Review Essay: Global Governance without Global Government?

Political Theory

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 133-151

  Scheuerman, William E ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 57749124978     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591707310100     Document Type: Review

References (22)

1. See the excellent volume co-edited by Peter Niesen and Benjamin Herborth, Anarchie der kommunikativen Freiheit: Jürgen Habermas und die Theorie der internationalen Politik (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2007).
2. Ingeborg Maus, “From Nation-State to Global State, or the Decline of Democracy,” Constellations 13 (2006): 465—484.
3. For a discussion of this issue, see William E. Scheuerman, “Critical Theory beyond Habermas,” in Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, ed. John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 94—103.
4. I use the tem “global governance” in the sense introduced by James N. Rosenau, “ Governance, Order, and Change in World Politics,” in Governance without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, ed. James N. Rosenau and Ernst Otto-Czempiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1—29.
5. See Jürgen Habermas, “Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years' Hindsight,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Idea, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 113—154.
6. Robert Dahl has updated these anxieties in his thoughtful “Can International Organizations Be Democratic? A Skeptic's View,” in Democracy's Edges, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordon ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19—36.
7. Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to Global Legal Community, trans. Jeffrey Flynn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
8. His tendency to see the EU as a positive model for other supranational organizations generates problems. See the excellent essay by Adam Lupel, “Regionalism and Globalization: Post-nation or Extended Nation?” Polity 36 (2004): 153—174.
9. I do not know what else to call a state that regularly disregards binding international and domestic prohibitions on torture, practices indefinite detention, and establishes secret offshore interrogation (and, probably, torture) camps.
10. Recall the neglected argument by the first-generation Frankfurt School political theorist, Franz L. Neumann, who claimed that the dissolution of state sovereignty tended to go hand-in-hand with the disintegration of the rule of law (Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944]).
11. For a critical discussion of Habermas's reflections on this issue, see Robert Fine and Will Smith, “ Jürgen Habermas' Theory of Cosmopolitanism,” Constellations 10 (2003): 469—487.
12. In his comments on global terrorism, a similar economism tends to creep in. See Michel Rosenfeld, “Habermas' Call for Cosmopolitan Constitutional Patriotism in an Age of Global Terror,” Constellations 14 (2007): 159—181.
13. Think, for example, about recent global debates about international intervention in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Darfur.
14. For a sample of the huge debate, see the essays collected in Michael T. Greven and Louis W. Pauly, eds., Democracy beyond the Nation-State: The European Dilemma and the Emerging Global Order (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000 ).
15. Andrei Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
16. See, for example, the New Left Review in recent years, where Schmitt typically makes a favorable appearance in discussions of U.S. foreign policy.
17. Glyn Morgan, The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
18. I challenge this conventional view of Realism in “Realism and the Left: The Case of Hans J. Morgenthau,” Review of International Studies (forthcoming). Realists like Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr are vastly more nuanced thinkers than Habermas—or most present-day cosmopolitans—prefer to concede.
19. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1954), 93—154.
20. For a defense of this position, see Otfried Höffe, Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (Munich, Germany: Beck, 1999).
21. Jürgen Habermas, “ A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society?” (paper presented at University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop, October 10, 2005).
22. To his credit, Habermas himself generally opposes this extreme view of what David Held and others have correctly criticized as the “hyper-globalization thesis” (David Held, Anthony McGraw, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999]).