Just Cosmopolites Talking

By entering a conversation, Habermas claims, we make a number of assumptions about ourselves, our interlocutors and the world. We assume a common practice of reason and morality. Habermas contends that "every person who accepts the universal and necessary communicative propositions of argumentative speech and who knows what it means to justify a norm of action . . . presupposes as valid the principle of universalization." Moreover, every norm arrived at argumentatively ideally fulfills the condition that "all affected can accept the consequences and side-effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests." In other words, there is no need to establish some ideal or goal beyond discourse. If you understand properly what you are doing in talking and arguing, you will eventually discover a normative structure. Discourse generates norms and "only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse."

Such a conversational model has evident practical and moral consequences.

"[U]nder the pragmatic presuppositions of an inclusive and non-coercive rational discourse among free and equal participants, everyone is required to take the perspective of everyone else, and thus project herself into the understanding of self and world of all others; from this interlocking of perspectives there emerges an ideally extended we-perspective from which all can test in common whether they wish to make a controversial norm the basis of their shared practice."

A great deal follows from this. By each person placing "herself" in the position of every other person, we collectively arrive at universal norms that transcend our baser interests and their instrumental reasoning. Following our better norms, rather than self-interested calculation, we arrive at a discursive version of the General Will. In this procedure, good norms triumph by the "unforced force of the better argument." Bad arguments, bad practice and regressive aspects of our heritage are exposed. And a just world order discursively arises. Normative consensus carries with it the distinct aroma of Rousseau's positive view of freedom.

Habermas inexorably draws out this aroma in his influential but little read tome, Between Facts and Norms (1992). Here he outlines an "architectonic" scheme in which the normative principle informing the practice of law is identical to the principle of democracy. These principles, he further alleges, emerge from the discourse principle "equiprimordially" with the principle of morality or universalization. In other words, when our ancestors first grunted to each other, their protean and uncoerced discourse intimated law, democracy and moral freedom.

In spite, or perhaps because, of its obscure architectonics, discourse ethics enabled Habermas to link his normative preoccupations with the emerging moral concern in the American and British academy (and on the European and Anglospheric Left more generally) about rendering democratic processes more ethical and just. From the 1970s onwards, a number of American political and legal theorists from John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin to a host of feminist and communitarian thinkers had deliberated over the just procedures that might rectify the unjust distributions of markets and representative governments. But it was Habermas who offered an appealingly abstruse argot and a critical synthesis of Anglo-American and Continental schools of thought for renovating the democratic project in the context of a "world domestic policy."

Significantly, this interest in radicalizing the democratic project coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent end of ideological history. Worse still, the Soviet collapse signified the triumph of an instrumentalist reason where market-oriented democracies successfully promoted economic individualism. For radical democrats, this triumph was an occasion for desperation rather than celebration. But it is out of desperation, as all good Habermasians know, that new progressive possibilities and academic research grants are born. Those on the campus and bureaucratic Left who might otherwise have had to re-evaluate their utopian commitment to endless redistribution and affirmative action in the wake of the collapse of socialism could instead take heart from the fact that the spread of markets and democracy inexorably led to legitimation crises on a global scale. Indeed, such crises serendipitously invited radical democrats to project their discursively achieved and universalizable norms onto a regional and global stage.

For the apparently successful democratic societies of the West were an illusion. They suffered, Habermas diagnosed, from the debilitating moral deficit brought on by the practice of instrumental reason. Only those informed by an awareness gained in uncoerced deliberation in protest groups or international non-governmental organizations were alive to this. Unmasking the rapacious egoism at the core of contemporary democratic practice could occur only if citizens did not use their

"communicative liberties like individual liberties in the pursuit of personal interests, but rather use them as communicative liberties. Law can be preserved as legitimate only if enfranchised citizens switch from the role of private legal subjects and take the perspective of participants who are engaged in the process of reaching understanding about the rules of their life in common."

Those who take this role seriously participate in social movements of a global provenance--like the Greens who resist the administrative power of the state and promote values that are inclusive of the non-Western "other." The emergence of social movements that act locally but think globally presages the emergence of a "reconfigured" political power drawing upon the resources of an increasingly globalized lifeworld.

The End of the National Interest

"There is no constitutional state without radical democracy", claims Habermas. Yet paradoxically, radical democracy requires the withering away of the state. This is because radical democrats contend that "the social and ecological reconstruction of industrial capitalism" requires the puncturing of the illusion that such matters can be treated "from our nationally limited perspectives." Radical democracy must ultimately transcend the nation-state and promote international legal regimes and supranational institutions as the stepping stones to a world society composed of global citizens. As the nation-state loses its world-historical significance, the norms arrived at in internationally inclusive committees like the Davos World Economic Forum will ineluctably extend across the globe.

"The hollowing out of the sovereignty of the nation-state will continue", Habermas predicted in 1989, "and requires us to develop capacities for political action on a supranational basis." On the basis of this highly questionable prediction, Habermas promotes the region, rather than the democratic nation-state, as the harbinger of a cosmopolitan legal order. Indeed, the global tensions generated by "power pragmatic" nation-states like the United States could only be overcome if

"large continent-wide actors like the EU . . . and ASEAN develop into empowered actors capable of reaching transnational agreements . . . taking over responsibility for an ever more closely tied transnational network of organizations, conferences and practices. Only with global players of this kind, that are able to form a counterbalance to the global expansion of markets running ahead of any political frame, would the UN find a base for the implementation of high-minded programs and policies."

This high-minded task evidently became more urgent after 9/11 and finds confirmation in the events that followed. Fundamentalism has appeared on Habermas's world-historical stage as a dialectical response to global oppression brought about by, of course, "pathological" communication. America and its allies can only respond with "the civilized barbarism of coolly planned death."

But desperate crises "pregnant with progressive futures" once again come to the aid of the Habermasian project. American nationalism, seeking to divide and weaken Europe during the Iraq War, only served to heighten (among more enlightened Europeans) a consciousness of their common political fate and shared identity. Consequently, a more united Europe could both "throw its weight on the scale to counterbalance the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States" and "defend and promote a cosmopolitan order on the basis of international law against competing visions."

To correct the global descent into a U.S.-orchestrated barbarism, intellectuals, Europeans and cosmopolites everywhere must promote a program of political transformation. Fortuitously, Europe already offered a form of "governance beyond the nation-state." The core European states, France and Germany, must now forcefully promote the deepening of European institutions, formulate a common foreign and security policy, and give expression to a common European will through an inclusive European constitution.

In 2003, therefore, we encountered the strange spectacle of the aging radical democrat joining forces with his erstwhile post-modernist sparring partner, Jacques Derrida, whose irrationalism he had once dismissed as the ugly twin sister to the instrumentalist reasoning of capitalism and the administrative state. They issued a joint manifesto to recommend enhanced European cooperation as the basis of "a post-national constellation." The Europe-wide protests against the Iraq War on February 15, 2003 announced in their view the spontaneous emergence of a European public sphere and the premonitory snufflings of a common European will. Core Europe constitutes, they asserted (not wholly coherently), the basis of a common identity that is both inclusive and yet "acknowledges the other in his otherness."

Habermas as the avid proponent of European integration obviously strikes a chord among the elites that run the managerial project of the European Union. Given that he also considers rule by committees, or "comitology", a potential source of legitimation for a new European deliberative order, that is not altogether surprising. His normative approach to international relations similarly finds favor at the UN and among international lawyers, whose non-accountable power it would augment and legitimize.

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