Etienne Balibar

“Strangers or Enemies? On the impolitical dimensions of Global Governance”

I want to sketch some hypotheses concerning the relationship between “Strangers” and “Enemies” – perhaps I should say as I did in a previous intervention on the same topic: strangers as enemies, to designate a tendency that I believe to observe in the contemporary world towards a reduction of the condition of the stranger to that of potential enemy. Since my intention is to interpret its genealogy and to indicate its inherent contradictions, I will try and show that such a reduction  - which in a sense destroys the legitimacy of the Nation-State as a construction embodying a certain universalistic model of instituting the political, or to put it in the words of Hannah Arendt, represents a form of its “decline” – nevertheless brings to the fore a virtuality that was given in the “fiction” of the Nation-State as Sovereign community, but whose extreme consequences are reached only when the fiction becomes exposed as such. When it walks naked, as it were… My conclusion, however, will not be that this process is irreversible, or that it calls for a withering away of the category of the stranger altogether, or that it should prompt us to advocate a symmetric transformation of the stranger into a “friend” (or a friendly other), but rather, and more ambiguously, that a crucial task of politics – the kind of politics that I call “civility” – lies now in the protection of the stranger, the preservation and reconstitution of its figure, or the protection of the strangeness of the stranger. By using this uncertain – even risky – formula, I am deliberately imitating (while at the same time deviating it from its initial intentions) a key formula that was proposed by Carl Schmitt in his Nomos of the Earth (1950): die Hegung des Krieges, or the limitation and protection of war, and trying to reverse it into an instrument of civilization. In order to carry this project, I shall proceed in retrospective manner, starting with what can be called a crisis of the definition of the stranger in today’s semi-globalized world, and returning from there to its origins and preconditions. And I shall speculate, on the basis of contemporary contradictions, on the unpredictable figures of the “stranger to come” (this time, in Derrida’s terms), which could reopen and displace the political dialectics of reciprocity and conflict in a world where “politics” – if there is one – has been irreversibly transnationalized.

Joshua Cohen

In this essay, I explore the ideal of public reason, as an ideal for both democratic and global politics. The ideal of public reason is about the conduct of political life: in the first instance, about the justification of political relations and decisions. Roughly stated, the ideal of public reason says that in our political affairs, justification ought to be conducted on common ground. More particularly, on the common ground provided by considerations that participants in the political relations can all acknowledge as reasons.
In emphasizing justification on a footing of common reason, I intend three contrasts:

1. When political justification rests on our common reason, and when such justification plays a role in shaping the conduct of political life, then we are not governed simply by the de facto distribution of power and interests, even a fair distribution.
2. Nor are we governed by considerations—ideas, values, and principles—that belong fundamentally to the views of some of us, whatever our conviction may be about the truth of those ideas and values. The ideal of public reason neither assumes nor implies any indifference to truth. But it does mean rejecting the claim that a proposition’s being true suffices to establish its relevance to political justification.
3. Nor are we governed on the basis of the common ground provided by some existing social consensus. Public reason is a normative idea, and part of the force of the ideal of public reason is that it points to the distinction between the considerations we, as a matter of ever-fallible fact, suppose to bear on a decision and the considerations that do genuinely bear on it: between what we accept and what we have reason to accept.

Hans Lindahl

This paper critically examines the prevailing assumption that legal boundaries are becoming irrelevant in postnationalism. While the boundaries of the nation-state are forfeiting some of their hold on human behaviour, postnational legal orders are simply not legal orders unless they can in some way draw the spatial, temporal, material and subjective boundaries that make it possible to qualify human behaviour as legal or illegal. This implies that reflexively constituted legal orders—whether national or postnational—must be presented as legal unities. To the extent that boundaries are the necessary condition of national and postnational legal orders, and therewith of legal unity, they also spawn the possibility of political plurality, manifested in behaviour that resists the very distinction between legality and illegality, as drawn by an order of positive law: a-legality. Rather than signalling the demise of legal boundaries, postnationalism ushers in a novel way of dealing therewith—and with a-legality.

Matthias Lievens

Carl Schmitt and the Specter of a Deterritorialized Politics

Carl Schmitt formulates a fascinating argument for the political, which he understands as a plural symbolic or spiritual space of friends and enemies who reciprocally recognize each other. He argues, however, that this pluralism should be ‘correctly placed.’ Schmitt recognized the dangerous, deterritorializing capacity of the political to pop up at unforeseen places, and tried to limit political status to a series of well defined subjects which would be the nodal points of (international) order. Other subjects are denied political status. As a result, Schmitt’s order would be haunted by what it had to overcome, namely depoliticization, and by the real enemy which does not accept its depoliticization. Beyond the duality of friend and enemy, there is always such an ‘other enemy’ which questions the distribution of politicizations and depoliticizations of the existing order. Thinking international order beyond Carl Schmitt requires taking this ‘third’ or ‘other’ enemy into account.

Margaret Moore

Global democracy and collective forms of self-determination

This paper is interested in the relationship between democracy and self-determination. It begins, in part one, by pointing out that many theories of justice assume that democracy is an important element in a just ordering of the basic institutional structure of society – that a just society is democratic and, conversely,  that undemocratic societies are thereby  rendered unjust (at least in this dimension).  This paper assumes that the above is true  - that there is an important, instrumental and intrinsic relationship between democracy and justice, such that democratic societies tend to be more just, more protective of human rights, etc. and in this way instrumentally important to the achievement of justice.  Moreover, there is a closer, constitutive relationship between justice and democracy, in the sense that democracy instantiates political equality and so achieves equal shares (of political power) in relation to the institutions of society and so is  intrinsically more just. This paper discusses the above view, with a little bit of argument, but then moves on to consider how theories of global justice should understand the requirement that global institutions be more democratic.  More specifically, it situates the demand for greater democracy, greater accountability and greater global governance (and democratic global governance) within the context of demands for self-determination.  Self-determination is intrinsically and historically connected to the democratic ideal, but collective forms of self-determination are, I will argue, also in some tension with global democracy. In part two of the paper, it will examine recent normative work critical of the notion of territorial sovereignty, and statist formations, which appeal instead to post-national autonomy and/ or local forms of governance (beneath the nation-state).   Many of the works on global justice do not advocate a global political order (world government) but seek alternatives  to governance beneath and above the level of the nation and state along functional lines.  This has been put forward by Thomas POgge in Human Rights and World Poverty, where he seeks to develop a normative framework for governance that is neither global nor is nationalist or statist. Similarly, David Held has argued for non-territorial, overlapping and functional governance models.  This paper will consider these in part because the advantage o f these interpretations of the democratic ideal is that they are not in (serious) tension with collective self-determination (the subject of this paper).  That is to say, non-territorial theories of self-determination and non-territorial theories of democracy are quite compatible.

The paper will examine the democratic credentials of these models, in part through an examination of a principle commonly evoked to justify post-national forms of governance  (to deal with problems that are increasingly regional or even global in character): the all affected principle.

A secondary (sub-) theme of this paper is to ask whether there are democratic reasons to prefer different types of democratic institutional arrangements.  That is to say, one idea for addressing a global problem is to engage with all people affected by the various problems/ solutions to have a chance to engage with it,  have input, etc. This would be a kind of direct effect arrangement, and is commonly invoked in the post-national literature.

Another arrangement might be to have the problem addressed at a higher level, at a regional or supra-regional level and in this way have concentric rings of self-gov’t but ones which are constrained by justice.  Sometimes both institutional configurations are referred to in the idea of post-national sovereignty.  This paper will consider whether there is a democratic reason to prefer one over the other.  Is there a reason to think that one is more legitimate than the other? The paper will conclude with some challenges to the idea of global democracy and some ways to institutionalize global democracy in ways that are consistent with collective self-determination.

Yannis Papadopoulos

The transnational challenge to democracy: the rise of unaccountable decision-making and of unelected decision-makers

The internationalisation of political decision-making increasingly undermines the circular relation between decision-makers and decision-takers which constitutes the cornerstone of democratic legitimacy.  This problem already arises at the level of the European Union, but even more so on the global level. This presentation has a critical look at some of the processes involved, including the increasing importance of soft law, the privatisation of governance and the emergence of a global civil society.

Stefan Rummens

From governance to government? Representative institutions and democratic legitimacy in the global society

This presentation starts from the observation that the role of representative institutions –the role of the political stage- remains underanalyzed in the vast literature on deliberative democracy. I argue that this neglect is misguided because representative institutions make a much more important contribution to the legitimacy of the democratic process than is generally appreciated in discourse theory. This result raises some concerns about the most prominent existing deliberative models of global democracy (Cohen & Sabel, Bohman, Dryzek, Gould,...). Because these models generally focus in a one-sided manner on discursive networks and tend to significantly reduce or even eliminate the role of representative institutions, it becomes questionable whether they are able to generate a democratic system of global governance which guarantees full democratic legitimacy.

Jan Wouters

Rules are no longer merely made by states, but increasingly by international organizations and other international bodies. At the same time these rules do impact the daily life of citizens and companies as it has become increasingly difficult to draw dividing lines between international, EU and domestic law. This presentation presents the notion of 'multilevel regulation' as a way to study these normative processes and the interplay between different legal orders. It indicates that many rules in such areas as trade, financial cooperation, food safety, pharmaceuticals, security, terrorism, civil aviation, environmental protection or the internet find their origin in international cooperation. Apart from introducing multilevel regulation on the basis of a number of examples, the idea is to set out an agenda for further research, including legal and non-legal approaches.