Debating globalization: cosmopolitanism and communitarianism as political ideologies

Abstract

Economic, cultural and political systems formerly bounded by the borders of nation states are increasingly globalized. Politicians, civil society and other societal actors engage in publically debating issues related to globalization. Whether conflicts consolidate to form a stable cleavage depends among other factors on the extent to which they become ideologically underpinned. As the basis for such an underpinning, we identify philosophical debates about justice between globalists and statists and between universalists and contextualists as raw material that political entrepreneurs active in the public sphere can draw upon. On this basis, we identify four major bones of contention that could provide the core of such ideological underpinning: the permeability of borders; the allocation of authority between levels; the normative dignity of communities; and the patterns of justification. One ideal typical combination of those four components can be labelled cosmopolitanism—combining arguments from globalists and universalists; another communitarianism, combining statist and contextualist arguments. The more these two ideal types feature as political ideologies in public debate, the more do debates about globalization solidify into a new cleavage. We develop a conceptual framework which can subsequently be used in support of empirical research analysing the ideological foundations of globalization conflicts.

Acknowledgements

This article was written within the context of the WZB research project ‘The Political Sociology of Cosmopolitanism and Communitarianism’. We would like to thank our fellow project members Ruud Koopmans, Onawa Lacewell, Wolfgang Merkel, Oliver Strijbis, Céline Teney and Bernhard Wessels for the many discussions that have inspired our thinking. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the IPSA in Madrid 2012 and at the WZB Global Governance colloquium. For all the comments we have received, our thanks go to the participants at those events and to Rainer Forst and Edgar Grande in particular.

Notes

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52. J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); T. Nagel, op. cit., Ref. 48. Concerning the question of how to realize a just society within the confines of the nation state, a long-standing debate is available between different versions of liberalism emphasizing the individual as ultimate basis of normative concern and various collectivisms—e.g. socialism, conservatism, confessionalism, nationalism—which some consider united in their common objections to liberalism under the banner of communitarianism. See D. Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); S. Mulhall and A. Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992). Communitarianism as a philosophical critique became especially important in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to the work of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

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57. As summarized by Haas et al., Controversies in Globalization. Contending Approaches to International Relations (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2010).: ‘Does trade liberalization contribute to economic prosperity?’, ‘Can foreign aid reduce poverty?’, ‘Is international terrorism a significant threat to national security?’, ‘Should the United States or the international community aggressively pursue nuclear nonproliferation policies?’, ‘Is foreign military intervention justified by widespread human rights abuses?’, ‘Should the wealthy nations promote anti-HIV/AIDS efforts in poor nations?’, ‘Should the United States aggressively promote women’s rights in developing nations?’, ‘Should countries liberalize immigration policies?’.

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72. D. Archibugi, ‘The Architecture of Cosmopolitan Democracy’, in G. W. Brown and D. Held (Eds) The Cosmopolitanism Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), pp. 312–333; D. Held, ‘Principles of Cosmopolitan Order’, in G. W. Brown and D. Held (Eds) The Cosmopolitanism Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), pp. 229–247.

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85. J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

86. Within this general characterization of cosmopolitan philosophy, we can first distinguish between ‘institutional’ and ‘moral’ conceptions of cosmopolitanism (C. R. Beitz, ‘Cosmopolitan liberalism and the states system’, op. cit., Ref. 51). Whereas a moral cosmopolitan argument seeks to develop general obligations, institutional cosmopolitanism addresses the question of the appropriate institutional design of a political order. Various versions of moral cosmopolitanism are based on various figures of justification: for example, a utilitarian cosmopolitanism (the utility of everyone in the world should be taken into account and maximized) P. W. Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), of a contract-theoretical cosmopolitanism (moral principles arise from a constructed contractual situation cf. C. R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)., a constitutionalism oriented on basic rights (everyone has the same basic rights that are to be observed—T. Pogge, World poverty and human rights, op. cit., Ref. 46.), and a discursive cosmopolitanism (moral principles must derive from an ideal speech situation—J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Reason and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).

87. Communitarianism has largely been developed in political philosophy as a response to liberalism S. Mulhall and A. Swift, op. cit.. Walzer, one of the leading thinkers in communitarianism, explicitly acknowledges this and speaks rather of a communitarian critique of liberalism than of a stand-alone philosophy or ideology of communitarianism—M. Walzer, Thinking Politically. Essays in Political Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Ch. 7. Also in other works of communitarian thinkers, liberalism stands out as a benchmark against which arguments are formulated—D. Bell, op. cit., Ref. 52; S. Mulhall and A. Swift, op. cit., Ref. 52. Although the group of theorists generally referred to as communitarians all share this, they have more in common than a critical view of liberalism alone. Unlike cosmopolitan and some liberal thinkers, communitarians argue there are communities of intrinsic value between the individual and humanity as a whole. These are ‘constitutive’ communities in the sense that membership is non-voluntary, cannot easily be renounced and forms a corner stone of our identity D. Bell, op. cit.. Examples of such constitutive communities include family, gender, race and nationality. Membership of a sports club, in contrast, is not constitutive since this can be easily given up. These constitutive communities shape people’s identity and their understanding of norms and values—A. MacIntyre, After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007). They inform distinct ‘spheres of justice’ (M. Walzer, Spheres of justice. A defense of pluralism and equality, op. cit., Ref. 79) out of which a particular understanding of justice cannot simply be transferred. Not only do particular understandings of justice diverge among constitutive groups, the intrinsic connection between an individual and her own group restricts her capacity to contribute to the realization of justice within other groups. In the communitarian philosophy, individuals’ responsibilities to others are therefore restricted (to a large extent) to their own constitutive group (M. J. Sandel, op. cit., Ref. 47, p. 11f.

88. M. B. Hamilton, op. cit., Ref. 10.

89. ‘An ideology is a system of collectively held normative and reputedly factual ideas and beliefs and attitudes advocating a particular pattern of social relationships and arrangements, and/or aimed at justifying a particular pattern of conduct, which its proponents seek to promote, realise, pursue or maintain.,’ ibid., p. 38.

90. N. Fraser, Scales of Justice. Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

91. C. Calhoun, ‘The class consciousness of frequent travelers: towards a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism,’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 101 (2002), pp. 869–897.

92. D. Held and A. McGrew, op. cit., Ref. 55.

93. See also M. Zürn, ‘The politicization of world politics and its effects: eight propositions’, op. cit., Ref. 22.

94. H. Kriesi, E. Grande, R. Lachat, M. Dolezal, S. Bornschier and T. Frey, op. cit., Ref. 3.

95. H. Kriesi, E. Grande, M. Dolezal, M. Helbling, D. Höglinger, S. Hutter and B. Wüest, op. cit., Ref. 3.

96. A. Azmanova, op. cit., Ref. 19.

97. E. Grande, ‘Cosmopolitan political science,’ British Journal of Sociology, 57 (2006), pp. 87–111.