The status of international law and transnational legal agreements with respect to the sovereignty claims of liberal democracies has become a highly contentious theoretical and political issue. ...Although recent European discussions focus on global constitutionalism, there is increasing reticence on the part of many that prospects of a world constitution are neither desirable nor salutary. This article more closely considers criticisms of these legal transformations by distinguishing the nationalist from democratic sovereigntiste positions, and both, from diagnoses that see the universalization of human rights norms either as the Trojan horse of a global empire or as neocolonialist intentions to assert imperial control over the world. These critics ignore “the jurisgenerativity of law.” Although democratic sovereigntistes are wrong in minimizing how human rights norms improve democratic self-rule; global constitutionalists are also wrong in minimizing the extent to which cosmopolitan norms require local contextualization, interpretation, and vernacularization by self-governing peoples.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the world-wide movement of peoples has increased from 175 million in 2000 to 218 million in 2012. Although it is only 3.5 per cent of the world's ...population that migrates, the accelerated pace of migrations as well as changing patterns of migrants' integration and acculturation in host societies have created challenges to devise just citizenship and migrations policies world-wide. How does the control of first entry, citizenship, and naturalization practices by states affect the life chances of the global poor? Is the institution of birthright citizenship justifiable legally and/or morally? This essay considers these questions through a review of Ayelet Schachar's book, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Hobbes's Leviathan has long been recognized as a classic in the history of Western political thought. This essay argues that this work deserves this accolade because some of the central antinomies of ...modern political experience—between scientific knowledge and the search for meaning, between reason and the passions in human psychology, and between the individual's will and the power of the collective—are brilliantly recounted in this work. Above all, the piece emphasizes the originality of Hobbes's construction of sovereignty through the theory of authorship and representation. The essay concludes by suggesting a feminist critique of Hobbes's view of human nature.
In this sense, Utopians are moralists, dreamers, and, au fond, deeply antipolitical thinkers.8 Some sought to achieve, Moyn writes, "through a moral critique of politics the sense of pure cause that ...had once been sought in politics itself" (lu, 171); further, human rights substituted a "plausible morality for failed politics" (lu, 175).\n By contrast, gender equality is protected within the United States by Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which applies only to major public institutions that receive federal funding.18 Political parties are excluded from this. ...international human rights norms can empower citizens in democracies by creating new vocabularies for claim-making as well as by opening new channels of mobilization for civil society actors who then become part of transnational networks of rights activism and hegemonic resistance.20 Human rights norms require interpretation, saturation, and vernacularization; legal elites and judges cannot just impose them upon recalcitrant peoples; rather, they must become elements in the public culture of democratic peoples through their own processes of interpretation, articulation, and iteration.
The global Covid-19 pandemic has changed many aspects of our social and political lives, such as the balance between work and family, the shrinking role of the public sphere and the growth of ...government by executive or emergency powers. Among the most surprising consequences of this situation has been the rise of scepticism and hostility towards science and scientific authorities. This essay examines the interdependence of modern science and the modern state via a brief detour to Hobbes’s philosophy. The economic growth and affluence made possible by the yoking of scientific technology to a modern market economy served to legitimize public power for several centuries. We have reached the end of this cycle and we need a science in the service of reversing the damages inflicted by the Anthropocene on the earth; we need economic production in the service of human equality and dignity, and we need a state in which the alliance between big pharma, big capital and big data is harnessed for a new green deal rather than serving corporate greed.
Jürgen Habermas’s
,
, synthesises his impressive work of the last half century. His thesis is that the modern project of the normativity of “rational freedom” can be reconstructed as a learning ...process of the conflictual dialogue between reason and faith, philosophy and religion in the West. Furthermore, under conditions of a world society, cross-cultural communication across lifeworlds, based on such normative principles, is possible.
I argue that Habermas’s argument recapitulates a claim first made in
by Hegel, who presented the normativity of modernity through a narrative unfolding between two epistemological standpoints, namely, that of consciousness and “we.” Just like Hegel, in order to defend the idea of a
, Habermas too must presuppose a unified subject called “we;” furthermore the development of such subjectivity unfolds in a homogeneous temporal process that is then assumed to be the same for all mankind.
I call this a form of “historicism,” and juxtapose recent historical writing that presents the narrative of modernity and the emergence of world-society as a much more diverse and fractured process than Hegel’s and Habermas’s methodology. “Die Einbeziehung der Anderen,” I argue, must involve including the voices of those others who do not experience the normative of modernity as a process like the one unfolding between faith and reason in the West.
Nevertheless, I conclude that this plea for a more complex narrative that “provincialises Europe,” (Dipesh Chakrabarty) is not a rejection of the normative legacy of modern rationality and freedom that are based on the ideals of fallibilism, refutability and revisability through a rational community of inquirers.
This essay examines recent debates concerning the emergence of cosmopolitan norms such as those pertaining to universal human rights, crimes against humanity as well as refugee, immigrant and asylum ...status. What some see as the spread of a new human rights regime and a new world order others denounce as the "spread of empire" or characterize as "law without a state". In contrast, by focusing on the relationship of global capitalism to deterritorialized law this essay distinguishes between the spread of human rights norms and deterritorialized legal regimes. Although both cosmopolitan norms and deterritorialized law challenge the nation-state and threaten to escape control by democratic legislatures, it argues that cosmopolitan norms enhance popular sovereignty while many other forms of global law undermine it. It concludes by pleading for a vision of "republican federalism" and "democratic iterations", which would enhance popular sovereignty by establishing interconnections across the local, the national and the global.
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