Daniele Archibugi (ed.): Debating Cosmopolitics.

Daniele Archibugi (ed.) Debating Cosmopolitics. Verso, 2003, 288 pp. ISBN 1-859-84437-5 (pbk) 14 [pounds sterling] ISBN 1-859-84505-3 (hbk) 40 [pounds sterling] A Polemic by Robert Fine

Cosmopolitanism has its faults, but it is far superior to anti-cosmopolitanism. That would be my formulation of the message conveyed by this collection, edited by Daniele Archibugi, who is one of the most imaginative and radical proponents of the new cosmopolitanism. Archibugi sets the scene with a paper on 'cosmopolitical democracy', which first appeared in 2000 in New Left Review. Here he makes the case that, while democracy has achieved substantial gains within states, it has made no such gains between states in the international arena. Rejecting attempts within international relations theory to justify the absence of democracy in the international field, he calls for the extension and application of principles of democracy internationally. It is this essentially normative project that Archibugi calls 'cosmopolitical democracy'.

Archibugi makes a brief stab here at giving content to this idea. It does not mean that existing states must be dissolved, or that a world government must be established. It does not mean exporting democracy by force. Its principle is that democracy needs to be realised outside as well as within states, and that institutional mechanisms should be established in order to involve world citizens in opinion-formation and decision-making on matters of universal interest. In practical terms, this might include the internationalisation of political parties and social movements; the formation of a world parliament and assemblies of civil society associations; the consolidation of international courts, including the International Criminal Court; the extension of human rights legislation; and the relativising of state sovereignty in international law. It also includes the elaboration of coherent, cosmopolitan principles on the use of military force for humanitarian purposes, such as for the prevention of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity.

Archibugi's paper is only a few pages long and functions, as it were, to advertise a position elaborated at much greater length in a series of works on cosmopolitan democracy written with David Held and other collaborators. This shorter paper was enough, however, to have provoked a number of critical responses in New Left Review, which have been collected in this volume. The volume also contains other critical pieces on the limits of cosmopolitanism, as well as papers defending the overall project. There is a genuine sense of debate in the book, and most of the papers are short and well worthy of inclusion. For reasons of economy I shall focus, in this review, on what I call the standpoint or outlook of 'anti-cosmopolitanism' that this collection, in part, contains.

Geoffrey Hawthorne is one of several writers who emphasise the naivete of the cosmopolitan vision. He focuses on Archibugi's conception of a parallel series of democratic institutions, such as a people's assembly or a forum of civil society associations, designed to enable the voices of individuals to be heard in global affairs irrespective of their resonance at home. Hawthorne expresses astonishment that in his conception of cosmopolitan order, Archibugi still finds a place for political parties ('machines which cannot do without discipline'), and he derides his cosmopolitical agenda either for its toothlessness (assemblies may ask but none need listen) or for its power-hunger (a world state in everything but name, against which there would be no countervailing authority). These objections are unconvincing. The instant disparagement of political parties does no more than express the failure of contemporary political philosophy to have anything serious to say about this major mediating institution of modern democracy. And we do not have to be protagonists of deliberative democracy to see that this 'either-or' rendition of popular assemblies evaporates civil society as a sphere of communication, opinion-formation and influence between the individual and the state.

The more positive case I find in Hawthorne has to do with the continued relevance of state formation in some parts of the modern world. Today, he argues, many states are barely able to exercise control over their own territory or ensure the security of their own citizens, and it is this collapse of statehood that poses the most fundamental of contemporary political problems. For Hawthorne, the key question is: how are failed and failing states to be re-formed? His negative article of faith is that states cannot be repaired through military interventions. He is particularly sceptical about liberals who claim the right to use force in the name of humanity. Preferring to avoid all talk of power, they speak instead of ethics, and forget that power is the most basic condition of state formation.

Hawthorne concedes that there is no sure answer to the questions he raises; but he, in turn, seems to forget that responsibility is attached to power--a responsibility, for instance, to use or at least consider using force in order to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity. A case can be made that the historical condition of state formation has often been that of killing or expelling unwanted groups but, of course, inaction in the face of such atrocity cannot be justified in the name of state formation. On the other hand, is it always and necessarily true--as he claims--that military force cannot be a catalyst for state formation? There are plenty of examples of unsuccessful attempts to impose a modern state by force: the failed Russian effort in Afghanistan comes to mind, and one can only wonder at the current American effort to do the same. There is surely an argument, however, that the military occupations of Japan and West Germany after the Second World War succeeded in forming or re-forming modern states after the catastrophic decline of these nations into totalitarianism. The question needs further investigation.

Hawthorne is in favour of bilateral institutions in which governments talk rather than go to war. He is in favour of international courts, even though he does not see them as institutions for democracy. He is in favour of NGOS like Amnesty International, Oxfam, Greenpeace and Medecins Sans Frontieres, even though he says they represent nobody but themselves. He is in favour of resistance to the erosion of political life in nominally democratic nation states, even if he does not think that cosmopolitan democracy offers a way of so doing. All said and done, he and Archibugi are, in practice, not so far apart. I am not so sure that this is true of David Chandler. He speaks with the confident voice of an established Left tradition. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, he declares, was a clear breach of international law. The limitation of sovereignty for some states (Yugoslavia and Iraq) is the right to intervene at will for others (the US and its coalition partners). The new interventionism is his target. He argues that it is a throwback to a time when state sovereignty was the privilege of the few, and that it indicates the right of powerful states to use force against the less powerful. For Chandler, it is an attack on the principle of sovereign equality, which was introduced after 1945 thanks to the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world power, the spread of national-liberation struggles, and inter-imperialist rivalries between the old European empires and the US.

Chandler's argument rests on the view that the post-war international settlement represented an acceptance by the great powers, however hypocritically, of a law-bound international system whose abiding principle was that of non-intervention. It is interesting to note what this surprisingly rose-tinted view of the past does not address: for example, whether it permitted the US and the USSR the licence to mistreat subjects as they pleased within their own 'spheres of influence'; or whether it encouraged new rulers of ex-colonial countries to reject criticism of their mistreatment of minorities as unwarranted interference in their internal affairs. In any event, it would seem that the main function of Chandler's reconstruction of the post-war settlement is to serve as a counterpoint to the new interventionism. The 'before' of sovereign equality is there as a backdrop to the 'ferocious attack' he now sees launched against even this mild form of international regulation, and which he associates with cosmopolitanism.

Chandler launches his own attack on the appeal to human rights in order to justify humanitarian military intervention, and reserves his severest criticism for the doctrine that there can be a duty of intervention even without the formal authorisation of the UN. He sees the appeal to 'international justice' in this instance as the official umbrella under which an attack on international law is being launched by big powers, and holds Archibugi and his fellow-spirits to account for helping to weaken the legal principle of state sovereignty. Yet Chandler does not engage with the problems to which cosmopolitical democracy is a response. The right or duty of humanitarian military intervention is raised by cosmopolitans in the context of serious violations of humanitarian law; that is, when other people are being slaughtered or expelled by their own rulers. Cosmopolitans argue that there ought to be some mechanism in international law for deciding when military interventions are justified in order to prevent such slaughters, who has the right to authorise them, and what means of warfare they have a right to use. Within this general framework, there is plenty of room for disagreement. Some argue above all for procedural regularity at the level of the UN. Others maintain that in the absence of effective international law, there is a responsibility on those with power to stop genocides, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, notwithstanding a failure of the UN to act. The failure of the UN to intervene in order to stop the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda or crimes against humanity in Bosnia is a classic case in point. These are tricky issues to resolve, and necessarily involve a good sense of judgement in and of particular situations; but Chandler simply fails to mention the circumstances that lead cosmopolitans to consider the ethics of intervention, and thereby to question the principle of absolute state sovereignty.

Chandler sees cosmopolitical democracy as an ideology of power, and not as a resistance to the abuse of power. His point of reference is the power of the US, rather than the fate of people who live in weaker despotic states. This reflex is most apparent in his attack on the Hague tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. He declares that the impartiality of the tribunal is a farce because it prosecutes Milosevic and other ethnic commanders from the former Yugoslavia, but not the NATO commanders who made military targets of civilian institutions. This is a similar criticism to that which has often been made of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after 1945 (which excluded in principle any crimes committed by the victorious allies). But in neither case can we say that the prosecution in a court of law of state officials and officers accused of authorising or conducting terrible atrocities is tantamount, as Chandler puts it, to the 're-legitimation of the right of the great powers to practice what violence they please', or to 'a return to the Westphalian system of open great power domination over states which are too weak to prevent external claims against them'. Notwithstanding the immunity of the victors from prosecution, the whole point of such tribunals is that military victory is tempered by a visible sense of legal justice.

Tim Brennan, a leading voice in critical cultural studies in the US, follows suit by splitting internationalism from cosmopolitanism. They are not just incompatible, he writes: they are opposites. Internationalism expresses global relations of respect and cooperation based on acceptance of differences in polity as well as culture. It supports national sovereignty since under modern conditions, there is no other way to secure respect for weaker societies. It is the ideology of the domestically restricted, the provisionally exiled, and the temporarily weak. Cosmopolitanism may be 'well intentioned', but its ideal of an all-encompassing global structure expresses the comfortable culture of middle-class travellers, intellectuals and businessmen. It offers a euphoric vision of a world federation based on peaceful rivalry of trade, but its content is neoliberal. Brennan invokes the names of Simmel and Gramsci in order to underwrite his conviction that cosmopolitanism is an imperial ideology embraced by middle-class intellectuals as an idealist detour from internationalism.

The splitting of internationalism and cosmopolitanism is a device to put all that is good and critical on one side, and all that is bad and uncritical on the other; but these conceptual shenanigans do little to address the real history of either internationalism or cosmopolitanism. get us not forget that in its official incarnation, internationalism often meant little more than the demand that communists worldwide follow Soviet foreign policy through all its abrupt twists and turns. Nor let us forget that official communists were prone to use 'cosmopolitanism' as a term of abuse, as in the phrase 'rootless, cosmopolitan Jew'. Of course, Brennan would not go down this road; but he identifies cosmopolitanism with Pax Americana dressed up in the cloth of international law. He devalues cosmopolitan concerns over crimes against humanity, and cosmopolitan designs to establish a better legal framework for prosecuting perpetrators, by referring to them merely as 'fear-mongering cameos of "tribal" blood-letting in barbaric backlands' (p. 46). He devalues cosmopolitan concerns over the subordination of the nation state to globalising market forces when he refers to cosmopolitan prescriptions merely as an agenda for surveillance, repression and control. He devalues cosmopolitan concerns over the absolutism of national sovereignty when he refers to them as an attack on the capacity of 'indigenous peoples to draw a boundary between what is theirs and what lies beyond'. Such dialectical acrobatics serve to translate cosmopolitics from a form of radicalism to an intonation of power; but it indicates how easily the act of 'splitting' can hinder genuine understanding of the phenomenon in question.

One of Brennan's key arguments is that cosmopolitan democracy only gives succour to those who would replace many states with a world state which, though it may not be explicitly built in the name of an existing power, would factually serve its interests. This theme is taken up by Peter Gowan, who argues that the formation of a supra-state authority, far from exercising jurisdiction over the US, would become its lightly disguised instrument. Gowan includes in this category the United Nations and the UN war crimes tribunal, as well as the IMF, the WTO and possibly even the EU. In every case, he argues, there is an asymmetrical relation between the uses of law as an instrument of us policy and the claimed exemption of the us from the jurisdiction of law. In this 'empire of civil society', sovereign states may well remain the cornerstone of the world order; but their political role now becomes that of maintaining political control over their populations while opening their domestic economies to us interests. Thus the more established liberal democracies follow a broadly neoliberal agenda of privatisation, removal of state regulation, decontrol of financial flows, conversion of political demands into rights-claims, the sacralisation of property rights, the downsizing of public administration, the discrediting of politicians in favour of entrepreneurs, etc.; while in the periphery, murderous social tensions erupt under the weight of the contradictions to which governments are subjected. For Gowan, the cosmopolitan dream of uniting humanity on the basis of global citizenry and universal human rights is a self-deception, since no scheme for universal harmony can work if it fails to confront the social relations of actually existing capitalism.

Gowan traces the new cosmopolitanism back to the old Anglo-American tradition of liberal internationalism, with its vision of a human race peacefully united by free trade and common legal norms. He argues that what is new is that national sovereignty is re-conceived as a 'conditional licence, granted by the "international community", which can be withdrawn should any state fail to meet the domestic or foreign standards laid down by the requirements of liberal governance' (p. 52). Where necessary, the right of military intervention may be invoked in order to impose the order of empire.

For Gowan, this represents a sea change in international relations--not from power politics to world peace, but rather to the formation of aggressive military alliances based on the global dominance of the US. He condemns what he reads as the cosmopolitan apologia for the American-led war in Yugoslavia--that it was a disinterested rescue mission for human rights, free of any power-political consideration--and argues that it is inferior to realist accounts, even that advanced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, which extol the scope and pervasiveness of American global power. For Gowan, the proof lies in the exception: in strategic backwaters in which no strategic interests are at stake, as in Rwanda, genocide can be countenanced; where key strategic interests are at stake, as in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Indonesia, the most brutal regimes are protected from humanrights pressures.

Gowan's argument brings to the fore the relation between cosmopolitanism and state policy. It was a disgrace that the western powers did not act to prevent genocide in Rwanda, but cosmopolitans have been relentless critics of this inaction, galvanised by disgust at the vast gap between the values the West professes and its own inactions. The strategic support, by the US, of certain states has certainly served to insulate them from human-rights pressures; but cosmopolitans have stood for the universal application of human rights notwithstanding strategic alliances. Even liberal cosmopolitanism stands in opposition to many of the policies pursued by western powers. The more substantial question, though, is whether inconsistency in the application of universal norms necessarily invalidates their application in any particular instance. Without prejudging the claim advanced by many on the Left that the Americans ought to be prosecuted for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, does the fact that the us government refuses to allow Americans to be prosecuted under international criminal law mean that the prosecution of Serbian and Croatian criminals is illegitimate? To put the matter another way, does the fact that one alleged murderer gains exemption from prosecution mean that another ought not to be prosecuted? There is every need for a critique of international criminal tribunals on the grounds of their inconsistency; but to infer that this invalidates these tribunals leaves no way forward.

All law is a form of power. All law pre-supposes the power to make law, interpret law and enforce law. Let us take it as read that the military intervention in Yugoslavia was not a disinterested rescue mission for human rights, free of any power-political consideration. Let us take it as read that amongst its various functions was the assertion of us military might. The question still remains: does this invalidate cosmopolitan justifications for military intervention in this instance? The answer to that question hangs on whether this military intervention was required in order to prevent ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity; whether it was a last resort; whether the criterion of effectiveness was met, and so forth. Of course, the facts of the case are contended; but it would be a strange expression of international solidarity if one were to leave the victims of ethnic cleansers to their fate on the grounds that the first and only duty of anti-imperialism is to oppose the exercise of US power, come what may.

Nadia Urbinati offers, to my mind, an intelligent consideration of these issues. She is at pains to give the cosmopolitan idea its due. She acknowledges that it expresses an aspiration for global justice and the universalisation of human rights; that it offers a political response to globalisation; and that it represents a refusal of politics to capitulate in the face of global economic forces. She characterises the principle of Kant's perpetual peace as the containment of political power. The aspiration it expresses is to transform political power from might to right by establishing certain international judicial institutions, and by recognising certain pre-political civil rights beyond which no nation state can exercise its sovereignty. She maintains that this was a project of liberty, and that the legal integration of states was conceived as a long-term project based first and foremost on the transformation of individual states into republics. In its specifically European incarnation, she argues that the new cosmopolitanism elaborated by Jurgen Habermas under the title 'postnational constellation' takes up the mantle of the cosmopolitan outlook of 1945: that the defeat of Nazism could not be total if it was only military, and that it had also to seek justice and install the rule of law if it was to achieve legitimacy. Habermas's perspective is that of consolidating a multi-layered, postnational Europe, and though he has energetically opposed the war in Iraq, he supported--with qualifications--the military intervention in Yugoslavia.

Urbinati's criticisms are more focused. Under the title 'Can cosmopolitical democracy be democratic?' she questions the cogency and desirability of making the cosmos into a democratic political space, and argues that the cosmopolitan vision as developed by Held and Archibugi is misconceived. As do other critics, she sees it as a centralising and unifying project based on the formation of a supranational political body endowed with powers of legislation, adjudication, administration and coercion/enforcement. She maintains that its commitment is to world citizenship independent of the mediation of states, to a world parliament, to a world executive organ (a reformed UN Security Council), to world courts (like the International Criminal Court), and to a world police and military force empowered to compel members to comply with basic human rights norms. For Urbinati, 'cosmopolitical democracy' is a commitment to a world state in all but name, and is deaf to Kant's warnings about the despotic potential of world government. Its critique of the sovereign nation state bypasses those revolutions in which states were transformed first into constitutional democracies and then into welfare states. It buys the myth of sovereignty as all-powerful and absolute, when in fact it has always been inseparable from the grammar of inter-national norms and from the presence of other states, which limit state sovereignty. It imports into its idea of a cosmopolitan order all the vices that have long plagued the modern state, and legitimates the formation of a singular, powerful and distant political elite.

I would reserve judgement on the view that 'cosmopolitical democracy' is a prescription for a world state that won't speak its name. This may be one of its possible readings, but it is explicitly opposed by Held and Archibugi, and contrary to their stated intentions. In any event, unlike many critics of cosmopolitanism, Urbinati does not speak in the name of a restored realism, a Leftist version of Schmittian neorealism or an ethically stripped anti-imperialism. She speaks of a decentralised global network of associations, interest groups and international institutions, which together comprise a system of governance rather than government, and are based on coordinated policies and activities rather than on a binding decision-making structure. The strength of this perspective lies in its recognition that civil society can bring issues of public concern to the top of the international agenda, and influence otherwise resistant representative bodies by turning to international support and transnational advocacy networks.

Yet civil society associations arise out of the same political economy as other inter-national institutions, they are subject to the same pressures of cooptation by powerful interests, and their own policy-making structures are often just as remote from the deliberations of representative bodies.

Within nation states, democratic legitimacy normally comprises two moments: formal processes of democratic will-formation in representative bodies, and informal processes of opinion-formation within civil society. If formal procedures are not to become detached from public life, there must be scope for creative inter-action between the two spheres. Civil society takes on quite another meaning if it is converted from being one element of a two-track theory of democracy into being a single track.

So to sum up: the lesson I would take from the various contributions collected in this book is not to reject cosmopolitanism, but to relocate it as a multifaceted research project in need of further elaboration. There is much more to be said; but I hope I have written enough to show that this volume lives up to its title of Debating Cosmopolitics, and that it raises the problem of anti-cosmopolitanism as sharply as it raises that of cosmopolitanism itself.