Bohman does specify at one point that a "public's concern for itself becomes cosmopolitan when the network and audience of communication transcends ethnic and political boundaries" (Bohman 1997, 189). This proposition, however, seems to require the universal adoption of an ethical orientation, for while globalization may require us to think about issues beyond our assumed boundaries, it does not necessarily require us to think about them in a "cosmopolitan" way. "Pluralism" of the kind that promotes internal tolerance and blurs national boundaries -- at least in Bohman's sense -- is very much a property of the First World (Habermas 1997, 132). The continuing patterns of "uneven development" in the scheme of globalization processes threaten to bring about a situation in which old relations of center over periphery in international politics do not mitigate but rather harden into new forms (cf. Nairn 1981). Economic, commercial, or "functional" forms of transnational integration have the underside of creating systems of socioeconomic dependence in the form of "soft power." Furthermore, the export of "mass culture" in the form of commodities, fashions, media, tourism, and the like have the effect of leveling cultural differences instead of coordinating them into dialogue: "The clocks of Western civilization keep the tempo for the compulsory simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous" (Habermas 2001, 75). These effects have the capacity to cloud the forms of cultural consciousness required to bring about self-determination in the form of a distinctive political voice. The imbalances in globalization processes of "social" versus "system" integration may have consequences for the other part of Bohman's vision, "the informal network of communication among the organizations and associations that constitute an international civil society" (Bohman 1997, 191). Instead of a more pluralistic, egalitarian international civil society, we could find ourselves in one characterized by a "central value system" (Edward Shils) that compels national and international institutions alike to orient themselves to the values of Western civilization. In a radical formulation of this prospect, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri postulate the rise of a new form of global hegemony ("sovereignty") phylogenetically descended from modern imperialism. "Humanitarian intervention" is here cast as the principle of a postmodern political theology providing the model of a global juridical order, with the "criminal against humanity" and "rogue state" assuming the role of the universal delinquent. "Empire" becomes the logic of rule of no-one, a global police state subservient to the decentered interests of network capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2000). Re (c): These problems suggest significant blockages to building a cosmopolitan public sphere, and they complicate further the issues surrounding how to maintain one. Bohman is not ignorant of the difficulties that we have always faced in keeping open deliberation alive in societies structured by mammoth and bureaucratically run institutions: "In complex societies, it may be difficult to see this public as anything more than an abstraction, a place holder, an episodic event (as Hannah Arendt thought) or even a 'phantom' (as Walter Lippman put it). Indeed, Habermas has recently argued that is only a 'structure of communication,' an anonymous and subjectless network of communication and discourse" (Bohman 1997, 194). Bohman earlier suggested that the political effects of a public sphere often come about as occasional interruptions of normalized politics, much in same way Thomas Kuhn described a cyclical process of "normal" versus "revolutionary" periods of scientific thought; political evolution through the public sphere occurs through episodic outpourings of expression and innovation at which the public becomes acutely aware of itself and the definitions and discursive formations with which it has come to understand itself (Bohman 1997, 192). In Bohman's view, a conduct of the public sphere that alternates between periods of "normal politics" and outbursts of "cosmopolitan politics" seems historically more likely than an idealized world of permanent, open deliberation. Yet this formulation does not by itself guarantee that such progressive episodes are possible in the future or on what scale. Without an explanation -- or, more concretely, without a framework of concepts with which to decipher the workings of publicity per se in light of both technological and spatio-temporal dynamics of the transnationalization of public spheres -- we seem to be in no better position to understand cosmopolitan politics than if we still relied on Kant's "natural teleology." | ||||||||||||||
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Engaging the idea of a global civil society that interacts through a "cosmopolitan public sphere" remains speculative without a corresponding basis in social theory. The problem here is that social theory itself often assumes a bounded society integrated in relation to a state apparatus -- a "rationalized" society. But we are now dealing with a scope that encompasses a plurality of societies with different modes of organization and at different levels of rationalization, such that it would be precipitous to refer to the globe as a singular society in the customary sense. Society and polity do not exist, nor do they coexist, at the global level in the same way that they do at the local. I would therefore like to introduce the idea of a body cosmopolitic, a paradigm for thinking about global society that remains sensitive to and in fact focuses on this multiplicity. Whereas a body politic connotes a centralized organization of public discourse geared toward the needs of a singularly integrated society, the body cosmopolitic refers to the totality of relations of multiple societies over a vast scope but who are ultimately enclosed within definitive limits. While Kant was able to speculate on the possibility of a thoroughgoing community of communities bound to interact, societies still existed such that a large degree of separatism between bodies politic could be maintained. Communio, the fortified community of space, by definition assumes the existence of an outside. This closure is the determining feature of much that is constitutive of a body politic -- boundaries, conditions of membership (versus non-membership), locus of authority, etc. It is in this context that we can understand the "communitarian" position on political identity, that political identification is in the last instance an ethical orientation stemming from one's identity as part of a community (Thompson 1998). "Right" from this perspective is unintelligible except from within the enclosure of a self-understood society of shared intersubjective meaning; it is to be comprehended, if at all, only as the articulation of a certain concept of the self in historically constituted relation to others. The inextricable tie between individuals' ethical orientations and their respective communities presents a stumbling block to political consensus across cultural boundaries. On the other hand, it seems that mass media technology and general increases in interaction of all kinds between such communities are mitigating these differences, for better or worse. Our task is to come to terms with the dynamics that drive and influence the terms of interaction at the cosmopolitan level. Cosmopolitanism must seek to investigate the ways in which bodies politic constitute themselves and interact as parts of the whole (commercium), and from this formulate reconstructive strategies for attaining more peaceful and equitable relations. For this purpose, we can make a few off-hand reflections on what this entails. We need to clarify what we mean by the term "cosmopolitan." Following Kant, I have been using the term to refer to the totality of human beings in a relation of possible interaction. But "cosmopolitanism" can refer to a form of right, an ethical orientation, a demographic make-up, a kind of "polis," global governance, or simply broad-mindedness or urbanity, and each meaning can imply a different goal when we think of cosmopolitanism as a political project. For example, the idea of human beings or bodies politic in cosmopolitical relations is very different from the idea of a "cosmopolitan body politic." Moreover, a cosmopolitan community at the global level implies different dynamics from ostensibly "cosmopolitan" public spheres at a national or even supranational or regional level. The former encompasses the whole of humanity, while the latter only a part, presumably in a boundaried territory with a corresponding "outside." This difference alone implies a significant difference in the form of political solidarity that may obtain. The latter case, for example, still allows for the possibility of a concept of "foreigner." Further, national citizens often also identify with places beyond the polity's boundaries as well as to the polity itself. But at the global level there are no outsides to speak of and no foreigners (no Schmittian "enemy"), as everybody is a world citizen. In any case, so-called "cosmopolitan" polities can still be very different in constitution, demographically and politically. Finally, there is a discursive risk in discriminating between polities that are cosmopolitan or non-cosmopolitan, particularly if we begin to think of cosmopolitanism as a desirable value -- depending on what one means by the word, it may or may not be achievable (or desirable) everywhere. I would recommend that these polities be referred to as "pluralistic" and reserve "cosmopolitan" to the global level, as the former seems much more susceptible to the kinds of differentiation we need to keep in mind. We need to investigate, in a critical-theoretical way, the effects of political openness and closure. How a polity constitutes itself vis-a-vis its outside is crucial to understanding the effects of globalization, particularly as we come to understand it in terms of ideas such as human or cosmopolitan rights. Globalization is of course at its hermeneutically stickiest when it comes to addressing how local cultures are to adapt themselves to universal ideas of justice and right. But recent attempts in international relations theory have tried to show that division among polities has a strong socio-structural component as well. Habermas notes that although the independent polities that make-up the terrain of international politics come from and continue to bear features of a variety of political forms -- ancient empires, city-states, theocracies, tribal organizations, family clans, etc. -- all have developed the operational facade of the nation-state (Habermas 2001, 62). Alexander Wendt has argued that the states system itself has a political culture that sets and maintains the "terms of individuality" for actors in the international arena and structures relations of violence between them (Wendt 1999, 255-8). By this model, states are predisposed to a relation of "rivalry" by which they jealously guard their interests while maintaining mostly peaceful relations through a strategy of mutual "status quoness," embodied in the principle of sovereignty (Wendt 1999, 279-80, 295). Sovereignty is both the ideological and structural principle of keeping up walls in the international system. Moreover, it has to this day been almost irrevocably entangled with our conceptions of justice and right, and indeed with politics itself (Foucault: "Right in the West is the king's right"). As globalization threatens to bring these status quos increasingly into question, we must grapple with new ways of thinking about right and sovereignty, based on the principle of thoroughgoing interaction as opposed to shared fortification. Social theory must broaden its approach to assess the relationship between technology and community-formation. Until now our sociological understandings have assumed the Weberian distinction between state and society as a one-to-one correlation. Now, new technologies are wearing away the boundaries of community identity as territorially conceived and are facilitating new forms of interaction. The changes in communication and economic systems that historians believe contributed to the nation-state form of polity (see, e.g., Gellner 1996, Anderson 1983, Nairn 1981) are being superseded by new forms of communications technology and postindustrial economic expansion. These forces are extending and strengthening themselves beyond territorial borders in a way that goes largely unchecked by political regulation. Cosmopolitan and social justice thinkers are caught in a race against a sprawl of economic and market systems that are hardening along the lines of affluence versus disadvantage at both the international level and within domestic arenas around the world. At present, social integration seems to arrive only in the wake of functional integration (see Habermas 2001, 82). Money and power, however, are not the only media being exported and linked across boundaries. Mass media in the form of high-speed audio and visual technologies have produced forms of communication not readily reducible to the workings of "print-capitalism" that played so significant a role in community integration at the high point of nation-state politics (Anderson 1983). Whereas the daily newspaper was, with its method and logistics of dissemination, bound in both content and audience to a territory and a population of common language, telecommunications networks challenge both the territorial boundaries of information communities and their orientation to local language games. Media technology is a largely unchecked game of getting information from any given point on the earth to any other point of the earth instantaneously and to every part of the earth simultaneously. The sociology of information that Benedict Anderson counted as so crucial a factor in both the gain of provincial vernaculars over "universal languages" (Latin in medieval Europe, languages of colonial administration in imperialist realms) as well as in the self-understanding of a people tied to a limited territory is being reversed by the rise of global media, with English becoming the universal second language (cf. Anderson 1983, 44ff, 62-3; Habermas 2001, 75). What print-capitalism was to the consummation of nation-states, image-capitalism may very well be to globalization by way of technologies no longer logistically bound to traditionally understood confines of spatial and temporal logic. We need a theoretical framework capable of mapping these new dynamics that seem to drive forms of social and system integration into a network of global, transnational, and local spheres with particular interplays of socioeconomic interests, cultural language games, public spheres, and institutional frameworks. Finally, we need to look into how these changes bring about new forms of political expression at the level of a global public sphere. Bohman himself recognizes this problem when he notes: "As difficult as it is to separate the idea of democratic participation from the town meeting model, it is also difficult to imagine the public sphere without modeling it on the circulation of printed material" (Bohman 1997, 196). The new transnational public spheres, being based on new forms of media technology, allows for forms of political action that entail novel displays of dramaturgical self-expression. Joshua Meyrowitz (1985), in a remarkable study, shows how television and other electronic media change the very terms of symbolic interaction, including in the political realm. Expressive performance is becoming just as if not more important than propositional or normative validity claims in public discourse, with profound effects. The student movements of the 1960s and especially the antiwar and civil rights campaigns in the United States were perhaps the first demonstrations of this potential, but we have still only begun to understand their effects on the public sphere at the domestic level, let alone at the global. Yet this is perhaps the most interesting and crucial aspect of understanding how a pluralistic, democratic culture might formulate in a cosmopolitan public sphere. Roland Bleiker uses the term "transversal" to describe "a political practice that not only transgresses national boundaries, but also questions the spatial logic through which these boundaries have come to constitute and frame the conduct of international relations" (Bleiker 2000, 2). In our time we have already witnessed no less than two major events whose impact cannot be separated from the dynamics of global media, and whose individual significance has been such that each has been cited as marking the end of the "short twentieth century." The first occurred on November 7th, 1989, when an awe struck world public witnessed the spectacular images of East German citizens tearing down the Berlin Wall and crossing over to the West. Only with the resources of global media technologies could the popular uprisings of 1989 have spread so fast and with such reassurance as to collapse one of the most fearful transnational regimes in world history. The events that led to the fall of the Soviet Empire is to date the most effective demonstration of Bohman's idea of "cosmopolitan politics," a period of experimentation that "questions the sovereignty of nations, even if such a politics affirms the sovereignty of citizens, now citizens of the world" (Bohman 1997, 192). The events of 1989 demonstrated the capacity in the cosmopolitan public sphere for non-state actors to effect political change with a magnitude that equals and even surpasses the mightiest superpowers. This sword, of course, has an opposing edge. More recently, we witnessed an event that questioned the spatial logic of the world political system in a different way, as on September 11th, 2001, people around the world watched live the dramatic suicide-attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center buildings. Once again, our conventional view of international politics has been challenged by the fact that the most devastating assault on a major power since World War II was carried out not by another state but by a transnational and largely voluntary non-government organization. This time, however, even proponents of cosmopolitan globalization must confront the fact that political integration across boundaries need not lead to pacifistic forms of association. Even though the attacks themselves were carried out by an "underground" organization, the sentiments that inspired them have been far from secret, and Osama bin Laden has long held status as a public figure in the Muslim world with an unequivocal message. The September 11th attacks took place not between states but between the populations of states (civilians of one assaulting civilians of another) in the context of a global society, over issues derived from socioeconomic and cultural entanglements as well as from military and political-economic relations. These aspects seem to give the matter a form closer to that of civil conflict than of interstate warfare in the traditionally understood sense. Terrorism, like mass protest, requires an audience; but while mass protest is a forceful injection of oneself into the public sphere, terrorism exists in the public sphere in a purely parasitic relation. Bringing no message but simple fear, terrorism merely assaults the public sphere itself -- it degenerates the force of public discourse, not back to the force of the stronger, but to mere force. A terrorist act signifies a more or less total contempt for the societal order it targets. What is interesting about September 11th, however, is more than the event itself. What is unique is that the various public spheres of the world were able, in a way more pronounced than in the past, to watch each other react to the same event in different ways. The reactions to September 11th highlighted and brought into the public eye a range of viewpoints on opposite sides of various lines of political exclusion, economic dependence, and cultural conflict that are drawn across the global horizon. The very fact of observing these mixed reactions have led many on all parts of the globe -- First, Second, and Third World alike -- to question their relationship to the world at large. Additionally, the very terrain of political discussion has changed on the global and at many national levels. Previously marginalized voices have appeared with new impetus to engage issues surrounding routes to community self-determination, the logic of "anti-Western" ideologies, the role of First World (and particularly American) power, structures of exclusion in the world system, the aims of globalization, and (fittingly) the prospects and need for a cosmopolitan form of governance. Still, the September 11th attacks at least make comprehensible the possibility of violent conflict over the status of global society itself, of something akin to "transnational civil war," which comes about not from the remnants of a pre-globalized, state-centric age but as a contingency specific to globalization. In sum, democratic theories of civil society and the public sphere cannot simply be thrown ad hoc onto the problem sets of international relations. My argument is that cosmopolitan theory today should not be so much about building mechanisms of universal governance but about investigating the conditions of and blockages to peaceful, equitable, yet dynamic interaction among the self-understood parts of the global whole. We need to inquire deeply into the conditions that are constitutive of forms of right, of political openness and of closure, of articulations of political communities and of relationships between them. In this way, we will become more able to sort out the complex dynamics and trajectories of globalization and develop strategies for realizing a path to cosmopolitan right that best harnesses the power of open public deliberation on a global scale. | ||||||||||||||
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