Towards global political parties

Ethics and Global Politics

Volumn 4, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 81-102

  Patomäki, Heikki ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

Author keywords

Arendt; Citizenship; Civil society; Participation; Political party; Republicanism; Rotation; Wells; World parliament; World social forum

Indexed keywords

EID: 80052199492     PISSN: 16544951     EISSN: 16546369     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3402/egp.v4i2.7334     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. Some sections are partly based on texts I have co-authored with Teivo Teivainen. This paper thus owes not only an intellectual debt to him (despite his characteristically more cautious attitude towards the idea of a global political party) but also many pieces of information as well a few formulations.
2. The relevant texts include Heikki Patomäki and Teivo Teivainen, A Possible World. Democratic Transformation of Global Institutions (London: Zed Books, 2004).
3. Heikki Patomäki and Teivo Teivainen, 'The World Social Forum. An Open Space or a Movement of Movements?', Theory, Culture & Society 21 (2004): 145-54.
4. Heikki Patomäki and Teivo Teivainen, 'Researching Global Political Parties', in Global Political Parties, ed. Katarina Sehm-Patomäki and Marko Ulvila (London: Zed Books, 2007), 92-113.
5. I am also thankful to the Bice Maiguashca and Raf Marchetti for comments and feedback; to Jennifer Gidley and Katarina Sehm-Patomäki for insightful suggestions and editorial work; and to the editor and three anonymous referees of Ethics & Global Politics. I take, of course, full responsibility for all the remaining errors and misinterpretations.
6. For standard discussions on agency and structure, see Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism. A Philosophical Critique of Contemporary Human Sciences (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979), for the point of contact between agency and structure, 51.
7. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).
8. Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).
9. E.g. Richard Falk, A Study of Future Worlds (New York: Free Press, 1975).
10. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199-220.
11. For an Arendtian and Habermasian attempt to develop the concept of global public sphere, see Heikki Patomäki, 'Republican Public Sphere and the Governance of Global Political Economy', in Value Pluralism, Normative Theory and International Relations, ed. M. Lensu and J-S. Fritz (London: MacMillan, 2000), 160-95.
12. See e.g. Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, 'Dilemmas of Anti-systemic Movements', Social Research (Spring, 1986): 185-206.
13. Asbjorn Eide, 'The Human Rights Movement and the Transformation of the Inter-national Order', Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance 11, no. 3 (1986): 367-402.
14. Saul Mendlovitz and R.B.J. Walker, eds., Towards a Just World Peace: Perspectives from Social Movements (London: Butterworths, 1987).
15. R.B.J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988).
16. Christopher Chase-Dunn has criticised me for making the claim that global civil society first emerged towards the end of the 20th century; Christopher Chase-Dunn, 'The Evolution of Capitalist Globalization and Possible Human Futures: Hamlet without the Prince', Cooperation & Conflict 43 (2008): 459.
17. However, my point is not so much an empirical claim about the existence of transnational activities as a claim about quasi-Hegelian developments of constitutive categories and consciousness. What I mean is that when the concept of societas civilis is employed globally it entails that civilising processes, legality and politics are recognised as global in scope, and that there thus is a planetary civilisation in the making. This recognition is compatible with the notion that the word civilisation will continue to be used in both singular and plural.
18. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 8.
19. For an argument that 'no contemporary discourse of civil society has managed to add even a single category to Hegel's categories of legality, privacy, plurality, association, publicity and mediation', see J.L. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), xiv.
20. Elise Boulding, Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World (New York: Columbia University, 1988).
21. Stephen Gill, 'Reflections on Global Order and Sociohistorical Time', Alternatives 16, no. 3 (1991): 275-314.
22. see also Paul Ghils, 'International Civil Society: International Non-Governmental Organizations in the International System', International Social Science Journal 133 (August, 1992): 417-29.
23. M.J. Peterson, 'Transnational Activity, International Society and World Politics', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, no. 3 (1992): 371-88.
24. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, 'Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, no. 3 (1992): 389-420.
25. The members of the small Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947 around the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, depicted themselves as 'liberals'. Milton Friedman was a member of that society. At that point, the 19th century era of classical laissez faire liberalism seemed over. Keynes and social democracy reigned in the West, Lenin in the East, and the idea of national liberation and state-led development in the South. The commitment of Friedman, Hayek and others to the ideals of individual (negative) freedom and to the free market principles of neoclassical economics made them appear insignificant and marginal.
26. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 20-22, 36.
27. For a full story of the currency transaction tax (CTT) movement, see Heikki Patomäki, 'Global Tax Initiatives: The Movement for the Currency Transaction Tax' (Geneva: UNRISD-United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 2007).
28. Civil Society and Social Movements Paper no. 27; and for an argument about a strategy for global democratisation that involves as the first step selected financial reforms such as establishing a debt arbitration mechanism and a currency transaction tax organisation, see Patomäki and Teivainen, A Possible World, note 1, chapter 10, et passim.
29. ATTAC stands for both 'attack' (instead of 'defence') and Association pour une Taxe sur les Transactions Financie'res pour l'Aide aux Citoyens.
30. Since the late 1980s, the Greenpeace International and some other environmental organisations have campaigned to alter the processes that cause global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted initially in 1997, was preceded by years of activism and diplomatic negotiations. The widespread recognition of the seriousness of the problem reached new proportions by 2007, when climate change became a global security issue and was thus securitised-through various intensively publicised reports and resolutions.
31. For an up-to-date analysis of the CTT proposal, see Heikki Patomäki, 'The Tobin Tax and Global Civil Society Organisations: The Aftermath of the 2008-9 Financial Crisis', Ritsumeikan Annual Review of International Studies 8 (2009): 1-18.
32. And for an analysis and explanation of the financial crisis and its consequences, see Heikki Patomäki, 'What Next? An Explanation of the 2008-9 Slump and Two Scenarios of the Shape of Things to Come', Globalizations 7 (2010): 67-84.
33. Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society. An Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 44-45.
34. David Held, Cosmopolitanism. Ideals and Realities (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 35.
35. James Bohman, Democracy across Borders. From Dêmos to Dêmoi (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 189.
36. Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the NewWorld Order. 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 248.
37. Robert D. Benford, 'Framing Global Governance from below. Discursive Opportunities and Challenges in the Transnational Social Movement Arena', in Arguing Global Governance, ed. Corneliu Bjola and Markus Kornbrost (London: Routledge, 2011), 83.
38. Kléber Ghimire, 'The United Nations World Summits and Civil Society Activism: Grasping the Centrality of National Dynamics', European Journal of International Relations 17 (2010): 75-95.
39. Andrew Kuper, Democracy Beyond Borders. Justice and Representation in Global Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 2.
40. Charter of Principles of the World Social Forum (São Paulo: World Social Forum, 2001), http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/main.php?id_menu=4&cd_language=2 (accessed October 24, 2009).
41. On Whitaker's concept of the WSF as an 'open space', see Chico Whitaker, 'The WSF as an Open Space', in World Social Forum. Challenging Empire, ed. Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman (New Delhi: Viveka Foundation, 2004), 111-21.
42. See also Teivo Teivainen, 'World Social Forum and Global Democratization: Learning from Porto Alegre', Third World Quarterly 23 (2002): 621-32.
43. George Monbiot, The Age of Consent. A Manifesto for a New World Order (London: Flamingo/ HarperCollins, 2003), 88-90.
44. See Christopher Chase-Dunn and Ellen Reese, 'The World Social Forum-A Global Political Party in the Making?', in Global Political Parties, ed. K. Sehm-Patomäki and M. Ulvila (London: Zed Books, 2007), 53-91.
45. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Ellen Reese, 'The New Global Left and Transnational Social Movements' (a paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, New York, session on the WSF, February 15, 2009), http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows48/irows48.htm.
46. Chase-Dunn and Reese, 'The World Social Forum', note 22, 69.
47. Chase-Dunn and Reese, 'The New Global Left', note 22, 6.
48. Chase-Dunn and Reese, 'The World Social Forum', note 22, 83-84.
49. See Terence Ball, Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
50. Rauli Mickelsson, 'Kosmopoliittisen puolueen mahdollisuudet' ['The Possibilities for a Cosmopolitan Party'], Futura, no. 1 (2005): 78-91.
51. Green Party of the United States Political Coordinator Dean Myerson on December 6, 2001 in a speech in Belgium, http://www.commondreams.org/news2001/1207-02.htm (accessed December 20, 2009).
52. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 79-90.
53. See Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
54. For an analysis of the contemporary geo-historical field that determines the plausibility of public speech-acts, see Heikki Patomäki, 'Neoliberalism and the Global Financial Crisis', New Political Science 31 (2009): 431-42.
55. Within this field, 'neoliberalism' is a negatively charged ideological concept that, by and large, is not considered respectable for selfdescription, not even for those numerous functionaries and politicians who are in effect implementing most parts of Friedrich Hayek's and Milton Friedman's ethico-political programme.
56. For the debates generated by Wagar's world party idea, see e.g. the special issue of Journal of World-Systems Research 2, no. 1 (1996).
57. See also Christopher Chase-Dunn and Terry Boswell, 'Global Democracy: A World-Systems Perspective', in ProtoSociology. An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research 20 (2004): 15-30.
58. The World Party proposed by Chase-Dunn and Boswell would be a 'network of individuals and representatives of popular organisations from all over the world who agree to help create a democratic and collectively rational global commonwealth'.
59. The idea was already present in his early non-fictional bestseller Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902). The phrase 'open conspiracy' was picked from the preface to the 1914 edition.
60. See Norman MacKenzie and Jeanne MacKenzie, HG Wells. A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 345 et. passim.
61. H.G.Wells, 'The Open Conspiracy', in The Open Conspiracy. H.G. Wells on World Revolution, ed. W. Wagar (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002, orig. published in 1933), 110-14.
62. I have criticised David Held's model of cosmopolitan democracy for a similar, although less militantly expressed, idea of the need to defend the global democratic community against its outsiders or others. An open and pluralist global security community is a precondition for sustainable political unification. Thus the process of building it on a planetary scale takes priority over local emancipation. A security community consists of geo-historical social systems in which actors do not prepare for the use of political violence against each other. Integration in the Deutschian sense generates capacity to resolve conflict by peaceful means and thus helps to sustain a security community, consisting of a sense of community and expectation of the possibility of peaceful changes.
63. See Heikki Patomäki, 'Problems of Democratising Global Governance: Time, Space and the Emancipatory Process', European Journal of International Relations 9 (2003): 358-69.
64. For a subsequent debate, David Held and Heikki Patomäki, 'Problems of Global Democracy: A Dialogue', Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 115-33.
65. W. WarrenWagar, A Short History of the Future. 3rd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).
66. The idea of a world political party probably seemed more remote in the late 1980s than in 2009 and that may be one of the reasons why Wagar assumed that a catastrophe is necessary to make such a party possible. But why did he assume that by the mid-21st century there would only be one global party-formation, using the name 'World Party'. It is more realistic and clearly more democratic and pluralistic to expect that there will be many party-like formations, with different and competing ideologies.
67. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
68. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, note 28.
69. Jamie Morgan, 'Interview with Michael Hardt', Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 93-113.
70. Wells, 'Open Conspiracy', note 33, 84-86, is also highly critical of the Marxist dogmas of class and class antagonism.
71. Wells argued that attempts to infer self-regarding and otherexclusive collective interests and solidarity from objective socio-economic positions are not only sociologically unsound but can have highly problematical practical-political consequences. 'In practice Marxism is found to work out in a ready resort to malignantly destructive activities, and to be so uncreative as to be practically impotent in the face of material difficulties'.
72. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, note 28, 220.
73. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
74. Wells, 'Open Conspiracy', note 33, 88.
75. Jan Aart Scholte, 'Political Parties and Global Democracy', in Global Political Parties, ed. Katarina Sehm-Patomäki and Marko Ulvila (London: Zed Books, 2007), 12-38.
76. The following brief account is based on the Wikipedia article on Greenpeace, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace (accessed October 10, 2009).
77. David McTaggart was a former badminton champion, construction millionaire, and skilodge operator, when in 1972 he joined up with Greenpeace, then virtually bankrupt, and provided his own boat for its first protest against French nuclear tests at Mururoa. In subsequent years, it was McTaggart who moulded the organisation, setting up national offices first in Europe and then round the world from Moscow to Latin America, and creating a uniquely powerful and centralised non-governmental organisation.
78. Cited on p. 75 of Fred Pearce, 'Greenpeace: Storm-Tossed on the High Seas', in Green Globe Yearbook 1996, ed. H.O. Bergesen et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 73-80, http://www.fni.no/YBICED/96_07_pearce.pdf (accessed October 25, 2009).
79. Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic. The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993), 142-44.
80. The meaning of the past is not fully fixed either; it depends on the way the on-going processes turn out in the future, and thus also on what we do.
81. See David Weberman, 'The Nonfixity of the Historical Past', The Review of Metaphysics 50 (1997): 749-69.
82. For ever a political theorist rather than a social scientist, Arendt had a tendency to mystify the pre-given qualities of the self-selected elites and reify the prevailing tendencies of the masses. See e.g. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965), 273-79.
83. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 259.