Two cheers for cosmopolitanism: Cosmopolitan solidarity as second-order inclusion

Journal of Social Philosophy

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 165-184

  Pensky, Max ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67349106310     PISSN: 00472786     EISSN: 14679833     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00372.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (44)

1. See Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Viking, 1996).
2. For an interesting discussion of Mann's Settembrini as a mouthpiece for racialist theories of European unity, see Menno Spiering, The Idea of Europe Since 1914: The Legacy of the First World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 186.
3. Whether Mann saw Settembrini as a figure of ridicule or an indirect spokesman for his own values (or both) is not actually clear. See the discussion in Hannelore Mundt, Understanding Thomas Mann (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 118ff.
4. See Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Oxford: Routledge, 2002);
5. for a view more favorable to the value of national attachments and cultural difference, see Kok-Chor Tan, Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
6. and Simon Caney, Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
7. For a useful overview of distributive and non-distributive accounts of cosmopolitan justice, see Darrel Moellendorf, Cosmopolitan Justice (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002).
8. "[W]e have assumed that a democratic society, like any political society, is to be viewed as a complete and closed system. It is complete in that it is self-sufficient and has a place for all the main purposes of human life. It is also closed⋯ in that entry into it is only by birth and exit from it is only by death⋯. For the moment we will leave aside entirely relations with other societies and postpone all questions of justice between peoples until a conception of justice for a well-ordered society is at hand. Thus, we are not seen as joining society at the age of reason, as we might join an association, but as being born into a society where we will lead a complete life." John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 41.
9. For treatments of the cosmopolitan virtues see Martha Nussbaum's often-cited treatment of the survival of Stoic attitudes in Kant, "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism," in For Love of Country? eds. Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 2-20.
10. See also Bonnie Menes Kahn, Cosmopolitan Culture: The Gilt-Edged Dream of a Tolerant City (London: Athenaeum, 1987);
11. and Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
12. For a good overview see Kate Nash, "Cosmopolitan Political Community: Why Does It Feel so Right?" in Global Ethics and Civil Society, eds. John Eade and Darren O'Byrne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 34-44.
13. This includes Habermas, who has been sharply critical of views, such as those of David Held, that a broad spectrum of rights enforcement can be transferred to supernational bodies such as the UN, and in general that a global consensus on universal human rights would be an adequate support for transnational governance. "[A] worldwide consensus on human rights," Habermas concludes, "could not serve as the basis for a strong equivalent to the civic solidarity that emerged in the framework of the nation state. Civic solidarity is rooted in particular collective identities; cosmopolitan solidarity has to support itself on the moral universalism of human rights alone." Jürgen Habermas, "The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy," in The Postnational Constellation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 108.
14. See Kok-Chor Tan, Toleration, Diversity, and Global Justice (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
15. Thomas Pogge, "Human Flourishing and Universal Justice," Social Philosophy and Policy 16, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 356.
16. See Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione, "The Normative Challenge of a European Polity: Cosmopolitan and Communitarian Models Compared, Criticized and Combined," in Democracy and the European Union, eds. Andreas Follesdal and Peter Koslowski (Berlin: Springer, 1998), 254-86.
17. For the most comprehensive statement of Habermas' conception of constitutional patriotism (although he does not use this precise term), see Habermas, "The Postnational Constellation."
18. For a criticism of the concept of constitutional patriotism in the context of the European Union, see Craig Calhoun, "Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere," Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 147-71.
19. The literature here is, not surprisingly, massive. For a helpful overview, see Daniel Verdier and Richard Breen, "Europeanization and Globalization: Politics Against Markets in the European Union," Comparative Political Studies April (2001): 227-62.
20. The political integration process in the European Union is not surprisingly the most relevant site for measuring post-national forms of attachment. Here again the literature is very great. For an overview see Russell Lewis, "The Myth of Europe," in The Euroskeptical Reader 2, ed. Martin Holmes (London: Palgrave, 2002), 1151-70.
21. On the transformation of citizenship under immigration pressures, see especially Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
22. For a thorough survey of recent literature on immigration and citizenship status, see Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, "Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory," Ethics 104 (January 1994): 352-81.
23. See Andreas Wildt, "Solidarity: Its History and Contemporary Definition," in Solidarity, ed. Kurt Bayerz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), 201ff.
24. The notion that lifeworld solidarities are "transferred" or "transmitted" from life world to political system with their intersubjective structure more or less intact (thus explaining the fact that the norms of intersubjective communication are isomorphic with the norms of democracy) is one of the chief claims of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, and for this reason the theory requires a very cautious treatment of the most basic claim of Durkheim's sociological theory, which insists that normative integration in modern societies occurs via difference and not similarity. I offer a full discussion of this topic in my The Ends of Solidarity: Discourse Theory in Contemporary Ethics and Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming 2007), from which this section of the article is adapted.
25. An outstanding account of the genealogy of modern political solidarity in friendship and solidarity is now available in Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Fraternity to Civic Friendship (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
26. Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, eds. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 66ff.
27. Emile Durkheim, The Social Division of Labor, trans. George Simpson (Clencoe, IL: Free Press, 1947).
28. See David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
29. It is important to bear in mind that liberal nationalist theories such as those of Miller and Kymlicka naturally begin with the presupposition that nationality as a source of solidarity will need to establish relations of likeness among persons with no relationships apart from the mediating category, and therefore likeness or similarity is entirely non-empirical. For Kymlicka this presumably takes the form of a strongly holistic culture according to which differently situated persons could presumably predict the kind of value-specific responses to challenges that unfamiliar persons would make on no other information than their national membership. This is what ultimately allows Kymlicka to identify the "paradox of liberal nationalism" in a way that Durkheim would have immediately understood: the more nationalists (Kymlicka is as usual studying Quebec nationalists) struggle to articulate and defend national uniqueness as a form of collective identity, the more they appropriate contemporary legal and political tools and values to do so, and the more successful they are, the more those values come to determine their own understanding of the normative basis of their own culture-hence the paradox that the more they struggle for national particularity, the more similar their value orientations become to those against whom they wish to distinguish themselves. See Will Kymlicka, "The Paradox of Liberal Nationalism," in Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 254-64. Likewise, Miller assumes that non-familiarity (people who have never and will never meet) is itself the precondition for the application of the category of likeness. "I take it as virtually self-evident," Miller writes, "as an important source of trust between individuals who in no position directly to monitor one another's behavior. A shared identity carries with it a shared loyalty, and this increases confidence that others will reciprocate one's own co-operative behavior" (p. 92).
30. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. paras. 257-62.
31. For a lucid treatment of subjective freedoms in Hegel and the concept of trust, see Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 6.
32. Apart from the now-classic work by Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (Civil Society and Political Theory),
33. see the helpful overview by Michael Edwards, Civil Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
34. The conception of civil society as a "lightly institutionalized" spectrum of non-parliamentary agents operating as a transmission device between a "chaotic" life world and institutions of democratic governance is developed in Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), chap. 9.
35. See Nicholas Deakin, In Search of Civil Society (London: Palgrave, 2001), esp. chap. 7.
36. In addition to the work of Habermas, which I discuss below, most of what I say regarding the use of inclusion as a concept for interpreting solidarity is derived from Iris Marion Young, Democracy as Inclusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), to which I also return in the article's last section.
37. There are many current versions of the "all-affected" principle as a more general test norm for the justification of political participation. Apart from the most well-known and influential version, the Discourse Principle in Habermasian discourse theory (which is explicitly adopted by Iris Marion Young), see especially David Held, Democracy and the Global Order (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995),
38. and Carol C. Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
39. For example, a group wishing to maintain its cultural autonomy may do so by inclusion in a deliberative democratic body, for which a successful outcome is measured in terms of favorable legislation. The group must redefine what will count as successful cultural independence by virtue of the legislative and/or policy outcomes of institutions that belong to the very majority political culture it wishes to shield itself from. In another place I have referred to this as "Yoder's Dilemma," after the famous Amish case: in order to (in their minds) protect their religious culture and its chances for survival, the Amish plaintiffs were obliged to appeal to the constitutional basics of religious freedom, and hence redescribe a holistic (comprehensive) religious doctrine into one of many freedoms of the secular order they wanted to protect themselves from. See Max Pensky, "Comments on Benhabib," Constellations 11, no. 2 (2004): 258-65.
40. For a thorough survey of recent literature on immigration and citizenship status, see Kymlicka and Norman, "Return of the Citizen," 352-81.
41. See Veit Bader, "Citizenship and Exclusion: Radical Democracy, Community and Justice, or What Is Wrong with Communitarianism?" Political Theory 23, no. 2 (1995): 211-46.
42. See Carlos Closa, "Supranational Citizenship and Democracy: Normative and Empirical Dimensions," in European Citizenship: An Institutional Challenge, ed. Massimo La Torre (The Hague: Kluwer, 1998), 415-433.
43. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
44. On the coherence of cosmopolitan solidarity, see the excellent article by Arash Abizadeh, "Does Collective Identity Presuppose an Other? On the Alleged Incoherence of Global Solidarity," American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (2005): 45-60.