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JÜRGEN HABERMAS AND THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF WORLD POLITICS
André Saramago
avsaramago@gmail.com
Invited Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Coimbra and the
University Beira Interior (Portugal). He is also an Online Teaching and Research Assistant with
DiploFoundation, University of Malta and an Associate Researcher with the Orient Institute. He
holds a PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University. His areas of expertise include
International Relations Theory, with a focus on Critical International Theory, Historical Sociology
and East Asia studies. Amongst his recent published work, he is the editor of Climate Change,
Moral Panics and Civilization, authored by Amanda Rohloff and published by Routledge, and of
‘Singapore’s use of education as a soft power tool in Arctic cooperation’, co-authored with Danita
Burke and published in the Asian Survey.
Abstract
This article consists of a review of Jürgen Habermas’s discussions of the dilemma posed by
human global interdependence to the possibility of democratic politics. According to
Habermas, since the Second World War, and in a process that has become only more
pervasive since the end of the Cold War, human societies have been brought into increasingly
tighter and more complex political, social and economic networks of interdependence that
have ultimately undermined the capacity of state-based democratic publics to have some
degree of influence over their conditions of existence. From a critical international theory
perspective, Habermas’s argument highlights the fundamental contemporary challenge faced
by the social sciences in general, and International Relations (IR) in particular. From that
perspective, the fundamental task of IR is not only to explain world politics, but also to
orientate social and political practice towards an expansion of democratic control over them.
The purpose of this article is to show how Habermas’s work makes a fundamental contribution
to improve that critical orientating role of IR. The article connects Habermas’s more recent
political writings on the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) with his earlier
work on the development of a theory of social evolution. In doing so, it shows how Habermas’s
work can constitute the basis for an approach to the study of world politics that both
understands how the present dilemma between global complexity and democracy came to be
the defining feature of the present stage of human development, and that discloses the
immanent potential gathered by modernity for a radical expansion of democratic politics to
the level of world politics.
Keywords
International Relations; Critical international theory; Democracy; Power; Capitalism;
European Union
How to cite this article
Saramago, André (2019). "Jürgen Habermas and the Democratization of World Politics".
JANUS.NET e-journal of International Relations, Vol. 10, N.º 1, May-October 2019. Consulted
[online] on the date of the last visit, https://doi.org/10.26619/1647-7251.10.1.2
Article received on October 15, 2018 and accepted for publication on February 26, 2019
JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations
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Jürgen Habermas and the democratization of world politics
André Saramago
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JÜRGEN HABERMAS AND THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF WORLD POLITICS
André Saramago
1
Introduction
Throughout his vast career, Jürgen Habermas has been engaged in the development of
a theory of social evolution that captures the dynamics of human historical development.
In this context, Habermas came to characterise the history of the species as a long-term
collective learning process in two interrelated fields; that of moral-practical knowledge
and that of technical-instrumental knowledge (Habermas, 1987). While the former refers
to learning at the level of collective norms that regulate social life, the latter refers
predominantly to learning in the areas necessary to the material reproduction of social
life, namely the control of non-human nature through productive activities. Habermas's
argument is that, throughout history, different stages of development of moral-practical
knowledge have been embodied in human societies’ social norms and background shared
moral understandings (what Habermas refers to as the 'lifeworld'), while different stages
of technical-instrumental knowledge have been embodied in the economy and related
spheres, such as bureaucratic and technical administrations (what Habermas refers to as
the 'system'). Habermas's argument is that as human societies develop and become
more complex, there is a rising tension between lifeworld and system. If, on the one
hand, moral-practical learning creates the possibility to exercise greater democratic
control over social life, on the other hand, social complexity creates pressures towards
greater systemic autonomy, with bureaucratic and economic social sectors assuming
dynamics of their own that escape democratic politics (Habermas, 1987).
In the last 20 years, Habermas (1996; 2001; 2012) came to argue that modernity faces
a fundamental ‘systemic problem’ that, with the global interweaving and interdependence
of humanity brought about by globalization processes, now encompasses the whole
world. A core feature of this problem is how, with the integration of national economies
in a global capitalist market, and especially with the radical liberalization of financial
markets since the end of the gold standard in 1971, there has been a dramatic increase
in the autonomy of systemic contexts in relation to democratic publics that have
remained state-bound (Habermas, 2001). This has undermined the balance between
democracy and systemic autonomy that had been achieved within welfare states since
the end of the Second World War. It is also the source of the contemporary resurgence
of ethno-nationalist movements calling for a reinforcement of state sovereignty as a
1
I would like to thank Professor Andrew Linklater and Dr. Kamila Stullerova for comments on earlier drafts
of this article. I would also like to thank the editorial board of JANUS.NET and the two anonymous reviewers
whose comments greatly improved the quality of the article.
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supposed solution to the unplanned harmful social consequences of a global capitalist
system that is out of control (Haro, 2017). However, to Habermas, a return to the state
is an illusory escape from the problem. Rather, his argument is that it is necessary to
develop a new 'principle of organisation' for world politics; one capable of expanding
social adaptive capacity to the developmental challenges posed by growing global
interdependence (Habermas, 2012).
In this context, Habermas has been mainly concerned with identifying the cognitive
potential, available in modern worldviews and consciousness structures, for the
development of such a principle of world political organisation that changes the prevalent
balance between state-based democratic constituencies and global autonomous systems.
In particular, Habermas is interested in understanding how the process of
democratisation of social life, already initiated at the level of welfare democratic states,
can be extended to world politics in a manner that reinforces human collective and
conscious control over the systemic character of inter-state relations and the global
capitalist economy.
Habermas’s arguments in this regard are analysed in the following four sections. First,
the article addresses Habermas’s observations on how human global interweaving
undermines the degree of democratic control that citizens of democratic welfare states
are capable of exercising over their conditions of existence. Second, it considers
Habermas’s argument that a reconstruction of Kant’s project for perpetual peace is
required as an orientating framework regarding how the global web of humanity can be
organised in a manner that guarantees a greater degree of collective and conscious
control over its future development. Third, it analyses the connection between this
argument and Habermas’s more recent writings on the European Union, and on the
decoupling between democracy and state power that can occur in its context. And fourth,
the article addresses how Habermas’s analysis of the EU informs his boulder proposal for
a reform of the United Nations and associated radical democratization of world politics.
Global interdependence and democracy
Since 1971, with the end of the gold standard and subsequent radical liberalization of
financial markets, the systemic dynamics of capitalism were unleashed from the
boundary conditions established by national democratic publics and became capable of
developing out of their own accord in conditions of greater autonomy. The capacity to
freely move capital across the webs of the world economy meant that, increasingly,
important areas of society were submitted to relations on the basis of money as the main
means of social integration (Habermas, 2001: 78). This permitted multinational
companies to withhold investment in certain states or social areas, blocking the access
to important sources of revenue through taxation, unless states underwent reforms to
make their internal conditions more adequate to the needs and interests of capitalist
corporations. States have thus become increasingly compelled to compete with each
other in making themselves more attractive to global business interests, namely, through
the privatisation of areas such as health and education, the reduction of workers’ salaries
and benefits, the extension of working hours, and a combination of increased taxes for
citizens with a reduction of corporate taxes (Habermas, 2001: 79).
Under these conditions, welfare states’ social security systems, designed to alleviate the
negative effects of capitalist development, became overburdened with rising
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unemployment and a shorter taxation basis. Increasingly, then, welfare states became a
channel for the systematisation of national lifeworlds by global systemic imperatives and
lost the capacity to guarantee democratic control over capitalist dynamics. Accompanying
the growing intricacy of global economic networks, there also emerged unplanned chains
of interlocking political decisions and outcomes that, when combined with the way that
cultural and political identities are reshaped and rekindled by such processes, have made
many local and regional sub-state actors question the legitimacy of the nation-state as a
representative and accountable centre of power (Habermas, 1973; Habermas, 2006;
Held, 1995: 136). The process of globalisation has thus 'enmeshed' nation-states in the
dependencies of an increasingly interconnected world society whose systemic contexts
'effortlessly bypass territorial boundaries' (Habermas, 2006: 175; see also: Walker,
1988).
One of the answers to this situation has been the hegemonic behaviour exhibited by the
United States (US) in the last two decades. Recent attempts by the superpower to use
its military, technological and economic superiority to create a global order compatible
with its ‘religiously coloured notions of good and evil’ constitute an expression of the
historical possibility for the emergence of an ‘imperial answer’ to the challenge of
regulating global interdependence (Habermas, 2006: 149). However, according to
Habermas, the most likely outcome of the continued pursuit of such a strategy, given the
inevitable resistance on the part of other great powers, such as Russia and China, is the
emergence of a ‘Schmittian’ world order, characterized by the ‘alarming prospect of
competition among hemispheres’ (Habermas, 2006: 148). Such a global order would, in
effect, undermine the possibility of collective control over the process of globalisation, as
the unplanned dynamics arising out of great power competition would push people and
states into patterns of interaction not intended by any of them, and with potentially
harmful implications for all the participants.
Instead, Habermas (2012) proposes an alternative ‘principle of organisation’ for world
politics in the form of an extension, to the level of international society, of the long-term
process of democratisation of social life that has hitherto been confined to the intra-state
level. The democratic-legal taming of state power that has been occurring within welfare
states needs to be carried further, in the form of a democratisation of the international
system of states, that pacifies relations between states and controls their anarchic
competition for power. Furthermore, such pacification would create the conditions for the
establishment of new supranational procedures and institutions, as well as new forms of
solidarity between people, on the basis of which a higher degree of conscious and
collective control might come to be exercised over the dynamics of the global economic
system.
In this context, Kant’s project for perpetual peace is suggested as the most compelling
alternative to the hegemonic proposal. However, it is also found to be in need of
‘reconstruction’ in light of Habermas's own research into long-term processes of legal
pacification of state power.
The political constitution of world society
Kant’s project is built on the awareness of the internal connection between peace and
freedom (Kant, 2015; Habermas, 2006: 175). Only under conditions of international
peace can human beings exercise a sufficient degree of control over inter-state relations
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that guarantees they are capable of freely self-determining their conditions of existence
and not be dragged by the unplanned dynamics of inter-state competition and conflict.
Both the pacification and the greater control of inter-state relations can be achieved, in
Kant’s view, through the establishment of a code of law regulating all possible dimensions
of human interdependence (Kant, 1991). Respectively, civil law regulating relations
between citizens within a state; international law regulating relations between states;
and cosmopolitan law regulating relations between states and human beings in their
quality of world citizens.
In Habermas's interpretation, (though there are others, see: Kleingeld, 2012; Mikalsen,
2011) Kant considers that such a code of law requires the constitution of a world
federation of republican states with coercive powers to ensure its compliance. An
understanding that Habermas contests by noticing how the actual historical development
of international law since Kant’s time leads to a different conclusion. Namely, that there
is an important difference between the development of legal control over state power
within states, and legal control over state power in the relations between states
(Habermas, 2006: 122). The former implies a process in which an already existent
monopoly over the means of legitimate violence comes to be circumscribed in its
operation by civil laws that, concomitantly, depend on that same monopoly to guarantee
their compliance. In the latter case, there is no supranational monopoly over the means
of legitimate violence to ensure the application of international law. Rather, international
law is developed and guaranteed on the basis of the expectation of self-restraint on the
part of states. Hence, the development of international law ‘runs counter’ to the
development of civil law, given that the main challenge at the level of international
relations is how to make international law effective, and not how to tame and legitimize
the power of an already existent monopoly over the means of legitimate violence
(Habermas, 2006: 172). At the international level thus occurs what Habermas (2006:
134) refers to as a ‘decoupling’ of law and state power, which does not occur at the intra-
state level.
If taken into account, this ‘decoupling’ shows that Kant’s model of a ‘democratic federal
state writ large – the global state of nations or world republic – is the wrong one’
(Habermas, 2006: 134). It is wrong not only because it understands the pacification of
world politics as a reproduction of the process that already took place at the intra-state
level, but also because it envisions that the monopoly over the means of legitimate
violence and international law remain fused in a single institution, the world federation
of states. Instead, an analysis of the actual historical development of international law
reveals a decoupling between state power and law, which opens up the possibility for an
alternative to Kant’s world federation (see: Beardsworth, 2011: 32).
According to Habermas, this alternative is found in the possibility of a ‘decentred world
society’, as a ‘multilevel’ global order that lacks the character of a state, but ensures
collective democratic control over the dynamics of both the inter-state and the global
economic systems (Habermas, 2006: 136). This multilevel world society implies not only
the constitution of the three levels of law envisioned by Kant – respectively, the civil, the
international and the cosmopolitan – but also the creation of three levels of decision-
making. First, the supranational level of a world organization which is responsible for the
clearly circumscribed tasks of securing peace and protecting human rights without,
however assuming the state-like character of a world federation of states. Second, the
transnational level in which great powers and continental unions of states address
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economic, social and ecological problems within the framework of permanent
conferences. And third, the national level in which each state’s lifeworld, expressed in
their respective public spheres, can reacquire democratic control over national state
power and the globally-connected national economy, given their integration in the
multilevel world society (Habermas, 2006: 136). By stressing the plurality of legal orders
in a politically constituted world society, Habermas effectively rejects the notion that law
should form a unitary and hierarchical normative system, instead envisioning the
coordination of legal orders to be guaranteed not by a vertical chain of authority, but
rather by the performance of deliberative processes of consensualization of norms at
different levels of decision-making.
Habermas (2006: 136) notes that, at the present historical juncture, only ‘natural great
powers’, such as the USA, Russia or China, have the necessary resources to operate at
the transnational level and establish continental regimes regulating economic, social and
environmental policies in their respective areas of the globe. Consequently, in order to
further give shape to this politically constituted world society, states in the various ‘world
regions have to unite to form continental regimes on the model of the European Union’
(Habermas, 2006: 136). With this proposal for the political constitution world society,
Habermas intends to show that a ‘world republic’ is not the only institutional form that
the Kantian project can assume, nor is it the most adequate orientating device for how
to pursue the pacification and democratization of world politics, given the cognitive
potential gathered by world historical development (Beardsworth, 2011: 32)
The next two sections address in greater detail Habermas's reflections on the
transnational and the supranational levels of his envisioned multilevel world society by
focusing, first, on his discussion of the European Union and, afterwards, on his proposals
for the reform of the United Nations.
The European model
Habermas’s most elaborate proposal for the political constitution of world society is found
in the compilation of texts entitled The Crisis of the European Union: A Response (2012).
There, he argues that, under conditions of global interdependence, human beings can
only attain a greater degree of democratic control over the global systemic dynamics that
threaten them with environmental, economic and social disruption via the constitution of
continental unions of states responsible for the regulation and coordination of policies in
their respective areas of the globe.
The European Union (EU) is the longest surviving effort at extending the pacification of
social life initiated within states to the international level. This effort has been developed
in order to not only pacify the inter-state relations of a continent ‘drenched in blood’ but
also to develop decision-making and steering capacities that enable European states to
collectively exercise a greater degree of control over the dynamics of the international
and economic systems that affect the continent as a whole and ignore state borders
(Habermas, 2012: 28). An essential aspect of this process has been the development of
European law regulating state behaviour without, however, the constitution of a
European monopoly over the means of legitimate violence. The innovations coming into
being in the EU can thus, in time, serve as a reference for other, less integrated, regional
institutions (Habermas, 2001). In particular, the fact that European law is obeyed and
has its own constituency independently of domestic law and state power sets a
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'precedent' for regional and global politics, effectively posing a new relation between law
and power. This new relation is argued to provide a new 'model' for political organisation
at the regional and global levels (Habermas, 2012, see also: Beardsworth, 2001: 98).
However, Habermas also notes that the democratization process in the context of the EU
is far from finished. One of the main challenges is the fact that European economic
integration has not been matched by the creation of democratic political institutions
capable of regulating the common market. The EU's continued reliance on economic
interdependence driven by business interests as the main integrative and pacifying force
on the continent is 'no longer acceptable' without a concomitant effort to match the logic
of market efficiency with the democratization of European political institutions
(Habermas, 2012, Verovšek, 2012: 369). Decision-making processes at the level of the
EU thus continue to be predominantly shaped by relations of power between states that
escape the influence of national public spheres, while producing decisions that have a
profound effect on the conditions of existence of the populations of each state. Hence,
European law, while enabling the self-regulation of the European system of states,
frequently lacks legitimacy in the eyes of European citizens given how it is not constituted
by deliberative processes of consensualization between all those who stand to be affected
by it (see: Linklater, 2007; Fraser, 2007). The present character of the EU is thus better
described as form of ‘executive federalism’, in which the European Council, composed of
representatives of each state, enacts measures that are implemented at the national
level through governmental majorities that disempower national parliaments and escape
the control of deliberative national publics (Habermas, 2012: 28). As such, national
governments and bureaucratic administrations can use European institutions to escape
the regulation of national public spheres and recover a degree of systemic autonomy
from the normative constraints of national lifeworlds.
Habermas thus sees the EU as a highly contradictory social formation. On the one hand,
it has contributed to the pacification of European inter-state relations and to the
development of European institutions with the capacity to extend legal and democratic
control over systemic forces that have bypassed national boundaries. But, on the other
hand, these same institutions reinforce the autonomy of state power vis-à-vis national
lifeworlds and diminish the level of collective democratic control that people are capable
of exercising over their lives, becoming a 'kind of post-democratic, bureaucratic rule'
(Habermas, 2012: 52). The EU is a 'paradox' to the extent that it shows marked
tendencies for a deepening of its democratic deficit while also gathering the potential to
serve as a vehicle for the extension of democratic governance beyond the nation-state
and thus for the development of democratic boundaries on the 'socially corrosive' impacts
of globalisation (Habermas, 2001; Grewal, 2001).
The EU stands at a crossroads in Habermas's assessment. On the one hand, it faces the
danger of a deepening of its democratic deficit by becoming a conveyer belt for the
transformation of national lifeworlds according to the systemic pressures of state
bureaucracies and capitalist interests. On the other hand, the historical development of
European institutions and the legal pacification of the continent constitutes a 'novel' event
in world politics that gathers the immanent potential for extending democratic decision-
making to the transnational level of world society. Such an extension would permit the
constitution of a European ‘transnational democracy’ that further approximates an ‘ideal
communication community’ (Habermas, 2012: 52).
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The main difficulty facing the democratization of the EU, Habermas observes, is that,
except for the European Parliament, democratic institutions of decision-making continue
tied to the state level. In this context, some have argued that the democratization of the
EU is impossible given the absence of a common 'demos' beyond European nation-states,
a collective European identity that creates bonds of solidarity between European citizens
and makes them a single constitutional subject (Dahl, 1999). The ‘no demos’ thesis can,
however, be contested in light of Habermas’s theory of social evolution that notes that
while the ‘nation’ has served as the basis for political community at the state level, it has
done so only to the extent that it was the historical solution to the tension inherent in
the identity of modern citizens. A tension between their universal moral character, which
is ‘better suited to world citizens’, and the reality of the fragmentation of world politics
between different nation-states (Habermas, 1979: 115). As such, inherent in the moral
orientations of modernity is already present the cognitive potential to overcome the
‘nation’ as the main principle of organisation for political communities (Habermas, 2006:
76).
In modern, universalistic worldviews and consciousness structures lies the potential for
the validity and legitimacy of social norms to derive less from being grounded in ethno-
nationalist identities than in universal principles that have been constituted via
deliberative processes of consensualization involving all those who stand to be affected
by them. This deliberative character of the validity and legitimacy of law implies its
decoupling from the background of shared national traditions. Decision-making processes
concerning common problems can thus be informed by 'principles of justice' rather than
in terms of the ‘fate of the nation’, given how people’s ‘emotional fixation’ can move from
the ethno-national community to the deliberatively constituted law (Habermas, 2006:
77-78). Increasingly, ‘civic solidarity’ can be defined not by belonging to a common
nation-state, but instead by a common allegiance to deliberatively achieved constitutional
principles embodied in law. From that perspective, it becomes possible to conceive of an
'enlargement' of civic solidarity and of the boundaries of political community to
encompass non-nationals and outsiders as rightful members of a transnational dialogic
community of co-legislators who are bound by their affectability by common norms,
rather than by shared cultural orientations or political aspirations (Linklater, 1998: 85;
2017). Habermas calls this transnational civic solidarity ‘constitutional patriotism’
(Habermas, 2006: 53; Habermas, 2006b: 118).
Constitutional patriotism expresses a possible new principle of organisation for welfare
states and world politics that permits the expansion of civic solidarity beyond the frontiers
of the 'nation'. It points to the possible emergence of a European-wide civic solidarity
that binds together in a ‘post-national constellation’ people from different states through
a shared allegiance to the principles of European law, which they collectively recognise
as legitimate and valid if these principles derive from deliberative processes of decision-
making involving all those who stand to be affected by them. The cognitive potential for
the development of European transnational democracy is thus already present in the
modern worldviews and consciousness structures of the citizens of modern European
welfare states.
In fact, according the Habermas, the partial actualization of this cognitive potential of
modern world views can already be observed in the growing decoupling of European law
from state power. The Lisbon treaty is an expression of this process when, in the absence
of a European monopoly over the means of legitimate violence, derives the legitimacy of
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European law from constitutional principles that have been constituted by the EU's ‘dual
constitutional subject’, which is defined as the national peoples (represented by their
states) and the citizens of the European Union (Habermas, 2012: 37). In Habermas’s
view, the Lisbon treaty thus confirms de jure what the EU has historically denied de facto;
i.e. that the legitimacy of European law can only be secured if it derives from democratic
deliberative processes of decision-making involving both the citizens and the member-
states of the Union. Consequently, the present decoupling of European law from state
power on which the EU is structured, as well as the validity of European law, can only be
maintained if the Union actualises the ideal of the political constitutionalization of world
society at the transnational level and makes the ‘dual constitutional subject’ of the Union
an institutional reality (see: McCormick, 2007).
The institutional apparatus for the actualization of the ‘dual constitutional subject’ is
already in place, in the form of European citizenship and institutions such as the European
Parliament and the European Council. What is required is that these institutions embody
the cognitive potential gathered in modern worldviews and consciousness structures by
establishing a European-wide democratic ‘two-track’ decision-making process. One that
enables individuals, both in their quality of European citizens, and of citizens of their
respective national states, to participate – respectively in the Parliament and the Council
– in the constitution of European law (Habermas, 2012: 28). This scenario implies that
the ‘same persons’ will embody these two roles in ‘personal union’ and adopt ‘different
justice perspectives’ depending on which of the two decision-making tracks is involved.
What counts as a ‘public’ interest in deliberative processes that they undertake as citizens
of a state, changes into a ‘particularistic’ interest in deliberative processes that they
undertake as European citizens. (Habermas, 2012: 37). This tension arises from the dual
character of the decision-making process and has important consequences for the
democratic character of the European Union.
On the one hand, it ensures that European law actually possesses democratic validity
and can secure its compelling power to regulate inter-state relations, even in the absence
of a European monopoly over the means of legitimate violence. Furthermore, it also
extends the level of democratic control that European citizens are capable of exercising
over the systemic contexts affecting the European continent – be it those of inter-state
relations or those of the capitalist market. On the other hand, the fact that the dual
constitutional subject of the EU is composed not only by European citizens, but also by
the states of the Union, means that European law cannot be superimposed on national
constitutional laws. Each state is capable of safeguarding its own internal legal and
normative framework, by ensuring that European law must satisfy the standards of civil
liberties that have already been historically achieved at the state level. Hence, European
law embodies both the ‘universal’ orientations of European citizens and protects the
‘difference’ of the several cultural biotypes of each one of the national peoples of the
Union (Habermas, 2012: 40).
The transformation of the European Union into a transnational democratic association of
states and citizens would contribute to the actualisation of the new principle of
organisation of world politics which is immanent in modern worldviews and consciousness
structures. It would be a ‘further step’ in the political constitution of world society and in
the democratization of world politics by permitting deliberative publics to acquire a
greater degree of collective and conscious control over the systemic dynamics of inter-
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state and global economic relations, which have escaped their control within welfare
states (Linklater, 1998: 167; Linklater, 2011).
However, Habermas is well-aware that any such developments in the European Union
are necessarily intertwined with wider dynamics of the international system and global
capitalism and that the democratization of the transnational EU level can only be
successful if framed in the wider democratization of world politics. The next section thus
turns to how Habermas’s reflections on the EU are complemented by his work on the
potential for the political constitutionalization of the supranational level of human
interdependence. Namely, it considers his proposal for a reform of the United Nations as
a condition for the expansion of democratic control over the global inter-state and
capitalist systems that presently undermine human beings’ capacity to self-determine
their conditions of existence.
The cosmopolitan condition
The goal of expanding democratic legal control over systemic contexts beyond national
borders derives its impetus from a ‘paralysing constellation’ in world politics. The
globalisation of human interdependence has ‘exhausted’ the capacity of states to answer
to the problems posed by the global systemic forces of inter-state competition and
capitalism that have developed beyond the control of even the most powerful states or
unions of states (Habermas, 2012: 54). Hence, transnational efforts at democratic legal
regulation, such as those of the European Union, must be complemented by the further
democratization of world politics. Namely, via a reform of the United Nations that
democratizes its role in the legal definition of the boundary conditions for the operation
of inter-state relations and capitalist markets.
According to Habermas (2006: 137), the democratic reform of the UN demands a
transition to a 'cosmopolitan condition' in world politics, characterized by the
'substitution' of international law by cosmopolitan law. Unlike current international law,
cosmopolitan law would be the result of decision-making processes involving not only
states, but also world citizens in their quality of constitutional subjects of the world
organisation. The UN would thus have to institutionally embody the two innovations that
Habermas sees as immanent in the transnational level of the EU. On the one hand, it
would have to ensure the compliance of member states with cosmopolitan law even
though the monopoly over the means of legitimate violence would remain at state level.
On the other hand, it would have to institutionally embody a ‘dual constitutional subject’,
composed of world citizens and national peoples; represented by their respective states,
or by other representative entities, such as NGO’s, in the case of sub-state or stateless
peoples (Habermas, 2012: 54).
While the first of these two conditions can already be discerned in the institutional
framework of the United Nations, the actualisation of the second element requires the
attribution, to every single human being on the planet, of the status of world citizen, and
the constitution, parallel with the General Assembly, of a ‘world parliament’ composed
by their elected representatives (Habermas, 2012: 58; see parallels between Habermas’s
proposal for world citizenship and those made by Apel (2007) who, however, lacks
Habermas’ level of engagement with the institutional changes that might be required to
actualize forms of world/cosmopolitan citizenship). The world parliament would not
transform the United Nations into a world republic, but it would reinforce the democratic
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legitimacy of cosmopolitan law by making world citizens, alongside with states, one of its
constitutional subjects. In other words, in the same manner of what would take place in
an EU transformed into a transnational democracy, cosmopolitan law would not
superimpose itself on national constitutional law or ethno-national conceptions of the
good life. Member-states, as the second constitution-founding subjects, would be able to
protect their internal orders from cosmopolitan law that did not meet their standards of
civil liberties (Habermas, 2012: 58). Furthermore, since the world organisation is not a
world federation of states and does not possess a supranational monopoly over the
means of legitimate violence, it would have to rely on ‘national monopolists’ for the
fulfilment of its tasks, including those envisioning the implementation of coercive
measures in order to reinstate compliance with cosmopolitan law. The need for the world
organisation to rely on member-states in this manner not only confirms the decoupling
between law and state power that characterizes the political constitution of world society,
but also ensures the protection of the autonomy of states through the maintenance of
the monopoly over the means of legitimate violence at the state level (Habermas, 2012:
61). In this manner, the democratization of world politics envisaged by Habermas would
effectively 'wed together' the Kantian ideal of equal membership of a universal kingdom
of ends with the Marxian project of dismantling systems of domination and exclusion that
undermine human autonomy by promoting new relations between universality and
difference (Linklater, 1998).
Essential in this regard, according to Habermas, is that the world organisation restrict
itself to the tasks of maintaining peace and protecting human rights, leaving decision-
making processes related to economic, social or ecological problems to the transnational
level of world society. The restriction of the UN to this narrow set of core functions derives
from the argument that issues related to economic, social or ecological problems, while
expressing a ‘shared abstract interest’ of all human beings, necessarily imply answers
that relate to particular conceptions of the ‘good life’ (Habermas, 2012: 63). These are
issues whose answers involve the self-affirmation of particular cultural and political
identities and, as such, while admitting of consensualization between people who share
common cultural characteristics as part of their collective history and belonging to a
particular region of the globe, are not liable to truly universal answers arising from global
processes of consensualization between world citizens. Consequently, these issues
should be dealt with at the transnational level, where continental unions of states in the
same cultural areas can potentially come closer to common agreements on preferable
‘ways of life’ (Habermas, 2012: 63). However, the same judgement does not apply to
issues of world peace and human rights. In Habermas’s (2012: 64) assessment, these
issues express an a priori general interest shared by the world population, ‘beyond all
political-cultural divisions’, in the avoidance of violence and in the expression of solidarity
with ‘everything that has a human face’. These issues have an inherently universal
character, to the extent that shared human vulnerability to war and violence is a common
feature of the species (see: Linklater, 2011). As such, their discussion is liable to produce
truly universal answers, arrived at through global processes of consensualization of
norms involving world citizens and all the states into which humankind is divided. The
world organisation must thus restrict itself to those issues that admit of universally
shared human interest.
According to Habermas, the universal, species-wide, character of the core functions of
the UN also means that the world organisation has different legitimacy requirements than
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the transnational level of continental unions. Given that ‘negative duties to refrain from
unjustifiable human rights violations and wars of aggression are rooted in the core moral
content of all the major world religions and in the cultures they have shaped’, global civic
solidarity amongst world citizens can be based on these shared convictions and does not
require a deeper collective commitment to a common conception of the ‘good life’, as
occurs at the transnational level (Habermas, 2012: 65). Consequently, the democratic
assessment of the deliberative decision-making processes of the world parliament can be
based only on the ‘expression of the, in essence morally justified, “yes” or “no” to the
supranational application of presumptively shared moral principles and norms’
(Habermas, 2012: 65). So, while the legitimacy of law at the transnational European
level demands not only a dual constitutional subject but also the permanent consideration
of transnational issues in a European public sphere, the weaker legitimacy requirements
of cosmopolitan law do not demand the formation of a permanent global public sphere.
They simply require the thematic and temporally circumscribed constitution of a global
public ‘sparked intermittently by this or that major event without achieving structural
permanence’ (Habermas, 2012: 62).
Conclusion
Habermas’s reflections on the possibility of democratization of world politics provide an
important starting point to discuss how to deal with the erosion of the capacity of state-
bound democratic publics to control the social processes that bind them together at the
global scale. In Habermas’s assessment, the answer to this erosion demands a new
principle of organisation for world politics. One whose actualization lies immanent in the
cognitive potential that has been gathered in modern consciousness structures by the
long-term process of human development. According to Habermas, the cognitive
potential of modernity implies the possibility of a decoupling between democracy and
state power, on the basis of which the political constitution of world society can occur in
a manner that would re-establish the balance between democratic politics and the
systemic imperatives of global capital and inter-state relations. Habermas’s theory of
social evolution thus provides a highly compelling approach to a critically-committed IR
that seeks to fulfil its role as a means of orientation that is adequate to deal with the
challenges posed by the complexity of human global interdependence. In other words,
an IR that seeks to constitute itself as an orientating framework that can help people
both acquire a better understanding of themselves and of their present historical context
and identify what sort of international institutional innovations are required to actualize
the immanent potential of modernity for a further expansion of human beings’ capacity
to self-determine their conditions of existence.
Habermas’s proposals, however, constitute only a starting point for the development of
such an IR. Further works needs to be done, especially in better connecting Habermas’s
philosophical-theoretical proposals with more concrete historical-sociological analyses of
world politics. For example, it is debatable whether Habermas’s restriction of the tasks
of the world organization to those of the maintenance of peace and human rights – under
the argument that these tasks, unlike those related to economic, social and ecological
problems, are more universal and less bound with particular conceptions of the good life
– is completely tenable. The historical record shows that matters such as the
maintenance of peace and human rights are as politicized and caught up with particular
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conceptions of the good life as those related to economic, social and ecological problems.
Sufficient evidence of this can be found in the numerous debates in the Security Council
surrounding the legitimacy of international interventions in the name of the maintenance
of peace or in recent debates about whether human rights, as currently conceived, are
truly universal, or if their content is still expressive of a phase of predominance of
Western powers in international society (see: Sun, 2016; Qi, 2005; Regilme, 2018) .
Furthermore, recent developments in world politics have seen international organizations
at the transnational level, such as the European Union or the African Union, assuming,
or with the intention of assuming, a greater role at the level of the maintenance of peace
and security in their respective areas of the globe (see: Joshua and Olanrewaju, 2017;
Nováki, 2018). And finally, it is highly debatable whether problems that arise with
economic, social and ecological interdependence can be adequately dealt with purely at
the level of transnational continental unions, or whether these issues, especially in the
context of increasingly out-of-control capitalist globalization and global climate change
processes, do not require also at least some degree of global coordination; a coordination
that would necessarily have to take place at the level of Habermas’s envisioned world
organization.
As such, Habermas’s critical approach to world politics needs to be further developed,
namely through a deeper engagement with the historical-sociological study of world
politics in order to disclose the actual existing immanent potentials for the development
of the type of ‘cosmopolitan vision’ Habermas is seeking to nurture (see: Beck, 2006).
Recent developments in critical international theory appear to be moving in this direction,
either calling for the need for greater historical-sociological engagement (Schmide, 2018,
Devetak, 2018), or seeking to develop it themselves (Linklater, 2016). It is up to
contemporary and future scholars to complete this task and understand if, and how,
Habermas’s ethical vision for the future of world politics might be actualized.
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